Made-Up Books

Can you be nostalgic for a past that's not yours? Stealth is saturated with the sensations and physical details of Cairo in the 1940s, in the lower-middle-class apartments and streets through which th... (Tom)

Why just eat a slice of watermelon on a hot summer day when you could swim in a giant watermelon pool? This quirky and imaginative picture book was a huge Korean hit and is now available for the first... (Haley)

"Secrets and desires are at the heart of our selfhood, and no one can be your best friend if you don’t let them see who you are." Girl's Girl so perfectly and evocatively captures the emotional highs... (Anika)

If you know that Harriet Clark is the daughter of Judy Clark, a former Weather Underground founder given a life sentence for her role in a murderous armored-car robbery, you might expect that her firs... (Tom)

Russell is eight years old: small, stubborn, resourceful, and a flirt with waitresses five times his age. He's also so terrified of his cruel older brother that he wanders the aisles of Fred Meyer at... (Tom)

This book could use a second trigger warning. The first was on the back flap of my copy where I read that a “sexual assault” sets the plot in motion. A more useful one might be, “Assumptions and expec... (Liz)

From The Borrowers to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, it's fun to imagine what it would be like to experience the world as a tiny creature. 102 joins the tradition of shrinking down its protagonist in a cre... (Haley)

“I'd assumed I would step into the role naturally since the role itself was natural, was nature. But nothing felt natural about this." At Yesteryear Ranch, Natalie Heller Mills has constructed the pe... (Shane)

As Liz, who loved this book too—it was her second-favorite Booker nominee last year—said to me before I read it, it's not doing anything that hasn't been done before, with its plot of adultery and sub... (Tom)

David Nicholls's latest novel is wonderful company if you enjoy a good, long hike and a slow-burn romance. Marnie is a 38-year-old divorcee who is nearly agoraphobic since becoming a self-employed cop... (Anika)

On the face of it, Lerner's fourth novel seems, after his big, and more chewily traditional, third novel, The Topeka School, to be a return to the more elliptical style of his first two, Leaving the A... (Tom)

A bizarre and beautiful take on the zombie story, where our narrator is the zombie. She is grieving her former life, including her own name and the love of her life; while her human memories have larg... (Anika)

“It’s strange to know that whenever I remember myself at fifteen, I’ll think of this.” Reading My Dark Vanessa felt like my skin was shrinking—like I was suddenly not enough to cover my body. There w... (Shane)

In a usual crime story, the consequences of a crime, if there are any, descend in a heap at the end, as justice is (or isn't) served. In this novel, an autobiographical debut from 1972, the consequenc... (Tom)

Bike is nervous for her first day as a rental bicycle. What if no one wants a ride? Her fears are soon put to rest as her busy day begins. She takes a baker to Pike Place Market, a dad and baby to the... (Haley)

“My god, to be nothing but a flicker of light.” I am learning that there is nothing so devastating as a Chloe Michelle Howarth novel. Shrouded in the fog of a family’s shame, the O’Leary siblings des... (Shane)

“I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” I’m not ashamed to say that I was moved to finally read Wuthering Heights in large part because of its (incredibly camp) movie tie-in c... (Shane)

Opossum Topsy plans to prepare a pancake feast to welcome her bear friend LouAnn out of hibernation. But each time she plates a steaming stack of tender and crispy pancakes, they disappear as soon as... (Haley)

To preface, this is the fourth glowing review of an Emily Austin novel I've had the pleasure of writing in the past five years. Yes, I'm a fan. Yes, she's a favorite. In this one, our protagonist Darc... (Anika)

The first book I finished this year—published in Germany in 1951 but recently translated into English by NYRB Classics—does two things at once. It immersed me so deeply in pre-WWII, bourgeois Jewish B... (Liz)

This imaginative picture book is set in a small village where the legend of a "night giant" causes speculation and rumors among the residents. Is it the mischievous giant who stacks the park benches l... (Haley)

Shanbhag's debut here, Ghachar Ghochar, was one of the first novels written in Kannada, a language spoken by tens of millions in southwestern India, to be translated into English. His second, also tra... (Tom)

I was charmed into reading this novel by its first pages, in which a self-sabotaging former ad exec revels in the slushy city beauty of a Minnesota December as he trudges to his weekly group therapy a... (Tom)

The arrival of full shelves of Persephone Books was one of the highlights of our year, so it seemed appropriate to close 2025 by choosing a Persephone book—in one of their slightly less expensive but... (Tom)

"If you make a call on a banana phone, who will answer?" The boy in this picture book finds out when he strikes up a long-distance friendship with a gorilla. Emily Hughes's soft-looking illustrations... (Haley)

