A startling achievement in a first novel, the work seems to have already touched a chord since it has taken Italy and Europe by storm and sold copies in the millions. It was undertaken by a young Italian physicist at age 27, who tells a haunting story. Better yet, he’s a natural, adept with characterization, knowing how to captivate and hold his readers.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Italy, Mathematics.

A Separate Country tells the story of Confederate General John Bell Hood, who moves to New Orleans after the war and marries a Creole debutante. Hood is a haunted man who has been physically marked by the war; he has lost a leg and the use of an arm. In addition, he can only excel militarily, and his life as a businessman is a resounding failure. Nevertheless, he finds love with the young beauty Anna Marie and they have eleven children together.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Historical Fiction.

The Extinction Clock is counting down. Time is short—10,800 minutes (just seven days)—and if the clock zeroes out, billions will die.
Ex-cop Joe Ledger and the DMS (Department of Military Science) are assigned the mission to stop the clock and the men behind it, a pair of freakishly brilliant monsters who intend to commit genocide on an apocalyptic scale.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Horror, Thrillers.

It’s a radioactive fairy tale, with adults known only by nicknames (the Black Sheep, the baroness) and facts twisted into fantasies. Ever seen Heavenly Creatures? There’s a bit of that in here – the overheated imaginings of two girls on the edge of puberty.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews.

Garrity is an archetype, an ill-understood and imperiled hero who after overcoming every obstacle, exits hand-in-hand with the alluring heroine. It is part of the fun for our heroes to be bigger, somehow, than life, and for villains to be so brilliantly inventive and evil as to rival Satan himself. This fictional world of good and bad provides the reader with a comforting temporary escape from the real world with all its pesky shades of gray.

This article is filed under Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Thrillers.

Novelist Lee Harwell is having breakfast at his favorite Chicago diner when a hostile homeless guy shouting a single word—obstreperous—interrupts his meal. He’s unsettled by the encounter and finally realizes why. The homeless man reminds him of his childhood friend Hootie who has been confined to a mental hospital since the sixties and communicates only in single words and literary quotations.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Horror, Thrillers.

The stream-of-consciousness style and lack of quotation marks seen here is indicative of the entire novel. These techniques project to the reader the type of seamlessness in which Lucio and the other characters live. Violence and love, reality and myth, abundance and drought, life and death; these dichotomies mingle and mate, creating an alternate world extreme in its gorgeous, frightening possibilities.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Mexico.

But without a doubt, it’s the series that he began seven years ago, Fables, that has captured the imaginations of so many readers. The premise of this story is clear and simple—familiar characters from fairy tales and folklore escape after an army of creatures led by the mysterious Adversary has come to conquer their home worlds. Where do all these exiled creatures go? New York City, of course.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Science Fiction and Fantasy.

The conflict becomes a war in which, “…there was no truth. It was a nothing, laughable Mickey Mouse conflict; it was a sinister time of terror and repression. The British were misguided and ignorant; the Cypriots were lethargic and foolish. The Cypriots loved the British; the Cypriots hated the British. The British were torturers; the British were decent and honourable. EOKA were terrorists; EOKA were heroes.”

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Great Britain, Military.

Oliver won’t socialize. He won’t even speak. He simply spends his days wrapped in his obsession, a pattern that is only slightly modified when he is given painting materials. For then he takes to painting a dark-haired woman over and over again.

This article is filed under Art, Fiction Reviews.

For Last Night in Twisted River is the work of a seasoned tale-teller, a writer who can blend his own life (a breakthrough novel on the fourth try, stints in Iowa under the tutelage of Kurt Vonnegut) with Danny’s and still manage to erase himself in the process. It’s the old story within a story trick, the character we thought to be a third person passive now metamorphosing into a first person active. So by the time we reach the finish, a finish that Irving ties neatly back to the beginning, Danny has provided us with an intriguing meditation on the process of fiction writing.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews.

The religious and cultural tensions present in this book, while controversial, are always handled with grace and candor, perhaps because, as Burr writes in an author’s note, the recounting of Sam Rosenbaum’s ousting from a Jewish temple is his own.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews.

A fast-paced, heartrending book, The Ghost King is a must-read for any fans of the Drizzt Do’Urden stories and a welcome read for general fantasy enthusiasts. While The Pirate King has a tighter plot and better action scenes, it’s this book that people will long remember.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Science Fiction and Fantasy.

What’s remarkable about her is that she shares her story with the class simply, with a kind of wonder and interest, as if it were not her own. In fact, Thassa finds delight, awe, and beauty in almost everything: her journal entries and stories charm everyone in the class, as does her person: “she shouldn’t even be pretty, except for the conspiracy of delight rounding her cheeks.” She seems perpetually happy! How can it be?

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews.

Matchless was originally composed by Maguire for the radio, and the story retains a sense of immediacy which makes it a quick read. Some pages contain only a sentence or two, and Maguire has included his own “illuminations” or sketches, to illustrate the story. There’s a lovely energy to Maguire’s drawings which complements the action of the story, and he plays with light and shadow in the same way visually as he does textually. These two formatting choices make the book ideal for children, something which is not true for his other re-imaginings.

This article is filed under Children's Literature, Fiction Reviews.