Oooh! What a delicious book! It just sneaks up on you--and in a good way. It takes a bit to get into it, but it's worth the wait. By the time the plot really gets moving the characters are fully developed and seem like real people. And look out! You won't be able to put it down.

It's 1922--just after WWI. Frances lives with her mother in a lovely British neighborhood in a house that is falling down around them--just like their finances. To make ends meet, they reluctantly take in borders, a married couple named Leonard and Lilian Barber, whom they refer to as "paying guests." Frances quickly develops a friendship with Lilian. Leonard and Lilian's marriage is falling apart, they fight, there is great unhappiness and Lilian turns to Frances. And then the unthinkable happens.

"The Paying Guests" has it all--historical fiction, love and sex, crime and intrigue and lots of suspense. Author Sarah Waters is a master!

This book will make you laugh. And this book will break your heart. It is about the comedy and tragedy of life--some of which we bring on ourselves and some of which just happens. The good. The bad. The in-between. And sometimes the horrific.

The story is told through the perspective of one family, broken as they are. Miles Roby and Janine have split up. She is marrying someone else after getting caught having an affair. They have a 16-year-old daughter, Tick, who is like all teenage girls--lovable, hateful, a know-it-all, insecure and still a child at heart. They live in Empire Falls, New York, a gray and gritty town that has fallen on hard times after the shirt factory and mills have closed.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel starts off slowly--almost excruciatingly so--and then picks up and takes off, much like a car idling through a parade and then zooming away at 80 mph. It's a story of dreams and nightmares, of what we do to protect our children and the horrors that sometimes happen that are beyond our control. Plain and simple: Author Richard Russo is a genius.

P.S. It's worth reading "Empire Falls" if for no other reason than the driver's ed scene about halfway through the book. I laughed so hard I had to stop reading. And then every time I thought about that scene for the next few days I would laugh again.

If I could give this book 10 stars, I would! But do know this is not an easy, on-the-beach type read. This is an intelligent book--literary fiction at its finest. The story by Lauren Groff, which is a behind-closed-doors look at the marriage of Lancelot (Lotto) and Mathilde Satterwhite, is told in two parts.

The first half of the book, titled "Fates," is the marriage as viewed through Lotto's eyes. The second half of the book, "Furies," is from Mathilde's point of view. And it leaves the reader thinking: "Wait! This is the SAME marriage?" Which, of course, makes you wonder if all marriages are like this? Do we ever really know one another even after decades of marital bliss?

This is ultimately the story of how Mathilde engineered their marriage to appear to be perfect--not so much to the outside world but to Lotto. What seemed like such a sweet romantic story in "Fates" becomes a chilling, dark and creepy tale in "Furies." Pay attention to things that happen in "Fates," even if they seem unimportant because there are many revelations in "Furies" that will send you back to those early pages. You'll think, "Aha! So that's what really happened!"

I highly recommend this book.

This book, while being a very slow read, is rich in the details, manners and the lifestyle of the late Edwardian period just before the outbreak of World War I. I was all set to give it three stars until the last 20 percent of the book when (finally) the plot picks up and something actually happens. That last 20 percent is so good, I've upped my rating to four stars. Still, for all the hype (the author is likened to a modern day Jane Austen), I found it disappointing.

This is a story about the village of Rye in Sussex, England. The little town thrives on gossip--some benign and much malicious--with a strict divide among the classes and ironclad unwritten rules about manners and behavior. So when fiercely independent spinster Beatrice Nash comes to town to teach Latin to the poorer children in the public school, tongues wag. A woman as a TEACHER? Goodness. What is the world coming to? And that is exactly the point. The world, as the good people of Rye know it, is about to change and it will never again be the same. War does that.

Even though it's thin on plot, author Helen Simonson's writing is excellent, the characters are fully developed and the descriptions are vivid.

Powerful story. Exquisite prose. This short book by Jacqueline Woodson will grab you with the first sentence (For a long time, my mother wasn't dead yet.), squeeze your heart tight and not let go. If I could give it 10 stars I would.

