The sequel to In Search of the Old Ones, twenty years on. He revisits sites and finds some wrecked by visitation and others still untouched, and pushes into new country — Range Creek in Utah, kept private by one family…
Sergio Olguín
Verónica Rosenthal, a Buenos Aires journalist on holiday in the north of Argentina, spends a few days with two young women travelers — one Italian, one Colombian. Days later, both are found raped and murdered in the hills of Tucumán.…
Omer Stewart
Omer Stewart wrote this in the 1950s and nobody would publish it. His claim was that the pristine wilderness the pioneers walked into wasn’t pristine at all — Native people had been burning it on purpose for thousands of years,…
Oliver Burkeman
Do the math and a normal lifespan comes out to about four thousand weeks. That’s it. That’s the whole allotment. Burkeman spent years writing a productivity column, running every system going, and finally decided the entire project is a trap.…
George Saunders
A fox teaches himself human by lurking under a window while a mother reads bedtime stories, so the whole thing comes at you in his spelling — Yuman, storys, grate. Then a mall goes up over the woods. The food…
Zadie Smith
Eliza Touchet is a Scottish widow running the household of her cousin, a once-famous novelist now writing books nobody reads, in Victorian England. She becomes obsessed with the Tichborne trial — a butcher from Australia claiming to be a missing…
Helen Birch
Two hundred-plus drawings by working artists, mostly people Birch found online, each one printed with a short note on how it was done. Ball-point pen on found paper. Crosshatching with a dip pen. Gouache over a photocopy. Colored ink on…
Hayden Herrera
Herrera published this in 1983, when Kahlo was still mostly filed as Diego Rivera’s wife, and it’s the book that ended that. She goes back to the blue house in Coyoacán where Frida was born, the polio at six, and…
Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
When Kahlo died in 1954, Diego Rivera turned the Blue House into a museum but had the rest of her things — clothes, letters, documents, and more than six thousand photographs — locked in the bathrooms and sealed. They stayed…
Naomi Alderman
Three tech billionaires have bunkers, and their prediction models are telling them when to run. Around them, a handful of people who know the systems from the inside — a survivalist forum obsessive, a daughter, a lover, an ex-employee —…
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…
Jennifer Ackerman
Birdbrain is a slur for which we should apologize to our feathered friends. Ackerman goes out with researchers and comes back with the feats birds pull off. New Caledonian crows manufacture hooked tools out of twigs and keep the good…
Margareta Magnusson
Marie Kondo pushed me, and Magnusson made me jump—that and having to fill two Dumpsters with junk when my dad died. Döstädning is a real Swedish word and a real practice: Going through your things while you’re still able, so…
Amitav Ghosh
It’s Calcutta, 1969. A three-year-old girl in a strict vegetarian household announces she wants fish for lunch. She’s never had it, never seen it in the house. She says she remembers another life, a mud house by a river, a…
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…
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…
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,…
Anthony McCarten
A tech billionaire named Cy Baxter has built FUSION, a system that stitches together every camera, phone, card swipe, and database in the country and claims it can find anybody. There’s a $90 billion CIA contract riding on whether it…
Claire Vaye Watkins
The Southwest has dried out and been evacuated, and a dune sea called the Amargosa is moving east across California, burying towns. Luz, a former poster child for the drought-relief effort, and Ray, an ex-soldier, are squatting in an abandoned…
John Vaillant
The tree of the title was a three-hundred-year-old Sitka spruce on Haida Gwaii with a genetic mutation that made its needles gold — a tree sacred to the Haida, protected in a small reserve, and a tourist attraction. In 1997,…
Donna Tartt
Theo Decker is thirteen when a bomb goes off in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, killing his mother, and in the smoke a dying old man tells him to take a small Dutch painting off the wall. He does, and…
Fumio Sasaki
Sasaki was a magazine editor in Tokyo, thirty-five, living alone in a room stacked with books, CDs, DVDs, and gear for hobbies he’d quit, comparing himself to everybody and losing. So he spent a year getting rid of about ninety-five…
Michel Pastoureau
Green was hard to make and harder to keep. The dye wouldn’t hold — it faded, it shifted, it wouldn’t sit still on cloth — and medieval guilds kept the blue dyers and the yellow dyers separate by law, so…
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…
Doug Peacock
Peacock came home from Vietnam a Green Beret medic who couldn’t be around people, drove into the Montana and Wyoming backcountry, and started following grizzlies. No gun, just a camera and years of sitting still watching bears he came to…
