Tom Newlands’ Only Here, Only Now is a winning coming-of-age story distinguished by Newlands’ sympathy for his characters, among them Scottish teen Cora, her wheelchair-using mother, and her mother’s shifty but kind boyfriend.
Novelist and screenwriter Richard Price (Lush Life, The Wire) takes readers to Harlem in 2008 in this suspenseful tale, which follows the fallout of a tragic building collapse.
For the Lahiris, the family at the heart of Nayantara Roy’s deliciously long The Magnificent Ruins, white-hot hate, resentment and violence mingle with love, loyalty and moments of tenderness.
Clare Chambers’ historical novel Shy Creatures is tenderly told, with just the right balance of melancholy and hope to keep the pages turning.
Nikki May’s warm way with her characters and her sharp eye for the details of life in Lagos make This Motherless Land an engaging and thought-provoking novel about race and reinvention.
In Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers, Ruthie, a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq child, disappears from a farm in Maine where her migrant family is employed during the summer.
Rio and Gibraltar, a successful Black couple, leave behind the world of Boston academia to build a new life in Gabriel Bump’s electrifying book The New Naturals.
Anyone who enjoys the careful art of the short story will find that in Ruined a Little When We Are Born, “art” is very much the key word.
Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut, Blue Light Hours, is an intimate meditation on home, homesickness and the many tiny ways of attempting to bridge an impossible distance.
Alia Trabucco Zeran’s Clean is the story of a live-in servant who is involved in a child’s tragic death. This well-drawn character study’s sadness lingers in the mind.
Libby Lost and Found takes the idea that books shape our reality and runs with it, in a madcap, implausible and inventive roller coaster ride about an author and her 11-year-old fan.
Our Evenings is a masterful accomplishment: an intricate vision of the conflict between an open, generous Britain and a clenched, intolerant one from Booker Prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst.
Listening to Kathryn Drysdale read The Modern Fairies will make you feel like you’re in a 17th-century Paris salon yourself, with a front-row seat to the glittering origins of the fairy tale genre.
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