By Marjorie Preston
This week, we have two high-stakes romantic thrillers, a frothy entry in the women’s-fiction category, a delightful backstage memoir by the great Judi Dench, and a fascinating history of the most famous men of jazz.
“Husbands & Lovers”
By Beatriz Williams
Ballantine Books
Two women from different eras and continents are haunted by past lives, loves and secrets.
Hungarian Hannah Ainsworth survived untold horrors in World War II, then found safe haven in her marriage to a British diplomat in Cairo. But Egypt is on the brink of revolution, and when a medical crisis throws Hannah into the arms of another man, she finds a love and passion that is more important than security.
Decades later, in Mystic, Connecticut, single mom Mallory Dunne is desperately seeking a kidney donor to save her teenage son. To do so, she must disclose details of her history she’d rather forget, including her mother’s adoption from a notorious Irish orphanage, and her own long-ago romance with noted musician Monk Adams.
“Husbands & Lovers” is part historical fiction, part romance, linking two women across time with a mysterious amulet. Prepare to get lost in this captivating novel.
“It Had to Be You”
By Eliza Jane Brazier
Berkley
They meet by chance on a train from Florence to Paris. Jonathan is handsome, brooding, and—unbeknownst to his fellow travelers—nursing a grave gunshot wound. Eva is smart, cynical, sexy—Jonathan’s psychic twin.
Despite his injury, the two click, and have a steamy assignation, right there in the sleeper car. Then Jonathan vanishes, and Eva discovers that he’s left behind a suitcase, filled with deadly weapons.
It’s no spoiler to disclose that our antihero and heroine are contract killers, each hired to rub out the other (and not in a good way).
In this darkly funny thriller, the assassins must choose between love and career, and determine who is the real enemy.
“Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent”
By Judi Dench
St. Martin’s Press
Imagine spending a long, carefree afternoon with Dame Judi Dench, as she spin tales of her life in the theatre. That’s the long and short of this retrospective, and it’s a joy.
In free-ranging conversations with actor-director Brendan O’Hea, Dench runs down every Shakespearean role she has ever played, from Lady Macbeth to Titania to Ophelia, and each one of the three sisters in “King Lear.”
The book is packed with backstage anecdotes about Dench’s stage career, her vagabond life, her successes and failures, and the lessons she’s learned about acting and storytelling. It also includes intimate glimpses of the greats she’s performed with—among them, Ian McKellen, Trevor Nunn, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Kenneth Branagh.
This is no dry treatise on the Bard, but alive and vital as can be, and great fun to read. It’s also a master class on acting, especially acting in Shakespeare.
“The Jazzmen”
By Larry Tye
Publisher
This sweeping history tells how Duke Ellington, Louie Armstrong and Count Basie transcended racial and cultural barriers to become the founding fathers of jazz, and three of the most popular entertainers in the world.
Ellington was the grandson of slaves. Satchmo rose from the slums of New Orleans to become a crossover musical sensation. Basie—a native of Red Bank, New Jersey—was the son of a washerwoman, whose father aspired to run a lawnmowing business.
Culled from more than 250 interviews, “The Jazzmen” is a warts-and-all, trials-and-triumphs account of these fascinating, contradictory artists, who helped create and popularize a singularly American art form.
“The Summer Book Club “
By Susan Mallery
Canary Street Press
For a group of book-club members in California, finding romance is pure fiction.
Each of the women is going it alone in life: Laurel, whose hot temper drove off the man she loved; Paris, whose husband abandoned his family to start a business in Alaska; and Cassie, whose personal weakness is rescuing jerky men who turn around and dump her.
Over the course of the summer, they agree to revisit the great romance novels of the 1980s. And just like that—magically? serendipitously?—each one encounters an eligible man who is not only not-a-jerk (yay!), but handsome, available, and caring (jackpot!).
“The Summer Book Club” is a lighter-than-air fairytale—fun, engaging, and just right for your own summer reading list.
