Ali Smith kicks off a seasonally-themed quartet with this ultimately uplifting look at the lifelong friendship between a young woman and her unconventional childhood soulmate, an artistic gay man.
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2017 is turning out to be a year of big change. Critic Craig Teicher highlights some of the poetry that can help guide readers through it.
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Giorgio De Maria's cult novel was first published in Italy in 1977. It's a spooky piece of magical realism that captures a chaotic time in Italian history, starting gently and getting seriously weird.
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Min Jin Lee's sprawling family epic spans decades and two clashing cultures — Korea and Japan. It's honest, unadorned writing that acknowledges horror but ultimately carries a message of hope.
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In Pretending is Lying, Dominique Goblet takes a scruffy, postmodern approach to autobiography, with photographic images and wildly morphing character depictions that question our ideas of truth.
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Nnedi Okorafor's Binti: Home is the second installment in her series following a young woman with grand interstellar dreams, who now must reconcile her university experiences with her home culture.
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Artist Joe Ollman's new The Abominable Mr. Seabrook is a biography of the Lost Generation travel writer (and sadist, alcoholic and cannibal) William Seabrook. But how much Seabrook can you stand?
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Paul Auster's new novel is a departure for the author — 880 pages of flowing prose about four versions of one character, living four mostly-parallel lives. It's sometimes confusing, but never boring.
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In Mur Lafferty's latest, six crewmembers wake up to horror on a malfunctioning spaceship — the artificial gravity is gone, and blood floats in the air. It's up to them to find out what happened.
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Kevin Wilson's new novel is set on a state-of-the-art commune where children don't know who their biological parents are. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the book lives up to its title.
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Kevin Wilson's new novel follows a pregnant teen who joins an experimental commune — but the characters in Perfect Little World never come alive, and the book suffers from an overdose of whimsy.
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Stephanie Garber's quasi-historical young adult novel is one part amusement park, one part Venice and one part game show — but the ending is marred by a muddled message that leaves the story hollow.
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Jonathan Coe's new novel is a black-hearted satire about the crumbling of modern Britain, and the point at which childhood gives way to a cold assessment of the world as it is, not as we dream it.
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Reporter Claudia Rowe documents her fascination with serial killer Kendall Francois in The Spider and the Fly — but the book focuses on Rowe's thoughts and needs at the expense of the victims.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates continues his tangled, philosophical (and big-selling) superhero tale with Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet. Coates' storytelling resonates, but his character can often ramble.
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What price love? In Lara, Anna Pasternak chronicles her famous great-uncle Boris's relationship with his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya — whose connection with the author landed her in the gulags.
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Ayelet Waldman's new memoir describes her experiences with a variant of bipolar disorder, and her attempts to self-medicate with LSD. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls it a "gutsy ... really good story."
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Simon Tolkien's new novel was inspired by his grandfather J.R.R.'s time on the Somme — but in theme, tone and style, it owes more to Charles Dickens than to The Lord of the Rings.
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Katherine Arden's new novel deftly weaves Russian fairy tales with tactile details to create a gorgeously wintry tale of magic, marred slightly by a clunky ending that's clearly setting up sequels.
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Anna Pitoniak's novel follows Evan and Julia, newly-minted Yale graduates trying — and finding it difficult — to make new lives for themselves in New York City on the eve of the crash of 2008.
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