It’s going to be hard to find a book just now that is much darker than “The Bass Rock,” the new novel from Evie Wyld. That’s not to suggest, however, that serious readers won’t want to give it their full consideration.

“Squeeze Me” is a welcome addition to those wonderfully lopsided eco-thrillers that Carl Hiaasen has developed a solid following for over the last three-and-a-half decades. It is also one of his angriest, as it comments on our current political climate as well.

“Northernmost” is book three in the exhilarating Eide (pronounced ‘80’) Family Saga by Peter Geye, a series spanning the 19th century to the present in both northern Minnesota and northernmost Norway.

Three young Southern women dominate the three stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald that are gathered together for the first time as “All of the Belles.” Each of the stories begins in the same small Southern town, a place with remarkable similarities to Montgomery, Ala., home of the actual young be…

The title of “Hamnet,” Maggie O’Farrell’s affecting and brilliant new novel, immediately calls to mind one of literature’s great masters and perhaps his greatest play. Yet neither is at the book’s true center.

Jacob Soboroff’s “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy” pulls no punches. It is about what has been called “the defining moral crisis of the Trump years.”

There’s a slight touch of irony to be found in the title of “Exciting Times,” the perceptive, invigorating debut novel from 24-year-old Dubliner Naoise Dolan.

Julia Heaberlin’s new thriller “We Are All the Same in the Dark” is another of her looks at small-town Texas, and it begins with a wallop.

There’s every good chance that, when they reach its final page, every reader of “Before You Go,” the bittersweet debut novel of Tommy Butler, will sit back, smile knowingly and realize they have completed one of the most satisfying novels of the year.

Two epigraphs at the beginning of “Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir” provide moving signposts through this heartfelt and heartbreaking homage to her mother by poet Natasha Trethewey. 

We first took a look at “The Ickabog,” J. K. Rowling’s new work for young readers, after 19 weekday chapters had been published online. Since the book was being published in “installments,” it was decided that this column should review the book in “installments,” too, joking, “New ways of pu…

To think of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe is to experience at least one incontrovertible shudder. How can an early story like “The Masque of the Red Death” so ably reference our current pandemic? How can a late story like “The Cask of Amontillado” make us laugh so willingly at another perso…

Both “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “The Birth-mark,” two of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic short stories, reflect the author’s concern with what are often identified as the opposing forces of religion and science. They are both forces in which Hawthorne finds potential danger and potential …

Any reader is going to immediately smile remembering “Rip Van Winkle,” Washington Irving’s legendary yarn of the Catskills. Most readers will probably not even recognize “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” as one of the many tales from Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

“The Natural” is the first book published by Bernard Malamud, and now is the perfect time to take a look at this early novel, either for the first time or once again. 

Sixty years after its publication, “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson remains as absorbing — and as frightening — as it ever was.

Author J. K. Rowling’s gift to her legions of readers during this time of pandemic and isolation is “The Ickabog,” a wonderfully convoluted fairytale about a monster that might not actually exist. 

When I recently opened my prized hardbound copy of “Goodbye, Columbus,” out of the flyleaf fell three pieces of correspondence from its author Philip Roth.

Adolescence never really becomes the subject of wide-ranging scrutiny in the works of Carson McCullers, until her moving consideration of Frankie Addams in “The Member of the Wedding.”