Category: Fiction

The Other City is strange and wonderful, a book about seeing, a book about reading. It’s a slim novel, but one to read slowly: it’s full of images that I wanted to linger over. It starts normally enough: a winter day, an antiquarian bookshop, snow starting to fall outside, the smell and texture of paper.…

The flap copy calls this a “Romantic novel in every sense of the word,” which it is: it’s a romance, a love story, and also a story set in the Romantic era, with protagonists who are part of the French Romantic literary/musical/dramatic scene. It’s the story of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, first an actress, then a poet,…

Earlier this month I read and really enjoyed Blackout, Connie Willis’s latest book, so I knew I wanted to go back and read this one, which is set in the same world. It’s Oxford in 2054 and the history department, which uses time travel to observe the past, is at the center of this story.…

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag picks up a little more than a month after The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie leaves off, so it was good to read them consecutively. It’s summer in Bishop’s Lacey, the little village outside of which eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce lives with her father and two…

I don’t normally read mysteries, and I forget where I first heard about this one: I know that Danielle over at A Work in Progress mentioned it last year, but I feel like I read about it elsewhere as well. No matter: I finally got around to placing a hold on it at the library,…

The premise of this book is excellent: it’s 2060 and we’ve figured out time travel, so historians, instead of just spending their time in libraries and archives and museums, head back to the past to witness history first-hand. Of course, there’s the usual time travel question: can they influence events, and what’s to stop them…

I hadn’t read anything by Martin Millar before, but picked this book up because the cover was well-designed and because everyone seems to love Lonely Werewolf Girl. But once I started reading, I wasn’t sure I’d keep going. Here’s the first two sentences: “Living in Battersea I one day arrived home in the early morning…

There is something really appealing about this book, about the style of Handke’s writing and Winston’s translation. The story is at once straightforward and surreal, and from the very first page everything’s shifty, unreliable, the story casting doubt on itself. Here’s how the book starts: “Don Juan had always been looking for someone to listen…

I heard about this book from Danya, who quoted the first sentences, which made me grin. Here’s how the book starts: Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day…