The ugly duckling who transforms into a swan is a common trope in literature and pop culture — Eva Leigh turns it upside down in My Fake Rake, which features a shy, quiet hero who gets made over.
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Our kids' books columnist Juanita Giles has a secret: Her kids don't care about Harry Potter. But they do like Mike Johnston's relatably hapless boy wizard Wick, star of Confessions of a Dork Lord.
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Turkish author Burhan Sönmez's quiet, subtle fourth novel, about a man who wakes up in the hospital with complete amnesia, is deeply concerned with the linkages between memory and the body.
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Naomi Kritzer's new novel takes off from her award-winning story about an AI that loves cats. It's a wild, rollicking tale with a gritty truth at its core: You never know who you're talking to online.
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Robert Harris' genre-bending new book at first appears to take place in a medieval setting — and then you realize the young priest at its center is holding a cracked, defunct, centuries-old iPhone.
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Kristen Richardson traces the history of the practice, with firsthand accounts from diaries and letters, finding political strife, social upheaval, and machinations aiming to keep out "undesirables."
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Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch reveal the hows and whys of the whirlwind they uncorked by commissioning Christopher Steele to investigate Donald Trump's activities in Russia.
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Lance Rubin's new novel follows an aspiring young comedian as she navigates the rough waters of romance, improv and her father's failing health, with plenty of laughs to light the darker moments.
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Dexter Palmer's new novel is based on the strange true story of a woman who confounded the medical and scientific establishments of 18th century England by claiming she'd given birth to rabbits.
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Journalist Michael Powell's book is about basketball the same way that Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights is about football — sports are the ostensible focus, but the real interest is the community.
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Johannes Anyuru's unusual speculative mystery They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears follows two seemingly ordinary (at first) Swedish citizens dealing with the aftermath of a shooting.
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Buzzfeed's Heidi Blake fails to support a dubious argument, but the book is worth reading for its recap of more than a dozen murder and suspicious death stories during a two-decade period.
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This month, cozy up to a bunch of pro ballplayers who end up solving their relationship hassles by reading romance, a gender-flipped classic rom-com and an intrepid Victorian lady ghostbuster.
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In Benjamin Markovits' new novel, a far-flung family reunites in their home town of Austin for Christmas, bringing all their baggage. And while it's an emotional book, it never descends into pathos.
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Claire North's new book starts with a doctor witnessing an atrocity in Africa in 1884, but becomes a spy thriller, a horror story, a supernatural mystery and an indictment of capitalism and empire.
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Connor Willumson's graphic novel follows the trail of a mysterious athlete, or possibly an actor — gawky, pale, never takes his mirror shades off — running through the desert outside Las Vegas.
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President Trump, we are told in this soon-to-be-published book, has destroyed the guardrails thoughtful people tried to erect around him. Further, he has banished nearly all those thoughtful people.
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In their new novel, Kacen Callender builds a vast, immersive landscape based on the colonial history of the Caribbean, but it's their morally conflicted heroine who will really hook readers.
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In the '70s David Rosenhan and seven "pseudopatients" went undercover in mental health wards. Their resulting article rocked the psychiatric world. But Susannah Cahalan struggled to confirm the facts.
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Saud Alsanousi's novel follows a group of Kuwaiti kids growing up in the 1980s — then jumps to a near future torn by sectarian violence. It's a resonant book that asks more questions than it answers.
(Image credit: Petra Mayer/NPR)
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