Like Isabel Allende, who has written about Chileans trying to survive the Pinochet dictatorship, Lucia Orth writes about ordinary Filipinos trying to survive under Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law. Orth, who lived in Philippines for five... Read More

A sense of doom overshadows this book from the very first paragraph. Pearl Swain was neither pretty nor popular as a child, yet she showed some musical gifts and was given violin lessons by a school friend’s mother. The lessons ended... Read More

The heroine of this romance, Ramona, is a thirty-six-year-old widow with two young sons, a mother and a mother-in-law who are both pillars of a local church, a sister who is the star of a local TV fitness show, and zero joie de vivre.... Read More

Novelist and poet Phillip Lopate sets these two novellas in Brooklyn, which becomes an almost magical, tragical-comical borough as readers learn how a stoic easily deceives himself and how a husband and wife keep secrets even as they... Read More