This is the story of August, a black girl who has moved from SweetGrove, Tennessee to the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn with her father and little brother in the early '70s. This is the story of August and her three best friends. This is the story of how those girls grow up on the streets, living on the edge of poverty and either make it--or not--in the world. This is the story of a dangerous place, but one also filled with hope and courage. This is a story of grief. This is a story of love.

Read it.

Oh, how delicious! This is historical FICTION. Emphasis on the word "fiction." While it is a historical account of Catalina, princess of Spain who becomes Katherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife and queen of England, there is liberal artistic license taken.

The facts are the bones of the book; the fiction is the flesh. And author Philippa Gregory, who is one of the leading novelists about this time period, melds the two brilliantly. The book alternates between a third-person story and the first-person thoughts of Catalina/Katherine.

This is the first in a series of novels about the Tudors. The story continues in the next book, "The Other Boleyn Girl," when the Bolelyn family (first Mary and then her sister, Anne) so devastatingly disrupt the marriage of the King Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon and set in motion the birth of the Church of England.

If you enjoy the stories of the Tudors--I find it all quite enthralling--then this is a must-read.

This is a difficult book to read--not because of inferior writing, a confusing plot or one-dimensional characters. The writing is excellent, the plot is well-conceived and the characters ring true. Rather, it is difficult to read because of the horrific subject matter: the relatively little-known genocide in 1915 of some 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Turks in Ottoman Turkey. And the rest of the world didn't know it happened. It was called the Slaughter You Know Nothing About.

The story: Elizabeth Endicott, newly graduated from Mt. Holyoke, accompanies her father to Aleppo, Syria to provide humanitarian aid to the Armenians. The Armenian men were summarily executed, while the women and children were marched across the desert for days without food or water to refugee camps. They were raped and often murdered for sport during the marches. Those few who made it to Aleppo were walking skeletons.

The book tells the story of Elizabeth, two German soldiers who were fighting as allies with the Turks, and Armen, an Armenian who lost his wife and infant daughter. The plot gets a bit weighed down, in my opinion, by bouncing back and forth between 1915 and the present day as Elizabeth's granddaughter attempts to unravel the secrets of her grandmother's past.

This book by Chris Bohjalian is shocking, tragic and romantic--historical fiction at its best because it tells a tale that needs to be told and that still resonates more than 100 years later.

It all began because of an illicit kiss.

Bert Cousins kissed Beverly Keating at a family christening party, and that set in motion two divorces, a marriage and a Brady Bunch of six kids who get tossed back and forth from the state of California to the commonwealth of Virginia and yet become what one of them later describes as "a fierce little tribe." Their lives are forever marked by a tragic event, and the role they believe they played in it.

The story continues over five decades, focusing especially on one of those six children--Franny. By the time she is in her 20s, she has dropped out of law school and is working as a cocktail waitress at the swanky Palmer House in Chicago when she meets Leon Posen, a renowned novelist who hasn't written anything in decades. Even though there is a 32-year age difference, they begin an affair, and Leon writes a stunningly successful novel about Franny's childhood and family. The book forces the now grown-up and somewhat estranged siblings and stepsiblings to come to terms with their volatile, but deeply connected, relationships.

Author Ann Patchett has written a powerful and compelling story about love and family, death and heartbreak. Highly recommended.

This is by far THE strangest book I have ever read. And maybe ever will read. The full title (and this is important) is "Moonglow: A Novel." Yes, it's fiction. But wily author Michael Chabon has written it and presented it as a memoir of his (never named) grandfather. Assuming it is based on fact and then embellished, this man led a heck of a life. But we don't even know that much! Is it really a novel that is pretending to be a memoir--or a memoir pretending to be a novel?

The writing has a touch of the genius. The story bounces back and forth in time but always in a way that works and isn't jarring. This grandfather was quite the guy--a stellar engineer who stalked Nazis in World War II, a man who spent time in prison for trying to kill his boss, a man who married a woman who already had a daughter and loved both until the day he died, a man who started and lost his own business(es), and a man who spent the last months of his life falling in love again while hunting a python. You just have to read it to really get it. And it's worth your time to read it--bizarre and strange and really odd though it is.

