Fran Hawthorne

It’s hard to publish a sequel to a powerful or popular novel, and even more so in a case like this, where author Joyce Maynard has said that she never intended to return to the complicated family s

“worth reading . . .”

“a page-turning exploration of love, motherhood, and secrecy.”

“the characters are complex, three-dimensional, and not always likable people, struggling with engrossing dilemma—the fixings of a good novel.”

“an original and powerful novel that a reader won’t easily forget.”

“The engrossing plot, richly drawn characters, and underlying horror make this a book that lingers in the reader’s mind . . .”

“for all its dramatically dystopian setup and sensuous descriptions, this novel falls surprisingly flat.”

“a compelling, unique read.”

From the first paragraph, this debut novel grabs the reader with its voice as well as its dramatic plot setup:

This is not only the story of Amrit Kaur, a princess of Colonial-era India, but even more, it’s the story of author Livia Manera Sambuy’s wide-ranging efforts to learn about Amrit.

“this debut is a page-turner that will keep the reader . . . glued . . .”

“The book desperately wants to convey its message of human connectedness with all the species that share this planet. Gil walks 2,400 miles to appreciate and then deliver this message.

“A fascinating visit to a little-known pocket of U.S. immigrant history.”

“fairy tales aren’t just for kids.”

All the Lights Above Us covers approximately the 24 hours of D-Day, almost minute-by-minute, through the eyes of five disparate women in England, France, and Germany whose lives are upende

“Family and home: They’re the grounding of this novel and of humanity.”

“Schnader’s writing is multi-sensual and powerful.”

“succeeds, thanks to Seckin’s unrelentingly honest excavations and sharply beautiful language.”

“The Hidden Child raises the disturbing question: How many of these fictitious people would have cheered Hitler on?”

“In this debut, Huisman has already given her readers a richly textured portrait of an enthralling woman you might love as a dinner companion—but never as your mother.”

“A Play for the End of the World deserves credit for finding common humanity among three very different cultures, while telling a compelling story.”

Readers can count on bestselling author Jessica Anya Blau for a breezy coming-of-age story about a nice, middle-class, teenage girl who learns about life during a tumultuous summer with an offbeat

“engrossing”

“[a] thought-provoking quest to understand the meaning of evil, guilt, and survival.”

"chilling depictions of prewar naivete, the slowly tightening noose in the ghetto, and a murderous eruption of anti-Semitism in Ukraine”

“a short, charmingly absurd portrait of postwar Germany.”

“a novel that explores the nostalgia, loneliness, guilt, and conflicted patriotism of the (fictitious) last American who worked at the facility.”

“The Paris Children is a page-turning and inspiring story of how courage and family ties can survive even the worst of evil.”

“a haunting portrait of a nation slowly collapsing . . .”

“Almost everything about The King of Warsaw is gripping . . .”

In the final weeks of World War II, when Walter Kempowski was 15 years old, he watched tens of thousands of his fellow Germans scramble westward through his hometown from their once-conquered terri

Notoriously, the small groups of European partisans who fought a guerilla war against the Nazis during World War II, hiding out in the area’s forests, generally refused to allow J

“Rafala seems to love language as much as his characters love their farms and their patron saint. That’s a powerful combination, and it fuels a compelling novel.”

Geertruida “Truus” Wijsmuller-Meijer certainly deserves to be the heroine of a novel.

“A pleasant page-turner with an important reminder about the value of social activism.”

“the language of Paris, 7 A.M. is better than the narrative. It is sharp, evocative, and true to Bishop’s style of picking out details of the physical world.”

“Certainly this novel is timely, a reminder of the United States’ inexcusable inhumanity 70 years ago when it cruelly blocked desperate refugees.”

“Revolutionaries is overflowing, hyper, passionate, raunchy, forceful, and over the top—just like its subject, the fictitious sixties radical Lenny Snyder.”

“Author David R. Gillham has taken the brave, difficult risk of turning an icon into a real teenager.”

This is not your mother’s Anne Frank.

Gone So Long has everything a novel could ask for: It’s a literary page-turner that explores the grit and pain of working class lives through complex personalities and beautifully pungent,

Ah, for the naivete of the sixties and seventies, when Americans were shocked that their own government would publish false statistics, that U.S.

