Books

Vega is a girl with stars on her skin. Her mother created the tattoos when Vega was small, knowing that one day she would take up the mantle of the last Astronomer. Vega has never left their valley and knows only the safety of her mother’s cottage. But her mother is dying from a sickness

British award-winning author Marcus Sedgwick has passed away unexpectedly at the age of 54. Sedgwick wrote over 40 children’s books, was nominated for more than 30 awards, and won the Printz award in 2014 for Midwinter Blood. He described his latest series, Be the Change, as a “brilliant interactive and accessible resources for kids to

Translated by Tara Chase — Danish author Anne Mette Hancock is writing the kind of crime fiction that’s perfect for lovers of Nordic noir. Her debut, The Corpse Flower, was a hit in Denmark and appeared in English last year. Now investigative journalist Heloise Kaldan and police detective Erik Scháfer are back in The Collector,

A few years after British actor Tom Felton hung up his Slytherin robes for good, he hit rock bottom. It was the first step toward reclaiming his identity, as it prompted him to ask how and when he left the wisecracking kid from Surrey behind and instead became dependent on the numbing effect of alcohol.

The 180-year-old private library, the first lending library in London, will welcome Helena Bonham Carter as its first female president. The actress has been linked to members of the library through her career, having played characters in an adaptation of founding member Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Netflix’s adaptation of Enola Holmes, itself a retelling

The Crime Fiction Lover Awards have returned – the only awards in the genre where the nominees and winners are chosen by readers. We are down to the shortlists for each category and today we bring you the last six in the Best Debut Crime Novel. This is an important category for us because new

From childhood, death neither repulsed nor frightened Hayley Campbell but instead spurred her curiosity. So it was only natural that Campbell, a freelance journalist based in London, would interview people who make a living from death: not just a funeral director and an embalmer but also a crematorium operator, a crime scene cleaner, an executioner

“I do trust librarians, I trust our teachers and I want to know that I don’t have to look at this list. But here I am finding multiple books that unfortunately are part of the LGBTQ community,” said Joni Shaw Smith, a member of the Keller Independent School District board at last night’s meeting. Keller

If you read The Rabbit Factor by Antti Tuomainen, not only did you meet the mathematician Henri Koskinen but you will have enjoyed one of the finest and most original crime novels of 2021. Quirky characters, perilous run-ins with violent gangsters, a disorientating setting, absurdist humour and a thread of romance – it felt like

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah The engrossing 10th novel from Nobel laureate Gurnah is filled with compassion and historical insight. Bitingly funny and sweetly earnest, Mathews’ debut is one of those rare novels that feels just like life. Not since Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend has a novel so deftly probed the magical and sometimes destructive

Kevin Conroy, best known as the voice of Batman in Batman: The Animated Series and numerous other projects, passed away on November 10th after a short battle with cancer. He would have been 67 later this month. Conroy was born in Westbury, New York in 1955. He studied acting at Julliard alongside fellow iconic DC

Step aside Mr Bond, it’s time for Miss Moneypenny to prove her grit as a World War II spy. In Christine Wells’ new historical spy novel, One Woman’s War, we meet 19-year-old Victoire ‘Paddy’ Bennett – the real-life inspiration for the James Bond character who has always played second fiddle to the debonair 007. It’s

How important are individuals in the shaping of history? Twentieth-century Europeans knew leaders whose decisions, good or ill, transformed their countries, the continent and, in some cases, the world. Ian Kershaw, one of our leading historians of the period, focuses on 12 of them in his enlightening and stimulating Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers

Library workers are trained professionals. Most librarians spend thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars to earn a master’s degree which helps teach them not only how to serve their communities, but how to access, assess, and make available accurate information for their patrons. It is an art and a science of balancing community needs

Is it good or bad luck to see a condor? I can’t remember. Let’s say good, because this week the legendary author James Grady – creator of Six Days of the Condor – has a brand new thriller out and it’s set on a train. We’ve also got two new names for you in Kellye

The nine short stories in George Saunders’ Liberation Day (7 hours) prowl a spectrum of dystopian premises and fall into two categories: tales about families, co-workers and neighbors navigating their relationships amid troubling current events; and stories about future humans who are reprogrammed as automatons (with the robotic voices to match) under other people’s command.

