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This reviewer has to wonder why an author as brilliant as Niall Williams, whose latest book is the resplendent, suspenseful Time of the Child, isn’t at the top of every reader’s mind. Few contemporary novelists create worlds and characters so amazingly alive and specific. Williams knows every nook and cranny of his Irish town Faha, from its weather, which is so damp that nothing ever dries out completely, to its farms and pubs and how it’s slowly losing ground to the estuary. His characters, even those we see only briefly, are unforgettable. Though the town is full of people, you’ll never mix up one with another. Even Faha’s animal citizens are memorable: Consider Harry, a dog who likes to nap in the middle of the street, making cars drive around him.

Time of the Child is a sequel to Williams’ other masterpiece, This Is Happiness, and is set around Christmas in 1962. Noel Crowe, the protagonist of that book, has moved to America, and our focus is now on the town doctor, Jack Troy, and his daughter Ronnie, who lives with him. In Faha, the doctor is a revered, stoic and necessary presence. He might as well be a granite plinth with a mustache. But within this pillar of rectitude, so many passions roil.

For Jack, like Faha itself, is a dour-seeming being who is full of love. He loves his patients in his brisk and discerning way. He pines for a lost romance, even as he pushes 70. And he loves his daughters, especially Ronnie, whose unmarried state he feels responsible for. When a local boy finds a baby in a churchyard and brings her to the doctor for care, the floodgates in Jack burst. Both he and Ronnie fall in love with the child, and as the unwed Ronnie can’t adopt her, he hatches a scheme so harebrained that it warms your heart even as you think, “Are you serious?” This is where the novel’s suspense comes in, as well as Williams’ genius for making you laugh out loud while he breaks your heart. Anyone who cherishes great writing should want more and more from Williams.

Niall Williams demonstrates his genius for making you laugh out loud while breaking your heart at the same time in Time of the Child, his follow-up to This Is Happiness.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World is the latest offering from botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, one of the great Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes. This slim but powerful volume continues the work of her previous books, including Gathering Moss and the New York Times bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass. Here, she draws from the traditional Anishinaabe economy for her understanding of reciprocity and gift economies, ones where, she writes, “a system of redistribution of wealth [is] based on abundance and the pleasure of sharing.”

Through vivid descriptions of the heartbeats around her—cedar waxwings, bluebirds, neighbors sharing garden-grown zucchini—Kimmerer immerses readers in her kinship and connection to the land. Moving between Western science and her own Potawatomi knowledge, she illustrates an accessible model for building reciprocal relationships with both nonhuman and human life around us through the harvesting and sharing of a fruit known as Amelanchier—or serviceberry, “Saskatoon, Juneberry, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplum, Sarvis.” Kimmerer writes that “ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance” and informs us that serviceberries are medicinal fruits that also synchronize “the seasonal rounds of traditional Indigenous people, who move in an annual cycle through their homelands to where the foods are ready.”

Kimmerer breaks down how an extractive economic system like capitalism, which focuses on individualism, competition and exploitation of resources, impacts our spirits; she does so in a language and tone that is generous, even toward the violence of such a system. Indigenous people, she explains, change themselves to suit the land’s changes of harvest, whereas Western methods of farming attempt to make the land suit a population’s desires and consumptions. “We force the food to come to us, at considerable financial and ecological costs,” Kimmerer notes, “rather than following the practice of taking what has been given to us, each in its own time.”

“The land is the source of all goods and services, which are distributed in a kind of gift exchange: one life is given in support of another. The focus is on supporting the good of the people, not only an individual.” The Serviceberry is a kind reminder that we would do well to restore the sovereignty and practices of Indigenous peoples for the present and future of our world.

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, returns with a powerful meditation on economics rooted in abundance and sharing.

