Around the World in 80 Books!

The novel, set in post–Spanish Civil War BARCELONA, concerns a young boy, Daniel. Just after the war, Daniel's father takes him to the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a huge library of old, forgotten titles lovingly preserved by a select few initiates. According to tradition, everyone initiated to this secret place is allowed to take one book from it, and must protect it for life. Daniel selects a book called The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax. That night he takes the book home and reads it, completely engrossed. Daniel then attempts to look for other books by this unknown author, but can find none. All he comes across are stories of a strange man – calling himself Laín Coubert, after a character in the book who happens to be the Devil – who has been seeking out Carax's books for decades, buying them all and burning them.
See the full review, "A post-modern Dickensian thriller!".

Edward Rutherfurd belongs to the James Michener school: he writes big, sprawling history-by- the-pound. His novel, LONDON, stretches two millennia all the way from Roman times to the present. The author places his vignettes at the most dramatic moments of that city's history, leaping from Caesar's invasion to the Norman Conquest to the Great Fire to (of course) the Blitz, with many stops in between. Wrap up 2000 years in an 800-page book? No problem. This all-encompassing fictional history of London is told through the experiences of a group of diverse families who, over the generations, meet, mingle, intermarry, and feud. Beginning with prehistory and continuing to the present, Rutherfurd combines geological details, historical events, real people, and his fictional characters to bring London to life.

Les Misérables, is an 1862 novel by French author Victor Hugo and is widely considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. It follows the lives and interactions of several French characters over a twenty-year period in the early 19th century, starting in 1815. The novel focuses on the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean and his experience of redemption. It examines the nature of law and grace, and expounds upon the history of France, architecture of PARIS, politics, moral philosophy, antimonarchism, justice, religion, and the types and nature of romantic and familial love.

When a lone septuagenarian is murdered in his apartment in the Nordurmýri district of  REYKJAVIK, detective inspector Erlendur Sveinsson is called in, along with partner Sigurdur Óli and female colleague Elínborg. Everyone is related to everyone else in Iceland and refer to one another by first name, even formally. Erlendur is about 50, long divorced, with two kids in varying degrees of drug addiction. The victim, a man called Holberg, turns out to have been a nasty piece of work, and Erlendur is disgusted by the series of rapes Holberg apparently committed. The rapes and the deaths of a number of young women may be connected, and the search brings Erlendur to the forensic lab, whose old "jar city," since disbanded, held research organs. Meanwhile, Erlendur's daughter, Eva Lind, is pregnant and still using; she flits in and out of his life angrily, but may be crying out for help.
See the full review, "A compelling modern murder mystery in a unique setting".

PRAGUE ... Written in the form of a memoir, this playful social satire follows the rise and fall of a diminutive Czech waiter while mirroring the political turmoil of recent Czech history. Gleefully chronicling the grossness and corruption of the 1920s, Hrabal makes Ditie's early life delightful reading. The mood turns abruptly sour when Ditie falls in love with a German gym teacher in the '30s and becomes equally enamoured of her Nazi ideaology. After the war, Ditie is sentenced to prison as a collaborator; then becomes a hotelier with profits made from selling rare stamps stolen from Jewish concentration camp victims. By the end of the book, with the coming of communism, Ditie has lost everything; he is banished to the former Sudetenland, with only some farm animals as company. The book begins brilliantly, but Hrabal's depiction of post-WW II Czechoslovakia is unrealistically rosy, and Ditie's moral transformation is not entirely persuasive.
See the full review, "A "playful, social satire" I found quite distasteful.".

In Prague, Arthur Phillips's sparkling, Kundera-flavored debut, five young Americans converge in BUDAPEST in the early 1990s. Most are there by chance, like businessman Charles Gabor, whose parents were Hungarian. But one of them, John Price, has the more novelistic motivation of lost love. He is following his older brother, Scott, intent on achieving an intimacy that Scott is just as intently trying to escape. The romantic hero of this unsentimental novel, John Price lives like an expatriate of the 1920s. He longs for experience but even more so for the great, obliterating love that takes the form of the perky assistant Emily Oliver. Mark Payton, a scholar of nostalgia whose insights are touched with mysticism, seems often to speak for the author. Phillips's five seekers are like mirrors that reflect Budapest at different angles, and that imperfectly--but wonderfully--point toward the unattainable city: the glittering, distant Prague.

