Novels Now

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
I would guess that the Man Booker judges committee this year all like the same kind of book: wry commentary on society, first person narrative, confessional story, with lots of dark humor. The White Tiger had the same tone and feel to me as A Fraction of the Whole […]

Popularity: 10% [?]

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The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Pages: 304
Finished: July 26, 2008
First Published: Apr. 2008
Genre: true crime, nonfiction, history
Awards: Samuel Johnson Award for Nonfiction 2008
Rating: 4.5/5
First sentence:
This is the story of a murder committed in an English country house in 1860, perhaps the most […]

Popularity: 13% [?]

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The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale
Summerscale has written a very interesting book about the history of detectives, real and fictional, as well as investigating a true murder that scandalized Victorian England in 1860. The subtitle is “A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victoria Detective.”
The murder was of three year old […]

Popularity: 13% [?]

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Although I haven’t yet read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies, after reading Unaccustomed Earth, I can understand why the committee was so impressed with her writing. Her stories of the Bengali immigrant experience were very well developed, and they had closure to them, something I’ve noticed is often times lacking in […]

Popularity: 22% [?]

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Daughters of the North, known as The Carhullan Army in the UK, is a dystopian novel set in an environmentally and economically ravaged Britain. Citizens are forced to be registered in cities where they are assigned work for the good of the state. Contraception is mandated and every female is fitted with a device […]

Popularity: 20% [?]

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The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
Pages: 313
First Published: April, 2008
Genre: literary fiction
Rating: 4/5
First sentence:
The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail,eyes wild, bawling.

Comments: This is a book that is very hard to summarize; there are many characters, many plot lines and at times they seem unrelated. It […]

Popularity: 24% [?]

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Janeology
By Karen Harrington
Completed June 15, 2008
Nature versus nurture – it’s an old question and still a widely debatable one. Do genes rule our own impulses? Does one’s environment shape who we become?
It’s this theme that formed Karen Harrington’s debut novel, Janeology. In this book, Jane Nelson decided that she was “done being a mother” and […]

Popularity: 29% [?]

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Matt Rogers
218 pages
Zondervan Publishers
From the Publisher:
On April 16, 2007, the campus of Virginia Tech experienced a collective nightmare when thirty-three students were killed in the worst massacre in modern U.S. history. Following that horrendous event, VA Tech campus pastor Matt Rogers found himself asking and being asked, Where is God in all of this?The […]

Popularity: 34% [?]

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Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri
333 pages
Jhumpa Lahiri’s first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize. After writing a full-length novel (The Namesake), Lahiri has returned with a second short story collection. Unaccustomed Earth is comprised of 5 short stories and a novella. And it is absolutely fabulous.
Most of the stories are set in […]

Popularity: 32% [?]

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First Sentence: Brother Gruffyd’s old heart trembled with excitement.
When I first entered my name for a chance to read and review The Arthurian Omen through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program, I had certain expectations for this book. As the reviews began to trickle in, I did my best not to pay too close […]

Popularity: 34% [?]

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