TBR

One

The Lifeboat, Charlotte Rogan – an unreliable narrator is put on a lifeboat from the Titanic by her husband, and she thinks about her life; very twisty

The Thing about Thugs, Tabish Khair – a modern narrator finds a cache of papers relating to a murder that took place in 1800s India; so the book is all epistolary

The Friend Who Got Away, ed. Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell – essays about friend breakups

Tigers in Red Weather, Liza Klaussmann – FIVE POINTS OF VIEW AND MURDERS AND GIN

Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson – a hacker in an oppressive regime loses his girlfriend because her parents arrange another marriage, and then there are DJINN and OTHER AMAZING THINGS

The Trinity Six, Charles Cumming – about an imaginary sixth member of the Cambridge Spies ruh-roh

All Other Nights, Dara Horn – a Union soldier is assigned to go to a Seder dinner in the South and poison his uncle, who is suspected of planning to assassinate Lincoln

What Are You Looking At, Will Gompertz – a history of modern art that’s very good and anecdotey

The Bellwether Revivals, Benjamin Wood – a working class kid at Cambridge befriends a weird rich set of siblings and there becomes a mystery and it’s a bit Gothic in feel though modern in setting (there may be a sequel also)

Above Suspicion, Helen MacInnes – an Oxford academic and his delightful wife are going to the mountains of Europe in 1939 and they decide to do a delightful spy mission (published 1941)

Waterland, Graham Swift – a book about a schoolmaster in East Anglia, which is also a reflection on history and narrative (yay)

The House on the Strand, Daphne du Maurier

The Good Psychologist, Noam Shpancer – a thriller about a good psychologist who might actually be good

Caroline Miniscule, Andrew Taylor – a student of paleography finds his tutor murdered and becomes involved in all sorts of ancient-manuscript-related intrigue and deception

Laurie Colwin writes superb funny amazing books about relationships, says Other Jenny

The Last Station, Jay Parini – the Tolstoy book has multiple points of view

Land of Marvels, Barry Unsworth – set in an archaeological dig in Egypt just before the start of World War I

So Long a Letter, Mariama Ba – a fictional diary of a Senegalese woman in a polygamous situation writing to her best friend in the United States

Stealing Fire, Jo Graham – a historical novel of great wonderfulness set just after Alexander the Great’s death

The Secret of Crickley Hall, James Herbert – a lovely ghost story in the classic style

The Ghost’s Child, Sonya Hartnett – an old woman finds a child in her house and he asks questions and she says him the story of her life, a two-year sea voyage, reluctance to be married, and so forth

The Oxford Murders , Guillermo Martinez – two Oxford mathematicians try to catch a serial killer

Angela Thirkell – writes Barsetshire novels that are reminiscent of Austen, Wodehouse, & Pym

James Thurber’s fairy tales (13 Clocks & Wonderful O) (Wonderful O is in Storage)

I, Claudius, Robert Graves – hit it up

An Absolute Gentleman , R.M. Kinder – a polished, suspenseful novel about a killer

Shadows and Lies, Marjorie Eccles – a woman who has lost her memory in 1910 tries to remember it by writing in an exercise book, and there are murders and South Africa and suffrage

An Imaginary Life, David Malouf – Ovid cares for a feral child while in exile

Somebody Else’s Daughter, Elizabeth Brundage – multiple points of view!

Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee – a professor in trouble for sleeping with a student goes to South Africa to live with his daughter; it is smoothly written and not super litrary

A Student of Weather, Elizabeth Hay – two Canadian sisters in the dustbowl are very different and a stranger comes to town and betrayal things happen

Cyril Hare – the poshest Englishest wearing-funny-wigs-est mystery of all time

Fall On Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald – story of four sisters in Canada who have long and complex lives

The Great Perhaps, Joe Meno – a story about a family told from multiple points of view; the father hunts for squids, the mum studies pigeons, and the kids make bombs and discover Christianity

Madeleine’s Ghost, Robert Girardi – a New Orleans grad students moves into a haunted apartment & the narrative goes between past and present (storage)

