13 books
Kevin Fedarko
The Grand Canyon runs 277 river miles and has no trail from one end to the other, so walking it means about 750 miles of route-finding along ledges between the rim and the river, in country where water can be…
Jen Beagin
Greta is 46, broke, and living in a half-ruined Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York, with a beekeeper and a bunch of bees in the walls. She has a job transcribing the sessions of a local sex-and-relationship coach, which means…
Rachel Kushner
Sadie Smith is a hired spy — ex-federal, now freelance, working for clients she never meets. Her job is to get inside a commune of radical farmers in southwest France and push them into doing something illegal enough to jail…
Melissa Broder
A woman drives out of Los Angeles to a Best Western in the high desert, supposedly to work on her novel, actually to get away from her father, who’s been in the ICU for months and died and been brought…
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…
David Szalay
István is fifteen, new in town, living with his mother in a flat on a Hungarian housing estate, and he doesn’t know how to talk to anybody. The married woman across the hall, closer to his mother’s age than his,…
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…
Jason Matthews
Dominika is back in Moscow, promoted, and now spying for the Americans from inside the SVR while being personally noticed by Putin, who appears as himself throughout. The operational thread runs to Vienna and to an Iranian nuclear program, and…
Jason Matthews
Dominika Egorova is a ballerina whose career ends with an injury, and her uncle in Russian intelligence gets her into Sparrow School, where the state trains officers in seduction as tradecraft. Her assignment is a young CIA officer in Helsinki…
Kevin Fedarko
In June 1983 the snowpack came off the Rockies faster than anyone predicted and Glen Canyon Dam started to come apart, spillways cavitating, plywood bolted onto the top to hold the reservoir back. With the Grand Canyon closed to boats…
Margareta Magnusson
Marie Kondo pushed me, and Magnusson made me jump—that and having to fill two Dumpsters with junk when my dad died. Döstädning is a real Swedish word and a real practice: Going through your things while you’re still able, so…
Jason Matthews
The last of the trilogy, finished as Matthews was dying. Russian intelligence has a mole of its own, in place for decades and about to be appointed to run the CIA, and Dominika is the only person who can identify…
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A short book — essay length, illustrated — built on one plant. The serviceberry ripens in June and everything eats it: Birds, bears, people. Kimmerer uses it to lay out what she calls a gift economy, the way it works…
