Best fiction books of 2018

• Release Date: 2018
• Genre: Best Books 2018, Book2Screen, Dystopia, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Mystery/Historical, Mystery/Thriller, Noir, Rundown

Memorable Characters, potent voices, great prose, evoking locales and conflict, various complexities, love, death and dreams in balance, problem solving, compelling narratives, suspense and mystery, they are all here.
This is my best books 2018 list.
Thank you to all the great publishers that brought these great voices of 2018, with great stories to tell.

Check out nonfiction best of 2018 list – https://more2read.com/review/best-nonfiction-books-of-2018/

From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of The English Patient: a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement.

“[A] haunting, brilliant novel . . . Mesmerizing from the first sentence, rife with poignant insights and satisfying subplots, this novel about secrets and loss may be Ondaatje’s best work yet.”
— Publisher’s Weekly

“A lyrical mystery . . . Ondaatje’s shrewd character study plays out in a smart, sophisticated drama, one worth the long wait for fans of wartime intrigue.”
— Kirkus reviews

“Such beauty in discovery, the memorable characters called The Moth and The Dart, the mystery carries the story through in this poignant tale crafted with a melody in words that is lucid, somber and nostalgic, therapeutic.”
– More2Read Reviews

Review

“The Overstory, a novel about trees and people who understand them, is the eco-epic of the year and perhaps the decade. Unlike the Lorax, who spoke for the trees, Richard Powers prefers to let them do their own talking.”
– Leanne Shapton, judge for the Man Booker Prize

“Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees, which makes me think of The Overstory, the best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period.”
– Ann Patchett

“Remarkable….This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction.”
– Ron Charles, Washington Post

Review to Come

“November Road is a remarkable and unforgettable reading experience… You will recommend it to friends. You will read it again. Berney is a writer to be read and admired. This is a staggeringly brilliant book and a flat-out terrific read.” – Don Winslow, New York Times Bestselling Author

“From its first frenetic pages to its wrenching final ones, Lou Berney takes us on the ride of a lifetime…It’s a crime story, a love story, a deeply American story. With November Road, Berney proves beyond doubt that he’s one of the most talented crime novelists working today.” – Megan Abbott, author of You Will Know Me

“Lou Berney has quickly become one of crime fiction’s stand-outs, a quietly subversive writer who can surprise the most jaded readers. November Road delivers everything we have come to expect from him — and then some.”– Laura Lippman, New York Times bestselling author of Sunburn

A tantalizing memorable suspenseful tale done with a crisp and potent voice, with a noir sense of thrill, with love, death, and dreams in the balance. – More2Read Reviews

Review                                     

Author Interview

“A book that will break your heart, set your blood pumping and your mind racing, and leave you gasping for breath by the final page.”
— Candice Millard, New York Times bestselling author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic

“John Grisham is not only the master of suspense but also an acute observer of the human condition. And these remarkable skills converge in The Reckoning—an original, gripping, penetrating novel that may be his greatest work yet.”
—David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon

A tale of three stories, love, war and murder, there will be tragedy in 1940’s rural small town Mississippi.
– More2Read Reviews

Review

His Scandal
Her Secret

From New York Times bestselling author Alafair Burke, a stunning domestic thriller in the vein of Behind Closed Doors and The Woman in Cabin 10—in which a woman must make the impossible choice between defending her husband and saving herself

“This might be the most gripping, insightful work from the best-selling author Alafair Burke yet. She poses a seemingly impossible, if undeniably compelling, challenge: a woman must either save her life or defend her husband, but not both.”
– Entertainment Weekly

“Written by a former prosecutor with a genius for plot, this thrill ride of a novel takes a hard look at loyalty and the violence a secret can cause—especially when that secret involves a revered public figure accused of rape.”
– O, The Oprah Magazine

“The wife, not the good wife, not the bad wife” – More2Read Reviews

Review

“Every time Laura Lippman comes out with a new book, I get chills because I know I am back in the hands of the master. She is simply a brilliant novelist, an unflinching chronicler of life in America right now, and Sunburn is her dark, gleaming noir gem. Read it.”
– Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl

“Laura Lippman continues to push the envelope of modern crime-writing. Sunburn, her take on noir, may be her nerviest novel yet, an unsparing look at how lovers can betray one another.”
– Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Suspenseful as hell, and she writes like a dream […] Lippman’s always good, but this is a cut above.”
– Stephen King

“Answering a question in the tale “What kind of woman walks out on her family?” we have a compelling narrative potently encompassing mystery, suspense, and psychologically tilted minds.”
– More2Read Reviews

