Emilia Nightingale returns from Hong Kong to her childhood home in Peasebrook in the middle of the English Cotswolds when she inherits Nightingale Books after her father's death. Taking over the establishment means that the villagers immediately become part of her inheritance, including a klepto...
Compassion goes a long way when writing about death – especially the death of loved ones. Narrating such a book requires a gentleness, a soothing rhythm. That Danticat reads her latest nonfiction – a thoughtful meditation bookended by her mother's fatal cancer diagnosis and Danticat's...
Kirby Heyborne deploys his gentle charm to give voice to 12-year-old Walter Lavender Jr. who, owing to "a motor speech disorder," might seem mute to the outside world but has an imaginative soul that can't be silenced. Always an insightful observer, Walter is an unparalleled...
With raw honesty (the memoir opens with suicide ideation), debilitating angst (the unrelenting hold of mental illness), and humor when least expected (the terrors of securing a prom date), Haroon Moghul’s memoir becomes an illuminating antidote to contemporary Islamophobia. As the U.S.-born son of immigrant Pakistani...
When Diane dies in a car accident, her daughters, 18-year-old Mary and 4-year-old Hannah, are left effectively with nothing. The family's rundown New Jersey seaside motel, which has always been home, is less than worthless owing to back taxes. Without resources, Mary and Hannah head...
Maile Meloy (Madame Lazarus) makes her narrating debut with this disturbing thriller that showcases a parent's worst nightmare – the disappearance of children. Best friends and cousins Liv and Nora take their husbands and two children (each) on a holiday cruise. The families bask in...
Jule West Williams is "the kind of woman it would be a great mistake to underestimate." Her background might be imagined, but the self-assessment is exact. Her invented 10-year "highly unusual education" – not unlike the epic journeys of white hetero heroes, which she both...
I’ve been hanging with a few serious Civil War buffs the last couple weeks (one of whom is a licensed historical tour guide and descended from a Civil War lieutenant colonel) and I haven’t yet met an “expert” who’s heard this strange tale about tiny...
With her name, Aza's dad bestowed her with possibility: "It spans the whole alphabet, because we wanted to let you know you can be anything." Davis's father "made [him] a junior. Resigned [him] to juniority." The two teens have little in common – Davis is...
While Phoebe Strole stays consistently convincing in voicing characters of different genders and ages, and conveying shocks and surprises throughout, Kimberly McCreight's continuing mystery centered on teen Wylie is showing signs of fatigue, not to mention just plain disbelief. Wylie, a self-described "full-on agoraphobic" in...
*STARRED REVIEW The term "refugee" is constantly in the news. In direct response, Alan Gratz gets personal with desensitizing statistics, policies, and politics by giving names, families, and histories to three tweens fleeing three countries during three time periods. Each fits the "refugee" label but is...
Two friends return to Watersend, SC, to the childhood vacation house their families once shared. Bonny Blankenship, an ER doctor forced to take a break, needs to face her bitter marriage and stalled career. She’s hoping her teenage daughter Piper, who’s just failed her first...
Just as the audiobook of Fiona Barton’s hair-raising debut, The Widow, got the full-cast treatment, so, too, does her equally unnerving sophomore effort. Mandy Williams returns as Kate Waters, the tenacious newspaper reporter introduced in Widow, who again won’t stop sleuthing until she has all...
*STARRED REVIEW Against a tumultuous backdrop of political, military, and economic turmoil in modern Nigeria comes a portrait of a marriage that begins with idealistic devotion and ardent promise. For Yejide and Akin, love should have been enough, but after four years without children, “even love...
Kanae Minato is two for two for twisted psychological Japanese noir. What she did with deadly milk cartons in Confessions made quite the debut splash. She goes back to school in Penance (expertly rendered into English by lauded translator Philip Gabriel) in which 10-year-old Emily is raped...
Imogen Church is three-for-three as Ruth Ware’s anointed narrator. With her convincing range of accents, modulations, and control, Church adroitly voices multiple viewpoints, proving to be more effective than many full-cast recordings. Like her previous bestsellers, The Woman in Cabin 10 and In a Dark,...
*STARRED REVIEW Arimah's debut collection comprises a dozen surprising, affecting stories. Narrator Adjoa Andoh sublimely intensifies the author's already breathtaking prose into an irresistible, spectacular performance, as she effortlessly modulates her distinctive voice, picking up genders and generations, cadences and accents, and just as easily discards...
*STARRED REVIEW Emma Gregory, with her impressive range of Anglophone accents – differentiated by age, region, country – is the ideal conduit for the 10 nuanced, exquisite stories in Tessa Hadley's (The Past) latest collection. Loss of innocence looms large in many of the pieces, from a...
Gabra Zackman narrates with intense intimacy, as if fully aware what she's reading is more than mere words on the page. This electrifying love story between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man continues to inspire global headlines – it's earned author Dorit Rabinyan (Persian...
"We didn't want to edit this book," married Jewish authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman confess. "We didn't want to write or even think…about Israel and Palestine, about the nature and meaning of occupation." But Waldman's 2014 visit to her birthplace forced both to "pay...
