Word: umbrous
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...Archangel, her home in the north. Kelso and a TV reporter head up there, followed by the cop, followed by military thugs. What they find, to no one's surprise, is that not everyone in the new, modern Russia thinks Stalin was a bloodstained disaster. Harris, a master of umbrous what-ifs, is at his best here...
...globe should need another umbrous island, anchored by one man's imagination halfway between Iceland and Greenland, is not something novelist (and former TIME contributor) Brad Leithauser bothers to explain. If you don't like Freeland, the gray and chilly outpost of which he is the sole curator of history, customs and current events, then chase your moonbeams in Lake Wobegon or your copperheads in Yoknapatawpha County...
...hero of his umbrous novel Novemberfest (Knopf; 386 pages; $24) is Glen Cady, a 50-year-old professor of German whose young wife Paige goes septic after he is rejected for tenure at his New Hampshire university. Glen is a decent fellow. He was an assembly-line worker in Detroit as a young man, before he quit and revived an interest in the German language begun when he was a soldier in Europe. Paige is petulant and self-absorbed. She disapproves of his besotted love for their four-year-old daughter ("so working class") and grumps when...
...many writers, male or female, have invented a woman spy as well drawn as Fiona or a spy fiction as wry and sinewy as this one. But do Fiona and Bernard reunite and live happily ever after? Deighton, at the end of some 2,000 admirably umbrous pages, wisely fails...
...watchers, pondered in the Daily Express: "Was M15 Chief Hollis linked with the KGB?" Nobody pressed for an answer, and no wonder. Sir Roger Hollis had spent nine cold-war years as D.G., or director general of M15, Britain's counterintelligence service, a civil servant so umbrous that his name was never publicly mentioned. After his retirement in 1965 Hollis led a pastoral life of golf mixed with un-spy-like community service in Somerset, until his death...