Books

Both an art book and a kind of poetic herbarium, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children defies easy classification. That’s for the benefit of readers, though: Untethered to the conventions of traditional genres, writer Jamaica Kincaid is free to create something brand new, and perusing the pages feels like true discovery. Kincaid’s tone shifts

Rosena Fung’s latest graphic novel, Age 16, explores the complicated relationships between three generations, jumping in time between the experiences of three 16-year-old girls: Roz in Toronto in 2000; her mother, Lydia, in Hong Kong in 1972; and Roz’s grandmother, Mei Laan, in Guangdong in 1954. How did you come up with the narrative structure

Ghosts haunt the pages of this summer’s best thrillers: figures out of memory, history and—just maybe—the Great Beyond. Originally published here.

Get ready to fall in love with Max, the irrepressible elementary school narrator of That Always Happens Sometimes. He’s full of energy and enthusiasm that constantly erupts like a volcano. In Kiley Frank’s clever text, Max poses a series of questions that reveal his personality, such as “Have your electric pencil sharpener privileges ever been

This reviewer is emphatically not a cat person. So it’s a testament to my faith in Lucy Knisley that I eagerly picked up Woe: A Housecat’s Story of Despair.  The comics included here will be familiar to the bestselling author’s numerous social media followers; over many years she chronicled the misadventures and many (many) demands

The author of The Night Ends With Fire, a new fantasy romance inspired by the legend of Mulan, shares her bookstore habits and favorite library memories. Originally published here.

Writing advice from Jami Attenberg, recipes from Black Appalachia, a guide to Japanese gift wrapping and more have delighted and inspired us in 2024. Originally published here.

When Daniel Lohr’s and Leah Auerbach’s eyes meet as they wait to board the SS Raffaello, their connection is instant and electric. The year is 1939, and they’ve both booked first-class passage on a weekslong journey from Trieste, Italy, to Shanghai. But while the cruise liner is massive in size and gorgeous in design, its

Set aside some time once you start reading Trust Her, because after a page of what seems like an idyllic summer outing on the Irish coast, Tessa Daly is plunged into a nightmare: held hostage and forced back into a life she thought she had left behind forever. Flynn Berry fans will recognize Tessa as

Surprise, surprise: Rom-coms still dominate. But moodier contemporary romances are on the rise and historicals are venturing into less-commonly seen eras. Originally published here.

Hair can instill empowerment and confidence. It can also cause stress and anxiety, especially when it doesn’t fit Eurocentric perceptions of beauty. Tomesha Faxio, a self-taught documentary photographer, sets out to debunk myths about Black women’s natural hair and celebrate the rituals surrounding its care in her loving photo-essay book Wash Day: Passing on the

The year’s biggest trends so far appear to be water, the perils of bureaucracy and Villains Who Are Good, Actually. Originally published here.

A woman is standing beside me at the swings. I can see the exact expression on her face; I can hear her voice as she chats with her son. Her name is Tessa, and she isn’t real. Like all readers, I’m familiar with the way reality and fiction can blur together. I remember visiting Edinburgh,

Armed with well-honed combat skills and a magical connection to nature, Princess Eve wants nothing more than to defeat the Knight, a mysterious figure who’s been preying on the people of her kingdom. But just as Eve is about to turn 17, her mother, the Queen, secludes herself in her room, mumbling to a mysterious

Trains are, for whatever reason, surprisingly common in contemporary genre fiction. Perhaps it is their predictability, with their reliance on firmly laid tracks and regular timetables representing an imposition of order on a chaotic world. But rarely is this made so explicit as in Sarah Brooks’ The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, where a

The year’s biggest trends so far appear to be water, the perils of bureaucracy and Villains Who Are Good, Actually. Originally published here.

National Book Award-winning author Tiya Miles has tackled a variety of tough, intriguing subjects in books like Wild Girls and All That She Carried. She felt stymied, however, as she approached the life of the legendary Harriett Tubman. As one friend told her, “No one could catch her then. It’s going to be hard to

“Rat stories are like ghost stories: everybody has one,” writes British author Joe Shute at the start of Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat. Shute’s own original rat story involves going to an alley to watch a ratcatcher and his trained dogs at work. The rats escaped down a sewer, sparing the author the

Spurred by illustrator and “accidental astrologer” Heather Buchanan’s popular Instagram account @Horror.Scoops, Blame the Stars: A Very Good, Totally Accurate Collection of Astrological Advice is a hilarious journey through astrology, a subject that is, Buchanan writes, “stuffed to the glittering gills with practical, utilitarian functions.” But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun with

Soil sensors prevent trees from dying in a college town in the Netherlands. A Boston arborist digitally tracks the city’s urban forest, helping efforts to maintain and preserve the canopy. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur develops an app to alert residents of wildfires. In The Nature of Our Cities: Harnessing the Power of the Natural World

Emergency rooms often resemble war zones, with patients who have ghastly injuries and medical personnel needing to make quick decisions. Joseph should know: An employee at an understaffed trauma center in Philadelphia—or, as he calls it, a “northeastern middling city”—he’s also an Iraq War veteran. And he has a complicated family life with its own

Twelve excellent historical novels from the first half of 2024. Originally published here.

Ann Powers makes an unexpected revelation early in her new book, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. In the second paragraph of the introduction, “Drawing the Maps,” Powers cuts to the chase, writing, “I’m not a biographer, in the usual definition of that term; something in me instinctively opposes the idea that one person

With its near 500-page count and robust endnotes, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq might at first glance scare off readers who haven’t sniffed a textbook in years. But thanks to Steve Coll’s crisp and dynamic prose, what’s between the covers feels little like an academic

In White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, MacArthur fellow and activist-pastor William J. Barber II makes the logical but nonetheless surprising point that, even though poverty has a disproportionately high impact on Black Americans, there is a vastly greater number of white people living in poverty, leading lives

Bestselling author Ellery Lloyd has become deliciously adept at drawing readers into the world of the wealthy: redolent of privilege and glamour, and tainted by darkness and deceit. In their third thriller, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, Lloyd (a pseudonym for married British authors Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos) builds upon the contemporary social

The Last Murder at the End of the World In Stuart Turton’s post-apocalyptic thriller, The Last Murder at the End of the World, the world as we know it came to a cataclysmic end some 90 years back, when a malevolent insect-infested fog engulfed the globe, killing everything in its amorphous path. Only a handful

In her eerie and engrossing debut, The Wilderness of Girls, author Madeline Claire Franklin invites readers to ponder the sometimes blurry line between belief and delusion, and to consider what it means to be free. Sixteen-year-old Rhiannon Chase is barely hanging on. Her financier father is neglectful and angry, and her stepmother’s cruelty has led

Bold thief Kierse gets more than she bargained for when she breaks into a terrifying creature’s home in The Wren in the Holly Library, the first in a new series from K.A. Linde. The Wren in the Holly Library takes place in a fantasy version of New York City, and the cityscape is written with so

Each section of neuroscientist and corporate coach Nicole Vignola’s Rewire: Break the Cycle, Alter Your Thoughts and Create Lasting Change is titled with phrases that will sound familiar to readers bent on self-improvement: “Ditch the Negative,” “Shift Your Narrative,” “Boost the Positive.” While those imperatives may not be new, the author’s explanations of how one