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Reviews

Reviews

by Orhan Pamuk - Fiction

Fatma, a mostly bedridden widow, awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. Her servant’s nephew, Hasan, is a high school dropout who has lately fallen in with right-wing nationalists. He will draw the visiting family into the growing political cataclysm issuing from Turkey’s tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity.

by Salman Rushdie - Nonfiction

How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir, Salman Rushdie tells that story for the first time --- the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech.

by J. K. Rowling - Fiction

When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early 40s, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. What lies behind Pagford’s pretty façade is a town at war. And the empty seat left by Barry on the town’s council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?

by Alexander McCall Smith - Fiction

After seven years and five books, Bertie is --- finally! --- about to turn seven. But one afternoon he mislays his meddling mother Irene, and learns a valuable lesson: wish-fulfillment can be a dangerous business. Angus and Domenica contemplate whether to give in to romance on holiday in Italy, and even usually down-to-earth Big Lou is overheard discussing cosmetic surgery.

by Ken Follett - Fiction, Historical Fiction

WINTER OF THE WORLD picks up right where FALL OF GIANTS left off, as its five interrelated families --- American, German, Russian, English and Welsh --- enter a time of enormous social, political and economic turmoil, beginning with the rise of the Third Reich, through the Spanish Civil War and the great dramas of World War II, up to the explosions of the American and Soviet atomic bombs.

by Kathy Reichs - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Temperance Brennan has been asked to examine the corpses of three dead babies in Montreal, while her long-time flame, Detective Ryan, is investigating the infants’ mother. When the woman flees to Edmonton, the investigation is joined by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant with whom Tempe had an ill-advised fling over a decade earlier. The dissonant team heads to a remote diamond-mining city to pursue an ever more sinister trail.

by Ivan Doig - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Tom Harry and his son, Rusty, make an odd kind of family, with Tom’s venerable bar their true home, but they manage just fine. That is, until the summer of 1960, when Rusty turns 12. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom previously knew, and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom’s past?

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón - Fiction, Historical Fiction

It’s Christmas of 1957 in Barcelona, and Daniel Sempere and his wife, Bea, are celebrating their new beautiful son, Julian, and the engagement of close friend Fermín Romero de Torres. But a mysterious stranger threatens all of it when he visits the Sempere bookshop and tries to expose a terrible secret that has been buried in the city’s past. His appearance plunges Fermín and Daniel into an adventure that takes them back to the 1940s and the early days of Franco’s dictatorship.

by Linda Fairstein - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Alexandra Cooper arrives in France to visit her boyfriend and famed restaurateur, Luc Rouget. But she quickly finds herself entangled in the murder of a young woman with only one piece of evidence: a matchbox from Luc’s restaurant. Alex is pulled back to New York for a high-profile case, but finds that the two cases may be connected as another of Luc’s matchboxes appears on the scene.

by Janet Evanovich - Fiction, Mystery

When Harvard University English professor Gilbert Reedy is mysteriously murdered, Lizzy and Diesel take up his 20-year quest for the Luxuria Stone, an ancient relic believed by some to be infused with the power of lust. Tearing through Boston catacombs, government buildings and multi-million dollar residences, they’ll leave behind a trail of robbed graves, public disturbances and general mayhem.