If you have ever been tempted to run away to sea, then this is the book for you. Derived from transcripts of interviews, this nonfiction book gives you the scoop on what it's like to work as a merchant seaman. Ronnie, the narrator, is the real deal: a 40-year veteran, he's sailed everywhere, including around the world twice. Thanks to Robert Jacoby, we get to listen in as Ronnie recounts some of his adventures, such as his attempt to bring a baboon on the ship, and describes the colorful characters he's met, like Shanghai Jane who coerces sailors into accepting runs they don't want, Omar Sharif who served Ronnie in the bar Sharif owned in Aqaba, and Greg Cousins who was on the Exxon Valdez during the spill.

The dangers aren't always the ones you expect. In Saigon, after unloading ammunition during the Vietnam War, Ronnie goes to a bar run by an Australian that's a “shack with a cooler in it.” To get to the head, he has to go out through the back, with the owner telling him to “‘say hello to the alligator.'” “I walk through these curtains, and I see these boards . . . It's a swamp back there. He just piled the beer cans up, and then he put boards across the top . . . You come back here drunk and just keep walking and they'll never see you again.”

As he travels around the world Ronnie encounters capitalist countries becoming communist and communist countries becoming capitalist, which gives him a healthy skepticism for what he calls “isms”. He describes being in a typhoon near the Philippines which he says is “like driving in a bad storm. You're scared, but you're driving in it. We don't have the luxury of pulling over. There's no pulling over to the Howard Johnson's and get a room or a cup of coffee and wait the storm out.”

I've never been to sea and Ronnie's idea of the perfect life isn't mine, but I sure know about wanting to be free. For me that means free to create my own life. For him, it means not settling down. Here's his take on his first trip, to Belgium and Germany: “I mean, it was total freedom. And there was no recrimination. Like an old girlfriend of mine once told me, ‘You know, you don't try hard enough.' I said, “Well, I don't feel like trying at all.'. . . . It was an opening to a career I could see I could really adjust to.”

I met Robert Jacoby at a writer's conference and was intrigued by his description of this book. As a writer, I'm most fascinated by the voice. Just taping someone talking doesn't usually yield interesting prose, but Ronnie is a real storyteller, giving just the right amount of detail about life aboard ship or a person's history.

I'm also interested in the structure of the book. It is no easy task to organise real-world events into the kind of narrative we are used to reading. Jacoby structures the story chronologically, with separate chapters for separate ships, or sometimes separate runs on the same ship. I was intrigued by how Ronnie's attitudes changed as he grew older and how they stayed the same.

For me, this was not a book to read straight through, but rather one to dip into and read a bit at a time. I found it an especially welcome relief after a long day at the office when the idea of throwing it all up and running off to sea suddenly seems like the most brilliant idea in the world.

Further adventures with Alice in the world of natural wine! I very much enjoyed her first book, The Battle for Wine and Love, and her blog The Feiring Line, even though I'm a wine neophyte. Feiring's engaging prose makes for a fun read even as she slips in technical explanations in easily digestible sips.

Feiring is a champion of natural wines, wines that are allowed to make themselves. I continue to be shocked by the number of invasive techniques and additives used in winemaking: yeast, sulfur, heat, wood chips, and silica gel, to name only a few. Most commercial winemakers are out to create a particular taste rather than letting that particular batch of grapes grown in that patch of land during that particular year express something quite individual. To me, it sounds like the difference between a fast food restaurant and that quirky bistro down the road with the excellent chef. On the other hand, winemakers have to be concerned about their business and so look for ways to avoid the instability they associate with natural wine.

In this volume Feiring has been enticed into creating a batch of wine in her own way. She is the first to say that she is not a winemaker and doesn't aspire to be. However, given the opportunity of having a half-ton of grapes on which to try out her theories, she is tempted though also terrified. Book learning is one thing; feet on the ground (or the grapes, as the case may be) are another.

