Among this week's outstanding recommendations are books that approach heavy topics with a light touch and more than a little panache. Eliza Clark's debut story collection, She's Always Hungry, is "inventive and incendiary" as she tackles taboos around gender, sexuality, violence, and power with darkly funny and speculative motifs. Those Opulent Days by Jacquie Pham is both "a complex murder mystery and an exploration of the problematic nature of colonization" as it follows the fates of four friends from a boarding school in 1917 Vietnam. Plus, Jason Reynolds's mindful and attentive Twenty-Four Seconds from Now...: A LOVE Story is a "gentle, candid, and approachable YA romance" about two Black high school seniors navigating love, sex, bodily autonomy, and consent.
And in The Writer's Life, celebrated children's author Katherine Rundell hopes to galvanize adult readers toward political action in order to protect the many animal species endangered by both climate change and more direct human interference, like trafficking.