When Giuffre first fell into the orbit of Epstein and his partner/aide de camp, Ghislaine Maxwell, she was a teenager who’d already had long experience with sexual abuse. Her father and a family friend molested her, she writes; later, after escaping an abusive rehab facility, she was raped by a man proffering false promises of […]
Ellie Belmont and Kathryn Kepler, together for five years, live a happy and fulfilling life in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis. Despite their contentment, an email from Kathryn’s high school boyfriend prompts Ellie to face her fear that Kathryn might leave her for a man. The recently widowed Gary Gibson, a successful Florida real estate […]
Midway through his handsomely illustrated study of mapmaking, Cheshire quotes diarist Harold Nicolson’s eyewitness account of President Woodrow Wilson kneeling over a map at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, tracing new borders with his finger. The scene captures the book’s central concern: our enduring desire to organize the world through cartography. As the writer […]
“The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other.” With that opening sentence, Stonex plunges us into the mind and world of Bridget “Birdie” Keller, a wife and mother in the rural countryside of Wiltshire, England. But Birdie’s world is not quite so tranquil: 18 years earlier, a man was […]
Journalist and author Cohen, author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, strikes gold with a story from Victorian Britain that comes with a scholar’s favorite documentation: court transcripts. In 1883 a wealthy Australian bought a used yacht in Britain and hired a crew to deliver it: an experienced […]
The author opens the book with a series of devastating events that occurred to people in the author’s inner circle that made him realize that “life can be more than mere survival.” Survival mode, he writes, is an “emergency response system” that may manifest as irritability, procrastination, or simply becoming numb. By contrast, thriving is […]
If the unnamed narrator of Tokarczuk’s latest novel appears to bear certain similarities to Tokarczuk herself—an abiding interest in mushrooms and astrology, say—that’s neither here nor there. The novel is set in a remote Polish village close to the Czech border: so close to the border, in fact, that when a visiting German tourist suddenly […]
Cassidy has always known that someday she’ll help run Silver Stallion Ranch, just like generations of Sterlings before her. Wilder Nash is a Hollywood heartthrob who’s trying to break out of commercials and high school prom-coms. Being cast as the lead in a historical Western miniseries might be his big break. The only problem: He […]
Hyman Tuchverderber was born to a Jewish family in Manchester, England. He was just 13 when Germany’s invasion of Poland incited World War II. He and his family survived the devastating 1940 Manchester bombings, which left the Tuchverderbers, like many others, financially strapped. Sixteen-year-old Hyman studied to be a wireless operator in the British Merchant […]
When Diana, a wealthy sugar magnate in her mid-70s, is abruptly forced into retirement by her own daughter, she relocates to the Ocean’s Edge, “a fifty-five plus community beautifully nestled along Florida’s Treasure Coast.” What begins as a quiet chapter in her life quickly turns into an unexpected adventure. Diana soon befriends a quirky group […]