Solis and Dougherty aim their skillfully written and smartly designed primer at “experts who are writing—or exploring the idea of writing—a nonfiction book.” Whether the reader is an educator, consultant, academic, or simply someone with a wealth of knowledge and “something useful and important to say that will impact readers’ lives in a transformative way,” the authors provide supportive strategies and a streamlined process for publishing. Their expert guidance focuses primarily on “advice-based nonfiction,” or “a type of transformational nonfiction…that changes…the reader in a positive way” (the type of book that offers a solution to a problem: Think self-help, how-to, and industry-insight books). After the authors have emphasized the importance of the “foundational steps” of writing “not just a good book, but a publishable one,” the book proceeds in four parts, providing readers with advice on preparing to write the book, mapping out the book, actually writing the book, and, perhaps the most intimidating challenge of all, navigating the publishing process. Each section is packed with clear, concise, and actionable information, organized in an eye-catching manner with graphics, bright colors, and deft deployment of headings and subheadings. In just over 200 pages, Solis and Dougherty help readers tackle such vital and daunting questions as why they want to write a book, what solutions they can provide, and for whom they are writing. This guide is essential for any expert looking to share a solution to a problem and serves as a perfect model that practices exactly what it preaches. The resource warmly welcomes all experts to the “book-writing party” and effectively encourages them to create the ultimate “ripple effect of people’s lives changing for the better.”

The guessing game isn’t a hard one, at least until the closer. The answer to each riddle, revealed with a page turn, not only completes a rhyme, but actually can be spotted immediately—in part, at least—in Han’s artfully composed nature scene. Hirsch provides enrichment by slipping nature facts into her verses, which she goes on to explain at greater length in a closing summation. The creature perched on a flower “testing out the food supply,” for instance, turns out to be a butterfly, who is literally tasting the petals with her feet before laying eggs, and thanks to versatile appendages that can “walk flat—or knuckle under,” chimpanzees are at home whether on the ground or climbing a “vine trapeze.” The author and illustrator throw a curveball at the end by suddenly switching away from the animal kingdom for a final set of “feet” that land “in a cold, red place” but “were built for just this spot.” The stated answer is the “Mars Robot” with hooked wheels. Readers might find it hard to pull any useful details about these Martian feet from the accompanying blurry image of a very small vehicle in a rugged landscape; still, they will come away with new information about a variety of earthly ones. Children and other human figures in the illustrations are racially diverse.

It’s July 2019 in New York City, but for this book’s 30-something narrator (whose name is never revealed), even the sunniest summer days in Lower Manhattan can’t keep her spirits up. She doesn’t know that a global pandemic is just months away, but her own personal shutdown has already begun. Her roommate, Emma, gets into a serious romantic relationship; her parents maintain steady jobs at Target’s headquarters, which they’ve held for decades; and her own marketing co-workers start to question her abilities and mental health. The narrator appears to be the only one in her orbit who doesn’t have it all together. She goes on a series of dates, engages in heavy drinking and random hookups, and flirts with everyone from her local coffee server, whom she calls “Barista Brian,” to a local bartender, Taylor, and finds herself in a situationship with a khakis-and-boat-shoes-wearing guy named Greg. He checks all the boxes of what she should want, except for the fact that he clearly doesn’t respect her—and she also can’t get Taylor out of her mind. Most of the chapters in West’s book begin with a date to place the story in time as the Covid-19 shutdown first looms on the horizon and later overshadows everyone’s lives. This timeline usefully provides readers with a play-by-play of the narrator’s daily life, including her interactions with her coworkers and family—and it makes clear that, for the protagonist, good friends are in short supply. The novel’s most poignant moments, though, happen in the interstitial chapters, which offer train-of-thought ramblings, poems, and, finally, a letter to one of the narrator’s lovers: “I’m sorry I disappeared. I heard you were trying to find me. Thanks for that.”

