In 2009, around the age of 60, the superb suspense novelist Peter Abrahams took a new direction. Writing as Spencer Quinn, he began a series of humorous mysteries about an appealing dog, Chet (the narrator), and a private detective, Bernie, working together. The series has flourished, and now comes another surprise: a wrenching new novel (set in the US and Afghanistan) about a woman you won’t soon forget (and a dog who comes to her aid). A war story, a story of “recovery” without the schmaltz, The Right Side illuminates our present moment in a way that only the best fiction can.
The slice of time examined in this chronicle—subtitled “Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858”—gives us a vivid sense of the mysterious intertwining of personality and circumstance, choice and coincidence, that is the essence of history. “Paths meet, cross, and converge, and patterns emerge,” as the distinguished historian Rosemary Ashton promises early on in her account of one of the hottest (and foulest-smelling) London summers on record. She delivers the goods (though her reverential treatment of Darwin begins to grate).
The famous Thames is at the heart of Rosemary Ashton’s One Hot Summer(see above); a much lesser-known river runs through Ryan Schnurr’sIn the Watershed. In 2016, Schnurr followed the Maumee River from its headwaters to its mouth—from Fort Wayne, Indiana (where he grew up) to Toledo, Ohio, opening into Lake Erie. Recounting his journey and what he saw in in the present, Schnurr also weaves in the deep history of the ...
1
You have reached the end of this Article Preview
To continue reading, subscribe now. Subscribers have full digital access.
Investigation: SBC Executive Committee staff saw advocates’ cries for help as a distraction from evangelism and a legal liability, stonewalling their reports and resisting calls for reform.
You have reached the end of this Article Preview
Investigation: SBC Executive Committee staff saw advocates’ cries for help as a distraction from evangelism and a legal liability, stonewalling their reports and resisting calls for reform.españolPortuguês
Money promises autonomous abundance. But we need someplace where we cannot hide.
Angry but not shocked at racist violence, the victims' families at funerals this week have a prayer: Let these deaths not be in vain.
