Gideon Defoe analyzes, memorializes, and lampoons world history in "An Atlas of Extinct Countries". Defoe writes that all countries depend on myths to justify their existence... Read More

In Kavita Bedford’s novel "Friends and Dark Shapes", a bereaved woman struggles to determine her place in the world. After her father’s death, a woman moves into a... Read More

Ben Hopkins’s epic historical novel, "Cathedral", is the riveting story of the lives and motivations of cathedral builders: of humble serfs turned quarry workers; of visionary... Read More

The pain of adolescence is complicated by family secrets and persistent grudges in Elena Ferrante’s devastating novel, "The Lying Life of Adults". For thirteen-year-old... Read More

D. A. Mishani’s "Three" is a gripping novel that begins with an affair and continues through the salacious surprises and everyday horrors of contemporary dating. What pains... Read More

Though much of it is set among the dead, Valérie Perrin’s "Fresh Water for Flowers" is an exuberant novel whose thoughtful treatments of family tragedies are alchemistic.... Read More

In Muriel Barbery’s bewitching "A Strange Country", elves and humans cross the boundaries that separate their lands, hoping to correct a travesty that’s playing out in the... Read More

Not to up your anxiety about climate change? But: read Just after the Wave, Sandrine Collette’s postapocalyptic novel. The cli-fi thriller follows a large French family’s... Read More

"The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree" is a fantastical tale set in post-revolutionary Iran that concentrates on a family’s tragedies, loves, and losses. It’s a work of... Read More

Stalin’s quip that “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic” gets to the essence of how we become numbed by the frequency of mass shootings. We simply can’t... Read More

Abbigail N. Rosewood’s compelling "If I Had Two Lives" begins in 1990s Vietnam as a young girl is brought to a military camp. The girl’s mother—an ambitious reformer who... Read More

“How the hell do you start a letter to the UN?” If you’re Al Santamaria, you do it with the absolute conviction that your entreaty for their recognition of your family’s... Read More