Tag: bestsellers

Books: Children of Wolves, A Novel by Lawrence Osborne, 2026

Very disappointed by the latest novel of Lawrence Osborne, an author I have been recommending left and right in the last five years. I can’t believe that after Hunters in the Dark, The Forgiven, and Beautiful Animals (the works that I rate highest among his oeuvre) he penned this half-baked story.

The plot of the novel, the mechanism that makes all its other parts tick is very week, to the point of not making much sense. What would you think of a terrorist cell of four who select one of them to commit the murder of their target, but then all of them have to be present at the glamorous event where the murder is supposed to happen without any of them having a role in the murder – just to have to plan their escapes?! Why would they need to be at this event in the first place?! Just to hang out and then escape?!

Things like that, as well as other non-consequential happenings, make you think what is mandatory for a good novel – it can’t offer just cool settings, ethnographic details like Turkish cuisine and drinks, descriptions of exotic Istanbul topoi, clothing, and expensive hotels…The characters are vague, their motives banal, they can be reduced just to their physical descriptions and some random behavior that does not engage the reader. The plot cannot withstand a very basic logical questioning.

What happened? It seemed like the author had a contract with the publisher and had to churn up something in a hurry….What a pity.

Books: Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

Would this book be so popular if the author had not been a high society Martha’s Vineyard housewife, Babe Paley’s granddaughter, and a Vanderbilt descendant? The simple answer is – no.

Still, it addresses every housewife’s deep fear of her husband cheating on her. It is like cancer – you may have it and not know about it. Hence, the popularity of the book. It is also intelligently written and offers some insights into women’s choices regarding marriage, career, and parenting. These insights are not particularly new or original. Belle Burden realizes she has traded safety and security for independence. She has consciously selected not to know or care about family finances and has focused on raising her children. The most original, probably, revelation of the book is that actually divorce is NOT the end of a woman’s life and can make a woman a better person!

What I find problematic about this book is that its main premise – living twenty years with a “stranger” – does not ring true. Whose fault is it that Belle Buden did not know much about her husband. He was visiting the family on weekends and spending one week with them at Martha’s Vineyard during the summer. The author points out as proof of her happy years with her husband the fact that he made family videos, that they had a common diary (as newlyweds), and that he was a caring parent ( except for doing baths and homework). The signs of a non-functioning family are in plain sight. This is though, the acceptable marriage model for stay-at-home mothers who are “provided” and have given up their careers. Well, who made this choice? The choice not to be interested in financial matters, not to go to work, not to deal with bosses and difficult colleagues, but instead drive the children to school and various activities, play tennis and go to parties, enjoy long walks, meet friends while the kids are at school, and basically take it easy! I am not sure the insights of such a female can be valid for the majority of modern women.

The shock of the husband’s not willing to explain why he left is a bit overplayed. He was alienated, not entirely present, very powerful, rich, and he already had his own life apart from the family. He just formalized through a divorce the choices he had already made. Makes you wonder what the author’s standards or notions of a good marriage were not to have noticed that.

The choice of a phony person and a narcissistic actress like Gwyneth Paltrow to play the main character in the future film Strangers is quite symptomatic, no?

Books: Look What You Made Me Do, A Novel by John Lanchester

It is a pleasure read and it gives you the feeling it was written for pleasure by John Lanchester. Inspires me to read more of his writing. Maybe, next one on my to read list will be his most famous novel Capital.

The plot is engaging as all revenge stories are. Closer to the end, it becomes predictable and a bit repetitive. Not all plot twists need to be explained as the narrator Kate does…But the plot meanderings are not the main source of the pleasure of reading. It is the language – incisive and witty. Lanchester has the gift of capturing and representing truthfully the class and age of his characters by rendering their conversations – intellectual discourse, dinner banter, intimate dialogue. He makes you reflect on the nature of willful or just fashionable socializing, of courtship and friendship, of passion and jealousy – through language. Kate, one of the two main narrators in the novel gets plunged into misery by witnessing her most intimate marital discourse becoming the dialogue of a popular TV show. Phoebe – the second narrator, pleases most with her cynical and blunt descriptions of her manipulative and deeply unhappy mother Sarah.

