Looking for a great read? Each week, our editors - along with other book lovers we know - point you to three fresh titles that are definitely worth your time.
The Street Sweeper
Perlman’s story of modern New York is a big book in every sense. Huge in its scope, it covers two of the most searingly painful aspects of 20th-century history: the Holocaust and the abuse of African- Americans’ rights. The framework of the novel is the relationship between Lamont Williams, a black ex-con trying to rebuild his life as a hospital janitor, and an old man in the same hospital, who’s dying of cancer and who wants to share his memories of Auschwitz. But we also follow the fortunes of a young Jewish historian researching the role played by a black regiment in the liberation of a Nazi death camp. Perhaps Perlman’s greatest achievement, though, is the sharply drawn New York world — from the slums of the Bronx to Columbia University, from Iranian immigrants to civil-rights lawyers. All are vividly brought to life in an often extremely moving book.
- Review by A N Wilson, Reader's Digest UK
The Might Have Been
Eventually, all of us have to grapple our might-have-beens. This is the moving story of a man whose chance for baseball stardom ended in a split-second accident, and it resonates far beyong the baseball field.
- Review by Dawn Raffel, Reader's Digest Editor at Large, Books
The Snow Child
An old Russian folk tale has it that a childless couple, living on the edge of the woods, build themselves a child out of snow, who then comes to life. In a stunning debut novel, Alaskan Eowyn Ivey reworks this story. Mabel and Jack, a couple from Pennsylvania, come to 1920s Alaska to forget the pain of losing a baby. They struggle through a long, dark winter and build their own snow child. But does she really come to life, or is Faina just a feral local girl? With Mabel still grieving for her lost child, we drift in and out of uncertainty as the whole spellbinding story unfolds.
- Review by Gill Hudson, Reader's Digest UK
