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 “theater of worlds.” In a land of mists, an unusual elf... Read More

Thorough and meticulous, William Rawlings’s "Six Inches Deeper" chronicles the disappearance and discovery of a murdered woman, the murder investigation, the trial, and its aftermath. This journalistic work concerns the August 1972... 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 magical realism with plenty to unpack. Bahar’s family... 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 plans for escape as a tsunami and endless rounds of... Read More

Mark Rader’s "The Wanting Life" is a cross-generational novel focused on happiness, fulfillment, and love. Father Paul Novack is dying. Foregoing chemotherapy, he’s resigned to letting the cancer run its course. He and his sister,... Read More

In Lisa Van Orman Hadley’s novel-through-stories "Irreversible Things", a family moves from a Florida beach town to a Utah mountain town, trading in a dark situation next door for life with their Mormon family and transitioning from... Read More

In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, many Russians fled the country and ensconced themselves in interwar Europe. Irina Odoevtseva’s novel "Isolde" speaks to the sense of alienation that many young Russians felt as they waited,... Read More

If home is where the heart is, Malka Older’s science fiction collection …and Other Disasters finds it in a “dappled world” where darkness and light play with abandon. In this engrossing work, the heart survives its “twinned... Read More