by Catherine Bardon, trans. by Tina Kover
In the searing and aptly titled The Ogre's Daughter, her first novel to be translated into English, French author Catherine Bardon (Les Deracines) imagines the tragic life of Flor de Oro Trujillo, the first daughter of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal and ruthlessly ambitious dictator of the Dominican Republic, to survive childhood. Flor is born in 1915 in the Dominican Republic. When she is young, her father is an army officer, but he realizes his bloody plans to attain power and the presidency by 1930. His reign
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by Paolo Giordano, trans. by Antony Shugaar
For anyone looking to have a lighthearted conversation, don't chat up a journalist who writes about the climate crisis and is working on a book about the atomic bomb, especially if that journalist is also justifiably freaked out about worldwide terrorism and rising authoritarianism. In other words, avoid Paolo, the narrator of Tasmania, a brilliantly unsettling, semiautobiographical novel by Paolo Giordano, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar. And to those who wonder what a natural splendor like
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by Katherine Rundell, illus. by Ashley Mackenzie
The already much-lauded British title Impossible Creatures, first in a new fantasy series by Katherine Rundell (Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms), has arrived in the United States for young readers seeking an exciting, imaginative, and thrilling fantastical adventure.
Animals have always been drawn to Christopher Forrester, and he's always enjoyed their attention. The boy is spending a reluctant holiday with his grandfather at his remote lakeside cabin in Scotland, when an injured baby griffin appears beside
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by Tony Tulathimutte
No one, whether an aspiring author or a love-struck romantic, wants to be rejected. The poor souls in Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte's thrilling collection of seven interrelated stories, encounter nonacceptance in various painful forms. The self-described feminist of "The Feminist" assumes women keep rejecting a catch like him, with his "academic achievement in his Gender Studies major," because he's narrow-shouldered, "the most oppressed subaltern group." A 20-something woman in "Pics" has a one-night fling
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by Gail Jarrow
Sibert Honor winner Gail Jarrow (Spooked!; The Poison Eaters) turns her astute attention to the phenomenon of spiritualism and the investigators who worked to disprove the con. Jarrow's remarkable ability to transform meticulous research into a gripping narrative once again results in a nonfiction work that will transfix readers of all ages.
Jarrow opens Spirit Sleuths in the mid-19th century with the story of the Fox sisters, two girls who claimed they had developed a communication system to talk with the
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by Lauren Elkin
It's hard to resist a novel that explores desire, psychoanalysis, and feminism in unbridled French-literature style. Scaffolding is the first novel from Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, and readers should buckle up, because Elkin doesn't skirt the polite edges.
In 2019, Anna is a psychoanalyst in Paris, taking time off to process a miscarriage by doing anything and everything but thinking about it. With her husband working in London, she renovates her apartment, ponders the nature of
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by Joyce Carol Oates
The reissue of Broke Heart Blues, originally published in 1999, reintroduces readers to the breathtaking novel and includes a self-reflective afterword by its author, award-winning writer Joyce Carol Oates (Hazards of Time Travel). Oates's contemporary classic about small-town obsession and nostalgia in the wake of a true-crime scandal will appeal to today's readers perhaps even more than before.
John Reddy is only a teenager when he is tried for killing his mother's lover. Amid the trial's media circus,
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by Seina Wedlick, illus. by Briana Mukodiri Uchendu
The Night Market is a beautifully wrought, atmospheric tale of a child who takes in the many wonders of a Nigerian market held under a full moon.
The child, holding a bag of golden coins, is amazed by the market, "wide awake" under a dark sky. The protagonist sees "marvelous objects and strange relics" as well as glow-in-the-dark jellyfish; hears traders hollering; tastes plump tomatoes; smells fresh primroses; and feels the texture of "sparkly" fabrics. The details delight and the sights, sounds, smells,
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