ArteFact

A review of Thom Satterlee's God's Liar.

Most anime offerings are shallow or crass, which makes the good ones stand out all the more. They not only provide magnificent artwork, storytelling and character development; they also give unexpected insights about the human condition, the virtues, and faith. Violet Evergarden, Taichi Ishidate’s quiet and beautifully animated adaption of the steampunk light novel series by Kana Akatsuki, does all of these.

Daniel Taylor’s three mystery novels—Death Comes for the Deconstructionist (2014), Do We Not Bleed? (2017), and Woe to the Scribes and Pharisees (2020)—are real page-turners. They deliver suspenseful plots, delight by rich allusions, and challenge through thoughtful explorations.

A Review of Tim Winton's The Shepherd's Hut.

A Review of Edwin O'Connor's The Edge of Sadness.

More often than not, the modern memoir proves to be a survivor’s field notes on the loss and reconstitution of self: a lush, gory, or strident examination of a protagonist’s memories—and an antagonist’s sins. So when we pick up a memoir, we assume we will find these two central characters... The first clue that Ron Hansen’s Hotly in Pursuit of the Real: Notes Toward a Memoir is something different to this is its borrowed title...

A Review of Ann Patchett's The Dutch House.

In Paula Huston’s novel A Land Without Sin, it is 1993 in the war-torn jungles of Central America, and Eva Kovic is looking for her lost brother.

Lucy Beckett’s novel The Time Before You Die: A Novel of the Reformation effectively conveys a queasy, uncomfortable immediacy to the whiplash-inducing movements of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and subsequent backlash against the Counter-Reformation, in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Several centuries later, Philip Trower’s A Danger to the State depicts the consequences of the Reformation in the full bloom of the Enlightenment - one of which is that religious truths increasingly serve politically expedient realities.

Morris West, The Devil’s Advocate (William Morrow & Co, 1959).