One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature
A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.
When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between...

Weaves together the story of the disappearance of a prison guard's daughter on Alcatraz in 1937, and an Irish boy's efforts 20 years earlier to find his real father in America.

Though best known for The Red Badge of Courage, his classic novel of men at war, in his tragically brief life and career Stephen Crane produced a wealth of stories-among them "The Monster," "The Upturned Face," "The Open Boat," and the title story-that stand among the most acclaimed and enduring in the history of American fiction. This superb volume collects stories of unique power and variety in which impressionistic, hallucinatory, and realistic...

Based on a true story, the author humorously recounts the time his grandfather got stranded with a friend on Surtsey, a brand new volcanic island in Iceland. The adventurers face epic challenges like molten lava, melted eyeglasses and scant supplies before finally getting rescued. Graphic novel-like layouts and spirited text invite readers to search for the one thing that's not actually true in this thrilling yet light-hearted tale of adventure. Endnotes...

Jonathan Zane seeks revenge against the man who abducted his sweetheart and controls a gang of marauding outlaws and Indians.

-- Life of David Hockney offers an insightful overview of a painter whose art is as accessible as it is compelling, and whose passion to create has never been deterred by heartbreak or illness or loss.

A cinematic Reconstruction-era drama of violence and fraught moral reckoning In Dawson's Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson's great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson's tale weaves her family's journal entries and letters with a novelist's narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the...

"Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian-but not an historian of the Jews-is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with...

When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis--known as Jack--she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn't holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak...

A reimagining of the early years of Catherine the Great traces the story of a naive German duchess as observed by young Barbara, a servant who watches her mistress's elevation and rises to become one of Russia's most clever royal spies.