The other feature of this novel that contributes greatly to the pleasure of reading it is the deeply amoral nature of its characters (but they are all super intelligent). There are no “nice” people in this book (except for probably Phoebe’s partner). Thus the book, never gets didactic. It just follows the domino effect of people’s egotistical behavior – the effect of “look what YOU made me do”. Everybody is “innocent” as the ending suggests. It is other people that make us behave badly and Lanchester’s point is that this bad behavior is quite enjoyable. The characters just can’t help it.

The description of the Oxford students’ love triangle was great. The seventies atmosphere, the college culture, the excitement of complex and playful but in the end life-defining relationships – all captured so well! Makes you realize how the act of “falling in love” breakes all the rules of decency and has nothing to do with morality or generosity of spirit.

Books: The Calamity Club, A Novel by Kathryn Stockett, 2026

It is a very hard read – too long and too “all-over-the-place.” I doubt many readers who begin it can endure to the end (at least without skipping pages.) Stockett wanted to touch on so many subjects of “woke” nature that it became a book about everything. The story of an orphan trapped in an unjust orphanage system, a single female struggling with financial hardship, a gay husband and his family wishing to “cure” him, a goodhearted wealthy alcoholic, a single mother sent to jail by a racist society, etc. etc.

All of this is told from an overtly feminist perspective, despite being set in 1930s Mississippi. The novel finally descends into implausibility when its three central female characters establish and successfully run a brothel in Oxford, Mississippi, as a way of surviving the economic devastation of the Great Depression. As a plot device—and as a statement of feminist empowerment, it sounds ludicrous.

There is not one original idea in this book – everything is predictable because it is premised on an ideological matrix – the plight of women and gays in the 20th century American South. Nothing to discover here, nothing we did not already know. The characters are sentimentalized and well-designed to fit the scheme of historical critique intended by Stockett.

Books: More Than Enough, A Novel by Anna Quindlen, 2026

Anna Quindlen is an achiever in fiction writing. She knows the rules and she is so industrious, so detail oriented, so sensitive to women issues, mood swings, and life’s surprises that you can’t really complain about the quality of her writing. And — still you can! This book attempts to cover absolutely everything—and does so formulaically. It feels as though Quindlen gathered a checklist of every modern female concern, striving to address each one without ever achieving depth or finding an original angle. While she occasionally captures a sharp detail or mirrors a familiar feeling perfectly, the overall narrative ultimately leaves an aftertaste of banality and dissatisfaction.

This clutter is the inevitable result of cramming a dizzying array of subplots into a single novel:

  • Mother-daughter friction
  • Deep father-daughter affection
  • Cross-marital betrayal
  • Late-in-life discovery of a biological father
  • Dealing with a parent’s dementia
  • A sister’s tight bond with her gay brother
  • Watching a fabulous best friend die of cancer
  • Chronic parental self-doubt
  • The quiet grief of a childless family
  • Desperation to conceive
  • A child coping with maternal loss

While Quindlen meticulously anchors these subtopics to her protagonist, the execution feels synthetic. In the end, it feels like she was busy checking boxes rather than writing about life itself.

Books: Before I Forget, A Novel by Tory Henwood Hoen, 2025

It is no accident that this book is a bestseller. Essentially, it is a self-help book presented in fictional form—and the fiction is of high quality without being great literature. The novel gently guides the reader through personal failure, coping with death and loss, and dealing with guilt, all in a mellow, compassionate way. A touch of humour and a dose of the occult are woven in, which the reader may take seriously or not.

Henwood’s satirical strength shines when the wellness industry enters the picture. The pages devoted to the main character’s conversations with her boss—the owner of an organic products (or rather, “experiences”) company—are hilarious.

Her most moving prose appears toward the end of the book, when Alzheimer’s and death become part of everyday reality and real pain must be faced in a gracious, unsentimental way. Finally, the author offers the reader one last lifeline with the suggestion that “no one ever leaves this world completely.” You may choose to believe this literally, or simply take it as a comforting metaphor of remembrance.

