This summer, Code Switch is laser-focused on books that teach us about freedom. Today, we're in conversation with a romance novelist whose own identity helped inform a rich cast of characters.
Messy and floundering in late midlife, Dana Spiotta's heroine is roiling — along with the rest of the country — amid the 2016 election and the rise of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.
This month, romance columnist Maya Rodale brings us three tales of danger and mystery, political intrigues, airship pirates, angry Scotsmen, and of course, the essential ingredient: passion.
Manuele Fior's latest, Celestia, is set on a far-future Earth, wracked by climate change — but the terrors of flood and fire stay under the surface of his dreamy, hazy, philosophical story.
Omar El-Akkad's new novel is fully aware of the larger forces that lead people to migrate — but it leaves those aside, focusing instead on the smaller human stories at the core of the migrant crisis.
In Nick McDonell's new novel, sentient animals control the fate of the few remaining humans — and must decide to do about the fear that humans will regroup and seize supremacy over the Earth again.
Katie Kitamura's new novel follows an unnamed woman working as a translator at The Hague who works with war criminals — but can readers really know a narrator who remains resolutely unknown?
Claire North's new Notes from the Burning Age is set far in the future — but the titular burning age is our own, an age of waste and exploitation from which only fragments of knowledge remain.
The author has gifts as a writer: a novelistic eye for scene and detail, an ear for dramatic dialogue. His story keeps moving, free of constraints common to courtroom lawyers or newspaper reporters.
There's something that feels impossible about leaving behind the place in which we slunk our way through the last year plus. Until Proven Safe takes us to the places others lingered through time.
Nisha Sharma's new YA novel follows two Indian American teenagers who overcome differing backgrounds to find love while prepping for an important dance competition — a perfect teen movie setup.
Becky Chambers comes down to earth for her new series, about a world where humans and robots diverged so long ago that now each group is just a myth to the other, and robots propagate themselves.
By haranguing all who will listen, in interviews or rally rants, Donald Trump even now is demonstrating his abiding and preternatural confidence in his own persuasiveness.
Now newly reissued, Gloria Naylor's 1982 novel-in-stories painted a group portrait of seven Black women living on a dingy street in an unnamed city, and the systematic racism they faced.
Sword Stone Table brings together a group of authors from marginalized groups to re-imagine the legends of King Arthur for new eras, places and players, inviting all to sit at the Round Table.
