Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Noir set in 1943 in a small mountain town in Veracruz. Ulises is a con man who works through the mail and marries lonely women for their money. His current mark is Perla, a spinster who owns a boardinghouse —…
Tana French
The last Cal Hooper book. Rachel Holohan, about to be engaged to the son of the local big man, is found drowned in the river. Her father wants Cal to look into it, which is the last thing Cal wants,…
Junot Diaz
Díaz’s 2007 first novel, which won the Pulitzer. Oscar de León is an overweight, lovelorn Dominican-American kid in New Jersey — a science fiction and fantasy obsessive who wants, more than anything, to fall in love. The book follows him…
Evelyn Clarke
A locked-room mystery published under the pseudonym Evelyn Clarke, which is V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke writing together. Arthur Fletch, a reclusive bestselling novelist, invites six struggling midlist authors — one each from thriller, romance, YA, sci-fi, horror — to…
Motohisa Yamakage
Yamakage was a Shinto priest in a lineage going back generations, and this is an insider’s explanation for outsiders. Kami as presence rather than deity. Purification as the central practice and why it matters more than belief. The shrine, the…
Christina Thompson
How did people reach every habitable island across ten million square miles of Pacific, upwind, centuries before Europeans could cross an ocean at all? Thompson takes the whole history of that question: Cook and his crews puzzling over it, missionaries,…
George R. Stewart
Where every American place name came from, told as a narrative rather than a dictionary. Stewart runs the whole sweep — Native words remade by English mouths, Spanish saints, French traders, Dutch New York, the Puritans naming towns for the…
Rebecca Solnit
A sequel of sorts to Hope in the Dark. Solnit takes the last sixty-odd years — her own lifetime — and lays out how completely the underlying beliefs have shifted on race, gender, sexuality, disability, the environment, and what nature…
Gary Snyder
Snyder’s 1968 collection, in four sections that map his life to that point: Far West, the Sierra and Northwest of his trail crew and fire lookout years; Far East, Japan and the years in a Kyoto monastery; Kali, India; and…
Sanmao
Sanmao was a Taiwanese writer who read one article about the Sahara and moved there, marrying a Spanish diver named José and settling in El Aaiún in the Spanish Sahara in the 1970s. These are her dispatches: Building furniture out…
Oliver Sacks
Sacks was a lifelong fern obsessive, and in 2000 he went to Oaxaca with the American Fern Society — a busload of amateur botanists, a few professionals, and him with a notebook. So the book is ferns, but it’s also…
Cory Doctorow
Doctorow coined the word in 2022 and it spread fast enough that the American Dialect Society made it word of the year in 2023. This is the long version of the argument. Platforms show up good — cheap, useful, generous…
Paul Yoon
The narrator is a dog. Etna is a working military dog in an unnamed country, and after years at war he walks away from the men he fought beside one night and heads for the place he was taken from…
M. L. Rio
Summer 1989: Ten-year-old Suzanne talks her way onto tour with her father Gil, a metal guitarist one break away from being somebody, and his band the Kills. She’s a music obsessive with a camera and no ability to play, and…
Delaney Nolan
Beatrice is twenty-nine and works at Twin Bridge, a broke residential treatment center in a dust-blown East Texas town called Askewn, minding a floor of furious teenage girls who are on too many drugs or not enough. It’s the near…
Caitlin Mullen
Callie Hauser comes home to the New Jersey Pine Barrens as the new police chief, which in a town this size means everybody she polices knew her as a kid. She makes an arrest that looks routine and it kicks…
Fernanda Melchor
The body of the Witch is found in an irrigation canal outside a Mexican village called La Matosa, and the novel works outward from there through five people connected to the killing — a teenage girl, a boy, a mother,…
Daniel Mason
Miles Krzelewski is 45 and fourteen years into a dissertation on Russian folktales that keeps changing topic every time it gets hard. His wife Kate lands a one-year visiting professorship at a college in Vermont, so the whole family —…
Emily St. John Mandel
Los Angeles, 2031, the first spring after the United States comes apart. Peacekeepers are pulling out, the curfew just lifted, the jacarandas are blooming, and everybody in the city is going to a party. Ari Waker walks across Silver Lake…
Naina Kumar
Neelu Pillai flies to Scotland for her estranged father’s wedding intending to keep her head down. Instead she hooks up with a local the night before, then delivers a tipsy tirade at the rehearsal dinner that sends the bride running.…
Jessica Knoll
Faye Heron is a Hollywood screenwriter, married to her producing partner, and she owes her whole career to a film professor at the small upstate New York college she went to. He dies, she goes back for the funeral, and…
Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver took David Copperfield, moved it to Lee County in the far southwest corner of Virginia, and let Dickens do the work he was built for. Damon Fields, called Demon, gets born on the floor of a single-wide to a…
Ani Katz
Caroline has a newborn, no sleep, and a husband who’s finally landed a job at a Big Tech outfit called Corridor, doing work he won’t talk about for money that fixes everything. He suggests a summer on Haven, the private…
Amitav Ghosh
Calcutta, 1969. A three-year-old girl in a strict vegetarian household announces she wants fish for lunch. She’s never had it, never seen it in the house. She says she remembers another life, a mud house by a river, a different…