Riveting. Captivating. Spellbinding. Entrancing. Get the idea? This short, can't-put-it-down novel by Ann Weisgarber will grab you at page one and not let go. This is the kind of book that will make you forgo sleep, housework and other responsibilities. Just one more page. (Yeah, right...like you could stop after just one more page.)

It's 1900. Catherine Wainwright of Dayton, Ohio has been caught in a horrific scandal of such magnificent proportions that she is shunned by proper society and forced to flee. Even her mother is appalled by her only child's behavior. So Catherine writes a letter to Oscar, a boy she knew as a young girl--a working class boy who left Dayton to build a new life in Galveston, Texas. Oscar had always admired her from afar. It just so happens that Oscar, now a widower with a 5-year-old son, needs a wife. And Catherine needs to escape. A train ride across the country, a quickie wedding by a judge, and the two strangers begin their new life together in Oscar's tiny house on the island of Galveston.

The story is told in the first person alternating between Catherine and Nan Ogden, who was a dear friend of Oscar's first wife and who now keeps house for Oscar and his son. There are a series of storms. The inner storms that Catherine and Oscar suffer individually, the storm of the first days of their hasty marriage, the storm going on inside Nan and finally the biggest storm of all: The September 8, 1900 hurricane that is still the worst natural disaster ever to hit the United States.

Just one more page...and you'll finish this book, wiping tears from your eyes.

I have recently discovered the joys of reading a well-written short story collection. Short stories are a tough sell to readers. The writer has to reel in the reader fast--in the first few sentences, ideally. And when each story ends, often abruptly, the next one had better have a riveting first sentence to clear away the hangover caused the previous story's ending.

Molly Antopol does this magnificently in her collection "The UnAmericans," eight stories about Eastern European Jews who either live in the United States or have a connection to it--albeit quite a slim connection in two of the stories that are set in Israel. The characters have been powerfully shaped by political events in their country of origin or by the violence of history that personally touched them. They are, for the most part, dissidents and intellectuals. For those who fled to the United States, they had to reinvent themselves as Americans. But are they treated as Americans? Not always. Hence, the "UnAmericans" designation.

There is heartbreak and humor, passion and pain, sympathy and solace in this compelling and intelligently-written collection that explores what we have in common as humans: our relationships to one another. And that is true no matter where we were born.

P.S. "My Grandmother Tells Me This Story" is worth the price of the book alone!

FYI: It's a sin to covet the riches of others. And that's exactly what makes this book so delicious!

In this case, we're talking about the filthy rich--those who are so rich that they can buy anything they want at any time they want--and they don't even have to work. That is...until the unthinkable, the unimaginable happens. The money disappears. It's gone! All of it. hat is the premise of this inspired book by Ramona Ausubel.

Edgar, the only child of Mary and Hugh, comes from new money. Fern, the daughter of Evelyn and Paul, comes from old money. They marry, have three children and are supported primarily by her father. And suddenly, the money dries up. What do they do? How do they react? That is the story! I won't reveal anymore, as do so many reviews, because anything else I say would be a spoiler. Suffice it to say that how Edgar and Fern react individually and as a couple nearly destroy them and their family.

There are two storylines in the book, as the chapters seamlessly switch between before the money is lost and after it is lost, and three points of view: Edgar, Fern and their 9-year-old daughter, Cricket. And while the book is quite focused on materialism and conspicuous consumption, it is also just as much about the inner turmoil of losing life as we know it--no matter what that life may be--and the emotional toll that takes. Yes, even the 1 percent have troubles!

But above all, it's just a good story. Ramona Ausubel takes a "what if..." and extrapolates it in a way that shows us the heartbreak and humor of life's gut-wrenching changes.