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, Maaza Mengiste – story about a doctor & his family during a military uprising in Ethiopia in the 1970s

Kate Ross writes a series of mysteries about a dandy shady-background mystery-solver with dandyish British humor – Cut to the Quick is the first (storage)

Miss Mole, E.H. Young – a mischievous British housekeeper in her forties who acts uninteresting but it is secretly lively and humorous (storage)

How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall – a wondrous book with interwoven narratives

Waiting for Columbus, Thomas Trofimuk – a nurse in a mental hospital becomes interested in a patient who thinks that he is Christopher Columbus and it’s all about the power of stories

The Sopranos, Alan Warner – a group of Scottish teenagers go to Edinburgh for a singing competition

The Dart League King, Keith Lee Morris – a story about five people to do with a dart league and they all have secrets and alternating viewpoints (storage)

Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann – a totally shocking book about girls having self-destruction and eating lots of tranquilizers.  SHOCKING.

Four Dreamers and Emily, Stevie Davies – novel about a group of Bronte aficionados all coming to an academic Emily Bronte conference

Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, Shyam Selvadurai – a Sri Lankan adopted boy struggles to come to terms with his sexuality

The Writing on My Forehead, Nafisa Haji – a girl called Saira discovered family secrets when she was sixteen, and grows up to be a journalist

Mistress of Nothing, Kate Pullinger – a lady’s maid moves with her mistress to Egypt and she falls in love with the dragoman and it’s wonderful

The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh – a family saga type book from 1885 to the World Wars about the British colonies in Burma and Malaysia

A Proper Education for Girls, Elaine Di Rollo – twins raised by a father with a weird collection of things and then one twin marries a missionary and goes to India and the other one stays home all oppressed at home

God is an Englishman, R. F. Delderfield – a Raj officer heads back to Victorian England to have a proper Victorian life with his wife and stuff

When I Lived in Modern Times, Linda Grant – a British Jewish girl called Evelyn goes to Palestine right when Israel is being formed

Kept: A Victorian Mystery, D.J. Taylor – read this over!

The Journal of Dora Damage, Belinda Starling – a woman in the 1800s takes over her husband’s bookbinding business and binds pornographic books

The Novel in the Viola, Natasha Solomons – an Austrian girl comes to England in 1938 to be a parlormaid (yay)

While England Sleeps, David Leavitt – a love affair between two men of different classes set against the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s

The Tortoise and the Hare, Elizabeth Jenkins – right after WWII a barrister’s wife gets cheated on and everybody is sympathetic

City of Thieves, David Benioff – in Russia during WWII, a boy gets caught looting a German paratrooper corpse and then must find a dozen eggs for the Russian colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake

My Father’s Moon, Elizabeth Jolley – an unwed mum working at a boarding school pines for her lost love, a nurse she fell in love with during World War II

Address Unknown, Katherine Kressman Taylor – an epistolary novel written in 1938 between a German and a Jewish American, showing how the German gradually becomes a Nazi

The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien – the best comic novel of all the comic novels, set in Ireland right before WWII

Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King – darkly comic retellings of Bible stories with a critique of exoticization of race (storage)

The Water Song, Suzanne Weyn – adaptation of The Princess and the Frog that is set in Belgium in World War I

The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, Louise Murphy – really dark unsettling telling of this story, set in Nazi Poland

Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin – a story narrated by Aeneas’s wife that isn’t Creusa, v. lovely (storage)

Enchanted Night, Steven Millhauser – stories about all the residents of a small Connecticut town when magic starts happening there

Starcrossed, Elizabeth Bunce – a young thief is stuck (because of  blizzardiness) in a manor house full of young rich people who have all kinds of awesome machinationy secrets

Blackwood, Gwenda Bond – two teenagers have to figure out what’s going on when 114 people disappear from modern-day Roanoke

The Golden Hour, Maiya Williams – two kids who have lost their mother have a time-travel adventure when they GO TO LIVE WITH THEIR ECCENTRIC AUNTS

Stolen, Lucy Christopher – Jill says don’t worry about the premise because it is wonderful