In 1902, elegant VIENNA is the city of the new century, the center of discoveries in everything from the writing of music to the workings of the human mind. But now a brutal homicide has stunned its citizens and appears to have bridged the gap between science and the supernatural. Two very different sleuths from opposite ends of the spectrum will need to combine their talents to solve the boggling crime: Detective Oskar Rheinhardt, who is on the cutting edge of modern police work, and his friend Dr. Max Liebermann, a follower of Sigmund Freud and a pioneer on new frontiers of psychology. As a team they must use both hard evidence and intuitive analysis to solve a medium's mysterious murder–one that couldn't have been committed by anyone alive.
See the full review, "An elegant mystery that will appeal to lovers of both history and historical fiction".

Married coauthors Cruise and Griffiths, who have written several nonfiction books about Canada, tell the history of VANCOUVER from 16,000 years ago to the present in this ambitious, deeply imagined novel. In 12 parts, 12 protagonists make their ways in the region, from Manto, a boy of the peaceful Yupick tribe who settles in the area with his Tlingit wife in 13,811 B.C., to Ellie Nesbitt, a young woman ...dreaming of escape in 2003. In between these two stories, the authors loosely link 10 other tales: of Gistula, in A.D. 212, who fights to stay with her family rather than become a whaler's bride; of Soon Chong, a Chinese immigrant in search of gold in 1844; of the changing fortunes of Konrad von Shaumberg in the early 20th century. Though the authors offer much in the way of background information-they cover, for instance, primitive fishing strategies, climate change and mining techniques-they never lose sight of the human story.

A triple murder in a MOSCOW amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and the New York City police as he pursues a rich, ruthless, and well-connected American fur dealer. Meanwhile, Renko is falling in love with a beautiful, headstrong dissident for whom he may risk everything.

ALICE SPRINGS ... Nevil Shute's most beloved novel, a tale of love and war, follows its enterprising heroine from the Malayan jungle during World War II to the rugged Australian outback. Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman living in Malaya, is captured by the invading Japanese and forced on a brutal seven-month death march with dozens of other women and children. A few years after the war, Jean is back in England, the nightmare behind her. However, an unexpected inheritance inspires her to return to Malaya to give something back to the villagers who saved her life. But it turns out that they have a gift for her as well: the news that the young Australian soldier, Joe Harmon, who had risked his life to help the women, had miraculously survived. Jean's search for Joe leads her to a desolate Australian outpost called Willstown, where she finds a challenge that will draw on all the resourcefulness and spirit that carried her through her war-time ordeals.
See the full review, "Some bonzer story-telling!".

"Garden of Beasts" is a fascinating historical thriller that is part psychological and part suspense with significant servings of provocative discussion about the meaning of good and evil. The historical context of the story is impeccably detailed and absolutely fascinating - the sights, sounds and geography of pre-war BERLIN; brownshirts; the social milieu and attitudes of everyday German folks living with the combination of hope, fear, patriotism, terror and awe that Hitler must have inspired as he consolidated his dictatorial grip on the Germans; Jesse Owens humbling performance in the 1936 Olympics; and much more.
See the full review, "A high speed thriller set in pre-war 1936 Berlin".

From an Amazon review: SAN FRANCISCO private detective Samuel Spade is visited by a gorgeous redhead who needs to have a man tailed. When his partner is killed on the job, Spade becomes the prime suspect, and he must solve the case or take the fall. Fortunately Spade is crafty, cunning, and absolutely ruthless. His clients lie to him left and right, but he slowly learns about the mythical Maltese Falcon, a statue of immeasurable worth that is at the center of the maelstrom. While trying to solve the case, Spade must battle his inner demons over the beautiful, but treacherous, Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Setting this story in San Francisco is just the icing on the cake, because the city itself is beautiful, but it's also dark, wet, and mysterious. It's the perfect setting for a detective who must face everything alone, where the police, his own clients, and his enemies all lie in wait.

