Books highlighted on our website this week take readers from the border between Burma and Thailand, to Nagasaki harbor, to Butte, Montana. To go on the journey, all you have to do is. . .
Read a review of Ivan Doig’s Work Song
Ivan Doig, born and bred in Montana, has written many popular works of fiction about the American West. In Work Song, he returns to his best-selling 2008 novel The Whistling Season [BookPage review] and its central character, Morrie Morgan. The place: Butte, Montana of 1919, a bustling post-World War I copper mining capital, where “The Richest Hill on Earth” has enticed Morrie to try his luck at siphoning off a few of the riches said to be waiting in its famed copper veins under the earth. Keep reading…
Read an interview with Mitali Perkins about Bamboo People
Guerilla warfare, child soldiers and landmines: What do these ripped-from-the-headlines terms have to do with 
a coming-of-age story for young readers? As it turns out, quite a bit. While displacement camps and military maneuvers are not the trappings of your standard touchy-feely “do the right thing” tale, they bring a sense of hard-edged reality to Mitali Perkins’ Bamboo People, an intriguing and insightful story about two boys learning how to become men in the midst of chaos. Keep reading…
Read a review of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
A versatile and imaginative writer, David Mitchell has earned a devoted following for his virtuosic novels, two of which have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. With his sumptuous new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell eschews the postmodern razzle-dazzle of Cloud Atlas and Number9Dream for a more straightforward, albeit exquisitely detailed, historical romance about a Dutch outpost in Nagasaki harbor at the turn of the 19th century and Japan’s reluctant passage from isolation to trading partner of the West. Keep reading…
Which of these books will you read first? I have my eyes on The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
Hi! I really enjoy your book reviews. I’m part of a group blog, too, (The Parking Lot Confessional) and appreciate the effort you all put into making this an informative site. I gave you a blog award.
You can get it here: http://wp.me/psAeI-xw