Lorraine Stern and her husband, Will, are in the Maternal-Fetal Care Unit at Metropolitan University Hospital, as are Clement and Rana Ghanima. Lorraine, a talented pianist in her early 40s, suffers from severe preeclampsia; Rana, a radiologist who emigrated from Iraq with her husband (his mother joined them a bit later), has high blood pressure and a botched prior surgery to her uterus may lead to trouble. As Lorraine hovers between consciousness and coma, her memories tumble out—from her childhood as a musical prodigy who was admitted to Juilliard at 10, on to her college year in Paris, where she came under the tutelage of famed modernist composer Darius Milhaud’s widow and then met Will at a nightclub. As Rana faces an uncertain outcome, Clement reluctantly recalls the war on terror–instigated tragedy that led his family to leave Iraq. Even more reluctantly, Lorraine swims through fragmented flashes of a terrible assault, one that forever altered her relationship with her mentally ill mother. Author Hughes keeps the tension high, cutting among the perspectives of individuals and pairs as physician-ordered deadlines loom: Will Lorraine’s 32-week-old fetus be able to breathe on its own? Can doctors prevent Rana’s uterus from rupturing? These and other questions contrast with the concrete pain of the past for both women—Lorraine’s told from her perspective and Will’s, Rana’s from Clement’s and his mother’s. The back-and-forth narration, syncopated and sometimes difficult to follow, echoes jazz improvisation, the truly unteachable kind that Mme. Milhaud tells Lorraine is “not available to everyone.” Improvisation is also what both Lorraine and Rana must submit to as their bodies and babies do things that are completely unexpected and often unwelcome.

James Forten (1766–1842) was born in Philadelphia to an African American family that wasn’t enslaved, although, as Grant points out, “Free didn’t mean they were treated fairly.” James (as Grant calls him) attended a Quaker school for free Black children that emphasized racial equality. When he turned 14, James joined the American colonies’ fight for independence from Britain. He worked on an American ship, helping to capture British boats, and for several months he was a prisoner of war. So it was with good reason that James expected that when the war ended in 1783 and the colonies were no longer under British rule, he would be considered an American citizen, but according to the new U.S. government, that privilege was reserved for white people. Throughout the book, which chronicles the adult James’ abolitionist activities, including his co-founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, Grant draws from research to speak to her subject’s interior life (e.g., “James gazed in awe at the brave fighting men”). This emphasis on emotion may appeal to young readers who are wary of history books (even those with illustrations). Likewise, Williams’ digital art, which features rich applications of classic colonial colors, infuses this history with humanity by foregrounding the people James worked with, battled, and loved.

Bride-to-be Elaine Wheeler has put them all together at the “queer table"—Fin Hightower and Jacque Aguilar, her closest male and female friends from their University of Texas days; Todd and David King, a not-very-happy married couple; a former co-worker named Marina, described as a “Cara Delevingne lesbian.” These five would “form a unit with each other because there were no others to form one with,” a phrase that seems to presage the energy level of what’s to come. The older friends plan to initiate the newer ones into a tradition they call “the Hour of Disrespect,” for which everyone saves up their peeves and criticisms for a group venting session. Flashbacks to iterations of this tradition from previous weddings are sprinkled throughout, but they are somehow never snarky enough, funny enough, or outrageous enough to move this novel into The People We Hate at the Wedding territory (which you might guess by comparing the titles). In between these interludes and many digressive backstories (including, for example, excerpts from Fin’s late mother’s diary), a jampacked itinerary of events has been scheduled for the guests at the Hill Country Hideout. Minor mishaps plague the lassoing contest and the s’mores bonfire, but nothing goes as badly as the river float, where minor violence breaks out and local law enforcement gets involved. Fin’s reluctant feelings about his own recent engagement to a handsome Canadian man have led him to keep the news from his dearest friends, but as buried secrets go, this is pretty weak tea. In both of his preceding novels, The Old Place (2022) and Four Squares (2024), Finger proved he can spin out page-turning plots and make us care about his characters, but sadly he doesn’t pull off either one here.