Review

“Slaughter has outdone herself with Pieces of Her—a novel that sets the standard for psychological thriller writing. Rarely in fiction have the past and the present collided with such force and in such a distinctive and compelling voice.”
—  Jeffery Deaver

“A crisp unflinching visceral narrative, unraveling pieces of a mother she thought she had known.”
– More2read Reviews

Review

“Joyful, uplifting, and tinged with sadness.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“[An] elegant whisper of a story…[Scott] finds a memorable—and quite beautiful, really—way to depart a town made all the better for his presence.”
—Kirkus Reviews

A modest small tale of a complex Mid-life crisis in small-town Castle Rock, with a possible phenomenon, germ, or virus, with big-town resonation.
– More2Read Reviews

Review

Drawing on the rich experience of his own life, best-selling author Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to relive the dreams of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order. In Hippie, he tells the story of Paulo, a young, skinny Brazilian man with a goatee and long, flowing hair, who wants to become a writer and sets off on a journey in search of a deeper meaning for his life.

Review

Perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver and Karen Russell, Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

“Carries the rhythm of an old time ballad. It is clear Owens knows this land intimately, from the black mud sucking at footsteps to the taste of saltwater and the cry of seagulls.”
—David Joy, author of The Line That Held Us

“Heart-wrenching…A fresh exploration of isolation and nature from a female perspective along with a compelling love story.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“A melancholic tale of tragedies, loss, complexities and frailties, coming of age, love lost and newly founded, what a great debut, no words wasted with great voice, a lucid poem of mystery playing out before for the reader.”
– More2Read Reviews

“Spot on dialogue, vivid to the point scenes unravelling, no words wasted succession of terribleness and greatness, a redemptive tale  with memorable characters coming off the page, crossing the boundaries of life and possibly coming back with second chances, finding some hope, road out, lessons learned and success.”
-More2Read Reviews

“As a look into where our overconsumption might lead us, Ling Ma’s Severance rings terrifyingly true. More than that, it’s a moving meditation on home, belonging, and life itself—all rendered in cool yet affecting prose that’s too good not to keep reading.”
— Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin

“A counter-history . . . Ma’s writing about the jargon of globalized capitalism has a mix of humor and pathos that reminded me a little of Infinite Jest and a little of George Saunders; it produced a sense of estrangement from my cosmetics, my clothes, and my iPhone.”
— Emily Witt, The New Yorker

“Funny, frightening, and touching…. Ling Ma manages the impressive trick of delivering a bildungsroman, a survival tale, and satire of late capitalist millennial angst in one book, and Severance announces its author as a supremely talented writer to watch.” —The Millions

“Scenes evoked vividly before the reader, the whole whirlwind of her mind with world gone topsy turvy, mesmerising and hypnotic, meditative and poetically strung together words with lucidity and satire in the narrative.”–More2Read Reviews

Review

“Masterful. White-hot. A devastating debut novel.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“A gripping deep dive into urban indigenous community in California: an astonishing literary debut!” —Margaret Atwood

“THERE THERE drops on us like a thunderclap; the big, booming, explosive sound of 21st century literature finally announcing itself.  Essential.”
—Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings

“There There is a miraculous achievement, a book that wields ferocious honesty and originality in service of telling a story that needs to be told. This is a novel about what it means to inhabit a land both yours and stolen from you, to simultaneously contend with the weight of belonging and unbelonging. There is an organic power to this book – a revelatory, controlled chaos. Tommy Orange writes the way a storm makes landfall.” —Omar El Akkad

Review to come

“Rip Crew is a taut, tense international thriller, filled with complex characters and gritty dialogue. Utterly riveting.”
– Alafair Burke, New York Times bestselling author of The Wife

“Rotella writes convincingly about the realities and mechanics of investigative journalism, and his detailed action scenes add just enough mayhem to keep thriller readers on the edge of their seats.”
– Publishers Weekly

“Taut masculine potent prose with brevity when needed, great descriptiveness and sentences when needed, bringing alive on the page culture, streets, cafes, peoples, mayhem and shoot-out scenes, and heart of darkness.”
– More2read Reviews

Review

“Kent Anderson has crafted a literary miracle here. We’re transported to ‘Nam and circa-’80 Oakland, reimagined as Hell, seen through the eyes of a crusading cop unique in the annals of police literature. This jazzy—and jazz influenced—novel is like the best of early Joseph Wambaugh. In Oaklandese: If I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’!”
—James Ellroy

