What would be your opinion of a book that opens with the line, “Howard Roark laughed.” then proceeds to describe a man standing at the edge of a sunlit cliff, surveying a dynamite explosion spraying granite across the water? It’s fitting, somehow, to begin Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. A seven hundred-page novel that, like its…
Anxious People hit home for me straight from the start, when Fredrik Backman—one of my favorite authors—made a raw, vulnerable confession: “our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks.” That picture—of people not knowing where…
“Are you from the Purlieus?” the woman asked Luke at the breakfast table. “I am,” Luke answered calmly. The woman had no malice in her tone or expression. “And what about you?” her husband asked Kamrin. “I live here in Savannah as well, a little further west,” Kamrin answered, smiling at Luke. “He’s brought me…