Book Quote: “He wants it each way. Both ways. All the ways. He wants his marriage solved, and he wants to be on the road with Rena, one of the undersea creatures strapped to the luggage rack, Yul Brynner with his head out the window, licking the air. He wants the Beanbags to smile, shake their heads, look at Hendrick’s charts and tell them ‘We’ve never…  Read More →

Book Quote: “From Havering to Holland Park, from Forest Hill to Ferrers End, from Upminster to Parsons Green, the individuals would shortly leave their flats and houses, fragrant and hopeful, bang the doors, and go like invisible cells into the bloodstream of the city…” Book Review: Review by Jill I. Shtulman (JUL 4, 2010) Sebastian Faulks is nothing if not ambitious. In his latest book, a sweeping and piercing satire about contemporary... 

Book Quote: “It’s not his fault that sorrow overwhelms him, that’s just middle age, buddy, everybody regrets something. He and Beth were together for thirteen years, and that’s a lot of emotional momentum, a runaway freight train rolling downhill, nothing but tanker cars full of toxic waste and high explosives, and sometimes he feels like he’s tied to the fucking track. ” Book Review: Review by Poornima Apte (JUL 3, 2010)... 

Book Quote: “It made her think about that Radiohead song ‘Fake Plastic Trees,’ with its fake Chinese rubber plant in plastic earth in a town full of other rubber plants. It made her think about her parents, too. How was it that they just kept at it day after day, living a sort of plastic life in a plastic house in a plastic suburb?” Book Review: Review by Mike Fredette (JUN 27, 2010) Those who enjoyed Susan Coll’s last novel will be... 

Book Quote: “You’ve got a dark side hidden away in there somewhere, haven’t you?” Book Review: Review by Guy Savage (JUN 18, 2010) Special –>   interview with Jenn Ashworth Imagine, for a moment, that you live in a nice quiet little middle-class street policed by the local volunteer neighbourhood watch. All the gardens are tidy and well-kept. The neighbours know one other, and nothing much ever happens here. And then imagine that... 

Book Quote: “My mother – well – she just wasn’t around much. I look at her now and I know why. She married the wrong man, handed over her children to Gran and grabbed life by the throat. But she was only strangling herself. I’m watching her recovery now. She is, you know, a very clever woman. Underneath the facelifts, there’s a decent brain.” Book Review: Review by Bonnie Brody (JUN…  Read More →

Book Quote: “My mother – well – she just wasn’t around much. I look at her now and I know why. She married the wrong man, handed over her children to Gran and grabbed life by the throat. But she was only strangling herself. I’m watching her recovery now. She is, you know, a very clever woman. Underneath the facelifts, there’s a decent brain.” Book Review: Review…  Read More →

Book Quote: “To quote a personal hero of mine, it’s the unknown unknowns that are going to come back and bite us. It’s all those scraps of intel that we can’t confirm and we don’t know. All those evil schemes that reside outside the perimeter of our Western mind-set. They’re like some kind of scary fish with thousand teeth and a fluorescent thing hanging in front of its face like you see on nature specials. What kind of lure... 

Book Quote: “Ohhhhhhhhhh!” she cried, rolling her head and grabbing Mary with one hand, Kitty with the other. “My last hope, gone! Instead of throwing my eldest in the path of eligible bachelors, they’re to be thrown to the unmentionables! And so go the rest of us, girls—to a potter’s field or down a dreadful’s gullet, one or the other! And all because your father started taking orders from some ponytailed... 

Book Quote: “How do trite things get to be trite. Why is the truth usually not just un-but anti-interesting?” Book Review: Review by Doug Bruns (MAY 12, 2010) I’ve thought a great deal about this review, since beginning the book, in fact. (I wonder if even the word “ review ” is the right one. A review implies more than I think I can deliver.) This is no ordinary book and writing about it is not a normal experience.... 

Book Quote: “It was soon after Joseph left that Betty heard from her cousin Lou. Cousin Lou was an elegantly dressed man with a pink face for whom the description open-handed might have been invented. He had, to being with, disproportionately large hands that burst from his sleeves and were constantly slapping the backs and patting the cheeks and enfolding the helpless smaller hands of the many people he …  Read More →

Book Quote: “Yes, I admit I was a poet once. No, I wasn’t much good. I’m not claiming to be some thwarted, tragic genius. This isn’t that kind of story. The fact is, like many a socially awkward man-child, good with words but bad with people, I broke out in poetry, like acne, somewhere in preadolescence, and by the time I met Jane, versifying had already become one of those vestigial gifts, like card tricks…  Read More →

Book Quote: “After a while Ridcully took out his watch, which was one of the old-fashioned imp-driven ones and was reliably inaccurate. He flipped up the gold lid and stared patiently as the little creature pedaled the hands around. When the expostulating had not stopped after a minute and a half, he snapped the lid shut. … ‘Gentleman,’ he said gravely. ‘We must partake of the game of the people – from whom, I... 

Book Quote: “Carefully, I injected each chocolate with a drop or two of the stuff, touching the injection site with a glass rod (slightly warmed in the Bunsen burner) to smooth over the little hole. “I had carried out the procedure so perfectly that only the faintest whiff of rotten egg reached my nostrils. Safe inside the gooey centers, the hydrogen sulfide would remain cocooned, invisible, unsuspected, until Feely – “Flavia!”... 

Book Quote: “We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors…. I think we wake up every day with high intentions and by dusk we have routinely fallen short.” Book Review: Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (MAR 5, 2010) There is a great deal to like in Helen Simonson’s debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand...