Latest Reviews
One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences. But now it is just Anne and Louisa, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. What really happened to Louisa’s father?
Nearly 50 years after taking up the game, Michael Bamberger made a pair of startling discoveries: golf had never meant more to him, and he knew almost nothing about it. He decided to cover himself in green in a whole new way. He spent a year inside the ropes of professional golf --- playing, caddying, competing, volunteering and interviewing --- looking for a door into the sport’s sanctum sanctorum. In THE PLAYING LESSON, Bamberger goes on the ultimate golfing bender. You’ve read about St. Andrews before, but here you will experience the home of golf in a whole new way. You’ll join the author as he volunteers in one tournament, caddies in others, plays in men’s and women’s pro-ams, and conducts intimate interviews with elite figures in the game.
Micah's relationship to music is complicated. As teenagers, her band took off after being featured on a popular TV show, but the group barely released their sophomore album before breaking up. Now, over a decade later, the band is reuniting for one more performance on a themed cruise. John misses playing in a band, and mostly he misses Micah, who had been his best friend until the music stopped. Back then, he didn't take the lead, either in his guitar parts or while he sat back and watched her date another bandmate. John has never been one to rock the boat, but he's faced with another chance now that this cruise has brought music --- and Micah --- back in his life. Onboard, Micah can't help but see John with brand new eyes, and John's feelings only intensify as the discordant band's tension grows to a breaking point.
On a remote island nestled off the coast of Sweden, four friends meet every year. The idea is to drink beer, dance by the water, and shake off the weight of life's expectations. The location of the island is a secret to everyone but them. Ten Years Later. Ever since she was a teenager, Tessa Nilsson has been consumed by the story of four friends who disappeared. Her best friend, Anneliese, wants to have a bachelorette party before she walks down the aisle. The destination is Baltic Vinyasa, a sleek, sophisticated yoga retreat on a small island off the coast --- one with such similar characteristics to the tragedy years ago that it raises the hair on Tessa’s neck. Tessa will not pass this up. It’s her last chance to find out what happened to the four women. And it’s someone else’s last chance to get revenge.
After dozens of Hollywood apartment buildings erupt in flames during a single night of terror, arson investigators Walter Sharpe and Andrew Walker are assigned to catch the serial torcher and end his spree. But then a catastrophic fire destroys a major freeway, crippling the city and forcing Sharpe and Walker to take on another massive case. Desperate for help, they know exactly who to call: homicide detectives Eve Ronin and Duncan Pavone. Together the four detectives must quickly figure out whether the freeway disaster was a tragic accident...or the work of a mastermind with a horrific plan. As the investigations collide, an old foe with a revenge scheme enters the fray, igniting a race against time to stop a conspiracy of deception, corruption and murder.
Lucy’s brother, Mikey, is dead. Two years ago, when he left their small Eastern Colorado town and moved west to Denver, he had intended to bring Lucy along. But Lucy has only just arrived and is in search of Helen, a woman Mikey loved. But when Lucy moves in across the hall, she finds nothing is as she expected: the city is crumbling; the weather is tempestuous; a predator is on the loose; the old woman in the attic needs company; desire is being compressed into pills and distributed like candy; and she finds herself becoming obsessed with Helen, who is nothing like she expected --- and who has no idea who Lucy really is. As their lives become more entwined, Lucy begins to realize that the real reasons she came to Denver are deeper and stranger than a simple desire to understand what happened to her brother.
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book FEAR OF FLYING launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just-out-of-reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year. HOW TO LOSE YOUR MOTHER is a compulsively readable memoir about an intense mother–daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and the upheavals that challenge our hard-won adulthood.
When Blair McGowan, the mail person with the longest postal route in the country of over 300 miles a day, goes missing, the question becomes: Where do you look for her? The Postal Inspector for the State of Wyoming elicits Sheriff Walt Longmire to mount an investigation into her disappearance, and Walt does everything but mail it in. Posing as a letter carrier himself, the good sheriff follows her trail and finds himself enveloped in the intrigue of an otherworldly cult.
After a stint in the private sector, working at the largest hedge fund in the world, Nora Carleton has returned to her former role as a New York City federal prosecutor. A threat is building in the city, with far-right extremism powered by internet demagogues and funded by shadowy organizations. Together with legendary investigator Benny Dugan and aided by colleagues at the FBI, Nora builds a case against one of the key players in this burgeoning movement, arguing before a jury that some speech is actually a deadly crime. But the menace taking root is far bigger than any courtroom, and as the militants target an upcoming United Nations rally, Nora and her team must race to disrupt the plans and minimize casualties.
Richard Russo’s masterful new essays consider how life and art inform each other and how the stories we tell shape our understanding of the world around us. In “The Lives of Others,” Russo reflects on the implacable fact that writers use people, insisting that what matters, in the end, is how and for what purpose. In “Stiff Neck,” he writes of the exasperating fault lines exposed within his own family as his wife’s sister and her husband --- proudly unvaccinated --- develop COVID. In “Triage,” he details the terror of seeing his seven-year-old grandson in critical condition. And in “Ghosts,” he revisits Gloversville, the town that gave rise to the now-legendary fictional town of North Bath, and confronts the specter of its richly populated past and its ghostly present.
