The Retreat

“In The Retreat, a novel much praised for its level of historical detail, French writer Patrick Rambaud locates little grandeur in the ghastly carnage of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. ….

Small Craft Advisory

“If the point of reading a memoir is to meet a person who is truly good company, and maybe to have a little wisdom rub off at the same time,…

The Lost German Slave Girl

“Bailey has the gifts of a novelist and a readiness to blend fact and conjecture . . . with the result that The Lost German Slave Girl reads like a…

The Beholder’s Eye

“Aims to dispel the old journalistic clich”: that a journalist writing about him/herself is always ‘self-indulgent and, quite likely, narcissistic.” He couldn’t have put together a better lineup of writers…

Levi’s Children

The Anniversary

Longlisted for the Stella Prize For fans of Lisa Halliday and Susan Choi, The Anniversary is a simmering page-turner about an ascendant writer, the unresolved death of her husband, and…

The Stendhal Syndrome

“In the opener, a trio of tourists . . . contemplate Michelangelo’s David in hilarious Restoration comedy-like asides as they are overcome by the statue’s, uh, size and power. ….

A Drink with Shane MacGowan

“Entertaining and shocking at the same time. . . . Informative and fun. . . . This book is really good because, in a sense, it is one long fascinating…

Matterhorn

A big, powerful saga of men in combat, written over the course of thirty-five years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran.

Seven Mile Beach

“Unusual, fast, light, short, suspenseful, meaningful, and filled with an immigrant’s pointed observations about identity and the possibility of changing it. . . . [With an] appealing stench of paranoia…