Lovers of Victorian Gothic mysteries will have loads of fun with this one, quite different in tone from the norm, and lovers of literary fiction will admire the author’s ability to describe and bring the period to life while also conveying important sociological and religious issues. Written by Alastair Sim, great-nephew of the famed actor of the same name, while he was still a student at the University of Glasgow, the novel takes the Victorian police procedural in new directions. Inspector Archibald Allerdyce, an emotionally damaged man who no longer believes in God, and Sergeant Hector McGillivray, even more damaged from his army experiences during the colonial rebellion in India and the Crimean War, have been ordered by the highest levels of government to solve the disappearance of William Bothwell-Scott, the Duke of Dornoch, wealthiest man in Scotland. The Duke has amassed a ten thousand-acre estate by having his thugs clear the land of long-time poor residents, also demolishing a small village near the coast which interfered with his view.
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Probably every lover of literary fiction has had a fantasy about creating or finding the ideal bookstore—one dedicated to exactly the kinds of novels we like to read and where we can spend an afternoon browsing, knowing that every book there has the potential to become one of our favorites. The main characters in this novel by Laurence Cosse have created just such a bookstore. A committee of eight writers representing different styles of novels is chosen in secret to make the selections of books for the shop, each member having a pen name so that no one, not even other committee members, knows their identities. With a choice Parisian location near the famed Odeon Theatre, The shop is mobbed from the outset, and by Christmas, the shop is a huge success. Then jealousies arise from competitors, and eventually, three attempts to murder members of the secret selection committee, described in the opening pages of the novel, involve the police. A combination of mystery, fantasy, philosophical analysis, and economic treatise on the book industry, A NOVEL BOOKSTORE raises many interesting questions within a unique story,
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In the midst of the Blitz in London in 1943, an event took place in Bethnal Green that was so extraordinary it is not understood completely even to this day. On March 3, 1943, when the air raid warning sirens went off, thousands of people headed, as usual, toward the nearest bomb shelter, the local Tube station, a one-entrance location which could accommodate up to ten thousand people within a few minutes of their arrival. Some had come here many times and knew that they could reserve cots and places to sleep for the night. Others just took their chances, hoping that the emergency would not last long and that they would be able to return to their homes soon afterward. On this night, something unique happened. One hundred seventy-three people died of asphyxia within a minute of their arrival at the station, all suffocated in the crush on the first twenty stairs of the entrance. Author Jessica Francis Kane, who found and studied the original government inquiry into the reasons for this catastrophe, draws on the facts of the real Bethnal Green case to create a fictionalized version of what went wrong.
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Recreating the events which led to the catastrophic battles for power which engulfed Liberia from 1980 – 1996, author Russell Banks shows how four different home-grown armies, each with their own goals, aggressively engaged in atrocities to ensure victory for their own side. Employing child soldiers, and killing and maiming anyone who stood in their way, including women and tiny children who simply had the misfortune to belong to the wrong rural tribe, these armies massacred a quarter of a million people and displaced a million others. Banks describes this turmoil through the eyes of a radical American anti-war activist named Hannah Musgrove who arrives in Liberia from Ghana under a false name in 1976. Musgrove is on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for her activities as a member of the Weather Underground, having been indirectly involved in a New York City townhouse bombing in which three people were killed in the late 1960s.
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How long has it been since you have read a novel with a thematic line so unusual and so well explicated that reading the book changed your way of seeing the world? This novel was one such experience for me. Metaphysical, historical, and utterly different from anything I have ever read, Giles Foden’s Turbulence kept me (neither a mathematician nor a student of physics) turning the pages, no matter how theoretical and dense the novel sometimes became with its science. Fascinating personal stories are interwoven with the scientific plot, giving the novel immediacy, even for a devout non-scientist. Set in London and Scotland from January through June, 1944, the novel is a study of weather forecasting and all the factors which must be considered in making long-range predictions, especially as the allies consider the D-Day invasion.
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