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2 months ago | 
lithub.com | Lea Carpenter
My mother’s younger sister died in a fire in her twenties. How that fire started and how it ended, where blame lay and, later, why people needed blame and needed it to lay someplace you could point to, even touch—those things were never clarified for me, and perhaps never clarified, period. No one ever told me about the firefighters, though there had to have been some.
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May 24, 2024 | 
airmail.news | Lea Carpenter
Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy by Elizabeth Beller At the end of Camelot, Arthur has lost the war, his queen, and his knights. At the end of The Once and Future King, it is even worse: Arthur knows he will lose his life. And yet in every iteration of the Arthurian legend, he wins.
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May 23, 2024 | 
airmail.news | Lea Carpenter
Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy by Elizabeth Beller At the end of Camelot, Arthur has lost the war, his queen, and his knights. At the end of The Once and Future King, it is even worse: Arthur knows he will lose his life. And yet in every iteration of the Arthurian legend, he wins.
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May 21, 2024 | 
kmuw.org | Suzanne Perez |Marie-Helene Bertino |Lea Carpenter |John le Carré
In this episode of Books & Whatnot, Suzanne and Beth discuss their recent reads... and a lot of whatnot.
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Apr 19, 2024 | 
airmail.news | Lea Carpenter
William Shakespeare never fought in a war. And yet every soldier knows Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, the “band of brothers” speech, the one so many veterans cannot recite without emotion. The speech’s power comes not only from the playwright’s language but, perhaps even more, from the fact that the speaker, Henry, knows the cost, and the honor, that come from having seen slaughter up close.
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Apr 1, 2024 | 
southforker.com | Lea Carpenter |Amy Zavatto
Hey, hey book worms! It’s time for your monthly page-turner installment of “Feed Your Read,” where we check in with one of our favorite local, indie bookstores on what they’re excited about in books for the month ahead. For April, we had a great chat with Finley Shaw, owner of Finley’s Fiction (8 Grand Ave., Shelter Island, 203-650-7616) — who just opened for the season Easter weekend (welcome back, Finley!).
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Feb 21, 2024 | 
bookbrowse.com | Lea Carpenter |Erin Martin
BookBrowse:
A woman becomes part of an espionage network after her husband's sudden death.
Let me confess that I don't watch a lot of spy movies or read spy novels because the plots are too much to keep up with. Please consider that information an extra endorsement for Ilium by Lea Carpenter, a spy novel that's blissfully accessible.
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Jan 11, 2024 | 
startribune.com | Lea Carpenter
A British spy narrates Lea Carpenter's latest novel, a work of dazzling eloquence and sensitivity. The prose demands that readers pay close attention — not because there are confusing leaps or twists, but because the slightest detail or gesture conveys so much information. The writing is controlled but not cold; on the contrary, Carpenter allows the narrator great sweeps of emotion that are some of the novel's finest passages.
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Oct 13, 2023 | 
airmail.news | Lea Carpenter
Charm in the secret world is placed very high on the list of desirable qualities. It’s called, in recruitment terms, ‘entertainment value.’ And at its baldest, it means that your wretched little agent, stuck somewhere, is going to look forward to seeing you. He or she is run-down, exhausted, lying to her employers, and she wants to be turned into a goddess for the evening, and she wants to be listened to—she wants a confessor.
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Oct 7, 2023 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Lea Carpenter |Barbara Kingsolver |Richard Wright
An edgy confessional novel with the trappings of spy fiction. A lonely young London woman is unknowingly drawn into a high-stakes intelligence campaign by the man she marries. Nearly 21, the never-named woman who narrates the novel is targeted by Marcus, a worldly, jet-setting American who happens to own the private garden she spent hours dreamily gazing at as a child.
