Thesiger crossed the Empty Quarter twice in the late 1940s, on camels, with a few Bedu who’d have gotten there a lot faster without him. His nominal job was scouting locust breeding grounds for the British, locusts being the scourge…
Ling Ling Huang
Enka grows up on the poor side of a walled city in Florida, gets a scholarship to an elite art school, and immediately fixes on Mathilde, the prodigy everyone else is afraid to approach. Mathilde is genuinely great and genuinely…
Mick Herron
A standalone in the Slough House world. A pointless government inquiry called Monochrome has been given a windowless room and no real powers, and two civil servants have spent two years finding nothing — until a classified file lands on…
Sara Herchenroether
In 1983, hikers in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest find the bodies of a woman and two children in barrels. Thirty years later, nobody has a name for any of them. Laura MacDonald, a librarian and genealogist in Connecticut going…
Sally Hepworth
Pippa and Gabe move their family to a cottage on a cliff in coastal Australia — a beautiful spot with an ugly reputation, because people come there to jump. Gabe has talked several of them down, which has made him…
Peter Heller
Jim Stegner is a painter with a real market, two dead marriages, a daughter who was murdered, and a prison term for shooting a man in a bar. He’s living in Colorado trying to fish and paint and stay level.…
Peter Heller
Ren Hopper is a park ranger in Yellowstone, still grieving the death of his wife, and his job is mostly managing tourists who get too close to the animals. His friend Hilly is a wolf biologist whom the anti-wolf faction…
Peter Heller
Celine is sixty-eight, blue-blooded, a Sarah Lawrence grad, with an apartment under the Brooklyn Bridge, a cigarette habit that gave her emphysema, and a better record finding missing people than the FBI. She takes cases about lost families because of…
Peter Høeg
A six-year-old Greenlandic boy falls off a Copenhagen rooftop and the police call it an accident. Smilla Jaspersen, half Inuit, half Danish, a glaciologist who fits nowhere and likes nobody, looks at the tracks in the snow on that roof…
Steve Hawk
A small nuclear device goes off beside a highway in West Virginia — low yield, few dead, and the first act of nuclear terrorism in history. Months later, on a rough stretch of Northern California coast, a surfer and lifeguard…
Janice Hallett
Hallett builds novels out of documents, and this one is a mixed-media master’s course file: Six students, their emails, group chat, forum posts, submitted essays, and the tutor’s marking notes, all bundled and handed to an external examiner months after…
Heather Gudenkauf
Wylie Lark is a true crime writer holed up in a rented Iowa farmhouse over Christmas, working on the 1980s murders that happened in that house — two parents shot, a girl missing, a boy who survived. A blizzard comes…
Lev Grossman
I don’t know how I stumbled upon this book, because I mostly left my interest in fantasy behind in my teens (talkin’ to you, Tolkien). But, wow. I couldn’t put The Bright Sword down and even raved about it to…
Lauren Groff
A servant girl runs out of the Jamestown fort in the winter of the starving time, with a hatchet, a stolen pewter cup, and two pairs of stockings, into a continent she knows nothing about. That’s the whole book —…
Daryl Gregory
The Birch family has kept a covenant with something living in a cave on their mountain in the Smokies since the 1930s. Each generation supplies a girl who goes into the dark to receive from it, and Stella was the…
Graham Greene
Vienna after the war, the city carved into four occupation zones and half of it rubble. Rollo Martins, a broke writer of pulp westerns, arrives to take a job from his old friend Harry Lime and finds Lime’s funeral instead.…
Graham Greene
A German prison in occupied France. Thirty hostages, three to be shot, lots drawn. Chavel, a wealthy lawyer, draws one of the marked slips and offers everything he owns — house, money, all of it — to any man who…
Graham Greene
It’s Saigon in the early fifties, the French war going badly. Fowler is a British reporter, middle-aged, opium in the afternoons, living with a young Vietnamese woman named Phuong and determined to have no opinions about anything. Pyle is a…
Graham Greene
Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in Havana, has a teenage daughter with expensive tastes, and no money. British intelligence recruits him. Having nothing to report, he invents a network of agents out of the phone book and sends London drawings of…
Graham Greene
In 1935, Greene, thirty and with no relevant experience whatsoever, walked across the interior of Liberia with his twenty-three-year-old cousin Barbara, a cook, and a line of carriers, on a route where the map said nothing but “Cannibals.” They spent…
A.E. Gauntlett
Annie is a university professor who never much believed in love until Mark, a surgeon she kept passing on the morning commute and then met properly at a support group for trauma survivors. Both of them are carrying something they…
Bonnie Garmus
Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist in early sixties Southern California who is very good and gets nothing for it — no doctorate, no credit on her own work, and a lab full of men who treat her as furniture.…
Franziska Gänsler
Iris runs a hotel in Bad Heim, a German spa town six hours from Berlin that used to draw tourists. Now fires burn across the river every summer, the smoke never clears, people wear masks outside, and the bookings have…
Rivka Galchen
Katharina Kepler was a widow in her seventies in a small German town, illiterate, sharp-tongued, in the business of mixing herbal remedies, and the mother of Johannes Kepler, who by then had worked out how the planets move. In 1615,…
Tana French
Tana French’s fourth Dublin Murder Squad book, and the bleakest. Mick Kennedy, called Scorcher, is the squad’s top closer, a by-the-book man who believes hard work and rules keep the dark out. He catches a case at Brianstown, a half-finished…
