Colette Bancroft

Opening a book by Amor Towles is like walking into your favorite fine restaurant — you know everything is going to be delicious.So the title of his new collection, “Table for Two: Fictions,” and the jacket’s elegant black-and-white image of a well-dressed couple sipping after-dinner drinks sets just the right mood. And the six short stories and one novella within are seven courses of satisfaction.This book shares some elements with Towles’ hugely popular 2016 bestseller, “A Gentleman in Moscow”…

It’s rare for novelists to retire. If writers of fiction become successful, it seems, they keep on writing until death puts the period to them. Official retirement is so unusual that when Philip Roth announced in 2012 (six years before his death) that he’d chosen to stop writing, it caused a sensation.Alma Cruz, the protagonist of “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” the new novel by Julia Alvarez, makes the same choice. Writing under the pen name Scheherazade, Alma has had an accomplished publishi…

In 2018, Tommy Orange’s acclaimed debut novel, “ There There ,” offered a stunning portrait of what he called “urban Indians,” a contemporary Cheyenne family living in Oakland, California. Emotionally powerful and lyrically written, it focused on the story of a teenager named Orvil Red Feather.Orange, whose heritage is Cheyenne, Arapaho and white, draws deeply on his own experience for his fiction. His new novel, “Wandering Stars,” is both a prequel and a sequel to the events of “There There,” s…

The man called Jim has always been the hero of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Mark Twain might have titled the book, often considered to be the Great American Novel, after the white boy who is one of its two protagonists. But Jim, an enslaved Black man who goes on the run down the Mississippi River with Huck in the antebellum South, is its deepest and most complex character, and its moral center in a cruelly violent world.Now, 140 years after Twain’s book was published, Percival Everett h…

In New York City, real estate can be a blood sport.Rosie Lowan learns that all too well in “The New Couple in 5B,” the latest psychological thriller from bestselling author (and Tampa Bay area resident) Lisa Unger.Rosie, the book’s narrator, is a sunny young woman, but Unger wastes no time creating a sense of creeping dread around her. As the novel opens, Rosie is having a very bad day.She and her dazzlingly charming husband, Chad, have been caring for his dying Uncle Ivan, a retired war photogr…

What an extraordinary life John Lewis lived. And how much he gave to us all.Anyone with a sense of American history knows the highlights. Lewis was born in 1940 as one of 10 children of Alabama sharecroppers and rose to become an icon of the Civil Rights Movement and a lion of the U.S. Congress, exemplifying the phrase that became his motto: “good trouble.”With “John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community,” Raymond Arsenault gives us not only the first full biography of the man — Lewis died i…

What does a veteran do when he devotes his life to fighting for his country, only to see it turning into a place he doesn’t recognize?In his stunning 2009 book, “The Good Soldiers,” journalist David Finkel wrote about being embedded with an infantry division during the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, focusing on the experiences of individual soldiers. He followed it in 2013 with “ Thank You for Your Service ,” a searing account of how some of those soldiers struggled after they returned home. The latt…

Vicki Sokolik had years of experience as a volunteer, much of it working to help homeless families.Then her teenage son brought home a problem she hadn’t seen before, and Sokolik found her calling.Sokolik, who lives in Tampa, tells the story in her clear-eyed and moving new book, “If You See Them: Young, Unhoused, and Alone in America.” It will be published next week, and Sokolik will be talking about it at several local events.The book combines personal memoir with the compelling story of how S…

Arden Ward is an ace at handling other people’s crises.It’s her job, and it pays very well. She’s a top employee at the Vision Group, a Boston crisis management firm — kind of the opposite of a typical PR company, which helps celebrities and powerful people get the word out about their accomplishments.Arden’s firm helps them when bad things happen: Erase what can be erased, minimize the publicity, renovate their image.When a wealthy client hits on Arden, she brushes him off; it’s just one of the…

James Lee Burke is acclaimed as a crime fiction writer, and one of the best at that. Over the more than five decades that he has been publishing books, he has taken a wider view of crime — his characters seek not just to solve a murder or stop a thief, but to understand the nature of evil, often at their own peril.That quest animates his new book, “Harbor Lights,” a collection of seven short stories and a novella. His 40th novel, “Flags on the Bayou,” which was just named a finalist for the 2023…