Little Brother, Cory Doctorow – a geeky kid gets put through a slightly dystopian San Francisco criminal justice system and everything gets all crazy

A Door into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski – a scifi book that nobody ever reads (storage)

Black No More, George S. Schuyler – a satire book about a world where they invent a surgery to turn black people white and it’s satirical

The Veil of Gold, Kim Wilkins

The Unnameables, Ellen Booraem – a dystopian fiction book about an outcast boy on a very orderly island

Jon Courtenay Grimwood

The Sorcerer’s House, Gene Wolfe – an epistolary fantasy novel about a dude who gets out of prison and inherits an old empty house

Spirit Gate, Kate Eliott – an extra good fantasy saga

Linda Buckley Archer’s time books – complex time travel stories!  The Time Travelers, The Time Thief, The Time Quake

Dying to Know You, Aidan Chambers – a kid comes to an old writer to ask the writer to help him write letters to his girlfriend; Ana says it’s very good and sincere and not what you’d expect

Framed, Frank Cottrell Boyce – a children’s book about art theft

The Clockwork Three, Matthew J. Kirby – three children with music and clockwork and tenements all come together and do powerful stuff together with automatons

The Box of Delights, John Masefield – an excellent spooky midwinter book about children whose parents are snowed in and there is a box that lets its owner change sizes and travel through time

Wake, Lisa McMann – YA novel about a girl who gets sucked into people’s dreams

Bleeding Violet, Dia Reeves – a bipolar biracial girl comes to a scary-ass town in Texas with monsters and doors to other worlds

Candor, Pam Bachorz – addictive propaganda gets broadcasted into everybody’s brains and nobody can be sure if they’re making real choices or what

The Old Country, Mordecai Gerstein – a little girl gets transformed into a fox and must figure out how to get switched back.  During war.

Blessing’s Bead, Debby Dahl Edwardson – a story about an Eskimo girl in 1989 and her grandmother in 1907, & the ways their lives are changing

The Floating Island, Elizabeth Haydon – an excellent fantasy novel with Brett Helquist illustrations and ships and nonhumans

Audrey, Wait!, Robin Benway – a girl called Audrey breaks up with a musician and he writes a song about it that becomes famous

The Thirteen Treasures, Michelle Harrison – a girl who can see fairies gets shipped off to her grandmother’s rambling old manor house

The Grounding of Group 6, Julian F. Thompson – five kids are being disposed of by their parents at a kids-disposal facility but this one group of kids doesn’t want to be disposed of

Plain Kate, Erin Bow – a girl called Kate’s father dies, and the townspeople think she’s a witch, and she has an adorable but not twee talking cat

Spellwright, Blake Charlton – fantasy book with a good magic system that works by words, and the protagonist is dyslexic

Eyes Like Stars, Lisa Mantchev – a girl in a theatre company has to prove that she belongs there!

The Magic Half – a little girl can time-travel through a piece of glass to her same house in another century, where another little girl lives and there is a wicked villain and time travel, hooray!

Last Days of Summer, Steve Kluger – epistolary YA novel about a kid who becomes penpals with a Giants third baseman

Well Witched, Frances Hardinge (Verdigris Deep in the UK) – three children become responsible for granting a wishing well’s wishes, and it deals seriously with family issues and the writing is lovely

Invisible People, Will Eisner – a clothes presser and a faith healer and a librarian with a sick father have loneliness and it is bleak and sad (graphic novel)

The Recently Deflowered Girl, Hyacinthe Phipps – a book of etiquette for threshold-crossing moments with illustrations by Edward Gorey

Essex County, Jeff Lemire – graphic novel set in a rural Toronto community and often mentioned in the same breath as Blankets (graphic novel)

Stuck Rubber Baby, Howard Cruse – introduced by Tony Kushner, graphic novel about homophobia etc in the civil rights movement

Skim, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki – a graphic novel about growing up Asian and gay in Canada

Vogelein, Jane Irwin – a graphic novel about a clockwork faerie that has become aware and can try to develop relationships with people

