Fiction

'A Breath After Drowning' by Alice Blanchard is a suitably complex psychological thriller that proves an addictive late-night pager-turner.

I love finding out what’s going to happen next in the books I write. I’m often delighted by what a character decides to say , or how a seemingly innocuous detail later turns out to be a major plot point.

In 'The Dead,' Christian Kracht melts Pasolini, Kirosawa and Chaplin into a singular dream sequence

In 'Our Kind of Cruelty' by Araminta Hall, the truth about a stormy breakup, lies between murky blurred lines.

The monster is Stephen King's 'The Outsider' is worse than a creepy clown.

In Christine Mangan's 'Tangerine,' madness, murder, and betrayal are brought forth by an exotic yet ominous landscape.

The noted Serbian author muscles this Kafkaesque short novel into the war-is-absurd literary tradition in one tremendous 183-page paragraph.

In this novel the prizewinning Spanish author skillfully weaves minutely imagined personal stories into the wide sweep of history. One gets the sense Árbol has gazed long and deeply into the human soul, found little redeeming there, and nonetheless felt compelled to lay it all out for us in glorious, gritty, and sometimes gory detail.

'Lagos Noir' from editor Chris Abani may not be the book the Nigerian tourist industry wants you to read as an inducement to come visit their country, but it sure is a lot of fun to read.

In Jessica Strawser's new novel, 'Not That I Could Tell', it isn't quite a beautiful day in this neighborhood