Jean Zimmerman

Two kinds of readers might exult over Geraldine Brooks's biblical epic about the life of King David, The Secret Chord. The first can cite chapter and verse of the Good Book. The second craves the resonance of the best historical fiction. Both will relish this new novel, which brings alive ...

Early on in this engaging suspense novel, heroine Gloria Harkness declares that she is not Miss Marple. It's something of an odd statement, considering she is very much cut from the same tea-cozy cloth as Agatha Christie's venerable character. If she's not Miss Marple, she'll do until the real thing ...

Charmingly disturbing. Delightfully dour. Pleasingly perverse. These are some of the oxymorons that ran through my mind as I read Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh's intense, flavorful, remarkable new novel. "Funny awful" might be another one. I marveled at myself for enjoying the scenes I was witnessing, and wondered what dark magic ...

I am slightly embarrassed to admit I had never before encountered the term "hen party" before reading Ruth Ware's suspenseful debut novel In a Dark, Dark Wood. Like so many phrases that describe all-female gatherings, such as quilting bee or kaffeeklatsch, that hen business has a slight cluck of the ...

Of all the colors in the brilliant paintbox that is Alice Hoffman's latest novel, The Marriage of Opposites, "haint blue" is the most important. Yes, the landscapes and the house interiors and the clothing brim with creams and reds, emeralds and silvers, and blues of every shade prevail. But haint ...

Crime is bred from secrets. British author Sophie Hannah hit that theme heavily in a recent interview, saying, "I can remember knowing from a very young age that there would be disastrous consequences if anyone were to discover how I truly felt and what I honestly thought." Now, Hannah ...

As she approached old age in the 1980s, the author, aviator and adventurer Beryl Markham had been largely forgotten. Her 1942 book detailing a pioneering east-west crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by plane, West with the Night, was long out of print. She had returned to her beloved Nairobi and ...

"One of my life's greatest tragedies," said George Orwell, "is to have already read Pickwick Papers. I can't go back and read it for the first time." The serialized novel of 1836 was one of the first commercial blockbusters of the English-speaking world. The author? A virtual unknown, a 24-year-old ...

In his new novel, The Subprimes, Karl Taro Greenfeld charges in where most of us would fear to tread. Carol Burnett could have warned him. "It's almost impossible to be funnier than the people in Washington," she once said, but Greenfeld tries his darnedest. He wants to skewer a certain ...

In April 1944, a Nazi commander on the island of Crete was somehow mysteriously and miraculously kidnapped right under the nose of the Germans. No shots were fired, there was no bloodshed and no sign of a struggle. General Heinrich Kreipe simply vanished.

Left behind were a few tantalizing clues: ...

A gaggle of querulous ghosts narrates the events in Aislinn Hunter's new novel The World Before Us. Hunter, a Canadian author of both fiction and poetry, brings a moody grace to these phantoms and to her telling of this rather quirky tale. The novel spans three time periods: The present, ...

Pier 54 on the Hudson River in Manhattan is padlocked and forgotten now. Like whispers of the past, the engraved names of the shipping companies Cunard and White Star remain barely legible atop its rusted iron gate. Few of the present-day joggers and cyclists who pass by might recall that ...

I fell into a state of dazed puzzlement at the start of this book, whose first chapter includes a remote century's bitter winter, "sour ale" in an "undercroft tavern," the stink of Newgate Jail, French secret agents, a wild-haired preacher and conversations in Italian and French as well as English. ...

Is there more to say about World War I nurses and their patients after Hemingway's uber-classic A Farewell to Arms? The saga of ambulance driver Frederic Henry and his beautiful English nurse Catherine Barkley is generally thought to be an unrivaled fictional treatment of what was called, at the time, ...

So was that real?

I hear variations on this theme all the time from readers. Titrating fact and fantasy can give a story a mysterious energy. Writers fetch up those details that sate the senses, allowing us to touch and taste, hear and feel how things were once upon a ...