If you’ve ever been curious about how an idea turns into a piece of art, you’ll love The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing. This visionary book’s first two pages lay out its thesis in surprisingly simple terms. First, there’s a sketch of a prescription pad with a physician’s signature at the bottom. Turn the page and you’ll see what that doodle became: the famous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. But how exactly did Frank Gehry’s messy sketch become the architectural masterpiece? That’s the process writer Adam Moss is concerned with; the “work” in his book’s title is a verb. Moss has been the editor of New York magazine and the New York Times Magazine, and his love for conversational, witty storytelling is clear here. The Work of Art collects conversations with some of the most lauded, interesting artists working—from Kara Walker, who takes readers through the creation of her 2014 public sculpture “A Subtlety,” to Gay Talese, who pores over the copious notes he took to write “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” in 1966. No minutia is too small to examine. In fact, it seems like the smaller the detail, the more information Moss is able to extract. Alongside each story, Moss includes images of the works in various stages of completion. You see Twyla Tharp’s massive choreographic sketches, and the first stages of a Will Shortz crossword. The images elevate the book to a compendium of precious ephemera. It’s possible that Moss has invented a new literary genre that merges self-help, art history and journalism. However it’s classified, you’ll read it cover to cover.

The Work of Art is a visionary compendium of ephemera that makes visible the bridge between idea and artwork.
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I’ll be honest—it took me a moment to understand this book. We are immediately thrown into an opulent “year-turning” party: buffets of food, swirling gowns, a mysterious grandfather clock slowly ticking down the hours until the new year. Our protagonist, Kembral Thorne, is at the party while on maternity leave from her job as a Hound, a police officer-esque position that specializes in retrieving people or objects from other dimensions known as Echoes. In rapid succession, author Melissa Caruso introduces Kembral and the rest of the guests at the year-turning party (including Kembral’s nemesis and obsession, professional thief Rika Nonesuch), the framework of Echoes and a series of specialized terms for the world and its sociopolitical system. If reading this paragraph was overwhelming, you can expect a similar reaction when you begin The Last Hour Between Worlds

But—but! If you’re a fantasy romance fan who’s been craving originality from the genre, this book is truly a breath of fresh air. Once you’ve gotten the gist of Echoes and more or less familiarized yourself with the characters, the storyline is a heady, bizarre rush of murder mystery meets Alice in Wonderland. Kembral discovers quite quickly that the year-turning party is being used as a chessboard of sorts, that a game is being played out between powerful interdimensional beings. Every hour, the party falls into a weirder, deadlier Echo, and it is up to Kembral and Rika to figure out how to stop the game before they’re trapped in an Echo they can’t escape from—if they don’t, everyone will die. 

Caruso has created a compelling heroine in Kembral, who is equal parts tough, resourceful and vulnerable. A full-blown adult and mother, there’s an element of maturity and caution to her perspective that is refreshing in a genre that is often full of young protagonists who dive headlong into peril. The heart of the novel is Kembral’s relationship with Rika: their history and their secrets, how they’ve leaned on each other and how they’ve hurt each other. Caruso’s writing is stunning as well, with lines like “trying to figure her out was like trying to hold the shape of fire in your mind.” Although I was skeptical when I started, by the middle, I was completely on board with Kembral and Rika as they tried to save their sinking ship—or, in this case, their dimension-bending party. The Last Hour Between Worlds isn’t a breezy read, but it will stretch your imagination and leave you thinking.

A heady, bizarre rush of murder mystery meets Alice’s in Wonderland, The Last Hour Between Worlds is an interdimensional fantasy adventure.
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A memory palace is a memorization technique used by figures as diverse as Cicero, international memory champions and the late, great Sherlock Holmes. Practitioners visualize placing images representing information they want to recollect in a familiar setting that they can revisit whenever their memory needs a nudge. The Memory Palace: True Stories of the Past, by award-winning podcaster and screenwriter Nate DiMeo, however, is a more intimate and complex edifice than any mnemonic device. Instead of facts and figures, DiMeo’s memory palace is inhabited by the moving true stories that illustrate how human beings throughout history, whether famous, infamous or unknown, felt the same emotions and had the same imperfections that we have and humans will always have.

