Fiction Reviews Archive

The Round House by Louise Erdrich Harper, 2012 321 pages (hardcover) Available: IndieBound Amazon Powells Joe, the thirteen-year-old narrator of The Round House, is like any boy. He can ride his bike for hours, sneaks a beer in the woods with his buddies, wants to impress his dad, finds his grandpa’s stories alternately fascinating

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid Shomer Simon & Schuster, 2012 449 pages (hardcover) Available Amazon Powells IndieBound Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale both toured the Nile in 1850. No evidence suggests that they met during their excursions, but in The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, Enid Shomer imagines that they did.

The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye Unbridled, 2012 280 pages (Kindle) Available Amazon Powell’s Towering pines. Cresting swells. Ravenous men and wolves. Logging teams working the ice road and whiskey runners avoiding the shipping channel. This desperate wilderness becomes the backdrop to a biography of the immigrant experience in Peter Geye’s new novel, The

Rules of Civility: A Novel by Amor Towles Penguin, 2011 352 Pages (Paperback) Available Amazon Powell’s Take a quick-thinking, ambitious Bronte heroine, put a chilled cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and set her in a dusky Manhattan jazz bar on the eve of 1938. That’s Katey Kontent, and she’s

The Mirrored World by Debra Dean Harper, 2012 256 Pages (Paperback) Available for pre-order (Releases August 28, 2012) Amazon Powell’s What causes a wealthy woman to give up all her possessions and become as one of the destitutes she serves? What turns a regular person into a hallowed saint? Is it devotion? Destiny? Madness?

Alys, Always by Harriet Lane Scribner, 2012 209 pages (hardcover) Available Powells IndieBound Amazon Driving back to London from the countryside on an icy evening, Frances Thorpe comes upon a car accident. She can’t get to the driver, who calls to her saying her name is Alice and that she spun out trying to

Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt Clarion Books, 2011 368 pages (hardcover) Available Amazon Powell’s IndieBound We don’t review a lot of middle grade or YA novels here at The Discarded Image, but we need to start. Our purpose is to pursue belief-changing ideas, and what is young adulthood if not an exercise

Everybody loves a good Western. Saddles and saloons, cowboys and chorus girls, longhorns and lawmen, all dust covered and tasting of desperation. Few figures ride taller in these adventures than Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. But who was the real Dr. John Henry Holliday, and how did he come to be in Tombstone on