Woolever's experiences working for Mario Batali and Tony Bourdain are fascinating--and, in the case of Batali, often disturbing. The food-focused writing and restaurant workings are the highlights; the author also recounts the implosion of her personal life, addiction, and extramarital affairs as well as shaping a new normal for herself. Laurie Woolever is fresh from culinary school and realizing that she doesn't want to be a chef when she stumbles into a position as an assis

I'm drawn to stories that explore issues around memory. In Ma's science fiction novel, China is the sole global superpower, and citizens' memories are valuable, dangerous, manipulated, and mined. Recollections serve as currency and as fodder for a government seeking to prosecute any subversive citizens. In a future land ruled by the Qin Empire, citizens all wear MindBanks, contraptions that record, monitor, and transfer memories and thoughts. Memories can be manipulated, unac

I loved the dark--and often darkly funny--journey of Cambridge postgraduate magick students Alice and Peter to hell, a quest they undertake because their advisor has died and they really need his recommendations. Also, they each fear they're the one who killed him. ...maybe going on meant believing in what she couldn't possibly know. Maybe if she went on she could find some way to make this pain stop. In Kuang's dark academia fantasy novel Katabasis , Alice Law is a postgrad

I like a story driven by a female investigaor of a main protagonist, and in this small-town mystery and tragedy, officer Emmy Clifton...

This quiet, epistolary novel witnesses the creaky, sometimes difficult shifts and realizations that a septuagenarian achieves around her...

I feel compelled to see this series through to its end. The Robin-Strike tension is finally spoken aloud, although not resolved, and the...

I've loved the other three books I've read by Lily King, but I didn't connect with the Heart the Lover characters and didn't believe in...

Ryan builds a vivid small-town Irish setting with its gloomy, then alarming, descent into corruption. The twenty-one points of view were...

Novik's novella The Summer War reads like a fable, with unexpected twists and turns; duty, clever evasion, and curses; a strange world...

Ian McEwan's new literary fiction looks back upon our present with a cutting 2119 eye. An enthused future academic and a contemporary...

I was delighted by the poignancy, humor, and layers in the first installment of this series of stories about sharp, disparate...

Smith was inspired by the real-life Victorian England case of a cockney impostor attempting to wrest an inheritance from the nobility,...

The Briar Club employs nine points of view to tell the story of life in a female-only boarding house in 1950s, McCarthy-era Washington,...

Patrick Ryan's literary fiction traces decades of the messy, poignant lives of two families shaped by uncompromising societal...

I loved my first T. Kingfisher read. This was dark, sometimes wryly funny, haunting, and intriguing, and the resolutions to the...

Allision Epstein shapes Charles Dickens's greedy criminal mastermind Jacob Fagin into a character with a rich backstory, showing him to...

This first installment in the series sets up an overlooked princess who becomes a heroine; deadly monsters who may be being treated...

I shuddered as I read (during daylight hours only) Caroline Fraser's painstaking accounts of the shockingly numerous serial killers who...

The first book in Hodgson's trilogy is smart, mysterious, charming, and layered. I loved the dark academia setting; the brilliant,...

I loved the twist, double-twist of my first Cavanagh mystery, and the story's revenge and renegade justice are layered with unexpected...