BEST BOOKS 2018

"Following the enthralling 18th century Chinese mysteries Jade Dragon Mountain and White Mirror, comes the next Li Du adventure in Whisper of Ink. Li Du was prepared to travel anywhere in the world except for one place: home. But to unravel the mystery that surrounds his mentor's execution, that's exactly where he must go. Plunged into the painful memories and teeming streets of Beijing, Li Du obtains a humble clerkship that offers anonymity and access...

Brad Parks delivers another riveting, emotionally powerful stand-alone domestic suspense thriller perfect for fans of The Couple Next Door and What She Knew . Disaster, Melanie Barrick was once told, is always closer than you know. It was a lesson she learned the hard way growing up in the constant upheaval of foster care. But now that she's survived into adulthood--with a loving husband, a steady job, and a beautiful baby boy named Alex--she thought...

"Something is going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and afraid to speak honestly. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven...

"1907: In a sanatorium in Temperley, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Doctor Quintana falls in love with Menéndez, the head nurse--of whom he knows almost nothing, not even her first name. Motivated by this love--which he shares with his colleagues--by money, and by the promise of transcendence, he carries out a cruel and misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. The premise is that a human head stays alive and...

An NPR Book Concierge Best Book of 2018!
A stunning story about how power works in the modern age—the book the New York Times called "one helluva page-turner" and The Sunday Times of London celebrated as "riveting...an astonishing modern media conspiracy that is a fantastic read." Pick up the book everyone is talking about.
In 2007, a short blogpost on Valleywag, the Silicon Valley-vertical of Gawker Media, outed PayPal founder and...

Based on a remarkable true story, the New York Times bestselling author of Please Look After Mom brilliantly images the life of Yi Jin, an orphan who would fall under the affections of the Empress and become a jewel in the late Joseon Court. When a novice French diplomat arrives for an audience with the Emperor, he is enraptured by the Joseon Dynasty's magnificent culture, then at its zenith. But all fades away when he sees Yi Jin perform the delicate...

"After the extraordinary success of Cravings, Chrissy comes back with more of her signature wit and take-no-prisoners flavor bombs. This time the 100 recipes are even simpler and more bang-for-your-buck--it's how she's cooking now as a new parent, but it's perfect for all busy cooks. Building on Cravings and the establishment of Chrissy as a major new culinary voice, this follow-up takes us further into her kitchen--a kitchen now marked by new parenthood,...

"In the tradition of parent-child memoirs from The Liar's Club to The Glass Castle, here is the haunting story of a daughter's quest to understand her father, to save him from his own demons and to save herself from following his self-destructive path. Marco Antonio was born in Mexico, but as a teenager migrated with his large family north to California, where he met Jean's mother, a young Puerto Rican woman just out of med school. Marco was a self-taught...

Offers a history of the rise of Christianity in the classical world that focuses on its terrible cost, in terms of violence and dogmatic intolerance, that helped bring upon the dark ages.

A definitive biography of the mythic general who refused to accept the Nazi domination of France, drawing on unpublished letters, memoirs, and papers in the newly opened de Gaulle archives that show how this volatile man put a broken France back at the center of world affairs. In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trenches in Verdun refused to accept defeat. He fled to London,...