In Death of an Alchemist, an old man—with a macaw and a cat as his only companions—is on the verge of publishing a recipe for immortality when he suddenly dies in his sleep. Given the year is 1543, fast-acting pestilence of many types abounds. Nevertheless, Bianca Goddard, daughter of an alchemist and maker of medicines, suspects he was murdered. Was it the physician whose daughter is gravely ill, the fellow alchemist, the usurer owed money, or the alchemist’s rogue son-in-law? As people begin dropping like flies, can Goddard, with the help of her old friend Meddybemps, solve the mystery? Can she understand the recipe in time to save her own husband imperiled by the sweat?
This is not a mystery for those seeking strict historical accuracy, as Lawrence states at the end of this book. Indeed, the author created an aspect of the mystery’s solution, making it difficult for the reader to puzzle out the solution before the ending. If, however, the reader is willing to suspend disbelief, Death of an Alchemist is an entertaining, Renaissance mystery with a strong, female protagonist.
(Reviewed in exchange for a copy of book in Manhattan Book Review.)
This novel is the story of Otto Laird, an elderly, physically- and mentally-failing architect who returns after a long absence to London to save one of his buildings marked for demolition. The once brilliant, now dilapidated building mirrors Laird’s own life. As a crew films Laird returning to and living in the building for several days, Laird reviews his life: his childhood hidden in a cellar during World War II, his early joy in meeting his first wife as a student in London and designing the building in question, their later troubled marriage and his troubled fatherhood as his career soared, his reconciliation with his wife, and finally his devastation by her death.
In Other Words is the story of Jhumpa Lahiri’s passion to learn Italian. On one level, this book addresses the mundane: Lahiri’s experience with tutors, living in Italy, writing in Italian, and grappling with the intricacies and nuances of a different language. Lahiri, however, plumbs the depths of these experiences to reveal deeper insights. For example, Lahiri writes of her alienation from both the language of her birth, Bengali, and her first adopted language, English, and the independence she finds in choosing her third language. She discusses the different assumptions she cannot escape as a Bengali-American when she speaks Bengali, English and Italian. Lahiri describes both the constriction and freedom she feels as a writer in struggling to write in Italian. Most interestingly, Lahiri wrote In Other Words in Italian but refused to translate it to English to protect her limited Italian and to prevent Lahiri from changing her work in her stronger language.
In The Sunlit Night, two lost souls meet by chance ninety-five miles north of the Arctic Circle on an archipelago of tiny islands in the Norwegian Sea. Twenty-one-year-old Frances has come to intern with an artist who is painting a barn in shades of yellow. Just before she arrives, Frances broke up with her boyfriend, who bluntly informed her that what she does doesn’t help anyone, and discovered her family is on the verge of disintegrating. Seventeen-year-old Yasha arrives to carry out his father’s unusual final wishes, while his long-absent mother makes a sudden reappearance in his life.
In Karma’s a Killer, yoga instructor, Katie Davidson, agrees to teach “doga” or yoga for dogs at a local animal rescue’s fundraiser, and chaos ensues. First, the doga class goes very wrong when someone insists on bringing Alfalfa the rabbit into the class filled with dogs. Then, animal activists stage a violent protest at the event. While Katie struggles to maintain her sense of inner peace, one of the activists is found dead, and a woman named Dharma, who claims to be Katie’s long-lost mother, is arrested for the murder. With her high-strung German Shepard companion, Bella, Katie sets out to discover the truth.
One of Santiago Torres’ closest friends, Jasper Willoughs, dies in a fall from a Georgetown University dormitory. Although ruled a suicide, Santi, a Jesuit priest and a Gonzaga high school headmaster, knows his friend too well to believe that. Jasper, a fellow priest finishing his doctorate on the early history of the Jesuit order, had been excited to meet Santi because he had found something that would cause him to rewrite his thesis. Soon, Santi receives mysterious clues from The Odd Fellows Society, a Georgetown club for history and trivia geeks for whom Willoughs created an annual scavenger hunt. Is Santi crazy, or did Willoughs somehow threaten a merely rumored, Georgetown secret society called the Stewards? Either way, Santi becomes caught up in a real life scavenger hunt around the nation’s capital. To complicate matters, his partner is Abby Byrnes, the woman he has secretly loved for eighteen years, and his brother, with whom he shares a complicated history and no affection, is the FBI agent on the case. Can they figure out the clues before Santi becomes the next victim to die under mysterious circumstances?
The Song of Hartgrove Hall is the story of Harry Fox-Talbot. In alternating chapters, the reader sees Fox as a young man and as an elderly man. The young Fox reveals the struggle of the Fox-Talbot brothers to save their dilapidated ancestral home—Hartgrove Hall—and Fox’s undeniable passion for composing music, collecting folk songs, and his brother’s girl, Edie Rose. In contrast, the elderly Fox struggles with the death of his beloved wife, his inability to compose more music, and the discovery that his young, difficult grandson has an amazing gift for music.
In The Evening Spider, two young mothers live over a hundred years apart in the same house. In 2014, Abby Bernacki, a history teacher on maternity leave, begins to hear strange sounds through her baby daughter’s monitor at night. At the same time, Abby increasingly recalls her college roommate, who Abby found dead. Sensing something off in the house but afraid to talk to her husband, Abby begins to research while becoming increasingly erratic. She discovers that a criminal lawyer, his young wife, and their baby daughter lived in the house in 1887. The young wife, Frances Barnett, becomes obsessed with two famous murder trials until her husband eventually commits her to a lunatic asylum.
Robert Hendricks’ father died at a young age, leaving Hendricks with his mother “who feared the worst” and a mentally-ill uncle. While serving in World War II, Hendricks was injured but cannot remember what occurred. At the same time, he met and lost the great love of his life, never to form another close attachment. By the novel’s opening in London in the 1980s, however, Hendricks has become a successful psychiatrist and author, although he feels a sense of disconnection. One day, Hendricks receives an unexpected invitation to visit a neurologist living on an island of France who knew Hendricks’ father and admires Hendricks’s work. This doctor encourages Hendricks delve into his past, but to what conclusion?
In Submission, Michel Houellebecq posits a future France in which the new Islamic party gains power through an alliance with the Socialist party. The Islamic party’s primary concerns are with education and the birth rate. The party ends compulsory education at age twelve, severely limits women’s access to higher education, and provides a “Muslim educational option” at all levels. The party also emphasizes the primacy of the family unit, even in economics, while sanctioning polygamy and veiled dress for women. Through these means, the party grows and indoctrinates new generations with the goal of gaining control of an expanded E.U.