Mike Rothschild’s "Jewish Space Lasers" is a cutting exposé of centuries’-worth of antisemitic scapegoating, often done with one influential family at its center. “Where myth and mystique meet outsized wealth and great historical... Read More

Deirdre Kelly’s cultural history book "Fashioning the Beatles" is insightful in revealing the Fab Four’s influence on fashion and popular culture throughout the 1960s. Tracking the band’s development year by year, the book reveals... Read More

A girl is consumed with grief and guilt when her mother goes missing in Siȃn Hughes’s luminous novel "Pearl". Marianne recalls the exact moment when the police stopped looking for her missing mother and began searching for her body.... Read More

Kathy Kleiner Rubin’s earnest memoir "A Light in the Dark" spans three brushes with death. As a child, Rubin had lupus and was isolated until high school—the first death sentence she avoided. In college, she and her roommate survived... Read More

Octavia Cade’s "You Are My Sunshine" collects eighteen stories that cast a speculative eye on the future, seen through an ecological lens. Ecological themes carry throughout the book, which also integrates elements of horror. In “We... Read More

Set in a dystopian near-future, Hilary Zaid’s conspiracy novel "Forget I Told You This" sets itself apart with erudite flair and heartfelt human drama. Amy specializes in writing letters by hand in an age where the act of writing is a... Read More

In Heather B. Moore’s illuminating novel "Under the Java Moon", a Dutch family is sent to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Inspired by a woman who lived in Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) when she and the women in her family were... Read More