Travel and awakening combine in "Lost in Oaxaca", Jessica Winters Mireles’s delicate romance. Camille is a piano teacher at a personal and professional crossroads. After an abusive lover left her injured, Camille turned cautious. Her... Read More

In Nancy Kress’s terrifying novel "Sea Change", a famine-stricken, near-future world has turned its back on science. In 2005, Renata’s life was normal. She was a student at Yale, worried about her difficult roommate and... Read More

Kristen Millares Young’s novel "Subduction" is rife with personal struggles, confrontations, and the pain of memory. Claudia, a Latinx anthropology professor, escapes a barren marriage and the life that she built in Seattle after... Read More

With its pivotal focus on Coco Chanel’s reported World War II work as a Nazi spy, Pamela Binnings Ewen’s novel "The Queen of Paris" fictionalizes the thoughts and motivations of the French design icon––a complex, controlled woman... Read More

In Gina Fattore’s (un)romantic comedy, "The Spinster Diaries", a Hollywood writer who shares the author’s name discovers that she’s ill. The novel’s Gina is an unemployed television producer when a cyst that’s pressing on her... Read More

Johanna Garton’s engrossing "Edge of the Map" traces the rise of Wisconsin native Christine Boskoff to the top of the list of elite mountain climbers. Known for her humility, courage, strength, and uncanny ability to breathe at high... Read More

Marc Petitjean grew up with Frida Kahlo’s disturbing painting “The Heart” hanging in his living room. As a child, he was terrified of the image of a huge bleeding heart lying in the sand, with its handless woman pierced by a metal... Read More

Nino Haratischvili’s multigenerational Georgian novel "The Eighth Life" spans the years between the Bolshevik Revolution and the early twenty-first century. It all begins with a master chocolatier and a magical hot chocolate recipe for... Read More