The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett

The Uncommon Reader is a short book — almost a novella — by a well-known British writer whose works I’ve never read before (although apparently he wrote the screenplay for The Madness of King George, a movie I liked a lot).  I probably never would have stumbled across it if my Aunt Bernice hadn’t read [...]

The Sealed Letter, by Emma Donoghue

It’s nice, when the Giller longlist comes out, to find a few books you genuinely like on there — or, a few books you haven’t read yet but know you will like.  Such was my reaction on seeing Emma Donoghue’s latest make the list.  I loved her earlier historical novel, Slammerkin, and while I didn’t love [...]

Bathsheba, by Tracy Morgan

Since I write novels about Bible women that are published by a Seventh-day Adventist press and sold in Adventist Book Centres, this new release (from the “other” SDA press, Pacific Press) caused some confusion at my local campmeeting ABC this summer.  My friend Alice who was running the ABC told me that people kept coming in, [...]

The Memoirs of Cleopatra, by Margaret George

After working my way through that vast Colleen McCullough Masters of Rome series that I reviewed last month, I still didn’t feel like I had quite enough of that world, especially the Antony and Cleopatra story. So I went back to reread a novel I’d enjoyed some years ago, Margaret George’s The Memoirs of Cleopatra. When [...]

The Way of Women, by Lauraine Snelling

The Way of Women is another of those books of Christian women’s fiction (not a romance in this case) that I occasionally pick up in hopes of a light and spiritually refreshing read.  Sometimes it works out really well, other times, not so much.  This wasn’t a bad book, but it was one of the [...]

Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse (and others), by Lee Goldberg

If you really love a TV series and just can’t get enough of it, the next best thing is a good series of spin-off novels.  Of course, spin-off novels could be terrible, but if they’re written by a really good writer who knows both the show and his genre inside-out, the novels could actually be [...]