Like DiMeo’s podcast of the same name, The Memory Palace’s stories—numbering nearly 50 in this volume—are briskly told, varied, unexpected and often paradoxical, giving us a sideways view of human nature. William Mumler, a 19th-century con artist photographer who stumbled upon a technique to make “ghosts” appear behind his subjects, gave genuine comfort to spiritualist Mary Todd Lincoln as she grieved the death of her child. William James Sidis, a boy genius who, at age 11, gave a Harvard lecture on the implications of the fourth dimension, could have been an academic celebrity, but instead sought seclusion to pursue his passion: collecting streetcar transfers. Carla Wallenda, the last surviving child of the founders of the Flying Wallendas high wire troupe, witnessed over several decades the gruesome deaths of her father, husband, cousins, aunt and uncle—but until her death at the age of 85, never felt so alive as when she was on the tightrope.  

DiMeo ordered the stories in no particular way, and he suggests that The Memory Palace could be a “dipping book.” But there’s a benefit to reading it in order: In his final seven stories, he seamlessly interweaves episodes from his family’s lives in a way that illuminates both the individuals chronicled in his “cabinet of curiosities” and the project of the book and podcast as a whole. Readers will feel a shiver of recognition and understanding—making a second or third visit to DiMeo’s memory palace both irresistible and gratifying.

The Memory Palace collects stories from Nate DiMeo’s award-winning podcast about historical people—famous and unknown alike, all breathtakingly human.
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The City Sings Green & Other Poems About Welcoming Wildlife is an inspirational treasure trove that introduces young readers to the concept of rewilding, showing how cities and communities around the world are repairing some of the environmental damage caused by human habitation. Focusing on 11 intriguing examples, Erica Silverman has created a unique blend of poetry, science, civics and activism. 

Each story is compelling: a honeybee highway in Oslo, Norway; a Los Angeles school that tore up their asphalt playground to create a natural oasis; and cities in Australia that built rope bridges over highways so that western ringtail possums might safely cross. Silverman introduces each short lesson with a poem celebrating an ecological achievement, accompanied by a prose explanation of the specific details. It’s a winning combination that succinctly informs and delights, while helpful back matter provides additional resources. Both the poetry and prose of The City Sings Green are widely accessible.

Ginnie Hsu’s cheery illustrations are an ecological feast, filled with bright colors that readily convey the benefits of each endeavor. Her art is particularly immersive, leaving readers feeling as though they’ve practically taken a walk through many of the places described, often seen from an animal’s point of view.  

The City Sings Green is inspiring, and likely to encourage budding environmentalists to more closely consider the intersection between humans and nature. 

The City Sings Green is inspiring, and likely to encourage budding environmentalists to more closely consider the intersection between humans and nature.

A hotly anticipated debut novel, complete with a princely advance and a dreamy move to Los Angeles, equals lifelong success, right? Not quite. Books flop, money dries up and the city’s bright lights conceal both its dark underbelly and what those in the limelight will do to stay famous. Pip Drysdale’s marvel of a thriller, The Close-Up, follows Zoe Ann Weiss, a writer as witty as she is messy, as she gets entangled in a high-profile, high-stakes relationship that could lead to a bestselling second book—if no one kills her first.

Zoe always dreamed of being a writer, and that dream came true . . . for a while, until her debut failed and her advance funds ran out. Now, Zoe works in a flower shop to make ends meet while her agent rejects pitches for her still-under-contract follow-up and her dad frequently begs her to move home to London. Just before Zoe’s 30th birthday, she has a chance reunion with Zach, a sexy bartender she spent three breathless days with years ago, who is now an action star with a to-die-for LA bachelor pad. Zoe finds inspiration for her second book in their rekindled romance (there’s just the little problem of the NDA she signed). But when she’s stalked by someone reenacting the events of her debut novel—in which the heroine dies at the end—Zoe finds herself fighting, and writing, for her life.

