New Book Roundups

Love and War
In Guernica, Seattle sports writer Dave Boling crafts a love story and family epic set during the Spanish Civil War. Boling, whose wife is Basque, fills his debut novel with vibrant local characters and details of the resilient Basque town whose firebombing by the German Luftwaffe in 1937 compelled Picasso's iconic painting of the horrors of war. In post-9/11 Afghanistan, a more current conflict links disparate personalities in Nadeem Aslam's award-winning The Wasted Vigil—a British doctor mourning the death of his Afghan wife, a Russian woman searching for her missing soldier brother, a young Afghani jihadi, and an American ex-CIA spy.

Tales of the Fathers
In his memoir, Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival, Newsweek's Moscow bureau chief Owen Matthews contrasts his experience working in contemporary Russia with a journey into his family's Russian roots.

In the process he discovers the story behind his grandfather's disappearance in 1937 Ukraine, and learns the details of his parents' own struggle in the 1960s to be reunited after his British father was deported from Russia. Another journalist digs into his heritage in My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq. Christian Science Monitor reporter Ariel Sabar ventures to his father's hometown of Zakho, Iraq, where once a mostly illiterate community of Jews lived, so isolated they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus.