Thursday Murder Club returns! Richard Osman's charming retirees and their friends have another mystery in the offing, and the twists are tightly plotted, while the characters are just as fun to hang out with as the adventure unfolds. It's not often that one gets a page-turning story with insight about lives well-lived, but Osman and his characters have made it happen here. Excellent for those who loved the first novel, but this one is fine to start with, especially if you quite like spy stories with a bit of gangster thrown in, too.
Stuck’s characters, wrestling with masculinity, race, and class, undergo bizarrely absurd and brutally real adventures, and shine a light back on us at every turn. This debut collection is an excellent, bitter, funny, incisive, heartbreaking read.
If you are new to Mathis’s work or unfamiliar with her long career, this retrospective will be a fantastic education. Her poems, dynamic and intimate, invite readers into her unfolding examinations of family, parenting, aging, and living in this imperfect world.
Third in the series, but a great one to start with! Perveen Mistry, solicitor, investigates the death of her not-quite-client, as Indian independence makes strides against British rule. Setting and character combine in this lively procedural, and this pioneering woman navigates her investigation's needs and her familial responsibilities.
An intimate, unflinching portrait of the aftermath of a school shooting. Through letters, lists, fragments, and more traditional narrative sections, Otto and others grapple with anger, grief, and the impossible necessity of living in a world that holds such pain. A vital story unfolds with truth and beauty in Griner's hands.
Urgent, important, intimate, political, personal, formal, challenging, explosive, and revelatory—Petrosino's insightful and lyrical illumination unfolds across each sequence and on every page.
This satisfying sequel to Magpie Murders finds our intrepid editor Susan Ryland bored and worried in Greece, where the puzzle of a woman gone missing in the wake of reading an Atticus Pund mystery entices her back to England. Susan tries again to get in her departed writer's head as she tries to figure out what the woman saw in the book, and how it might lead her family to find her now. Horowitz's homage to Poirot, Christie, and the mystery genre's industry enlivens his elaborate country-home mystery, exquisitely executed, as ever.
Dr. Siri and his wife, as brilliant and enduring as ever, find themselves pursuing the origin of a journal that made its way to them. This, the final mystery in Cotterill's Dr. Siri series, finds Dr. Siri and Madame Daeng traveling across rivers and into mountains in search of the journal writer and the source of his journal's increasingly fabulous tales. As warm and unflinching as all the novels in this series, their final adventure reveals much about war, survival, and how we all try to make our lives into the best stories we can.
This gripping mystery examines a brother’s life spent in penitence for a bad decision on a bad day, a brother’s death after a mysterious decision on his own bad day, and the harsh secrets a family has allowed to fester, all under the brutal, unforgiving glare of the Australian outback’s heat and space. Harper creates a breathtaking picture of harsh beauty and failed connection that will pull in lovers of mysteries and of excellent writing alike.
A stellar seasonal sampler of Soho Crime authors. The stories range from grisy to festive, from scary to funny, from heartbreaking to, well, almost heartwarming—these are crime stories, after all! You may find in these pages an author who is an old friend, or an author who'll be a favorite discovery. All around, a fantastic holiday read, & a great gift for the mystery reader on your list, too.
Americanah is both a unfolding love story & an incisive look at constructions of race—Ifemelu is a transplant to the U.S. from Nigeria, and the story of the end of her time in the States and her return to Nigeria is bound up in her youthful love affair with the man she called Ceiling, and in all she has had to learn about how to be black in America, as well as all she has to learn about having been an expat upon her return to Nigeria. Like Austen, Adichie uses the framework of love lost & longed for to examine the society she, and the rest of us, move through. Her beautiful writing & her characters' intimate dilemmas reveal a multiplicity of layers in the world around & beyond us.
"If only I had some summer reading that made me laugh," your kid says. "If only we could read something besides the Magic Tree House," you think. Don't let the movie's existence stop you--run right out and try Cressida Cowell's How to Train Your Dragon books. Gentler than the movie, and more outrageous, these books are fun to read aloud and exciting enough for the listener to pick up the book and read ahead when your voice is gone. Hiccup is the hero we all could be, and his efforts to find a new way to be the Viking leader his dad hopes him to be are funny and touching and never soppy. It's a great series. (And if you are wondering if your young reader will have the Monty-Python-appreciation gene, these books may be the predictor to soothe your fears.)
Enough story for readers of any age: tsunami, pirates, sharks, astronomy, beer, how we make meaning from tragedy, how we communicate, even mistaken priorities of colonialism--he packs a lot in. It's funny, heartbreaking, adventuresome and contemplative--classic Pratchett, even if not Discworld. A good introduction to a wonderful writer.
A very funny and surprisingly insightful novel. For any fan of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, or Jasper Fforde. Or for those you hope will grow up to be fans of theirs, too.
