Author Suanne Schafer

Cleopatra does a remarkable job piecing together the story of a woman from the first century BCE about whom very little is actually known. Schiff pulls together many early sources, extrapolates as many facts as she possibly can, then pieces them into a coherent vision of a magnificent queen. Many of Schiff’s thoughts are based on what we know of Egyptian culture, parti...

I LOVE Elif Shafak’s work and am working my way through her twelve novels. With every read I find a new favorite, but There Are Rivers in the Sky is my all-favorite so far. 

The book opens in 630 BCE, in Ninevah, the capital of the ancient Assyrian Empire along the Tigris River and home of the library of Ashurbanipal, a king known for his erudition as well as ...

As I have been with so many other authors, I am slowly working my way through Ann Patchett’s oeuvre, starting years ago with Bel Canto. Whistler ties with Tom Lake as my—so far—all-time favorites of her works. Tom Lake is a quiet story. Whistler tells of a family fractured by divorce and somehow winds its way into being uplifting and healin...

I have been slowly working my way through Larry McMurtry’s oeuvre. The Berrybender Narratives brings together the four volumes of the epic story of the American West: Sin Killer, The Wandering Hill, Sorrow’s River, and Folly and Glory. In these books, he sets the fictional English aristocratic family, the Berrybenders, against the American frontier ...

Poison is about the intertwined fates of a Spanish commoner and a queen born on the same day and year. Set in 1692, the bicentennial of Columbus’s discovery of America, it features the worst of Spanish life at the time: the dreaded Inquisition. Spain is now a bankrupt nation, having squandered all the riches stolen from its discoveries. Francisca de Luarac is the dau...