"On paper, “Angel Down” sounds like a book that shouldn’t work: It’s a stream-of-consciousness World War I novel, told in one sprawling, 285-page-long sentence, about a failed draft dodger who finds, of all things, an angel on the battlefield. And…
"How nerve-racking to be G.W. Pabst, the 20th-century Austrian filmmaker at the center of Kehlmann’s wondrous novel. He’s an auteur stuck in Europe under Nazi rule, forced to make propaganda and benign duds for the Reich while compromising every…
"Like the richest 19th-century fiction, this nearly 700-page family saga had our critic Alexandra Jacobs swooning: “Crowded but never claustrophobic,” she wrote, and “better company than real-life people.” A tentative romance between the title…
"'There was something about the Mikkola sisters that made me feel less alone,” says Jonas, the narrator of this spry and sprawling novel, and a playfully neurotic stand-in for the author himself. Up close and from afar, at drunken parties and at…
"In the remote plains of New South Wales, Australia, a woman arrives at a convent in desperate need of solitude and retreat. It’s a curious choice: She left behind a full life in Sydney, and is an atheist who abhors the “savagery” of the Catholic…
In 1972, a young married couple, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, decided to give up their lives in England and sail to New Zealand on their boat, the Auralyn. But after nine months, the Auralyn was destroyed by a breaching whale, leaving the Baileys…
"When a white supremacist intent on fomenting a race war shot and killed nine members of a Bible study class at Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church in 2015, he struck at the heart of the oldest African American Episcopal congregation in the South, in…
"In this unsparing yet darkly funny memoir, the prizewinning novelist captures the fierce, asthmatic, impossible, inspirational woman who shaped her as a writer and an activist — and left her emotionally bruised for a lifetime. Roy doesn’t let…
"With uncommon precision, tenacity and grace, Goldstone, an anthropologist turned journalist, casts a shocking spotlight on the “working homeless,” a term that should be an oxymoron but which in America defines hundreds of thousands of people.…
"In the annals of art history, bad boy artists are legion, and the 19th-century French painter Gauguin often figures near the top of the list — denounced as a colonizer who seduced underage Tahitian girls and spread syphilis in the South Seas.…
