Francis Spufford's latest novel is set in 1746 Lower Manhattan, a world of spies, thieves, card sharks and crooked bankers. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Golden Hill "intelligent and entertaining."
Critic Maureen Corrigan says Nick Laird's latest novel begins as a tale of two Irish sisters, but ultimately turns into "a lot of wild blather" about political and religious orthodoxies.
Becky Aikman's new book is a fierce, funny chronicle of the making of Thelma & Louise — the Hollywood forces arrayed against it, and the effect it had on the industry on both sides of the camera.
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Daryl Gregory's new novel spans decades in the life of the Amazing Telemachus Family — a con-man, card-sharping patriarch and his troublesome psychic children, whose powers haven't helped them any.
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Patrick Dacey puts his characters through the wringer in his new novel, a wrenching saga of a profoundly unhappy family set against the ostensibly idyllic background of Cape Cod.
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Ahead of the July 4th weekend, the Seattle-based librarian shares a stack of eight recent favorites. She includes thrillers, mysteries, family sagas and an homage to the game rock, paper, scissors.
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Recently, the New York Times published an essay defending cultural appropriation as necessary engagement. But that's a simplistic, misguided way of looking at appropriation, which causes real harm.
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Fiona Barton's latest — a followup to last year's hit The Widow — picks up with journalist Kate Waters as she digs into another cold case, this one an infant skeleton found at a building site.
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Karin Tidbeck's new novel is set in the mysterious city of Amatka, an agricultural colony ruled by a totalitarian government — but this is no standard dystopia. In Amatka, language has strange power.
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A family curse, a resurrection and a vengeful witch are at the center of Elle Cosimano's Southern Gothic chiller The Suffering Tree. But the book elides its setting's history of racial violence.
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Anne Helen Petersen's new book is a thoughtful consideration of several public women — from Nicki Minaj to Hillary Clinton — who've run up against the invisible expectations our culture has of them.
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Don Winslow's new novel is packed with crooked cops and crookeder crooks, all defending their territories and trying to maintain a status quo where everyone earns, everyone eats and no wars break out.
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In Chain Letter, cartoonist Farel Dalrymple returns to The City, the mysterious metropolis at the heart of his early 2000s series Pop Gun War. It's a weird, complicated and charming place.
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Scott McClanahan's semi-autobiographical novel is packed with loss, pain and existential anguish, but his narrator — also named Scott — refuses to give up, no matter how often he's knocked down.
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Theodora Goss's novel takes bits and pieces from several different monstrous mythologies — Jekyll and Hyde, Dr. Moreau and more — but she makes something new and deceptively intricate out of them.
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Nancy MacLean's book stretches back to 19th century Vice President — and ardent secessionist — John C. Calhoun to find the roots of modern libertarianism, which she calls a threat to democracy.
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Of the scholars who set out on a 1761 quest to Yemen, only one came back alive. But don't let their looming doom distract from the drama in Thorkild Hansen's hybrid of history, fiction and travelogue.
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Victor LaValle's story of a rare book dealer whose life is torn apart after his wife commits an act of violence and vanishes is by turns enchanting, horrifying, infuriating and heartbreaking.
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Maile Meloy's novel centers on two families whose children go missing during an international vacation. Maureen Corrigan read it in two nights and says it's a "very smart work of literary fiction."
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While the love story in Allegra Goodman's latest novel can seem formulaic, she captures the allure of video gaming and the tension between real-world art and literature and the fantasy worlds online.
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