Kent Anderson serves up the best of what crime fiction can do in Green Sun, showing us a slice of the world that stands for the whole wide world, and giving us Officer Hanson, whose perseverance and bedrock fairness and understanding of human frailty make him a hero for all places and times. The Hanson Trilogy should not be a secret. It’s the best of the best in American storytelling today.”
—Michael Connelly

“Green Sun tells the unvarnished truth about what it is to be a cop in modern day America. I can give a suspense novel no higher compliment.”
—James Patterson

Review

“Fast, hard, and effortlessly authentic—both lead character Eric Steele and author Sean Parnell are the real deal.”
– Lee Child, author of The Midnight Line

“Man of War is an exciting, action-packed debut! Bristling with intrigue, deceit, power and treason—once you pick this book up, you will NOT be able to put it down. Sean Parnell has knocked it out of the park!”
– Brad Thor #1 New York Times bestselling author of Spymaster

“..along with the technical know-how of battle, it all unravelling, encompassing the reader, and pulling the reader along, hostage to the page with a sense of clear and present danger in saving the masses amongst conspiratorial manoeuvrings.”
– More2Read Reviews

Review

“Spare, consuming, unforgettable. Foe is a dark arrow from a truly original mind. Page by eerie page, Iain Reid pulls the known world out from under you, and leaves you trapped inside a marriage’s most haunting question: can I be replaced? This is a book that seeps into your bloodstream––and crowns Iain

Reid the king of deadpan, philosophical horror.”
–Claudia Dey, author of Heartbreaker 

“Foe is a tale of implacably mounting peril that feels all the more terrifying for being told in such a quiet, elegantly stripped-down voice. Iain Reid knows how to do ‘ominous’ as well as anyone I’ve ever read.”
–Scott Smith, author of The Ruins and A Simple Plan

“Reid proves once again that he is a master of atmosphere and suspense. Readers won’t be able to put this one down.”
–Publishers Weekly

“You just don’t want to leave the page, the narrative just wheels you along with suspense, and psychologically enthralling reading with disquieting first person narration.”
-More2Read Reviews

Review

Review

“Krueger skillfully combines the otherworldly setting of the Minnesota wilds with Native American lore to create a winning mystery with more than a few surprises.”
(Publishers Weekly)

“Krueger is adept at fusing shocks with setting…Great atmosphere, both physical and cultural.”
(Booklist)

Review

“A strong choice for book clubs. Former political correspondent Vaughan makes an impressive debut with this savvy, propulsive courtroom drama.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Vaughan offers gripping insight into a political scandal’s hidden machinations and the tension between justice and privilege…Absorbing, polished.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Skillfully interweaving the story of the unfolding scandal, Vaughan gradually reveals just how shockingly high the stakes are…Sinewy…engrossing, twist-filled.”
—Publishers Weekly(starred review)

Review

“A tremendous book -thought-provoking and terrifying, with tension that winds up like a chain. The Cabin at the End of the World is Tremblay’s personal best. It’s that good.”
– Stephen King

“The Cabin at the End of the World is a thriller that grapples with the timely and the timeless. I tore through it in record time. I just couldn’t wait to see where Tremblay was going to take me next.”
– Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

“The Cabin at the End of the World is a clinic in suspense, a story that opens with high-wire tension and never lets up from there. The blend of human horror and human heart is superb. Paul Tremblay is rapidly becoming one of my favorite suspense writers.”
– Michael Koryta, New York Times bestselling author 

“Clear flowing writing order with chaos, with a contagion of fear and theories, holding the reader with great anticipation and concern, with all the bat shit craziness you could possibly contain in a cabin at the end of something.”
– More2Read Reviews 

Review

“Every story is a ghost story, Bailey tells us. But not every ghost story is as haunting as this one. Nor as luminously written, literate, absorbing, transporting, and all-around excellent. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, bestselling author of We are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Dale Bailey has written a literary puzzle box that deftly mixes the scary, nasty folktales of the 19th century and Daphne du Maurier’s classic Don’t Look Now. In the Night Wood is an affecting, weighty, and haunting book about the shackles of grief.”
—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World

Review

Two brothers are exposed to the brutal realities of life and the seductive cruelty of power in this riveting debut novel-a story of savagery and race, injustice and honor, set in the untamed frontier of 1880s Australia-reminiscent of Philipp Meyer’s The Son and the novels of Cormac McCarthy.

