Book Reviews

You may not really be able to leave the house right now, but of course fiction can take you all over the world. Here are three novels that will help you escape — to Japan, to Portugal and to Spain.

There is a lot of detail amassed in the CNN analyst's book that even Trump investigation junkies won't have seen, much having to do with behind-the-scenes strategizing and negotiating by lawyers.

Yiyun Li's new book — about a woman looking back on her life by annotating the diary of her late ex-lover — plays with both Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire and Li's own previous work.

The search for answers in this nonfiction anthology edited by Sarah Weinman is one of many cohesive elements that make the collection land among the best true crime books of the year.

The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die, by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, centers on an Indian family haunted by a jealous ghost. And S. A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland is a noir thriller — with muscle cars.

Drafted soon after "the global humbling" of COVID began and completed in the days after George Floyd's murder, these personal essays capture the author's reflections during a time outside of time.

Cherie Dimaline's new novel seems small in scope — it's about a woman who loses her husband and is determined to bring him back, nothing more than that — but it's rich, tightly written and powerful.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores the relationship between trauma, agency, and voice as she excavates the lingering effects of her mother's murder upon her life.

In framing Tomine's life trajectory via professional and personal setbacks and moments of mortification, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist becomes mesmerizing, funny, and deeply honest.

Alaya Dawn Johnson's new novel is set in New York on the eve of World War II, in a world where a few lucky (well, not that lucky) people are gifted with "saints' hands," that give them strange skills.