While we follow the thread of Alice's wine, we also get to go off with her on adventures visiting vineyards. We learn about the techniques they use and problems they encounter and at the same time get to enjoy the evening walks through the vineyards, the charming family luncheons, and the boisterous, good-natured dinner parties that go late into the night. We get to meet the winemakers who stand outside the mainstream, colorful characters such as Nicholas Joly, “the Deepak Chopra of wine biodynamics”, who says of artificial wine, “‘This wine had no song ‘”. Feiring comments, “Joly called it song, I called it voice, but we meant the same thing. Just as writing needs a voice, a distinctive wine needs its own expression.”

She has a deep appreciation for the vignerons of Europe, winemakers who also cultivate the vineyards. Who better to understand the particular nature of a grape than the person who has nurtured it and the soil in which it is grown? This is not a model common in the U.S. where most winemakers purchase grapes grown by someone else. Feiring's quest for an American vigneron takes her on visits to a number of quirky winemakers, including the Coturri brothers who grow fruits and vegetables next to the Zinfandel and Benyamin Cantz, a former art major who creates organic kosher wine.

This thoroughly enjoyable book contains a number of helpful appendices, including a list of additives and processes for wine approved by the U.S. and a list of natural wines that Feiring cautions is a “very personal—and perhaps even eccentric—list”. Alice is a friend of mine, so perhaps I'm biased, but check out other reviews such as these in the New York Times and Bloomberg News. And try some of the wines she mentions.

Everyone was talking about the film a few months ago, but I wanted to read the book first. It starts with a chilling scene: Ree Dolly, in thin cotton dress and combat boots standing on the front steps buffetted by the wind of an approaching snowstorm, staring at deer carcasses hanging from trees across the creek. The meat belongs to relatives who may or may not share it with sixteen-year-old Ree and her two younger brothers. In any case, the children won't ask for it, but will instead make do with grits.

This is not a scene from one of Margaret Bourke-White's Depression-era photos of poverty in the rural South. This is the present-day in the Ozarks where drugs are everywhere and many children are “dead to wonder by age twelve, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean.” There may be two hundred Dollys and even more other kin within thirty miles of their valley, but Ree is on her own when it comes to protecting her family. Her mother is sunk in dementia while her father, Jessup, has gone off when the walnuts were falling, without leaving money, food, or a woodpile for winter, telling Ree to look for him when she sees him.

Woodrell's economical prose captures life in this remote valley without sentimental hand-wringing, with just the calm clarity of purpose that moves Ree through her day. He summons characters with a single sentence: “Jessup was a broken-faced, furtive man given to uttering quick pleading promises that made it easier for him to walk out the door and be gone, or come back inside and be forgiven.”

When Jessup last walked out the door, he was out on bail from his latest arrest for cooking crank. The local deputy, whose wife went to school with Ree's mother, shows up at the cabin to inform Ree that Jessup's court date is in a week. Ree isn't concerned until the deputy tells her that Jessup put the house and land up for his bond, so if he doesn't show up in court, the place will be sold out from under them.

Ree's search for her father leads her to various places, to people who might be kin but are as likely to shoot you as look at you. Help is rare, squeezed out of these rocky lives, but all the more welcome when it comes, unexpected and hard to recognise. There are slanting references to the family's distant past: a charismatic preacher and a reckoning that tore the family apart into today's mistrustful schisms, references that add what Tolkein called “shimmer” to the icy hills and creek-cut valleys.

I fell into Ree's life with the first sentence and didn't emerge until the last page. This is the great gift of fiction: it enables us to inhabit someone else's life. I might have thought Woodrell exaggerated the poverty, the careless disregard for children's welfare, if I hadn't read Jeannette Walls's extraordinary memoir, The Glass Castle.

This weekend's unseasonably early snowfall only made the book that much more appropriate. We are so protected. Whatever hardships we face—and we all face hardships—they are nothing compared to the bleak poverty portrayed in this novel. Now I'm ready to see the film.

Jackson Brodie returns! Atkinson entered the list of my favorite authors with her first book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and each new book has only confirmed my opinion of her writing. This is her fourth book featuring now-retired private investigator Jackson Brodie. The first is currently being televised by Masterpiece, starring Jason Isaacs as Brodie.

