Like the earlier books in the Malabar House series, this one has an intricate plot that must be unraveled by the delightful Persis Wadia, the newly independent India’s first woman police inspector. With those who govern the new nation already pulling in different directions, Persis manages to stop a lone young man from assassinating a hawkish politician.

“Music can scourge the heart.” The tone of this novel’s opening is poignant, almost elegiac. Showing the musician through a series of moments that echo and return and flow into her compositions, MacLaverty transports us into the heart, mind, and soul of Northern Irish composer Catherine Anne McKenna.

We are all descended from African ancestors, Zeinab Badawi tells us, laying out recent scientific discoveries about this and well as giving us some fascinating glimpses into the development and migration of early humans.

Flanagan’s memoir of his father—though it is far more than simply a memoir—imparts fascinating historical information as well as rewarding food for the soul and imagination.

In 2024 I read only 101 books, the same number as in 2023 and 21 fewer than the year before. Guess I’ve been doing more writing, so that’s all good.

The Author’s Note at the beginning of this novel is a highly unusual disclaimer. Harris aims to “use the techniques of a novel to retell the story of the Dreyfus Affair,” which he characterizes as “perhaps the greatest political scandal and miscarriage of justice in history.” “None of the characters,” we learn, “is wholly fictional.”

As Shafak says in her final note to the reader, “beyond the borders of time, geography and identity,” water connects us all. The author has dubbed her latest work a love song to rivers. “Fluid bridges, they “link one bank to the other, the past to the future, the spring to the delta, earthlings to celestial beings, the visible to the invisible…the living to the dead.”

It’s always a joy to read Kate Atkinson’s work. This latest Jackson Brodie adventure struck me as even wiser and more hilarious than the wonderful stories of his previous exploits. When the story opens, Jackson, now sixty and a grandfather, has been house-hunting. However, he’s just overcome “several weeks being sensible and mature” and bought a brand-new “rugged, blokey” Land Rover Defender. After all, he reflects, “you could live in a Defender if you had to, “but you couldn’t drive a house.”

In the opening story, a husband and wife move from the country to Moscow during the Russian Revolution. Irina, the convinced communist, is a brilliant foil for her husband Pushkin, whose character evolves in an entirely different direction.

I just finished listening to The Glass Maker. The structure of this riveting novel expresses the fluidity of time while providing a wide canvas for the author to paint the history of Venice and Murano. We see through the eyes of Orsola Rossi, whose glass making family have lived and worked on Murano for centuries.

Writers often talk about point of view and it can be challenging for novelists to differentiate the “povs” of different characters.

Reading Percival Everett’s novel is a dramatic demonstration of the vital importance of point of view in fiction—and indeed in life.

Ex-Kolkata policeman Kamil Rahman, introduced in previous novels, began his London life as a waiter, then worked as a cook. In this volume, he is seconded from his job as a detective for the London police to assist MI5. Thanks to his brown skin and Muslim heritage, Five asks him to infiltrate a mosque where they suspect a major act of terror is being fomented.

This gripping novel by Jeanine Cummins is filled with profound ideas and nuanced emotion. The opening action is the murder of a Mexican journalist by one of the cartels. His widow Lydia knows that “fear and corruption work in tandem to censor the people who might otherwise discover the clues that would point to justice.” She is also aware that the previous year, “Mexico was the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist, no safer than an active war zone.”

Recently the Reverend Richard Coles gave a fascinating interview through the Guardian. A veteran of many jobs besides the ministry, he mentioned that he’d wanted from childhood to write mysteries. By exposing him to all manner of human frailties, his pastoral work has provided fodder for his stories.

As John, a British airman, returns home from a rendezvous in Paris, his beloved Nicole returns to her home to apply for a visa to come to him and his widowed father in London. Wanting to “do things properly,” they wait to tell him together of their plans to marry. The declaration of war derails their plans and the young pilot is killed.

In the lobby of the respectable Meredith Hotel in the seaside village of Hazelbourne, two English ladies from different backgrounds face a dilemma that results from being female.

A conventionally structured tale of murder, the story plays out against actual and imagined social history. Fortunate to be educated and married to the enlightened and liberal Doctor Ramu Murthy, Kaveri not only involves herself in solving a murder, but persuades Ramu to aid her efforts in helping the police. As she does so, she comes across all manner of social ills. The burden of a home’s respectability, Kaveri quickly realizes, is placed on the womenfolk.

Set in Mahdist Sudan in the late 1800s, this novel carries us into the heart of the Muhammad Ahmad’s rebellion against foreign control of the region. A deeply divisive figure among Muslims, the Madhi claimed to be the expected one, then rebelled against the British, Egyptians and Ottomans who were controlling Sudan at the time. After his death, his tomb in Omdurman was desecrated by the British to discourage another Muslim uprising, but later rebuilt.

The greater good is a phrase that comes up a lot in this novel, but it isn’t as good as it sounds. Instead, the phrase is brought into service to excuse evil deeds on both sides of the conflict.

First as a man, then as a woman, Jan Morris has travelled the world and written about it, showing it to readers through her unique vision. Her journalistic exploits include covering the first conquest of Mt. Everest, the 1956 Sinai War, as well as the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the South African Treason Trial involving Mandela, the construction and destruction of the Berlin Wall, and the 1997 British handover of Hong Kong to China when the lease had expired.