In Armfield’s unsettling, uncanny, and utterly delightful debut, wolves, mythological monsters, and seemingly ordinary girls and women abound. In “Formerly Feral,” a girl’s neighbor from across the street adopts a wolf and names her Helen. When the girl’s parents divorce, her father remarries the ne... Continue reading »

Set in 1908 Los Angeles, Kincheloe’s effervescent third Anna Blanc mystery (after 2017’s The Woman in the Camphor Trunk) finds the socialite turned police matron still smitten with police detective Joe Singer, whom department regulations forbid her to date. Never one to follow the rules, An... Continue reading »

In a profound look at humankind’s spacefaring future, Jimenez’s debut tells of both anguish and love as the result of heart-wrenching decisions. A century from now, aerospace engineer Fumiko believes humans should leave the climate-ravaged Earth, and regretfully chooses her career designing space st... Continue reading »

Navy vet Jason Clements, the hero in Clare’s heartwarming, delightful third Wyoming Cowboy contemporary (after The Cowboy and His Baby), is wracked by PTSD, mourns the death of his service dog, and has trouble keeping a job. He gets a new kind of therapy when he meets the chipper, bighearte... Continue reading »

The phenomenal penultimate volume of Sattouf’s epic five-part autobiography takes a dark turn, charting the French-Syrian cartoonist’s descent into puberty in the late 1980s and early ’90s as his family fractures around him. Leaving childhood means leaving a life insulated from the cares and expecta... Continue reading »

Ruefle (My Private Party) delivers a giddy, incisive ode to failure, fragility, and unknowing in her 12th book. “It may be our heads/ are filled with feathers/ from the stuff/ we don’t know,” she hazards, tiptoeing through one after another outlandish scenario sketched with uncanny delicacy... Continue reading »

James (The Bishop) builds an intricate world grounded in robotic technology in this stimulating tale. Thirty years in the future, advanced technology has created “Artificials”—robots so closely resembling humans it is difficult to distinguish them from human beings (called “Naturals”). Afte... Continue reading »

In this spectacular debut, Ekstrom, founder of Headbands of Hope, which donates to cancer research for every headband sale, provides a delightful guide to making one’s dreams come true. “I’m not going to tell you to put on a happy face and skip down the street high-fiving everyone who walks by,” she... Continue reading »

In this excellent guide, garden designer Wallington rehabilitates the lowly weed—“a broad and negative term associated with any plant that pops up where we weren’t expecting it”—by identifying and extolling its virtues. Wallington argues that a garden without one (“probably the first flower anyone k... Continue reading »

Religious historian Armstrong (A History of God) examines the world’s major religions to make her case that modern humanity has lost track of what scripture meant in the past and, in the process, departed from the compassionate heart of those faiths in her most profound, important book to d... Continue reading »

An inclusive collection of poets and artists pays homage to cultural and familial inheritance through a series of illustrated memories. Compiled by Hopkins, readers are treated to an intimate look into the childhoods of poets such as Naomi Shihab Nye and Kwame Alexander. Every work opens with a pers... Continue reading »