Kathryn Scanlan’s slim novel “Kick the Latch” didn’t arrive with a massive media push when it was published in 2022, but both book and author continue to defy expectations.

Over the course of a single week this year, the Los Angeles-based writer was the recipient of both the £10,000 Gordon Burn Prize and one of this year’s Donald ...Read more

Missing persons are almost inescapable in thrillers, and for good reason. Not knowing what has happened to someone, imagining what could have happened, is compelling reading. That's exactly what you'll find in Emiko Jean's "The Return of Ellie Black."

This is Jean's first foray into suspense. She made the leap (not as big as you might think ...Read more

Rachel Khong's ambitious second novel, "Real Americans," ponders big issues: how to measure the worth of one's life, the implications of contemporary scientific research and what it means to be an American in an era of extreme wealth inequity.

Divided into three sections, the novel moves smoothly back and forth in time and place to tell the ...Read more

"Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied." Who is that talking? "Real Housewife of New Jersey" Teresa Giudice? Or Mrs. Bennet, from "Pride and Prejudice"?

JK. If it were the former, the grammar would not be so impeccable. But the point stands, as Carrie Mullins discusses in the first essay...Read more

This spring's crop of picture books for children focuses on friendship, history and nature. With belly laughs!

Go and Get With Rex, by David LaRochelle, illustrated by Mike Wohnoutka. (Candlewick Press, $17.99)

A perfect book for kids who know the alphabet but aren't yet strong readers — or for any kid who likes to laugh. The Theodor Seuss ...Read more

PHILADELPHIA -- I strolled into the sea of superheroes, of Jedi warriors and Ghostbusters, pink-haired pixies and ax-wielding goblins, or at least scores of deliriously happy people dressed like them, not knowing what to expect.

I had arrived at Philly’s Fan Expo, the annual celebration of all things fandom, from comics to sci-fi, horror, ...Read more

To write a few words in remembrance of Jay Robert Nash seems insufficient, for this was a man for whom a few words were never enough. During his life, which ended on April 22 of lung cancer after 86 active years, he once estimated that he had written something in the neighborhood of 50 million words.

Most of those came in non-fiction books, ...Read more

The year is 1938 in "Whale Fall" and a whale has washed ashore on a remote island off the coast of Wales. It's September, lobster season. The boats are "half-rotten and covered over with barnacles, the nets flopping over the sides like tongues."

A month later, two other foreign bodies make land, this time in the form of Joan and Edward, English...Read more

CHICAGO — Renting out a Lincoln Park brownstone for $200 may be considered unusual, but a 300-year-old vampire who wears three-piece suits and enjoys Taylor Swift music wouldn’t know any better. After all, he has also been imprisoned in a vampire dungeon in Naperville.

The fantastical scenario is the brainchild of Jenna Levine, who wrote ...Read more

At the end of Colm Tóibín's poignant 2009 novel "Brooklyn," Eilis Lacey leaves her native Ireland to join her husband Tony in New York. Left behind is broken-hearted Jim Farrell, with whom she had a romance and who had no idea she was secretly married.

Tóibín's new novel, "Long Island," takes place 20 years later. Eilis and Tony and their ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, April 27, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2024 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2024, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Funny Story"...Read more

We know the American Civil War's stories of carnage and heartbreak from movies, biographies and Ken Burns, but the most interesting thing about the latest from "The Devil in the White City" writer Erik Larson is that it covers the run-up to war, the events that came before more than 600,000 people died.

There may be a tendency to think of the ...Read more

The first time I met her she was tiny and her dad was tall. I bumped into them as they were walking through Lincoln Park on their way, the father said, “to the zoo,” and the little girl smiled and said, “We go all the time.”

This was almost 30 years ago. That father was Gene Siskel, my colleague at the Tribune, and the daughter was ...Read more

A 19th-century pet cemetery in Westchester County, New York, with poignant epitaphs: "Born a dog/Lived like a gentleman/Died beloved." A metropolis adjacent to a metropolis, with teeming Chicago stockyards next to a luxurious hotel. Manhattan's equine ambulance, which preceded the city's first human ambulance by a couple of years.

These are ...Read more

How do you recover from a stranger’s attempt to murder you in front of a thousand people, an attack that leaves you on the edge of death with 15 stab wounds?

If you’re Salman Rushdie, you write a book about it.

Rushdie’s new memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” has a stunningly graphic but elegant cover, and the ...Read more

In the dramatic opening pages of Rene Denfeld’s new novel “Sleeping Giants,” a distraught boy, who has escaped from a nearby center for disturbed youths, runs headlong into the freezing surf off Oregon’s rough coast. Denfeld writes, “…the sea grabbed the boy and pulled him down under the surface, into a watery paradise of sparkling ...Read more

Sometimes, the right book is just waiting for you to find it.

Once, while exploring a dark corner of my hometown library, I looked up to see a dull, greyish, library-bound copy of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel “The Moviegoer.” I don’t know what it was about this dusty tome that grabbed my younger self – especially since its scuffed spine ...Read more

One of my favorite contemporary writers is this guy from Milwaukee named James Tynion IV. It’s a haughty name, except he writes horror comics. He writes other things, too, nothing that would suggest gravitas: Batman comics, Batman meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics. That is, unless you know the finest monthly comic books these days are ...Read more