The Book Show

Helen Phillips is one of the most interesting and original writers working today. In her latest novel, “Hum,” she turns her eye to marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and artificial intelligence.

Known for her incredible research bestselling author Jodi Picoult brings to life the incomparable Emilia Bassano, the real-life and “too little considered” English poet believed to have authored many of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. Picoult’s new novel is “By Any Other Name.”

Simon Rich is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He has written for “Saturday Night Live,” Pixar, and “The Simpsons” and is the creator of the TV shows “Man Seeking Woman” and “Miracle Workers.” His latest story collection, “Glory Days,” mourns the death of youthful innocence and hails the beginning of something approximating wisdom.

In 1993, in his hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, Bret Anthony Johnston watched on live TV as flames engulfed a number of buildings in Waco – full of men, women, and children – during the FBI’s siege of the Branch Davidian compound. This time led to his writing the novel, “We Burn Daylight.”

“The Heart in Winter” by Kevin Barry is a big-hearted, violent, hypnotic, and lovelorn epic set against the iconic genre of the American Western. If features an unforgettable female protagonist and tackling the dislocation and self-invention of the Irish immigrant experience.

A mystery set in a rural village in the West of Ireland, “The Hunter” is the second novel by best-selling author Tana French novel set in mythical Ardnakelty. It’s a blazing summer when two men arrive. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of America’s most beloved historians. She joins us to discuss her new book “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” where she artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history.

American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest book is “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.” The book shares the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked on in the last years of his life, as the couple examined a tumultuous decade in American history through the lens of their own personal involvement in public service.

“The Friday Afternoon Club” by actor Griffin Dunne is a memoir of growing up among larger-than-life characters in Hollywood and Manhattan. The book finds wicked humor and glimmers of light in even the most painful of circumstances.

CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent and New York Times best-selling author Jake Tapper’s third thriller, “All the Demons Are Here,” brings readers to the 1970s underground world of cults, celebrities, tabloid journalism, serial killers, disco, and UFOs.