Book Blog — Robin Gaines

“Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.”

—Susan Sontag

T HIS IS THE NIGHT OUR HOUSE WILL CATCH FIRE: A MEMOIR by Nick Flynn When Flynn was a child growing up in Massachusetts, his mother tried to burn the house down with him and his brother in it. Now, as an adult, Flynn, with a young daugh

Robin GainesDecember 31, 2025

HEART THE LOVER by Lily King Sold as a sequel to her previous novel, Writers & Lovers , King's latest, Heart the Lover, finds the narrator, Casey, in college and in a relationship with two different men, and then, decades later,

Robin GainesNovember 30, 2025

BROKEN COUNTRY by Clare Leslie Hall It's the late 1960s in the English countryside. Beth and Frank tend to their sheep when Beth's first love, Gabriel, now a famous author, returns with his son, Leo, to his nearby country estate. Beth

Robin GainesOctober 27, 2025

A MARRIAGE AT SEA by Sophie Elmhirst Oh, this one had me from the opening sentence: Maralyn looked out at emptiness. There was little to see except the water, shifting from black to blue as the sun rose. A clear sky, the ocean, and th

Robin GainesSeptember 13, 2025

THE NAMES by Florence Knapp What’s in a name? A lot. Names shape identities. Names work on our psyches. In Knapp’s debut novel, Cora and Gordon are parents of a newborn son. Cora must register the birth. She wants to name the baby Juli

Robin GainesAugust 27, 2025

DREAM COUNT by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie “I have always longed to be known,” Chia, one of the four female narrators, declares in the opening line, “truly known, by another human being.” A travel writer, Chia, reminisces about pa

Robin GainesJuly 30, 2025

THE FLOAT TEST by Lynn Steger Strong   Four siblings converge on their parents' home in Florida after the death of their mother, the  "litigator" of the family. High demanding of herself (she suffers a stroke while running) an

Robin GainesJune 30, 2025

HEARTWOOD by Amity Gaige Motherhood. The disappointing mothers. The cold and neglectful. The dreamy and ethereal. The non-mothers. Mother earth. Mother trees. The anxious and caring mothers. Mothers of mentally ill children. Mothers of

Robin GainesMay 30, 2025

SHOW DON’T TELL: STORIES by Curtis Sittenfeld All creative writing students are instructed early on with the same misguided advice to show, don’t tell in their writing. In other words, show me the character is crying without telling me

Robin GainesApril 29, 2025

CRUSH by Ada Calhoun “You’ve got a Lamborghini engine for flirting,” the husband, Paul, tells the unnamed wife at the beginning of this contemporary marriage novel. The narrator is a successful ghostwriter and breadwinner to Paul’s fle

Robin GainesMarch 31, 2025

THE WEDDING PEOPLE by Alison Espach Phoebe Stone checks into the luxurious Newport, Rhode Island hotel wearing a green silk dress and gold heels and carrying no luggage. Everyone at the resort believes she is a guest of the wedding tak

Robin GainesMarch 3, 2025

GOOD MATERIAL by Dolly Alderton Andy’s been dumped by his girlfriend Jen and he spends a good chunk of the novel trying to figure out why. The struggling comedian at thirty-five moves back in with his mom and tries, and tries again to

Robin GainesJanuary 29, 2025

HERE ONE MOMENT by Liane Moriarty What if you knew how and when you would die? Would you change your life in any way? Such is the premise of Moriarty’s latest, Here One Moment. Cherry comes from a line of fortune tellers. During a fl

Robin GainesDecember 31, 2024

DON’T BE A STRANGER by Susan Minot The master storyteller of female desire, Minot’s latest takes the reader on fifty-two-year-old Ivy Cooper’s affair with musician Ansel, almost twenty years younger. Introduced by a mutual friend, the

Robin GainesNovember 29, 2024

TELL ME EVERYTHING by Elizabeth Strout   In Crosby, Maine, Olive Kitteridge is living in a retirement community. Lucy Barton visits, and the two tell stories to one another. Bob is still married to Margaret, but he walks with Lucy

Robin GainesOctober 29, 2024

I’VE TRIED BEING NICE: ESSAYS by Ann Leary It’s a real thing. As a woman of a certain age (I obviously can’t speak for men of a certain age, but I imagine this never pops up in their mental feeds, like ever), one of my regrets is all t

Robin GainesSeptember 30, 2024

SAME AS IT EVER WAS by Claire Lombardo   Lombardo writes sweeping generational family sagas with telling bits of relationships in all their complicated spit and shine. Her first novel, The Most Fun We Ever Had, was equall

Robin GainesAugust 31, 2024

ALL FOURS by Miranda July   Can one person hold two or more identities side by side and skip lanes inside a life? If you’re the narrator in All Fours, the answer is yes. A semi-famous artist from LA leaves her husband and young son

Robin GainesJuly 30, 2024

TRUTH IS THE ARROW, MERCY IS THE BOW: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories by Steve Almond The chapter on Writers’ Block is worth the price of the book. But all fifteen essays, from “How to Write Sex Scenes Without Shame” to “T

Robin GainesJune 27, 2024Cult Classic; Sloane Crosley; Real Americans; Rachel Khong; Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories; Steve Almond

THE TREE DOCTOR by Marie Mutsuki Mockett   The unnamed narrator of the novel returns to her childhood home in northern California from Hong Kong when the pandemic hits and curtails her plans to return to her husband and two daughte

Robin GainesMay 31, 2024