Rod Phillips’s Cats: A History is an exhaustive and engrossing survey of the millennia-long relationship between cats and people. Humans first kept cats to protect grain stores from rodents, Phillips notes, while ancient Egyptians... Read More

Breaking down what happened during the Great Depression and deriving lessons from it, The Deflation of 1930 is an edifying historical text. John C. Harvey and Mary Keil’s analytical economic history book The Deflation of 1930 is about... Read More

"The First Fascist" is Sergio Luzzatto’s absorbing biography of the Marquis de Morès, covering how he came to lead an antisemitic movement in the late 1800s that was later defined as fascist. The French son of former Italian nobility... Read More

Focused on labor struggles and class differences, the alluring historical novel "Elly Robin: Bird in a Gilded Cage" positions its scrappy heroine for further adventures. In P. D. Quaver’s invigorating historical novel "Elly Robin: Bird... Read More

A lonely girl peeks beyond the veil, ensuring a childhood of wonder and silence, in Su Bristow’s enchanting novel "The Fair Folk". Felicity’s earliest memories are of peering up from her baby carriage at the fairy faces grinning down... Read More

Mysterious mail initiates a family’s search for their buried truths in Anne Berest’s elegiac novel "The Postcard", which vivifies and honors the dead. At her first Seder well into her adulthood, Berest is confronted by an aspiring... Read More

In Elijah Kinch Spector’s brooding novel "Kalyna the Soothsayer", the end of the world is coming. Kalyna knows that her country is about to collapse into war and destruction, but she cannot flee. She is trapped in the service of the... Read More

A legendary sword, mysterious portals, and an old foe bring magic and mischief to Avalon in Rin Chupeco’s young adult novel, "An Unreliable Magic". Picking up where the previous volume left off, the novel recounts important details in... Read More