Cave Mountain: a Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks

by Benjamin Hale

Harper Collins Publishers

    Benjamin Hale covers a great deal of ground - beginning with a missing child, segueing to a Christian cult murdering a different child and the lives of many of those involved in both occurrences. Hale manages to keep an open mind, while remaining a skeptic and allowing the people he's showing us to be themselves, in all their complexities. He writes beautifully of these people and the countryside, without ever making less of them than they so obviously are.

   If you are very religious, or bothered by profanities, you may find this a bit difficult. 

If you would like to know more about, or own this book, please check with your local independent bookstore or this great place: bookshop.org. 

The Buried Giant

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Vintage/PRH 

   A medieval quest that is not for the grail but for memory. A moral decision of  historical truth, vengeance, war and the possibility of forgiveness weighed against forgetting everything.

    A question that unfortunately lingers.

If you would like to know more about, or own this book, please check with your local independent bookstore or this great place: bookshop.org. 

Last Night in Brooklyn

by Xochitl Gonzalez

Flatiron Books/Macmillan

    You don't need to have ever been to Brooklyn to enjoy this story of a group of friends having one last blast of a summer. Warm, funny and just a bit sad, beautifully told - a great, easy but thoughtful read.

If you would like to know more about, or own this book, please check with your local independent bookstore or this great place: bookshop.org. 

Glyph

by Ali Smith

Pantheon/PRH

    Sisters who've been estranged, a loss which leads to too much imagination (can there be?), all of the horrors people inflict upon each other, ghosts and a horse that leads to a reconciliation. This is warm and sad and a reminder that war, 'though it's always been with us, has never been right.

    I'm going to have to read everything she's written.

If you would like to know more about, or own this book, please check with your local independent bookstore or this great place: bookshop.org. 

All the Birds in the Sky

Charlie Jane Anders

Tor/Macmillan

    Friendship, what it needs and what it can bring, and whether it just might be able to save the world. This is a thoughtful and frightening novel about the kinds of destruction, 10 years after this was published, we are doing.

    Take it as a warning, but a charming and very readable one.

If you would like to know more about, or own this book, please check with your local independent bookstore or this great place: bookshop.org.