Made-Up Books

Over twenty years in the drawing, Berlin covers just a few crucial years in the city's history, from late 1928 to the end of the Weimar Republic in early 1933. Lutes's scope is wide—he marks the major... (Tom)

As far as time-travel goes, Charlotte takes a minimal leap—she only goes forty years into the past. But since she is living in 1958, today’s reader goes back a nice round century. Details about the Gr... (Liz)

One sign of how much Lin's new picture book feels like a timeless classic is how surprising it is to turn to the book's last pages and learn that the fable she tells—of a girl whose nighttime nibbles... (Tom)

Not many kids' books come with a foreword, an introduction (with endnotes), and an afterword, but the reappearance of the only children's book by the great James Baldwin (nearly forgotten after it was... (Tom)

When I started listening to the audiobook edition of French Exit, I thought, "Oh, this narrator [the book is read by Lorna Raver] is a bit much." Well, it turned out she was just right, because French... (Tom)

How could Adrian Simcox have a horse? He lives in town, in a tiny house, and horses are expensive! Chloe's sure that the red-headed dreamer in her class is telling lies, and she makes sure everyone kn... (Tom)

Sometimes a book takes the world by storm and, nearly as quickly, recedes from awareness. Buoyed in part by the drama of its writing and rediscovery (Nemirovsky wrote this fictional account of the Fre... (Tom)

One of my favorite books from last year was the Booker-longlisted Reservoir 13. Although it didn’t win, it was such a phenomenon in Britain that the BBC commissioned McGregor to write a series of comp... (Liz)

Nostalgia time! As I was growing up, there were few books more holy on the shelves of my naturalist mother (or her naturalist mother) than Holling's illustrated tale of a hermit crab making his way in... (Tom)

To say, as Zadie Smith has, that Sabrina is "the best book I have read about our current moment" makes our current moment seem quite grim. (Understandably.) A story of random murder, conspiracy theory... (Tom)

The Gallery turned out to be a masterpiece of WWII literature I wasn’t expecting and didn’t know I needed. Burns alternates brief recollections of his travels in the military bureaucracy trailing the... (Liz)

Summer might feel like it's slipping away already (it does to me!), but we still have a month and a half left till Labor Day, which is plenty of time if you're doing Summer Book Bingo with the Seattle... (Tom)

Liz has already written so well about Outline (and its follow-up, Transit), that I'm not sure what I have to add, but I just want to say that I fully expected to love Outline, and I did love it, fully... (Tom)

Ryan Higgins has a particular empathy for the dilemmas of carnivores. First there was Mother Bruce, a bear who just wanted a nice meal of hard-boiled eggs and ended up with a brood of adoring goslings... (Tom)

Where? Oakland, mostly: the center of a dozen or so lives, all of them Native American by some calculation, though each is working to define that for themselves. They are, in Orange's words, "Urban In... (Tom)

One small pleasure of bookselling is discovering that an old favorite of yours, which you had for some reason assumed was unavailable, is in fact still in print. That was the case recently with this 1... (Tom)

You may remember Shopsin as the author of one of my favorite books of last year, the funny, odd, and wise memoir of her family's Greenwich Village diner, Arbitrary Stupid Goal. Her day job, aside from... (Tom)

In the mathematical fable Flatland, the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world can only see three-dimensional visitors as a flat slice of their true being. That's sometimes how I think of Helen DeWitt... (Tom)

The headline to a review I wrote of this book when it came out in 2004 read, "Caribou Hair Everywhere," and I can't think of three words that better describe it. Raised by a father who moved from the... (Tom)

Plenty of kids' books introduce young readers to colors, but few do what Tamaki's beautiful book does so subtly: show that color depends on perspective (why does blue water turn clear when it runs thr... (Tom)

Why not? Because it's covered in germs, but then again, as it charmingly (or disturbingly, depending on your outlook) explains, so is everything else! Ingeniously combining the content of Elise Gravel... (Tom)

Romy Hall has a son, a past, and the impossible sentence of two life terms plus six years to serve in a remote central California prison, which she's just beginning when this novel opens. If this is a... (Tom)

A bad (well, mostly bad) month in Vera Brosgol's own childhood turns out to be the perfect source for a smart, subtle, and entertaining graphic novel that anyone thrown into a new situation will appre... (Tom)

Settle in quickly when you begin this little book, because it's going to charge out of the gate, whether you're buckled in or not. It begins with a stumble for its main character, Mara, which soon bec... (Tom)