The author grew up in her grandmother’s home on Jackson Avenue in San Jose, California; it was a relatively small physical universe, but one that fueled an imagination “not bound to geography, gender, or the restrictive realm of ‘impossibility.’” In Fort-Marshall’s engrossing depictions of the home, which welcomed her various aunts and up to 11 children at different times, she was exposed to adults so effusive in the ways they talked about humor, food, and heartbreak that the author had little interest in children her own age. Left in her grandmother’s care after her mother’s divorce and flight from an abusive relationship, Fort-Marshall describes a life of contradictions in which she learned to hold space for “both incense and gospel.” Later essays move through her unraveling marriage, a return to dating, motherhood, work, and her bout with breast cancer. Each new chapter, introduced by a meal and list of songs she would pair with the writing, thrums with sharply observed humor and acute self-awareness as the author begins with one memory before taking readers somewhere unexpected. Job losses, births, trips to Ghana, and dates-gone-wrong mesh together, supporting her tightly constructed reflections and self-help advice about recognizing when one is “mistaking adaptability for authenticity.” This loose, freewheeling structure is one of the work’s greatest strengths. Fort-Marshall condenses entire years into a few simple observations before lingering on a single image with striking clarity. She imbues nearly every sentence with something memorable, whether she’s succinctly capturing motherhood (which she says “has never been only [about] love. It’s also [about] fear”) or describing the haunting experience of fearing how the world would react to her beautiful Black son when he held a replica rifle as part of a color guard. Readers willing to surrender themselves to her essays’ unusual rhythms will be rewarded by their efficiency and power. Fort-Marshall’s own description of the book feels exactly right: “It’s not even a memoir. It’s a friend. It’s a late-night conversation.”

Lowe’s business leadership book explores the evolving relationship between work, place, and personal life. That’s nothing new, but the book amplifies the argument that the traditional office-centered model is no longer the default. Instead, work-life integration (notice the word integration instead of balance) is redefining how employees work post-pandemic. Structured into four distinct parts, the book takes readers through the history of work, the present-day workplace, future possibilities, and a practical framework for implementing remote work. Lowe begins by tracing the evolution of labor, from industrial-age factories to modern digital environments, emphasizing how technological advances—particularly computing and the internet—have gradually detached work from physical locations, even before Covid-19. In his exploration of generational divisions, Lowe notes that younger workers (think millennials and Gen Z) prioritize flexibility and autonomy over traditional career paths. This is all leading to a conflict between employers who want their employees back in the office and workers who are resisting that trend. To illustrate the divide, Lowe uses real-world examples, such as corporate leaders questioning remote workers’ productivity. But he counters these concerns with research showing that hybrid and remote work often maintain employee productivity while improving job satisfaction and reducing turnover. Lowe also writes that resistance to remote work comes from outdated management practices and a desire for control. The arguments Lowe poses in the book can be insightful and highly relevant, particularly for those who are navigating hybrid work environments. The book’s strengths are its clear organization and a practical approach that blends historical context with actionable advice. But although Lowe is clearly advocating heavily for remote work, this preference leads to a tendency to underplay its challenges, including collaboration difficulties or inequities across job types. Still, Lowe’s book is a persuasive and forward-looking examination of the future of work, and he makes a strong case that flexibility and integration—not rigid office norms—will define the next era of employment.

