CategoryAudiobook Reviews

This is my eighth Elizabeth Strout book and is distinguished by having so many of the familiar characters show up again. Her first main character, the cranky Olive Kitteridge, is now 90 and living in a retirement home. She is visited by Lucy Barton and the two tell each other stories and sometimes Olive complains that Lucy’s stories are pointless. Lucy, the novelist, tells stories and...

This is the second book I’ve read in the Benjamin Black crime series featuring pathologist Dr. Quirke. Black is the pen name of the award-winning Irish writer John Banville. The series is set in Dublin in the 1950s. As it was in A Death in Summer, the story is horribly unpleasant, and Quirke’s behavior is awfully irresponsible and self-destructive. Having just completed a long stint...

It was Reading Matters that took me to this book. The author is the much admired Irish writer John Banville, writing mysteries under the pen name Benjamin Black. I have read one of John Banville’s books. The mystery solving characters of his books are a medical pathologist named Dr. Quirke and a policeman Detective Inspector Hackett. In this one Dr. Quirke begins an affair with the wife of...

It was Dorothy’s recommendation that took me to this unusual little book. Asya and her husband Manu are immigrants from different countries who met in college and live in an unnamed big city. Asya describes their lives over the course of several months as Manu goes off to his job every day and Asya goes to the park to make a documentary. They are in that time of life depicted by the TV show...

This is my fourth Louise Erdrich book. Her first book was written in 1982; this one in 1986. The action occurs mostly in a small town in North Dakota beginning in 1932 where Mary, an eleven-year-old child, is deposited from the box car she and her fourteen-year-old brother were riding after their mother abandoned them. Karl jumped back in the boxcar after leaving Mary there. Their Aunt Fritzie...