In her captivating historical novel, Lisette’s List (Random House), Susan Vreeland, The New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, takes readers by the hand and guides them, with assured steps and astute historical knowledge, through the tumultuous, war-torn, years of 1937 to 1948 in Europe, depicting horrific attempts by the Nazis to…

From the opening of Anita Diamant’s heartwarming novel, The Boston Girl, (Scribner), when Addie Bauman, an 85-year-old grandmother recounts her life story to her granddaughter, I was struck by the similarities between the Jewish cultural beliefs and mores in Boston in 1915, when Addie’s story starts, and in Iran, where I grew up in the…

They have a way of scaring you, of chasing sleep away, these psychological thrillers that send your heart thumping. Imagine, then, what you are in for when two masters of the genre decide to collaborate. The result is “The Golem of Hollywood,” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) by bestselling authors Jonathan Kellerman (The Alex Delaware series) and…

I devoured all 331 pages of Ayelet Waldman’s gripping and powerful novel Love and Treasure (Alfred A. Knopf) in one 14-hour marathon on my flight from Los Angeles to Israel. Before the El Al plane made its descent into Ben Gurion Airport, I began this review with Waldman’s interview with Carolyn Kellogg for the Los…

Ah! The joys and tribulations of being surrounded by stacks of books at my bedside, my husband’s bedside, books tucked into every available nook and cranny, piled high on every tabletop and stacked double on every shelf, making it impossible to navigate around safely without worrying that one of my beloved five-pound books might tumble…

Best Chapter: Your novels are all historical novels, set in exotic times and places. Your novel Harem introduces readers to the intriguing world of the Jewish quarter in Persia. In Courtesan, we read about Belle époque France and the closed domain of women in 19th-century Persia. The Last Romanov is set in the royal court…

Mitch Albom has succeeded in striking an important chord in all of us — the intrinsic human desire to discover what lies beyond, the need to believe that the way we conduct our lives matters and that “the end is not the end,” after all, but another beginning. These intertwined themes are evident in most…

While reviewing The Gallery of Vanished Husbands by Natasha Solomons (Plume Original), the bestselling author of The House at Tyneford, I was also reading Ralph Ellison’s, The Invisible Man, and the thought occurred to me that invisibility can take many forms that might have nothing to do with skin color. Juliet Montague feels invisible in…

On a Shabbat morning, more than 34 years back, I decided to visit Sinai Temple, a conservative Jewish synagogue in Los Angeles. At the time, having been displaced from Iran, my country and home, I did not know much about Conservative Judaism. In fact, apart from a cursory idea about the religious philosophies of Orthodox…