Drawing on personal experiences and cultural analysis, Jaswinder Bolina’s essay collection "Of Color" is an important examination of race in the US. The son of Sikh Punjabi immigrants by way of London, Bolina writes about navigating a... Read More

French writer Jean Giono’s fascinating "Occupation Journal" was kept while he lived under Nazi rule. In 1943, Giono was a respected novelist with a family to care for. He wrote his novels from Provence, drawing upon the local culture,... 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 “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