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Eleanor Catton's novel
Birnam Wood and the guerrilla gardening group at its center draw their name from lines in Shakespeare's
Macbeth, serving as the novel's epigraph, in which one of the witches prophesies:
Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.
Macbeth, in the ...
In the title story of
You Glow in the Dark, scrap metal scavengers uncover a strange glowing capsule in the ruins of an abandoned hospital. Dazzled by the beautiful blue particles that glow in the dark, they spread radioactive poison throughout their community, leaving illness and death everywhere they go. When the accident is finally ...
...a beyond the book article for
Held
The friendship between Hertha Ayrton and Marie Curie is explored in Anne Michaels's multigenerational novel
Held. Although Marie Curie is a household name, Aryton's fascinating life is likely unfamiliar to most readers.
Born in 1854 in Portsea, England, Hertha Ayrton was born as Phoebe Sarah Marks. Levi Marks, a clockmaker from...
Joel H. Morris's novel
All Our Yesterdays imagines the lives of Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, before the events that unfold in Shakespeare's tragedy. Many are familiar with the tale but may not realize the couple are based on individuals who really did live in what is now Scotland during the eleventh century.
Scotland was...
Tia Williams' novel
A Love Song for Ricki Wilde contains flashbacks to the Harlem Renaissance, considered a golden age for Black culture and art in the United States. This movement, centered in Manhattan's Harlem neighborhood, took place between the 1910s and 1930s.
During the period known as the Great Migration, when large numbers...
Kevin Jared Hosein's title
Hungry Ghosts has its origin in Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism. According to the
Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism, hungry ghost, or
preta "literally means 'one who has gone away from here' and is used to indicate the disembodied spirit of a dead person, especially during the first ten days after ...
In
A Country You Can Leave by Asale Angel-Ajani, teenage narrator Lara characterizes her mother Yevgenia's reading habits as something akin to a religious experience. She describes coming upon her at a time when she was utterly absorbed by Nikolai Gogol's
Dead Souls: '...a book she had read before, only this time she was reading the ...
For those living in the dystopian world of Soyoung Park's
Snowglobe, the main source of entertainment is reality television shot within a climate-controlled dome. The lives of the actors on these shows are on 24-hour display to be consumed obsessively by the fans in the icy world beyond the dome's barrier. Every detail of the stars' lives...
...a beyond the book article for
Dances
Dances by Nicole Cuffy is a novel filled with the mechanics of ballet. Through the first-person narration of her protagonist Cece, Cuffy portrays the everyday rhythms and realities of dance, creating patterns and scenes with its terminology. While the physicality of this language is an art to be enjoyed in itself, having even a cursory ...
...a beyond the book article for
Stealing
Margaret Verble's novel,
Stealing, centers around Kit, a young girl who is part Cherokee. Set in the 1950s, she is removed from her home and sent to a Christian boarding school where a significant portion of the students are Native American. Not only are the indigenous children systematically stripped of their heritage but Kit observes ...
...a beyond the book article for
Headshot
Rita Bullwinkel's novel
Headshot depicts the intensity and intimacy of a girl's boxing tournament. Although women's boxing was only officially introduced to the Olympics in 2012 and was banned by the USA Boxing organization before 1993, accounts of women boxing date back to the 1700s. Here are just a few of the trailblazing women boxers ...
As most will know, a mystery novel is one that starts off with a conundrum – someone has been killed, something or someone has gone missing – and proceeds along a logical path until the puzzle is solved, generally with plot twists and red herrings along the way. There are many variations on this theme, and consequently many ...
In
Only the Beautiful, the historical novel by Susan Meissner, readers are introduced to Rosanne 'Rosie' Maras, a teenage girl who has lost her family and is placed under the care of her parents' former employers. To most, Rosie seems like a normal girl, but she's hiding a secret: when she hears sounds, she sees colors. When her secret is...
Katherine Arden's
The Warm Hands of Ghosts, in addition to focusing on the violence and trauma of the World War I trenches, is also about the female nurses who treated wounded soldiers.
Protagonist Laura's point-of-view sections devote ample description to the sordid day-to-day of serving as a hospital nurse in WWI. Already sent away ...
Constanza Casati's
Clytemnestra focuses on the life of the title character, known in mythology as the vengeful wife of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, Greece. In her novel, Casati paints a full and nuanced picture of this much-villainized figure.
