This Week's Acquisitions
- Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (Ecco, 2012). Retelling of the legend of Achilles and Patroclus from Patroclus' POV. (Lift Bridge)
- Lynn Shepherd, The Solitary House (Delacorte, 2012). Well, Bleak House already was a detective novel of a sort. Here, Tulkinghorn asks private investigator Charles Maddox, a disgraced police detective, to do a little job for him. (Amazon)
- Colm Toibin, The Empty Family: Stories (Scribner, 2011). Short stories set everywhere from Ireland to Spain, and from the early twentieth century to the present. (Barnes & Noble)
- Susan Barrett, Fixing Shadows (Review, 2005). In Victorian England, a commoner's living baby is substituted for an aristocrat's dead one, with the usual results. (Amazon [secondhand])
- Fiona Shaw, The Sweetest Thing (Virago, 2004). Neo-Victorian novel about a young working-class woman and her relationship with a Quaker who accumulates photographs of women like her (shades of Arthur Munby). (Amazon [secondhand])
- Helen Dunmore, The Greatcoat (Hammer, 2012). Ghost story involving a woman, an old coat, and a mysterious man who suddenly enters her life. (Amazon [secondhand])
- C. P. Golightly, Look at Home, or Short and Easy Method with the Roman Catholics (J. H. Parker, 1837). First polemical pamphlet by this ardent anti-Catholic campaigner. (eBay)