Made-Up Books

In her long and well-traveled life, Han Suyin, the physician daughter of a Chinese father and a Belgian mother, wrote mostly about Asia, but in 1955 she published this very British gem of a novel, tel... (Tom)

"Courage," "Hate," "Longing," "Trust": I don't whether these feelings translate exactly from their Polish equivalents, but, judging from the irrepressible and distinctive personalities of Aleksandra Z... (Tom)

One of the challenges for a writer of short stories is to resist the tidiness that their compact form seems to demand, and evoke the full messiness of life while still telling a tale. Messy is somethi... (Tom)

I made the mistake of beginning The Wall on the first day of a trip, and throughout the week my mind was constantly drawn back to thinking about the book and wondering what was going to happen next. O... (Haley)

Little Witch Hazel's year starts with spring, but its four seasonal tales circle 'round and can be read in any direction. The Bellingham-based Wahl's lush and cheery illustrations are quickly making h... (Tom)

You just need to pick up this book of poetry, Hill's sixteenth or so collection, to see what it is and whether you might like it. The poems are tiny—two or four or six lines long—grouped in series abo... (Tom)

My glib line on this novel is, "Like Rachel Cusk, if she liked people," but that doesn't really do this book (or the great Cusk) justice. Like Cusk, Govinden, a British novelist hardly known over here... (Tom)

Told from dual perspectives—from Benny and from "the Book" itself—young Benny's story begins when his father is killed in a senseless accident and he begins hearing the voices of inanimate objects. Mu... (Anika)

Satarchayan, the narrator of this autobiographical novel first published in India in the late '30s, is not your usual hero: he reminds me of the naive Captain Delano through whose wide, half-seeing ey... (Tom)

Taking a cloud home is more complicated than you might think: you have to make sure to water it (but not too much!), be ready for surprise downpours or even thunderstorm tantrums, and give them all th... (Tom)

VanderMeer has created such an atmospheric and foreboding landscape in Area X, and I found myself drawn deeper and deeper into it by the beauty and mystery there. Instead of seizing up with dread or s... (Anika)

In 2019, Sandra Newman published a novel, The Heavens, that landed on my year's best list, a book that "asks profound questions about what kind of world we want to live in and what lengths we'll go to... (James)

Sometimes I pick up a book and I just know we're going to get along. This sweet YA novel ticked so many of my boxes. Positive mental health rep? Check. A post-graduation road trip with surprising dive... (Anika)

This punchy work of graphic nonfiction reads like the best of stand-up comedy in its presentation of the feminist history of "the female genitalia." It highlights the absurd and infuriating; for insta... (Anika)

I was already a fan of Emma Straub’s fiction before I picked up This Time Tomorrow, but now I’m a superfan. This time-travel fantasy was pitch perfect: sweet without being cloying, sad without being a... (Nancy)

Phinney Tiny Cedric In the land of unintended consquences, when a pint-sized king banishes everyone taller than him from his castle the result is: a castle full of babies! The result for the reader is... (Tom)

Where are you, in this little novel? From its subtitle, you can tell you are in the next century, and from the description on the back (and, slowly, from the reports within) you learn you are in a spa... (Tom)

With romance novels replacing their Fabio-licious covers with cute cartoony illustrations, it's refreshing to see Vladimir stepping boldly, winkingly, into the void. And the winking continues inside.... (Tom)

I tend to avoid sci-fi, but when I heard that John Wyndham—a grandparent of the genre—had written a novel considered an example of “cozy catastrophe,” well, resistance was futile. Along with the Engli... (Liz)

For a book with a premise (and a cover!) as darkly chilling as this one's—a dystopian England in which art, and those who make it, are destroyed by roving mobs and vague official authorities—They is c... (Tom)

For those of us fans of Hild, Griffith's beloved historical epic set in early Britain, who can't wait until its sequel, Menewood, arrives next spring, this little adventure is the ideal appetizer to h... (Tom)

Poets, with their gifts for compression, rhythm, and (sometimes even these days) rhyme, would seem like natural picture-book writers, and Young, the poetry editor of the New Yorker and the new directo... (Tom)

Elizabeth Zott is my new hero. As a scientist in the 1960s, she has to contend with ingrained sexism not just in the world in general, but especially in the world of science, where her male colleagues... (Doree)

Those of you (and there are many) who've encountered the previous volumes of the Barrøy Chronicles, The Unseen or White Shadow, will not need me to say anything about this new book other than It's her... (James)

Comparison is the thief of this artistic, anti-capitalist, homesteading young mother's joy when she starts comparing the mundanity of her own lived life in rural Vermont to the highlight reel of her N... (Anika)

