Blogroll

Book Review: God’s Mercy by Kerstin Ekman

Sense of place is not just a combination of geography and culture, it is a synergy of the two. Swedish author Kerstin Ekman doesn’t seek to describe sense of place in her novel God’s Mercy. She does something far more difficult. Sense of place so permeates the novel it moves from being a setting to […]

Book Review: The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist

Worried about retirement or maintaining your standard of living in your “old age”? The near-future country in which Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist’s first novel, The Unit, is set has a comfortable future in store for many women 50 and older and men 60 and older.

Imagine this: Your own, fully furnished apartment in a complex […]

Book Review: Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

Capturing the pulse or flavor of any particular place is difficult. One person perceives things differently than another. Some have access to places and locations others could never enter or may fear to enter. This is particularly so for a country as diverse as India. Aravind Adiga’s Between the Assassinations attempts to surmount that problem […]

Book Review: Breath by Tim Winton

You could summarize Tim Winton’s Breath by saying it’s a novel about a two Australian teenagers who perfect their surfing skills under the tutelage of a reclusive mentor. Of course, that would be like saying Fight Club is a novel about young men in an illicit fighting club.

Breath may be built around surfing […]

Book Review: To Live or to Perish Forever by Nicholas Schmidle

Inherent in any book about current events or current affairs is the problem of lag time, the time from experiencing the events to writing about them to the book actually ending up in stores. Some of that can be alleviated by selling stories of the events to magazines or newspaper as or shortly after they […]