To give some structure to what he calls his “semiretired” life, Brodie is criss-crossing Britain in search of his second wife, Tessa, who has absconded with most of the fortune he unexpectedly inherited. Or perhaps he is searching for a home. He is also making a point of visiting all of the Bettys Tea Rooms. “If Britain had been run by Bettys it would never have succumbed to economic Armageddon,” he muses. I've been to the mothership in Harrogate, and I agree. He is also “bagging the ruined abbeys of Yorkshire on his journey” which brought back strong memories of my first visit to Fountains.

Too much? Tessa, fortune, Bettys, abbeys—keep up! This is how I feel reading a Kate Atkinson book: as though she is laughing and dancing ahead of me down the path turning now and then to say Keep up! In most thrillers, the ever-accelerating action creates the drive that sweeps you through to the last page. With Atkinson, it is the pace of her mind that makes me feel like I'm in a Mini barreling blind down narrow, curved Yorkshire lanes. The tumbling allusions and half-quotations pile on top of each other—keep up!—and make me pay attention. Quick references to the Spice Girls, the laconic Captain Oates, Mother Goose, Paul Simon, Poussin (and from the Poussin, at least for me, it's only a short step to Brideshead and Castle Howard): I don't get all of the references, but enough to admire the agility and scope of Atkinson's writing.

I also admire her use of just the right words. For example, when Brodie's young son falls asleep on his father's lap “The soft, sandbag weight of his boy in his arms was disturbing.” Perfect! And the book is about children, given Brodie's accidental métier of searching for lost children. The story starts with Tracy Waterhouse, moving neatly between a murder in 1975 when she was just a WPC and the present day when she's retired from the force as a detective superintendent and heads up security at a shopping mall. Also in the mall is Tilly, an aging actress suffering from the beginnings of undiagnosed dementia, and Brodie who in a fit of chivalry has acquired a dog.

The title comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson which seems to have some obvious parallels with the story. Brodie, who has recently started reading Dickinson's poetry, does have a dog now and likes to start the day early: “It was good to get a march on the day. Time was a thief and Jackson felt he gained a small triumph by stealing back some of the early hours.” The deeper parallels lie within our understanding of the poem, one of Dickinson's more ambiguous ones. I've seen a variety of interpretations claiming that it's about death or fear of love or the constellation Orion. Maybe the poem is just playful, or maybe fear and danger lurk beneath the playfulness. All very appropriate for the further adventures of Jackson Brodie.

Saidie May and her sister, Blanche Adler, collected art not for their own use but to donate to museums for the benefit of the public. Cousins of the Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, who bequeathed their amazing collection of Impressionist art to the Baltimore Museum of Art, Saidie and Blanche traveled to France frequently and befriended the struggling artists they met there. Knowing that the Cones planned to leave their collection to the BMA, the sisters concentrated on collecting more modern art that would complement and carry forward the Cone collection. In addition to the many works of art they donated, they gave generously to the BMA throughout their lifetime, Blanche volunteering with the curatorial department before serving as Vice-President of the Board of Trustees and Saidie funding an entire wing to be used for introducing children to art.

Saidie and Blanche grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Baltimore. Their father, Charles Adler had emigrated from Germany in 1856 and, with Henry Frank, built a shoe manufacturing business that enabled the family to live in a fine house in Bolton Hill and send the three youngest children, including Blanche and Saidie, to private school. They traveled back to Germany often, taking the children. Saidie's early adult life was one of marriage and domesticity but, prefiguring the changes to women's roles in the 20th century, after an amicable divorce she chose a life of art and independence. She, herself, was an artist, challenging herself to learn new techniques and try new forms right up until her death, though she recognised that her talent was not in the same league as the artists whose work she collected.

Throughout her life, she gave generously to individual artists for schooling, living expenses, art supplies, or costs related to a show. During World War II she paid for passage out of Occupied France for many Jewish artists, working with the American Rescue Committee, and acted as sponsor, providing the guarantee of support required by the U.S.

At the same time, she carried on with her life in the U.S., moving from one luxurious resort to another, painting and purchasing new works for the BMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the San Diego Art Museum. I found it a little disconcerting to read about her brilliant social life interspersed with accounts of the war and harrowing escapes from Marseilles, but of course life did go on, even during wartime. And it's a good reminder of how isolated the U.S. was from the fighting. Easy enough, even today, to go about one's life without remembering the wars our military are currently fighting.

