Novels Now

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Contemporary Fiction - Epistolary
2008 The Dial Press
Finished on 7/23/08
Rating: 4.75//5 (Fabulous!)
ARC - Release date of July 29th
“Here’s who will love this book—anyone who nods in profound agreement with the statement,’Reading keeps you from going gaga.’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel […]

Popularity: 27% [?]

Read full story »

If you live long enough, everything happens.
And then some of it happens again. [pg xii]
The Servants by Michael Marshall Smith
Harper Collins, 2008 (ARE)
Fiction; 209 pgs
Mark is an 11 year old boy whose life is out of balance. His mother has remarried and they have moved from London to the seaside community of Brighton. […]

Popularity: 16% [?]

Read full story »

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
I first heard of this big ole book when bookfool mentioned it, then kookiejar loved it. It’s big in size (531 pages) and ambition. Toltz covers a lot of material here, and I’ll try to summarize a bit.
Jasper Dean is writing his family’s colourful history in Australia, […]

Popularity: 15% [?]

Read full story »

“Listen,” he says to her sternly, “I will tell you a secret about your demons: they are never stronger than you.” -From The White Mary, page 337-
Marika Vecera is an talented journalist who has traveled to the most troubled parts of the world and risked her life to witness war, genocide, torture and famine. […]

Popularity: 18% [?]

Read full story »

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% [?]

Read full story »

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% [?]

Read full story »

Made in the U.S.A. by Billie Letts
Contemporary Fiction
2008 Grand Central Publishing
Finished on 6/29/08
Rating: 2.5/5 (Fair)
Fate sometimes thought that God was looking out for him and Lutie. The notes left for them, and the food they found on the hood of the car and in the library. All of that came from someone. And if it […]

Popularity: 25% [?]

Read full story »

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
My son just said to me, “Didn’t you just start that book yesterday?” Always the sign of a good book, one that I just race through. I’ve been reading some good reviews of this one in the Southern Reading Challenge. It’s a classic southern novel, tackling racist life in Mississippi just after […]

Popularity: 32% [?]

Read full story »

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
In 1988, a plane carrying the President of Pakistan crashed, killing the President - military dictator General Zia, some generals, and the American Ambassador, Arnold Raphel. This book looks at what may have caused the crash and the death of the General Zia.
I had to look up at […]

Popularity: 28% [?]

Read full story »

And despite my best attempts to be rational, I was afraid. I could feel the house’s atmosphere, that eerie swirling in the corners of the room and the folds of the curtains and behind the furniture. It wasn’t explicit; there was no sudden breathless rush, sucking the air out and dragging the walls in […]

Popularity: 26% [?]

Read full story »