In a dark palace corridor, a lonely princess counts her steps and asks a former assassin to come back tomorrow. Kemmerer's second Braided Fate novel is at its best in moments like that one, and weakest when the war outside finally knocks.

A laid-off federal writer comes home to a Darke County village whose meat plant is about to close, just as its residents start bursting open and coming back as something stranger and happier. John Scalzi's comic horror novel is generous, profane and sharp about money, though it settles its villains too easily.

Stranded at dusk on a stone platform in a lake she has just made, the woman blamed for ending the world has to decide whether to save the man who came to kill her. Jensen's first Sundering novel builds a whole romance from that choice, and asks who gets to be saved when the night comes.

Before dawn on a Kentucky cattle ranch, a four-year-old is afraid of the last day of preschool and her father talks her down with a story about a horse. Paisley Hope's new cowboy romance is at its best in moments like that, and less sure of itself when it turns to the hero's fists.

A grandmother hijacks an FBI briefing room with lasagna and a slideshow, and the Naturals are drafted into a week of Christmas meddling while a stranger leaves bodies posed in the snow. Barnes's long-awaited return is tender, funny and sad, with a mystery that matters more than it menaces.

A laid-off federal writer comes home to a Darke County village whose meat plant is about to close, just as its residents start bursting open and coming back as something stranger and happier. John Scalzi's comic horror novel is generous, profane and sharp about money, though it settles its villains too easily.

Sixty years after leaving her childhood home in York, an actress climbs its narrow stairs to the attic and finds two of her drawings still on the wall. The memoir that follows talks its way through a whole life, and rarely in a straight line.

Two floors under the New York Public Library, a guard unlocks an oak box and shows a broke usher a scroll of narrow paper strips sealed end to end with wax, every inch of it covered in a dead poet's handwriting. The usher goes home and starts writing.

Every morning before breakfast a schoolteacher in Nishinomiya sits with his eyes shut before a glass case holding a carved bodhisattva, praying for soldiers on both sides of a war he never discusses. His son, now Japan's most famous novelist, spends this slim book working out why.

A Wampanoag-centred history of Plymouth that runs from an ancient homeland to a sachem's reburial in 2017, with the war of 1675 at its heart. Silverman makes the holiday's founding story impossible to hear the same way again, though his advocacy sometimes outruns his evidence.

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Six books, seven weeks until the winner, and one of them runs to six hundred pages. Which of the shortlisted novels to open first, which to save for a group, and which one I think wins.

Thirteen novels, one shortlist in September, and not enough evenings. Here is what each book on the Booker 2026 longlist actually is, and which one I would open first.

You have a ticket and not much time. Here is what I would actually read before Nolan's Odyssey, sorted by how many free evenings you have between now and the cinema.

Finishing Circe leaves a very specific hole. Here are the Greek myth retellings that actually fill it, and the ones that only pretend to.

Your group has decided to read Homer. Now comes the argument nobody expects: which Odyssey translation are you all reading, and what happens when half the room turns up with a different book?

The 2026 Nobel laureate writes verse novels, tango essays and boxed elegies. Here is which of Anne Carson's books work best in a group, what to ask about each, and how to run the meeting.

Three men in a kitchen disagree about a Hebrew verb, and six hundred pages depend on who is right. Here is how to run that argument at a meeting, including the part where Steinbeck's reading turns out to be contested.

Steinbeck told us Cathy Ames was born without a conscience and then wrote four hundred pages that contradict him. Zoe Kazan's adaptation takes the other side. Whether that is a repair or a rewrite is the argument worth having.

There is only one pearl buyer in town. He keeps several agents in separate offices so that it looks like a market. Once you notice that detail, the novella stops being a fable about greed and becomes something much angrier.

A defrocked preacher decides there is no such thing as an individual soul, and the whole novel is the Joad family slowly being forced to agree with him. Reading the book as that argument changes what the notorious last page is doing.

Christopher Null is an award-winning journalist, editor, and novelist.Null...

When an author services company fails, the loss is rarely just money. Here is what actually happens to your listings, your files, your identifiers and your unpaid royalties, stage by stage.

Most book club plot discussions end in summary or argument about plot holes. Here's a better set of questions — ones that get to what plot actually reveals about character, theme, and authorial intent — without the conversation feeling like a lecture.

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