In a shifting, unsettled world, it is always reassuring to find stories that reflect and refract our lived experiences. This week we review An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth by poet and novelist Anna Moschovakis, which imagines an "uncanny near future" shaken by a seismic event and the desperate hunt for stability that it precipitates. The "mesmerizing" new novel by Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, "plays with questions of reality and its construction" as it explores the way memory and life experience collide. And Sacha Naspini brings "close and poignant attention to true events" in The Bishop's Villa, a novel in which a shy Italian cobbler undertakes quiet acts of resistance during World War II. Plus, Kevin Henkes shows young readers how to navigate the "mismatch of expectation and reality" in Still Sal, a warm and authentic novel about a "spunky, determined, funny, and unsentimental" six-year-old entering the first grade.

In The Writer's Life, Metal from Heaven author August Clarke points to the influences that Peter S. Beagle and Megan Whalen Turner had on their fantasy writing, alongside the "tale as old as time" of discovering Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy.