The pain of adolescence is complicated by family secrets and persistent grudges in Elena Ferrante’s devastating novel, "The Lying Life of Adults". For thirteen-year-old Giovanna, her father’s side of the family has always been a... Read More

Fariha Róisín’s novel sings of building joy within sorrow and spins a gossamer reverie that clings to the consciousness. Taylia grows up on the Upper West Side as the less loved younger daughter of a mixed race family. Her father is... Read More

Three troubled but tough generations of women, all molded and wounded by the Pentecostal culture around them, are celebrated in Kelli Jo Ford’s masterpiece, patchwork novel, "Crooked Hallelujah". Religion became a source of both... Read More

Though much of it is set among the dead, Valérie Perrin’s "Fresh Water for Flowers" is an exuberant novel whose thoughtful treatments of family tragedies are alchemistic. Abandoned at birth, Violette was shunted between disinterested... Read More

In Anna Dorn’s "Vagablonde", Prue, a Los Angeles lawyer, hopes to wean herself off of various psychotropic prescriptions. Prue is also an aspiring rapper, despite the fact that she is bourgeois and has “the coloring of a Nazi.” As... Read More

Daniel Ben-Horin’s black comedy "Substantial Justice" concerns humanity’s best and worst traits. In the 1980s, Spider makes an honest living as a mechanic and distracts himself from lost love with mind-altering drugs. Then, ten years... Read More

In The Anarchists’ Club, Alex Reeve brings back his large-hearted Victorian sleuth, Leo Stanhope, a transgender man who’s swept into a loury London murder case. When a stranger’s body is found at the Social and Democratic... Read More

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s novel "Starling Days" is a gentle treatise on the anatomy of sadness, wherein the many manifestations of modern melancholy raise questions about what it truly means to be “okay.” Mina wants to silence the... Read More