Lost at Sea, Bryan Lee O’Malley – a graphic novel about an eighteen-year-old girl who believes a cat stole her soul and she goes on a road trip with her friends

Ballads, Charles Vess – retellings of ballads by people (graphic novel)

The Other City, Michal Ajvaz – a book about reading and seeing and a night-time Prague that uses the spaces regular Prague isn’t using

Ilustrado, Miguel Syjuco – a Filipino writer searches for clues to his friend’s supposed suicide in his friend’s manuscripts

The House of the Mosque, Kader Abdolah – a privileged family lives through the 1979 Iranian revolution

Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih – Arabic book with a story within a story and it deals with gender and colonialism and all sorts of things

Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers, Stephanie Levine – a woman spends a year amongst Hasidic girls!  LEARNING EXPERIENCE FOR JENNY.

Indian Summer, Alex von Tunzleman – a very excellent book about Partition in India

Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism, Deborah Lutz

Ghost Hunters, Deborah Blum – nonfiction book about Victorian spiritualists and the people who researched them

Wild Romance, Chloe Schama – a nonfiction book about a Victorian woman and letters and a ship and a lawsuit.  WIN WIN WIN

Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War, ed. Peter Conradi – Murdoch’s letters from WWII

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes – what it says, very exciting and sad

The Zookeeper’s Wife, Diane Ackerman – nonfiction book about a husband and wife running a zoo in Warsaw who helped Polish Jews to escape from Warsaw

Everything is Broken, Emma Larkin – an exceptionally good nonfiction book about Burma by a superb nonfiction author

Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale, Catherine Orenstein

Nine Parts of Desire, Geraldine Brooks – a book about Islam and women

Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, Jean Kilbourne

Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps

White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture

Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth, Randi Hutter Epstein – a cultural history of childbirth

Rapunzel’s Daughters, Rose Weitz – a book about American women and their relationship to their hair

Chances Are, Michael and Ellen Kaplan – a witty book about statistics and probability

Anything Goes, Lucy Moore: a biography of the Roaring Twenties

Jane’s Fame, Claire Harman – how people thought about Jane Austen over the many years

The Bronte Myth, Lucasta Miller – a book about the Brontes and what people have made of them over the years

Napoleon of Crime, Ben McIntyre – a profile of the Victorian thief Moriarty was based on

The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art, Hector Feliciano

Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece, Money, Politics, Collectors, Greed, and Loss, Cynthia Saltzman

The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Edward Dolnick

The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft – Ulrich Boser

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art, Laney Salisbury

The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren, Jonathan Lopez

Museum of the Missing: The High Stakes of Art Crime, Simon Houpt

The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy’s Art During World War II, Ilaria Dagnini Brey

Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman – will totally change my perspective on time

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee – a look at body-mind links that is accessible to people who are not scientists

Religious Literacy, Stephen Protheroe – a book about how people need to learn some basic stuff about religion

F.R. Leavis (storage)

Counting Sheep, Dr. Paul Martin

Phantoms in the Brain, V.S. Ramachandran – alternate realities experienced by victims of neurological damage

Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer – reasons for going to war and when we should do it

A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power – America and how we have dealt (not dealt) with genocide

Home is Where We Start From, Donald Winnicott – one of the earliest psychoanalysts writes essays about mental health and accepting imperfection

Parisians, Graham Robb – a lovely and witty book about Paris by the guy who wrote Strangers

Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession, Robert C. Fuller

The Trial: A History from Socrates to OJ Simpson, Sadakat Kadri

The Tyrannicide Brief, Geoffrey Robertson – all about the guy who prosecuted King Charles for randomly killing his subjects

David Kynaston – an editor that brings together diaries and memoirs and records from British history about day-to-day life

The Hot Zone, Richard Preston – an exciting book about discovering Ebola

The Art of Choosing, Sheena Iyengar – a book about how we make choices, written after doing loads of nifty experiments

Patsy Sims is a Southern writer of fantastic nonfiction

Satire or Evasion?: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn

Is That a Fish in Your Ear, David Bellos – a wonderful book all about the difficulties of translation

Climbing the Mango Trees, Madhur Jaffrey – a memoir of growing up in India, with WWII and Partition (biography)