This is an engaging book, a quick read even though it is a factual account of Saidie May's life. The extensive research indicated by proper footnotes lends authority to the work. The numerous illustrations support the text and add to the interest. Period photos and postcards evoke an earlier time.

It was a time when the rich used at least some of their wealth to benefit society, establishing libraries, museums, and charitable foundations. Today's super-rich, rivalling and outdistancing the greatest railroad fortunes of a hundred years ago, don't seem to have the same ethic. Some do, of course, such as the Meyerhoff family, Harry and Jeanette Weinberg, and Mary Catherine Bunting in Baltimore alone.

And it's not like everyone can't help. I continue to be inspired by Bea Gaddy, a former welfare recipient who used her home as a donation point for food and clothing for the poor and later as a homeless shelter. She parlayed a small lottery win—$290—into an annual Thanksgiving dinner, free to all comers, and made a point of inviting the whole city, rich and poor. Come on down, all you lonely folks in Roland Park she'd say. You're welcome, too. Since her death in 2001 her daughters have carried on her work, enabling the Bea Gaddy Family Center to continue to serve the community and carry on the Thanksgiving tradition.

Saidie May has joined my pantheon of inspirational heroes. It's true that she had the wealth to give herself a room of her own, but she devoted her life to sharing it with all of us.

Matur's poems ache with power. Her words and images barely control the deep, rumbling force that threatens to explode in blinding light. A Kurdish Alevi from Southeastern Turkey, she draws on that dark heritage of war and defeat and loss and exile to create the poems in this collection, selected from her four books published in Turkey. Perhaps related to that loss is the fact that she writes in Turkish, not the Kurdish of her childhood. In the Introduction, Maureen Freely says that Matur “talks of the way in which dead languages lurk inside living languages.”

Freely also talks of the grief followed by grief, the secrets embedded in Matur's images. These poems burn with a depth of suffering and emotion few of us know in a lifetime, a loss not only of home and family, but of history itself. The extraordinary sixteen-part poem “Winds Howl through the Mansions” tells an epic story in its few pages of clipped fragments, each so full of meaning and yet broken and obscure that I found myself reading and rereading. The mother is “a tattooed oak”, “a rootless oak/Silent, now and then weeping.” The contradiction between adjective and noun—that an oak, the most sturdy and stable of trees, should be rootless!—adds to the power inherent in the exile, the deaths that have occurred and the deaths that are to come. Matur also adds the precise detail that carries emotional weight: when the children are taken away “Our necks ached with looking round/Our eyes narrowed at every bend.” I thought of Hansel and Gretel with their futile breadcrumbs.

These poems have the power of stone, a stone that has been cut and cut again until it presents a puzzle that only the reader can complete. Fragmented and ambiguous, they leave a great space for us to fill, such as this complete section from “The Island, Myself and the Laurel”:

V

Shadow of a great forest, the voices of gods,

no one left here from the sea,

Desire pierces their eyes like a knife

and never leaves.

The multiple meanings of “left” echo in these lines. Some of her poems are quite short, but like haiku, they contain a world of meaning. One of my favorites is this one:

Loneliness

Stones too need loneliness.

And olive trees

and the inside of houses where dark shadows lurk.

She manages to say so much with so few words. The idea of needing loneliness is odd enough, but that these particular things should need it, and that the house should need to be qualified with dark shadows—the juxtaposition so shakes me that I find myself imagining an entire existence previously unknown to me.

The title alone would have persuaded me to buy the book. I stood in the LRB Bookstore in London pondering the idea of a patient god, the possibilities multiplying until my head spun. I turned to the poem from which the title is taken, seeking enlightenment, and found more images, such as: “And rain the river of homelessness/reminds us of god and childhood.” The metaphor alone is startling enough, but the meaning she draws from it knocks me even further off-balance. Yet the poem in its austerity and proliferation of images does come together. Enlightenment, indeed.

These are poems I will come back to again and again.

