Long Island by Colm Toibin is a May, 2024 sequel to his notable 2009 novel Brooklyn and follows its principal characters, Eilis Lacey, an Irish immigrant to Brooklyn in the 1950’s, and her husband Tony Fiorella, a plumber from a robust Italian family. When Toibin picks up their story again, it’s the 1970’s, and they …
Continue reading Four Novels by Three Authors, All About Family Life
Want to get away from current news stories, weather warnings, and Donald Trump's hush money election fraud trial? Want to stretch out with a book amidst the fragrance of lilacs, the perfume of flowering crab trees and sweet rhododendrons, and the riotous colors of geraniums and bleeding hearts? Here are some novels to consider this …
The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin is a lush historical novel about Isabella Stewart Gardner, Belle of Boston, an upper class young woman who refused to limit herself to the cultural norms prescribed by the wealthy social elite of her time and who, in her struggle to assert herself, made an impact on the …
Continue reading More books to delight and challenge,pt. 1-fiction
North Woods by Daniel Mason is an exquisite book about a house in a forest in western Massachusetts, and all the people who have lived in that house going back to colonial times, starting with a pair of lovers fleeing the constraints of Puritan society. Each chapter is devoted to successive inhabitants of the house, …
Continue reading Books as companions when it snows – pt. 1, fiction
Marjorie Arons-Barron 