As the October days shorten, it's a good time to curl up with a romance novel — this month, we're featuring stories about people who defy traditional expectations to find their happy-ever-afters.
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Axton Betz-Hamilton was 12 when her family's mail began disappearing. Her memoir details what follows and, when she discovers the culprit, the painful process of collecting the pieces of her past.
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Elizabeth Hand's new historical thriller has a compelling main character and vivid, carefully drawn settings — but its treatment of the story's murderous villain leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.
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Legendary underground cartoonist Kim Deitch's new book is packed with monkeys, cartoon magpies, and even Jesus; it starts with an account of killing time after eye surgery and gets wilder from there.
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Author Michael Newton waxes rhapsodic in his new book about a century of acting, with a special fondness for performances about performance; it's taken for granted how much we love movies.
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Known for the punch of her columns, The New York Times' Gail Collins sprinkles conversational, sardonic asides throughout No Stopping Us Now in an effort to keep the decades-long hike spry.
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As a teen, Adrienne Brodeur helped her mother keep a long-term affair a secret. In her memoir, she writes of realizing that being her mother's confidant didn't equal the unconditional love she sought.
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Richard Bell's true tale details how even as the Underground Railroad ferried enslaved people north towards freedom, free black people vanished from northern cities to be sold into plantation slavery.
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O'Brien's 19th novel is based on the real story of the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist group Boko Haram in 2014. It's a painful and essential read that ends on a hopeful yet realistic note.
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Ten years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, where ornery Olive is learning about compassion, connection, and her own self.
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Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, revered experts on the Russian secret service, give the book a credibility most others on Russian clandestine operations lack — and they also change the optics.
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The author of the magisterial work A Short History of Nearly Everything turns his sights inside, but without the magic touch of the past that made his very big books transcend the common textbook.
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Extremely personal, emotionally gritty, and unabashedly honest, Saeed Jones' memoir somehow manages a perfect balance between love and violence, hope and hostility, transformation and resentment.
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Deborah Levy's new book considers themes of objectification, betrayal and focus, centered on a historian who goes to East Berlin and finds himself both the observer and the observed.
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John Hornor Jacobs' new book combines two novellas that stake his claim to the territory of cosmic horror. Both gorgeously written and unsettlingly conceived, they dig at how fragile our humanity is.
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Author and poet Brynne Rebele-Henry transplants the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice to modern-day Texas, for a wrenching tale of two young women whose love lands them in a religious re-education camp.
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In her new book, Heidi Heilig continues the tale of family, rebellion and necromancy begun in For a Muse of Fire. Heilig tackles difficult issues deftly, and sets up readers for a rousing conclusion.
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The book ties the killing of his story on Harvey Weinstein's alleged sexual misconduct to a pattern of harassment and abuse within NBC — including payouts and rape allegations against Matt Lauer.
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In WHAM!, the singer-songwriter reminds readers of Michael's songwriting genius, often overlooked by pop-averse critics and taken for granted by listeners who gorged on the hooky riches of the '80s.
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Megan Phelps-Roper, who first picketed against homosexuality with her family at age 5, writes of facing feelings of guilt. In her memoir she says of her family, "losing them was the price of honesty."
(Image credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
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