Since turning forty, journalist Ada Calhoun has been obsessed with the women of Generation X and their “struggles with money, relationships, work, and existential despair.” Playing devil’s advocate in Why We Can’t Sleep, Calhoun... Read More

Grand sacrifices made to protect others dominate this action-packed thriller. In Christopher Irons’s thriller "Reclaiming Our Own", military veterans go against a child kidnapping ring. When his toddler nephew is kidnapped, Brett, a... Read More

In Mark Barr’s engrossing historical novel "Watershed", personal and social changes lead to tension in a rural Tennessee town where a post-Depression federal dam project brings work, strangers, and electricity to the region. Claire is... Read More

“The conversation hobbles on,” Harriet Shawcross observes at a camp for children with selective mutism. “Without daily practice, they grasp at topics like leaves in a stream, exchanging information, but never quite conversing.”... Read More

James Polchin’s "Indecent Advances" extracts more than its title from true-crime press clippings dating back to the 1920s, examining both what appeared in print and what was sanitized or excluded. “Indecent advances” was just one... Read More

When Isla Bell is a teenager, she discovers three dead bodies propped against a wall during her morning run. In Emma Kavanagh’s "I Am Watching", there is a lone survivor of the attacks: one of the victims’ teenage brothers, Ramsay,... Read More

In Jon James Miller’s heartwarming noir "Looking for Garbo", James is dying for a unique story to build a documentary around. Seth, who’s dying of emphysema, lures James in with a tale centered around legendary actress Greta Garbo... Read More

Wars may begin on the battlefield, but they end on a map. "The Bird King" is an exquisite fantasy about the end of Muslim sovereignty in the West, the power of desire to disrupt and transform, and how the privilege of naming can reshape... Read More