The richness and accuracy of the historical
backgrounds add to the story and the fully developed characters, which left me
sometimes angry, sometimes content, sometimes sad, sometimes happy.
I felt that
often, Morrow’s characters were hiding something. There were subplots that
tantalized me and took me down new avenues, but Morrow always brought them back
to the primary plot. And, of course, the beautiful prose.
Finally, the complexity of the subplots, as Morrow weaved
them into a coherent whole, left me humbled but also inspired to move from the
“temporal linearity” of my own books to something more complex.
“Twining music history with the political tumults of the 20th century, The Prague Sonata is a sophisticated, engrossing intellectual mystery.”—The Wall Street Journal
Music and war, war and music—these are the twin motifs around which Bradford Morrow, recipient of the Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has composed his magnum opus, a novel more than a dozen years in the making.
In the early days of the new millennium, pages of a worn and weathered original sonata manuscript—the gift of a Czech immigrant living out her final days in Queens—come into the hands of…
I go back to this book often, often just diving into one
of my many favourite scenes. Fraser is the author of the famous Flashman series, and the humor of these books also occasionally appears in Quartered Safe Out
Here.
However, since this book is about Fraser’s service as a young soldier in
the Burma Campaign of 1944-45, there are many descriptions of the brutality of
firefights (or duffies, as they were called), men being killed or wounded, and
the effects of this brutality not just on Fraser but also on the other men in
his platoon (hard-bitten men from Cumbria).
Fraser is brilliant at
recording the curious dialect of the Cumbrians. It is a book that I go to time
and time again.
After 25 years of chronicling the military misadventures of Flashman, the Victorian arch-cad, George MacDonald Fraser has temporarily deserted fiction to write this, his own personal account of the Burma War. In this book he describes life and death in Nine Section, a small group of hard-bitten and possibly eccentric Cumbrian borderers with whom the author, then 19, served in the last great land campaign of World War II. The book describes the experience when the 17th Black Cat Division captured a vital strongpoint deep in Japanese territory, held it against counter-attack and spearheaded the final assault in which the…
This is one of a series of Spenser novels. It is set in
modern-day Boston, and this novel follows the protagonist, Spenser, as he tries to
find out who shot his associate Hawk. Parker takes the reader into a murky
netherworld where all is grey, even justice.
The novel's pacing is slick,
the characterization believable, and the dialog takes one back to Raymond
Chandler. I read it in two sittings.
The wives of Boston's wealthiest men have a mutual secret: they all had an affair with the same cad who's blackmailing them, and Spenser's been hired to stop him. But when the wives start dying one by one, Spenser's new case becomes murder.
When
Spiro, Maria, and Anna Andrakis, a young immigrant family from Greece, are
unwillingly thrust into the maelstrom of the Colorado Coalfield War
(1913-1914), the most brutal labor conflict in American history, they must
overcome a series of tragedies that change their lives forever.
This is
a novel of desperate bravery and horrendous violence, of unflinching loyalty
and abject betrayal, with characters that range from John D. Rockefeller, the
richest man in the world, to impoverished immigrants fighting for their
freedom.
