Maureen Corrigan

Esi Edugyan's new novel, Washington Black, opens on wretched terrain: The year is 1830; the location is a sugar plantation in Barbados. Our narrator, an enslaved 11-year-old boy named George Washington Black — "Wash" for short — tells us that the old master has recently died.

Book critic MAUREEN CORRIGAN says Sarah Smarsh's new memoir Heartland is smart, nuanced and atmospheric.

Sarah Weinman's The Real Lolita offers a compelling argument that Nabokov's 1955 novel had its roots in the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner — despite the author's claim to the contrary.

There's life in the old road trip saga yet. That's just one of the many things that Gary Shteyngart's spectacular, sprawling new novel, Lake Success, affirms.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new apocalyptic novel 'Severance' by debut novelist Ling Ma.

What I love most about Wilson's writing is that he'll start off with these goofy, almost sitcom-type contrived premises and from there create stories that knock you out with the force of their emotional truth. That distinctive sweet-tart flavor of Wilson's writing is triple-concentrated in his new short story collection, Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine.

R. O. Kwon's pensive debut novel, The Incendiaries, arrives just in time to stoke up "back-to-school" anxieties, especially those of entering college students and their nervous parents.

Megan Abbott's new novel centers on a two young women whose high school friendship has morphed into professional rivalry. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Give Me Your Hand a "spectacular thriller."

It's a rusty old bucket of a plot contrivance: throw a bunch of strangers together on a boat and roil the waters with a big storm or a white whale. But, in her latest novel, The Last Cruise, Kate Christensen demonstrates there's life yet to be found in what may appear to be the creakiest of fictional premises.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' about a grieving woman trying to sleep long enough to relieve existential pain.