“I wanted people to get a good laugh out of it,” le Carré says of his new, 25th novel. Maybe I’m the wrong kind of reader; I didn’t chuckle even once, but I still enjoyed this meticulously crafted spy novel suffused with politics of all sorts. Protagonist Anatoly—“Nat” for short—is a middle-aged veteran of Britain’s …
Madison Books hosted an event with Lynda Mapes and David B. Williams this autumn. The excerpt from their conversation with James Crossley was originally printed in the Madison Books newsletter. You can click here for more! We’ve long been fans of their acclaimed writing about the human relationship with the natural world, and we’re delighted …
I read an early copy of Ruta Sepetys’ The Fountains of Silence, and it was absolutely fantastic. If you aren’t familiar with this author, she writes books about history that we often aren’t familiar with or taught in school. The Fountains of Silence takes place in Madrid, 1957 when Spain was under the fascist dictatorship …
I should perhaps be focusing on Coats’s newest book, the middle-grade fantasy The Green Children of Woolpit, but it’s just come out and well, I haven’t read it yet. But I really want to, based on how much my daughter and I enjoyed Coats’s earlier novel, The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming. I can’t …
Thanks to the hard work of festival organizers, volunteers, authors, and illustrators and the enthusiasm and patience of thousands of attending book lovers, the Seattle Children’s Book Festival was a tremendous success. The festival, held in playground tents and in the gym of Greenwood Elementary in Seattle, was full from opening at 11:00 beyond the …
The first Seattle Children’s Book Festival will be held Saturday, September 28, 2019 from 11:00- 3:00 at Greenwood Elementary (144 NW 80th St) in Seattle. The event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by The Innovation Press, Madison Books, Phinney Books, Seattle Public Schools, Seattle Milk Fund, the Seattle Office of …
After being diagnosed with brain cancer as a teen, Seattle writer Jeff Henigson made an unconventional Starlight Children’s Foundation wish. He wanted to (and did) travel to Moscow to talk with Gorbachev about nuclear disarmament. But this memoir is less about cancer and the Cold War than it is about surviving high school and searching …
Not long ago a book sneaked up on me. The paperback of Valerie Trueblood’s Terrarium hit the shelves of Madison Books, which served as a reminder that I’d had the hardcover sitting unread on my nightstand for far too long. I tried one story in the collection, then another, and kept going until the characters began …
From the Madison Books newsletter I hurried past Cal Anderson Park this week in time to join a crowd gathered in front of the light rail station there. It was a joyful throng, although it was a death that had brought us all together. We were present to honor the memory of Barbara Bailey, a …
It’s a commonplace (at least with me) to say that sometimes the best way to describe reality is to distort, enhance, or otherwise defamiliarize it through fantasy and speculation. Helen Phillips seems to agree with me, at least to judge by her intense, somewhat surrealistic fiction. The Need, a thriller about the anxieties of parenthood …
