Made-Up Books

One response to the complexity of explaining the Haitian Revolution is to narrow the scope, as Hazareesingh (see above) does by focusing on Toussaint. Despite his tinier canvas and his younger audienc... (Tom)

Again Again both was and wasn’t the young adult love story I expected. Adelaide’s summer can and does go a myriad of different ways, in a number of possible worlds, perhaps thanks to her introduction... (Anika)

Jess Walter's fiction has covered comedy, history, crime, character study, and more, but I don't think he's ever put so much into one book before. His most recent novel centers on two brothers, Rye an... (James)

I’ll admit the set-up is not promising even in the best of times: two upper-middle-aged/class friends, one with cancer, the other caring for her. BUT STICK WITH ME! In the highly capable hands of one... (Liz)

The strangest and most baffling book I've read this year—and one of the best—is shelved in our Middle Reader section. Alan Garner is a legend in the UK but much less well-known here, and The Owl Servi... (Tom)

As many people discover the story of Tevis's The Queen's Gambit through the new Netflix series, I would like to note, somewhat smugly, that Tevis's novel was our very first Phinney by Post selection,...

Akhtar pulls you in with his very first sentences—intellectual and political, but flowing with the energy and intimacy of friendly conversation—and you are off on a ride through post-9/11 America, as... (Tom)

Living in the “castle” are the surviving Blackwood family members: 18-year-old Mary Katherine “Merricat” and her cat, Jonas, 28-year-old Constance, and their old Uncle Julian, who spends his days sitt... (Anika)

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick Hardwick called this book a novel, and it may look to some like a memoir (the life of the "Elizabeth" in it matches of the outline of Hardwick's), but to my mind... (Tom)

Skulls, glorious skulls! You might think of this as a scary Halloween book (it is October, after all), but really it's a wonderfully unscary celebration of that big, well-shaped bone in your head, a "... (Tom)

I was drawn to this novel for two reasons: because it was a surprise hit in the UK last year, from a small publisher I admire, and because it was described as "a nice book about nice people." That mig... (Tom)

You might be drawn into this book by the brilliant bright orange of that rambunctious little fox, set against the pale, windswept Dutch seaside. But then the book opens out into an expansive story tha... (Tom)

Fredrik Backman knows exactly how to break my heart. And he does it just moments after making me snort with laughter. The author of A Man Called Ove and Britt-Marie Was Here ups the comedy in his new... (Doree)

It hasn't been easy to explain why I like this novel so much (Laura and Nancy and the Booker Prize judges do too), but I think it comes down to what it's like to be inside the head of Wallace, the gay... (Tom)

How about some chills to cool you off this summer? Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia fulfills the eerie haunted house genre perfectly. After society girl Noemí receives a strange letter from her... (Haley)

Christian Robinson's name keeps popping up on the covers of our favorite picture books (Gaston, Last Stop on Market Street, and Another, to name a few), and here his sprightly, generous illustrations... (Tom)

Miéville is best known as a baroque and endlessly inventive fantasist, but in this novel he harnesses his imagination to the rules and the spare language of a police procedural, which he turns inside-... (Tom)

I hope it doesn't trivialize last week's New Book of the Week, Erica C. Barnett's memoir of alcoholic blackouts and self-destruction, to say that the humiliating confessions in this book are nearly as... (Tom)

I love historical fiction that focuses on strong female characters, especially when it’s written by Beatriz Williams, who is a master at slowly unfurling connections between characters years apart. He... (Doree)

Remember visiting your friends' houses? This blissfully kooky book carries with it an immediate and probably unintended nostalgia for those carefree days of going from house to house. But the real ple... (Tom)

Within the first few pages of The Vanishing Half, I knew I was reading something special. In this slow-burn novel, twins Desiree and Stella grow up in Mallard, a small black community in segregated Lo... (Anika)

The Jolly Postman, by the British married duo, the Ahlbergs, was a throwback when it was published in the '80s and seems even more so now, but its inventiveness remains, with letters between Mother Go... (Tom)

Old Book of the Week by Andrew Holleran Thomas Wolfe once divided novelists into "putter-inners" (like himself) and "taker-outers," who pared their art down to its bones. This is one of the taker-oute... (Tom)

Sin Eater takes a little-known historical role and expands it in this imaginative novel set in an alternate Elizabethan England. For stealing a loaf of bread, teenage orphan May is forced to become a... (Haley)

The Little Island We usually choose new picture books for Phinney by Post Kids, but when this one—which I had never seen before, even though it was written by Margaret Wise Brown and won a Caldecott i... (Tom)

