Isa Arsén delightfully details the dramatics of the 1950s theater sphere in The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf, which follows the lavender marriage between two Shakespearean players.
Zora Neale Hurston’s familiarity with the political and spiritual workings of the Roman Empire makes The Life of Herod the Great a thought-provoking read, particularly in her depiction of Herod’s visits to Cleopatra, Marc Antony and Caesar.
Catherine Airey excavates the intertwining stories of three generations of Irish American women in Confessions, a firecracker of a debut novel that never gives up any slack.
Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Told in a poetic voice, Tammy Armstrong’s debut novel, Pearly Everlasting, imagines the life of a girl and a bear raised as brother and sister in a cabin set deep in the pines.
In The Wildes, novelist Louis Bayard shows us Oscar Wilde through the eyes of his wife and sons—presenting a portrait of the poet and playwright as engaged father, loving but distant husband, self-absorbed keeper of secrets and a terrified man unable to love openly.
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