The Butterfly Mosque, G. Willow Wilson – a woman raised in a madly secular household converts to Islam and moves to Egypt

Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species, Sean Carroll – stories from the history of geology & zoology & all sorts of lovely things

Bonk, Mary Roach – light nonfiction about sexual research

Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World, Lawrence and and Nancy Goldstone

Enchanted Hunters, Maria Tatar – why kids like stories, how reading helps them, the role of horror

Reading Comics, Douglas Wolk – a nonfiction book with much criticism of comics and stuff about their theory and history and it’s interesting even though he doesn’t like Craig Thompson

The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar – book about fairy tales, and how the Grimm brothers sanitized them!

The Bayeux Tapestry, Carola Hicks – a book all about the history of the Bayeux Tapestry in all the different time periods

Quiet Please, Scott Douglass – a book all about libraries

The Music Room, Namita Devidayal – a memoir about learning classical Indian music

Flyaway, Suzie Gilbert – a memoir about rehabbing wild birds that is far more interesting than you might think

Journey from the Land of No, Roya Hakakian – a memoir about a Jewish girl growing up in pre- and then post-revolutionary Iran

When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams – a memoir about the woman’s mother who left her, and it’s extremely beautiful and the writing appeals

Foreign Correspondence, Geraldine Brooks – a memoir about her childhood pen friends & going to find them as an adult

The Mighty Queens of Freeville, Amy Dickinson – memoir of an advice columnist with a wonderful family

The Suicide Index, Joan Wickersham (she deals with her father’s suicide – in memoir form!)

James Lee-Milne is an incredibly funny and amazing diarist

Rupert Hart-Davis’s correspondence

Tell Me Where It Hurts, Nick Trout – a memoir about being a modern-day veterinarian

Other People’s Dirt, Louise Rafkin – a book about being a housekeeper

How Doctors Think, Jeremy Groopman – useful to know and not dull at all

Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab, Melissa Plaut

In Her Own Sweet Time, Rachel Lehmann Haut – memoir and research about American women having children later in life

Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, Melissa Milgrom

Direct Red, Gabriel Weston – a woman’s memoir about becoming a surgeon

The Real James Herriot, Jim Wright – a biography of James Herriot by his little son

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, Harriet Reisen – a wonderful wonderful biography!

The Good Women of China, Xinran – a collection of true stories assembled by a Chinese journalist who had to publish her book in England rather than China due to censorship and it’s terribly sad and upsetting BUT IMPORTANT

Burmese Days, George Orwell – novel based on Orwell’s time as an imperial officer in Burma

Someday My Prince Will Come, Jerramy Fine – a memoir about a girl who goes to London because she wants to become a princess

A Lucky Child, Thomas Buergenthal – a memoir of surviving Auschwitz that is beautifully written

The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw – memoir of growing up in 1970s Britain and having music hooray!

Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain – an Oxford-educated girl’s memoir of living through the First World War, losing her fiance and brother, & becoming a nurse

The Art of Time in Memoir, Sven Birkerts – occasionally too academic but mostly very lovely

College, Stephen Akey – memoir about the guy’s time in college

Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz – a wondrous book about my least favorite thing ever, being wrong

The Memory of Love, Aminatta Forna – a book about three men with good jobs in Sierra Leone after the civil war, now trying to make people’s lives good etc.

The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith – excellent novel about lesbians in 1950s New York

The Year of the Gadfly, a boarding school girl’s only friend is the ghost of Edward R Murrow. COME ON.

Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein – a captured British spy has two weeks to write her confession and then she will be executed by the Gestapo

These Days Are Ours, Michelle Haimoff – a wonderful debut novel and social satire about a rich Jewish girl who lives on the Upper East Side and is trying to figure out marriage and life

Birthmarked, Caragh M. O’Brien – a girl with a scarred face lives outside an Enclave where the perfect people are only allowed to go and it’s dystopian

She Matters, Susanna Sonnenberg – a memoir about female friendships

Empires of the Indus, Alice Albinia – an excellent travelogue about India and its history by a woman who also speaks several of the languages. Yay.