“I couldn’t put Only Killers and Thieves down. It does what great Westerns do, it drops you inside the ugliness and chaos of Australian frontier life, it educates and horrifies, but also it entertains. Howarth’s debut is a powerhouse page turner.” -Willy Vlautin, author of Lean on Pete

“Only Killers and Thieves is a powerful debut. Paul Howarth brings early Australia to life, bloody warts and all, in an epic tale of murder, revenge, and colonial oppression, with very little room for redemption. The story and his words will stay with you, long after you have finished the book.”-New York Review of Books

“Prose like that arrives direct from Cormac McCarthy’s dusty Southwest…Howarth’s spotlights how arbitrary frontier justice can be. But he also asks: How much less arbitrary is a purportedly civilized society?”-Washington Post

Review

McCammon masterfully combines historical thriller and supernatural horror in a compelling and suspenseful tale of race, class, and family… This is a violent and gritty tale, but redemption is always possible.”
— Booklist 

“Race relations are one subject of this seductive slice of supernatural noir set in 1934 New Orleans… McCammon conjures believable characters whose sympathetic plight pulls the reader headlong into the novel’s volatile mix of crime and fantasy. Its tense finale, paced at breakneck speed, will have readers turning pages until its surprise-packed end.”
— Publishers Weekly

A for force for evil and a force for good, takers and the listeners cross paths in a tragedy in Louisiana.
– More2Read Reviews

Review                                   

Author Interview

From award-winning author Willy Vlautin, comes this moving novel about a young ranch hand who goes on a quest to become a champion boxer to prove his worth.

“No one anywhere writes as beautifully about people whose stories stay close to the dirt. Willy Vlautin is a secular—and thus real and profoundly useful—saint.”
– Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan

“[T]here’s a distinct sense of foreboding in the air as Vlautin slowly lets this poignant tale unwind to its inevitable, heartbreaking conclusion. A powerful, haunting portrayal of lives rendered in unflinching, understated prose.”
-Kirkus Reviews

This is a nice little treat of a human struggle, an alternative American dream, against the grain, against the odds and histories.
– More2Read Reviews

Review

“Susan Henderson offers us the wondrous, sharp picture of the small town of Petroleum, Montana where the past comes back on two feet and a blizzard rages. The Flicker of Old Dreams is a fine novel, heartfelt and bracing company. It is a gem.” – Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies

“Susan Henderson’s The Flicker of Old Dreams is a clear-eyed, wise, and poignant tale of losses and gains, told with tremendous empathy and grace.”
–Therese Anne Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“The Flicker of Old Dreams is at once a vivid and wildly compelling study of small town American life and an intimate and incisive exploration of the human condition, from love to loss and beyond.”
– Jonathan Evison, the New York Times 

“The author crafted some great sentences in this tale, a prose with empathy, a world the narrator loves and loathes at the same time, great sentences expounding on the complexities and fragilities of the human heart..” – More2Read Reviews

Review                                       

 Author Interview

“Vivid and visceral, gritty and magical, dark and soaring–COYOTE SONGS pulls you in and refuses to let go. Read it.”
– Meg Gardiner, author of “Into the Black Nowhere.”

“Call him the Barrio Palahniuk, a badass Henry Miller, Charles Willeford in Cholo-land–whatever the moniker, for my money Gabino Iglesias is one of the most fearless, original and riveting writers working today.”
– Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight

“Iglesias is a master of compact phrasing and perfectly paced suspense.”
– Los Angeles Review of Books

“Ballard..magical realism ..poetically visceral ..vivid, hypnotically juxtaposing reader amidst..voices, locales, death, histories of violence..,American dreams askew …border tragedies.”
– More2Read Reviews

“Chris Offutt is back, writing with his gritty, poetic language about mid-century eastern Kentucky. Country Dark reveals the core of one man’s humanity as he risks everything, including his life, to hold his family together. Offutt is a born storyteller. He draws us in from the first page and never lets us go.”
— Ron Rash, author of Above the Waterfall and Serena

“Chris Offutt’s work about mountain life earns high praise from other writers, and Country Dark, his return to fiction, is entirely welcome and a pleasure all around.…Offutt writes so well, with such deep knowledge of the language and people, that Country Dark is likely to be read straight through, no resting places.”
— Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Boneand The Maid’s Version

“Like the late, great Larry Brown and the late, great William Gay, Chris Offutt delivers a hardscrabble, mythic South with a laconic voice that turns sly to describe the follies of Man…Country Dark is a smart, rich country noir.”
— Stewart O’Nan, author of City of Secrets