Emily Jane’s first novel was about aliens, her second about sea monsters, and her third is about, as the title makes clear, werewolves. In each of her books, Jane uses supernatural beings to fully plu... (Doree)

The concept of Buzz! Boom! Bang! is simple: look at each page and make the noise you think the illustration would sound like. But once you start to "clip clop," "boink," and "hiss," you may find yours... (Haley)

The public drama of Penelope Fitzgerald's life came late, as she burst into literary fame in her sixties after years of poverty and quiet desperation. She mined those private years for much of her fic... (Tom)

I remain intrigued that the same person wrote the plain-spoken farmer's memoir, A Garlic Testament, that was our January Phinney by Post pick this year and this brilliant piece of weirdo fiction, but... (Tom)

Tuck Everlasting is one of my top ten favorite books of all time, so it's hardly surprising that this beautiful illustrated adaptation will be one of my top ten reads of the year. The original tells t... (Anika)

I am slowly catching up with the genius of Joseph Roth. After the multigenerational sweep of his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, this little novel reads like a minor chamber piece, but in some ways i... (Tom)

Over the more than five decades spanned by this lovingly curated collection, Carol Emshwiller held to something distinctly Emshwillerian in the stories she invented: out of the most straightforward la... (Tom)

In Cat Nap, a sleepy kitten follows a mouse into a Metropolitan Museum of Art poster. From there, the chase is on, through ancient Egyptian carvings, Mexican ceramics, a medieval prayer book, and more... (Haley)

In addition to writing the exquisite little novel A Month in the Country, which ensorcelled our staff last year, wrote a number of other little novels, and even published them himself, in oddball edit... (Tom)

It has all the ingredients for my ideal comfort read: a family tree, a house with a name, and a story that spans at least a century. As one plotline unfolds over two weeks in 1960, tales of earlier ge... (Liz)

Silvia Borando's Short Stories is flash fiction for kids. Each of these eleven cheeky stories is just a few sentences long, with the simple illustrations adding to the visual gags. Night falls while a... (Haley)

The Art of a Lie is my favorite book of 2025 so far! I was drawn in by the main character's eighteenth-century confectionery shop and treated to a page-turner full of more twists and turns than a Hitc... (Haley)

Aboard the Indian sleeper train, everyone is getting ready for bed. But one little girl is too excited to sleep. She thinks it might help to try to remember all the places she has slept in the past, l... (Haley)

I had never heard of Rosalyn Drexler before I opened this novel, published in 1972 and reissued this year as the first book from the cool new imprint Hagfish, but she seems like a heck of a woman. Mos... (Tom)

A light touch in fiction can be the hardest to master. Gary Shteyngart has always been overloaded with talent, especially with a kind of manic clairvoyance that sees about six months ahead of whenever... (Tom)

“Now is the time between birth and slaughter. Another Summer has arrived.” Summer has come to Crossmore, and Lucy is waiting for some anything to happen. She’s waiting to love her best friend, Martin,... (Shane)

Recently I sifted through our new releases in search of—well, I wasn't sure. A certain kind of book I knew I needed without quite knowing what it was. And this little novel, I realized almost as soon... (Tom)

Mama Owl unexpectedly needs to leave home, but whooo will help put her ten little owls to bed? Readers get the chance to play babysitter by showing the mischievous little owls how to hop and flap to b... (Haley)

Some writers have such fun with our shared language—stretching it, wandering down its more neglected byways, reveling in its regionalisms—that it makes you wonder why so many of their peers are conten... (Tom)

There are a lot of folks in the Northwest who want to get away from it all. One of them is Rhys Kinnick, an ex-journalist who pissed off his family, chucked out his smartphone, and disappeared into th... (Tom)

The young protagonist in Anything tells us she can wish for very hard things—a rainbow in her room or the biggest slice of pizza in the whole world! But wishes (or "anythings," as she calls them) only... (Haley)

At the Window is a celebration of the people we become accustomed to seeing throughout our daily routine (especially in a neighborhood like Phinney Ridge). You may never exchange a word, but there is... (Haley)

In Dungeon Crawler Carl, Carl’s world collapses. Literally. Every interior on Earth with a roof is collapsed and absorbed into the 18-Level World Dungeon. Part Hunger Games, part role-playing game, Th... (Shane)

Would you prefer never to relive your awkward teen fumbling again, or would you jump at the chance to repeat those misspent moments again and again until you finally perfect connecting with the person... (Tom)

I hesitate to use an overworked booksellers’ phrase, but I can’t get around the fact that this 1947 novel epitomizes the “rediscovered gem.” It’s a 170-page story about a woman, a family, and a villag... (Liz)