In Joan Haig’s urban fantasy for young readers, three children help a creature fulfill a promise made long ago. Lal Patel is homesick for India. His father relocated their... Read More

In Muriel Barbery’s evocative novel "A Single Rose", a woman travels to Japan following the death of her father. Rose is forty, lives in France, and has never met her... Read More

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