Grow’s novel can be ranked with Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated in capturing the essentials of modern Ukraine.
Wood’s book is a stately and dignified account that is beautifully leavened by intimate glimpses of Edith and Woodrow in their happiness, grief, anger, and optimism.
Terrific research buttresses strong writing that will keep readers riveted. Molly Guptill Manning’s When Books Went to War and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 are great tandem reads for Labuskes’s latest.
Twenty years in the making, this saga alludes to the romantic work of Lermontov while also doing a great reprise of the jazz scene in Tbilisi. Compelling notes of Keith Gessen, Gary Shteyngart, and Jonathan Safran Foer will resonate for readers keeping up with Soviet absurdities in ex-USSR states.
Loesch’s writing can be lyrically evocative. Many red herrings and detours mar the story’s momentum so that the strong opening pages fade to a mélange of thriller, mystery, and fantasy.
Spanning the final decades of the 1900s, Meadows’s latest is a genre-bender that fluently integrates sports with accents from political and psychological thrillers. Most novels about gymnastics are written for YA audiences, but this one is for seasoned readers.
Like the novels of Helen Dunmore, David Benioff, and others, Parry’s work covers appalling agonies. There is an O. Henry quality in the revelation of an amazing connection among the characters. Readers of Ruta Sepetys’s Between Shades of Gray and Salt to the Sea will enjoy the action focused on the teenager.