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Though I am not a fan of historical fiction, I cannot help admiring a novelist who backs up her narration with painstaking research. In Her Hidden Genius, Marie Benedict pays tribute to a forgotten scientist whose work laid the foundations of DNA research in post-War England. From the mid-1940s to the…

Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook contains all the ingredients of a good spy novel: dark secrets, furtive meetings, shadowy characters, perils and betrayals. But author Celia Rees blends in extras: coded messages hidden in food recipes, plus a haunting portrait of post-war Germany with its starving survivors, homeless refugees, and…

If Alice Feeney were an architect instead of a novelist, her buildings would be admirable for their craftsmanship. In Rock Paper Scissors, she has designed a three-story tale of a crumbling marriage. It combines suspense, a tangled love story, and philosophical musings that keep the reader involved all the way. Adam…

Daniel Alarcón’s novel is reminiscent of the movies Capote and Citizen Kane. In each case, the narrator is part of the story.  In a tantalizing extra twist, Alarcón conceals the narrator’s identity until late in the novel, as he pieces together witness accounts of this mournful saga of three actors…

Need to Know describes the birth of American intelligence-gathering operations during World War II. Historian Nicholas Reynolds goes into great detail about the many individuals and agencies who worked – sometimes together, often in opposition to one another – to create an international spy system similar to Great Britain’s MI6, which…

Ghosts haunt the house where sisters Ruth and Lucille find themselves all but abandoned in the impoverished town of Fingerbone. In this astonishingly rich novel, Marilynne Robinson brings all the forces of nature and yearnings into play, in language so descriptive and personal that one could spend hours savoring it.…

I seem to gravitate toward books about books. Several quite good ones have appeared recently. My latest discovery is about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the cornerstone of words and their definitions. Before you nod off at the idea of reading a dictionary, be aware that this novel…

Anyone who thinks history is a dull subject has never read one of Erik Larson’s books. The Devil in the White City is my third. It certainly won’t be my last. I’m hooked. Larson’s enthusiasm for research shines on every page, and he weaves suspense into his histories in ways…

Few novelists bring such depth of experience to their writing as does Herman Wouk in The Caine Mutiny. The author, who served aboard a Pacific minesweeper during World War II, speaks in gritty, authoritative detail that makes a feast of this 1951 Pulitzer-Prize winner. Wouk’s main character, Willie Keith, is a…

In her lush yet efficient prose, Ursula Le Guin needs less than two hundred pages to create a planet on which Earth refugees have settled, only to make the same mistakes as their forebears. The difference is that some have preserved humanitarian values and are putting them into practice. Victoria…