It seems a shame to visit an act of violence upon such an agreeable couple as Charles and Jane Bingley. But for fans, the fatal poisoning of Mr. Hurst, Mr. Bingley’s unpleasant brother-in-law, in the breakfast room of the Bingley estate at Netherfield Park, has a distinct upside: the opportunity to see Jane’s socially awkward young nephew, Jonathan Darcy, reunited with Juliet Tilney, the one person capable of igniting a spark of affection in the young man. The two have been apart since Juliet was publicly disgraced by a painter who incorporated her image into a scandalous work of art in The Rushworth Family Plot (2025). Now that same painter is offering Juliet the chance to repair her reputation by marrying him, a proposal that revolts her, but that her family pressures her to take seriously. Realizing that the local constabulary will never exert enough energy to solve Hurst’s murder, Jane wants Jonathan and Juliet, who’ve cracked crimes before, to come to Netherfield and catch the killer. Although propriety dictates that she summon each party to the investigation separately, perceptive Jane recognizes that the pair are successful at solving crimes only when they work together. And only together can Jonathan and Juliet tackle the complicated family dynamics that keep them from formalizing their romance through marriage. The puzzle of the murder and the conundrum of how the young lovers will overcome the many obstacles to their union sometimes vie with each other for space here. But Gray peoples her tale with so many lively, complex, and vividly drawn characters, and involves them in such a variety of intrigues, that the reader’s attention will never flag.

The narrator, a dark-haired youngster named Wendy, explains that little brother Owen adores the trees in the yard. He keeps them warm with scarves and gloves in winter, sings them songs, and gives them names. When the kids learn that the family will soon be moving, Owen’s initial anger at having to leave the trees behind turns to sadness, and the next morning, Wendy notices a new “tree” in the yard. Li cleverly depicts Owen gathering branches to tie around his torso, then portrays the boy as he imagines himself: a tree, with branches for arms and a trunk for a body. Wendy keeps Owen warm, sings to him, and even tries to “repot” him so they can move. It’s too much for Owen, who sobs that he will miss his trees, his friends, and all the things they can’t take with them. Li realistically conveys the grief that results from change while also offering a strong model for validating those emotions. There is no instant fix: Owen must sit with his own feelings and process them, while his family gives him support and understanding. Detailed illustrations of a loving family and friends in warm and colorful mixed media complement Owen’s emotional journey. Owen, Wendy, and their parents present East Asian; supporting characters are diverse.

Host of the Wild With Sarah Wilson podcast, award-winning Australian journalist Wilson sees the world in a state of collapse, exacerbated by inequality and polarization. Once a stalwart climate activist, she has become disillusioned by practices to reverse global warming, and she admits to feeling hopeless. Assuming that her feelings are shared by others, she offers a “kaleidoscope of ideas” to respond to an overarching question: “When hope is gone, might there be something else—something more useful and nourishing—that a despairing humanity can cleave to?” Drawing on more than 200 interviewees (they appear on her podcast)—“energy futurists, economists, philosophers, climate scientists, effective altruists, demographers, spiritualists, and at least two nuns”—she finds insights that console her. When we let go of hope, she writes, “truth emerges as a far more solid and enlivening thing to peg a life to.” She has no faith in what she calls “efforting,” instead seeing the benefit of human connection: “small intentions and interventions,” such as “moments of intentional collaboration, cooperation, and communication.” Living with uncertainty does not mean living with despair but requires looking away from “chaos-making,” a tactic designed to undermine cohesiveness. “Bear witness to what’s going on, be engaged, and don’t allow for overwhelm,” she writes. “Do less, buy less, grab less, meddle less, strategize less.” Small moves, “powered by fierce love” may generate “unexpected turns and mysterious transformation.” Her tone is conversational and confiding; she includes wide margins and blank spaces for readers to write down their feelings, and her prescriptions focus not on doing but on being: finding a way “to live a meaningful, human life with agency amid what is going on.”

