Radio Book Club Book Mentions

"An international bestseller and one of The Times's "Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century," Claire Keegan's piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love, now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US. It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas'...

Rumors begin to spread of a species of hyperintelligent, dangerous octopus that may have developed its own language and culture. Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them. The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where the octopuses were discovered, off from the world. Dr. Nguyen joins DIANIMA’s team on the...

In The Mike File, Stephen Trimble grapples with his brother's heartrending life and death and looks behind doors he's barricaded in himself. In 1957, when "Stevie" was six and Mike 14, psychosis overwhelmed Mike. He never lived at home again and died alone in a Denver boarding home at 33. Journalists used Mike's death to expose these "ratholes" warehousing people with mental illness. Detective story, social history, journey of self-discovery, and...

Six children -- Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis -- meet in a garden close to the sea, their voices sounding over the constant echo of the waves that roll back and forth from the shore. The book follows them as they develop from childhood to maturity and follow different passions and ambitions; their voices are interspersed with interludes from the timeless and unifying chorus of nature.

"From the visionary author of The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, an epic novel tracing the conception and construction of a colossal statue-and the lives of two centuries of immigrants navigating its turbulent wake "Lidia Yuknavitch is a writer who, with each ever more triumphant book, creates a new language with which she writes the audacious stories only she can tell," Roxane Gay has written. Now, Yuknavitch bridges the nineteenth...

"From the ... author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality. Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi...

Poetically defining emotions we all feel but don't have the words to express, the creator of the popular online project of the same name invites readers on his epic quest to fill the gaps in the language of emotion.

"April Clarke-Cliveden was the first person Hannah Jones met at Oxford. Vivacious, bright, occasionally vicious, and the ultimate It girl, she quickly pulled Hannah into her dazzling orbit. Together, they developed a group of devoted and inseparable friends--Will, Hugh, Ryan, and Emily--during their first term. By the end of the year, April was dead. Now, a decade later, Hannah and Will are expecting their first child, and the man convicted of killing...

It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance — and the subsequent cover-up — will have an impact...

Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation speaks in the clear voice of a woman who emerged from the other side of autism, bringing with her an extraordinary message about how animals think and feel. Among its provocative ideas, the book: argues that language is not a requirement for consciousness -- and that animals do have consciousness ; applies the autism theory of "hyper-specificity" to animals, showing that animals and autistic people are so sensitive...