(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
 

Ann Skea reviews...
 

She Rises
by Kate Worsley

In 1740, 15-year-old Luke is drinking in a Harwich tavern when he is press-ganged into His Majesty's Navy. His induction into life on board the warship Essex is brutal and overwhelming, and Worsley captures his experiences vividly. The smell of the bilges and of the men, the constant noise and movement, the hard, unfamiliar routines, the roughness, the fights and the course language, the dangers and the brutal punishments—Luke becomes familiar with them all.
 

And the Mountains Echoed
by Khaled Hosseini

Whilst never forgetting the horrors of war and the choices forced on families by disaster and poverty, Hosseini concentrates on the way in which life goes on, regardless of change. This is story-telling at its best as his characters reveal themselves through their varied tales.
 

Gilbert Wesley Purdy reviews...
 

Letters to Borges
by Stephen Kuusisto

The fact of his blindness is all throughout the poems of Letters to Borges. Not just in the obvious ways, the ways that might be expected, but in surprising ways. The better of Kuusisto's poems tend to resemble Chagall paintings. In a cemetery, in Milan, there are "tombs carved like sailing ships," in wartime "[s]choolteachers who resemble candles."