Roberta Silman

Book Review: “His Only Son” — A Delightful Discovery from Turn-of-the-Century Spain

A splendid, absorbing read in which you feel as if you’ve been dropped onto the set of a Mozart opera.

Frances Wilson’s biography of Thomas De Quincey is superb, written with enormous empathy and insight.

This is a book about “survivor’s guilt,” and also about the terrible loneliness that comes of losing so many whom you love.

If any of you are harboring a budding young musician, investigate the possibility of he or she attending BUTI.

Kent Haruf’s novels remind us that even in the hardest lives, there is joy, often delicate and evanescent, but joy, nevertheless.

This canny writer is concerned with the kind of complicated family relationships that engaged his Jewish literary forebears.

You may have read similar earlier works, but Dominic Smith’s novel is in a class of its own.

There are resemblances to Virginia Woolf in Helen Dunmore’s awareness that much of family life lies in what is not said as much as in what is said.

Perhaps in the future Michelle Hoover will let her very real talent take her into the unknown, where narrative and myth merge.

Iris Murdoch proves a wonderful companion: funny, honest, insightful, and courageous.