Sienna Powers

A beautiful moment in history is brought to life in Vanessa and Her Sister (Ballantine) with a correspondence between an as-yet-unknown group of young artist and writers who despair of ever amounting to anything. The title’s Vanessa is the painter Vanessa Bell, sister to theVirginia who would later become Woolf. Their friends include an as-yet-unpublished E.M Forster and Lytton Strachey. John Maynard Keynes is job hunting. Here we have a fictional reworking of what-might-have-beens. An […]

Menna van Praag’s highly anticipated second novel (after 2013’s The House at the End of Hope Street) delights with elements of fantasy, fairy tale and magical realism. Beautifully written and vibrantly shared, it’s a tough tale not to fall in love with. Cora Sparks, a scientist, lost her parents under mysterious circumstances many years ago. Since then, Cora has immersed herself in her work and in the corners of her grandmother Etta’s dress shop. What […]

Guggenheim Fellow, Ellen Feldman, wows us with her fifth novel, The Unwitting (Spiegel & Grau). Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the Cold War as it was experienced in the United States, we join young magazine writer Nell Benjamin on November 22, 1963, as she gets some distressing news. Yes: it is the day President Kennedy was shot, and that’s distressing enough. But what Nell learns impacts her on a much more personal level. Her […]

It would perhaps be an over-statement to call Nancy Thayer queen of the beach read. Even so, 16 novels into a fantastic career, one would not go far in saying that about the Nantucket-based author. Just in case you don’t believe me, have a look at the first edition cover of her latest book, Island Girls (Ballantine). As you can see: ocean, a horizon line, a beach umbrella. If ever a book were designed to […]

Anyone who has ever taken part in Nanowrimo — National Novel Writing Month — and wondered what was possible need wonder no more. If ever there was a best case scenario, Elizabeth Haynes has lived it/is living it. It looks like this: Haynes, a mother, wife and police intelligence analyst who lives in Kent, England, made her first foray into fiction writing with Nanowrimo in 2006. Fast forward not very far to her first novel. […]