Category: fiction

Five Favorites from 2025

Of the fifty or so books that I read (or started to read) this year, I wrote reviews of the thirty that I enjoyed most. Now I’m going to highlight the five that are my top favorites of the year.

A Little Less Broken by Marian Schembari:  This memoir succeeds … Read More

“At the core of each lay suffering; . . .We must try to see one another in this way.”

A review of “Lincoln in the Bardo” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

This novel, set in the time of Lincoln’s son Willie’s death, is the most challenging book I’ve read in years. Its subject is grim, its list of characters exceeds 100, and its style resembles a play, without … Read More

“I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning.”

A review of “Writers & Lovers” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

The rest of the opening paragraph of this novel lists the other things the narrator tries not to think about: sex, her boyfriend, death, and her mother who died on vacation last winter. She shows the reader all … Read More

“That should be my epitaph: All because of my stupid childhood.”

A review of “Will and Testament” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

How do you write a successful novel about a traumatic childhood?  Let’s raise the bar: how do you write a best-selling book about a person who remembers being raped by her father? Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth achieves this. … Read More

“You want to eat clam chowder and lobster rolls . . . served to you by someone who calls them chowdah and lobstah.”

A review of “The Identicals” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

This novel is a beach read about people who debate how Martha’s Vineyard compares to Nantucket Island. They actually do have passionate conversations about their beaches. Rich? Why, yes. Happy? Of course not. Readers may be reminded of Mary … Read More

“The present changes the past.”

A review of “The Inheritance of Loss” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

Let’s just say that you wanted to write a novel that was built around that idea that “the present changes the past.”  How would you structure it? Would you tell the story chronologically? Illustrate your idea through … Read More

“You put all the [decoy] mallards out there, but if you’re going hunting you need something like this egret, for a confidence decoy.”

A review of “The New Yorker Stories” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

How did she do that? Readers often ask this after reading an Ann Beattie story. Just when it seems as though not much is happening, boom! The story explodes. For example, in the final long paragraph … Read More

“The ground suddenly seemed a long way down and escape far away.”

A review of “Five Tuesdays in Winter” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

Short stories can be more than appetizers. But the challenge of creating a world with vivid characters who do something that matters to us in a compressed format is great. The length is a trap: some writers … Read More

“There is only one thing I care about now, and my feet are carrying me there.”

A review of “Foster” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

Should museums include the work of living artists? Rarely does an institution say, “We are confident this will stand the test of time,” but that’s in fact the judgement of The Museum of Literature Ireland in Dublin on Claire Keegan… Read More

“She had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of not interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.”

A review of “Quartet in Autumn” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

What should a moderately successful novelist, who didn’t engage readers during the social revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, do to stage a come back? Explore trends? Update her plots? Become provocative? Barbara Pym declined these … Read More

“Pleased down to my clogs, as all bakers are when something they make is properly appreciated, I slid the coffee thermos back onto its warmer . . . “

A review of “Nothing Much Happens” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

Imagine a story about a baker who experiments with a recipe for biscotti that contains pistachios and orange zest. The baker is pleased with the results. The end. Wait, what? How can a story have no plot and … Read More

“You need to avoid saying things like ‘Good God, Mrs. Morris, surely you realize that you daughter doesn’t have the slightest chance of getting into Princeton.’”

A review of “Three Days in June” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

As a young bride, what book did Gail Baines receive from her mother-in-law? If you are a fan of Anne Tyler novels, you might guess something quirky and blunt, and you would be right: it’s Manners for … Read More

“The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.”

A review of “James” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

There are so many ways Percival Everett could have taken his retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective. He could have focused on revenge, or the relationship between Huck and Jim, or finding justice. Instead, he focuses on James’s strengths … Read More

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.”

A review of “Interpreter of Maladies” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

The story “The Third and Final Continent” is about a man who moved from India to the United States. The story focuses on his early days in this country thirty years ago. However, in the final pages of … Read More

“Frightening how quickly it all falls away.”

A review of “Intermezzo” in 100 words by Catherine Stover

Let’s think about the title of the novel Intermezzo. If you enjoy words with many meanings – this one can refer to a musical composition, a file system for Linux, a prescription medication, a breed of horses, or a chess … Read More