2010 literary season. Corrigan, a tiny mining town in Australia during the sixties. One scorching summer night, two teenagers stumble on their classmate's body hanging from a eucalyptus. Her battered face suggests this wasn't suicide...

Joseph Vaughan grew up in Augusta Falls, a rural Georgia backwater. When this story kicks off in 1939, he's twelve and just lost his father. Life's rough for him and his mother. But there are loyal friends: Reilly Hawkins and the others...

A mountain village near a border. Brodeck spent his whole life there. He's the one, this minor clerk, tasked by villagers to write a report on a violent incident. One angry night, the locals murdered a stranger...

New York, 1916. Every day, men descend into the earth's depths to dig what will become the subway connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn. These workers come from everywhere: Ireland, Italy, Poland... Nathan Walker arrives from Georgia...

Thought I'd read everything about the Holocaust, but Hilsenrath managed to surprise me by taking the perpetrator's viewpoint. Max Schultz and Itzig Finkelstein were born the same day on the same street in a small German town...

Part of my "summer purge of the TBR pile" series. Dug up this collection from a somewhat forgotten English humorist. These tales feature early 20th century English gentry. Garden parties, hunting expeditions...

Remember: Tom Robbins was my big hit from the 2009 literary season with his frog and water lilies. I couldn't skip the reissue of his most famous novel in Gallmeister's Totem collection...

I'm slightly too young for Bob Dylan to be my teenage idol, but he remains an iconic and mysterious figure from those wild sixties that deeply transformed the 20th century. Warning! This isn't autobiography...

In Winter, Rick Bass chronicled moving to the Yaak Valley, a wild valley in northern Montana. Twenty years later, he picks up the pen again to defend his valley. Yaak is prey for logging companies. The forest is under attack...

After building calf muscles on Anglo-Norman staircases, I crossed France west to east to hike in the Alps, specifically in the magnificent Clarée Valley above Briançon. Must say I was blown away...