Review                                     

 Author Interview

“Poverty, class, violence, addiction, isolation: No one writes about the issues facing rural America as clearly, as fairly, or as well as David Joy. The Line That Held Us plumbs the depths of friendship and family, uncovering truths that are stamped on the page with blistering realism.”
— Wiley Cash, author of The Last Ballad

“Exquisitely written, heart-wrenching . . . Joy’s descriptions are lyrical and lingering.”
— Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“David Joy’s novel brought me to my knees. Exquisitely written and heart-wrenching, it reminded me of Faulkner in its dark depiction of family loyalty — that “old fierce pull of blood.” . . . Joy’s descriptions are lyrical and lingering. . . . In the end, the line that holds Joy’s characters may be fraught and frayed, but its pull is fierce.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune

Review 

“Michael Farris Smith is continuing the Southern Gothic tradition of William Gay and Flannery O’Connor. Drenched in sorrow and written with complex language, The Fightermoves toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable.”
–Chris Offutt, author of Country Dark and Kentucky Straight

“One of those wonderful and rare books that’s both a page-turner and a novel of great depth and emotion. The Fighter is Southern noir at its finest.”
–Ace Atkins, New York Times bestselling author of The Fallen and The Sinners

“Michael Farris Smith is so good, I might actually hate him a little bit. The Fighter is a book I wish I’d written but am deeply grateful I got to read. It is a masterful portrait of place and character and how one influences the other, with language that is both brutal and tender at once. Smith loves Jack Boucher and the Mississippi Delta to the bone.”
–Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird

Review                   

 Author Interview 

“Laird Barron’s Blood Standard is stylish, witty, and stupendously entertaining, and it gives us a main character—Isaiah Coleridge, head-cracking classics-quoting half-Maori ex(ish)-gangster—who is entirely unforgettable.”
—Lou Berney, Edgar Award-winning author of The Long and Faraway Gone

“Rendered in icy strokes of prose, Laird Barron’s Blood Standard is a remarkably self-assured crime novel—at once explosive and intimate, with a tightly wound plot and wonderfully realized characters. And then there’s Barron’s hero, Isaiah Coleridge. He’s got a dead dog named Achilles and bits of Beowulf on his breath and in his teeth. Needless to say, there’s not too many like him.”
—Michael Harvey, author of Brighton and The Chicago Way

“Isaiah is the real deal, man with heart and kicks ass, menacing going berserk on any deserveth, he is setting a standard, the blood standard and the rest best keep up once he finds his ground as fixer/detective.”
– More2Read Reviews

Review 

“Deeply, deeply disturbing, hard to put down, not recommended reading after dark.” –Stephen King

“In an audacious twist, Alma Katsu has made something new and suspenseful from the legendary story of the Donner Party. The Hunger is filled with terror, pity, and grue.”—Keith Donohue, author of The Boy Who Drew Monsters and The Stolen Child

“Katsu shows an acute understanding of human nature.…[She] is at her best when she forces her readers to stare at the almost unimaginable meeting of ordinary people and extraordinary desperation, using her sharp, haunting language.”—USA Today

“A reimagining of the ill-fated Donner Party but with an eerie supernatural twist.”—New York Post

“The author keeps you thoroughly immersed with the fate of the characters at hand and the decisions and roads they undertake upon the wilderness with this tale of survival against the odds, the psyche, mythology, prejudices, and at its core against each other and the hunger.” –More2Read Reviews

Review   

Author Interview

“Jacobs just keeps getting better. Seldom has cosmic horror been so naturalistically, so vividly, wrought. The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky is a squirm-inducing glimpse of humanity’s inner darkness, and worse.”
– Laird Barron, Award-winning author of Blood Standard, TheCroning, and Occultations

“The author does an excellent job of immersing the reader in this culturally rich setting […] but it’s Avendaño’s backstory that is the Lovecraftian foundation of the story […] raising the story from something merely good to something deliciously sublime.”
– Kirkus Reviews

“Author has successfully crafted a memorable read that is gothic artistry, an inward and outward struggle and quest, a short work, writing about writers in framework of cosmic horror.”
– More2Read Reviews

Review                           

 Author Interview

“There is a note of both nostalgia and brutality that runs through these stories. Eras such as the Depression and the 1950s are evoked in terms that have less to do with naturalism than with popular iconography… A hard-nosed and evocative set of stories that carry a rough-hewn pleasure.”
  – Kirkus Reviews

