Paris by Edward Rutherfurd ****

The first "long" book that I've read in a while, this came in at over  800 pages, but it held my interest for all that time. I liked this male author because he doesn't get carried away with background information that goes on for pages. He did go back and forth in time, from the 13 th century right through to post WWII, but he made everything work so smoothly that I didn't have to struggle too much to keep the various families straight, and telling this from the point of view of the people of Paris, rather than the big names like Louis XVI, Napoleon, Marie Antoinette. 

There was lots of interesting stuff, from building the Eiffel Tower to the artistic communities of the 20s, the confinement of the Jews in Paris, plus the fact that the men who signed up for WWII went to the lines in taxis- the only way to get them there quickly!

A good read, and even- dare I say it- a good ending!. 

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

This is historical fiction, based on a true story from Iceland, which took place in 1828, when Agnes Magnusdottir became the last woman to be executed in Iceland. She and another man apparently murdered her lover, Natan, because he had spurned her affections for a young woman whose lover was the second murderer. Anyway, Agnes is placed on a farm to await her execution and is assigned a young priest to become her confessor . So the story is about what actually happened leading up to the murder, plus her relationships among the people who live on the farm, and the young priest who visits her every day.

There was a lot of local color in this novel- at first I found the names and locations difficult, but I decided to ignore that and just enjoy the story. There is no moral tale here, and the author appears entirely unprejudiced one way or another. She explains in the Afterword that she preferred to make a more " ambiguous portrayal" of this unfortunate young woman.

A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

I heard the author interviewed by Shelagh Rogers on CBC, and I was impressed by Ruth. An Asian who suffered from bullying similar to Nao in the story, Ruth choose her own name and that of her husband, Oliver, as the Canadian couple who discover a Hello Kitty backpack on the beach of BC, and thus discover Nao's diary, a teen living in Japan at the time of the tsunami in 2011. Ruth sets about trying to find what has happened to Nao, in between reading her diary and getting to know this 16 year old girl who really has a pretty grim life, from her parents' difficulties with depression and attempts at suicide, to the extreme physical bullying she endures at school. It is only in spending a summer at the tBuddhist temple of her grand-mother high in the mountains of Northern Japan that Nao finds ways of coping with her life.

I was more impressed with the interview, and the character development in this book. I found the excellence of writing a little less than I would have liked, something which becomes even more important to me as I read more books.