New Books In Literature

Joanna Lowell is known for her witty historical romances set in late Victorian England, a period both undergoing and resisting dramatic social change. Her previous novels in this series pair a young artist from the East End with her tortured muse, a duke; a runaway duchess with an admirably calm young man convinced she is a plant lover like himself; and a reluctant, poverty-stricken art forger with an art critic who is alienated from his aristocratic family. A Shore Thing (Berkley Books, 2024) follows the romantic fortunes of Kit Griffith, a former painter who now makes his living selling bicycles, and Muriel Pendrake—the intrepid, intelligent, world-traveling botanist impersonated in book 2. Muriel has traveled to St. Ives, Cornwall, to collect seaweed—not because that is her own preference, beautiful as some of it is, but because the stodgy male chauvinist in charge of a forthcoming talk that Muriel has agreed to present in New York has declared that no other topic is acceptable for a woman. She travels in