Fran Hawthorne

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,

In many ways, the debut novel Home Field resembles the high-school football games at the center of the story: Sometimes white-knuckle dramatic, sometimes too slow, an explosion of smells a

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.

What can a reader say about a page-turner with laughably stock characters, a few unusual touches, and pedestrian prose—all written by a real-life hero?

The novel Anna Karenina may have been analyzed from every literary and historical viewpoint imaginable, but has anyone calculated how much richer Anna would have been if she’d dumped her h

There are many ways to define “kosher.” The Hebrew root of the word simply means fit—food that is fitting for Jews to eat.

For the better part of this year, newspapers, magazines, the blogosphere, radio, TV, and bookstores have been filled with analyses of how President Obama squandered his initial popularity by pushin

Ian Bremmer ought to have an easy time proving his basic premise: “only genuine free markets can generate broad, sustainable, long-term prosperity.” Yet he fails.

Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen obviously hurried to get Mad as Hell on the market before the November midterm elections. They should have waited.