‘Editor’s note: The opinions of the smart, well-read women in my Denver book club mean a lot, and often determine what the rest of us choose to pile onto our bedside tables. So we asked them, and all Denver Post readers, to share their mini-reviews with you. Have any to offer? Email bellis@denverpost.com. – Barbara Ellis
‘The History of Love,’ by Nicole Krauss (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006)
Leo Gursky immigrated to the United States from Poland, chasing his love, Alma, when they were both 20. He didn’t succeed in marrying her, but he distilled his passion into a book. This book, stolen, translated and borrowed, ultimately becomes “The History of Love.” Sixty years later, young Alma Singer begins searching for the writer of her mother’s favorite book, hoping to bring romance to her grieving parent. Her search permeates this novel as she comes of age.
Told from multiple perspectives, out of chronological order, you might think this story sounds confusing, but trust the process: Krauss braids all the strands together in a most satisfying way. I was impressed with her writing. — 3 1/2 stars (out of 4); Neva Gronert, Parker
‘Murder Mindfully,’ by Karsten Dusse, translated by Florian Duijsens (Soho Crime, 2026)
A Berlin-based criminal lawyer signs up for mindfulness therapy in a desperate concession to save his marriage and preserve access to his adored daughter. The lawyer takes the tenets of mindfulness to heart, and Dusse takes both these tenets and his protagonist to absurd – and sometimes shockingly violent – conclusions. Fortunately, Dusse lightens the lawyer’s spiral into his mobster clientap dark underworld with wry humor and pointed skewering of both the wellness industry and the criminal legal profession. A contemporary twist to the classic procedural mystery novel. — 2 1/2 stars (out of 4); Kathleen Lance, Denver
‘Visitation,’ by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions Paperback Original, 2010)
“Approximately twenty-four thousand years ago, a glacier advanced until it reached a large outcropping of rock that now is nothing more than a gentle hill above where the house stands.” “Visitation” tells the stories of some of the people during the last century who lived off-and-on on that small, forested property on the side of a lake outside Berlin, and of the gardener who seems to have lived there forever. This book’s German title, “Heimsuchung,” roughly means “search for home(land),” and this book is also about haunting. Structure does not follow chronology; we go back and forth in time. But the author’s masterful, poetic sentences ground and steer us so we can follow the weaving together of lives and time periods. The moment I finished, I started flipping back through the pages — epigraphs, sentences, sections taking on deeper meaning, characters beckoning me to re-read. Born in 1967 in East Berlin, the author had a career in music and directing operas before turning to writing in the 1990s. (Nominated for several awards in Germany. Erpenbeck’s recent novel, ‘Kairos,’ won the 2024 International Booker Prize.) — 4 stars (out of 4); Michelle Nelson, Littleton
‘The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran,’ by Shida Bazyar; translated by Ruth Martin (Scribe, 2026)
There is a fundamental difference between an expat (who chooses a life abroad) and an emigrant in exile (who has few good options). Bazyar lovingly depicts the reality of the latter in her novel about an Iranian family, whose parents remain dedicated to the hopes of communist ideology in the 1970s and whose political activism forced them to flee the oppressive theocracy after the 1979 Iranian revolution. Each chapter unfolds in a new decade and from the perspective of a different family member – father, mother, daughter and son – and illustrates how exile can impact individuals and generations so differently, yet so profoundly, including the newcomer’s cultural, linguistic and personal isolation, backward-looking nostalgia versus future-oriented optimism, paralyzing uncertainties versus assured self-awareness in a new culture, and ultimately, the hope for a return to the native country. (Shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize.) — 4 stars (out of 4); Kathleen Lance, Denver
