In Marielle Thompson’s intimate and enlightened historical novel "The Last Witch in Edinburgh", a women’s community entrenched in subtle spell-work and relationships faces misogyny and witch-hunting. In the early 1800s, Nellie, the... Read More

Scholar Jordan D. Rosenblum’s fascinating text "Forbidden" is a history of how the pig became the litmus test for Jewish identity. In accordance with biblical dietary laws, the pig is only one non-kosher animal out of many. Still, it... Read More

A girl resists the limits imposed by her class and gender, daring to seek a new kind of life (with some supernatural help), in Sacha Lamb’s wonder-filled historical novel "The Forbidden Book". In a shtetl whose rabbi possesses a text... Read More

Sharon Dilworth’s "To Be Marquette" is an absorbing coming-of-age novel about a woman’s freshman year in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the 1970s, Molly chooses a college in Marquette to escape the freeways and factories of her... Read More

A troubled prosecutor reconsiders her definition of justice in Simone Buchholz’s thriller "The Kitchen". During a sweltering Hamburg summer, garbage bags filled with body parts keep turning up in the bay. Riley, the public prosecutor,... Read More

African identities are diverse in Iheoma Nwachukwu’s haunting, award-winning collection "Japa and Other Stories". Japa is both noun and verb, identity and a place in the mind. Japa children escape Nigeria to far-flung continents,... Read More

Jennifer Heath’s fabulistic short story collection "The Jewel and the Ember" celebrates love as it’s found in ancient texts. Inspired by Golden Age cinema, including Samson and Delilah, and by the idea of love itself, Heath retells... Read More

Dianna E. Anderson’s "Body Phobia" is a convincing personal and philosophical exposé of how a culture that fears bodily differences harms vulnerable people. Anderson, who is nonbinary, trans, and queer, grew up in an evangelical... Read More