Books Articles: July 2008

Bauman crams so much into the story of the Victorian Bostonian, repressed wife, orchid hunter, and suffragette that the book goes from mildly unrealistic yarn to really annoying to toppling into hopeless silliness.

Really, someone should start a union for mysterious women in thrillers and demand better conditions.

Gessen's writing most resembles F. Scott Fitzgerald’s in the struggle to represent youth and beauty without succumbing fully and uncritically to their seduction.

Anyone who has been bullied or excluded or felt that their family is weird will identify with many of these stories.

While writing about the serious science of sex, Roach appears to have never met a double entendre she didn’t like.

This guide will help you pinch your pennies along the journey so you can splash out when it counts.

There is much to be learned about this little pill, and it is a comfort knowing that everyone -- raver or non-raver, pill-popper or anti-drug -- is able to, in their own way, "keep it real".

Bass executes such a revealing expose on the shadowy world of medical research and the pharmaceutical industry that it proves important stories, like timeless truths, need repeating.

One of the better literary thrillers I’ve read in a long while, a revenge tale that twists into a well-constructed edge-of-your- sofa-cushion murder story.

Unlike their characters, Childers and Buchan refused to indulge in such nonchalant optimism. Their books are fine examples of the ‘Invasion Novel’, a sub-genre of thriller which flourished in the early years of the 20th century.