The pool in KIGALI at the Hotel des Milles-Collines is a centrally located gathering place in the early spring of 1994 for "international experts and aid workers, middle-class Rwandans, screwed-up or melancholy expatriates of various origins, and prostitutes." Here, Valcourt, a Canadian journalist, watches with a jaundiced eye over the drama of local wheeling and dealing, diplomatic toadying, military corruption and AIDS-ridden whoring: the colorful and tragic texture of life in a corrupt post-colonial African republic. It's a predictable enough portrait but it is seen with quivering rage and documentary exactitude through Valcourt's eyes; in a very true picture of a foreign correspondent's perception, he is jaded enough to show the truth but still retain a boundless capacity for moral outrage.

When the badly mutilated body of John Harald Jonsson—a working-class family man and an expert on the tropical fish known as cichlids—is found in the snow in the provincial Swedish town of Libro, UPPSALA homicide detective Ola Haver and his colleague, Ann Lindell, quickly identify a suspect, an embittered sociopath. The brilliance of Eriksson's richly detailed crime novel, his second (after The Illuminated Path) but his first to be translated into English, lies in its psychological and even sociological insights. Eriksson not only reveals a deep, sympathetic understanding for his large cast of characters but also evokes a pervasive sense of despair, reminiscent of Henning Mankell's, in the face of the violent, amoral nature of contemporary society and the challenges it places on the police. The title derives from the common name of one of Jonsson's beloved cichlids, and the aquarium is a neat metaphor for the dynamics of smalltown life.

CHARLESTON, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy's first novel in 14 years. In the late '60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city's inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach's son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father.

A tense and haunting novel following four people trying to survive war-torn SARAJEVO. After a mortar attack kills 22 people waiting in line to buy bread, an unnamed cellist vows to play at the point of impact for 22 days. Galloway brings to life a distant conflict.

From an Amazon review ... "As a British colony, Trinidad became the home of many Indian immigrants, and "A House for Mr. Biswas" tells the story of a man who is born into and grows up in this society searching for a place he can call his own. In this novel, V.S. Naipaul vividly and picturesquely describes PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad as a thriving but generally poor island city populated by a strong Hindu community with a waning observance of the caste system and where, even well into the twentieth century, the most common mode of transportation is the bicycle."

The corpse of an unknown provincial is discovered under the rails of a train in a TOKYO station, and Detective Imanishi is assigned to the case.

Russian emigré Marina Buriakov, 82, is preparing for her granddaughter's wedding near Seattle while fighting a losing battle against Alzheimer's. Stuggling to remember whom Katie is marrying (and indeed that there is to be a marriage at all), Marina does remember her youth as a Hermitage Museum docent as the siege of LENINGRAD began; it is into these memories that she disappears. After frantic packing, the Hermitage's collection is transported to a safe hiding place until the end of the war. The museum staff and their families remain, wintering (all 2,000 of them) in the Hermitage basement to avoid bombs and marauding soldiers. Marina, using the technique of a fellow docent, memorizes favorite Hermitage works; these memories, beautifully interspersed, are especially vibrant. Dean, making her debut, weaves Marina's past and present together effortlessly. The dialogue around Marina's forgetfulness is extremely well done, and the Hermitage material has depth. Although none of the characters emerges particularly vividly (Marina included), memory, the hopes one pins on it and the letting go one must do around it all take on real poignancy, giving the story a satisfying fullness.
See the full review, "A heartbreaking story of two different battles".

John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has been heralded as a "lyrical work of nonfiction," and the book's extremely graceful prose depictions of some of SAVANNAH, Georgia's most colorful eccentrics--remarkable characters who could have once prospered in a William Faulkner novel or Eudora Welty short story--were certainly a critical factor in its tremendous success.
See the full review, ""If you think that last bump was vulgar, honey, watch this one!"".

