Book Reviews

Mark Z. Danielewski's proposed 27-part saga about a girl and her very strange cat rolls on in Volume 3, Honeysuckle and Pain — in which all the different voices and stories start to find a groove.

Annie Proulx's epic new novel is a multigenerational, multi-century epic about the fall of forests before human depredation — just don't think about how many trees went into its 700-plus pages.

Emma Cline's spooky new novel starts with a teenaged girl spying on a shabby-glamorous group of Mansonesque cult followers. She follows, desperate for attention — and eventually, they see her too.

Alain de Botton returns to a long-standing fascination — the arc of relationships — in his new novel. But despite its fictional trappings, the book seems more like a class on maintaining a marriage.

This week, the NPR Books Time Machine travels back to the era of the Napoleonic Wars for a look at Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which wraps up this week with the release of League of Dragons.

Jessica Valenti's powerful new memoir examines the toll sexism takes on women's lives. Sex Object doesn't offer solutions; instead, it bears witness to the daily grind of harassment and hatred.

In Super Extra Grande, Cuban sci-fi author Yoss imagines a world where faster-than-light travel has brought humanity into contact with a vast array of strange and marvelous intergalactic creatures.

Ren Warom's tale of AIs, genius hackers, corporate crime and the occasional sea creature uses familiar building blocks to create a wild, loud, corkscrewing story that builds to a bloody conclusion.

Novelist Ben Lerner takes on poetry in his new book, an academic dissection of the ways we love and hate that ancient art. But sometimes he seems like he's talking about his own thinly-veiled hatred.