I am arriving late to the Liane Moriarty party, as this is the first book I have read by this best-selling author. Now I know why she is a best-selling author. What a fun book! It's almost like time travel--but more believable. Thirty-nine-year-old Alice Love falls down her own rabbit hole, so to speak, after she faints and falls off her bike during a spin class in 2008. When she comes to on the gym floor, she thinks it's 1998, she is pregnant with her first child and madly in love with her husband. But it's not 1998. It's 2008, and she has three children and is in the middle of a nasty, acrimonious divorce. She remembers none of that!

But this is more than Alice not remembering her children and thinking of her closest friends as complete strangers, including the new guy she is dating. More important, Alice doesn't recognize or like the person she has become in the last decade.

While the book is entirely plot-driven and not much more than escapist reading with a purely predicable story line, it does have at least one message for the thoughtful reader: If you could time-travel 10 years into your future, would you like who you have become?

To become a physician, I believe, requires as much of a spiritual calling as it does to become a priest, minister or rabbi. If a fat paycheck is the primary motivator for a career in medicine, I suspect that person will not survive residency. Exhibit A: This book.

Written by a practicing internist a decade after he completed his three-year residency in internal medicine, this book will give the non-medical person a hint of what this grueling training is all about. I say a hint, because simply reading the book will not make you feel what all residents must endure: the utter exhaustion of seemingly endless shifts, the pressure to remember so much information at a moment's notice, the mind-numbing paperwork and the heartbreak of losing patients. But it will give you more empathy for your own doctor.

The writing is superb, and while it's nonfiction, it is as engrossing as a novel. Unlike other types of medical residencies, internal medicine is a kind of medical catch-all. These residents do it all--from the emergency room to intensive care, from clinics to hospice. And that is what makes this book so compelling. Author Terrence Holt takes you along as he experiences it--the adrenaline-pumping code blue, a young woman who commits suicide by Tylenol (a death that is excruciatingly drawn-out and painful), in-home hospice care with a woman whose mouth has been eaten away by skin cancer, a psychiatric hospital where two patients do horrific and gruesome things to hurt themselves (no spoilers here), and being with a family as the matriarch dies. There is more. A lot more.

While some of the stories are disturbing (you won't want to read this book while eating lunch), they will all give you an appreciation for the medical profession. My hope is that if I am ever hospitalized, I have a resident who is as caring as Dr. Holt. It's a fascinating book, and I highly recommend it.

This is a dark book. With an even darker ending. But that's not a spoiler because this extraordinary tale by Hannah Kent (published in 2010 when she was only 25 years old!) is based on actual historical events. While it is a novel, the author's prodigious research gives the story authenticity.

Taking place in Iceland in 1828, "Burial Rites" is a (partially) fictionalized account of the life and death of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a young woman found guilty of the murder of her lover. While she awaits her execution, she is housed in the remote country home of a low-level government official, his wife and two grown daughters. She chooses a young and inexperienced priest named Tóti to counsel her. The family is frightened to accommodate the prisoner, but something happens over the months that Agnes lives with them. She talks. Tóti listens. The family listens. Is Agnes really guilty of this horrific, bloody crime?

While the murder may be the tantalizing centerpiece of the story, the descriptions of the north of Iceland are so vivid, the reader can almost feel the brutal cold, see the snow and hear the howling winds. Like I did, you may find yourself looking online for photos of a badstofa, turf homes and the barren winter landscape of north Iceland.

This isn't a light beach book. It is by turns disturbing, alarming and sorrowful with no humor to lighten the woeful tale. But it is an incredible book that will give you an appreciation for this time and place and the most basic of human emotions that transcend both.

Delicious! Delectable! Daring! Oh, dahling...you simply must read this. Great literature it is not, but it is so much fun. So between Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Austen and Anne Tyler (all of whom I highly recommend), read this sinfully delightful book by Beatriz Williams.

It's the dawn of the Roaring '20s where sex (not necessarily with your spouse), drink and other shenanigans rule the day. The rules of society are changing. The plot is complex (so I won't even try to summarize it here--you can read that easily enough elsewhere), and the writing keeps up the pace in what turns from a love story/love triangle to a murder mystery (with exciting twists and turns) and then back to the love story/love triangle. Williams brilliantly captures the aura of these freewheeling times from the sordid speakeasies to the grand parties in elegant Fifth Avenue apartments that are mansion-like in size.

