Readingthepast

Based on her grandparents, Edith and Milton Fieth, Terri Lewis’s When They Came Home is a moving portrait of a Midwestern couple's marriage in the aftermath of WWI. The story spans decades in its evocation of their lives in the first half of the 20th century. It intertwines multiple tales of survival and endurance: the psychological wounds that Milton suffers while fighti...

“The road Vernice is walking is paved different from yours,” Annie’s grandmother tells her towards the beginning of Jones’s remarkable novel. “It ain’t fair, but that’s the way life takes us.”

With her new novel, Elisabeth Storrs moves from her familiar ground of long-ago Rome and Etruria, setting for her Tales of Ancient Rome trilogy, to WWII Germany—and her enthusiasm for the archaeology of the ancient world is carried forward here. Fables & Lies<...

Writing frequent pieces about books, brief reviews included, involves a lot of multitasking. At any given time, I’m typically reading one novel for review, finalizing the content for another before turning it in by the deadline, and serving as the editor for others’ reviews. Within the last few weeks, in addition to finishing up three reviews myself, I’ve been developing questio...