Books

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

Banned Books Week is coming, which means that waves of displays in libraries, classrooms, and bookstores are also incoming. We’re already seeing many, and while they are useful for highlighting the reality of censorship across America to those who are not as tapped into the news about it, too many banned books week displays are

The 1980s are having something of a renaissance right now thanks to TV series like The Newsreader and Stranger Things. Just ask Kate Bush, whose 1986 hit Running Up That Hill took on a new life after featuring in the latter show on Netflix. Val McDermid is an author who likes to have her finger

Barbara Ehrenreich was an author, journalist, and activist who published more than 20 books, including Nickel and Dimed, which documents several months she spent working the lowest-paying jobs in the U.S.A. and trying to survive on that income. She wrote articles and book reviews for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times,

The much-awaited series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is premiering today at 6 PM PT / 9 PM ET on Amazon Prime with two episodes. Fans of Tolkien’s Middle-earth—or curious newcomers—can sign up for a free 30 day Prime trial to watch the new series. The Rings of Power takes place

Edited by Kenneth Wishing & Chantelle Aimée Osman — In his lively introduction to Jewish Noir II, legendary New York crime fiction author Lawrence Block sums up every Jewish holiday in three sentences: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!” While the last sentence is an essential part of Jewish holiday celebrations, he

Better the Blood begins with a prologue set 150 years ago depicting a violent act of colonisation. Six soldiers are celebrating the capture and killing of a Maori chief by having their picture taken alongside his hanging corpse. The picture serves as inspiration for the novel’s antagonist, and as a reminder to the reader of

A new Missouri law has made it a misdemeanor for a school employee to provide “explicit sexual material” to minors, which could come with up to a year in jail and $2000 in fines. The law applies to images only, such as in graphic novels, and does not apply to material with “serious artistic significance,”

What Follows is the first in a new California-set series featuring detective Roscoe Tanner of the Oakland Homicide Division. It’s written by the Welsh writer Dylan H Jones, who now lives on the West Coast and has clearly soaked up the local vibe. He’s also known for the DI Tudor Manx series set in his

The story is performed in the Inverted Theater, which exists outside of time and can only be visited while one is dreaming. An unnamed spectator sits in the audience and is told that this story is a love story. It is summer, as it always is in the Old Country, and one fateful night, the