Book love, or It’s complicated

Jeffrey Eugenides had me at the first sentence of The Marriage Plot: “To start with, look at all the books.” Ah, what a come-on, and the long paragraph that follows is equally seductive as it describes Madeleine Hanna’s books on the day of her 1982 graduation from Brown University, from the expected texts of an [...]

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Forever England

Cecil Valance is a Rupert Brooke-alike. The handsome young poet breezes into the home of fellow Cambridge University student George Sawle in the late summer of 1913, capturing the hearts of both George and his younger sister, Daphne. Before he leaves, he pens a poem about his weekend visit, “Two Acres,” in Daphne’s autograph book. With its paen to [...]

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Capital London

Sebastian Faulks’ canvas is so vast in his new novel A Week in December that I found myself on page 39, on the London Underground, one of  the “tourists with their wheeled luggage and their rucksacks. They chattered as they pored over guidebooks, glanced up at the Tube map overhead, trying to reconcile the two. [...]

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