Books

Renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog has written more than a dozen books and screenplays, but The Twilight World (3.5 hours) is his first novel. Translated by Michael Hofmann and short enough to qualify as a novella, it’s the fictionalized story of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, the real-life intelligence officer in the Imperial Japanese Army who defended Lubang

He’s an author who successfully merged crime fiction with a sense of other-worldliness in The Ice Twins, and SK Tremayne has taken a similar approach with The Drowning Hour, which came out in the summer. Now he is in the chair for a new edition of Dr Jacky Collins’ video interview series The Doctor Will

The Deal Goes Down sees a welcome return for Larry Beinhart’s long-standing PI creation Tony Casella. Time has moved on for the detective. Now he’s an ex-PI living in the Catskills with zero chance of living out a happy, peaceful retirement thanks to the bank. His mortgage was bought up during the financial crisis, the

Jordan Crane’s graphic novel Keeping Two, which took him 20 years to complete, pays very strict attention to form. Over the course of 300-plus pages, Crane rarely strays from a simple six-panel grid, arranging the action in neat squares that move down and across the page with an almost mesmeric energy and speed. With this

Looking for Alaska was published in 2005, but it’s being banned and challenged now more than ever, the author shared on TikTok. Alicia Farrant, a candidate running for school board in Orange County, Florida — which includes the school John Green attended as a student — has campaigned partly based on banning Looking for Alaska

Comics artist Kate Beaton, creator of the award-winning satirical webcomic “Hark! A Vagrant,” demonstrates her remarkable range and storytelling prowess with her debut graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. With strong prose and striking art, she captures the complexities of a place often defined by stark binaries: the Alberta oil sands, one

You don’t get a more dramatic start to a crime novel than the discovery of six bodies, hanging side by side in the conservatory of a fairly run-of-the-mill Buckinghamshire family home. And they are a family, three generations of the Bryants to be precise. Was it a mass suicide, or murder? The horrific scene is

Mary Roach investigates the uneasy relationship that exists between humans and wildlife in Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. Traveling to India, Vatican City and other locales, she meets with a wide cast of characters that includes predator attack investigators, a bear manager and a human-elephant conflict specialist, all in an effort to understand how

As someone with chronic depression and anxiety, wild mood swings are just a normal part of my life. Sometimes, I’m bursting with frenetic energy, barely hanging on for dear life as I do All The Things. Other times, I’m flattened by chronic fatigue, barely able to function. But a new emotion has been building up

The Cunninghams are having a little family get-together at Sky Lodge, a snowbound mountain retreat in Australia, the perfect setting for mulled wine and murder. If your first thought is that this is one of those stories where a group of people get snowed in somewhere with a murderer on the loose, then you’d be

When Orthodox Jewish teen Hoodie Rosen sees a girl dancing on the sidewalk outside the window of his yeshiva classroom, he has no idea that the connection they’ll form will lead them to question everything they believe and change both of their lives forever. Debut novelist Isaac Blum’s The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen

With a backlist of over a dozen novels and novellas, Colleen Hoover isn’t a new author. Since publishing her first novel in 2012, the romance writer has earned the loving nickname of CoHo and has worked to cultivate a huge following of devoted fans. She started a Facebook group in 2016 called Colleen Hoover’s CoHorts

By day he’s a marketing and branding copywriter. By night he’s a crime novelist, and sometimes even a ghost. Well, a ghostwriter to be precise, who coaches new authors and helps them get that elusive novel that’s inside them down on paper. At the moment, David’s mystery series featuring private investigator Dora Ellison is thriving.

