Son of Nobody

by Yann Martel

Booker Prize-winner Yann Martel (Life of Pi; The High Mountains of Portugal) intricately nests one story in another in the excellent Son of Nobody. Protagonist Harlow Donne narrates to a specific audience: his eight-year-old daughter, Helen, named after Helen of Troy. Harlow is, or rather was, a Homeric scholar, and he describes to his beloved, story-loving child the year he spent in postdoctoral study at Oxford University. His discovery there of a previously unknown text relating the Trojan War contained

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The Fountain

by Casey Scieszka

In Casey Scieszka's harrowing yet entrancing debut novel, The Fountain, it's 2014 and a 213-year-old Vera Van Valkenburgh has returned for the first time to where she grew up in the 1800s. She's accepted a forest ranger job in the Catskills Preserve after what she says is a stint out west working at Joshua Tree. What no one in her small town suspects is that Vera stopped aging at 26 and has a death wish that she unfortunately cannot fulfill, no matter how hard she tries. She rents a cottage adjacent to the

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Nightfaring: In Search of the Disappearing Darkness

by Megan Eaves-Egenes

At a moment in which the glow of screens is rivaled only by the ever-present "skyglow" of municipal grids, the experience of a true night has become nearly a historical relic. In Nightfaring, Megan Eaves-Egenes takes readers on a restorative journey into the few remaining pockets of the planet where sundown still signals the appearance of stars. Her focus is the profound, creeping loss of the nocturnal world, a phenomenon often accepted as merely an aesthetic casualty of progress, but which she argues is a

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Who Hid the Stars?: How Light Pollution Changes Our World

by Danio Miserocchi, Maciej Michno, trans. by Sylvia Notini, illus. by Valentina Gottardi

Valentina Gottardi, Maciej Michno, and Danio Miserocchi--the Italian trio behind 2025's The Tomorrow Tree--explore the costs of light pollution for nature in an absorbing, exquisitely illustrated picture book for middle-grade readers. Who Hid the Stars? is packed with details that will likely compel its audience to look at human-created illumination in a whole new light.

"Artificial light may be useful, but it comes at a cost to the environment." Gottardi, Michno, and Miserocchi present complex scientific

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Where No Shadow Stays

by Sara Hashem

A once popular teen, with the help of a surly school loner, must break a generational curse haunting her Egyptian bloodline in this intensely creepy YA horror novel full of sinister secrets yet buoyed by superb romcom undertones.

Seventeen-year-old Mina Mansour was only nine when her mother departed on "her first and last visit" back to her hometown in Egypt (Masr) and died in a car accident. Mina's father's silence about the matter, however, has always suggested to Mina that something is amiss. So, when she

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