A girl resists the limits imposed by her class and gender, daring to seek a new kind of life (with some supernatural help), in Sacha Lamb’s wonder-filled historical novel "The Forbidden Book". In a shtetl whose rabbi possesses a text... Read More

Sharon Dilworth’s "To Be Marquette" is an absorbing coming-of-age novel about a woman’s freshman year in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the 1970s, Molly chooses a college in Marquette to escape the freeways and factories of her... Read More

A troubled prosecutor reconsiders her definition of justice in Simone Buchholz’s thriller "The Kitchen". During a sweltering Hamburg summer, garbage bags filled with body parts keep turning up in the bay. Riley, the public prosecutor,... Read More

In Renée D. Bondy’s historical novel about clerical sexual abuse, "[non]disclosure", a survivor finds the courage to tell her story. As a girl at a Catholic school, the unnamed narrator is taught that the reward for confession is no... Read More

Biology professor Sönke Johnsen’s "Into the Great Wide Ocean" is a compelling work of oceanography that reveals the greatest unexplored areas on Earth. Covering the open ocean—the most abundant source of life on the planet—and... Read More

Canadian actor Layne Coleman’s "An Open-Ended Run" is a reflective memoir-in-essays. From the vantage of his sixties, Coleman grapples with childhood trauma, the death of his wife, and how loss shaped his and his daughter’s lives.... Read More

A commanding short story collection, Caribbean Canadian Nalo Hopkinson’s "Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions" blends ecological awareness, cultural heritage, and fantastical happenings. In the mordant story “Clap Back,” Wenda, an... Read More

Evan Rail follows the trail of a clever and creative fraudster in "The Absinthe Forger", an engrossing true crime story. The word “absinthe” alone is enough to conjure images of tortured artists, fin de siècle decadence, and... Read More