Made-Up Books

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)

Nearly every discussion of Chesnutt's 1901 novel, only recently acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of its time, focuses, understandably, on the real event it was inspired by: the white riot in Wi... (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)

This short story collection does what Yuknavitch does best—asks you to trade your life for a book that is just strange and beautiful enough for you to make the deal. I floated through these stories th... (Erica)

I loved Greenwell's first book, What Belongs to You, the elegant and intense story of an American's desire for a Bulgarian man, and I love this one too. It's also the story of a young American in Bulg... (Tom)

Twenty-one years and five books after the release of his exceptional first historical mystery, River of Darkness, Airth continues to devise new investigations for his original Scotland Yard-trained sl... (Jeff)

Yoshitake's Still Stuck, the story of a boy who can't get his shirt off, is one of our very favorite picture books, and in his latest, a child is confronted by an even more common, and more challengin... (Tom)

Famously, Gibson predicted our future in books like Neuromancer, and then our present caught up to him. Fittingly, his current loose trilogy, of which Agency is the second book, is set both in the fut... (Tom)

We loved the art and story of Mora's first picture book, Thank You, Omu, but might like her new one even more. It's a simple tale of a shared routine between mother and daughter in a busy life, of mod... (Tom)

This book never goes where you expect it to. Is it a satire of '80s SoCal self-empowerment? Is it a post-nuclear-war story of human apocalypse and survival? Both? Neither? The real story, for me, is i... (Tom)

There are counting books, and then there are counting books! With elegance and imagination and, finally, an extremely long foldout page, Völker demonstrates, in concrete terms, the difference between... (Tom)

You could be forgiven for wondering, for the first half of this novel, why we have it shelved in the Crime & Mystery section, as you get to know two families, the Parks and the Matthewses, in cont... (Tom)

A Big Mooncake for Little Star was my favorite picture book last year, and Lin has followed it with a companion book that is a perfect match for its feeling that you have stepped into a timeless fable... (Tom)

The buzz surrounding this award-winning French author’s first English translation—the saga of a family of pig farmers—always includes a warning along the lines of “You’ll never eat bacon again!” Well,... (Liz)

While we wait for her weird and wonderful collaboration with Maurice Sendak, A Hole Is to Dig, to return from the out-of-print limbo to which it's been inexplicably banished, we have this never-before... (Tom)

To say that Mary Gaitskill is the ideal author to translate the #MeToo movement into fiction doesn't really do justice to the subtlety of her work, or the complexity of the movement. But nevertheless,... (Tom)