BOOKLOVES

Early in In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck, a woman in a migrant camp goes into labour and there is no doctor. Mac, who has arrived that afternoon and knows nothing about childbirth, announces that he has medical training and delivers the baby by nerve and hot water. It goes well. Afterwards he explains to […]

Eda Shaw is inching along a wooden beam above a full playhouse, knees shaking, trying not to think about what happens to the people below if she falls. She is following a small black mouse. When she reaches the gallery roof the mouse has become a man, and he has secured them the best seats […]

Halfway through Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, a man called Hazel, who is kind and not clever, sits in the Monterey jail beside a vagrant fortune teller and asks what he insists is only a hypothetical question. Suppose a man is in trouble. Suppose there is one way out and he cannot take it himself. […]

Rosa Williams watches her husband leave the house on her phone. The police have asked to see the doorbell footage, so she scrolls back past her own return from an early yoga class to the clip of Daniel at 6.50, pulling the door behind him, patting a pocket for his keys, glancing once up at […]

An emotionally charged yet forensic audit of inherited dysfunction and one man’s fight to preserve his truth “I realized that in my family, an intimate thought was not a confidence; it was a target.”  Decades before David V. Gobel began auditing his family’s betrayals, he learned how to become a vault. In his deeply affecting […]

A gripping novel of fate, luck and choice set in the Vietnam War and its aftermath John Zaiss’s ambitious novel, A Confeluence of Fates, is a terrifically rewarding historical read, depicting the experiences of a soldier and a Vietnamese orphan with equal sympathy.  With the spare efficacy of a literary thriller, A Confluence of Fates […]

Midway through The Red Pony by John Steinbeck, an old man comes up the ranch road one afternoon and announces to a ten-year-old that this is a return: there was a house on this land once, and it is where his life began. The boy has no idea what to do with that and runs […]

On Christmas Eve, with deep snow over New York and every flight to San Francisco cancelled, a novelist stranded alone in his Greenpoint apartment receives a five-dollar payment from the critic who destroyed his career. The memo suggests it is for eggnog for one. He sends five dollars back with a joke about skating alone. […]