18 books
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…
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…
Ani Katz
Caroline has a newborn, no sleep, and a husband who’s finally landed a job at a Big Tech outfit called Corridor, doing work he won’t talk about for money that fixes everything. He suggests a summer on Haven, the private…
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…
Tony Judt
Europe from the rubble of 1945 to 2005, east and west given equal weight, in one nine-hundred-page volume by a historian who could actually write. The material everybody knows — Marshall Plan, Wall, 1968, 1989 — is here, but the…
Matthew B. Crawford
Crawford has a doctorate in political philosophy, took a think tank job, lasted five months, and quit to open a motorcycle repair shop. His argument is that we’ve built an economy that separates thinking from doing and calls that progress…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Michael Pollan
This book disabused me of my illusions about “organic” and introduced me to Michael Pollan. He tackles four meals, traced all the way back to their sources. There’s a fast food dinner eaten in the car, which turns out to…
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…
Kassia St. Clair
Seventy-five colors, two or three pages each, and every one has a story with a twist. Mummy brown was made from actual ground-up mummies, and Victorian painters kept buying it until they found out. Scheele’s green was arsenic and it…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane set out to find what wildness is left in Britain and Ireland, expecting remoteness — islands, summits, moors — and slept out in fifteen of them over a year. Then Roger Deakin, his friend, kept pointing him back toward…
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…
Rebecca Solnit
This is walking as a subject with a history. Solnit runs from bipedalism through the peripatetic philosophers, the invention of the country walk as recreation, Wordsworth and the Romantics, pilgrimage, the labyrinth, mountaineering, the flâneur, protest marches and the Suffragettes,…
Jennifer Ackerman
Owls are hard to study — night, silence, no interest in being watched — so most of what people believed about them was folklore. Ackerman goes out with the researchers finally cracking it. Feathers with a comb on the leading…
