Book Reviews

Julia Franks' debut novel is set in Depression-era North Carolina, where young farm wife Irenie is sneaking off to the woods for moments away from her husband — who's convinced his wife is a witch.

Sylvain Neuvel's debut begins with a young girl who falls into a hole in the ground and is found soon after, sitting on a 20-foot-long mechanical hand. And that's just the (finger) tip of the iceberg.

L.S. Hilton's new book, the first in a trilogy, follows the aptly-named Judith Rashleigh on a wild ride of sex parties, private yachts, and behavior just as shallow and selfish as any male character.

Richard Kadrey kicks off a new series about a magic-immune thief in a magic-soaked Los Angeles with The Everything Box. It's a madcap ride in which the end of humanity is just the beginning.

Steve Toutonghi's new novel imagines an America where people can fuse their psyches together and share a single body — but the story's compelling urgency is sometimes buried in exposition and theory.

Graham Swift's slim, incantatory new novel centers around young Jane, a maid on a rural estate, and the day in 1924 that unexpectedly alters the trajectory of her life.

Andrés Reséndez' new book is a careful and scholarly examination of the enslavement of indigenous people in the Americas. It lays bare a shameful chapter of history, with a clear line to the present.

Chester Brown's new graphic novel is hard to categorize — a work of lay scholarship about prostitution in the Bible that's simultaneously ideosyncratic, meticulous, imaginative and heretical.

Esme Weijun Wang's novel — packed with family secrets, betrayals, a decaying house and a dramatic fire — could have seemed pulpy in lesser hands. But her restrained, beautiful prose makes it work.