Books: What We Can Know, A Novel by Ian McEwan, 2025

The novel offers variations of all possible answers to the question “What can we know?” The answers, as expected, are pessimistic. In a world overwhelmed with data and a digital cloud heavy with “knowledge” about everyone and everything, it is still possible to manipulate memory and history as we struggle to “know”. “Most of life is oblivion,” one of McEwan’s characters argues. The truth about the past is unattainable, as it is controlled by the living and by what they have decided to pass on. We can’t know ourselves or what we are capable of. Memoirs are misleading as we put our “better selves” on the page. In a dystopian post-catastrophic world, an age metaphorically named by McEwan – the Inundation (think climate change of catastrophic proportions), humanities and history are losing the attention of the young. The generation of the future is obsessed with the present. Still, a nostalgic professor from the 22nd century searches for a lost poem recited at a birthday party in 2014. This search reflects the author’s hope that literature will still matter…

While the first part of the novel takes place in the future and centers on the search for the lost poem, the second is a soliloquy of the woman to whom the poem was dedicated. It is the more captivating and emotionally engaging part. Here, the novel becomes a satire of sorts of a poet-genius and his literary circle. The poet suffers from “status anxiety” and “limited forgiveness for humankind,” and McEwan so detests him that he turns him into a murderer. Or did he have to do this because he needed to introduce some thriller element to his otherwise quite essayistic narrative?

Stylistically, McEwan is at the height of his craft; his message is melancholic and ironic.

Books: Heart the Lover, A Novel by Lily King, 2025

What an exquisite tear-jerker, impossible not to love! It is the perfect story about a love triangle, the choices we make in our youth, and the blurred line between love and friendship…

The novel follows three college friends, all passionately devoted to literature. It abounds in literary references as the characters spar, debate, crack jokes, and dissect their lives in an effort to impress one another. The narrator is in love with a boy whose closest friend is also in love with her. The first relationship eventually collapses, and the friend becomes her lover. He fathers a child with her but does not learn of it until his deathbed. He dies holding her hand, while her former boyfriend keeps vigil nearby. Stripped down to its bare plot, the story could easily sound like a soap opera. Yet one quickly realizes that “soap” does not define a novel as long as it is not part of its expression.

The reader gets immersed in the story of the girl as it is told by her – a reflection on growing up, a sensual narrative full of happy moments, dominated by the anticipation of happiness and future fulfilment that is only possible in youth, as well as by pain—pain that youth alone allows us to overcome. Even as the novel ends with death, the reverse perspective on time lived has a healing effect.

The entire book is illuminated by a line from The Aeneid, quoted twice: “Someday we will remember even these hardships with pleasure.” That very pleasure flows through the narrative, making the novel so profoundly moving.

Books: Long Island, A Novel by Colm Toibin, 2024

Colm Toibin returns to the heroine of “Brooklyn” – Eilis Lacey, the Irish immigrant, now married to Tony with two grown-up kids and somewhat stifled by the proximity and the routines of his large and closely knit Italian family. Then, quite unexpectedly, the haze of complacency, rather, inertia, is disrupted by the visit of a stranger and his shocking revelation. It is a classical device for opening a novel, and Tobin is a master of the craft of classical belle lettres. The narrative unfolds slowly with relentless drive towards tragedy. And I don’t mean “tragedy” in the Greek sense of the world; it is the Chekhovian type of tragedy of the mundane, where seemingly there is a space for choice that can turn one’s life around, but the characters gradually come to the realization that this choice is impossible.

After Eilis leaves her American home and returns to Ireland, as if to return to the past, the novel focuses on the love triangle – Eilis, Nancy, and Jim. Their fates are intertwined once again, as they attempt to actively manage their moves driven by subconscious complex desires; it becomes evident that fulfilling these desires is impossible. The story unfolds like a tragedy of timing, wrong timing rather, similar to Father Lawrence’s predicament in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” The messenger is “late!” If Nancy had announced her relationship with Jim earlier, if Eilis had given her answer sooner, if Jim were not that secretive, etc., etc. The strings and nets of coincidences so masterfully woven by Toibin become the meta-metaphor for the chaos of life, where decisions, big or small, are determined by so many factors, that the big picture is lost, the “why” is hard to answer, and the easiest choice is to return to the routine, to the choice of least resistance. And when you make this choice, it is pointing you in only one last direction – death. There will be no “turning a new page ” for any of the characters of “Long Island.”

One of the best novels I read recently – literature at its finest!