Elsie Parker gets to spend eight weeks learning about important topics like the difference between sex and gender, but at school, her fifth grade classmates will get their puberty education only via a generic hourlong video in a gender-segregated class at the end of the school year. Elsie decides to fill the gap: She hangs a whiteboard on her locker, creating an anonymous advice column. Though some of her classmates poke fun and call her Puberty Girl, most seem to appreciate the service she provides, asking questions about pimples, periods, and the meaning of LGBTQ. She makes sure to look up facts using reputable sources before answering. The school administration isn’t as receptive, however. Elsie, who’s implied white, has recently been accepted at a prestigious arts and STEM–focused middle school, and she worries she may be jeopardizing her chances there if she gets in too much trouble. But through conversations with her Latina best friend, Mara Morales; her Pakistani and Egyptian American crush, Nadia Hadid; her bisexual mom; her transgender dad; and her parents’ friend Nate (her “DNA provider”), she realizes that sometimes it’s worth getting in trouble to make the world a better place. Some pop-culture references seem outdated, but Elsie’s voice and the social dynamics feel authentic, and the pacing is solid.

In his well-crafted debut collection of linked essays, Trinidad, a Filipino Kiwi writer, considers family and identity; the richness of Filipino culture and the challenges of immigration; and gay awakening and queer adulthood. A graphic recounting of catching, gutting, defeathering, and butchering a chicken turns into a warm portrait of his feisty grandmother, a college teacher with a thriving business of providing poultry to her colleagues. He recalls his beloved grandfather’s exotic pet: a voracious arowana that he kept in an oversized tank. Trinidad and his sister were haunted by nightmares of being swallowed by it, “Jonah and the whale style.” His world was embedded in superstition: As a boy, he was taken to a healer to “cure” him of sleepwalking and to a practitioner who circumcised him. Without being circumcised, it was believed, he could “be a cross-dresser, or grow to only be five-foot-two.” The procedure was done during summer vacation, when he could stay home wearing his grandmother’s skirts as he healed. Colonialism and racism emerge as themes in essays about his move to New Zealand, with his mother and sister, to join his father, who had emigrated six years before. The disruption was profound, especially for his mother, who had to give up her career as a university professor, reduced to working in a supermarket. His father was employed by the Farm, a large agricultural business that “wasn’t like the Shire, not at all.” Homesick and lonely, his mother believed immigration would help her children live a better life, even if it wrenched them from their homeland and language. Trinidad is caustic about language hierarchy, in which English, hardly “helpful and harmless,” becomes “a sustained effort to neutralize the power of our words.”

This follow-up to Riot Act (2024) returns to 1991 and an alternate America that’s ruled by propaganda and fear. Axl is haunted by grief. It doesn’t help that Gigi, his dead friend and longtime crush, is also haunting him. After being murdered during a radical act of civil disobedience, Gigi lingers among the living—specifically inside Axl’s thoughts and memories. Existing in his head is no picnic: He’s so devastated by her death that he’s drinking himself into oblivion, and his steamy fantasies about her are consuming them both. Hanging on by a thread, Axl is determined to avenge Gigi’s death and incite a nonviolent revolution. He teams up with Orin, his nemesis (and Gigi’s ex), to infiltrate the tightly controlled TV programming of Bud Hill’s brutal dictatorship. Meanwhile, Axl and Gigi’s thespian friends risk their lives to create short films that Orin inserts into the regular broadcasts, using their art to challenge the regime. The story’s political premise remains compelling, and the 1990s setting is intriguingly off kilter, but this second installment doesn’t fully land. The interplay between Gigi’s posthumous narration and Axl’s inner monologue can be hard to follow, and the supporting characters feel flat. While the story has sparks, it lacks the theatrical charm and rich worldbuilding that made the first book sing. Gigi and Axl are cued white.

