Historian O’Malley (Final Passages) offers a spellbinding saga of one man’s long and wandering search for freedom in Revolutionary-era America. David George left behind one of the earliest known first-person testimonies of escaping slavery. It was transcribed by British officials during the Revolution, and O’Malley attempts to fill in the brief but stupendous account’s many blanks. In 1762, 19-year-old George escaped from a Virginia plantation and headed southwest toward the Creek Nation. His odyssey led him thousands of miles and found him in and out of captivity—first held by the Muscogee, and then enslaved again by a rich Irish landowner. He ended up on a South Carolina plantation, where he married and became a preacher, building a congregation that was “likely the world’s first Black Baptist church,” before the Revolution provided him and his family a path to freedom by escaping to the British lines. Postwar, he settled in Nova Scotia, before tension with white neighbors led him to join a resettlement colony in Sierra Leone. In tracing George’s repeated enslavement and escapes, O’Malley argues that the institutional nature of colonial slavery made every new person a Black colonial encountered “not just a single master oppressing them but a whole society, a system,” all blurred together as “faceless oppressors: They.” It’s an astonishing tale of endurance in a harshly reimagined early America. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this elegant account, former Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Robinson (Disintegration) uses his own family tree as a window onto Black history. Spanning five generations, the narrative illustrates the halting two steps forward, one step back progress toward equality that characterizes civil rights in the U.S.. Those profiled include Robinson’s great-grandfather Major Fordham, born in 1856, who “took advantage of fleeting Reconstruction-era opportunity” to become a lawyer and politician before Jim Crow hindered his ability to rise further, and his great-uncle Marion, who was drafted to serve in the legendary segregated Buffalo Soldiers infantry division in WWI and returned home to the Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs attacked Black people in cities across America. As Robinson situates his family members within major events in U.S. history, he notes, again and again, how white history comes to dominate and obliterate Black history. He gives as one example the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, the killing of three Black students during a civil rights protest. Few know of the slaying today, Robinson observes, compared to the Kent State shooting two years later, highlighting how “the nation’s historical memory gives primacy” to whiteness. Novelistic and at times achingly poignant, it’s a lyrical account of one family’s hard-won achievements in the face of bitter oppression. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Solomon (Future Humans), a biology professor at Rice University, delivers an underwhelming exploration of the long-term consequences of humans migrating to space. While scientists and science fiction writers have long been fixated on the idea of settling on Mars, Solomon explains the many challenges humanity would have to overcome to do so, like the prevalence of toxic chemical compounds in the planet’s soil and high radiation levels on its surface. He tackles the question of whether humans can reproduce in space (the near weightlessness experienced there might prevent bones from fully forming, increasing infant mortality), explores the psychological effects that could result from leaving Earth (the harshness and isolation of being on Mars or the moon could lead to high stress levels), and outlines the evolutionary changes that could occur (living in lower gravity might reduce the need for arched feet, and living in climate-controlled habitats or space suits could lead to a reduction of sweat glands, lowering the intensity of body odor). “It is premature to push for space settlements because we are not yet ready,” he concludes. While he discusses a range of noteworthy scientific topics, from spaceflight to CRISPR gene-editing technology, he offers little new information or insights. Space aficionados will be disappointed. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this dynamic biography, historian Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder, uses the ideas of poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) as a window onto the “intellectual and spiritual schizophrenia” that permeated the Victorian era. Holmes zeroes in on Tennyson’s early career, when his “thought and poetry were fired... by the new science and the new skepticism” and he grappled with “the struggle... between intellectual hope and spiritual despair.” Throughout, Holmes returns to an early poem, “The Kraken (1830),” in which Tennyson writes of a “deep division” threatening to overtake the world as scientific revelations seemed to paint two vastly different pictures: while astronomy gave an “optimistic” view of an ever-expanding universe full of new worlds, geology offered a “claustrophobic” glimpse of a “cruel, meaningless” world full of “monsters, dust, and extinctions.” Holmes depicts Tennyson, haunted by failed love affairs and the death of his friend, the poet Arthur Hallam, as drawn to an early kind of speculative science fiction, or “speculative natural history,” that “put forth a radical vision of humanity... evolving, both physically and morally, to rise to a new peak.” Tennyson himself, sounding surprisingly modern, once wrote that “it is inconceivable that the whole Universe was merely created for us who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun.” It’s a fascinating and delightfully questing deep dive into the turbulent spirituality of the modern age. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Political scientist Neep (Occupying Syria Under the French Mandate) offers a nuanced history of Syria since the 1800s. Then as now, the region comprised a diverse mix of ethnic and religious groups; the rise of a modern Arab identity helped inhabitants rally together against Ottoman, English, and French imperial rule beginning at the turn of the 20th century. Post-independence, the idea of pan-Arab reunification with neighboring countries became a major source of political contention within the fledgling nation, inflamed at various moments by Israeli expansionism and Western interventionism, and complicated by rising disillusionment with the country’s elites, all of which contributed to the ascendancy of the populist Ba’ath party in the 1950s. After a brief unification with the authoritarian Egyptian government, the increasingly militant Ba’ath party propelled Hafez al-Assad to power in 1970; his decades-long rule of Syria through wily political machinations and brute force led to a pressure cooker of tensions that, exacerbated by the unfulfilled promises of his son, Bashar al-Assad, resulted in the Syrian Civil War. Neep’s eye for detail helps him mount challenges against some long-standing truisms, such as the Ottoman Empire’s characterization as the “Sick Man of Europe,” and offers insight into pressing contemporary questions, including the connections between Syria’s current leadership and the Islamic State. While occasionally dense, it’s an illuminating, comprehensive study of the region. