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Guides, reviews and our full library of titles — the books we’re reading and recommending.
Book Guides & Reviews
15May Flowers at The Three Coins Inn | Book Guide and Review
If you are longing for a holiday but are either too poor or too busy, Kimberly Sullivan’s May Flowers at The Three Coins Inn is an easy recommendation. This is comfort reading in its finest form, the kind of book…
How Do You Live Without Love? | Book Guide
How Do You Live Without Love? is a literary fiction drama that tackles tough questions through the lens of institutional decay, grief, and faith. It's written primarily for a Christian or spiritually questioning audience, given its setting deep within church…
Love Me Do, by Meg Macy | Book Review
There’s something satisfying about sequels, and Meg Macy’s Love Me Do, published 15 December 2025, delivers exactly that pleasure. This continuation of the “All You Need Is Love” series proves unafraid to tackle the messy complexities of LGBTQ+ relationships. It’s…
Rainy Wood (As It Began), by Taanja Mahye | Book Review
The first book in Taanja Mahye’s Rainy Wood series, As It Began is a dark and atmospheric historical novel set in 1917 Minnesota. It follows fifteen-year-old Helen Spooner, an orphan raised in near-total isolation deep in the Northwoods, who is…
Let Slip the Beasts, by Suzanne Berget | Book Review
What does it mean to be human when your memories might be fake, your body is no longer your own, and a corporation holds the patent on what you are becoming? That is the question at the centre of Let…
Steal the Reaper, by Todd Hosea | Book Review
Steal the Reaper by Todd Hosea is a book with a premise I have never quite encountered before, but that feels like a lost or forgotten Stephen King novel. What if an alien spacecraft crashed on Earth, but plot twist…inside…
The Children of the Children, by Robin McMillion | Book Guide and Review
Robin McMillion’s new book The Children of the Children is an ambitious cult drama that tackles religious manipulation with extreme realism. Set during the final years of the Cold War, the novel presents a chillingly believable apocalyptic religious community where…
Next in Line, by T.W. Baker | Book Guide and Review
I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect when I picked up Next in Line by T.W. Baker going by the cover. As it turns out, this is a workplace comedy novel that tackles the chaos of pharmacy life through oodles…
Off Script: The Actor’s Operating System, by Francisco Marquez | Book Guide
Published 17 February 2026, Off Script: The Actor's Operating System by Francisco Marquez is a practical handbook for actors built around a singular organizing idea: that the techniques of the craft should function together as a coherent system rather than…
The Migration of Vivex, by Xyne | Book Review
Released on 23 March 2026, The Migration of Vivex by Xyne is a LitRPG novel that slithers straight out of the dark swamp of survival fiction. I reviewed the first book a couple of months ago—in fact, it was my…
The Last Diaspora: Book 1: Letters To Earth, by Mandy Gardner | Book Review
Released in 2019, The Last Diaspora: Letters to Earth by Mandy Gardner is the first in a five-book sci-fi series about planetary colonisation, published by Endless Ink Publishing. While comparisons inevitably arise to Interstellar and Andy Weir novels like The…
The Dyre Prophecy, by Wyatt Moore | Book Review
Some books feel like they were made to be discovered on a school library shelf, shoved into a bag and finished in one sitting. Wyatt Moore’s second novel after 7 Days to Die is that kind of book. The Dyre…
The Dreamer’s Path: Twin Peaks and David Lynch the Actor, by Brent Simon | Book Review
The Dreamer’s Path: Twin Peaks and David Lynch the Actor by Brent Simon, published in February 2026, is one of those wonderfully obsessive books that feels less like a standard film study and more like stumbling into a hidden archive…
Medicine for the Blues, by Jeff Stookey | Book Guide
The 1920s are often remembered as a decade of jazz, economic prosperity and social change. Images of flapper dresses, speakeasies and bustling cities dominate popular culture's understanding of the era. Yet beneath this glamorous image was a reality that many…
What Lies through the Smoke, by C. C. Ford | Book Review
What Lies Through The Smoke by C. C. Ford, released in 2025, is a debut novel that introduces readers to a world of dieselpunk vibes, a term I had never even heard before reading this book (in contrast to steampunk).…
All Books
60Where the Water Falls
25 year old Hunter Strong is determined to figure out how to build a perfect life. What he learns is that to pursue that life, it takes one step outside of his comfort zone as a result of Marge's guidance.…
The Fourth Courier
It is 1992 in Warsaw, Poland, and the communist era has just ended. A series of grisly murders suddenly becomes an international case when it's feared that the material out of the defunct Soviet Union. The FBI sends an agent…
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English merchants who collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw…
Solivagant
The solivagant walks the streets of Edinburgh, the voice in his head incessantly active as, unbidden and unrelenting, it dissects his inner life. Occasionally other voices intervene but whether these are constructs of his own consciousness, or extraneous to it,…
Beautiful World, Where Are You
A novelist and her best friend exchange long emails on civilization's decline while navigating their own messy relationships.
Antarctica
Stories exploring desire and moral transgression, its title story following a married woman's dangerous flirtation.
Small Things Like These
A coal merchant discovers a disturbing secret about the local Magdalene laundry, weighing his family's safety against morality.
Dept. of Speculation
A marriage unravels after infidelity, told in fragmented, aphoristic paragraphs rather than continuous narrative.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
A tea monk encounters a robot returning to check on humanity, and the two discuss purpose and contentment on a gentle journey.
Long Island Compromise
A wealthy family's fortune unravels across generations after a kidnapping, exposing how inherited trauma warps everyone who touches it.
The Man in the High Castle
In an alternate America where the Axis won WWII, a banned novel imagining an Allied victory circulates in secret.