I might express the strangeness of this novel by saying that the extensive footnotes about a misguided thinker named de Selby, who believed, among other things, that night is caused by "accumulations... (Tom)

Here’s the pitch: a soap opera about local government with hints of Middlemarch and Peyton Place. Well. You’d forgive a publisher for taking a pass, but this 1937 novel was an instant bestseller, adap... (Liz)

Corey Ann Haydu is one of my favorite YA authors, and I eagerly snagged an advance copy of this novel-in-verse as soon as I laid eyes on it. In Lawless Spaces, Mimi, fifteen-turning-sixteen, grapples... (Anika)

As soon as Mina came into the store, we knew we'd have to send it to our Phinney by Post Kids subscribers. Forsythe's lush illustration and the deadpan humor of his story of a worried mouse daughter a... (Tom)

I'm often skeptical when new books I haven't read yet are compared to books and media I've already consumed and loved; I've too often been disappointed before by promises unfulfilled. That said, I've... (Anika)

I love to read novels about libraries, bookstores, or authors, especially if there’s a kernel of historical truth in there. Nina de Gramont’s new novel, The Christie Affair, imagines what really happe... (Doree)

Within a few paragraphs, I knew I was in good hands. The hands of a writer at the top of her game, exhibiting perfect control without apparent effort. The story is set in late-1960’s London and follow... (Liz)

It’s rare that I find a book of short stories that really works for me, but when an advance copy of this collection showed up with local author Kim Fu’s name on it, I had a good feeling. I was lucky e... (Anika)

One of the best things a fairy tale can do is take a bizarre premise and make it seem natural, following wherever its strange rules lead. What would happen, for example, if a childless royal couple ha... (Tom)

There’s a literary True Crime wave cresting in 2022 and it is Meta: teeming with books of all types that dissect our long obsession with the genre. Centuries before Penny Dreadfuls were condemned for... (Liz)

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We can all use a reminder to be gentle with ourselves, and Living with Viola by Rosena Fung showcases this in a beautifully illustrated middle grade graphic novel. Lovable sixth-grader Livy Tong strug... (Haley)

For fans of 2018’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, I give you The Maid by Nita Prose. Protagonist Molly Gray is also ... different. She’s exceedingly good at her job as a maid at... (Doree)

The only thing more impressive than an author conjuring a realistic world and three-dimensional characters from thin air is when they manage to do so in only 114 pages. Let's peer for a moment into th... (Haley)

Does the cover of Time Is a Flower make you think of an early '80s jazzercise VHS tape, or a late '70s Gail Sheehy bestseller? Open it anyway, and you'll find a wonderfully evocative and open-ended ap... (Tom)

Even during their own lives, the women, men, and children entangled in the Salem witch trials were caught between reality and the imagination, and as their lives have been further mythologized since,... (Tom)

The story of Matrix kept reminding me, strangely, of its fellow National Book Award finalist, Laird Hunt's Zorrie, which also compresses the full scope of a woman's life, cloistered and full of work a... (Tom)

When she was six, in 1913, Babb's father brought their family from their Oklahoma town to an isolated homestead in eastern Colorado, a sod house dug out of a dry land, with the nearest water two miles... (Tom)

It may not be the best time of year for camping, but Mann's picture book, a recent winner of the Washington State Book Award, is a warm, funny, and relatable story of just what its title says, young E... (Tom)

There are few writers whose every book I know I'll read, but, two books in, Atticus Lish is one of them. His debut novel, Preparations for the Next Life, grabs your lapels with its story of two people... (Tom)

As much as I liked The War for Gloria (see above), when I finished it I needed an antidote, and this sweet little book was the perfect prescription. When I say that it's a novel about an Apple repair... (Tom)

Have you ever, from desperation or inertia, had a job so terrible that, perhaps most terribly, caught you in a trap of service and subsistence that left you no choice but to wake up and do it again? L... (Tom)

Annabelle and her son Benny have a lot to deal with, emotionally and otherwise. Her hold on her job is tenuous while her accumulating piles of stuff have a choking grip on their household; he's suffer... (James)

The story of this lovely novel is simple: will the Stevenses, a lower-middle-class family of five from the outskirts of London, enjoy their holidays? It's no small matter: their two weeks at the seasi... (Tom)

Cobwebs? Check. Creaky doors? Check. Squeaky stairs, rattling pipes, flickering lights? Check, check, and check. What house wants to be haunted, because who would want to live in a haunted house? Well... (Tom)