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Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, describes her latest genre-busting novel, Piranesi (2020), as a story about a house that contains an ocean.

A Curse So Dark And Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer

Eighteen for the three hundred twenty-seventh time, Prince Rhen despairs of breaking the curse that turns him into a beast at the end of each day until feisty Harper enters his life.

If you're a fan of fairy-tale retellings (specifically Beauty and the Beast), then have I got a recommendation for you.

Set in 1893, The Once and Future Witches (2020) takes us back to the fight for women’s suffrage, with a magical twist. Following three estranged sisters who are drawn back together by the suffragist movement and the pull of long-lost witchcraft in their blood, this compelling story is a magical, feminist adventure with dangers and issues that also seem to mirror today’s world.  

The Nickel Boys, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, is a slender volume, clocking in at only two hundred-some pages long.

After his grandfather's death, a young man must prove how deep his love of books really is when a strange cat asks for his help to save books that are being abused. As the young man journeys with the cat, he not only finds the courage to stand up to the adversaries that bar his path, but also to start living life again.

If "ghost ship in space" sounds like a fun premise to you, then you should definitely check out Dead Silence (2022), by S. A. Barnes.

Thanks to WPL’s Fiction Book Group, I was able to read Maggie O’Farrell's most recent novel,

I Hear the Sunspot (2017) is a touching, heartwarming manga about the relationship between two male college students. Kohei, who is hard of hearing and knows he may eventually become deaf, deliberately keeps everyone at arm’s length because he is tired of the insensitive ways people often react to his disability. Taichi, who is struggling to make ends meet, sees Kohei’s ad looking for a notetaker to help him in class and agrees to take the job in exchange for lunch every day.

Little Danny from The Shining is all grown up now. Still haunted though. 

Reading Deacon King Kong reminded me of listening to a rich and soulful jazz composition played by a brilliant ensemble that improvises playfully like nobody's business and in doing so takes my breath away. I won't even try and extend this metaphor.

I loved this new time travel novel from Emily St. John Mandel. Covering a span of several hundred years from 1912 onwards, we are taken to moments in time connected to a mysterious time slip or glitch.

The Sparrow (1996), by Mary Doria Russell, opens in 2059, in the aftermath of a disastrous Jesuit mission to make first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Emilio Sandoz, a priest and linguist who is the only survivor among the mission’s crew, has just returned to Earth physically mutilated and spiritually broken.