Honored last year with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her inspiring fiction and soul-baring memoirs, Allende (Ripper, 2014, etc.) offers a saga of a couple that keeps its affair secret for the better half of a century. … Vividly and pointedly evoking prejudices "unconventional" couples among the current-day elderly faced (and some are still battling), Allende, as always, gives progress and hopeful spirits their due.
“City on Fire is a big, stunning first novel and an amazing virtual reality machine, whisking us back to New York City in the 1970s with bravura swagger and style and heart . . . The ghosts of New York memorialized by earlier writers—F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Richard Price—hover over City on Fire. At the same time, the novel’s ambition and Dickensian storytelling ardor will remind many readers of Donna Tartt’s dazzling The Goldfinch, while its fuel-injected prose and nimble stacking of plot complications will recall for others Martin Amis’s classic portrait of Gotham in Money. But this novel is defiantly and indelibly Hallberg’s own: a symphonic epic that reaches a crashing crescendo during the blackout of July 13, 1977 . . . [In] Hallberg’s XXL tool kit as a storyteller: a love of language and the handsprings he can make it perform; a bone-deep knowledge of his characters’ inner lives that’s as unerring as that of the young Salinger; an instinctive gift for spinning suspense. He also possesses a journalistic eye for those telling details that can trigger memories of the reader’s own like small Proustian grenades . . . A novel of head-snapping ambition and heart-stopping power—a novel that attests to its young author’s boundless and unflagging talents.”
A Banquet of Consequences: A Lynley Novel by Elizabeth George
“George’s mystery unfolds with great psychological depth, finely drawn characters and gorgeous portraits of the English countryside. . . . [George] is an essential writer of popular fiction today.”
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