At 8:24 p.m. on Nov. 2, 2020, Caroline Darian was a happily married 42-year-old working mother, close to her parents and two brothers, David and Florian, content with a life so ordinary that she would later characterize it as “banal.”

Then, one minute later, she became someone very different. The phone rang and her life was split in two.

...Read more

For almost four decades now, Jonathan Coe has employed wit, insight and scalpel-sharp satire to deliver compulsive, incisive novels that chronicle British lives and explore facets of Britishness.

Coe’s 1994 breakthrough, “The Winshaw Legacy,” laid bare the rapacious appetites and other grotesque qualities of “the meanest, greediest, ...Read more

The subject of Ron de Beaulieu’s new book is a notorious bootlegger with a talent for misdirection.

After one of Isadore Blumenfeld’s arrests, authorities said he used seven aliases. The author’s research unearths a few more. But history doesn’t remember him as “Joe Miller” or “Dr. Ferguson.” Instead, writes de Beaulieu — a ...Read more

Dana Perino, co-host of the popular Fox News panel show "The Five," has never taken her success for granted.

Throughout her career that started with stints as a local TV reporter and a staff assistant in Congress, she's acknowledged the guidance she's received from people along the way, including former President George W. Bush, who asked her ...Read more

While on vacation a few years ago, I enjoyed listening to the audiobook of “The Maid,” first in the Molly the Maid series. The book sold more than a million copies worldwide, earned a couple of mystery awards and led to a movie slated for release next year, starring Florence Pugh as the protagonist, so I’m not alone. But reading the latest...Read more

Graphic novel “The Flip Side” grew out of Jason Walz’s grief and he hopes it will help other grieving people deal.

What was he sad about? A lot.

“I had a friend, a best friend, whose name was Kris [Erickson]. He and I made tons of movies together. We wrote scripts, worked on comics, tons of stuff. Mostly it was garbage but we had a ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, April 12, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Say You’ll...Read more

There’s a pocket of the literary world where the name “Lidia Yuknavitch” is spoken in reverent tones, as if invoking a sort of high priestess. You might think I exaggerate; I don’t.

It all started in March 2011 with the publication of her first book, a memoir titled “The Chronology of Water.” Among lovers of the memoir genre, poetry...Read more

To enter a Katie Kitamura book is to get lost in an ice palace. We marvel at its crystalline mazes, chills tingling our spines, wisps of breath twirling from the page. Nobody writes like her, those lissome lines and abundance of commas. She’s one of the few who can pull off tell-don’t-show.

“Audition,” her new mousetrap of a novel, ...Read more

Jon Hickey is enrolled in the Lac du Flambeau Band of the Anishinaabe Indians and follows tribal politics fairly closely. And yet he has this question: How authentic of an Indian is he?

“That debate is a sort of sport among Indians, I find,” said Hickey, 44, whose novel “Big Chief” is out now. “I think a lot of people who are enrolled...Read more

One reason the mystery genre has remained popular is its infinite adaptability. Someone can get whacked anywhere and once you’ve got a corpse, the game’s afoot!

French writer Laurent Binet’s “Perspective(s),” newly available in a brisk and breezy English translation by Sam Taylor, is a delightfully inventive whodunit , set in Florence...Read more

“These [essays], carried out as both criticism and autobiography, are my attempt to think through what it means to write and read from the position of an other, which is for me the starting point of an ethical and political art.”

That’s Viet Thanh Nguyen, writing in his latest collection, “To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other.”...Read more

If “The Impossible Thing” were a song, we’d call it a banger.

Like Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” or Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” Belinda Bauer’s 10th novel is a pure pleasure machine, all the moving parts of which are designed to delight. It took a while for “The Impossible Thing” to come together, apparently — ...Read more

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose novels explored the military dictatorships and political corruption of Latin America, has died. He was 89.

His son, Alvaro, announced his death on social media, without attributing a cause. Mario Vargas Llosa, a towering figure in literature and politics ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, April 5, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Say You’ll ...Read more

LAS VEGAS — As soon as former Las Vegas resident Lee Scrivner released his latest book “Casinolabs” he started getting people asking if he’d seen the hit show “Severance” from Apple TV+.

“My sister was the first one who insisted I watch it,” said Scrivner, who grew up in Las Vegas, “so I finally broke down and watched it and ...Read more

If you polled 100 people about who is the awfullest among the awful people in “The Great Gatsby,” I bet 99 of them would answer “that louse Tom Buchanan.” In the new “The Gatsby Gambit,” Buchanan finally gets what’s coming to him.

Daisy Buchanan’s loathsome husband is murdered early on in “Gambit,” Claire Anderson-Wheeler’...Read more