The Book Club

Some homecomings are not really homecomings. They are surrenders dressed up in a coat of duty. That is the bruised feeling at the centre of John of John by Douglas Stuart, the third novel from the author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo. John-Calum (Cal) Macleod, broke and graduated from a Scottish textile college with little to show but debt and a c...

There is a moment near the middle of The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee when an aging assassin stands at a watchtower gate and watches former colleagues walk into a frozen wasteland to die with dignity. No fight. No betrayal. Just paperwork, polite applause, and a long walk into negative-forty wind. That scene, more than any sword exchange in the book (and there...

The premise of Caller Unknown by Gillian McAllister lands like a phone ringing at four in the morning. A British mother, a teenage daughter, a remote rental lodge in Big Bend country, and one missing girl. From the first chapter, the novel reaches in and grips your wrist, and it does not loosen its hold for a long stretch.

McAllister, the Sunday Time...

There is a certain kind of writer who can walk into the smallest room of an ordinary life and find the whole weather of the world hanging in it. Elizabeth Strout has been that writer for almost three decades. Her new novel, The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, takes us into the head of a fifty-seven-year-old high school history teacher in coastal Massachusett...

Some books grab you with plot twists. Others quietly settle in, pour you a cup of chamomile tea, and refuse to let you leave until you have cried at someone else’s kitchen table. The Daisy Chain Flower Shop by Laurie Gilmore is firmly the second kind. It is the sixth and final book in Gilmore’s Dream Harbor series, and she writes it with the easy confidence of an aut...