Clytemnestra is the daughter of Leda, a princess who becomes a Spartan queen. According to ...
Emily Howes' enthralling debut novel,
The Painter's Daughters, features a fictionalized version of the lives of Molly and Peggy Gainsborough. Their father, Thomas Gainsborough, was one of the most influential British painters of the 18th century.
Gainsborough, born in 1727, was the youngest of John and Mary Gainsborough's nine ...
In Elizabeth Gonzalez James's novel
The Bullet Swallower, a group of Texas Rangers pursue the protagonist, Antonio Sonoro, with maniacal zeal. The most dangerous member of the posse tortures and murders innocent civilians as a warning to Sonoro, crossing the Rio Grande and attacking Mexican citizens with impunity. Set in the mid-1890s...
In
Say Hello to My Little Friend, main character Izzy Reyes traveled by raft from Cuba to the United States in 2003 at age seven with his mother, who drowned during the trip. It is mentioned in the novel that his Tia Teresa exploits the sympathy of teachers who note the similarity of the circumstances between Izzy's journey and that of ...
...a beyond the book article for
Weyward
'Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those who speak it, not those it describes. A word that builds gallows and, turns breathing women into corpses...
After a mysterious event that blinded the entire world population, the characters in
Blind Spots use devices called vidders to see. In real life, many people are experiencing vision improvement through technology that might sound like something out of a science fiction novel. From smart glasses to implantable contact lenses, vision ...
In Jennifer Croft's
The Extinction of Irena Rey, humans' domestic and professional concerns mix with those of the natural world against the background of the vast Białowieża Forest, beside which the titular author lives and hosts a personal entourage of translators. The Białowieża Forest is a complex of woodland ...
The history of celebrities dabbling in espionage is a fascinating one. As Ronald Drabkin illustrates in
Beverly Hills Spy, famous people often have opportunities to gather intelligence from high-value sources. Who would not want to socialize with a beautiful or handsome star?
One of the most audacious celebrity spies during World War ...
Mark Lawrence's fantasy novel
The Book That Wouldn't Burn centers on an incredible library, where the knowledge of millennia is guarded by magical assistants and dangerous labyrinths. For book lovers, reading about magical libraries can have a special appeal—a place that, in the real world, already feels enchanted and full ...
The hands of history have reshaped the Greek past for centuries, sculpting it into an idealized version credited with birthing a myriad of ideas and concepts, notably identity. Certain contemporary political currents claim that Hellenic identity was what we would today consider white, although Greece was a multiethnic society that did not...
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 50 inches of rain on Houston, Texas. It was the biggest rainstorm in United States history and
the third major storm of its kind to hit the city in as many years. Huge swathes of Houston and its surrounding suburbs were submerged. Floodwater laced with toxic runoff, sewage and debris inundated ...
...a beyond the book article for
Leaving
Roxana Robinson's novel
Leaving begins with the protagonists meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House during a production of
Tosca. This opera is a tragedy, set in Rome in 1800, during the Napoleonic Wars.
The drama centers around three main characters: Mario Cavaradossi, a painter and Napoleon supporter; Baron Vitellio Scarpia, the ...
Exploring alternate realities through time travel is a familiar subject across fiction. Traditionally, the mechanism for making such a feat possible is the invention of a new technology: a time machine, a spaceship that can go faster than the speed of light, etc. Yet books built around these high-tech means often come with a mind-bending ...
The discovery of DNA is one of the greatest scientific achievements in the modern era, and possibly one of the most significant in history. The credit has long gone to James Watson and Francis Crick, who publicized the famous double-helix structure of DNA and the rest, as PBS
notes, 'is Nobel Prize history.'
The problem is this is an ...
Joe Barrow, the protagonist of Francis Spufford's
Cahokia Jazz, does not speak the titular city's common language, Anopa. He learns bits and pieces of it over the course of the novel, at around the same pace as the reader (heeding the
suggestion of his friend Alan Jacobs, Spufford does not include a glossary). We learn the words for ...
Rationally, we all know death is coming, but how many truly believe it? Most people only accept the inevitability when forced to by accident or terminal illness. Ironically, such a diagnosis can lend a new lease on life, as it did for Rod Nordland, author of
Waiting for the Monsoon. Rereading E.M. Forster's
Howards End recently, I came ...