A Fugitive Green by Diana Gabaldon

read by Jeff Woodman

This is a novella from the Seven Stones to Stand collection—these are stories set in the Outlander universe, about characters other than Jamie, Claire, and their immediate family. It recounts the story of how Minnie met Lord John Grey’s brother Hal during a distinctly low period in his life, and it’s charming as all hell.

Minnie is a 17-year-old whose father runs a rare book business—and also trades in gossip, secrets, and documents whose originators and/or proper owners would prefer remain private. Minnie, like most people in that day and age, has been brought up in the family business. And she may have just a little too much knack for the illicit information trade for her own good.

As the story begins, Minnie’s father is sending her off to London, putatively to both deliver and receive some books and at the same time to be introduced to polite society with the idea of catching a wealthy English husband. In reality, he has a handful of less legal commissions for her—and she has some personal business of her own.

Accompanied at various times by two stalwart Irish bodyguards and by the redoubtable matchmaker, Lady Buford, Minnie sets out to accomplish her father’s errands, evade her new suitors, and find and meet her biological mother. Along the way she meets Hal.

Hal’s wife has just died a month ago, giving birth to a probable bastard. In addition to dealing with that, he’s trying to restart the regiment that was disbanded when his father became a convicted traitor, and to do that, he’s got to secure royal patronage. In order to secure royal patronage, he’s got to get rid of the stain on his reputation that was caused when he dueled with and killed his dead wife’s poet lover. And he’s got plenty of evidence—a cache of letters between his late wife and her paramour. But he refuses to let the deeply painful letters be made public, or seen by anyone at all.

Into this muddle sails Minnie, at a critical point. She has the tools to cut this Gordian knot—but will she find a way to do it without unacceptable consequences? How will this mess get set to rights, and who will pay for it?

Ms. Gabaldon’s crystal-clear pose and deft, balanced hand with character, setting, *and* plot will hook you and keep you hooked. (Not to mention a cameo from a certain Jamie Fraser, whose masculine charms get him out of hot water without him even knowing about it.) A must-read for fans of the Outlander books.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

read by the author

The first time I read Tales of the City, I had not yet fallen out of love with San Francisco. It was sometime around 1992 and I fell deeply in love with Mouse all the other Barbary Lane denizens. I proceeded directly to the library to get my mitts on every other book in the series so I could devour them all.

I was far too young, when my family moved to San Francisco in the mid ‘70s, to be really aware of what San Francisco meant to the adults, what it was like to live there—especially coming from somewhere else. Nonetheless, as I came of age during that decade and the next, I absorbed the local customs and predilections without realizing it was happening, as one does. And picking up a book, in my early 20s, that spoke lovingly of the sorts of people I’d grown up around, when they were roughly the age I was when I finally got to reading it… it was a rediscovery of what still felt like my home town, and a discovery of some of the influences that had shaped me.

I continued to read these books as they came out, up to The Days of Anna Madrigal. I never stopped enjoying them; it was always good to catch up on the latest gossip about old friends. But it had been a few years, and I had said goodbye to them all in my heart, when the new Netflix series came out.

This isn’t a review of that series. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a reboot that happens instead of what happened in The Days of Anna Madrigal (I think!), in an exaggerated but clearly recognizable San Francisco of today. I liked it a lot. I liked it so much, I decided it was time to go back and re-read the book that started it all, to see how it had aged.

It has aged beautifully—mainly, I think, because it was so deliberately and perfectly a work of its time that it’s a perfect little time capsule. San Francisco in a music box. It makes no attempt to be universal or timeless; it’s a unique product of a unique place and time.

To begin with, there’s Barbary Lane itself, a sprawling wooden apartment building on a tiny side street that’s also a staircase in the Castro district. This sort of place still exists, of course, but nobody in the socioeconomic neighborhood of the folks in the book could afford to live there now. Except the landlady, of course. But it’s a type of building and street and hillside very familiar to anyone who has spent much time in San Francisco.

Then there are the characters—stock characters of their time. Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, the adorable, wistful twink who just wants to find love. Mary Ann Singleton, a blonde Midwestern career gal naively navigating Oz. Mona Ramsey, both earthy and spacey, both questioning and believing everything. Anna Madrigal, the wise, quirky landlady who grows her own pot and dispenses it, along with sometimes-cryptic advice. It goes on and on.