Now that Philippa has turned eighteen, she can request that her adoption file be opened so that she can learn about her birth parents. A supremely self-confident young woman, she's applied to the Registrar General by herself, without telling her adoptive parents. Maurice Palfrey is rather famous as a writer and teacher of sociology and blessed with wealth inherited from his first wife, daughter of an earl. His second wife, formerly his secretary, is a timid woman who is only truly happy in her kitchen.

What Philippa has been told is that she the daughter of a servant from the earl's estate in Wiltshire, a parlor maid who got in trouble. Philippa even remembers being at the estate as a child, in a rose garden, and an older man coming towards her in the mellow light. From that memory she has constructed a story that her father is actually the old earl. Finally she is on the verge of finding out the truth.

I'm on a bit of a crime spree, I guess. It seems odd, if not perverse, that I should find mysteries so relaxing. It is not for the thrill of the chase, nor for the gladiator-like showdown of the detective with the criminal(s). I don't enjoy gruesome details of the horrible things people can do to each other and find lengthy descriptions of the victim's torture almost pornographic. Anyway, I don't need fiction for that, unfortunately.

With that said, I will eagerly read the most gruesome murder mysteries if the writing is good. And that's one clue as to why I like mysteries: the writing is often just so darn good. And I know pretty much what to expect from the authors I read. That alone makes reading them relaxing. I know the formulas by now for the different genres of mystery, although if the writing is good enough I only note the formulaic structure in the remotest corner of my mind. I mostly try new authors based on recommendations from others, though sometimes I'll pick something up just because it looks interesting.

And there are some writers, like P.D. James, whose every book is simply excellent. Often, as in this book, the actual crime is almost incidental to the story. One of the fascinating aspects of this book is its exploration of the long-term consequences of a crime. Other mysteries end when the crime is solved and the perpetrator arrested. Here Philippa's path gives us a taste of what happens afterwards, to the killers as well as to their family and that of the victim.

This book is about the stories we tell ourselves, not just about our personal history but about the world around us. I cannot think of a theme more pertinent to our time. Often, reading or listening to political commentators or friends with views different from mine, I wonder where they've gotten the stories they tell to explain why things are the way they are and what we should therefore do about them. Perhaps someone has given them incorrect information. Perhaps they are letting fear or desire for political power override logic. Perhaps I'm the one whose stories are mistaken. Whatever it is, the consequences for our country have been dreadful.

A small newspaper article puts Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg back on the trail of a serial killer he's been tracking for thirty years. The killer's M.O. is unmistakeable: a knock on the head and three puncture wounds in a row, equally spaced and equally deep. No one by Adamsberg even accepts that the murders are related since the killer always provides a fall guy: someone too drunk to remember his actions and conveniently holding the ostensible murder weapon. One of those fall guys was Adamsberg's brother, so the commissaire has a personal stake in identifying the real killer. He even knows who it is: the draconian judge who terrorized their childhood. Given the judge's power and reputation, no one took Adamsberg's accusations seriously. And now the judge has been dead for sixteen years.

Set in Paris and Quebec, where Adamsberg and several of his colleagues are sent to learn DNA profiling from the RCMP, this book is an engaging mix of complex storylines and eccentric characters. Plus, did I mention Paris and Quebec? The pacing suits me perfectly, as well: not a roller coaster ride, but action interspersed with some time for reflection. Add in some bits of esoteric knowledge and the remnants of a love affair gone wrong, and you have the perfect read for these autumn nights when the dark closes in early.

One thing that I look for in police procedurals, especially because it is so lacking in literary fiction, is a sense of office politics. I find work relationships quite fascinating, the permutations of power, the shifting alliances. Vargas delivers in spades. The relationship between the commissaire—the equivalent of a British Chief Superintendent, as the end note explains—and his co-workers contains the kind of nuances recognisable to the office-workers among us.

Brezillon, his superior, is deftly identified by a particular mannerism as someone who has risen from lower-class roots and is not ashamed of them, even as he enjoys the perks of wealth and position. Adamsberg's deputy, Danglard, also presents a challenge. Adamsberg does not know how far to trust him. The man seems loyal, but also does not bother to hide his disapproval of the commissaire. Adamsberg cannot be certain of either man's response when he himself is accused of murder.

