Book Reviews Archive

In The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon begins to write about the controversial killing of Lazarus Averbuch in 1908 Chicago, but soon goes off course with the story of a self-absorbed author and a purposeless road trip across the Balkans. >>

In The Cellist of Sarajevo, Canadian author Steven Galloway follows the lives of a handful of citizens of the besieged Bosnian city, tying them together with the story of a sniper charged with protecting the life of an enigmatic cellist who plays adagios for the victims of a recent shelling. >>

In Origins, Lebanese author Amin Maalouf investigates the way his family evolved through the turbulent twentieth century. Along the way, he visits his hometown in Lebanon, as well as Cuba, and looks at how the changes of the last century affected his family, and how they tried to change their homeland. >>

Andrew Davidson's debut novel, The Gargoyle, begins with a car accident that leaves its narrator, an unnamed, cocaine-addled pornographer, hospitalised in the burn ward. While he's recovering in the hospital he's visited by the mysterious Marianne Engel, who greets him with the enigmatic words, "You've been burned... again," and proceeds to soothe him with tales of previous lives and lost loves. What follow is a skin-deep tale of redemption and disfiguring burns. >>

24 for 3, by Jennie Walker (aka the poet and publisher Charles Boyle), is a terrific little book about love, life, and cricket, and it has an interesting story behind it. >>

In The Boat, debut author Nam Le tries to prove that a writer needn't be bound by his own personal experiences. Instead, this collection of short stories serves as a reminder of the importance of experience, and the dangers of over-edited prose. >>

In Fieldwork, Mischa Berlinkski travels to Thailand and brings back a story of friction between anthropologists and missionaries. >>

The Mind's Eye, the first novel in Håkan Nesser's Inspector Van Veeteren series, opens with the classic "amnesia and corpse" combination. >>

Semi Invisible Man is a biography of Norman Lewis, author of Naples '44, The Honoured Society, and many other travel books and novels. It's a great opportunity to rediscover an often overlooked author. >>

In City of Thieves, screenwriter and author David Benioff spins a yarn set during the siege of Leningrad. It's an involving and well-told adventure, but it suffers from a distracting and unnecessarily gimmicky framing device. >>