A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne. This accomplished Irish novelist first gained notoriety in 2006 with the publication of his The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. His last work, The Heart's Invisible Furies, was released in paperback this past spring, and has been a popular title in independent bookstores. Now Boyne delivers a fascinating portrait of a relentlessly immoral man - Maurice Swift - whose obsessive drive to be a successful writer destroys others around him. The problem is that Maurice has no talent, so he needs to find and steal his stories from others. Working as a waiter in a West Berlin hotel in 1988, Swift engineers his first opportunity: a chance encounter with celebrated novelist Erich Ackermann. He quickly ingratiates himself with the powerful but lonely older man, teasing out of Erich a terrible, long-held secret about his activities during the war. It's perfect material for Maurice's first novel - never mind that its publication will ruin Ackermann's life. Thus begins a quest for literary fame by a cunning, manipulative protagonist who invites comparisons to Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley.

 

In a starred review of the book, Publishers Weekly said,"Boyne's fast-paced, white-knuckle plot, accompanied by delightfully sardonic commentary on the ego, insecurities, and pitfalls of those involved in the literary world, makes for a truly engrossing experience."    

 

 

Evening in Paradise: More Stories by Lucia Berlin. In 2015, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published   A Manual for Cleaning Women, a posthumous story collection by a relatively unknown writer, to widespread acclaim. It was a   New York Times  bestseller, and NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune were among those that gave the book rave reviews. Meanwhile, the book's author, Lucia Berlin, earned comparisons to Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, and Anton Chekhov. Evening in Paradise is a careful and well-chosen selection from Berlin's remaining stories, a collection that showcases her autofiction style as it draws from her her  chaotic roller coaster of a l ife (which is described in an appendix).