Drysdale’s four previous novels have been bestsellers in Australia, and the author grew up on three continents (per her bio, she “became an adult in New York and London”). Her protagonist, Zoe, has a believably world-weary air and a distinctively jaded voice, with nascent hope swimming just under the surface. The decisions she makes are often rash, heavily influenced by ambition, love, lust and all the other intense emotions endemic to those who move to Hollywood with stars in their eyes. You may not agree with Zoe Ann Weiss, but you will love watching her navigate Drysdale’s deceptively glamorous LA. With its colorful supporting characters (especially Daisy, an aspiring actor who manages Zoe’s flower shop) and spectacularly twisty plot, The Close-Up is a fantastic addition to the neo-noir subgenre.

World-weary and distinctively jaded, The Close-Up is a fantastic, Los Angeles-set neo-noir.
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It might seem simple, sitting on the couch with Netflix on and your belly full, to envision the heroics you’d accomplish if war broke out in your homeland: You’d join the armed forces, or whatever constituted the resistance. You’d break the chains of your oppressors, just like Star Wars, or go rogue, living off your wits and aiding the forces of good, just like Mad Max. Of course you would. Of course you would

But life isn’t a Hollywood movie, and as the real stories of World War II are lost to living memory, it takes someone with a sharp eye and an emotionally perceptive heart to bring the nuance of enduring an occupation into focus. Italian author Sacha Naspini has done so triumphantly in his second novel to be translated into English, The Bishop’s Villa. Naspini is from Grosseto, a town in southern Tuscany that holds a dubious distinction: It was Europe’s only Catholic diocese to have been rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust. For eight months toward the end of the war in the European theater, the Roccatederighi seminary housed about 100 Jews, many of whom were sent on to Auschwitz. 

The Bishop’s Villa’s fictional protagonist, who stands in for everyman, is a cobbler in Grosseto named René. It’s not his war; he’s just trying to keep his head down and make it through, like most of the townsfolk. But when his friend (and unrequited love) Anna flees to join the resistance, his relationship with her lands him in hot water with the local collaborators, and he finds himself an unwilling “guest” at the bishop’s villa. Though he’s beaten and interrogated, René holds out hope. “What,” he reflects, “can you do to a man who looks at you calmly when you threaten him with death? You can chew his bones clean, but you can’t touch his soul, which means you will never win.”

René’s gut-wrenching story of survival caroms between moments of unexpected kindness and unfathomable cruelty as the final days of the war play out. Naspini is to be commended for helping us to recall a story that played out thousands of times across a continent, a scenario that we dare not forget lest it be repeated. 

Sacha Naspini’s The Bishop’s Villa is a gut-wrenching story of survival set in Grosseto, a Catholic diocese in Tuscany which was rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust.
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Every new Haruki Murakami book is an event, but The City and Its Uncertain Walls has a special importance for longtime readers of the Japanese master. This weighty tome is not just his first novel in six years, but also a return to one of his earliest works: 1985’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. In the book’s afterword, Murakami relates how he reworked the ideas of that early book, reflecting on 40 years of writing life in the process. Without giving too much of this glorious novel away, what emerges from those four decades of thought is a striking, moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways. 

The unnamed narrator of The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a man caught between reality and an alternate world dominated by a strange Town surrounded by an impenetrable wall. When we meet this narrator, he’s reminiscing about both a teenage romance with an odd ending and the Town itself, which he once visited to work in a dark library as a Dream Reader. With the love story from his youth and his time in the Town dominating his mind, he sets out to change his life and find fulfillment working in a new, more conventional library. 

