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Imperial Caesar

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IMPERIAL CAESAR by Rex Warner   Award: James Tait Black Winner 1960   Date Read: March 4, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ When The Young Caesar was reviewed back in 1958 and commended as biographical historical fiction of a high order, we expressed the hope that there would be a sequel, since the story stopped with the Gallic Wars. Here is the sequel, which carries on the record through the conquest of the Germans, his invasion of Britain, the crossing of the Rubicon, the Battle of Pharsalia against Pompey, the amorous affair with Cleopatra, his campaigns in Africa and Spain -- up to the Ides of March, when, sleepless, he knew forebodings of death. The story is set in the frame of his reassessment of these years, his memory sharpened by insomnia. And the style holds closely to the mood and expression of Caesar's own writings of his campaigns. It has the same terse style, concern with facts, ruthless self criticism- all recognized as Caesar's outstanding literary qualities, ...
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Our Wives Under The Sea

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OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA by Julia Armfield   Nominations: BookTube Longlist 2023, Carnegie Longlist 2023   Date Read: March 2, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ What happens to a marriage when one spouse is no longer the person you married? Leah and Miri lead a conventional married life of comfortable routine, shared love of movies, and happiness at having found each other. Then Leah, a marine scientist, embarks on a three-week submarine expedition during which things seem to go disastrously wrong, and she and her shipmates disappear for six months at the very bottom of the ocean. Miri’s narrative and excerpts from Leah’s diary of the mission relate their growing awareness—and grudging management—of the changes and relationship losses they both endure as a result of their prolonged separation. When Leah returns home, things do not go as Miri had envisioned; her unanticipated transformation—a terrifying dissolution of her human form into something unfamiliar and strange—challen...
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Colored Television

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COLORED TELEVISION by Danzy Senna   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2025, National Book Critic’s Circle Longlist 2024, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2025   Date Read: February 24, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ When her second novel hits a wall, a biracial California writer makes a desperate attempt to start a TV career. One of the funniest scenes in this brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect book happens early on, in a flashback to the party in Brooklyn where Jane met Lenny, her husband and the father of their two kids. Feeling that she’s aging out of the dating game, Jane has recently consulted an “intuitive psychodynamic counselor with a specialty in racial alchemy,” aka a psychic, who told her she’s about to meet her future husband, a funny, tall, handsome Black man who would be wearing “West Coast shoes.” But when she meets Lenny, who seems to perfectly fit this description, he’s with a very possessive white girlfriend. “Ebony and ivory, together in disharmony.....
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Cloud Cuckoo Land

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CLOUD CUCKOO LAND by Anthony Doerr   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2022, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2022, Dublin Finalist 2023, Goodreads Finalist 2021, National Book Finalist 2021   Date Read: February 20, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An ancient Greek manuscript connects humanity's past, present, and future. “ Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you ” wrote Antonius Diogenes at the end of the first century C.E.—and millennia later, Pulitzer Prize winner Doerr is his fitting heir. Around Diogenes' manuscript, "Cloud Cuckoo Land"—the author did exist, but the text is invented—Doerr builds a community of readers and nature lovers that transcends the boundaries of time and space. The protagonist of the original story is Aethon, a shepherd whose dream of escaping to a paradise in the sky leads to a wild series of adventures in the bodies of beast, fish, and fowl. Aethon's story is first found by Anna in 15th-century Constantinople; thou...
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The Water Cure

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THE WATER CURE by Sophie Mackintosh   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2018, Dublin Longlist 2020   Date Read: February 19, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Three sisters, secreted away during a global crisis of male violence, learn to fight for their survival in this spare, dystopian debut. Grace, Lia, and Sky follow the rituals enforced by their mother and their father, King, the only man they've ever known. The strange family lives in an isolated, crumbling mansion by the sea, where women arrive to receive the family's storied water cures and heal from violent pasts. They look like "they had been bled out, their skin limp. Eyes watering involuntarily, hair thinning," recalls Lia, and the sisters learn to fear a world that visits so much violence on its women. There are water cures for everything: to purify toxins from the outside world, illness, grief, too much feeling. The rituals themselves are often violent, requiring drowning or self-harm. When the novel opens, the si...
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My Sister, The Serial Killer

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MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER by Oyinkan Braithwaite   Award: LA Times Winner 2018   Nominations: Booker Longlist 209, Dublin Longlist 2020, Goodreads Finalist 2020, Women’s Prize Finalist 2019   Date Read: February 15, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ From the hospital rooms and living spaces of Lagos, Nigeria, comes a dryly funny and wickedly crafty exercise in psychological suspense. Introverted, sensitive Korede is a nurse, a very good one from what we see of her at work. She feels such a connection with her patients that she finds herself taking a coma victim named Muhtar into her confidence. There’s one secret in particular that pours out of Korede like scalding liquid: Her flamboyantly beautiful younger sister, Ayoola, has this habit of killing the men she dates. (Three, so far.) She hasn’t been caught yet because Korede cleans up after her. They both disposed of the most recent victim, a poet named Femi, so efficiently that nobody in his family or with the police...
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The Tattooist Of Auschwitz

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THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ by Heather Morris   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2020, Goodreads Finalist 2018   Date Read: February 14, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp. Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicin...
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