Books

Writer Nina MacLaughlin hit her low point producing a listicle of the world's 100 Unsexiest Men. Six years and a lucky Craigslist ad later, she's a carpenter and author of the new memoir Hammer Head.

When Johanna Basford first told her publisher she wanted to draw books for adults — well, she says, "You can imagine how quiet they were." Today, both of her books have become sellout successes.

T. Geronimo Johnson's new novel follows a young man from a small Georgia town who comes home from college with a multicultural crew of friends, and plans for a disruptive (if well-intentioned) prank.

Are the Nordic countries really the utopias they're cracked up to be? NPR's Rachel Martin speaks with Michael Booth about his new book that attempts to answer that question.

Robert Siegel talks to Bill Browder, an American financier who was expelled from post-Soviet Russia and saw an attempt to claim his company devolve into a deadly bureaucratic and legal farce.

In Natalie Babbitt's celebrated classic, a young girl stumbles upon a secret spring and the family the spring has given eternal life to. Babbitt says she wrote the book to help kids understand death.

In the new psychological thriller, Rachel Watson becomes obsessed with a "perfect couple" she sees each day during her commute. When the woman in the couple disappears, Rachel decides to get involved.

In his new memoir, Allen Kurzweil goes looking for his childhood tormentor — and discovers he's served time for involvement in an international fraud scheme so wild and colorful, it could be a movie.

In the first memoir from a prisoner still being held at Guantanamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi tells how he went from his native Mauritania to joining al-Qaida in Afghanistan to the U.S. prison in Cuba.

James Ward's new book stems from a lifelong love of Post-it notes, pencils and paper clips. He tells NPR's Melissa Block that they remind him of his school days, when life was less complicated.