REQUIRED READING
The Girl on the Train
by Paula Hawkins (Riverhead)
“Gone Girl” and “Dragon Tattoo” fans, meet your new BFF. In Hawkins’s debut novel, highly disturbed narrator Rachel’s life has fallen apart thanks to a severe drinking problem. On her daily London train commute, she passes the same couple breakfasting on their deck everymorning and constructs a fantasy life around the duo, nicknaming them “Jess and Jason.” One morning, she sees “Jess” kiss another man. When “Jess” disappears, Rachel thinks she knows why. Too bad her drinking belies her credibility with the police, and possibly the reader.
African Canadians in Union Blue
Volunteering for the Cause in the CivilWar
by Richard M. Reid (Kent State University Press)
Slavery was already illegal in Canada during our Civil War, but thousands of black Canadians joined the Union Army, even though itwas illegal under British lawto enlist in a foreign army at war. Historian Reid’s newbook asks why these soldiers took the risk and uncovers a complex set of reasons. Some enlistees felt theywere answering Lincoln’s international call, others had professional or family reasons for Union involvement. A few weren’t Canadian at all, but Southern slaves hiding their identity fromtheir owners. A unique look at a US war fromthe other side of the border.
Uncle Janice
by Matt Burgess (Doubleday)
A novel about Queens’ police force, by a borough resident. Jackson Heights born Burgess (“Dogfight, A Love Story”) delivers the tale of “Uncle” (as undercover narcotics cops are called) Janice Itwaru, who pounds the pavements of Roosevelt Avenue disguised in old clothes and looking to collar drug dealers. With a month to go before she’s up for a promotion to detective, Itwaru is racing the clock: There’s a rumor going round that internal affairs in conducting a probe of her unit. Criminals are about to blow her cover. Meanwhile, back at home in Richmond Hill, her mother is driving her crazy. The down, dirty and funny on the toughest job in NewYork.
Harraga
by Boualem Sansal (Bloomsbury USA)
Street stalls sold posters of bin Laden and Madonna in the early aughts in Algiers. And Sansal (“An Unfinished Business”) became a novelist after hewas booted from his government post for criticizing policy. His latest novel concerns Islamic treatment ofwomen. Like his other books, it is banned in Algeria. In it, awoman pediatrician and a pregnant teen live together in a decrepit Algiers neighborhood. Together, they fight discrimination.
When Globalization Fails
The Rise and Fall of Pax Americana
by James MacDonald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
There’s a popular theory that free trade and globalization leads to world peace— that no two countries with a Mc Donalds ever went towar with each other. Exinvestment banker MacDonald (“A Free Nation Deep in Debt”) believes otherwise. Liberal thinkers in the late 19th century thought interdependency would prevent conflict, but World War I proved them wrong. Will the rise of China and the anger of Russia lead to a similar upheaval?