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Nonfiction that reads like a thriller: On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”—the fastest liner then in service—and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20 , was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania ...

New York Times Book Review, August 2016 praises The Underground Railroad: In his dynamic new novel, Colson Whitehead takes the Underground Railroad — the loosely interlocking network of black and white activists who helped slaves escape to freedom in the decades before the Civil War — and turns it from a metaphor into an actual train that ferries fugitives northward. The result is a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery. It possesses the chilling, matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” and with brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift. “The Underground Railroad,” chronicles the life of a teenage slave named Cora, who flees the Georgia plantation where she was ...

Roger Angell may be best known for his books on baseball, but his talents transcend sports reportage. The author of favorites like The Summer Game and Season Ticket has produced a new collection of essays in which his skills as a memoirist are amply evident. Let Me Finish contains 17 pieces that cohere beautifully to form an overview of Angell's remarkable life, from his years at Harvard, to his service during the Second World War, to holidays spent with his mother, Katherine Angell, a longtime New Yorker editor, and his stepfather, beloved author E.B. White. Capturing the culture of 1930s New York, many of the essays evoke a time when movies cost a dime, manners mattered and divorces, like the bitter one that occurred between Angell's parents, were a source of scandal. The author's father, Ernest Angell, a brilliant and eccentric lawyer, personifies the period. Remembered fondly in the lively essay The King of the Forest, he presided over the fami...

Ann Patchett's latest novel follows six siblings over a period of 50 years. An embrace at a christening party between a man and woman married to other people leads to multiple divorces and remarriages. Patchett follows the two semi-connected families for the next 50 years, as the children become adults and the grown-ups become old. The nine chapters, which feel at times like short stories, proceed mostly chronologically, with regular flashbacks and occasional depictions of the same event from more than one person’s perspective. Insofar as there’s a main character, it’s Franny, who after babyhood becomes an avid reader, drops out of law school, dates a successful novelist and remains devoted to her family. Patchett's books are intelligent and engaging. In 2011 she started an independent bookstore in Nashville, becoming a heroine in the world of modern publishing.  She once wrote, “Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is t...

At the close of the Civil War, weary veteran Malcolm Hopeton returns to his home in western New York State to find his wife and hired man missing and his farm in disrepair. The repercussions of events that ensue ripple through a community with spiritual roots in the Second Great Awakening. Hopeton goes from the horrors of war to far worse while the people around him try to make sense of it all. M any are damaged but stronger for it: a veteran profoundly changed by war, a father tormented by the loss of his daughter, a Seneca man more powerful than others realize, a boy forced too early to become a man. In this 19th century male world, women, too, are assuming new strength—through the roles they take on, and the loves they allow themselves. Lent was born in Vermont and grew up there and in western New York State on dairy farms. No doubt he draws from his life experience to render a time and landscape so vividly that story, characters and place are inseparable.  

The chief of the Israeli Intelligence recalls two former agents in order to eliminate a top Palestinian terrorist. One agent, Gabriel Allon, is now an art restorer, the other a fashion model. Ten years before on a mission to destroy the Arab Black September group they were briefly lovers. Now their pasts and their enemies come back to haunt them, as the terrorist murders ambassadors in Paris and Holland. Will the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks be his next target? And what motivates the terrorist? Is it politics, or is it possibly personal? Set mainly in London, but with forays into Paris, Amsterdam, the Middle East and north America, it has all Daniel Silva's hallmarks of strong characters, unusual backgrounds and a page-turning narrative. T his is the first in a series of novels featuring Gabriel Allon who never manages to extricate himself from the gritty business of fighting terrorists.