The Great Good Thing, Roderick Townley – a princess lives in a storybook that gets read only rarely, only by this one girl all through her difficult life

Dust, Arthur Slade – an excellent YA boys’ book with weird things happening in a small town and much about the power of the imagination and reading

Living Color, Nina Jablonski – a nonfiction book about the untrueness of societal interpretations of race (as opposed to skin color)

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, Mary and Bryan Talbot – a memoir about the author’s troubled relationship with her own father, a Joyce scholar, and Joyce’s daughter’s troubled relationship with him

Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed – one of the last remaining ghoul hunters goes on a last ghoul hunt with an apprentice and a girl who is the last of his tribe

Dancing Backwards, Salley Vickers – a beautifully written novel about a shipboard romance

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor – an excellent book about an art student with blue hair and demons in Prague

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, Caroline Preston – a simple little story about a 1920s girl coming of age, but told in the form of a scrapbook with lots of little cool things

Murkmere, Patricia Elliott – a girl gets summoned to a spooky hall to be a companion for the Master’s ward and it’s based on British folklore

Bunheads, Sophie Flack – a book about a dancer in the New York City Ballet who falls in love or something and anyway the author used to be part of the NY City Ballet so hooray

India Dark, Kirsty Murray – fictionalized version of a true story about a kids’ acting troupe in India in 1910

The Shakespeare Thefts, Eric Rasmussen – a sort of memoir about the guy’s time on a committee to track down all surviving copies of the First Folio

Two

The British Museum Is Falling Down, David Lodge – an awesome satiric book about a poor PhD student and his family

The German Woman, Paul Griner – an intricate tale of an Englishwoman and a German-extracted American during the two World Wars

Dreadful Skin, Cherie Priest – a Brit comes back from India a werewolf, and an ex-Irish nun monster hunter happens

The 10 PM Question, Kate de Goldi – a kid with anxiety problems makes a new friend and it’s all about families

A Beautiful Lie, Irfan Master – Goodbye Lenin with Partition in India rather than the fall of the Berlin Wall

Amy’s Eyes, Richard Kennedy – a little girl with a sailor doll turns into a doll herself and goes off on piratey adventures

Crossing, Andrew Xia Fukuda – a Chinese-born student in an American school tries to solve the mystery behind the disappearance of several students, and the end will make you question the rest of it

Pterror over Paris, Jacques Tardi (graphic novel)

The Castaways, Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo – graphic novel about a boy in the Great Depression

Strange and Secret Peoples, Carole Silver – nonfiction book about what Victorians thought about fairies

The Arsenic Century, James C. Whorton – a nonfiction book all about arsenic in Victorian England

A Persian Requiem, Simin Danishvar – she was the first woman published in Iran!!! and Emily Jane says her books are amazing

Master Pieces: The Curator’s Game, Thomas Hoving

The Narcissism of Minor Differences, Peter Baldwin – how Americans and Europeans are not that different

The American Enemy, Philippe Roger – about French anti-Americanism

Treacherous Alliance, Trita Parsi – the US and Iran and Israel and their weird screwed-up relationship

Barbara Shircliffe is a good writer about racial issues

Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, Paul Chaat Smith

The House on Sugar Beach, Helene Cooper – a memoir of a wealthy Liberian girl with an adoptive sister that she lost when there was a big Liberian coup

Oleander Jacaranda, Penelope Lively – author’s memoir of her childhood in Cairo and then England in the 1930s

NYPL in-library only

Angels and Men, Catherine Fox – a postgraduate at a British university is studying cults and has a history with cults but then she makes college friends and it’s all sort of bleak and intense and collegey

Forlorn Sunset, Michael Sadleir – a 1947 novel about the Victorian underworld with characters from all walks of life

Unicorn Sisters, Ursula Holden – three sisters are sent to a boarding school run by eccentric spinsters during World War II

Saplings, Noel Streatfeild

A Lemon and a Star, E.C. Spykman – an Melendyish book about a family of four kids living at the turn of the century and having all sorts of jolly adventures