Started Early, Took My Dog is the fourth novel in Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series. Brodie has appeared in three previous novels by Atkinson, but he’s merely one consistent player among a changing ensemble cast in each book. Atkinson’s books don’t really qualify as mysteries. Yes, Brodie is a policeman-turned-private detective, but the projects he works on are not your typical ‘CSI’ scenarios. He is not confronted with murder scenes, where he must rely on his superior investigative skills to uncover clues, then pull out his Sherlock Holmes-like brain power for a big reveal. More often than not, Brodie chances onto a solution by accident or simply by being in the right place at the right time. 

Filmgoers know of Daniel Woodrell from Winter’s Bone, his novel made into last year’s Academy Award-nominated film.  A few of us hardier souls know his work from long before, both the acclaimed  “country noir” novels set in and around the Ozarks and Woe to Live on, his splendid gothic Western published in 1987 (and filmed by director Ang Lee as Ride with the Devil).  Woodrell’s novel was one of several from the ‘70s and’80s, including Ron Hansen’s Desperadoes, and stories from Barry Hannah’s legendary Airships, that breathed new life into westerns and paved the way for modern-day works like Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and Patrick DeWitt’s Booker Prize short-listed novel, The Sisters Brothers. In fact, a section from Woe to Live On is featured in this collection, under the same title, and it’s one of this short collection’s true stand-outs. 

Throughout a long career of travel writing and literary journalism, the British writer Jonathan Raban has expertly blended the personal with the public in a tone that’s never vain or self-aggrandizing. From the relative exuberance of young adulthood in Coasting—about a solo sailboat trip around the coast of England—to the mature, battered-by-life expatriate in Passage to Juneau—another sea journey through the Inside Passage and up to Alaska—we gladly follow his spiritual journeys through whatever territory he chooses to take us. In Driving Home, a bountiful new collection of essays, Raban can also lay claim to being an astute observer of the American scene.