An immigrant contends with alienation and love in Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo’s spirited novel "The Tiny Things Are Heavier". Nigerian Sommy is a graduate student in Iowa, though she’s ambivalent about the virtues of the American... Read More

In Scott Alexander Hess’s pastoral novel "Drought", an isolated man inherits a farm and learns about the estranged relative who left it to him. When Parnell, an aimless orphan, inherits a tobacco farm from his Uncle Willy, he moves to... Read More

The urgent, prescient essays in Rebecca Solnit’s "No Straight Road Takes You There" name social inequities and ecological pains while insisting upon hope. Writing after the 2020 election, at a time when many on the left implored... Read More

A forensic anthropologist and her partner travel abroad in search of the truth behind a boy’s brutal murder in the feverish dystopian novel "Not Long Ago Persons Found". A seven-year-old boy’s torso is found in a city’s river with... Read More

Danger and duty collide on the alpine expanses of the Cascade Range in Christopher Van Tilburg’s inspiring memoir-cum-history book "Crisis on Mount Hood". Sourced from the archives of the Hood River Crag Rats, the US’s oldest... Read More

Lynda V. Mapes’s probing nature book "The Trees Are Speaking" is about North America’s old-growth forests on both coasts, preservation and restoration efforts, and climate change. Profiling dozens of researchers and activists,... Read More

A Toronto woman tries to balance motherhood with being a musician in Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s heartfelt novel "The Fun Times Brigade". Amy’s newborn daughter, Alice, screams, won’t sleep, and won’t take a bottle. Amy’s husband,... Read More

Be Steadwell’s novel "Chocolate Chip City" is about gentrification and protest. It is also a hymn to Black love, Black queerness, and Black spirit that pulses with the joy of existence. The Jones sisters—Ella, Jasmine, and... Read More