It seems impossible that this short novel of family life on a remote Norwegian island hasn't been handed down for generations. It feels as much like a document for the ages as it does a piece of conte... (James)

Audiobook of the Week Actress by Anne Enright My usual policy (with a few notable exceptions) is that an audiobook is almost always better when read by the author, who brings, if nothing else, the emo... (Tom)

Are you the sort of person who would choose to read The Road in the middle of a blackout? Then The End of October might be for you! Wright has been justifiably acclaimed for his fearlessly reported ac... (Tom)

When I heard an interview with Jonathan Auxier talking about how many years of historical research he did when writing Sweep, I couldn't wait to dive into his authentic world of Victorian chimney swee... (Haley)

Jessica Vye is a 13-year-old girl living in the North of England during World War II. Yet she maintains that the “violent” experience that shaped her was being told, at the age of 9, by visiting autho... (Anika)

I really think of this as two books. There's the novel itself, a beautiful, thoughtful channeling of the great late-Roman emperor that is graced by an elegant, regal reticence and one of the rare powe... (Tom)

Melchor’s English-language debut is a portrait of a Mexican village as unnerving and entrancing as any painting by Bruegel or Bosch. The scene opens on the village's outskirts, its resident Witch foun... (Liz)

If you think that Etgar Keret, the Israeli master of oddball tales for grownups, might also be pretty good at writing stories for kids, you would be correct. Here he turns the premise of a distracted... (Tom)

In a drought-stricken California town, a teenage girl grows up in thrall to her troubled single mother and a pastor with a cultish power over his flock, struggling to assert autonomy over her mind, so... (James)

These days, when public discourse seems like so much shouting past each other, the last thing you want to read is a fictionalized he-said/she-said about a #metoo moment. BUT! Not many write as lucidly... (Liz)

Great is a retelling of The Great Gatsby as a contemporary YA novel. In this version, Nick Carraway is reimagined as a teenage girl named Naomi Rye, who is spending the summer at her mother’s East Ham... (Anika)

Yes, I know that Station Eleven is one of the most brilliant and entertaining books about a pandemic ever written, but I swear, it's a coincidence that I'm recommending another book by Emily St. John... (James)

Normal People, while a coming-of-age novel about first love, is not a romance. The story is written with insight into two protagonists, Marianne and Connell, which lends a sort of he-said, she-said qu... (Anika)

The House in the Cerulean Sea is a heart-swelling wave of sweetness and hope. Mild-mannered government caseworker Linus Baker is sent on a secret assignment to an island orphanage he's never even hear... (Haley)

Peter Temple launched his career as a novelist (at age 50) with a very enticing sentence, introducing one "Edward Dollery, age forty-seven, defrocked accountant, big spender, and dishonest person." Th... (Tom)

I love to learn things from the books I read, and this book taught me so much—not only about the South Korean island Jeju, its matrifocal society of haenyeo (women divers), and its culture and traditi... (Anika)

As the title promises, this story is a dark one. It is a modern-day Lolita, in which 32-year-old Vanessa is still reckoning with the affair she had at the brave and vulnerable age of 15 with her 42-ye... (Anika)

As anyone who reads kids books out loud knows, not every rhyming picture book has rhymes that really sing. But Colin Meloy, the singer and songwriter of the Decembrists, knows how to compose a singabl... (Tom)

Booksellers geek out devising pithy comparisons that telegraph the feel of one book with the modified title of another. So I gave myself a pat on the back when I realized I had just finished the Hunga... (Liz)

The first book by the Pumphrey brothers has the classic feeling of the old truck (and the way of life) it celebrates, with beautiful pastel prints and a story of technological obsolescence that brings... (Tom)

For so long I've looked forward to trying Patrick O'Brian's famous tales of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and I'm glad I finally did so via Patrick Tull's utterly delightful audio rendi... (Tom)

Many books are bad (I can admit that), some books are good, and a few books are great. Even fewer are great at being more than one kind of book at the same time. Oregon's Emily Winfield Martin has lon... (James)

I’ve noticed more and more people coming into the bookstore asking for a type of fiction the Guardian has recently dubbed "Uplit." Not escapist fluff to help forget reality, but books to reassure them... (Liz)

My favorite book I've read so far this year came out in 1985 and takes place in the late '50s. You may know Segal (I did, at least) from her fantastic kid's book, Tell Me a Mitzi, but boy, she is quit... (Tom)

With its primary colors and interactive premise, The Button Book is not the first picture book to be inspired by (or, alternatively, rip off) Hervé Tullet's modern classic Press Here. But regardless,... (Tom)