Book Reviews

Katie Kitamura's new novel follows an unnamed woman working as a translator at The Hague who works with war criminals — but can readers really know a narrator who remains resolutely unknown?

Claire North's new Notes from the Burning Age is set far in the future — but the titular burning age is our own, an age of waste and exploitation from which only fragments of knowledge remain.

The author has gifts as a writer: a novelistic eye for scene and detail, an ear for dramatic dialogue. His story keeps moving, free of constraints common to courtroom lawyers or newspaper reporters.

There's something that feels impossible about leaving behind the place in which we slunk our way through the last year plus. Until Proven Safe takes us to the places others lingered through time.

Nisha Sharma's new YA novel follows two Indian American teenagers who overcome differing backgrounds to find love while prepping for an important dance competition — a perfect teen movie setup.

Becky Chambers comes down to earth for her new series, about a world where humans and robots diverged so long ago that now each group is just a myth to the other, and robots propagate themselves.

By haranguing all who will listen, in interviews or rally rants, Donald Trump even now is demonstrating his abiding and preternatural confidence in his own persuasiveness.

Now newly reissued, Gloria Naylor's 1982 novel-in-stories painted a group portrait of seven Black women living on a dingy street in an unnamed city, and the systematic racism they faced.

Sword Stone Table brings together a group of authors from marginalized groups to re-imagine the legends of King Arthur for new eras, places and players, inviting all to sit at the Round Table.

In his second novel, Anuk Arudpragasam returns to the subject of Sri Lanka's civil war — this time to examine the ways people live amidst the aftermath of war, and to memorialize the lives lost.