Many things about Murakami’s work are striking, but what stands out most when you dive into this book is his unmatched narrative patience. He does not rely on breakneck pacing to drive you from page to page. Instead, he moves the story forward steadily, with a confidence and wit that keeps you longing to read on. In his trademark assured, graceful prose, Murakami has produced a work of tremendous ambition that on a sentence-by-sentence level feels like sitting down with a friend to hear them tell a very strange story. It’s another masterwork from one of our finest living novelists, and a must-read for Murakami devotees.

Haruki Murakami’s latest masterwork, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, is a moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways.
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Thank You, Everything is a unique picture book meant to be enjoyed over and over: It may easily become a favorite of preschoolers as well as young elementary students. One morning, a child wakes up, eats breakfast and receives a box containing a mysterious treasure map that launches a grand journey. Told with minimal prose, this intriguing tale opens up the world to readers in a multitude of fascinating ways, leading them on a grand adventure that lasts for months and involves travel by bicycle, train, bus, plane, raft and hot-air balloon.

Icinori—the design and illustration duo of Mayumi Otero and Raphael Urwiller—use a bold yet limited color palette that favors shades of turquoise and rust to create wildly stylized, dynamic illustrations. Their graphic designs are eye-catching throughout, whether portraying a glass of water, jungles of wild animals or winding pathways reminiscent of an M.C. Escher painting. The pacing is perfect, prompting readers to appreciate and take close-up looks at small details (a bath towel, a canteen, a caterpillar) while also admiring big, beautiful landscapes (a bustling city, a dark forest lit by a full moon, a mountainside strewn with boulders, a mysterious palace).

The narrative, translated from French by Emilie Robert Wong, is equally distinctive. Just as Goodnight Moon uses a repeated refrain, the explorer in this picture book, as the title suggests, thanks each and every thing encountered, starting simple (“Thank you, alarm clock) and getting progressively more intriguing (“Thank you, volcano”). This delicious blend of art and prose is both soothing and exciting, and will encourage young imaginations to soar. The mystery of the final destination—where a surprise awaits—will keep readers engaged from start to satisfying conclusion.

Thank You, Everything is a delightful book filled with wonder and gratitude, feelings that will linger with readers long after they close its cover.

Thank You, Everything is a delightful book filled with wonder and gratitude, feelings that will linger with readers long after they close its cover.

Theater kids of all ages will adore Take It From the Top, Claire Swinarski’s effervescently heartfelt and cathartic tribute to the joys and dramas that come with life in the limelight. 

Each year, Eowyn and best friend Jules tread the boards at Lamplighter Lake Summer Camp for the Arts in the Wisconsin Northwoods. They instantly bonded in their first year, but now as they enter their sixth—at 13 years old—a once rock-solid friendship bolstered by elaborate plans for a shared future (they’ll be famous together!) has become a tenuous truce at best.

Eowyn’s not sure why Jules is icing her out, so she buries her feelings in intense audition prep for the big end-of-summer production, in which she’s determined to get a lead role. Jules is prepping too . . . but what if they both score big parts? Can a friendship that’s painfully broken be healed in time for a harmonious opening night?

As in her middle grade debut, epistolary mystery What Happened to Rachel Riley?—a BookPage Best Middle Grade Book of 2023 and 2024 Edgar Award nominee—Swinarski has created a story rife with realism, empathy and well-drawn characters navigating their figuring-themselves-out years. She also plays with structure to excellent effect, alternating Eowyn’s perspective in the present with Jules’ in the years leading up to this pivotal sixth summer. 

It’s a genuine treat to follow along as the talented, hardworking tweens in Take It From the Top strive to understand others’ perspectives and translate their onstage performances into how they address real life. As Eowyn muses, “Up there on the stage . . . You could be someone you weren’t. Or maybe you could be someone you really were.” Bravo!

