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The Peacock and the Sparrow
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The Peacock and the Sparrow

I.S. Berry · 2024 · 320 pp

Shane Collins is fifty-two, divorced, twenty-five years in the CIA, and finishing his career in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, chasing evidence of Iranian support for the Shia uprising that his bosses in Washington badly want to exist. He’s tired,…

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No. 0233 spy novel · Europe

Palace of Treason

Jason Matthews

Dominika is back in Moscow, promoted, and now spying for the Americans from inside the SVR while being personally noticed by Putin, who appears as himself throughout. The operational thread runs to Vienna and to an Iranian nuclear program, and…

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Palace of Treason
No. 0232 spy novel · Europe

The Kremlin’s Candidate

Jason Matthews

The last of the Dominika Egorova spy trilogy, finished as Matthews was dying. Russian intelligence has a mole of its own, in place for decades and about to be appointed to run the CIA, and double-agent Dominika is the only…

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The Kremlin’s Candidate
No. 0231 ghost story · forest

North Woods

Daniel Mason

This is the story of one house in the western Massachusetts woods, told across four centuries by everyone who passed through it. Two lovers fleeing a Puritan colony. An apple-obsessed English soldier. Twin spinster sisters. A landscape painter, a schizophrenic…

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North Woods
No. 0230 thriller · Europe

Someone in the Attic

Andrea Mara

A woman in the bath hears something above the ceiling, watches the attic hatch swing down, and a masked figure drops through. Thirty seconds later she’s dead. Across town her estranged friend Julia sees a video online of a masked…

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Someone in the Attic
No. 0229 novel · future

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

An actor dies onstage during King Lear in Toronto on the night a flu arrives that will kill almost everybody. Twenty years later the Traveling Symphony walks a circuit around the Great Lakes performing Shakespeare for the settlements that are…

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Station Eleven
No. 0228 cli-fi · Asia

A Guardian and a Thief

Megha Majumdar

It’s set in Kolkata, India, a few decades out, under flood and heat and a food shortage that has markets selling seaweed and synthetic fish. Ma runs a shelter, cares for her elderly father and her two-year-old daughter, and has…

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A Guardian and a Thief
No. 0227 science fiction · No fixed address

Prophet

Helen Macdonald

Sunil Rao can tell whether any statement is true — no explanation, he just knows — and he’s been used for that by intelligence services until they got tired of his drug habit. Adam Rubenstein is the American colonel sent…

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Prophet
No. 0226 novel · future

Severance

Ling Ma

Candace Chen works a dead-end job in New York coordinating the production of specialty Bibles in Chinese factories. Shen Fever arrives — a fungal infection that doesn’t kill people so much as lock them into repeating one familiar routine forever,…

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Severance
No. 0225 novel · No fixed address

White Fur

Jardine Libaire

New Haven, 1986. Elise Perez is twenty, mixed race, out of the projects, squatting in the house next door to a Yale senior named Jamey Hyde, who has an heir’s trust fund and a family that will not tolerate her…

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White Fur
No. 0224 novel · No fixed address

Here Kitty Kitty

Jardine Libaire

Lee manages a Tribeca restaurant and runs on cocaine and pink champagne, financed by older men who buy her clothes and cover her rent. She was going to be a painter. She can’t remember the last time she touched a…

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Here Kitty Kitty
No. 0223 thriller · No fixed address

Portrait of a Thief

Grace D. Li

Will Chen is a Chinese American art history student at Harvard who witnesses a museum heist and shortly thereafter is approached by a Chinese corporation with an offer: Fifty million dollars to steal back five bronze zodiac heads looted from…

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Portrait of a Thief
No. 0222 thriller · Scandinavia

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson

Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist just convicted of libel, gets hired by an aging industrialist to solve a forty-year-old disappearance on the family’s private island north of Stockholm. Working with him, eventually, is Lisbeth Salander — a researcher and hacker,…

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
No. 0221 cli-fi · Europe

The Wall

John Lanchester

Sea level went, and Britain has ringed the entire island in concrete. Every citizen serves two years as a Defender on the wall, twelve-hour shifts staring at cold water, and the rule is simple: If Others get past you, you…

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The Wall
No. 0220 science fiction · space

Station Eternity

Mur Lafferty

Mallory Viridian has a problem: People keep getting murdered around her, and she keeps solving it, and after enough bodies nobody wants her near them. So she moves to a sentient space station called Eternity, which is largely populated by…

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Station Eternity
No. 0219 thriller · Scandinavia

The Girl in the Woods

Camilla Läckberg

A four-year-old girl goes missing near Fjällbacka, Sweden, and the case is a mirror of one thirty years earlier, when two teenage girls confessed to killing a child and were later released. Both women are back in town. Detective Patrik…

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The Girl in the Woods
No. 0218 novel · Europe

When We Cease to Understand the World

Benjamín Labatut

Five linked pieces that start as history and slide into fiction without telling you where the line is. Fritz Haber pulls nitrogen out of the air, feeds the world, and invents chemical weapons. Schwarzschild solves Einstein’s equations in the trenches…

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When We Cease to Understand the World
No. 0217 novel · Europe

Creation Lake

Rachel Kushner

Sadie Smith is a hired spy — ex-federal, now freelance, working for clients she never meets. Her job is to get inside a commune of radical farmers in southwest France and push them into doing something illegal enough to jail…

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Creation Lake
No. 0216 thriller · sea

Whalefall

Daniel Kraus

Jay Gardiner is seventeen and diving alone off the California coast to recover his father’s remains — the father was a legendary diver who walked into the ocean to die of cancer, and the two of them had said unforgivable…

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Whalefall
No. 0215 science fiction · space

The Deep Sky

Yume Kitasei

Eighty crew members, all women and nonbinary, on a ship carrying humanity’s last real hope to a habitable planet, ten years out from Earth. An explosion during a spacewalk kills three of them and knocks the ship off course, and…

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The Deep Sky
No. 0214 novel · No fixed address

The Passenger Seat

Vijay Khurana

Two teenagers, Adam and Teddy, in a small town at the end of a summer. Adam is the one with the ideas, deep in video games and internet grievance; Teddy is the one who goes along to see what happens.…

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The Passenger Seat
No. 0213 novel · Japan

Snow Country

Yasunari Kawabata

A wealthy Tokyo dilettante named Shimamura takes the train through a long tunnel into the mountains of Niigata, where the snow piles up higher than the houses, and stays at a hot spring inn. There he takes up with Komako,…

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Snow Country
No. 0212 spy novel · Europe

To Catch a Spy

Stuart M. Kaminsky

Toby Peters is a broke Los Angeles private detective in the 1940s whose specialty is doing quiet jobs for movie stars. In this one the client is Cary Grant, being blackmailed with a photograph and tangled up in wartime counterintelligence…

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To Catch a Spy
No. 0211 ghost story · American West

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

Stephen Graham Jones

In 1912, a Lutheran pastor in Montana takes the confession of a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, who comes to the church weekly and tells his story in pieces. Good Stab is a vampire, made by a white creature he…

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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
No. 0210 novel · No fixed address

The Laughing Monsters

Denis Johnson

Roland Nair, a Danish-American with a NATO intelligence job and a private agenda, flies into Freetown to meet his old friend Michael Adriko, a Ugandan special forces soldier who is charming, unreliable, and possibly running a scam involving enriched uranium.…

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The Laughing Monsters