My mom helped me cultivate a drive to preserve and help expand the voices of communities to make the world feel more connected and tender. Little did she know, the mysteries tucked within her own family history would inspire me to embark on this journey to create a cookbook to preserve our family’s recipes handed down by the last two generations.
The result, “The Postcard,” recreates in stunning detail the lives of Berest’s lost family members and weaves them into a detective story, loosely centered on the postcard. Part Holocaust drama, part family mystery, the novel led Berest to relive some of the grimmest hours of France’s recent history and to examine her own experience of being Jewish.
Book shops are where I find comfort and community at home in New York City, so it’s no surprise that I also seek them out when I’m traveling. Sure, the books themselves are the main draw, but it certainly doesn’t hurt that booksellers are often the coolest people you can find in any given neighborhood.
But more than that, the welcoming atmosphere and creative energy I’ve found in nearly every bookshop I’ve ever visited is what pulls me in like a magnet every time.
But these "secret" rivers are imprinted on London's geography. Marylebone started life as St Mary by the bourne (an old name for a watercourse, in this case the Tyburn); while Bayswater, Knightsbridge, Westbourne and Holborn are all named by waterways that ran through them. Deptford was the site of a deep ford over the Ravensbourne, while Wandsworth is named after the River Wandle. East Ham and West Ham get their names from an old word for an area between rivers (hamm) – in their case, the Lea and the Roding. And while Britain's leading newspapers have left Fleet Street, the River Fleet still runs beneath.
"London should really be one massive wetland – a salt marsh on an estuary," said Will Oliver, a development manager at Thames21, a charity helping guide 40-plus river restorations. Thanks to the organisation's efforts alongside other groups, buried rivers have returned to the light, while others are being rewilded in ways that will improve the lives and environment of millions of people, as well as provide a key boost for nature.
The precision of the writing and the carefully told story, which concentrates on its humble protagonists, not the bigger arc of history, make this a sweet and gentle novel, and an absorbing and satisfying read.
As a quiet misfit in a foreign place, Daphne hungers for human connection even as she physically deteriorates. A look inside her mind reveals the force of danger thinly veiled behind the romantic glow of youth.
Though the voice is decidedly Irish, the message of Michael Magee’s dead-on debut novel is universal. At its core, “Close to Home” is about finding a way to transcend the pain, the people and the place you’re born into.
Perhaps Miles even enjoyed himself a little too much: The stories of romance, intrigue, gambling, and heavy drinking are so many that his nearly 400-page history can feel a little repetitive at times. Yet Once Upon a Time World is much more than a book-sized gossip column. Miles’s whirlwind of characters coalesces into a narrative of booms and busts throughout the decades: the highs of the Belle Époque, the Roaring ’20s, and the 1950s—when Hollywood stars took the area’s glamor to a new level—but also the lows of both World Wars and the Great Depression.