It’s a genuine treat to follow along as the talented, hardworking tweens in Take It From the Top strive to understand others’ perspectives and translate their onstage performances into how they address real life.
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From the Scottsboro Nine to Black Lives Matter, Black youth have positioned themselves at the center of the battle for civil rights for the past 100 years. In Resist: How a Century of Young Black Activists Shaped America, award-winning Nigerian American journalist Rita Omokha makes an unwavering push to put these young Americans’ stories at the forefront of the public record. 

Omokha’s research was spurred partially by the tragic murder of George Floyd and the unprecedented wave of protests around the country. A master of storytelling with a knack for thoughtful investigative journalism, Omokha has created a shining reexamination of history through a Black lens. For example, most of us learn about the Scottsboro Nine—the nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931—by reading the outlines of their case and legal proceedings, but how many of us see the ordeal from the Nine’s perspectives, or realize how thousands of students organized for charges to be dropped? It’s here where Omokha excels, providing a ground-level look at how young people were often thrust into organizing for civil rights. “Crucially, the most illuminating insights from history were not solely defined by actions but by the fervent optimism of the young. . . . Young ones who have intentionally learned from history, cautious of its perils, ready with their folded chairs at the table.” 

Omokha draws a clear line from these young people to the Black youth activists of today, exploring how technology has helped resurrect Black liberation movements in the past 20 years. When George Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder for killing Trayvon Martin, three Black women—Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Ayo Tometi—“declared what seemed spiritual, a sacred psalm in three simple words preceded by a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter.” Resist includes the stories of Darnella Frazier, the woman who videotaped George Floyd’s murder, and Johnetta Elzie, a co-creator of the Mapping Police Violence project, who launched into action after the shooting of Michael Brown. With the help of Omokha’s meticulous reporting, their stories go beyond the headlines and hashtags.

Ultimately, Resist is a must-read for anyone looking to dive into the collected history of Black youth activism and its immense impact on America—and perhaps learn how to take action themselves.

Rita Omokha’s Resist is a must-read for anyone looking to dive into the history of Black youth activism and its immense impact on America.

When we bring our mobile phone to life with a tap or settle in behind the wheel of our car, few of us give much thought to the raw materials required to make these sometimes miraculous- seeming devices work. Journalist Vince Beiser has reflected deeply on that subject, and the result, Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape Our Future, is a sharp cautionary tale about the dilemmas facing humanity as we advance deeper into what he calls the Electro-Digital Age, especially as we pursue the essential transition to an energy-renewable future.

Everything comes with a cost, Beiser reminds us, even when it comes to the use of so-called critical metals like lithium, cobalt and nickel. These resources are fundamental to the massive expansion of electric cars and the clean energy sources (namely solar and wind power) that are necessary to combat climate change. What makes that truth problematic, he argues, is that the inevitable price of progress often falls most heavily on the residents of impoverished countries who bear the burden of first extracting these materials and later disposing of the batteries and printed circuit boards, for example, in which they’re used.

Beiser’s journey to this insight takes him from the streets of his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, where he tracks an “urban miner” digging through dumpsters for salvageable products like copper wiring, to a lithium mining operation in Chile’s Atacama desert, to a garbage dump in Lagos, Nigeria, where “e-waste scrappers” work in hazardous conditions to recycle electronic products. Power Metal is a concise, but thoroughly researched, work crammed with eye-popping statistics—among them the fact that 75 pounds of ore must be mined to build one four-and-a-half ounce iPhone. It investigates highly touted technologies like sea mining, whose promised benefits may conceal massive environmental risks. 

In the final section of his book, Beiser offers some prescriptions to reduce the planet’s insatiable demand for resources that go beyond costly and energy-intensive recycling, including broadening the scope of right to repair laws, making urban spaces more friendly to bicyclists and deeply questioning our infatuation with the automobile. Whatever one thinks of the practicality of some of his proposals, Beiser has performed a vital service by alerting both policymakers and ordinary citizens to some of the critical choices facing us. 

Power Metal sounds the alarm on the environmental and social consequences of electronic and digital energy—and how the ways we are combating climate change come at a cost.

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