Today, I began reading “The Hunter: A Novel” by Tana French, often called the Queen of Irish crime fiction. The story takes place in a small village in the West of Ireland during a hot summer. Two men arrive, one returning home and the other seeking riches. However, one of them is also seeking death.

Cal Hooper is a retired Chicago police officer who moved to rural Ireland for a peaceful life. He has built a relationship with a local woman named Lena and has been mentoring Trey Reddy, a troubled teenager on a better path. But when Trey’s long-lost father returns, accompanied by an English millionaire and a plan to find gold in the townland, everything they have built is threatened. Cal and Lena are willing to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey is not interested in protection. What she wants is revenge.

This novel, written by the acclaimed author described by The New York Times as “in a class by herself,” tells a nuanced and atmospheric tale about what we are willing to do for our loved ones, what we will do for revenge, and what we may have to sacrifice when the two collide.

I started reading “The Book of Love: A Novel” by Kelly Link today. The book showcases her exceptional writing skills, where she channels different forms of love, including friendships, romance, and family ties, with her trademark compassion, wit, and literary prowess. Readers can expect to experience joy, a little terror, and an affirmation that love endures despite challenges.

The story revolves around Laura, Daniel, and Mo, who mysteriously vanished from their hometown in Lovesend, Massachusetts, and were presumed dead. However, almost a year later, they find themselves in a high school classroom with their unremarkable music teacher. The teacher seems to know why they disappeared and what brought them back. They agree to undertake magical tasks to reclaim their lives, allowing them to return to their families and friends, but they can’t reveal where they’ve been. The tasks would lead to winners and losers.

Their resurrection attracts the attention of other supernatural beings with their agendas, which puts the community in danger and chaos. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo try to piece their lives together, and Laura’s sister Susannah tries to make sense of what she remembers, they must solve the mystery of their deaths to prevent a looming disaster.

The story takes place in Lovesend, where readers will experience love and loss, laughter and dread, magic, karaoke, and some delicious pizza.

Today, I delved into the gripping pages of “All the Sinners Bleed” by S. A. Cosby. This enthralling novel centers around Titus Crown, the first African American sheriff in Charon County, Virginia. Despite the county’s reputation for traditional customs such as moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, Titus, with his FBI expertise, knows that the peace won’t last forever.

On the first anniversary of Titus’s election, a schoolteacher is murdered by an ex-student, and Titus’s deputies take down the perpetrator. As Titus delves deeper into the case, he uncovers a web of horrendous crimes and finds a serial killer lurking in plain sight, haunting Charon’s dirt roads and woodland clearings.

Titus is determined to solve the case, despite its connection to a nearby church, and he harbors a personal secret that haunts him. However, he faces opposition from a far-right group that wants to hold a parade to honor the town’s Confederate past while he tries to solve the issue.

Despite the challenges, Titus remains resolute in his love for Charon and his commitment to finding justice. The collision of religion and hatred cannot deter him from his duty.

S. A. Cosby is a New York Times bestselling writer from southeastern Virginia. He is the author of All the Sinners Bleed, which was on more than forty Best of the Year lists, including Barack Obama’s, as well as Edgar Award finalist Razorblade Tears and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Blacktop Wasteland. He has also won the Anthony Award, ITW Thriller Award, Barry Award, Macavity Award, BCALA Award, and Audie Award. He has been longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.

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Long Bright River by Liz Moore was a 2020 NPR Books We Love Selection. It’s a contemporary novel about the opioid epidemic, it’s a novel about sisters and families, it’s a book about the police and how they fall short of the communities they serve, and it’s a well-plotted crime novel. Its main story revolves around Mickey, a patrol officer raising a young son in a working-class neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia, and her missing sister, who’s addicted to drugs. Both women are the children of addicts, raised by a strict grandmother.

Despite Long Bright River being selected by NPR and others as one of the best books, I was not sure what to expect. My doubts evaporated on page one. Mickey’s narration, including her description of Kensignton, made this a page-turner.

Mickey and Kacey’s lives became so realistic that I could not put the book down. One night, I stayed up to finish reading for the first time in almost a decade.

As much as it focuses on the opioid epidemic and the shortcomings of policing, its proper focus is on sisters and families. My love of family has become more important to me than ever since the loss of Jan, the love of my life.

