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New Atlantis is an incomplete novel written by scientist and scholar Francis Bacon. Left unfinished, it was published posthumously in 1626 within a much longer text on natural history, Sylva Sylvarum. The official title is New Atlantis: A Worke...

Too Bright to See is a young-adult novel by Kyle Lukoff. It follows Bug, a young person, who begins to experience a series of supernatural events following the death of an uncle. Over the course of the book, Bug comes to a meaningful understanding...

Raymond Chandler, the creator of the Phillip Marlowe character, died in 1959. However, his estate enlisted the help of authors worldwide to ensure that more stories involving Marlowe continued to be told. Benjamin Melville (operating under the...

The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) is a novel by Paul Tremblay that tells the story of a couple named Andrew and Eric. Together with their adopted daughter, the two rent a cabin in the middle of nowhere to rest and rejuvenate. Initially,...

Edo Van Belkom's Wolf Pack (published in 2004) is the first novel in Belkom's Wolf Pack series. It tells the story of Ranger Garrett Brock, who rescues a litter of wolf pups from incoming fire and brings them home. However, soon after Brock brings...

Miriam Towes' Women Talking (2018) is a novel about a series of rapes in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia. A group of men sprayed a veterinary sedative into women's homes around the colony, rendering them unconscious. After that, they broke...

The Lying Life of Adults is a novel written by Italian author Elena Ferrante, which was first published in Italian in 2019 and later translated into English in a novel published in 2020. The book tells the story of Giovanna, a young girl from...

Bonnie Garmus' Lessons in Chemistry (2022) is set in the 1960s. It follows Elizabeth Zott, a chemist who is struggling to integrate into a world that is not equal and dominated by men. Zott generally doesn't like dealing with other chemists, but...

Martin J. Sherwin spent much of his long and illustrious career researching the book that became American Prometheus, originally published in 2005. For twenty years, Sherwin studied and outlined American Prometheus, a biography about divisive...

Sofie Cramer's Text for You (2022) is a novel about Clara, a young woman eagerly awaiting her marriage to her fiance. However, after a night of intense arguing, Clara's fiance gets into a nasty accident and dies. Clara feels guilty and blames...

Reef is Romesh Gunesekera's debut novel, published in 1994. It was nominated for the 1994 Man Booker Prize, and won the 1997 Premio Mondello Five Continents Asia Prize, the 1994 Yorkshire Post First Work Prize, the 1994 New Voice Award, and was...

Laline Paull's Pod (2023) is set in the depths of the ocean, which has traditionally been far from the reach of humans. However, humans have begun to encroach on this previously unexplored place, destroying it. Pod is told from the perspective of...

Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait (2022) is a novel about Lucrezia di Cosimo de'Medici, a young woman who lives in Florence, Italy, in 1550. One day, at 15, Lucrezia's parents inform her that she will marry Alfonso II d'Este, a much older...

Black Butterflies (2022) is set in the spring of 1992 in Sarajevo during the so-called "siege of Sarajevo." Each night during the siege, racist gangs create barriers around the city, separating its ethnic areas into their sections. Each morning,...

Trespasses, published in late 2022, is Louise Kennedy's debut novel. Trespasses are set during the Irish Civil War, called "the Troubles." Specifically, Kennedy's novel follows Cushla, who lives with her mom in a small town in Belfast, Ireland....

Jacqueline Crooks' Fire Rush (2023) is a novel about Jamaican immigration to the United Kingdom during the 1980s. Fire Rush focuses on Yamaye, a rowdy young woman who frequently parties with her friends at a club called "The Crypt."

Yamaye has...

Katherine Center's Happiness for Beginners (2015) is a novel about Helen Carpenter, a divorced schoolteacher who hopes that a three-week wilderness survival course will leave her feeling confident and renewed. The unexpected presence of her...

The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. It was first printed in the First Folio in 1623, and the earliest known performance is recorded to have been at Gray's Inn, one of London's law schools, on December 28th, 1594. However,...

A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times is a short story collection by Ethiopian writer Meron Hadero, first published in 2022. The stories in the collection detail various lives of African immigrants in America.

The stories tackle different...

Alan Garner's Treacle Walker, published in 2021 and shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, is a brief but poetic novel that explores themes of time, reality, and perception. The novel builds on much of Garner's previous work, which similarly...

Athol Fugard has spent much of his career chronicling the injustices of Apartheid South Africa. The Train Driver is Fugard's play, published in 2012, and tells the fact-based story of a young mother who committed suicide with her three children...

The Holocaust is a complex topic for adults to contend with. It is an even more difficult subject for children, which is why Morris Gleitzman's book Once, published in 2005, is so important.

Once attempts to distill the Holocaust into something...

Kindertransport is Diane Samuels' play, first published and performed in 1993. Samuels' play follows the evacuation effort in pre-World War II Germany from 1938 to 1939 and saw Jewish children's movement from Nazi-controlled areas to safe zones in...

Gish Jen's "In the American Society" is a poignant short story that first appeared in a literary magazine in 1986 and later became part of her critically acclaimed short story collection, Who's Irish?, published in 1999. The title itself captures...