Book Reviews

A review of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a medieval murder mystery and philosophical tour de force that makes rigorous scholarship feel like the most gripping of puzzles.

A review of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, a tightly wound mystery about a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio whose favorite daughter is found dead, and the secrets that surface.

A review of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the speculative fiction masterwork about a theocratic America that controls women’s bodies, and one woman’s account of surviving it.

Marilynne Robinson published Housekeeping in 1980, her first novel, and it arrived like nothing that had come before it. The book is quiet where most debut novels are eager, slow where most are propulsive, and written in prose so precise and so strange that it continues to unsettle readers decades after its publication. It won…

Larry McMurtry published Lonesome Dove in 1985, and the novel won the Pulitzer Prize and transformed its author’s reputation overnight. McMurtry had spent the previous two decades writing about modern Texas – small towns, pickup trucks, the death of the frontier – and many of his readers were surprised to find him writing an epic…

Summary Hilary Mantel published Wolf Hall in 2009, and it won the Man Booker Prize, and it upended what literary historical fiction could do. The novel covers the years 1500 to 1535 in Tudor England, from Thomas Cromwell’s early adulthood through his ascent to become Henry VIII’s chief minister following the fall of Cardinal Wolsey….

Kate Chopin published The Awakening in 1899 and watched it destroy her career. Critics found it immoral; she was essentially blacklisted from the literary society that had welcomed her earlier, safer work. The novel was largely forgotten until the 1960s and 1970s, when feminist scholars recovered it as a foundational text of American women’s literature…

Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind is the kind of novel that makes readers want to cancel their plans. Published in Spain in 2001 and translated into English in 2004, it sold twenty million copies worldwide and established Zafon as one of the great popular storytellers of his generation. Set in post-Civil War…

Edith Wharton published The House of Mirth in 1905, and its ending – swift, specific, and devastating – made it one of the most discussed novels of the decade. Where The Age of Innocence follows a man who retreats from life into respectable misery, The House of Mirth follows a woman who has no such…

Summary Kazuo Ishiguro published Never Let Me Go in 2005 and it won him the Booker Prize shortlist and a renewed international readership. The novel is, on its surface, a science fiction story: its narrator and central characters are clones, bred to donate their organs and die young. But Ishiguro is not interested in the…