Category: Book Reviews

There is a bumblebee on Signy’s pillow, and it should not be there. The bees live in the gardens, and Signy is in bed, in the early artificial dawn of a moonlet where the wall lights warm to orange on a schedule. She coaxes the exhausted insect into her cupped hands, walks it through the […]

The nutcracker weighs about as much as a piano. It was carved from a single log, it stands taller than most men, and on the coldest night of December Ella Chambers is dragging it, wrapped in old blankets, out of a mansion basement and across an icy driveway toward a car that is older than […]

Eight hours out of Browning, at a truck stop in Williston, North Dakota, a young man who has spent four months in a hospital bed cannot make himself use a urinal. A trucker coughs in a stall. An old cowboy two places down finishes easily and leaves. Back in the camper, on the road again, […]

An utterly charming romp of an impossible-to-put down queer historical romance Beau Scamp by C.M. Harris hits every mark a reader of queer historical romance could ask for. Is there a dashing highwayman? Is there ever. How about an intelligent, underestimated lady? Yes, indeed. And the plot? How does a multi-layered genderbending masquerade fueled by […]

Somewhere in the second half of Burning Bright by John Steinbeck a woman tells a man, very coldly, that she will do anything at all to bring her husband contentment, and instructs him to remember that she said it. She means it literally. She is already sure her husband can father no children, that the […]

When telling the truth is a career-ending act, who protects the whistleblower? There are few workplaces where the consequences of speaking out could be more serious than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In The Broken Whistle: A Deep State Run Amok, Pedro Israel Orta offers a personal account of what happened when he did precisely […]

Early in America and Americans by John Steinbeck a man named Jimmy, chief of a Piute band summering near Lake Tahoe, turns up at a trout hatchery in the snow and asks for a fish. He is given one. He puts it in a snowbank, strips, washes himself in the freezing stream, dresses, picks the […]

The closing dispatch of Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck sends a lieutenant up a hill on an Italian island in December 1943 carrying a white flag, and his white flag is a bath towel. There are forty-three American paratroopers behind him and eighty-seven heavily armed Germans dug in ahead. He has memorised […]

Near the end of A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck, the travellers are handed a sealed cardboard box and told not to open it until their plane has left Soviet airspace. Inside are four thousand negatives, less whatever the censors kept. They kept very little: some shots that showed landscape too clearly, some pictures of […]

A woman gets on a bus in The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck and is asked her name. She glances at a cigarette advertisement on the wall and then out of the window at a tree, and says she is Camille Oaks. She also tells everyone she is a dental nurse, which she is not. […]