Yellowface
A writer steals her deceased friend's manuscript and passes it off as her own, becoming a bestseller built on theft.
The Mark and the Void
A fictional version of the author becomes convinced a banker is planning a heist, skewering post-crash Irish banking culture.
The Name of the Wind
A legendary figure in quiet exile tells the true story of his own extraordinary and tragic life.
Hamnet
A fictionalized account of Shakespeare's son's death, centering not on the playwright but on his unrecorded wife.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A boy fakes his death and rafts down the Mississippi with an enslaved man fleeing to freedom, in regional vernacular.
Zone One
A survivor clears the remaining zombies from lower Manhattan over three surreal days, in a literary take on the genre.
The Year of Magical Thinking
Didion recounts the year after her husband's sudden death, examining grief with clinical precision.
Of Mice and Men
Two displaced ranch workers dream of owning their own farm, a fragile hope threatened by one man's strength.
The Enigma of Arrival
A writer observes the slow decline of an English estate, in a quiet meditation on displacement.
Moth Smoke
A disgraced banker spirals into drugs and murder accusation, told through competing courtroom-style testimonies.
The Shining
A caretaker's sanity is slowly consumed by a haunted, snowbound hotel's malevolent influence.
On Writing
Part memoir, part craft manual, combining Stephen King's path to becoming a writer with blunt, specific advice.
Real Life
A Black, gay grad student navigates racial isolation and a fraught new relationship over one weekend at a white Midwestern university.
Cloud Atlas
Six nested stories spanning centuries are linked by recurring souls and a shared birthmark.
Life
Keith Richards's unusually frank memoir of the Rolling Stones, addiction, and his turbulent partnership with Mick Jagger.
Black Boy
Richard Wright's autobiography of childhood in the Jim Crow South, marked by poverty, hunger, and constant threat.
Intermezzo
Two grieving brothers take radically different approaches to loss, love, and their own strained relationship with each other.
Exhalation
Nine speculative short stories exploring free will, memory, and time, from one of sci-fi's most acclaimed short story writers.
The Elements of Style
A famously brief guide to clear English prose, condensing writing advice into rules as terse as 'omit needless words.'
Less Is Lost
Novelist Arthur Less embarks on another journey, this time through America itself, confronting a country he barely recognizes.
Go, Went, Gone
A retired professor befriends African asylum seekers camped in Berlin, confronting Europe's migrant crisis up close.
Native Son
A young man's accidental killing of a white woman spirals into a manhunt exposing the machinery of American racism.
The Underground Railroad
An enslaved woman escapes via a literal underground railroad, encountering a distorted version of history in each state.
Decline and Fall
An expelled Oxford student stumbles through absurd jobs, including an engagement to a socialite with a secret ring.
Notes of a Native Son
Baldwin's first essay collection, covering his father's death, race in Harlem, and expatriate life in Paris.
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry
A grieving bookstore owner finds an abandoned baby in his shop, and unexpected fatherhood slowly repairs his life.
The Sellout
A man reintroduces segregation to his LA suburb in this scathing satire, the first American novel to win the Booker Prize.
Wide Sargasso Sea
A prequel to Jane Eyre reimagining the 'madwoman in the attic' as a tragic Creole heiress in colonial Jamaica.
The Atlas Six
Six young magicians compete for a coveted spot in an elite society, knowing only five of them will survive initiation.
John Henry Days
A cynical journalist attends a small-town festival honoring John Henry, woven together with the historical legend itself.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Two rival magicians attempt to revive practical magic in Napoleonic-era England, entangling a dangerous fairy lord.
Detransition, Baby
A detransitioned man proposes an unconventional three-parent arrangement with his trans ex-partner and current girlfriend.
The Song of Achilles
The Trojan War's greatest warrior is retold through the eyes of his closest companion and lover.
Quicksand
A mixed-race woman drifts between Harlem, Denmark, and the South, never quite belonging anywhere.
Bird by Bird
A writing guide focused on managing anxiety and self-doubt, built around the advice to take it one small step at a time.
Cat’s Cradle
A writer stumbles onto a doomsday substance capable of freezing all water on Earth, in this satirical classic.
Winter in the Blood
A young Native American man on Montana's Fort Belknap Reservation drifts through bars, brief relationships, and hazy memory as he searches for a connection to his family's history. James Welch's 1974 debut is considered a founding text of the Native…
Greek Lessons
A woman who has lost speech forms a quiet connection with her visually impaired ancient Greek teacher.
Either/Or
A Harvard sophomore tests competing theories of how to live a good life through disastrous romantic experiments.
Prophet Song
A mother's husband disappears under a newly totalitarian Irish government, tracked with unrelenting present-tense urgency.
Solaris
A psychologist investigates a sentient ocean-planet, confronted by a physical manifestation of his dead wife.
The Mothers
A teenager's secret decision ripples through her church community for years, narrated partly by a chorus of older women.
Pale Fire
A poem is buried inside an increasingly unhinged commentary by its self-appointed, possibly delusional editor.
The Fifth Season
People able to control geological forces are both essential and violently oppressed, in a world of catastrophic seismic events.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Seven generations of one family repeat each other's mistakes in an isolated jungle town, in the foundational text of magical realism.
The First Bad Man
A woman's rigid inner life is upended when her employers' twenty-year-old daughter moves in with her.
Today Will Be Different
A mother resolves to have one perfect day, only to have it derailed almost immediately by escalating crises.
On the Road
A restless cross-country journey fueled by jazz and drugs, the defining text of the Beat Generation.
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Thirteen interlocking stories, including one told entirely as a PowerPoint presentation, won the Pulitzer Prize.