Sarah Manguso’s Liars is a haunting novel that dissects a marriage doomed by its own foundations. The novel begins with Jane, an aspiring writer, meeting John, a charismatic filmmaker. Both share lofty dreams of love and artistic success and they waste no time in getting married. Yet, cracks in their shared vision quickly appear. John’s...

I relish books that take me to different geographies, show me how a land breathes and lives. Latitudes of Longing, in that sense, is rich in its sprawl. Beginning with the story of Girija Prasad and Chanda Devi in the Andamans the story took me across continents through an intricately woven tapestry of people and...

What do you do when you are ambitious but don’t have the skills? You steal, of course. You do anything to achieve your goal, and everything including people become the means to an end. That’s what Maurice Swift does in John Boyne’s latest “A Ladder to the Sky.” We first meet the devastatingly handsome Maurice...

The first book I read from Kent Haruf was his last. “Our Souls at Night” swept me away with its quietude and I expected nothing less from the next book I was recommended, which was “The Tie That Binds.” This novel is similar in its quietude but there is a certain bleak beauty to it....

Unsettling. I can wrap up the review for Sayaka Murata’s “The Convenience Store Woman” in that one word. But first, a big thank you to NetGalley and publisher Grove Atlantic for this ARC. The convenience store woman of the title is Keiko Furukura, a slightly eccentric woman in her mid-30s, who has been working at...