Book reviews from Tin House Press — fiction, nonfiction, children’s and independent titles, read and reviewed by our editorial team.
Fourteen-year-old Marceau Leggett is a gifted but accident-prone apprentice artist living in the medieval seaside kingdom of Valemont. Unfortunately, his budding ambitions are often sabotaged by his clumsiness, leaving him in trouble more often than not (“Is that how you ended up with your hands covered in blue pigment? Watching girls instead of what you …
Drawing from Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism, each of the 66 chapters includes a dharma (teaching) and sadhana (practice) to help people shift from suffering to peace. The aim is to move from an agitated “monkey mind” and to instead “perceive what is truly happening in the freshness, juiciness, and awe of the present moment.” The …
For many people like the author, the world feels “like a bag of puzzle pieces with no picture on the box.” In this intimate memoir, Manning details his struggles to understand why. The short answer, as he eventually came to realize, boiled down to one word: autism. Getting a grip on the bigger picture that …
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife …
In 2036, Abigail Thompson, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is working as an intern for the summer at Intelligenics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After a traumatic childhood in Baltimore, she’s now focused on her future. She’s eager to rise through Intelligenics’ ranks, so she arranges to show off her “intelligent network administration …
Senya, with her angelic healing powers, barely escapes a religious cult; Nell, the Crown Princess of Aesterland, flees an arranged marriage and the destruction of her country; and Siegfried the assassin travels with them, intent on avenging his family. The trio join forces against the Jenseiters, a growing political force spreading across their nations thanks …
Scott and her family lived in various places in Canada and England. She and her younger sister spent much of their time with nannies and babysitters, since their parents were often traveling. As a girl, the author was known in her household for her “hysterical meltdowns,” generally stemming from an intense fear of being alone. …
Sociologist Luft provides a sober, well-documented portrayal of the Catholic Church’s ultimate failure to avoid mass executions of French Jews. Her history, beginning in 1933 and continuing through the closing months of the World War II, chronicles a number of personalities whose actions and inactions shaped the fate of France’s Jewish population. Luft is always …
Interior designer Lauren Simpson and architect Mike Miller have an unforgettable encounter over the holidays when a storm strands the traveling strangers at an airport hotel and they rescue a stray dog, but circumstances keep them from exchanging contact information. As their lives continue to intersect through an increasingly improbable series of near misses, both …
The self-declared “worst” kid in his gifted circle of friends—the one with seemingly no talent for anything except getting into trouble—has spent his final year at Jerome Marco K-8 collecting disaster stories with his Team Bomb Shelter crew: martial arts cousin Adam, science whiz Rover, statistics prodigy Sean, wheelchair-using brainy beauty Helen, bighearted athlete Charlie, …