The one thing that I think would stand out as an off note to a modern reader who wasn’t around in the late 20th century is the telegraphic-yet-pulpy style of writing. The book was originally published in serial form in the San Francisco Chronicle, so each chapter is a little segment written to be read on its own and to compel the reader to comb through the sections of next week’s Sunday paper to find the next installment. If that whole concept seems strange to you, the pacing and semi-shorthand will feel a bit odd to begin with. But I think you’ll acclimate.

Verdict: if you were there at the time, you’ll definitely want to read this. If you weren’t, but are fond of (or curious about) San Francisco in the 70s, absolutely give it a read. If you’re curious about the roots of modern LGBTQ+ culture, this is a must-read. And if you just like a good soap opera, give it a try!

Eternal Life by Dara Horn

read by Elisabeth Rodgers

Rachel Azaria can’t die. Two thousand years ago, she and Elazar sacrificed their own deaths so that their son might survive a terrible illness—and for two thousand years, Rachel has lived life after life and raised family after family, loving them all, changing very little.

She moves from place to place as her apparent immortality became a danger to her loved ones because of the beliefs of the society around them, or as she is killed in a fire and finds herself renewed, a physically young woman again, somewhere in the world far from where she has “died.” The first time this happened was when she was burned to death at the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, and it’s happened enough times since for her to have lost any fear of it.

What she does fear is that her life will never end. After this many centuries and this many lives, living has lost its meaning. It has also, in this age of social media and biometrics, become much harder to properly disappear and start a new life. And Elazar—who sacrificed his death alongside her, who has followed her and who has become a mysterious presence in the lives of her offspring—Elazar is stalking her, convinced that they are meant to be lovers throughout eternity.

Then her favorite granddaughter starts studying longevity, and Rachel begins to hope, for the first time in many, many lifetimes, that she can die after all. Maybe she can strike a bargain with this granddaughter.

This book is beautifully written—you really get the sense of what somebody born two millennia ago would feel and think if they were still alive today. You understand both the joy and the despair of unending life, the mystery of a terrible oath resulting in a miracle so huge that there’s no knowing whether it’s a blessing or a curse. Highly recommend.

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

read by Davina Porter

It’s 1686. Nella has traveled from her home in the countryside to Amsterdam to join her new husband’s household. But when she arrives, being the wife of a wealthy merchant isn’t at all what she imagined. Somehow Nella has to learn how to be a proper wife and citizen, but she has no idea how and nobody to help her.

She rarely sees her husband, who seems kind enough in his way but takes almost no interest in her; his proud, cold sister is the one who is really in charge of the household; and one of the servants is an insolent keyhole-listener and the other is a foreigner. Nella is lonely, bored, and cooped up in the imposing house almost every day, with no company but her little bird, Peebo. Her few interactions with the burghers who should be her peers leave her perplexed at best.

Then one day her husband brings her a wedding gift: a model of their house the size of a cabinet. Nella commissions a miniaturist to create tiny residents and furniture for the house—but soon finds that the miniaturist seems to know a lot more about the goings-on in her household than she herself does. In fact, everyone she meets seems to know more about her household than she does. All these secrets lead inevitably to disaster, and then Nella really needs to find sources of strength.

This is a gorgeously claustrophobic, twisty-turny book—Diana Gabaldon meets Margaret Atwood. Highly recommend, especially if you like a beautifully-researched period piece that doesn’t succumb to stereotypes. And speaking of Diana Gabaldon, the narrator of the audiobook version is Davina Porter, who also narrated all the Outlander books, and she is nothing short of amazing.

World Without End by Ken Follett

read by John Lee

It’s two centuries after the building of Kingsbridge Cathedral, and while many things have stayed the same—for example, the balance of power between the hidebound clergy and the rapacious nobility is constantly being pushed at by both sides, pretty much always to the detriment of everyone else—change is on the way. The Hundred Years’ War has begun, and the Black Death is on the horizon. This won’t just mean the death of 60% of the population, but also the beginning of the end of the feudal system. New ideas about medicine and architecture are beginning to develop, among other things, and they’ll change the world, too.

