reviews

“I will recognize you. I will know you by the picture you have given me through all these months, a portrait in words.” Author: Anne Youngson To open this small, unassuming book is akin to entering a museum. There’s a hushed reverence, a sense of timelessness, and an attention to detail that is both careful and luxurious. Anne Youngson’s debut novel, which she wrote in retirement, at age 70, is the measured, heartrending story of Tina Hopgood and Anders Larsen, who meet and come to know each other through letters exchanged between her remote English farm and his austere home [...]

History or Sarcasm? Author: Sarah Vowell My first stint with Book of the Month resulted in a free copy of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, a history tome rumored to be all snark and entertainment. Several years later, after having gathered some dust on my shelves, I decided it just looked too forlorn and it was time for this decidedly fiction loving, generally history averse (I’m sorry, facts have a certain dryness, don’t they) bookworm to get back to the languishing part of her epic collection. And so, it was with less relish and more sense of duty that I [...]

The anti-Bond... Author:  Andrew Lownie He may have been one of the more bizarre characters in British history.   And that’s saying something.  If you were to create a fictional character as foul and decadent as Guy Burgess, it’s likely that you’d be accused of excess and exaggeration.  One of the Cambridge Five – a loosely organized gang of Brits who spied for the Soviet Union – Burgess gained notoriety when he disappeared in May 1951.  When he eventually resurfaced in Moscow five years later, it became clear that he’d been spying for the better part of two decades.  Published in [...]