MADreads

Sometimes I'm looking for a book that works as a total escape for me and that's just what I got with Stephen Hunter's WWII thriller.

Basil's War introduces British special agent Basil St. Florian who spends his off time drinking and sleeping with film stars and his work time being sent into Nazi-occupied France on secret missions during WWII. If all that sounds a bit flashy? It is. Basil's newest assignment is to enter occupied France and gain access to a manuscript kept in the archives in a Paris that swarms with the German military.

In 1951 two British government officials, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, left on a boat sailing from Southampton to France and then disappeared. Though there were suspicions that they had defected to the Soviet Union, this wasn't confirmed until five years later when they appeard at a press conference in Moscow. In the years after this it became clear that they were not the only two British "gentlemen" to have been recruited by the KGB, there were at least 3 others and they all became known as the Cambridge Five.

I've been hearing great things about The Will of the Many for a while - which made me more reluctant to read it. I have this kind of reverse metric when it comes to buzzy books. If too many people are raving about a book, how good can it really be? That and it's a chonker of a book (639 pages!) had me on pause. I finally gave in when one more person, who likes many of the same things I do, gave it a rave. And now I'm both glad I waited and kicking myself for waiting so long.

"The kid is born with two shadows"

In spare, poetic language Marisa Crane draws you in from the first sentence and then holds your heart in their hands until the last page. They explore what it means to parent under the figurative shadows of loss and grief and the literal shadows imposed on their characters by a totalitarian government in this dystopian debut.