A Weekend Update: Signed, Sealed & Delivered

NYTBR: Dwight Garner waxes serious rhapsody over Joseph O’Neill’s NETHERLAND, but all I can do is speculate on why the Book Review’s deputy editor – who, granted, last reviewed in the daily just one month ago but otherwise hardly ever ventures outside “Inside the List” or Paper Cuts writing-wise – got the cover. Original plan or last-minute substitution? It feels like the latter but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the former…

Otherwise, David Shaftel finds out that V.S. Naipaul gets a cool reception in his native Trinidad; Lorraine Adams extols the genius storytelling of Rabih Alameddine; Liesl Schillinger teases out the Austen references in Karen Joy Fowler’s new novel; and Marilyn Stasio’s crime column features her take on new books by Donna Leon, Duane Swierczynski, Joseph Anable and Elaine Viets.

WaPo Book World: Allen Barra goes into the black with John Feinstein; Michael Dirda takes a voyage into the supernatural; and Ron Charles examines Jeffrey Lewis’s latest exercise of modern age noblesse oblige.

LA Times: Susan Salter Reynolds is gut-wrenched by Ann Hood’s tale of losing her young daughter; Denise Hamilton enjoys the latest Percy Jackson tale; and Ed Park travels back to the 1880s in the company of “The Inhabitant.”

G&M: Joe Queenan on Montreal native William Shatner’s memoir; Joe Degen dispels the myth of Canadian copyright hysteria; and Chuck Konkel enjoys the prose stylings of William Deverell.

Guardian Review: David Runciman defends political hypocrisy, which ain’t about to go away anytime soon; Hunter Davies recalls his life and times as a ghostwriter; and a new book examines the women left behind by their navy husbands.

Observer: James Bond gets reimagined and re-examined by a slew of women; Peter Conrad reads Dumas’s formerly lost Napoleonic novel; and Adam Phillips enjoys Stephen Romer’s wordplay skills.

The Times: Jeanette Winterson correlates poetry and therapy; Celia Rees chats up her French Revolution-set new novel for children; Lucy Atkins sniffs at Gyles Brandreth turning Oscar Wilde into a fictional sleuth; Australian novelists might be getting the recognition they deserve, finally; and Marcel Berlins reviews recent crime offerings from Iain Levison, Ariana Franklin and Jean-Francois Parot.

The Scotsman: Michael Fry says enough already with the glut of political memoirs; in that vein, Sebastian Shakespeare winces at Cherie Blair’s candor; and David Robinson is more of a fan of Gyles Brandreth’s Wilde reimagining.

The Rest:

Oline Cogdill weighs in on recent mystery outings by Julie Compton and Nevada Barr.

Jeremy Jehu reviews new thrillers by Harlan Coben, Gerald Seymour, Gavin Esler and Colin Bateman for the Telegraph.

Jack Batten at the Toronto Star discovers the work of Peter Abrahams and is summarily blown away.

The Chicago Tribune’s Paul Goat Allen reviews new thrillers and mysteries by Nicholas Pekearo, Jason Pinter, John McEvoy and Peter Leonard.

Also in the Trib, Adam Langer discovers a 1970s feel to Mark Sarvas’s HARRY, REVISED.

Bob Hoover at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette thinks Inger Wolfe – whomever that person is – didn’t succeed in marrying literary and mystery fiction together.

The Courier Mail’s Lucy Carne is thrilled to have Jack Cafferty back in Mo Hayder’s RITUAL.

The Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald’s Paul Fiander rounds up crime fiction by Tom Cain, R.J. Harlick, Anne Emery and Alex Berenson.

The Bookseller previews Tana French’s THE LIKENESS, follow-up to her awesome Edgar winning novel IN THE WOODS. The trade magazine also chats with Open Book hostess and woman about town Mariella Frostrup.

At the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, James Rollins talks about his stint writing the tie-in novel to INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL.

Was William McGonagall the worst poet in the history of the English language? Maybe not.

Richard Mason attempts a comeback after the bonus-baby disaster of his first novel and tells the Independent what he’s been up to in the interim.

And finally, give this girl a date and a job.