This is a fun, easy read--ideal for the beach or a snowstorm. This is the classic "can't-put-it-down" novel. Get it!

It's summer 1961 in New Breman, Minnesota. JFK is president. It is a time of innocence. Kids wander everywhere in this small town--in the fields, down by the river, on the railroad tracks. But this idyllic town is rocked by five deaths--accidents, suicide, homicide--in just a few short months, and life for some will never be the same. Frankie is 13, the son of a Methodist minister. He narrates the book as an adult, recalling that dreadful summer 40 years ago. This is a who-done-it wrapped in an emotionally-charged tale about the fragility of life and the roles we each play--often unwittingly--in the hurt and happiness of those around us. It is the story of Frankie leaving childhood behind and becoming a man. It is the story of God's grace in unexpected and brilliant ways as a family struggles to still breathe after the worst happens. It is about grieving and becoming whole again.

I found the book to be a riveting read--not so much because I wanted to find out what happened next (even though I did!), but rather because I wanted to find out how the characters would feel and handle the crises all around them. Yes, there is a wonderful plot that keeps you reading, complete with lies and secrets, adultery and teen sex, hatred and prejudice, but this book is so much more than plot. And that is what separates it from the pack. This is a book that means something and will haunt your thoughts for a long time.

If you read this book, do so with caution! Why? It's really good. And it's the first in a series of six books (with a seventh reportedly in the works). I read the second in the series, "The White Queen," first, and it's even better than this one.

Written by Philippa Gregory, whom USA Today has dubbed "the queen of royal fiction," this book begins in 1430 in France with the story of Jacquetta, a young girl with the "sight" (ability to foresee the future), and her eventual adult life serving in the English court of the rather inept King Henry VI and his wife, Margaret of Anjou. It is under his reign that the War of the Roses--the bloody battle between cousins--begins and nearly tears apart England.

And while there is a lot of history packed into this book, the main focus is on the women--those unheralded and forgotten characters that had such a powerful and influential impact on their husbands and, thus, on events that shaped the times.

I don't know what most impresses me about author Chris Bohjalian's writing in this book:
--He wrote from a woman's perspective.
--He wrote with the knowledge of a physician.
--He wrote with the knowledge of an attorney.

And he pulled it off expertly!

When a woman giving birth dies in the care of experienced midwife Sybil Danforth in a perfect storm (literally) of everything that could possibly go wrong, she is arrested and tried in a court of law. The story is told from the perspective of her daughter, Connie, who narrates the book as a 30-something adult recalling this tragic piece of their family history when she was a young teenager.

The plot moves quickly and holds the reader completely, and the characters are fully developed and three-dimensional. Best of all, the last three chapters are so riveting, you will not be able to stop reading. (If you're the family cook, I hope no one wants dinner when you get to that point of the story.)

This is not-to-be missed story of hopes and dreams, of tragedy and consequences, of the power of the law and the force of conscience. Most of all, it is a story of love. What we do and how we act under the most extreme circumstances is the true testament of who we are as human beings.

Plain and simple: This is a work of literary genius.

But this is what it is not:
• It is not an easy read. Don't even think of taking it to the beach.
• Even though it is billed as a "multigenerational novel," it is not. It is four novellas about four people spanning 100 years who are not related to each other--except that they are all Chinese-Americans.

The writing style and structure of each novella is unique. The stories are so unrelated to each other that they could be read separately, which is why I have called them novellas. But the element that connects the four is the symbolism of the elephant. (English majors, this is for you! Non-English majors--just Google it.)

Author Peter Ho Davies very creatively and seductively explores the extremely different lives of four people--three of whom were real, although he has reimagined their lives. (I call that daring for a novelist!) As disparate as these three men and one woman are in time, place and prosperity, their stories show the hatred of racism, the importance of identity in the larger society, the power of ambition, the frailty of life without love--and above all the place of family in our lives.

English major that I was, I was riveted. It made me think. It made me weep. It made me laugh. And it made me want to read a lot more about China.