That Part Was True Deborah McKinlay Grand Central Publishing Release Date: February 4, 2014 ISBN 978-1-4555-7365-3 You know, I wasn’t going to finish reading Deborah McKinlay’s new novel, That Part Was True, after the first fifty pages or so. It wasn’t that it wasn’t well written – except for a […]
As American viewers await the start of Downton Abbey’s fourth season, the entire season has already aired in Britain, and the waiting really seems unbearable. Luckily, we have the holidays to distract us, and this led me to ponder an aspect of the series that, if the blogs devoted to […]
Aunty Lee’s Delights Ovidia Yu William Morrow Release Date: September 17, 2013 ISBN 978-0-06-222715-7 Aunty Lee’s Delights is a modern day murder mystery novel set in the bustling metropolis of Singapore. In a novel twist, however, its main investigator is not a hardnosed policeman nor a svelte government agent. The […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.