Fifteen-year-old Yehuda “Hoodie” Rosen and his Orthodox Jewish family, along with many members of their community, have recently moved to Tregaron, Pennsylvania, because the cost of living in their previous town became too expensive. When Hoodie meets Anna-Marie Diaz-O’Leary, the daughter of Tregaron’s mayor, he’s instantly smitten. Yet after he and Anna-Marie are spotted cleaning

I’ve written about my book club for Book Riot before. It’s been one of my favorite things for almost ten years. How our book clubs works, generally, is that each member takes a turn choosing a book. Everyone reads it, and then we meet once a month to discuss that pick. When you choose the

The windy crevices of the Italian Alps. The dark backstreets of Stockholm. Among Shropshire hedgerows. In American courtrooms. Crime never sleeps and justice must be done. Here in our latest On the Radar column we’re doing justice to five new crime fiction novels and our lead book this week comes from a writer whose work

Curious what it looks like to run for school board? Wondering if now is your time to step up and help provide governance for your local education system? Let’s dive in. It’s no secret that school board elections right now are crucial. It’s also no secret that some school board candidates — even in nonpartisan

Translated by Miranda France — There Are No Happy Loves is the third crime thriller in a series by award-winning Argentinian writer Sergio Olguín, featuring the irrepressible and libidinous investigative reporter Verónica Rosenthal. It follows on from The Fragility of Bodies (2019) and The Foreign Girls (2021). Once again, Rosenthal happens upon a potentially outrageous

★ Ruby Fever In Ilona Andrews’ Hidden Legacy series, the world is dominated by magical families known as Houses. Catalina Baylor is the Deputy Warden of Texas and a Prime, an extremely powerful magic user. She’s moving her House and her fiancé, assassin Alessandro Sagredo, into a new compound when an important politician is killed

Last week, I put together a quiz about identifying sci-fi books based on pixelated versions of their covers. That was entertaining for me to do, and it looks like a lot of people liked taking the quiz, so I decided to do the same thing for famous fantasy books. But this time, to shake things

We head into September and the Autumn with a six-book line-up for you, made up entirely of novels from independent crime publishers and authors. With that scorching summer nearly behind us, it’s a great time to discover authors who are doing new and inventive things with their writing, and doing it well. Take a look

The titular character of Mazey Eddings’ Lizzie Blake’s Best Mistake is dealing with some very rom-com-appropriate problems—namely, that her two-night stand with a hot Australian guy resulted in an unexpected pregnancy, and she’s now trying to platonically cohabitate with him. But alongside all the tropey hijinks, Lizzie also gains a better understanding of and more

Nursery rhyme books are a staple of childhood reading for good reason — they’re short and simple to read and remember, but they also carry layers of storytelling that introduce very young children to the ways that stories, rhymes, and language work. Reading nursery rhymes is a great way for parents and caregivers to bond

Lizzie Blake knows that she’s a lot. A lot of energy and enthusiasm. A lot of creativity and vibrant warmth. But also a lot of mess and chaos. Her attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder can make things difficult, given that she lives in a world built for people whose brains don’t function like hers. After a lifetime of

Buckle up, because there is so much fantastic small press nonfiction coming out this fall! Memoirs and graphic memoirs, essay collections, and anthologies, genre-defying hybrid works that blend history, travel writing, science, and more — and all of that is just the beginning. I had to reign myself in, because there are just so many

Award-winning TV news anchor Linda Hurtado Bond returns with her fourth novel featuring a journalist as the main protagonist. This time, it’s Marisol ‘Mari’ Alvarez, a disgraced Cuban-American crime reporter who must stay one step ahead of a serial killer while also uncovering the truth about her mother’s murder when she was a child. Mari

Poet and author Ander Monson has seen the 1987 movie Predator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger on the run from an alien in a Guatemalan jungle, 146 times. To explain why, he wrote Predator: A Memoir. Through a scene-by-scene exploration of the film, which he describes as “satire wrapped in gun pornography,” Monson reckons with his lifelong

There’s a tonne of fireworks in Fields of Fire, making it an apt title from debut author Ryan Steck. This is a cuss-free action thriller set mostly in the wide open spaces of Montana but also flitting between California, Washington and Mexico. There’s political intrigue along with a screwed up international covert operation to take

Banned Books Week is coming, which means that waves of displays in libraries, classrooms, and bookstores are also incoming. We’re already seeing many, and while they are useful for highlighting the reality of censorship across America to those who are not as tapped into the news about it, too many banned books week displays are

Barbara Ehrenreich was an author, journalist, and activist who published more than 20 books, including Nickel and Dimed, which documents several months she spent working the lowest-paying jobs in the U.S.A. and trying to survive on that income. She wrote articles and book reviews for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times,