Far too many Americans, writes Bostock, are stuck in “a toxic day-to-day grind that leaves them drained and purposeless.” Since the 1970s, corporate America, per the author, has embraced a ruthless approach to profit (epitomized by Milton Friedman’s signature essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits”) that has “led to a decline in the quality of life for both workers and consumers.” Drawing on his own experiences as the CEO of SnapCab (a multimillion-dollar manufacturing company he founded), Bostock offers a countercultural paradigm for the corporate sector that prioritizes the humanity of employees and consumers. Centered around five principles, each with its own dedicated chapter-length analysis, the titular “Human Business” model starts with creating a “Foundation of Caring” that fosters a kind, safe, and supportive workplace environment. From there, businesses should focus on their “Ruling Love” (energizing workers and management behind a united cause) and provide opportunities for employees to feel “Useful” (rather than simply completing seemingly meaningless tasks because they were told to). Finally, businesses should “Embrace Problems and Weaknesses” as opportunities to improve rather than as excuses to cast blame as they model themselves after the “Human Form” (in which every part of the human body, or its analog in the workplace, has a distinctive but equally important role to play). Interspersed throughout the advice to businessowners and managers are memoir-like anecdotes in which Bostock discusses overcoming childhood shame associated with dyslexia or leveraging his love for installing high-end cabinetry to establish a thriving elevator cab business (after all, he writes, “an elevator interior was basically an inside-out cabinet”). Written in a down-to-earth style that reflects the author’s desire to break down boundaries between owners and employees, the book makes a convincing case for reevaluating definitions of corporate success.

The author says that he’s long been fascinated by John Hughes’ 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. As an undergraduate at Columbia College Chicago, he visited various locations shown in the film. His eagerness to understand how it was made led him first to film school and, ultimately, to interviewing much of the cast (including stars Matthew Broderick and Alan Ruck) and crew. The resulting book presents the most comprehensive and thorough examination of the film yet written, one that is less interested in film trivia than it is in the rigors of production and the mystery of how a piece of commercial entertainment becomes a classic work of art. Readers learn how, early in his career, Hughes and his fiancée rented a converted boxcar for $110 a month; how he penned the piece that would become the basis for the film National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) while stranded at home during a blizzard; and of the numerous changes made to Ferris between scripting and the final film (an early draft would have had Broderick smoking). Klamm reveals that Molly Ringwald initially hoped to play Ferris’ girlfriend, Sloane Peterson; that Polly Noonan, who played the Gummy Bear Girl, later graced a classic album cover; and that a scene set in a strip club was nixed by the studio. The book provides invaluable insights into Hughes’ philosophy of writing (“Character comes first,” he said, “because I think people are more interesting than plot”). Klamm’s love for the film is palpable, and his film-school background makes him ideally positioned to discuss costuming, line delivery, location scouting, and the logistics of pretending to drive a car through a “mid-century, glass-and-steel structure.” As anecdote piles on anecdote, even readers with little knowledge of the movie industry may find themselves pondering dolly shots and wardrobe tests while developing a deeper respect for the hundreds of small decisions involved in making even a single minute of film.

When we last left Shackleton Jones, his dad, Amelia Miles, and her mom, they had vanquished a giant anaconda in their flooded park, only to be met with a flurry of “sky blobs” conjured up by a supervillain who recently moved into their neighborhood. Shackleton immediately breaks the fourth wall: “In the last book, Glam-Evil cursed the park…was that enough of a recap?” Shackleton is eager to “REVERSE THE CURSE,” but the parents are less enthused. But they don’t have much choice; the wind is whipping through the park, sky blobs are ruining Mr. Jones’ favorite shirt, and only an ominous cave offers shelter. Exploring the cave’s depths, unfortunately, leads them straight to Glam-Evil. The dastardly villain absconds with the parents, and the kids must sail across a lava lake and navigate a whirlpool to save them. At last, the kids make their way to Glam-Evil’s castle, but the quartet are now trapped—will they save the day? Or will meat-eating cactuses get them first? As in the first book, the illustrations prove slightly muddled. Visual storytelling that incorporates liquid blobs, drippy cave walls, and melted magma can be tough to make sense of without color. Still, the escapades are thrilling, with plenty of metafictional, self-referential fun. The Joneses are pale-skinned, and the Miles family is brown-skinned.

