"The Chinese Jars" is both a breezy, classic noir murder mystery, as well as an entertaining character-rich novel which mines the kind of intrigue specific to a time before cellphones and the Internet, and to a city rooted in old... Read More

Doctor, cancer researcher, pathologist, University of Colorado professor, and writer Robert Greer takes a break from his nine-book CJ Floyd mystery series to introduce a new main character (and potential series focus) in a novel set in... Read More

Death, at the grim hand of cancer, mines a person of the body he or she spent a lifetime in. It devours, destroys, and erodes everything. Its changes move too slowly to be seen daily, but over weeks and months, family and friends are... Read More

Francis Spufford is a British writer with highly eccentric interests. In I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, he produced a cultural history of ice, Eskimos, and polar exploration. His previous book, Backroom Boys: The... Read More

“When my father died, he had already been gone a long time,” says the narrator of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s latest novel. Translated from the French by Trista Selous, this slim volume explores the life and personality of the narrator’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 woman living in Rome with her devout Muslim husband. He... Read More

Ernst Vogler seems to have found a dream job creating a master list of the world’s artwork based on taste, significance, and desire. Except the year is 1938, and Ernst is working for Hitler’s Sonderprojekt, collecting—or looting,... Read More

Svetislav Basara’s "The Cyclist Conspiracy" is a fascinating novel. Beginning with a first-person narrative by Charles the Hideous, ending with a design for an inverted Tower of Babel, and filled with mind-bending philosophical,... Read More