Ms. Moore brings it all together in the ending but leaves enough doubt as to the future relationship of the sisters that we can feel the harsh reality of life itself. Long Bright River is the first but not the last book by this author that I will read.

Goodreads has an overview if you need more convincing.

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don’t speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.

Then Kacey disappears suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey’s district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit–and her sister–before it’s too late.

Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters’ childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.

I highly recommend this book.

Today I started reading The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman. It’s a story about love, heartbreak, self-discovery, and the magic of books. The Invisible Hour is the story of one woman’s dream. For a little while, it came true. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: “A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.

Mia Jacob finds hope in the power of words on a brilliant June day. She reads The Scarlet Letter, a novel written almost two hundred years earlier, which mirrors her life. Mia and her mother, Ivy, live inside an oppressive cult in western Massachusetts called the Community, where contact with the outside world is forbidden, and books are considered evil. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words perfectly capture the pain and loss that Mia carries inside her.

As Mia journeys through heartbreak and time, she breaks free from the rules of her Community. Along the way, she discovers the power of reading to transport and connect people, the fluidity of time, and the strength of love to overcome any obstacle.

As a young girl, Mia fell in love with a book. Now as a woman, she falls for a writer as she travels back in time. But what if Nathaniel Hawthorne never wrote “The Scarlet Letter”? What if Mia never found the book on the day she planned to end her life?

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Today, I commended reading Normal Rules Don’t Apply: Stories by Kate Atkinson, is a dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that readers love about her novels—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.

Nothing is quite as it seems in this collection of eleven dazzling stories. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep, a secretary who watches over the life she has just left, and a man who bets on a horse that may—or may not—have spoken to him. Everything that readers love about the novels of Kate Atkinson is here—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.

A startling and funny feast for the imagination, these stories conjure a multiverse of subtly connected worlds while illuminating the webs of chance and connection among us all.

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This morning, I completed reading Octavia E. Butler‘s acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Parable of the Sower and immediately started reading its sequel, Parable of the Talents, initially published in 1998. This second book is even more relevant today than it was back then. The novel’s timely message of hope and resistance in the face of fanaticism is shockingly prescient.

In 2032, Lauren Olamina survived the destruction of her home and family. She envisioned a peaceful community in Northern California, which she established based on her newly founded faith, Earthseed. This new settlement provides a haven for outcasts who face persecution following the election of an ultra-conservative president. The new president pledges to “make America great again,” but the country becomes increasingly divided and dangerous. Lauren’s subversive colony, a minority religious faction led by a young black woman, becomes a target for President Jarret’s oppressive regime characterized by terror and discrimination.

In the future, Asha Vere discovers the journals of her mother, Lauren Olamina, whom she never met. As she delves into her mother’s writings, she grapples with the conflict between Lauren’s responsibilities to her chosen family and her mission to guide humanity toward a brighter tomorrow.

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“Mother Mary Comes to Me,” Arundhati Roy‘s first memoir, is an intimate and inspiring account of how she became the person and writer she is today. It explores how her life was shaped by various circumstances, particularly her complex relationship with her extraordinary mother, whom she describes as “my shelter and my storm.” The book has been named one of the New York Times Book Review’s Top Ten Books of 2025 and is a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

Devastated by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022, Roy experienced a mix of confusion and shame over the depth of her emotions. She began writing to understand her feelings for the mother she had distanced herself from at eighteen, not out of a lack of love, but to preserve her ability to love her. Her writing marks the beginning of an astonishing, often disturbing, and surprisingly humorous memoir that chronicles the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to her accomplishments as a prize-winning novelist and essayist, and continues to the present day.

With the scope, richness, and emotional depth characteristic of her novels, “The God of Small Things” and “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness“, as well as the passion, political insight, and warmth found in her essays, “Mother Mary Comes to Me” serves as an ode to freedom and a tribute to complicated love and fierce grace—a memoir unlike any other.

Arundhati Roy is the author of “The God of Small Things,” which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” a novel translated into more than 40 languages and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. Roy has also published several nonfiction works, including “The End of Imagination,” “The Doctor and the Saint,” “My Seditious Heart,” and “Azadi.” In 2023, she received the prestigious European Essay Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2024, she received the PEN Pinter Prize for telling “urgent stories of injustice with wit and beauty.” She resides in Delhi.

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