If anyone can transport us into the soul of the White Continent, it’s photographer Sebastian Copeland. A professional polar explorer, Copeland has made several human-powered expeditions in frozen extremes, including the first transcontinental crossing of Antarctica from east to west…
Tana French
In 1984, three children go into the woods outside a Dublin suburb and only one comes out, found clinging to a tree with his shoes full of blood and no memory of it. Twenty years later, that boy is Detective…
Tana French
Cal Hooper takes early retirement from the Chicago police after twenty-five years, a divorce, and a daughter who barely speaks to him, buys a wrecked cottage in the west of Ireland, and plans to fix it up and shoot rooks…
Tana French
The second Cal Hooper mystery. Cal, a retired Chicago cop, has settled into the west Ireland village of Ardnakelty, is with Lena, and is teaching a teenage girl named Trey carpentry. Then Trey’s father comes back, four years gone, with…
Alice Feeney
Adam and Amelia have been married ten years and give each other a gift by the traditional list every anniversary — paper, cotton, leather. She wins a weekend away in a converted chapel in the Scottish Highlands, they drive up…
Percival Everett
Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s side, and the first thing Everett does is give him back his mind. The slave dialect is a performance the enslaved put on for white people and drop the second they’re alone — Jim teaches the…
Alvaro Enrigue
A Mexican woman flees into the desert after an Apache raid on her dead husband’s ranch. A lieutenant colonel chasing cattle rustlers realizes he’s tracking an abduction instead. Decades on, the American and Mexican armies maneuver Geronimo toward a surrender…
Ashley Elston
Evie Porter is a con artist, and Evie Porter isn’t her name. She works for a man she’s never met who calls himself Mr. Smith. He hands her a town, an identity with a manufactured past that holds up to…
Mark Z. Danielewski
A family moves into a house in the Virginia countryside and finds a closet where there wasn’t one, then a hallway, and then they measure the place and discover the inside is a quarter inch bigger than the outside. The…
Charles Cumming
This is the third Lachlan Kite spy novel. In 1995, he’s sent to West Africa to catch a war criminal from the Rwandan genocide, an operation that gets people killed and leaves a debt. In the present, the same man…
Charles Cumming
The second Lachlan Kite spy book, and it splits the same way the first one did. In 1993, Kite is a young officer sent into post-Soviet Russia under cover as an English teacher, running an exfiltration of a bioweapons scientist…
Charles Cumming
BOX 88 is a black-ops outfit run jointly by the British and the Americans, so far off the books that neither MI6 nor the CIA is sure it exists. Cumming runs two clocks. In 1989, Lachlan Kite is eighteen, a…
Emma Cline
Alex is twenty-two, broke, running from people in the city she owes money to, and spending August on Long Island with a much older man who is done with her by the second chapter. He puts her on a train.…
Michael Christie
I liked this book. The New York Times also liked it a lot. The Washington Post was a bit more cynical, but also on point. “Michael Christie’s second novel, Greenwood, makes it clear that we really want 500-page novels about…
Michael Chabon
Josef Kavalier gets smuggled out of Prague in 1939 in a coffin with the Golem, a kind of Jewish Frankenstein’s monster, lands on his cousin Sammy Clay’s bedroom floor in Brooklyn, and the two of them invent a comic book…
Eleanor Catton
Birnam Wood is a guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand — a few dozen people who plant crops on land nobody’s watching, roadsides, dead lots, farms gone fallow, sometimes with permission and sometimes not. Mira runs it, and after five…
M.R. Carey
A physicist in a collapsing Lagos discovers how to step sideways into parallel Earths and is immediately picked up by the Pandominion, an empire spanning a million versions of the world, run by the humans and animal-descended peoples who got…
M.R. Carey
Melanie is ten, brilliant, and loves her teacher. Every morning, soldiers strap her into a wheelchair at gunpoint to take her to class. Carey lets you work out why on your own, and once you have it, the book turns…
Alafair Burke
Three women who met as teenagers and have a bad summer in their shared past take a weekend in the Hamptons to patch things up. A car cuts them off, they’re annoyed, and one of them leaves a note on…
Melissa Broder
A woman drives out of Los Angeles to a Best Western in the high desert, supposedly to work on her novel, but actually to get away from her father, who’s been in the ICU for months and died and been…
Kaliane Bradley
A near-future British government has time travel and no idea what to do with it, so it pulls a handful of people out of history moments before they would have died and assigns each one a “bridge” — a civil…
William Boyd
Gabriel Dax writes travel books and doesn’t sleep. A fire took his mother and the family house when he was six, and he’s been dreaming it every night since. In August 1960, he’s in Léopoldville in the DRC and lands…
Algernon Blackwood
Two men in a canoe run the Danube in flood below Vienna and camp on a sandy island in a wilderness of willow scrub. The river is eating the island under them. The willows move when there’s no wind. Things…
I.S. Berry
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,…
Jen Beagin
Greta is forty-six, broke, and living in a half-ruined Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York, with a beekeeper and a bunch of bees in the walls. She has a job transcribing the sessions of a local sex-and-relationship coach, which means…