“Lansdale (Hap and Leonard) ranges far afield in this short but sharp collection of six stories in a variety of genres… And saving the best for last, Lansdale adds to his history of black cowboy legend Nat Love, sending the marshal after four escaped murderers who also incur the wrath of one big, bad momma grizzly. Lansdale provides consistent entertainment for readers of all genres, not only in his fiction but also in the chatty intro and in afterwords of each yarn.”
  – Publishers Weekly

“An artist with his hands and mind, martial artist and word slinger firing at you six memorable nicely put together entertaining short stories.”
– More2Read Reviews 

Review                             

Author Interview

“An instant classic.”
—Newsday

“Exceptional luminosity . . . hits a powerful vein.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Grace and oblivion are inextricably yoked in these transcendent stories. . . . [Johnson’s] gift is to extract the beauty in all that brokenness.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Nobody ever wrote like Denis Johnson. Nobody ever came close. . . . We’re just left with this miraculous book, these perfect stories, the last words from one of the world’s greatest writers.”
—NPR

“Johnson offers visions and sadness and laughter. But it’s the sentences—those adamantine, poetic sentences—that made him one of America’s great and lasting writers. It’s the sentences that live on.”
—The Boston Globe

Review to come

“A brilliant, incandescent debut that will remind everyone of a young Cormac McCarthy.”
— Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Son

“A wild and alive debut, full of grit, gunfire, blood, and bad news. Rough Animals is as phantasmagoric as McCarthy and as pitiless as Jim Thompson. A rare treat.”
— Joshua Ferris, bestselling author of The Dinner Party and Then We Came to an End

“Furious and electric . . . The novel succeeds as a viscerally evoked and sparely plotted fever dream, a bleakly realized odyssey through an American west populated by survivors and failed dreamers.”
 — Publishers Weekly

“Mastery of word after word with a tapestry of new selves to fruition, ultimately, in the crucible of the blood, sweat, surviving the bitter harshness of the land and rough animals, an odyssey, all visceral and potently evoked within the reader, with no place for gritless women.”
– More2Read Reviews 

Review

“Wideman is one of the nation’s literary treasures, and his contribution is a dazzling, delirious achievement: as his narrator, perched on edge of the Williamsburg Bridge, prepares for suicide, he delivers a cri de coeur that ranges from Sonny Rollins to the Yalu River and becomes nothing less than a meditation on the extraordinary resilience of ordinary black lives in the American Century”
– Junot Diaz

“Wideman can write … He can make the ordinary scene sing the blues like nobody’s business”
– New York Times

“An outstanding haunting meditation of literary work of the past and present, global and personal..”
– More2Read Reviews

Review 

Oates probes the diabolical, shape-shifting nature of authoritarianism and the timeless valor of dissent. While in this clever, brain-twisting, Poe-like fable she looks to the past and the future to dramatize the vulnerability of the psyche, the fragility of freedom, and the catastrophic consequences of repressing intelligence, independence, and creativity, what Oates illuminates is the present.
— Booklist

Oates weaves a feeling of constant menace and paranoia throughout…A memorable novel.
— Publishers Weekly

Memorable, shocking and brilliant tale, a must read for this strange new world emerging with a possible cautionary vision envisioned by a great writer Joyce Carol Oates.
– More2Read Reviews

Review

“Here’s my prediction: this book will seep into your soul. The Oracle Year is about knowing the future—and what you do with that knowledge. As you meet Will Dando, you can’t help but reevaluate yourself. Get ready for the best kind of fun.”
– Brad Meltzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Inner Circle

“Soule’s The Oracle Year is like a sliding puzzle, except every time you think you can predict what the image will be, new pieces slide into place. It’s a wonderfully mysterious thriller that proves Soule is as much a master of prose as he is of comic book script.”
– Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author of Invasive and Blackbirds

Review

“A funny thing happens when reading The Grey Bastards. You’re rolling along, smiling at the novelties on display, but then, almost without warning, you find yourself truly in the world French has created, and it all becomes wonderfully familiar and convincing. The world-building creates exactly the kind of seamless transition that makes fantasy literature compelling, informative, and just plain fun.”
— R.A. Salvatore, New York Times bestselling author of The Legend of Drizzt

“French flips the fantasy script as the monsters become the good guys, fueling an action-packed, sneakily smart adventure. Half orc and all badass, Jackal is a hero you won’t soon forget.”
— Scott Sigler, New York Times bestselling author of Alive and Infected

“A terrific and highly original epic fantasy debut…French’s half-orcs, halflings, centaurs, and others have rich histories and folklore, giving the work depth while never getting in the way of the fun. Excellent fantasy fare on all levels.”
— Publishers Weekly 

Review