He’s not a Proust in his cork-lined study, but a Dickens, with his notebook out, on the streets. For a man who famously keeps the modern world at bay, preferring to work in silence in a dark room, wearing earplugs – when he’s not out bird-watching, that is – Franzen seems peculiarly, unnaturally alert to the many stupidities and sublimities of the modern world.

It is a dense, serious, entertaining read that features a female protagonist and is sure to attract plenty of attention because it addresses a whole host of bang-up-to-the-minute issues, including the Occupy movement, state secrets, surveillance and whistle-blowing. On these terms alone, Purity is guaranteed to enrage his critics and delight his fans.

And another is that he shouldn’t be getting so much attention anyway. Another is that he can’t write female characters. One of the main complaints about Franzen is that he’s really just an old-fashioned realist passing off a 21st-century version of middlebrow lit-lite to an audience who should be reading something altogether more challenging. And, as every schoolboy also knows, his work tends to irritate and annoy almost as many people as absolutely adore it. The main question is at what cost will they be able to achieve this goal? Highly recommend.As every schoolboy knows, Jonathan Franzen is one of the world’s great living writers, having emerged from the shadows of obscurity and straight into a spotlit Oprah brouhaha with his novel The Corrections in 2001, a book about a dysfunctional family that told us everything we needed to know about a dysfunctional America. This time around, Eve and her friends Cam and Alex will have to adapt to these changes if they have any hope of putting this curse back to rest. Picking up where the previous book left off, Eve quickly finds herself in a world that is rapidly changing in ways better left to the realms of nightmares than that of reality, but it is the reality that Eve's will have to face if she has any hope of trying to defeat the ancient Egyptian curse that has once again been released into the world running rampant in a manner previously unseen in history. Very few authors are able to break thru with something that is fresh as well as intriguing and with the third release in the Zombie Girl series, A.Giacomi has proven quite succinctly that she is one of those rare authors. There are so many books in the zombie genre that it is starting to get rather difficult to find new books that aren't built on the same stale premise.

Eve Brenner by A. Giacomi