BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Bad, Bad Place by Frances Crawford
(3/25/2026)
A Bad, Bad Place is an excellent whodunnit, but at its core it's a bittersweet love letter to the characters that (for good or for ill) made up this marginalized and underserved slice of society. What Crawford has achieved is no mean feat: a story that grips and characters that stroll fully formed off the page and into your consciousness, where they're bound to linger long after the final page. As the city's official motto goes, "People Make Glasgow"—and
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Eradication: A Fable
by Jonathan Miles
(2/11/2026)
At 160 pages, Eradication's meager length masks its meaty ideas. Miles has a lot to say about our current environmental catastrophe and the weaknesses of human nature that perpetuate it; readers might only wish that he had given himself more space in which to say it. But they can nevertheless be grateful for what he's delivered: a sharp, funny novel of ideas that bristles with rage at what humanity can wreak on the world.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Listen: A Novel
by Sacha Bronwasser
(11/19/2025)
Readers expecting Listen to resolve itself into a cohesive whole may find themselves disappointed. Bronwasser doesn't limit herself in this slim novel—she writes skilfully and intelligently about photography and perception, about abuse of power in all its forms, and about the joys and anxieties of young adulthood—but her attempts to gather those disparate strands together are never entirely successful. At times, Listen feels more like a short story collection th
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History
by Moudhy Al-Rashid
(9/10/2025)
Al-Rashid is an engaging and endearing guide through these muddled layers of history, one who knows how to breathe life into dry clay fragments. An Oxford University academic immersed in her subject, she isn't afraid to weave herself into the story. Indeed, it's often through personal anecdote that the immensity of the timescales she's dealing with comes into stark relief. Telling the Epic of Gilgamesh to her three-year-old daughter as a bedtime story, she's filled with a sense of wonder
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Girl, 1983: A Novel
by Linn Ullmann
(7/30/2025)
On a winter's night in 1983, a 16-year-old girl is lost on the streets of Paris. She's been in the city for less than 24 hours and can't remember the name of her hotel; she's alone and scared. All she has in her pocket is the address of "K," the forty-something fashion photographer who's lured her to the French capital with a promise to get her picture in Vogue. She wants to go home—back to New York, back to her mother, who pleaded with her not to com
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The House on Buzzards Bay: A Novel
by Dwyer Murphy
(7/2/2025)
The House on Buzzards Bay would risk being yet another rehash of The Big Chill for a new generation, except for author Dwyer Murphy's more sinister sensibilities. While he utilizes all the hidden secrets and jealous rivalries that are the standard fare of "friend group" fiction, he also feeds a deeper unease into the story. A slim novel at under 300 pages, this is a slow burner all the same. Murphy is more interested in crafting an atmosphere than a plot; his focu
BookBrowse Editorial Review
So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease
by Thomas Levenson
(6/4/2025)
With So Very Small, his latest in a string of popular histories of science, Thomas Levenson attempts to educate the rest of us in how good we have things today. The book centers on the history of germ theory, tracing a centuries-long struggle to understand the microscopic lifeforms (bacteria and viruses) that were for so long the unknown root of so much of humanity's suffering. His focus is the story and, author of half a dozen history books, he is an experienced and gifted storytel
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Pretender: A Novel
by Jo Harkin
(4/23/2025)
After 500 years, Tudor history has every right to be stale. Its cut-throat court politics have been hashed and rehashed by novelists, poets, and playwrights since Henry VIII was still picking wives. So it's always worth sitting up and taking note when a writer arrives who can inject the genre with a little life—and Jo Harkin, author of Tell Me an Ending, is definitely one such writer. Her brilliant and inventive new novel, The Pretender, tells the extraordinary story
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Good Girl: A Novel
by Aria Aber
(2/12/2025)
Nila's past-tense narration comes from an ostensibly older and wiser place, but she's clearly kept her penchant for pretension. At one point she tells the reader how she is "troubled by the fundamental uncertainty inherent in post-structuralist theories"; the reader, in turn, may be troubled by the complete earnestness with which she says this. The novel is far more interesting and Aber's writing skills far more affecting when trained on Nila's reckoning with her identity. Never having visited t
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Patriot: A Memoir
by Alexei Navalny
(11/20/2024)
Through it all, Navalny stays human. In a country run by stony-faced authoritarians, this was always his superpower. His damning investigative journalism, carried out with colleagues at the Anti-Corruption Foundation, proved his unflagging work ethic. But it was his easy-going charm and likability that made him such a fearsome political threat. In the pages of Patriot, these qualities are on full display. He is wonderfully alive—more alive in death than Putin has ever shown himself
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Book of George: A Novel
by Kate Greathead
(11/6/2024)
Greathead cleverly plays on the idea of the picaresque hero, a loveable rogue satirizing society's mores as he slips from one adventure to the next. George's picaresque adventures cut through some of the great social upheavals of the last two decades—Occupy Wall Street, MAGA, the MeToo movement—but the novel's fast-paced episodes mean that too often these feel more like superficial waypoints through the 21st century than cultural moments worthy of true reflection. Greathead's strengt
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
by Olga Tokarczuk
(10/2/2024)
Like the body of Frau Opitz on the dining-room table, women are at the center of Tokarczuk's narrative without ever speaking a word. The Empusium features vanishingly few female characters, but their qualities and—more precisely—their defects are the obsession of the isolated male guests. As Wojnicz comes to realize, "every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women." To say too much
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Pink Slime
(8/21/2024)
The narrative bones of Pink Slime may be those of a straightforward family drama, but Trías enjoys wrapping them in some meaty experimentation. Like the eponymous pink paste, however, the philosophical musings and stylistic flair that pepper her writing are only somewhat nourishing. The novel may touch on all the weightiest contemporary concerns—environmental disaster, democratic backsliding, class inequality—but it's the knotty personal relationships that give it such a
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
by Olivia Laing
(7/17/2024)
Gardening is as much an intellectual endeavor for Laing as it is a physical one, and the roots of her thinking run deep. She makes room in this expansive book for figures ranging from the Greek historian and philosopher Xenophon to Toni Morrison, but the greatest space is given over to micro-biographies of those who, like herself, have sought to plant paradise. Between vignettes from her own struggles, Laing introduces figures like John Clare, the 19th-century "peasant poet" who captured the nat
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Women and Children First: A Novel
by Alina Grabowski
(6/5/2024)
After Lucy Anderson falls to her death at a high school party, no one in Nashquitten, her gloomy, rain-battered hometown on the Massachusetts coast, seems to be quite sure what happened. Across ten chapters narrated by ten different female voices, Women and Children First draws a sharp portrait not so much of the ambitious, mercurial teenager—but of the community that let her slip away. The prose is biting, but although cynicism may be Grabowski's signature style, her writing is tha
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Clear: A Novel
by Carys Davies
(4/3/2024)
Ivar has lived alone for decades; the Highland Clearances, a series of mass evictions that began a century earlier, have already forced his family from the land. But if Scottish history would have him for another victim, Clear deftly upends the usual narrative. Soon after arrival, John slips on the craggy coastline; Ivar, discovering his unconscious body, takes it upon himself to patch the minister up. An obsession with language drives this slim yet gripping novel. Ivar speaks Norn, an is
