This week I had the privilege of celebrating book launches with Fiona Davis and M.J. Rose.  Both books delve deep into the history of New York in the twentieth century and both are excellent. The Masterpiece takes us deep into Grand Central Terminal, first in the glory days of the 1920s, then in the gritty grimness…

This week was all England all the time, in books, at least. I read Julia Whelan’s My Oxford Year, about an American abroad at Oxford– which made me want to re-read Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night, arguably the best of all possible Oxford novels in that best of all possible worlds (although you can also put…

It’s been a bit of a week, so I’ll confess I’m having trouble remembering what I’ve read.  (What day is this again?) But two books stand out.  Beatriz Williams’s The Summer Wives, set on fictional Winthrop Island in the 1930’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s, as choices made in one generation shape the lives of those who come…

I’m going to be back to the writing cave shortly with revisions on the Barbados Book, but, in the meantime, it’s such bliss to get to dive into other people’s fiction– new fiction, not books I’ve read a hundred times before.  (I tend to stick to old favorites when I’m writing.) To kick off my…

This week, I finally got around to reading Greer Hendricks’s and Sarah Pekkanen’s The Wife Between Us, a dark, domestic, psychological thriller about the unraveling of a woman’s life and marriage. I gobbled it up over the course of two short-ish train rides. (There’s really nothing like train and airplane reading.) For a total change…

It’s been a week of the new and the old. I began with Ruth Ware’s latest, The Death of Mrs. Westaway, a modern Gothic featuring a mysterious heritage, an appropriately waifish and desperate heroine, mistaken parentage, and, of course, a House. After that, I changed tone and time period and plunged back into the 16th…

It’s been a week of dark and atmospheric books, starting with Wendy Webb’s The End of Temperance Dare, a ghost story set at a tuberculosis sanatorium turned writers’s retreat, with all the attendant eeriness you can imagine. Highly recommended for a dark and stormy afternoon, preferably with tea. From there, I moved on to a…

It’s back to winter here in New York! (Um, spring? Where did you go?) On cold and drippy days, what could be better than a classic mystery? I revisited Agatha Christie’s The A. B. C. Murders and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Dying Detective. Now I’m trying to decide whether to move on…

Do you ever have those weeks when you pick up books and put them down again? I’m sure they’re very good books, and books I might like at another time, but they just weren’t holding my attention– so I gave up on them and picked up Joan Aiken Hodge’s Marry In Haste. I wasn’t sure…

First: how is it Friday already? Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining. But it feels more like Tuesday, somehow. This week is a bit of a blur. Which may be why I can’t quite remember what I read this week. I know there were books… but I have no idea what they were. The…