As scores of friends, relatives, and relatives-of-friends gather in Atlanta on a sunny April afternoon for the tastefully expensive wedding of Elizabeth Gottlieb and Hank Jackson, seven of these as

Shadow Child is a detective story set in 1960s Manhattan, and also a historical saga of a Japanese-American woman during World War II, and also a tale of teen rivalry, which shifts from pa

With over a dozen English-language books on the topic in the last decade alone, the ill-fated love story of the 12th century French scholar-monk Peter Abelard and his pupil Heloise continues to fas

When Autumn was published 15 months ago—the first in a planned “seasonal” quartet by the award-winning, Scottish-born writer Ali Smith—it was dubbed “the first great Brexit novel.” So what

With her bestselling debut Everything I Never Told You and now her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng has indisputably proved that she is a master at mining the rel

Like most of the nine other novels by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, The Red-Haired Woman is a story that personalizes political, cultural, and philosophical conflicts, especially east vs.

The debut novel Lilli de Jong is almost a feminist version of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, targeting the treatment of women in the 1880s rather than slaughterhouses in the early 2

“Buchanan writes with a sharp and original artist’s eye of her own.”

Georgia Hunter presumably loves her family and didn’t want to insult anyone when she set out to write a fictionalized account of how these well-to-do, assimilated Polish Jews survived the Holocaust

As the rare “lady doctor” at a small town clinic in Communist Hungary in 1960 and an ardent partisan who helped her father smuggle anti-Nazi pamphlets during World War Two, when she was a student,

The new novel The Unseen World starts out like the 2014 bestseller We Are Not Ourselves, as the haunting story of a brilliant scientist who develops early-onset Alzheimer’s diseas

As a veteran movie and television producer, Tracy Barone knows how to tell a story on screens. Her debut novel Happy Family proves that she can also steer an engrossing plot in print.

Sprawling across more than 500 pages, the new novel Three-Martini Lunch captures the excesses as well as the inhibitions of New York City in 1958, from the eponymous meals of the big Manha

When Kyung Cho, an untenured biology professor, turns the knob on the front door of his parents’ “stunning Queen Anne” house in a wealthy Boston suburb, he is surprised that it’s unlocked.

The simple sentences and unspoken words of My Name Is Lucy Barton are deceptive.

Frank McAllister, a wealthy South African-born investor who has spent his adult life in London, takes languid drives through the richly varied countryside of the native land that he clearly loves.

Simply put, Paradise City is a good, old-fashioned read.

Bestselling novelist B. A. Shapiro clearly admires Abstract Expressionist art.

A small-time gangster who has disappeared and may be dead. Hasidic folk tales. A yarmulke-wearing Oberlin College student expelled for drug dealing. Hedge-fund fraud.

Can a narrator with a breezy stream of quips effectively tell the story of how her marriage fell apart after her best friend died in a spectacular car accident?

For a while.

“powerful.”

Izabella Rae Haywood, teenage heroine of What the Waves Know, has lost her words. She has not spoken in eight years, ever since her father disappeared on her sixth birthday.

“Unfortunately, there are too many horrors in the world, and we have become too numbed by traditional storytelling. We need books like this one to slap us in the face.”

“Despite its sometimes underwhelmingly brief prose, Beauty is one of the better fiction offerings for readers who want an easy read that also offers some insight into the way busin

“This is not a memoir. It is a political polemic. . . . the biggest problem is Soueif’s blind devotion.

“. . . a unique and prodigious talent.”

“. . . a harmless enough read for a holiday vacation.”

“. . . channeling Michael Lewis sets a pretty high bar, and the attempt makes Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic more fun to read than most financial books.”

“. . . politics and foreign policy wonks will love this book.

“Ms. Herz indeed proves her point about ‘benign masochism.’ We are disgusted by disgust. And we can’t stop reading about it.”

“It’s too bad, really, that Against Thrift fails at its most basic level. Dr. Livingston is daring, original, obviously well read, and—to a liberal reader—well intentioned.

“The writing in Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes is sharp and original throughout most of the book, with skillful intercuttings of first- and third- person viewpoints.”

“Liberals, conservatives, and anyone else with a passionate point of view all need to learn to laugh at themselves. The B.S. of A. could be a good start . . .”

It might seem impossible to turn the concept of Al Qaeda getting nuclear weapons into a boring novel. But Bob Graham manages to do just that.