OLD CITY HALL bills itself as a legal thriller but I believe it would be more accurate to describe it as a low key legal procedural or mystery. Every inch of the road, every street scene and every event in the story right down to the hopeless futility of being an eternally unfulfilled Toronto Maple Leaf hockey fan resonated with absolutely accuracy and completely conveyed me into the life of downtown TORONTO.
See the full review, "OLD CITY HALL bills itself as a legal thriller but ...".

OTTAWA

CAIRO

SENEJAN

MUMBAI
See the full review, "An extraordinary debut novel from a Canadian author!".

LOS ANGELES

DETROIT

The Broker marries the best of John Grisham's many talents--his ability to immerse himself in the culture of small town life (in this case, BOLOGNA, Italy), and his uncanny mastery of the chase. The first half of the book focuses on Backman's transformation from infamous power broker to helpless victim in his own game. Upon his release from prison, Backman is taken into "protective custody" and whisked off to Italy where he is assigned a new identity, and a tutor to help him blend in. Sure he is on the run, but some readers may feel that Backman's time spent in Bologna is a bit too leisurely--readers join him on an almost cinematic tour through the Italian town, complete with language and history lessons. Impatient readers will be happy to know that the final half of the novel is classic Grisham--a fast-paced, thrilling cat and mouse chase pitting Backman against the numerous agencies that want him dead--as the broker makes a move to take back his life.
See the full review, "The unique (and successful) combination of thriller with a European travelogue!".

The death of a nameless prostitute in a glitzy MELBOURNE high-rise is the first in a series of crimes that Insp. Stephen Villani discovers are all tied to protecting the interests of the city's elite in this brutal tale of corruption, greed, and revenge. Burdened by a shaky marriage and an increasingly rebellious teenage daughter while trying to stay afloat in Melbourne's treacherous political climate, Villani doesn't know where to turn. The discovery of three savagely tortured men with ties to one of the city's biggest crime bosses only adds another layer to the already twisted case, and makes Villani question eve-rything he thought he knew about the line between cop and criminal. Temple's elliptical storytelling—the past and the present are often interchangeable—fits the slippery subject of deeply ingrained police corruption and one man's determination to uncover the truth.

It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone it seems is after a piece of Turkey. But the shockwaves from this random act of 21st century pandemic terrorism will ripple further and resonate louder than just Enginsoy Square. Welcome to the world of The Dervish House; the great, ancient, paradoxical city of ISTANBUL, divided like a human brain, in the great, ancient, equally paradoxical nation of Turkey. The year is 2027 and Turkey is about to celebrate the fifth anniversary of its accession to the European Union; a Europe that now runs from the Arran Islands to Ararat. Population pushing one hundred million, Istanbul swollen to fifteen million; Turkey is the largest, most populous and most diverse nation in the EU, but also one of the poorest and most socially divided. It's a boom economy, the sweatshop of Europe, the bazaar of central Asia, the key to the immense gas wealth of Russia and Central Asia.

When the Venetian courtesan Alessandra Rossetti wrote a letter that exposed the 1618 Spanish Conspiracy, VENICE was saved. Four hundred years later in Phillips's lovingly researched half-historical, half-contemporary debut, Claire Donovan, an American graduate student, struggles to finish her dissertation on the courtesan's brave act. Claire attends a Venice conference to check out the work of British superstar historian Andrew Kent, who sees Rossetti as nothing more than the pawn of very powerful men in a diplomatic double cross: once Andrew's work is published, his ideas could derail Claire's fledgling career. Phillips, developing parallel plots, unspools Alessandra's story directly to the reader in detail denied Claire and Andrew, who overcome their initial animosity to solve the greater mystery.

Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of CHICAGO; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities.
See the full review, "Ferris wheels, Cracker Jacks, Buffalo Bill and a serial killer!".