The Thread®

Every family has words that are unique to their closed circle. We discuss their roots in a new book, “Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms.”

Dr. Henry Marsh felt comfortable in hospitals — until he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. "I was much less self-assured now that I was a patient myself," he says. His book is And Finally.

Riley Rennhack was surprised by how much she enjoyed Martin Riker’s new novel “The Guest Lecture.”

Clint Smith’s acclaimed book, “How the Word Is Passed,” is now out in paperback. In it, he examines how slavery has been central in shaping our country’s collective history, and ourselves.

This Friday, Big Books and Bold Ideas will feature Clint Smith, celebrated author of “How the Word is Passed,” which powerfully examines the legacy of slavery in America. Kerri Miller’s conversation with Naima Coster in 2021 trod a similar path, only Coster used a fiction lens to look at effects of segregation in her novel, “What’s Mine and Yours.”

Twin Cities writer V.V. Ganeshananthan didn’t expect her second novel to take so long to write. But after almost two decades “Brotherless Night,” a tale set against the Sri Lankan civil war, is drawing critical acclaim. It’s a depiction of a determined young Tamil woman struggling with life, love and family even as her country descends into chaos.

Patrick Millikin is a bookseller at The Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, which specializes in mysteries, and the crime novel he’s been waiting for finally hit the shelves this month. It’s “Everybody Knows” by Edgar-award winning author Jordan Harper. 

In 1912, the 47 residents of Malaga Island were forcibly removed from their small, interracial community. Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding fictionalizes the story in a stunning new historical novel.

Old West mythology is full of dust-covered cowboys, lonesome gun slingers and gold-seeking prospectors. But if you only know the men’s side of the story, you only know part of it.

Hermetic, paranoid, sleek, dark — and with brief explosions of the sex and violence that have characterized Ellis' oeuvre — The Shards is a stark reminder that the author is a genre unto himself.