One parent who makes a short appearance in Louise Fitzhugh’s 1974 young adult novel Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change is a poverty-stricken ex-prize fighter named Mad Dog Madden. He’s [...]

Ken Follett’s 1978 novel Eye of the Needle works so well — nearly half a century later, it remains a gripping read — that it may well be the perfect [...]

Shroud for a Nightingale, published in 1971, was the fourth crime novel by P.D. James, the fourth of a series centered on Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh that would eventually [...]

This is where I came in. In 2000, The Fifth Elephant was Terry Pratchett’s 24th Discworld novel, and his American publisher was pushing the book and the Discworld series as [...]

It’s ironic that Spoon River Anthology — perhaps the most famous book about an American small town and one that has helped shape the way Americans think about small towns [...]

British cultural historian Rosemary Hill begins her 2008 book Stonehenge about the famed prehistoric place with these words: What we now call Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire at [...]

Patrolman Bert Kling is 24 and newly back from serving in Korea where he’d seen terrorized women, and starving women, and begging women.  But, writes Ed McBain in The Mugger, [...]

Paddy Clarke is a nine-year-old, lower middle-class, small-town Irish boy who turns ten somewhere during the course of Roddy Doyle’s hilarious, revelatory and achingly tender 1993 novel Paddy Clarke Ha [...]

I’m not sure what to say.  Larry McMurtry was a highly praised, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and Leaving Cheyenne, his second book, has been described by some fans as his best. [...]

The red-haired cop looks at Ricky Rudolph and, with an angry edge to his voice, asks, “You think Jesus Christ is a joke?”  Well, no, Ricky doesn’t, but the cop [...]