A polar bear on a gelatocycle. A fish on a hydrocycle. An armadillo on a penny farthing (that's a bike too). Mayor Snail on a snazzy little BMX. A giraffe on a very tall unicycle. Everyone in Cycle Ci... (Tom)

In our post-Gone Girl times, when it seems we are in an arms race of narrative unreliability, Araminta Hall gives things a twist of her own, putting her tale in the hands of Mike Hayes, a self-made Lo... (Tom)

An insurance scam (or two or three), lovers working at an out-of-the-way diner: the elements of James M. Cain's greatest crime novels are in plain sight, and Lippman clearly had some fun putting them... (Tom)

"It's my birthday. So boo! I hate all of you." "Go away! No! Stay!" This is not your average birthday picture book, but I'll bet it reflects the true roiling, ambivalent emotions of many omf the toddl... (Tom)

It's rare that words feel as embodied as they do in Nguyen's poems: he imagines himself in the bodies of others (his mother's, a blond boy's), he takes other bodies into his own. It brings an intimate... (Tom)

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)

White's third novel for children may not be as thoroughly enshrined as his first two (Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web), but in our house it's the most beloved, thanks to the audiobook, read by White... (Tom)

It sometimes seems like the American reading public only makes room for one new translated superstar at a time, and already it's hard to recall just what a revelation it was when the Chilean-Mexican-S... (Tom)

On one hand, this droll, wordless picture book, about a city crocodile getting ready for a day at work, is a slow-rolling set-up for one big joke. I think it's a pretty funny joke, but the real pleasu... (Tom)

Country Dark is the first fiction Offutt, who in his youth was compared to Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver, has published in twenty years, and it shows. Not because it's an encyclopedic novel packed w... (Tom)

From the moment it was published 25 years ago, Understanding Comics set the standard for something that had hardly existed before it came along: the theory of comics. (And that it was done as a comic... (Tom)

Maggie and Abby have always been locked-at-the-hip pals, at least until Abby spent half the summer at camp on Orcas Island while Maggie was stuck in Seattle, but now they've discovered they are connec... (Tom)

Into the fine and hilarious tradition of men making every possible wrong decision stumbles Ray Morris, a 33-year-old tech journalist living on the still-too-expensive outskirts of London with a wife n... (Tom)

If, like me, you first heard about Roadside Picnic, sometimes called the "greatest Soviet science-fiction novel," because it inspired Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, you should know that going from R... (Tom)

Marco the fox has questions—"Why don’t trees ever talk? How deep does the sun go when it sinks into the sea?"—and none of the other foxes seem to care about the answers, so he joins the crew on a pass... (Tom)

This book may be more for ex-kids like me, for whom the mysterious M. Sasek created a fascinating world of cities and landmarks in the '50s and '60s in his This Is... picture books. This Is Paris, Thi... (Tom)

Mike Muñoz aspires, sort of, to write the Great American Novel, or, more specifically, the Great American Landscaping Novel, but Johnny Evison might have written it for him. Mike is 22, mowing lawns,... (Tom)

Attila is a psychiatrist from Ghana who has made a career of assessing trauma in war zones. Jean is a divorced wildlife biologist from New England. It almost seems enough that Forna has imagined these... (Tom)

What's the line? "It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you?" It's a line that could describe more than one Philip K. Dick novel, but none so directly as in this superb early item in his oeuv... (Tom)

We're glad to say we finally have this year's Caldecott Medal winner back in stock! Wolf in the Snow has the feel of a classic, with a tale of a girl and a wolf pup each lost in the snow that might re... (Tom)

How did I only recently learn about this wonderful picture book from 1964? Created by Remy Charlip (a design and choreography collaborator with Merce Cunningham and John Cage and—fun fact!—the physica... (Tom)

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh boy do I love this book about a boy who, yes, has a hard time getting his shirt off and starts to worry he never will. Right now, it feels like it's both the most enj... (Tom)

Brian Selznick, known for intricate illustrated epics like Wonderstruck and The Invention of Hugo Cabret, reinvents the early-reader book with this fat set of simple stories about a primate private ey... (Tom)

Despite the words "A Novel" on the cover, I found myself struggling to think of Vengeance as anything but true. In part, that's by design: the main character is a journalist named Zachary Lazar who me... (Tom)

Ever since Vlautin, the singer-songwriter of the longtime Portland alt-country band Richmond Fontaine, started writing novels, I've been hearing how good they are, and I finally sampled one, via an au... (Tom)

You wouldn't think that there was anything new to discover in the ol' "before and after" gambit, but over and over in this bright and appealing board book Jullien, a multi-talented French designer liv... (Tom)