There is a lot I could  say about Mischling, Affinity Konar’s new Holocaust novel; it’s heartbreaking and beautiful and horrific. Twelve-year-old twin sisters Stasha and Pearl are sent to Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather, and come to the attention of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, who specialized in grotesque experiments on twins,  subjecting […]

In Charlie Quimby‘s follow-up to his debut novel Monument Road, he returns to his native western Colorado and the city of Grand Junction, a town built at the confluence of the Colorado and Gunnison rivers. And it is at the river where Quimby’s story begins. The river banks, covered in the invasive tamarisk, have become […]

El Paso is Winston Groom’s first work of fiction in almost 20 year since Forrest Gump. It is a brawny, sprawling novel, part legend, part history, of outlaws, revolutionaries, railroad tycoons, kidnappings, and daring rescues. While Europe plunges into the Great War, the Mexican Revolution intrudes on the still wild American southwest. When railroad tycoon […]

Inspired by  a true historical episode, Girl Waits with Gun, by Amy Stewart, starts with an automobile crashing into a buggy carrying the Kopp sisters.  It’s 1914 in Paterson, New Jersey, and the villainous Henry Kaufman, drunken and erratic son of a rich factory owner, refuses to pay for the damages.  He and his thugs soon begin […]