Summer reading, if you ask me, should meander, without a plan. Pick up, put down, misplace, leave crusty with sand or warped with humidity. Fall is for rigor, winter for hunkering down, spring for peering ahead, but the right summer read is a promising dirt road in a field. Someday, when I open a bookstore and the big bucks roll in, I’ll ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- If your name is Kathleen West and you’re part of a class action suit or you’ve been mailed a coupon for new gutters or offered an exciting opportunity for a time-share in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, there’s a decent chance the Minneapolis writer who shares your name has your mail.

“I have never met a Kathleen West in ...Read more

While Los Angeles bands like The Germs, The Go-Go’s, X, and Bad Religion drew the spotlight to Southern California’s punk rock scene, their iconic larger-than-life presence may have inadvertently cast a shadow on the suburbs of Orange County, whose teens were ready to prove that rebellion thrived outside of La La Land.

In “Tearing Down ...Read more

Caroline Fraser has pulled a major switcheroo with her new book, “Murderland.”

Fraser’s last book, “Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” won a Pulitzer Prize for its portrait of the folksy writer and her daughter, whom Fraser demonstrated was heavily involved in her mom’s writing. But, whatever else he may ...Read more

The worst possible thing has happened to Corby Ledbetter, and he has only himself to blame.

No spoilers but the tragedy is such, in Wally Lamb‘s “The River Is Waiting,” that Corby will forever be wracked by whether he can be forgiven — by himself, his wife, his small daughter or the rest of his family. The court, however, is not in a ...Read more

After 15 years spent investigating organized crime in Liverpool, Detective Sergeant Nicola Bridge has returned to her childhood home on England’s southwest coast. In the sleepy village of Fleetcombe, she hopes to patch up her marriage and enjoy a calmer pace of life, far from lawless gangs and brutal murders.

Her best-laid plans are quickly ...Read more

John Adams, a founder of the United States and its second president, privately expressed doubts that the republic would survive its own design flaws. Yet the Constitution, its blueprint, has proved more resilient than just five pages of parchment, despite inflamed schisms and the brutal Civil War.

A key player in that strengthening was ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, June 14, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Bury Our ...Read more

Robert Macfarlane has climbed to the icy summits of windswept mountains and plunged into the darkened depths of the earth to research his books, and he says that may have given people the impression that he was a bit of a loner.

“There was a time, maybe 15, 20 years ago, when I was reputed as somebody who wrote about being alone — and alone...Read more

If “This Dog Will Change Your Life” were a dog breed, it would be a border collie: sweet, fun to be around, a little hyper.

The book comes from Elias Weiss Friedman, who bills himself as the Dogist on social media, where he has 7.6 million Instagram followers. Friedman photographs dogs he meets and interviews their owners about the dogs’ ...Read more

In her “Meet Me at the Crossroads” Megan Giddings thanks people you’d expect a writer to acknowledge, including readers and University of Minnesota English department colleagues V.V. Ganeshananthan and Julie Schumacher. There’s also at least one you might not expect: an Uber driver.

That driver, who drove the creative writing and ...Read more

Claire Lynch’s debut novel, “A Family Matter,” is built around a dark fact, stated plainly in an author’s note at the end — in the 1980s in the U.K., 90% of lesbian mothers in divorce cases lost custody of their children.

Such a terrible injustice is hard to imagine, which is surely why Lynch has imagined it — to understand how ...Read more

Yiyun Li’s memoir, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” stuns with its lucidity and with the nightmarish facts that prompted its writing. As Li explains, “My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”

Recommending Li’s ...Read more

Taylor Jenkins Reid has kept busy since publishing her last novel three years ago. In 2023 alone, she produced the hit streaming series based on her novel “Daisy Jones & the Six” and co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of her “One True Loves.”

While Hollywood remains all in on Reid’s work, with projects based on three of ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, June 7, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Atmosphere: A ...Read more

The Chicago Tribune once called Richard Bausch a writer’s kind of writer, “the kind passed around and treasured by other writers as models of approach and perception.”

In his expansive career, the 80-year-old Bausch, a writing professor at Chapman University in Orange, has penned 13 novels and 10 short story collections. His work has ...Read more

If all the world’s a stage, it must include the 20 hectares of barren, dusty and drought-stricken Malaysian farmland at the center of Tash Aw’s sensitively drawn novel “The South.”

This failing acreage, with its muddy pond and orchard destined for the chainsaw, seems an unlikely setting for a novel, especially one centered on teen angst...Read more

A deadly white nationalist rally convulsed a Virginia city in 2017. Deborah Baker’s “Charlottesville” comprehensively demonstrates how internet hatemongering and gun ubiquity are endangering pluralism, civic participation and good-faith debate.

Baker, the author of books about Minnesota poet Robert Bly (“Making a Farm”), Britain’s ...Read more