Reading Death on a Winter Stroll by Francine Mathews is like a vacation in an idyllic spot, at the most festive of times… with murder. It’s a police procedural set on an island 30 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. This is not a location suitable for a remake of Agatha Christie’s And Then There

In Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers, Oxford University Shakespeare studies professor Emma Smith offers a lively and engaging survey of the history of the book, focusing on the “material combination of form and content” she calls “bookhood.” It’s a “book about books, rather than words,” that describes with both insight and

In October, Barnes & Noble posted their list of the top 11 books of the year, as selected by their booksellers. The list included bestselling novels, a picture book, a New Orleans cookbook, a history of hip-hop jewelry, and more. Some of these books overlap with the previous editorially-selected Barnes and Noble Best Books of

We had no idea how popular the Crime Fiction Lover Awards would be when we launched them last year, but they’re back for 2022 and nominations have closed. Now it’s down to the final six in our Best Crime Novel category and as a crime fiction lover we welcome you to vote for your top

Two of the weepiest BookPage editors share a few of their favorite 2022 audiobooks, read masterfully by the authors, that deliver all the emotion. ★ Inciting Joy For readers invested in learning more about communities of care—informal collectives centered on the praxis of love—Ross Gay’s sixth book, Inciting Joy (Hachette Audio, 8.5 hours), is essential. The

The 2022 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction has been awarded to Khadija Abdalla Bajaber for her debut YA novel The House of Rust. The novel is a coming-of-age story steeped in Swahili and Hadrami culture in which Aisha, a young girl in Mombasa, Kenya, embarks on a sea journey in an enchanted boat

To say anticipation was high for the latest novel by Jordan Harper would be something of an understatement. His 2017 debut, She Rides Shotgun (A Lesson In Violence in the UK), picked up a prestigious Edgar Award and we awarded it five stars as well as interviewing the author. We certainly didn’t expect to have

The onset of cold weather can only mean one thing: It’s time to head to the kitchen and cook, bake and sauté up a variety of delicious, warming meals and treats to be eaten as the early dark creeps in. Bliss on Toast It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a person wishes to

A desert star is a tiny white flower found, unsurprisingly enough, in the inhospitable desert sands. Resilient and beautiful, they’re “a sign of god in this fucked up world”, according to a friend of former LAPD detective Hieronymous ‘Harry’ Bosch. The flowers of the book’s title bloom near to a makeshift memorial in the Mojave

★ Never Rescue a Rogue Virginia Heath’s Never Rescue a Rogue is a sophisticated Regency gem. In this second entry in the Merriwell Sisters series, world-weary nobleman Giles Sinclair battles ennui by trading barbs with journalist Diana Merriwell, his best friend’s sister. Though their charming family and friends think they would make a perfect pair,

This is the second year of the Crime Fiction Lover Awards and the excitement is palpable. Based on nominations made by Crime Fiction Lover readers, we are now able to unveil our shortlists and ask you to make your votes. A big thank-you goes out to everyone who nominated. We’re hoping for an even bigger

The 2022 Kirkus Prize Award winners were announced Thursday October 27 in a hybrid ceremony at a public library in Austin, TX. The literary award was first given in 2014 and is among the highest paying, granting each of its winners $50,000. The winners are as follows: Fiction Trust by Hernan Diaz Trust shows the

The indie publishing house Corylus Books specialises in discovering unique voices in crime fiction from various countries, then diligently translates the authors’ novels into English. Jónína Leosdóttir is the latest distinctive crime writer Corylus has found, and the third from Iceland, following Sólveig Pálsdóttir and Óskar Gudmundsson. Jónína’s novel Deceit has just hit the shelves

Amazon bought Goodreads in 2013, but for the most part, there hasn’t been much integration between the retailer and the social reading site. Recently, though, some authors have spotted Goodreads average ratings showing up on Amazon listings of their books, although Amazon has its own ratings system. So. Amazon is starting to add Goodreads ratings