On each spread, four poetic lines of text detail the birds’ breeding season, the use of present tense conveying a you-are-there immediacy. Wright’s accurate, freely sketched watercolorlike artwork, dominated by subdued hues of blue-gray, depicts these birds from a variety of perspectives. Sidebars relate further information (size, wingspan, diet, nesting and courtship, and the growth and maturation of the chicks). Herkert describes these birds hunting at night, though she doesn’t explain how their special vision makes that possible. We learn that heronries—or heron breeding colonies—often attract eagles, hawks, and owls, eager to prey upon the young birds. Between pages, one chick dies (readers aren’t told exactly how); the moment passes quickly, and the sidebar notes that such loss is common. Soon the surviving chicks are old enough to leave, and nests throughout the heronry “sit empty now”—but “next spring, the herons will return,” Herkert assures readers. Brief backmatter adds more information: Some great blues migrate seasonally, and conservation efforts are ongoing (though the author doesn’t mention that these birds are now happily in the “least concern” category). The sensitive artwork and spare text give the majestic great blues the focus they deserve.

In his Trilogy About the Boy, Stefánsson follows an unnamed teenage orphan—poetically gifted and deeply sensitive—through trauma and loss, toward a fragile sense of safety and belonging. In the earlier volumes, Heaven and Hell (2025) and The Sorrow of Angels (2025), the boy witnesses his best friend’s death in a fishing accident and nearly dies while accompanying a postman across Iceland’s harsh west fjords. The last we saw them, they were tumbling down a snowy mountain with a coffin in tow. In this final installment, they survive—just barely—and recover under the care of locals before returning to the Village, a remote Icelandic port town where passions and prejudices collide in a landscape “scorched by volcanic fire and blasted by wind but with green valleys like dreams…” The book starts slowly, meandering through the pair’s recovery but gaining momentum in its second half. Still mourning, the boy begins to thaw, like the land around him, drawn to a fiery redheaded woman who helps nurse him and, back home, to Ragnheiður, daughter of the petty merchant Friðrik, who feels contempt for the boy’s lower social status even as she’s drawn to him. Torn between grief and desire, he realizes his heart is “divided into two compartments, one called happiness, the other despair.” Stefánsson excels at capturing the rhythms of village life—the gossip, grief, and constant threat of sea and storm—while offering moody reflections on life and death in a place shaped by the forces of nature. What’s also forceful is the power of language. Words surround the poetry-struck boy like fog creeping in from the sea. “Words are not lifeless rock or gnawed, wind-whitened bones up in the mountains,” writes Stefánsson. They “can grow distant over time and be transformed into museums that house the past, what is gone and will never return”—something not just true of the books the boy reads, but of this one, too.

Aubrey Lewis has seen better days. The former actor used to star in a popular British television series, People Live, People Die, People Live As If They Were Already Dead, but now lives in a London sublet, still grieving the death of his wife from cancer and subsisting on his dwindling savings. He gets the offer of a lifeline from Fran Howe, a director he’s worked with before, who wants him to audition for a role in a literary adaptation; he declines the chance. Enter Lindsey Korine, a former schoolmate of Lewis’ who happens to bear a striking resemblance to him and who shows up at his door one day with no explanation. Lewis, who grows tired of Korine’s company, leaves his flat, leaving Korine alone; Korine decides to audition for the role himself: “I might have registered Lewis’s vulnerability and decided to exploit it,” Korine admits. “Or else, I registered his vulnerability and decided that this person, this walking SOS, needed my help." Meanwhile, Lewis moves in with Korine’s estranged wife and child—the two seem to know he’s not Korine, but choose to keep the charade going. Lewis and Korine begin to encounter each other around London but keep living each other’s lives. This is a novel that can be read in one of two ways: Either Lewis and Korine are indeed different people, doppelgängers, or they’re one person undergoing an existential crisis. Waidner never tips their hand, which is a brilliant decision that throws the reader off balance as they are drawn into Lewis and/or Korine’s unsettling world. The novel is not as gleefully absurd as Waidner’s previous two, but their restraint turns out to be welcome. This is a stunning book with much to say about how grief can alter our life (or lives).