Books

Sci-fi can be intimidating. Let’s not pretend it isn’t. There’s a whole set of rules to the genre and a new vocabulary to keep up with. On top of that, sometimes sci-fi can feel unwelcoming to the uninitiated. Where do you even start? Don’t worry, I, a very casual reader of sci-fi, am here to

On the face of it DCI Kath Fortune isn’t your typical crime fiction protagonist. She runs a cold case team in Shropshire, smokes like a chimney, has recently lost weight, is finally in a relationship with a man she has loved from afar for years and is best friends with a hardened criminal. Her team

Renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog has written more than a dozen books and screenplays, but The Twilight World (3.5 hours) is his first novel. Translated by Michael Hofmann and short enough to qualify as a novella, it’s the fictionalized story of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, the real-life intelligence officer in the Imperial Japanese Army who defended Lubang

The Deal Goes Down sees a welcome return for Larry Beinhart’s long-standing PI creation Tony Casella. Time has moved on for the detective. Now he’s an ex-PI living in the Catskills with zero chance of living out a happy, peaceful retirement thanks to the bank. His mortgage was bought up during the financial crisis, the

Jordan Crane’s graphic novel Keeping Two, which took him 20 years to complete, pays very strict attention to form. Over the course of 300-plus pages, Crane rarely strays from a simple six-panel grid, arranging the action in neat squares that move down and across the page with an almost mesmeric energy and speed. With this

Beware, Outback noir, Queensland is coming for your crown. That’s the vibe we’re getting from Troppo, the crime series now showing on Freevee via Amazon and on iView in Australia. It proves beyond doubt that there’s a lot more to Australian crime fiction than dusty sheep ranches and dried up billabongs. Things get underway in

Comics artist Kate Beaton, creator of the award-winning satirical webcomic “Hark! A Vagrant,” demonstrates her remarkable range and storytelling prowess with her debut graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. With strong prose and striking art, she captures the complexities of a place often defined by stark binaries: the Alberta oil sands, one

Looking for Alaska was published in 2005, but it’s being banned and challenged now more than ever, the author shared on TikTok. Alicia Farrant, a candidate running for school board in Orange County, Florida — which includes the school John Green attended as a student — has campaigned partly based on banning Looking for Alaska

You don’t get a more dramatic start to a crime novel than the discovery of six bodies, hanging side by side in the conservatory of a fairly run-of-the-mill Buckinghamshire family home. And they are a family, three generations of the Bryants to be precise. Was it a mass suicide, or murder? The horrific scene is

Allison Saft’s second YA novel, A Far Wilder Magic, is an enchanting fantasy tale about two young people, Margaret and Wes, who are drawn together in pursuit of a mythical fox purported to hold alchemical power. Throughout the story, Saft creates magic that feels astonishingly real. Here, she offers a deeper look at A Far

★ Ruby Fever In Ilona Andrews’ Hidden Legacy series, the world is dominated by magical families known as Houses. Catalina Baylor is the Deputy Warden of Texas and a Prime, an extremely powerful magic user. She’s moving her House and her fiancé, assassin Alessandro Sagredo, into a new compound when an important politician is killed

The Cunninghams are having a little family get-together at Sky Lodge, a snowbound mountain retreat in Australia, the perfect setting for mulled wine and murder. If your first thought is that this is one of those stories where a group of people get snowed in somewhere with a murderer on the loose, then you’d be

When Orthodox Jewish teen Hoodie Rosen sees a girl dancing on the sidewalk outside the window of his yeshiva classroom, he has no idea that the connection they’ll form will lead them to question everything they believe and change both of their lives forever. Debut novelist Isaac Blum’s The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen

By day he’s a marketing and branding copywriter. By night he’s a crime novelist, and sometimes even a ghost. Well, a ghostwriter to be precise, who coaches new authors and helps them get that elusive novel that’s inside them down on paper. At the moment, David’s mystery series featuring private investigator Dora Ellison is thriving.

