Staircase Wit

For those of us who enjoy historical fiction, especially when set during WWII, it is a pleasure to encounter a book that reveals a new aspec...

It’s been six years since I visited Lane Winslow and her neighbors in King’s Cove, British Columbia, where she settled after WWII, hoping to...

Tracy Chevalier is best known for her book about Vermeer, Girl with the Pearl Earring , but her skill - whether writing about a 17th century...

Captain Harry Phillips, a British officer, is a prisoner of war in a German-controlled hospital in Romania. It’s 1918 and while Germany has...

I remember what a tear-jerker The Light Between Oceans was so I was not expecting an easy read in A Far-flung Life but it took nearly all ...

Alas, A Murder in Marylebone barely mentions Marylebone and is too obviously written by an American, although it began promisingly. Minerv...

Elizabeth Chadwick is an author I have enjoyed in the past but somehow I had not read any of her books since moving back to Boston, so she s...

When she was at her lowest emotionally, Skye saw a competition to win a cottage in Greece for one euro, and entered. How she won and how the...

Ruth Reichl was the restaurant critic for the New York Times from 1993 to 1999, and although I doubt we frequented the same places, I often...

Fred Harvey (1835–1901) was an entrepreneur who created the first American restaurant chain, multiple locations that served those traveling ...

This is an old-fashioned family saga of a historical novel by an author whose gift for creating memorable characters was matched by her pain...

There is probably a whole fictional sub-genre of governesses-in-jeopardy but few have the immediacy or appeal of Camilla Forest, the intrepi...

Beverly Cleary’s only historical novel is about a sensitive girl with big dreams, living on a farm in 1920s Pitchfork, Oregon. The book is ...

In this captivating historical novel, a grieving widow is drawn back to Cornwall, the location of her earliest memories, where she expects a...

Jane is a pragmatic Brit who met a handsome American in Cornwall five months ago and was swept off her feet. Despite being newly engaged, s...

In the first book of this WWII trilogy, a desperate mother in 1939 Berlin sends her children to what she hopes is safety in Britain. Ariell...

This unusual historical novel from writing duo Gaynor and Webb uses the early years of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign as the backdrop for the fr...

Marjorie Malcolm-Scott leads a lonely but privileged existence in Edinburgh, living with her Uncle Fergus, who has been gone for months (war...

Sometimes a book is so annoying one cannot sit back and enjoy the setting, even when it turns out to have been inspired by a place one has v...

Ellie Endicott is stunned when her husband of 30 years tells her he wants a divorce to marry a “smart, pleasant,” much younger colleague. O...