Anyone with a penchant for the tension between the past traditions and the coming future (a la Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey) and historical nonfiction should pick up Black Diamonds. Catherine Bailey, author of The Secret Rooms, has once again scoured archives private and public looking for the missing links in noted family’s story. Posterity…
REVIEW: THE BURNING AIR by Erin Kelly
Erin Kelly’s third novel puts a modern twist on a classic archetype: The English country house mystery. This is a chilling psychological tale, told from a number increasingly unreliable narrators. The MacBride family is well-to-do and respectable. The patriarch is a lauded schoolmaster in a prim and proper English town. When the mother of the…
THE GREATCOAT by Helen Dunmore
This book would have done better as a short story. It has the makings of a good yarn, but it draws things out much too long. If kept clean and simple, it would have been much more effective. In 1952, a young woman, newly married, takes up a worn, dingy apartment with her husband. He…