by Molly Lundquist
If you take Charles Dickens, add a good dose of magical realism, you’ll have a sense of THE MERMAID AND MRS. HANCOCK by Imogene Hermes Gowar. Gowar’s debut offers abundant pleasures—it is vibrantly imagined and lushly detailed, occasionally raunchy—yet...
by Molly Lundquist
In his fourth novel, Charles Frazier returns to familiar stomping grounds, the same ones he trod with such mastery in Cold Mountain—the South during the final days of the Civil War. VARINA centers on Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the...
by Molly Lundquist
You don’t see Diane Chamberlain coming; she sneaks up on you. By that I mean that Chamberlain isn’t praised as a prose stylist—you don’t find lyrical sentences that catch your breath, soaring imagery, or probing insights to give you pause. Her gifts...
by Molly Lundquist
Comedy, tragedy, and magic join hands in HARRY’S TREES, a charming, if uneven, novel. Its appeal lies in the two main characters: Harry Crane, a middle-aged average-Joe kind of guy, and a cheeky, bossy nine-year-old named Oriana Jeffers. Both are in the throes...
by Molly Lundquist
Stephen McCauley’s characters get a chance at new life in his funny, incisive new novel. The story’s three main players are unsettled and out-of-joint—David Hedges, a gay man, whose San Francisco apartment is being sold out from under him; Julie Fiske, a...
