Time Is a Mother
Ocean Vuong’s second poetry collection, written in the aftermath of his mother’s death from cancer, is a landmark work of grief, queer desire, and immigrant memory. A 2023 Meridian Award winner. Rated 5.0.
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The Secret Hours by Mick Herron
A standalone Slough House novel featuring alternating timelines, Cold War intrigue, and Mick Herron’s signature dry wit. The Secret Hours won the 2023 Meridian Award and CWA recognition for its formally inventive, thematically rich take on loyalty, institutional honesty, and the weight of history.
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World Running Down by Al Hess
A warm, funny, and deeply humane post-apocalyptic novel featuring a trans salvager and his AI companion navigating a devastated world. Al Hess’s World Running Down won the 2023 Meridian Award for its inventive worldbuilding and its moving exploration of belonging and personhood.
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Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
A searing debut novel set in a near-future America where incarcerated people fight to the death in a privatized gladiatorial league. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars is a National Book Award finalist and 2023 Meridian Award winner that earns every word of its acclaim.
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No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by Behrouz Boochani
Written on a smuggled phone from Australian immigration detention on Manus Island, Behrouz Boochani’s Victorian Prize-winning memoir is a work of philosophical literature and political witness unlike anything else in contemporary world writing.
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The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos by Mark J. Easter
A rigorous and deeply readable guide to food and climate from rangeland ecologist Mark J. Easter, challenging oversimplifications about which foods help or harm the planet and making the case for complexity over category rules.
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From Unincorporated Territory [guma’] by Craig Santos Perez
A landmark ecopoetic and decolonial collection from Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez, weaving together fatherhood, colonial history, and Pacific environmental grief into one of the essential ongoing poetry projects in American literature.
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Freeman’s Challenge
Robin Bernstein’s award-winning history reconstructs the 1846 case of William Freeman, an Afro-Native man whose trial for murder exposed the brutal machinery of America’s original prison for profit system at Auburn State Prison, New York.
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Warsaw Testament
A 2024 National Jewish Book Award winner, Warsaw Testament collects the real-time wartime testimony of Rokhl Auerbach, one of three surviving members of the Oyneg Shabes archive. Translated by Samuel Kassow, it is an irreplaceable primary document of the Warsaw Ghetto’s interior life.
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The Comfort of Ghosts
The final Maisie Dobbs novel: Jacqueline Winspear closes her beloved series with a postwar London meditation on grief, trauma, and the slow work of making peace with a life fully lived.
![Cover of From Unincorporated Territory [guma'] by Craig Santos Perez](https://writersreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/from-unincorporated-territory-guma-cover.jpg)
