fb-pixel

Hilary Mantel on re-reading

Hilary Mantel’s new novel, “The Mirror and the Light,” brings to a close her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. The novelist talked with the Globe about what she's reading (and re-reading) lately.

Love and fury in West Texas

“Valentine” is an angry novel, a blast of feminist outrage against a toxic culture that breeds racism and violence against women as readily as the babies most of its female characters bore before they were old enough to vote.

‘Too Much’ draws a direct line from Victorian to contemporary restraints on women

Author Rachel Vorona Cote takes a historic look at feminine excess.

‘I Want You to Know We’re Still Here’ is a memoir of heartbreak and horror

There are heartbreaking moments in Esther Safran Foer’s “post-Holocaust memoir” about her obsessive quest to uncover the details of her immigrant parents’ Holocaust history. How could there not be?

BOOKS
Speculation on the afterlife in ‘Heaven and Hell’
Bart D. Erhman's “Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife” is a fulsome sweep through the biblical, philosophical, and literary canon.

NEW ENGLAND LITERARY NEWS
Finding healing in poetry and drawing
News of literary note, including recommendations for what to read now.

Latest Headlines in Books

LOCAL BESTSELLERS

Local bestsellers for the week ending March 22

Bestsellers based on reporting from the independent booksellers of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and IndieBound.

NEW ENGLAND LITERARY NEWS

Closings, cancellations, and reading recommendations

Bookstores are working to make book-buying possible in a time of COVID-19 and the practice of social distancing.

BOOKS

Author Paul Lisicky provides a snapshot of Provincetown in the early 1990s

“Later: My Life at the Edge of the World” is set during the height of the AIDS crisis.

BOOKS

Medical malevolence

Fiction can enhance our historical knowledge while adding a personalizing gaze, and Megan Giddings does just that in her debut novel, which intertwines historical fact and speculative fiction into a story about exploitative experimentation.

What to read with the kids? Escape into Tove Jansson’s Moomin books

In the US, the books never reached beyond a cult audience but also never went out of print.

BOOKS

Greed, crime, and ghosts

Emily St. John Mandel’s eerie, compelling follow-up to her award-winning bestseller “Station Eleven” is not your grandmother’s Agatha Christie murder mystery or haunted hotel ghost story.

BOOKS

‘War Fever’ recalls pandemic and pandemonium in 1918 Boston

The book arrives just in time to remind us that ours is by no means the first generation to experience the wholesale disruption of our norms and institutions by an “invisible enemy.”

BOOK REVIEW

A terrifying industry, a daring heist

Like the greatest social novels, “Barn 8” focuses on the individual lives of its many characters. Farmers, activists, park rangers, and even a hen get a say in how agribusiness affects them.