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…
Gary Ferguson
Ponderosa is the tree that makes the Southwest the Southwest— cinnamon bark, high open groves you can ride a horse through, vanilla smell in the sun. In the last decade, from Santa Fe to the Sierra, more than two hundred…
Franny Moyle
J.M.W. Turner was the son of a Covent Garden barber, sold his first drawings out of the shop window, got into the Royal Academy at fourteen, and became the most radical painter in England — and stayed a rough, secretive,…
Kory Stamper
Kory Stamper spent decades writing dictionaries at Merriam-Webster, and she kept getting stuck on the color entries in Webster’s Third, which are gloriously nuts. Begonia is defined as a deep pink that’s bluer than fiesta and stronger than sweet william.…
Ian Frazier
Frazier caught what he calls Russia-love and spent years going back, culminating in a nine-thousand-mile drive across Siberia in a used van with two Russian guides who argued the whole way. The book is that trip plus the whole history…
Joe Simpson
Simpson and Simon Yates climbed the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, the first ascent, and on the way down Simpson shattered his leg. Yates lowered him a thousand feet at a time until Simpson went over…
Gabrielle Zevin
Sam and Sadie meet as kids in a hospital game room in Los Angeles, fall out, and meet again in a Cambridge subway station in the nineties. They make a video game together in a borrowed apartment over one summer…
Eowyn Ivey
In 1885, shortly after the Alaska Purchase from Russia and before the gold rush, the U.S. Army’s Lieutenant Henry T. Allen was ordered on a twelve-hundred-mile expedition to map the Copper and Tanana rivers of Alaska’s interior. Little was known…
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…
Rosalie Haizlett
With luck, Tiny Worlds will trigger FOMO—and point you toward the miraculous web of beauty seen at foot level and strolling speed. Plagued by chronic migraines as a teenager, West Virginia watercolorist Rosalie Haizlett started taking long walks in nature…
Martin Amis
The book runs backward. It opens with a man dying in America and moves the wrong way down his life, narrated by a consciousness riding inside him that can’t control anything and doesn’t understand what it sees. So doctors take…
Carrot Quinn
The Pacific Crest Trail, 2,660 miles, told as the daily blog she actually kept — which is why it reads nothing like a reflective memoir. It’s feet, water carries, hunger, weather, town stops, and the trail family that forms and…
Anil Ananthaswamy
Recommended by a friend of a friend who’s a working physicist. You know the experiment. Shine light through two slits and it makes an interference pattern, like waves. Fire it one particle at a time and the pattern still builds…
Tiffany Crum
Tiffany Crum’s debut mystery is about Benny Abbott and Joy Moore, best friends who host a hit podcast built on “against all odds” survival stories — near-death experiences told with a lot of gallows humor. Their show is on the…
Christopher Ketcham
Ketcham spent years reporting on the four hundred fifty million acres the federal government holds in the West and came back angry. The core of it is livestock grazing on public land — how few operators there are, how little…
Ken Ilgunas
Ilgunas walked the Keystone XL route across the Plains, most of it on other people’s land, and came out with a question: When did Americans lose the run of their own country? His answer is that they had it and…
Cassidy Randall
Yes, gender is critical to the story of the 1970 Denali Damsels expedition on North America’s tallest summit. The six women just wanted to climb mountains, and in the late 1960s they had to fight male misogyny and suspicion to…
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.…
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Simpson is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, a writer and musician, and this book thinks with water rather than about it. She starts from a Nishnaabeg story about a woman and a flood and works outward through ice, rain, tributaries, and the…
Christof Koch
Koch spent decades at Caltech hunting the neural correlates of consciousness with Francis Crick, and this is his case for integrated information theory — the idea that consciousness is a measure of how much a system’s parts inform each other…
Margaret Atwood
It’s thirty-odd years after The Handmaid’s Tale, told by three women. Aunt Lydia, the most senior of the Aunts, who runs Ardua Hall and has spent years quietly compiling files on everybody who matters. Agnes, raised inside as a commander’s…
George Saunders
This is the story collection that put Saunders on many people’s radars. There’s a boy imagining himself heroic in the woods and a dying man walking out onto a frozen pond to spare his family. Prisoners in a facility being…
Graham Greene
It’s set in a German prison in occupied France, with thirty hostages, three to be shot, lots drawn to see who goes. Chavel, a wealthy lawyer, draws one of the marked slips and offers everything he owns — house, money,…
M. Kat Anderson
The California the Spanish and then the Americans walked into looked like untouched abundance, and Anderson’s book shows it was a garden. Indigenous Californians burned meadows on schedule, coppiced hazel and redbud so the shoots would come back straight enough…
Ueda Akinari
First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan’s finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the…
