I love reading British Library Crime Classics Christmas mystery offerings around this time of the year, and their latest is one madcap riot! 😆 The story, set during WWII, begins with the arrival of Sir Willoughby Keen-Cotton at the Redpaths just before Christmas. Not that it’s an ideal time for Rhoda and Frank Redpath to […]
Jackie Polzon’s debut is a quirky little novel! It follows an unnamed protagonist living in Minneapolis as she takes care of four hens that she has recently acquired, all the while trying to come to terms with a great personal loss. Having read and enjoyed The Pilgrim Hawk and The Goshawk before, it was interesting […]
The Performance follows three women – Margot, a professor; Ivy, a philanthropist; and Summer, a theater usher – as they watch Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. There’s a wildfire ravaging in the nearby hills, so this performance would have been a reprieve to most in attendance, sheltering them from the heat and the destruction for a […]
Based on Julie Otsuka’s own family history, where her mother, uncle, and grandparents were sent to Japanese internment camps after the Pearl Harbor bombings, When the Emperor Was Divine paints a vivid picture of a grim moment in history that America would rather forget and pretend never happened. The story begins in 1942, following an […]
Set in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1662, Hour of the Witch takes us back to a time when witch-hunt fervor was on the rise. The twenty-four-year-old Mary Deerfield had arrived in the New World from England with her wealthy merchant parents not so long ago. The lack of suitable suitors in a “community of saints” had […]
Fair warning! You will need a Kleenex box nearby to read this one! Marianne Cronin’s debut, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, is set in the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital. The seventeen-year-old Lenni has only a few months left to live, and she’s now a ‘permanent’ resident in the hospital’s May Ward meant […]
This is my third book from Shaun Usher’s Letter of Note series, and they are quick reads you can devour in a single sitting. I’m admittedly a cat person who, at the best of times, can barely tolerate dogs! But my husband has been campaigning for us to get a dog once we settle down […]
My favorite septuagenarian sleuth quartet is back! The second installment of The Thursday Murder Club series is set about a couple of months after four friends from the Coopers Chase Retirement Village; Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron, and Ibrahim, solve their first murder mysteries. Now that the excitement from the murders has died down, it seems like […]
This was a quick and easy read. When I received Meichi Ng’s book last year, I expected a comic. But this is a memoir in half graphic, half text format, so it got lost in the land of TBR, only to be “resurrected” recently when it was nominated for Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Humor […]
I read Jessie Greengrass’s debut novel Sight when it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018, so when the ARC for The High House, Greengrass’s latest novel slated to be published on the 4th of January 2022, came through the mail, I was curious. I figured I’d read a couple of pages, […]
Daughters of War, set in 1944, follows the story of the Baudin sisters while they live under the Nazi occupation in Southern France. The three sisters are separated from their widowed mother, who now lives in England, before the war, which has made Hélène, the eldest sister, their de facto mother. Hélène, an artist turned […]
In this slice-of-life novel, Benson, a Black daycare teacher, and Mike, a Japanese American chef working at a Mexican restaurant, are a gay couple living in Houston. They have been together for about four years now, but their relationship, as of late, seems like it’s closing in on its ending. Mike still cooks for Benson […]
Olenka, a Ukrainian woman working as a maid in Finland, has formed a habit of visiting a dog park in Helsinki in the evenings for a while now. Each time, she sits on the same bench and keeps watching one family in particular – a well to do Finish couple with a young boy and […]
This anthology is a real treat for the classic crime fans among us, but, I have no doubt, it can also be cherished by all bookworms alike! Edited by Martin Edwards, as usual, Murder by the Book features a mix of tales by familiar authors (thanks to British Library Crime Classic reprints) and a few […]
This fabulous book is my second five-star read this year. Published in 1915, Sally on the Rocks strikes a delightful balance between comedy and social commentary, and I had a ball reading it! The story begins with the arrival of Alfred Bingley, a banker, in the small village of Little Crampton in England. An annual […]
Red Lips and Bibliomaniacs 