In World Without End we see all of this through the eyes of four main characters: Caris, the daughter of a wool merchant; Merthin and Ralph, two very different sons of an impoverished knight; and Gwenda, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well landless laborer. As the book begins, they’re all children. Gwenda is being made to steal a nobleman’s purse at a crowded church service—which immediately leads to a plot twist I don’t want to spoil. In fact the entire book is essentially a big ball of easily-spoiled twisty-turny plotty-wotty stuff. In fact the plot thickens at such a pace that it’s as dense as a neutron star long before you get to the middle of the book's thousand or so pages (a.k.a. 45+  hours of audiobook).

Don’t let the size of the thing put you off, though. I’m long past the age when I was a size queen about books (ah, to be young and have time for a book-a-day habit—during the summer, at least), but I was engaged all the way through. Yes, Follett is putting characters with relatively modern mind-sets into a historical setting—but only relatively modern, and there’s a reason for it. He’s writing about a time when the world was changing pretty rapidly, after all. And he also includes plenty of characters with thoroughly contemporary points of view, including two of the four POV characters, only one of whom is a villain.

By having his main characters start off as children who don’t understand everything, Follett eases the reader into a world that isn’t fully understood. And throughout the book he explains all sorts of things we may not be familiar with, without ever making the reader feel talked down to; it just seems very natural that a given character wouldn’t understand a given situation or a technology fully, and you learn about it along with them. There are several times when some characters seem painfully and even unrealistically naive, but that's my only quibble with a really grand work of historical fiction.

For fans of the first book in this trilogy, Pillars of the Earth, this is a must-read. But you needn't have read the first book to enjoy this one thoroughly; it's written to stand alone. Strongly recommend.

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

Read by Mark Meadows

I am a sucker for time travel stories and vampire stories.

What I often love best about vampire novels and movies is the rich, specific melancholy of the very long-lived—the friends and lovers lost in the depths of centuries; the layered memories of cities as they change through their life cycle while you go on, unchanging; the sense of displacement when the culture that formed you no longer exists. What I love about time travel books is being vicariously plopped, with all of my modern sensibilities, into another time.

How to Stop Time isn’t a vampire book or a time-travel book. It’s about a bloke named Tom Hazard. He’s not a blood-sucking monster and doesn’t have access to any technology that lets him mess with the fabric of space-time. He’s actually a pretty average guy, apart from one thing—due to a rare genetic condition, he doesn’t age at the same rate as the rest of us. He’s been alive for centuries, but doesn’t look a day over 41.

As we read we learn about his childhood, and how he became aware of his condition, and what a danger it was to those around him. Tom’s mother was killed as a witch when people started to notice that he had been 13 years old for an awfully long time, for example. And of course he himself is in danger of being torn apart by mobs or vivisected for science or, at best, thrown in a loony bin, depending on the era and area he’s in. He gradually learns to lie low and never, ever fall in love.

Except he did fall in love, once, when he was a young man. His beloved is long dead as the novel opens, but the daughter they had together, who inherited his longevity, has disappeared. Tom has been searching for her for centuries, with the help of the Albatross Society, a shadowy group of people who share Tom’s condition. They’re a helpful bunch, helping their members acquire new lives and new identities every eight years so that they can live unmolested. All the Albatross Society asks in exchange is the occasional favor.

Tom isn’t actually crazy about performing these favors, but whenever he thinks about backing out of the society, he thinks about his beloved daughter and how they are helping him locate her, and he sticks around. Fingering his many memories like beads on a rosary, avoiding falling in love, and meanwhile rubbing elbows with the likes of William Shakespeare and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

This is a book that held a lot of charms for me. Tom isn’t some superguy; he’s just this bloke who happens to have this genetic condition which has been, yes, a blessing to him, but also, at times, a curse. There’s an extent to which all that elbow-rubbing with famous people starts to feel a little Forrest-Gumpish, but really, if you were writing a time travel book--okay, a book in which your protagonist travels through a lot of time—would you really be able to resist putting them in intriguing historical situations or having them meet intriguing historical personages? And the author doesn’t overdo it.

My main beef with this book is that Tom seems a trifle naive for somebody with plural centuries under his belt. But I love the way his personality develops, over time, into a modern one, and the flashbacks to previous eras are so skillfully written that I felt I’d been whisked right there.

A fun piece of speculative fiction; file under Ripping Yarns for Melancholy Temperaments.