Not all coming-of-age stories are quite as tender as Piper Templeton’s novel Rain Clouds and Waterfalls. The symbiotic relationship among story, character, action, and mood heighten a reader’s desire to finish this book in one sitting.

Although there's a lot going on under the surface of this slim novel, Tyler's Last is, first and foremost, a lot of fun, an absurd, cleverly-plotted romp across continents with generous helpings of sex and violence along the way. It's a brilliant parody, and it's also much more than that.

Throughout his thirty years as a CIA agent spying for the People’s Republic of China, Gary Weimin Shang, the protagonist in Ha Jin’s psychological novel A Map of Betrayal, betrays…

There is this about the novel The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez: The push and pull between reason and emotion, choice and chance, life and death—a trio of diametrical pairings played against each other in the life of the narrator, Antonio Yammara.

Sometimes a book tears open the fabric of being and forces the reader to question the meaning of existence. A masterpiece of existentialist inquiry, Falling Out of Time by the eminent Israeli author David Grossman is such a book.

On the face of it, Muriel Barbery’s international bestseller, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, is a sentimental tale about a fifty-four-year-old woman who pretends to be illiterate and inept but is actually…