The plot, while historically interesting, goes on irrelevant side stories. The ending is just OK, very strange, and, I thought, unsatisfying.

This book has a lot going for it, police drama, corporate intrigue, murder, action, a new kind of tortured super-hero, and the effects on a small community.

Nora Seed wants to die, but instead she finds herself in a library where she could live alternate versions of her reality, with different choices to live a life

How Beautiful We Were is, in a word, fatalistic. The villagers are fighting a lost cause,– The David vs. Goliath story slowly morphs into a nuanced conflict.

The Porpoise by Mark Haddon is a novel following three stories in different time periods, all with a common narrative, in different worlds, which just touch.

Into the Jungle takes place in the jungles of Bolivia where an American woman finds herself with her Bolivian husband who went back to his village in the jungle

The first book in a series about Jet, a former Israeli Mossad assassin. Mr. Blake is an international best selling author of action/adventure novels.

Solovyov and Larionov by Eugene Vodolazkin (translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden) – A Russian novel which is part military history, part academic satire.

Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina is a novel about a Tartar widow who has been exiled to Siberiawinner of the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award & other Russian book awards

The Volunteer by Salvatore Scibona tells of young boy is stranded at Hamburg Fuhlsbuettel Airport in 2010. He speaks no German, it seems as if he was abandoned