Where would they go? They didn’t know, but their shipboard byword became, “It will emerge.” In SEVEN AT SEA: Why a New York City Family Cast Off Convention for a Life-Changing Year on a Sailboat (Shadow Mountain, $27.99), husband and wife take turns narrating the story of their voyage, chronicling the crests and troughs of their seaborne experience. Their time on the boat would be that dream.

After that we’d be broke.” Like her husband, Emily wanted to “pursue a dream so big there was room for my whole family” before their eldest left for college. “Based on our best budgeting,” Erik calculated, “we’d saved enough money to sail for a year.

These books ought to come with 3-D glasses and a soundtrack.įive years ago, the Manhattanites Erik and Emily Orton, beleaguered but buoyant parents of five children between the ages of 6 and 16, hadn’t even plotted an itinerary when they bought a 38-foot catamaran (sight unseen), flew to a Caribbean harbor and set sail on a Swiss-Family-Robinson-style adventure. What do you need to know about the places you’re going? A dozen new books answer this question in strikingly idiosyncratic ways, wreathing their authors’ wanderings in vivid back story - sometimes emotional, sometimes empirical, sometimes imperial - enveloping the reader in a kind of legible Sensurround. Rowling adopted a male pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, to write her post-Potter adult thriller series, which centers on a disabled male private eye called Cormoran Strike. For so long the ads in the subways and in newspapers touted boldface names like Jack Reacher, Gabriel Allon and Harry Bosch. It is perhaps not a major publishing plot twist that, almost two years after the #MeToo movement burst into public consciousness and began to change the conversation around gender, power and who gets a seat at what table a year and a half after women in pop culture, sports and Hollywood began speaking up about equal opportunity and at a time when there are more women in Congress than ever before, proving they can be just as belligerent and forceful as their male colleagues, the traditionally male-dominated world of the thriller has been ceding ground to a different kind of hero(ine).įor so long, after all, the most chart-busting thriller novels were the province of the robotic but moral special ops guy, the dissolute unshaven detective, the beefy brawler with a soul.

What the wind knows review