A Novel Concept

By Michael Malone “The Sterns are Listening” is an offbeat tale of punk rock and what happens years after you age out of that scene. Benjamin and his wife Dita Stern are longtime New Yorkers, living in an Upper East Side

By Michael Malone It being that time of year and all, “Wishin’ and Hopin’” is a Christmas novel from Wally Lamb. It’s not a Christmas book the way “A Christmas Story” is a Christmas book. It is more like a Christmas book the way “Die

By Michael Malone “The Five Wounds,” by Kirstin Valdez Quade, is a highly entertaining novel. The book is brimming with riveting characters who find themselves in exceedingly difficult situations, typically after putting themselves in exceedingly difficult situations. Those characters will

By Michael Malone Zadie Smith is having a pretty good November. She had an essay in The New Yorker, in which she shared the harrowing yet humorous account of her falling out of a bedroom window in London as a teen

By Michael Malone “Small Mercies,” the latest novel from Dennis Lehane, is a look at the Southie neighborhood of Boston in the summer of 1974. Boston’s infamous busing struggle, which would see students bused from Black neighborhoods to white schools,

By Michael Malone “All the Light We Cannot See,” from Anthony Doerr, is a big, bold, terrific novel about a blind French girl and a sensitive German boy and how their lives come together as World War II spreads across

I was sad to see an obituary for author Vincent Patrick in the New York Times last month. Years ago, before I moved to Westchester, Patrick and I lived in the same building in Manhattan. I can’t say we were pals, but

By Michael Malone “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” is about a neighborhood, a not-all-that-desirable district in Pennsylvania where Jewish immigrants and African Americans lived side by side, with a few Italians and other European immigrants mixed in. The neighborhood is

By Michael Malone A Novel Concept looks at a non-fiction book this week, but one about a colossal figure in American fiction. “Lucky Mud & Other Foma” bears the subtitle “A Field Guide to Kurt Vonnegut’s Environmentalism and Planetary Citizenship,” and looks

Edinburgh has Trainspotting, a bleak tale of young men fighting to get through each day in the city’s dour underside. Glasgow, an hour or so to the west, has Shuggie Bain. Shuggie Bain didn’t so much get published as it exploded. Coming out