A drab concrete cityscape gets a much-needed infusion of new life when a local girl decides to transform an abandoned lot into a community park and garden. She starts out with just one seed and a small idea; others soon take notice and... Read More

"Through the Bookstore Window" is a bold exploration of lives joined by history. The story features Gina Perini, an exile in San Francisco, whose life as a bookstore manager covers a troubling past in Bosnia, and Alexi Wilder, an abused... Read More

"Roadmap to Hell" is a timely and devastating examination of the criminal underworld. Barbie Latza Nadeau’s journalistic, snappy, and easy-to-digest work breaks down exactly how West African women are lured to Italy by Nigerian pimps... Read More

Yehudi Mercado blends science fiction, kung fu, and hip-hop in "Sci-Fu", a unique and entertaining graphic-novel adventure. In 1980s Brooklyn, a young boy named Wax happily spins and scratches vinyl until he inadvertently answers an... Read More

"Black Sugar" opens as pirate Henry Morgan dies clutching his gold, his ship sinking under a Caribbean forest. In this moment of vivid magical realism, Miguel Bonnefoy sets the stakes for his novel—sunken treasure in the islands and... Read More

In Michelle de Kretser’s "The Life to Come", lives intersect, entwine, or separate within distinct yet unified passages. The general nexus being Australia, backdrops shift from Sydney to Paris or Sri Lanka, from the present to the... Read More

Bleak and unsparing in its stark description of a world without hope, "The City Where We Once Lived" paints the picture of a future racked by climate change and destruction. Those who have stayed in the North End of the book’s unnamed... Read More

"A Possibility of Whales" is charming and sweet as it explores personal identity, life changes, love, and, of course, whales. Nat—short for Natalia Rose Baleine Gallagher—is the daughter of a movie star who doesn’t know who her... Read More