Books

Margaret Atwood's long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale brings readers new voices (and one familiar one) and a whole new view of Gilead, the dystopian theocracy that was once the United States.

Atwood made the list for her sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, and Rushdie for his reimagining of Don Quixote. Chigozie Obioma, Elif Shafak, Lucy Ellmann and Bernardine Evaristo round out the finalists.

Etgar Keret at his best can be brilliant, and some of the stories in his new collection are nearly perfect, but over all it's an uneven read, weighed down by pointless whimsy and unearned pessimism.

Tash Aw's beautifully written new novel focuses on class issues in contemporary Malaysia, where his compelling protagonist is struggling to lead a quiet life after a long-ago murder conviction.

As a kid in Tucson in the 1950s, anthropologist and poet Renato Rosaldo ran with a crew called the Chasers. 50 years later, he interviewed them at a reunion and created prose poems in their voices.

Minette Walters' sequel to The Last Hours finds her medieval villagers beginning to deal with the fact that they've survive the Black Death — and what that means for what's left of society.

We're all different and that's good, says the U.S. Supreme Court justice. Her new children's book about embracing diversity portrays kids of all abilities working together to create a gorgeous garden.

E.R. Ramzipoor's novel tells the story a group of resisters in Belgium during World War II who lampooned the Nazis by putting out a satirical edition of the newspaper Le Soir, then a Nazi mouthpiece.