What do you recommend?

“The book that kept me up late last night was S.C. Gwynne’s remarkable Empire of the Summer Moon, about the rise and fall of the Comanches. It’s powerful and bloody, wading as it does into the grim details of the clash of civilizations that took place along the Texas frontier. The story of Quanah, the half-Comanche, half-white war chief-cum-school board chairman is compelling, and the crisp writing carries you along. The book I read before that, The Swerve, I also recommend as one of the most thoroughly researched, masterfully told works I’ve ever read, compressing as it does centuries of history into a tale as thrilling as a spy novel. Plus, it’s the story of a long-lost, found-again poem that changed the course of Western civilization — a book any writer and reader can appreciate.”

Juliana Barbassa, author of Dancing with the Devil in the City of God

Barbassa appears at 8 p.m. Friday at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables.

This story was originally published July 31, 2015 at 12:45 PM with the headline "What do you recommend?."