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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Apr 2005, 256 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2006, 256 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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From the book jacket: In Roxana Robinson's
lucid and elegant prose, her characters' inner worlds open up to us,
revealing private emotional cores that are familiar in their needs,
their secrets, and their longings. These people tell us the truth –
not only about themselves, their relationships, and their lives, but
about ourselves as well.
A Perfect Stranger powerfully and affectingly examines the
complex, intricate network of experiences that binds us to one
another. These stories are tender, raw, lovely, and fine–and they
reaffirm Roxana Robinson's place at the forefront of modern
literature.
Comment: Short stories are often overlooked in favor of novels, but why when they're just the thing for so many occasions? Short stories are just the
right length for the bath, subway ride or just those few minutes of
downtime that we all need occasionally; they also make great "beach reads" because it's easy to close the book every few dozen pages and actually notice you're on the beach!
Roxanna Robinson's short stories come highly recommended by a number
of reviewers, including Joyce Carol Oates who describes them as
'beautifully rendered prose [that] captures moments of domestic drama
- sometimes painful, sometimes ecstatic, always heartrending and
illuminating'; and Kirkus Reviews who concludes that they are 'stories
that tick away with the precision of perfectly wrought timepieces'.
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in June 2005, and has been updated for the
March 2006 edition.
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If you liked A Perfect Stranger, try these:
The Little Black Book of Stories
by A.S. Byatt
Published 2005
These unforgettable stories are by turns haunting, funny, sparkling, and scary. Byatt’s Little Black Book adds a deliciously dark note to her skill in mixing folk and fairy tales with everyday life.
by Bernhard Schlink
Published 2002
A collection of stories that weave themselves around the idea of love---love to seek and love to flee; love as desire, as guilt, as confusion or self-betrayal; love as habit, as affair, and as life-changing rebellion.
The House on Biscayne Bay
by Chanel Cleeton
As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
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