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In the incisive debut from Ghanaian American writer Alonté, a woman’s friendship is strained by a child custody battle. Raised in Oakland, Calif., low-key Dzifa meets her vivacious bestie, Tatiana, when both are college students in Massachusetts. Seven years later, Dzifa is living in Brooklyn with Tatiana, until Tatiana gets pregnant with her daughter, Maddie. A year and a half later, Tatiana, Maddie, and her partner, B, are living in Boston and have just had a new baby, Luca, who was born with a serious heart condition. Dzifa is back home in Oakland when she gets the call that Luca has died. She rushes to Boston, where she is thrust in the middle of a power play between Tatiana and B’s parents, who support B’s decision to sue for full custody of Maddie. Dzifa also has her own family drama, including her unstable and vindictive mother and her holier-than-thou sister. Alonté does an excellent job illustrating the characters’ grief in the wake of tragedy, along with Dzifa’s heartfelt desire to support her friend. This will move readers. Agent: Alex Kane, WME. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this innovative polyphonic novel, Yamashita (Sansei and Sensibility) blends archival documents with fictional flourishes to chronicle the detention, forced removal, and conscription of Japanese Americans during WWII. The title is a reference to two sections of the U.S. government’s Loyalty Questionnaire for internees, which asked whether they would fight for the U.S. and denounce the Japanese emperor. If they answered in the negative, they were segregated from other internees and cast into a no-man’s-land of statelessness, while those deemed loyal were conscripted to fight in the European theater, where many of them died. Many second-generation Japanese Americans found themselves caught in a fraught middle ground, which Yamashita dramatizes by detailing the murky role of the Japanese American Citizens League, which deepened divisions and confusion by placating the U.S. government rather than defending its community. Yamashita employs a bold blend of perspectives, from scans of questionnaires to oral histories and even a trombone, who travels with its owner, an 18-year-old who passes as Chinese, to join a “wannabe Glen Miller band.” The result is a powerful and lively novel that documents the turmoil endured by internees while raising enduring questions about identity, loyalty, and citizenship. Agent: Chris Fischbach, Fischbach Creative. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Stories of addiction and underemployment feature in the bare-knuckled fiction debut from journalist Strickland (You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave). The unnamed narrator of the title entry, a high school senior, dreams about heading to California from his hometown in north Texas, leaving behind his alcoholic mother and memories of his older brother who died at age 16 from a heroin overdose. In “Mockingbirds,” a former teacher, now mopping floors at an abortion clinic, is hounded by an anti-abortion protester intent on making him into a villain online. In “Rent Money,” a woman in her early 20s comes to terms with the shortcomings of her 41-year-old husband, a heavy-drinking slumlord for “meth monsters” who tries to goad her into collecting rent, a far cry from the “clean, simple life” he promised her when they got married five years earlier. Strickland laces his hardscrabble scenes with lyricism, as in “Screaming East on I-10,” when a young drifter living alongside crack addicts describes taking a hit of the drug, then notices how “night bruises the sky purple.” In each piece, grief underscores the characters’ recklessness, imbuing the collection with an unsentimental but tender emotional register. Strickland’s humane depictions of people living on the margins acknowledge the forces that shape them. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Biographer Weber (Mondrian) offers an impressively detailed portrait of Anni Albers, a weaver whose 1949 show at the Museum of Modern Art marked the museum’s first solo textile exhibition. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in 1899 Germany, Albers had Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neurological disorder that prevented her from playing sports, but spurred her to develop her natural artistic abilities. In 1922, she was accepted to the Bauhaus, an institute founded by Walter Gropius that merged artistry and craftsmanship, where she developed her weaving skills and met her future husband Josef Albers, an artist who became a Bauhaus faculty member. After the Nazis shuttered the institute in 1933, Josef was recruited to join the faculty of North Carolina’s Black Mountain College and the couple headed for the United States, where they spent the rest of their lives. Albers eventually took up printmaking, in part to overcome the inherent physical limitations of and low public regard for textile work. Drawing from extensive interviews with his subject, the author carefully situates Albers’s career against a vivid depiction of the WWII-era art world and the Bauhaus, bolstered by brief portraits of key figures like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. It’s an intimate study of an overlooked artist and the creative milieu from which she emerged. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Mount Shasta, Calif., high school senior Izumi Tanaka is a normal 18-year-old American girl: she enjoys baking, watching Real Housewives, and dressing like “Lululemon’s sloppy sister.” But Japanese American Izzy, conceived during a one-night stand in her mother Hanako’s final year at Harvard, has never known the identity of her father. So when she and her best friend find a letter in Hanako’s bedroom, the duo jump at the chance to ferret out Izzy’s dad’s true identity—only to find out he’s the Crown Prince of Japan. Desperate to know her father, Izzy agrees to spend the summer in his home country. But press surveillance, pressure to quickly learn the language and etiquette, and an unexpected romance make her time in Tokyo more fraught than she imagined. Add in a medley of cousins and an upcoming wedding, and Izzy is in for an unforgettable summer. Abrupt switches from Izzy’s perspective to lyrical descriptions of Japan may disrupt readers’ enjoyment, but a snarky voice plus interspersed text conversations and tabloid coverage keep the pages turning in Jean’s (Empress of All Seasons) fun, frothy, and often heartfelt duology starter. Ages 12–up. Agent: Erin Harris, Folio Literary Management. (May)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink