BOOKLOVES

Prince Elias of Gledann, the resentful heir of a domineering and abusive king, is forced into a politically motivated marriage with Princess Fu Liling of Toguan. Liling is both a dutiful daughter and a reluctant pawn; her bond with her own powerful father grants her unusual privileges as she steels herself to manipulate foreign courts. […]

This fourth installment of a series finds Farrell’s main characters, part-time private investigator Eddie O’Connell and his Uncle Mike, once again caught up in horse racing, bookmaking, and the mob. Mike, a retired cop, is the owner of O’Connell’s Tavern in Chicago, where Eddie acts as bar manager. As the novel opens, Eddie’s girlfriend, Nicole […]

In a prologue, Peter Jay uses the key given to him by his recently deceased father, John, to access a manuscript that “looks beneath the record” with margins “crowded with a single name, written over and over—Mr. Smith.” The narrative then continues in chapters that jump back and forth in time to share the saga […]

Journalist and commentator Freedland, author of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz To Warn the World, writes that Adolf Hitler enjoyed overwhelming support from everyday Germans soon after he took office—and nearly to the end. He drew their backing with his declaration that supposedly depraved foreigners working with perfidious fellow citizens […]

Bourdain, notes editor Witherspoon, “had wanted to be a writer all his life.” His fame as the host of several television travel series, she adds, was accidental: The gigs were someone else’s idea, but as long as he got to write, it was fine. Some of the pieces assembled here are near-transcripts from those shows, […]

Physics is at a stalemate. Its two best theories—Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum mechanics—can’t both be right. Vedral, a physicist at the University of Oxford, is placing all his bets on the quantum. Our physics woes, he says, come from our failure to see quantum theory as truly universal, governing everything from atoms to […]