Mr Flood’s Last Resort
Mysteries abound in Jess Kidd’s story of an antique dealer’s enigmatic past.
Katherine A. Powers
Katherine A. Powers received the 2013 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963. Her email address is kapow3@gmail.com.
Convenience Store Woman
In Sayaka Murata’s “wonderfully strange” novel, the regimented cheer of a convenience store is one character’s dream job.
The Sparsholt Affair
The author of “The Line of Beauty” traces a mystery across three generations of gay life in Britain.
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
The history behind the beloved Little House books was one of endurance and suffering — and family myth and infighting…
The Ninth Hour
In Alice McDermott’s new novel, a family’s history exposes the power — and the cost — of religious devotion and…
The Leavers
An ambitious young woman leaves her rural hometown in China for what she hopes will be a better life in…
Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited
A new biography by Philip Eade seeks to use newly available documents to reopen questions about the writer’s love life…
The Romanovs
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s group portrait of Russia’s long-reigning dynasty captures a family whose crowned heads included both despots and disasters.…
The Past
A family gathering at a house in the country is the occasion for Tessa Hadley’s sinuous novel of secrets coming…
The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings
The voice of the stylish and uncompromising critic Robert Hughes often took the form of “a fount of effervescent vitriol.”…
Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
George Custer is remembered more for his death than for his tumultuous life. T.J. Stiles aims to correct that. Review…
The Pope’s Daughter
Was Lucrezia Borgia one of the most sinister figures of the Italian Renaissance? Or just a woman who learned to…
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance
A novel of a doomed cruise provides bittersweet laughs and an opportunity for the mother at its helm to examine…
The South
To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Discover Great New Writers program, Katherine A. Powers looks back at an early…
The Fishermen
Katherine A. Powers on a family story of prophecy, tragedy and madness that echoes a Nigerian masterwork.
Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life
A late bloomer who turned her stoic middle-class background into the engine of unforgettable fiction.
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing
A young woman’s journey into a world of torment, rendered with Joycean invention.
Euphoria
A vivid new novel, born from the true story of Margaret Mead’s loves and losses in New Guinea.
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
The New Yorker cartoonist confronts the inevitable in this graphic memoir.
The Lowland
Two brothers of Calcutta take divergent paths in a tale of 1960s rebellion.