Book Reviews

Tracy Chevalier's new novel follows a woman left alone after her fiance and brother died in World War I. She decides to make her mark on the world by joining a guild of embroiderers at a cathedral.

Shaun Hamill's new novel uses the lens of horror to examine the ways we interact and fail to interact with each other, and the way a family can be held together by the very things that tear it apart.

James Verini's book will stand up with some of the best war reporting, as he takes an unblinking look at the dirtiest kind of battle — urban combat — and the human wreckage it leaves in its wake.

In Kevin Barry's grim but compassionate new novel, two weary Irish ex-crooks sit waiting in a run-down Spanish ferry terminal, waiting for one man's estranged daughter who may or may not show up.

Attica Locke returns to the world of Highway 59 in Heaven, My Home, which finds Texas Ranger Darren Mathews dealing with the disappearance of the young son of an imprisoned white supremacist leader.

In her first essay collection, Rachel Cusk writes like someone who has been burned and has reacted not with self-censorship but with a doubling-down on clarity.

Nell Zink is a very funny writer, but the comedy never quite works in her new novel, which follows two aging punks and their daughter, from the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the '80s to D.C. today.

Paul Kingsnorth moved to a small farm in Ireland to be closer to the land and to reconnect with the essence of being. Instead of contentment, he found that it was tough to find meaning in writing.

Arriving the year before an election that could set healthcare and disability policy for decades, Anne Boyer's memoir warns us of the human costs of any system that prioritizes profit over lives.