Three troubled but tough generations of women, all molded and wounded by the Pentecostal culture around them, are celebrated in Kelli Jo Ford’s masterpiece, patchwork novel, "Crooked Hallelujah". Religion became a source of both... Read More

Though much of it is set among the dead, Valérie Perrin’s "Fresh Water for Flowers" is an exuberant novel whose thoughtful treatments of family tragedies are alchemistic. Abandoned at birth, Violette was shunted between disinterested... Read More

In Anna Dorn’s "Vagablonde", Prue, a Los Angeles lawyer, hopes to wean herself off of various psychotropic prescriptions. Prue is also an aspiring rapper, despite the fact that she is bourgeois and has “the coloring of a Nazi.” As... Read More

Daniel Ben-Horin’s black comedy "Substantial Justice" concerns humanity’s best and worst traits. In the 1980s, Spider makes an honest living as a mechanic and distracts himself from lost love with mind-altering drugs. Then, ten years... Read More

In The Anarchists’ Club, Alex Reeve brings back his large-hearted Victorian sleuth, Leo Stanhope, a transgender man who’s swept into a loury London murder case. When a stranger’s body is found at the Social and Democratic... Read More