Fifteen-year-old Yehuda “Hoodie” Rosen and his Orthodox Jewish family, along with many members of their community, have recently moved to Tregaron, Pennsylvania, because the cost of living in their previous town became too expensive. When Hoodie meets Anna-Marie Diaz-O’Leary, the daughter of Tregaron’s mayor, he’s instantly smitten. Yet after he and Anna-Marie are spotted cleaning

Curious what it looks like to run for school board? Wondering if now is your time to step up and help provide governance for your local education system? Let’s dive in. It’s no secret that school board elections right now are crucial. It’s also no secret that some school board candidates — even in nonpartisan

The windy crevices of the Italian Alps. The dark backstreets of Stockholm. Among Shropshire hedgerows. In American courtrooms. Crime never sleeps and justice must be done. Here in our latest On the Radar column we’re doing justice to five new crime fiction novels and our lead book this week comes from a writer whose work

For 25 years, beginning with her National Book Award-winning story collection, Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett has devoted vast amounts of her creative energy to vividly imagining several generations of a family and their friends living in central New York. In Natural History, the publisher tells us, Barrett “completes and connects the lives of the family

The America Library Association reported 729 book challenges in 2021 that impacted nearly 1,600 titles, the highest number of challenges the organization has recorded in 20 years. Despite this increase in challenges, only 43% of the librarians who took the School Library Journal’s (SLJ) 2022 Controversial Books Survey reported facing a formal book challenge— which

Translated by Miranda France — There Are No Happy Loves is the third crime thriller in a series by award-winning Argentinian writer Sergio Olguín, featuring the irrepressible and libidinous investigative reporter Verónica Rosenthal. It follows on from The Fragility of Bodies (2019) and The Foreign Girls (2021). Once again, Rosenthal happens upon a potentially outrageous

The titular character of Mazey Eddings’ Lizzie Blake’s Best Mistake is dealing with some very rom-com-appropriate problems—namely, that her two-night stand with a hot Australian guy resulted in an unexpected pregnancy, and she’s now trying to platonically cohabitate with him. But alongside all the tropey hijinks, Lizzie also gains a better understanding of and more

The winners of the 2022 Hugo Awards were announced Sunday, September 4th in a ceremony at the 80th WorldCon— named ChiCon this year— in Chicago, IL. The event was hosted by authors Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz. The Hugo Awards, science fiction’s most prestigious award, were first presented in 1953 and have been presented

We head into September and the Autumn with a six-book line-up for you, made up entirely of novels from independent crime publishers and authors. With that scorching summer nearly behind us, it’s a great time to discover authors who are doing new and inventive things with their writing, and doing it well. Take a look

Nursery rhyme books are a staple of childhood reading for good reason — they’re short and simple to read and remember, but they also carry layers of storytelling that introduce very young children to the ways that stories, rhymes, and language work. Reading nursery rhymes is a great way for parents and caregivers to bond

Lizzie Blake knows that she’s a lot. A lot of energy and enthusiasm. A lot of creativity and vibrant warmth. But also a lot of mess and chaos. Her attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder can make things difficult, given that she lives in a world built for people whose brains don’t function like hers. After a lifetime of

Buckle up, because there is so much fantastic small press nonfiction coming out this fall! Memoirs and graphic memoirs, essay collections, and anthologies, genre-defying hybrid works that blend history, travel writing, science, and more — and all of that is just the beginning. I had to reign myself in, because there are just so many

Award-winning TV news anchor Linda Hurtado Bond returns with her fourth novel featuring a journalist as the main protagonist. This time, it’s Marisol ‘Mari’ Alvarez, a disgraced Cuban-American crime reporter who must stay one step ahead of a serial killer while also uncovering the truth about her mother’s murder when she was a child. Mari

Poet and author Ander Monson has seen the 1987 movie Predator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger on the run from an alien in a Guatemalan jungle, 146 times. To explain why, he wrote Predator: A Memoir. Through a scene-by-scene exploration of the film, which he describes as “satire wrapped in gun pornography,” Monson reckons with his lifelong

There were too many times when my mother would catch me reading a book with a flashlight under my sheets, demanding I go to sleep already. I can’t say that romance was ever my go-to genre as I was (ironically) falling in love with reading as a kid. I loved fantasy, mystery, and historical fiction,

There’s a tonne of fireworks in Fields of Fire, making it an apt title from debut author Ryan Steck. This is a cuss-free action thriller set mostly in the wide open spaces of Montana but also flitting between California, Washington and Mexico. There’s political intrigue along with a screwed up international covert operation to take