by Sacha Naspini, trans. by Clarissa Botsford
Sacha Naspini (Nives) brings close and poignant attention to true events with his historical novel The Bishop's Villa, translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford.
In the fall of 1943, in the sleepy village of Le Case in Tuscany's Maremma region, the war is poverty, deprivation, and the passage of time. When the local bishop rents out the seminary and surrounding villa to be used as a prison camp for the region's Jewish population, Le Case mostly plods on as before. Solitary and quiet by nature,
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by Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel
With The City and Its Uncertain Walls (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel), Haruki Murakami returns to a world first created more than 40 years ago in a novella of the same title. That walled city will also be familiar to fans of the author's Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World, but prior familiarity is not required to appreciate the mesmerizing new fiction from the gifted and enigmatic Murakami (First Person Singular; IQ84; Wind/Pinball).
Part One opens as the
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by Kevin Henkes
The mismatch of expectation and reality can be a hard lesson to learn in first grade. Still Sal is Caldecott Medalist and Newbery Honor author Kevin Henkes's wonderfully warm and authentic novel for newly independent readers. Sal navigates the surprises and disappointments of school with a typical six-year-old's jumble of optimism, anxiety, secrecy, and craftiness.
Sal's visions for first grade are filled with glittery pencils, notebooks printed with baby animals, and her best friend, Griff. The reality is
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by Richard Schoch
Some have claimed, with good reason, that Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who died in 2021, is America's Shakespeare, a person who didn't invent his art form so much as take it to a new level. Richard Schoch, a U.S.-born historian and Shakespeare scholar at Queen's University Belfast in Ireland, no doubt agrees. In How Sondheim Can Change Your Life, a book as delightful as its title, he argues that tributes to Sondheim didn't address a key question: "What do his music and lyrics bring into
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by Garth Nix
Garth Nix's We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord is perfectly crafted, highly believable, middle-grade science fiction in which a boy's 10-year-old sister finds an alien object capable of mind control in "an alternate version" of 1975 Canberra, Australia.
Most evenings, 12-year-old Kim and his best friend, Bennie, along with younger sisters Eila and Madir, ride bikes to the lake. One night, after the sun disappears "for a fraction of a second," Eila wades into the water and pulls out a perfectly round,
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by Anna Moschovakis
Poet, novelist, and translator Anna Moschovakis unsettles readers of An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, a narrative meditation on the obsessions one clings to in the face of chaos. In an uncanny near future, a seismic event has disrupted Earth's crust, leaving everyone to live through continuous earthquakes. While not all of them are large, they are nearly constant.
This catastrophic event is not the first thing to upend the novel's first-person narrator, however. Her lackluster career
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by Kim Hyo-Eun, trans. by Deborah Smith
Kim Hyo-eun's delicious How We Share Cake, her second Korean import after the award-winning I Am the Subway (also translated by British polyglot Deborah Smith), focuses on the pursuit of familial fairness. "We are three sisters and two brothers," begins the second sister, serving as judicious narrator. "This is a story about how we share cake... and everything else."
For every item--apples, milk, roast chicken--five-way division is a must. "Sometimes, sharing is easy," because who wants broccoli?
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