Lauren Willig

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…