This is the fifth book in Vargas's series. You can bet I will be looking for the others.

What an interesting film! Almereyda has set Shakespeare's play in a modern urban landscape, such as New York City, where all the surfaces are smooth and slick. Young Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) is home from school and trying to come to terms with the changes in his family. Hamlet's father (Sam Shepherd) is dead and Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan) has not only taken over his brother's role as king and CEO of Denmark Corporation but has married Gertrude (Diane Venora) his brother's wife. Hamlet's bewilderment turns to anger after a visit from the ghost of his father and, absorbed by his own thoughts, he ignores his girlfriend Ophelia (Julia Stiles) whose father Polonius (a restrained Bill Murray) and brother Laertes (Liev Schreiber) warn her to stay away from him.

It's surprising that I never tire of this play. As an usher at Center Stage in my teens, I saw it so many times that I had the entire play memorised. Since then I've seen many productions. I remember sitting in the theatre as Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film started and thinking that I couldn't bear to sit through the whole thing again; I just knew it too well. I gathered my things and prepared to leave. Then the first scene started and I was hooked all over again.

Almereyda has streamlined the play but not updated the language, and I'm surprised by how well the familiar words work coming from men in business suits or young people in hoodies and baggy jeans. He's added some great visual tropes, such as presenting some of Hamlet's soliloquys as part of his video diary and having the ghost show up on a security camera.

Knowing the play as well as I do, I cannot judge if it is cut so much as to be confusing. The cuts go deep, but the well-chosen visuals, such as Hamlet with his bank of video screens, Ophelia jumping into the pool, and Polonius tying Ophelia's shoelaces, add to and clarify the story. I was a little disappointed that such a critical scene as the one with the gravedigger was cut and that Fortinbras is barely mentioned. Horatio preparing to tell Hamlet's story is the capstone of the play for me: “And let me speak to the yet unknowing world/How these things came about”.

But if this production makes anyone new to the play fall in love with the language and pursue it further, then the film is a success. I'll be satisfied if someone just recognises that the play is the source of so many sayings in common use today. Recently, Becky, a 20-year-old Londoner, posted on her tumblr blog a page from her moleskin notebook that she had filled with “Things We Say Today Which We Owe to Shakespeare”. It went viral and in only one week has gotten over 28,000 notes.

These words just don't go away. How shocking is it that a play written 410 years ago is still so relevant, so vital today! How resilient it is: cut, adapted, changed, its magic is undiminished.

This is my take-away from the film: the stories we tell matter. Our words, our stories will last far beyond our ephemeral lives.

I'm reminded of something Loren Eisely said in his memoir. Thinking about a book that changed his life, he wants to tell the long-dead author how much the man's book has meant to him. He says, “. . . all we are quickly vanishes. But still not quite. That is the wonder of words. They drift on and on beyond imagining.”

The death of Gordon “Go-Go” Halloran brings together four people who had been inseparable for a few years in the late 1970s but have since lost touch. The two girls, Gwen and Mickey, became friends with the three Halloran boys—“Crass Tim, Serious Sean, Wild Go-Go” —after barging into their kickball game. The five of them spent long summer days exploring the wild and overgrown woods nearby before stumbling into a mystery that would challenge and change them forever.

The story also includes their parents who interested me even more than the children. I usually describe the Baltimore of the past as being a combination of the very rich who owned the mills, the blue-collar workers who toiled in them, and a small middle-class who served both. Much has changed since then, of course, including the closure of nearly all of the mills, converted into health clubs and artist studios. However, to me, the three sets of parents reflect these levels. Gwen's parents, Clem and Tally, are quite wealthy while the Hallorans struggle to maintain a household that is just a bit beyond what they can manage. An accountant, Tim moves from job to job while Doris, a housewife, is overwhelmed with trying to keep up with three boys. Mickey's mother, Rita, works as a waitress, and her “not-quite-stepfather” Rick manages a service station. I confess Rita is my favorite character, maybe because I recognise myself in her. I too think life is a hoot and regret nothing. Well, almost nothing.

