This week, I’m going to try and catch up on some new books I’ve added. It’s easy to add the ones that are physically on the shelves, but I have a number of new titles on my Kindle that I want to tell you about! First up, My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout: Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from… Read more

From the nice folks at HarperCollins, Missing Pieces by Heather Gudenkauf: Sarah Quinlan’s husband, Jack, has been haunted for decades by the untimely death of his mother when he was just a teenager, her body found in the cellar of their family farm, the circumstances a mystery. The case rocked the small farm town of Penny Gate, Iowa, where Jack was raised,… Read more

Downloaded my review copy of a new book I am really looking forward to! Back in 2011, I gave a great review to Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s Tiger in the Kitchen. Now, I get to review her first novel, Sarong Party Girls: On the edge of twenty-seven, Jazzy hatches a plan for her and her best girlfriends: Sher, Imo, and Fann. Before the… Read more

I added a few things to my personal library over the holidays. First up, a little something from Kindle First: The Oddfits by Tiffany Tsao Eight-year-old Murgatroyd Floyd doesn’t fit in—not as a blue-eyed blonde living in Singapore, not in school, and certainly not with his aloof expatriate parents, who seem determined to make his life even harder. Unbeknownst to him, there’s… Read more

This one looks great — What She Knew by Gilly MacMillan: In a heartbeat, everything changes… Rachel Jenner is walking in a Bristol park with her eight-year-old son, Ben, when he asks if he can run ahead. It’s an ordinary request on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, and Rachel has no reason to worry—until Ben vanishes. Police are called, search parties go… Read more

New week, new books! First, The Undoing by Averil Dean: On a bitter January evening, three people are found murdered in the isolated Blackbird hotel.  Best friends since childhood, Eric, Rory and Celia have always been inseparable. Together they’ve coped with broken homes and damaged families, clinging to each other as they’ve navigated their tenuous lives. Their bond is potent and… Read more

And yet a little more non-fiction for the shelves – The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley: The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch—the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics and philosophy, Matt… Read more

Now, I’ve got some new stuff to share that I hope to be reviewing soon. First up is Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century by Alistair Thorne: Sir Alistair Horne has been a close observer of war and history for more than fifty years and in this wise and masterly work, he revisits six battles of the past… Read more

Well, I’m back. I’d like to say it was nice to have a break, but mostly I’ve been slammed with work. Still, I’ve got some new books to tell you about and a few to get added to the review list. This week, I want to feature 2 books that I picked up for my personal library. First is one… Read more