Category: Fiction

In this, the third Flavia de Luce mystery (after The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, both of which I read and liked last May ), we once again find ourselves in the little village of Bishop’s Lacey, which is again beset by mysterious criminal happenings.…

This is the story of a relationship, alphabetically: a dictionary whose entries are vignettes from a couple’s life together. Sometimes an entry is a page or a paragraph or a few pages; sometimes it’s just a line, like: autonomy, n. “I want my books to have their own shelves,” you said, and that’s how I…

This book, which was originally published in Hungarian in 1942, is very much about the ends of things, the passing of time: the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the end of the nineteenth century, the end of a friendship, the end of a marriage, the end of an affair. Henrik, the reclusive General, lives alone…

This book and I didn’t totally click, and I’m not sure I can articulate why. The back cover describes it as “part novel and part memoir,” and its 100 short sections tell the story of a life: childhood, marriage, parenting, travel. It’s set mostly in Israel, with bits elsewhere (primarily Japan), and it sometimes reads…

The back cover blurb mentions the “off-kilter world” of Finley, our narrator: that’s an understatement. This book is a detective story but not really, or rather, it’s a detective story about finding oneself. It’s set in a world that is almost our own but not quite, or maybe it is our world and all the…

After I finished reading Travels in Siberia, I found myself in a sort of critical reading mood—unsure what to read next, and fearful that whatever I read wouldn’t live up to the intelligence, humor, and range of Ian Frazier’s book. I decided that something short, light, and fictional was the way to go, and so…

This book starts with a death, then proceeds to a mystery: Bluma Lennon, a professor at Cambridge, is walking down the street while reading, and she’s struck by a car and killed. A few months later, the narrator of the book (who’s taken over Bluma’s office and courseload, and who’s not entirely disinterested—he was her…

It was the cover of this book, that particular yellow and the three shelves of interestingly-shaped bottles with their lovely old labels, that made me pick it up from a pile of books someone left in the lobby of the apartment building where I live. It sat on my shelf for a few months, and…

I like how this book starts, the way the first sentence takes you immediately into a place of questions or uncertainty or play: “Step inside and take a look, or perhaps he said a book, sweeping his magic wand in a semicircle in front of him” (3). The story is structured as a walk through…