The book alternates between the past and the present and between the point of view of the children and their parents. I am not usually a fan of stories told from so many (ten) points of view, but Lippman handles the transitions deftly, and I am never confused about where or when we are in the story. How she manages that is something I'm still trying to figure out. In one part the chapters in the past are labeled with the season and year, but mostly it is the voice that identifies whether it is the child or the adult speaking and the details, such as a reference to Gwen's daughter, that identify the time period. The only bit I found confusing was the use of the first person plural (we) in some sections about the children. Since each child was referenced by name, I wondered if there was a sixth person narrating those sections (there isn't). I loved Joshua Ferris's use of first person plural, but in that case there were many unnamed characters in the group, any one of whom could have been the narrator.

However, this is a minor quibble with a book that I thoroughly enjoyed. Of course I loved the local references: crabs at Connolley's, sauerkraut for Thanksgiving dinner, the jingle from the Schaefer beer commercial. And there are a few references to delight long-time Lippman readers. I've also spent time in Dickeyville, where the story is set, a most peculiar neighborhood even in a city known for its colorful neighborhoods. Reminiscent of a Cotswold village, Dickeyville is a little pocket of homes and other buildings that originated as a rural industrial village in the 19th century. Unknown to most city residents, it is a hidden place, set apart from nearby suburbs and shopping malls. Adding to its fairy-tale character, Dickeyville backs up to Leakin Park, a wild and tangled place known during Baltimore's drug wars as a dumping ground for bodies.

Wildness seems to me the core of the book. The quality of memories, individual and shared, and the use to which we put them are always concerns of Lippman's, but here there is also the idea of venturing out of the everyday world into woods where, as in a fairy tale, anything can happen. The children are unsupervised, as we all were back then, only required to be home for dinner. Our parents had large brass handbells they rang to call us home. These children are supposed to stay within calling distance of home, but find a way around that in order to plunge deeply into the woods, tearing their clothes on briars and splashing in the streams—forbidden because of pollution. I miss the freedom we had as children, to wander in nearby woods and push the rules to venture into territory our parents never dreamed of. I steeled myself to give my own children the same freedom to roam the park and woods without my supervision. They survived, of course, and I hope have good memories of catching salamanders and hauling rusty treasures out of Stony Run.

This book is more ambiguous morally than Lippman's other novels. I mean that as a compliment. Yes, children do things that they know or don't quite know are wrong, things that as an adult you hate to remember and can barely believe that you could have done. You could argue that there is no crime here, since these people do what they think is right. At least one reviewer thought that there was not enough “urgency” given to the mystery at the core of the book. I say that not every book is a thriller, nor would we want that. I liked the pacing: measured, thoughtful. For me the real mystery is what goes on in other people's heads. In the first part of the book Lippman explores how incurious children are about other people. Then she looks at the parents and their assumptions and quick assessments of each other. It is so hard for people (me included) to step out of our own heads. Our social mores don't lend themselves to those kinds of conversation, so spending extended time seeing the world through someone else's eyes is one of the joys of reading and writing for me.

As always, Lippman gives us young characters who ring true. It is tremendously hard to write about children without succumbing to sentimentality or making them annoyingly precocious. Yet Lippman succeeds in presenting the five children so realistically that I almost recognise them as kids I once knew. Even better, she holds them up against their adult selves, the continuum between child and adult perfectly believable. I find that path from the child to the adult fascinating. It's why I like reading memoirs and biographies. Yesterday I held a six-week-old baby and had the odd experience of a vision—just a flash—of the child as a young adult, what he would look like, what kind of person he would be. I hope I'm around to find out.

I thought the section on the parents the best part of the book, perhaps because I am at that time of life where I am assessing the choices made against Whittier's “dreams of youth”. In London this summer I saw Nick Gill's mirror teeth at Finborough Theatre, a funny and disturbing satire of a middle-class English family. The characters kept saying, even as things fell apart around them, “It's a good life.” It gave me a shock to see the same line here. Yet, Lippman is after the same kind of commentary, I think, if not quite so broad. What is a good life? What is a good marriage? What compromises do we make as adults with the dreams we had as children?