Books

Fiction

Matthew Sullivan knew there was a story in Soap Lake before he and his wife even moved there. They had been living in Boston, but Sullivan, author of “Midnight in Soap Lake,” had spent a lot of time in the Inland Northwest, including attending University of Idaho to get a master of fine arts in creative writing. Sullivan and his wife had a child, so living in Boston became more difficult. Sullivan took a job with Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake.

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, April 19, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana. (Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.) HARDCOVER FICTION 1. "The Perfect Divorce" by Jeneva Rose (Blackstone) Last week: — 2. ...

Clarice Wilsey remembers very clearly the first moment she learned her father David was keeping a secret.

Travel expert Rick Steves doesn’t want you to have a safe trip, he wants you to have a “bon voyage.”

Not far into “Midnight in Soap Lake” by Matthew Sullivan, I had to stop and research if this place was real.

In a May 2000 essay for Essence magazine, Octavia Butler wrote that “to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.” History clearly inspires Kevin Nguyen’s dystopian second novel, “My Documents,” which imagines a near-future in which, following coordinated terrorist attacks by Vietnamese perpetrators, 1 million Vietnamese Americans are imprisoned in the same way Japanese Americans were during World War II.

Early in motherhood, author Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum would note her child’s language acquisition in a journal, combining her sensitivities as a writer and an educator – Sundberg Lunstrum teaches seventh-grade English.

Some people get tennis elbow; John Green has bestseller shoulder. His doctor said – no joke – that Green, 47, was developing arthritis from signing so many books: more than 700,000, he estimates, over the past 10 years. For his latest, Green signed more than 100,000 sheets of paper, to be bound into copies from the first printing. When we met at the D.C. stop of his tour, he was looking at – what, another thousand? “Easy peasy,” he said. He propped his phone against a stack of hardcovers to take a time-lapse video for his socials, and uncapped his Sharpie.

“Blazing Eye Sees All,” the second book by investigative journalist Leah Sottile, opens with tectonic shift and continental drift, mistaken as a continent disappeared. Because of the presence of lemurs in Madagascar, lemur fossils in India, but no lemurs elsewhere in Africa, British zoologist Phillip Lutley Sclater dubbed this hypothetical land “Lemuria.”

Leah Sottile likes to follow the fringes of American life.

If you’ve ever thrown a fist to the sky and shouted, “Stupid bird!” then Tacoma-based author Matt Kracht has the book for you – “A Dumb Birds Field Guide to the Worst Birds Ever.”

The cover image on Mary Catherine Starr’s new book says it all: A mother sits on the toilet, head in her hands, as her two young children plead for her attention. “Mom, look at me,” says one. Then her husband chimes in to ask where his keys are.

For the love of books (and all the other wonderful things you can find at the library), Spokane Public Library invites you to get online and share your story of how local libraries have impacted your life.

When my fiancée, Denise, declared themself gender nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns, I didn’t get it. In fact, I fought it. I used grammar, biology, any stick I could grab to argue that humans come in only two genders – thereby proving two disturbing revelations of the 2024 election. One, the power of transphobia. It worked for Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans, who spent $215 million on anti-trans ads ahead of the election. Two, despite our nation’s name (the “United” States) and founding principle (“All people are created equal”), Americans, including me, are prone to disparaging people who are different from us. Not because they’ll do us harm. Just because they’re different.

It’s easy to assume that writing for children is less toiling than writing a novel for the big-brained adults of the world, but having an audience of young learners doesn’t make the task of storytelling any more painless than usual.

We tend to think of Jane Austen as the first great female novelist, whose originality paved the way for creative descendants to dazzle critics and readers. “Jane Austen’s Bookshelf” contends that virtually every part of that sentence is wrong.

When Alia Dastagir became the target of an online mob, a thought gripped her: What if the harassment never stopped? Could she survive it?