In Naomi Hirahara's mystery novel, a Japanese American family interned during the war returns home to a changed city. They're still settling in when their daughter is caught up in a murder.
(Image credit: Penguin Random House)
Set in a neighborhood where Blacks and immigrant Jews have lived next to each other for decades, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the best novels critic Maureen Corrigan has read this year.
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Rickly's first book is a solid and promising literary debut. He's a natural, albeit a germinal one. He is best known as a singer and songwriter of the rock band Thursday.
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Schlatter's autobiography Still Laughing is a compendium of stories about entertainers he's known and worked with. Ernie in Kovacsland is a treasure chest of memorabilia from Kovacs' shows.
Lindsay Lynch's luscious debut, Do Tell, is set in Hollywood's Golden Age. Dwyer Murphy's The Stolen Coast is a moody tale of a lawyer who makes his money ferrying people on the run into new lives.
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Set in Mexico City in 1993, Silvia Moreno-Garcia's latest novel is steeped in cinematic history and lore, as well an eerie well of myth that recalls H.P. Lovecraft, albeit in a more progressive form.
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The playful second book in the author's Harlem Trilogy shows Ray Carney scheming how to get his teenage daughter into the concert of her dreams. Alarming capers ensue.
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Ken Tucker reviews Robert McCormick's Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey, and Robert Mugge's Notes from the Road: A Filmmaker's Journey Through American Music.
A few weeks ago we asked NPR staffers to share their favorite summer reads. Old, new, fiction, nonfiction — as long as it was great for hot and hazy hammock reading, it was fair game.
(Image credit: Islenia Mil for NPR)
Nothing goes right for American Wren Wheeler during a trip to London. And that's before the overthinking 18-year-old meets a prince — and they both learn a comet is hurtling toward Earth.
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These Paul Tremblay stories — a wildly entertaining mix of literary horror, psychological suspense and science fiction — will be more than enough to make readers into immediate fans.
(Image credit: William Morrow)
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Hull grew up in the rural interior of Central Florida during the 1960s and '70s. Her memoir evokes a land of perfect citrus, and the cruel costs of its harvest.
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Andrew Lipstein achieves the difficult feat of realistically animating a hedge fund manager who talks and moves as real hedge fund managers might, but who is compelling and not overly alienating.
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An excellent work of people-first journalism, Donovan X. Ramsey's book offers a vivid and frank history and highlights how communities tend to save themselves even as they're being targeted.
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Author and illustrator Jon Klassen is best known for children's books like I Want My Hat Back and This is Not My Hat. His latest, The Skull, is an adaptation of a traditional folktale.
Mai Nguyen's debut novel centers on the family of Tuyết and Xuân Tran, Vietnamese refugees who settle in Toronto. It simmers with questions about work, class and generational divides.
(Image credit: Atria Books)
Most novels set in bookshops are heartwarming paeans to bonds forged among readers. The Door-to-Door Bookstore by Carsten Henn and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa are no exception.
(Image credit: Harper Perennial)
As we roll into the dog days of summer, these three YA novels move beyond being beastly — as their protagonists transform into the creatures that lie within.
(Image credit: Meghan Collins Sullivan/NPR)
Ford brings his Frank Bascombe saga to an end in Be Mine, while Moore weaves together a fragmentary Civil War plot with an off-kilter vision of the afterlife in I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.
(Image credit: Harper Collins)
It is easy to act as if fiction and history were separate. But they cannot be completely divided. Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos and Oksana Lutsyshyna's Ivan and Phoebe help readers connect with time past.
(Image credit: Meghan Collins Sullivan/NPR)
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