Marie-Laure is a young blind girl, living with her father in Paris, 1940. Her father is the keeper of the keys at the Natural History Museum, and he builds her a miniature replica of their neighborhood, so that she might memorize the details and learn her way around. When the Germans invade Paris, Marie-Laure and her father flee Paris, for the coastal town of Saint-Malo, where they live with his brother Etienne in their childhood home. Werner is a young orphan, living in an orphanage with his sister, other children, and their care keeper, a woman who speaks French and tells them stories of France. Werner and his sister discover…

Sue Monk Kidd’s new novel, The Invention of Wings, starts with Sarah Grimké’s 11th birthday in 1805 South Carolina. As a gift from her mother, Sarah receives 10 year old Hetty (Handful) to be her handmaid. Sarah doesn’t want a handmaid, has been scarred at an early age by the cruelties of slavery, so she decides to set Hetty free. It doesn’t take. So Sarah instead befriends Hetty, tries to be as kind as possible, and endeavors to teach Hetty to read. Unfortunately, teaching slaves to read is illegal, and both Hetty and Sarah suffer for their crime. Sarah is a bright girl who loves to read, and her beloved…

‘Americanah’ is the story of a young Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, who in college, falls in love with a boy, Obinze. They come from different backgrounds…his mother is a high minded academic, a college professor. Her parents are much more working class, living with the issues of power outages and so on. They fall deeply in love, but amongst the constant strikes in the college, it becomes almost impossible for them to graduate from college, so she moves to the United States, where her aunt has invited her. She is an excellent student and gets scholarships, but still she owes plenty of money on tuition and living costs. She’s suffering. Things…

(artwork found on the New York Times website, here) “They say there are many worlds, all around our own, packed tight as the cells of your heart. Each with its own logic, its own physics, moons and stars. We cannot go there — we would not survive in most. But there are some, as I have seen, almost exactly like our own. . . . And in those other worlds, the places you love are there, the people you love are there. Perhaps in one of them, all rights are wronged, and life is as you wish it. So what if you found the door? And what if you had…

“Little Bee” is the name chosen for herself by a young Nigerian girl running from “the men” who have come to burn her village and kill its occupants, so that the oil field below may be developed.  She takes the name to hide her identity, as her real name would clearly identify her as a member of a particular family, all of whom are supposed to be dead.  Little Bee has lived a happy life in an impoverished village, where there is no running water or electricity, but there is a tire swing and a lot of fun to be had.  When the village is destroyed by the men, she…

Graphic found on the New York Times review of the book, here. The preface of Amor Towles Rules of Civility finds our heroine, Katey, and her husband attending the opening of a photography exhibit in Manhattan, in 1966. The exhibit is of photographs taken with a hidden camera on the subways, some 25 years before. She is stunned to find, amongst all of the other photographs, two of a man she recognizes, Tinker Grey. In the first picture, he is wearing a custom shirt and a cashmere coat, and is clearly enjoying life. In the second, taken perhaps a year later, he looks as though he hasn’t had enough to…

Any system of slavery must be abolished. It had seemed simple in England; yet in Ohio that principle was chipped away at, by economic arguments, by personal circumstances, by deep-seated prejudice that Honor sensed even in Quakers. Honor has traveled from her home and family in England, hoping for a new life in the new world. Her sister is engaged to be married to a man who works with his brother in their general store in a small Quaker town in 1850 Ohio, and Honor has decided to go along with her. Circumstances change quite a bit between the sisters leaving home and arriving in Ohio, and Honor finds herself…

picture found here PARSIFAL IS DEAD. That is the end of the story. The technician and the nurse rushed in from their glass booth. Where there had been a perfect silence a minute before there was now tremendous activity, the straining sounds of two men unexpectedly thrown into hard work. The technician stepped between Parsifal and Sabine, and she had no choice but to let go of Parsifal’s hand. When they counted to three and then lifted Parsifal’s body from the metal tongue of the MRI machine and onto the gurney, his head fell back, his mouth snapping open with no reflexes to protect it. Sabine saw all of his…

Da gets up to go and he pats my dirty hair and I suppose I should be ashamed, but what do I care about anything anyway.  That’s part of being awful, not caring.  And then what’s part of it too is the thought that suddenly jumps into my head.  The thought that it could be a person’s own mother who might make a doll with her daughter’s hair and throw it into a fire.  She’d watch the flames eat it up and then she’d dance off to bed laughing and having sex and bleeding little drops of perfume all over the sheets as if there was nothing to it.  I…

I fished. I’d set down my pack against a still green tree. The kayak sled. My rifle. I passed up the beetle kill, the standing dead trees that broke and fell in a hard wind, and walked further into the green. I always fished a stretch of woods that had not died, or that was coming back. I set down the pack and breathed the smell of running water, of cold stone, of fir and spruce, like the sachets my mother used to keep in a sock drawer. I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here. I could almost imagine that it was…