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

"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

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

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

A captivating fantasy thriller rife with magic and intrigue, Christelle Dabos’s A Winter’s Promise is an exhilarating venture into a world of floating cities, illusions, and... Read More

Audrey Schulman’s engrossing novel is a combination of dystopian fiction, science fiction, and a love story, uniting bonobos and survival in the not-so-distant future. Dr.... Read More

The human dramas in Carousel reward the voyeur’s eye. A Brussels neighborhood is the site of a grand experiment in human connection, in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s"The Carousel... Read More

From his beloved hillside retreat in Jamaica, superstar novelist Noel Coward and his manservant drink and smoke and grumble their way through delightful memories of glamorous... Read More

“Why it says to the world what the world wants to hear: that nothing goes better with depravity than vanity,” claims the narrator of "Persecution". Like the author’s... Read More

“The real problem is that we live in a society where the male is both the opponent and, at the same time, the referee.” So observes Safia, a smart and funny young Egyptian... Read More