Ellah Allfrey

Caitlin Moran's semi-autobiographical novel is an earnestly written look at a young woman's self-reinvention. How to Build a Girl tackles class, gender and sexuality with both humor and sincerity.

In his episodic memoir, Will Boast meets the siblings he never knew while navigating family deaths and secrets. Critic Ellah Allfrey finds Epilogue conceptually ambitious, but lacking in execution.

Daniel Kehlmann's F, about three brothers abandoned by their father, examines the detail of lives lived without integrity. It is brilliantly translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway.

Stephanie Feldman's debut novel is about Jewish folk tales and family history. It's also an exploration of the inheritance of loss and the guilt of survival as it is passed down through generations.

California tells the story of a couple who, when they learn they are having a baby, leave their solitary refuge in a forest for a Utopian community in post-apocalyptic America.

The Unwitting by Ellen Feldman is part love story, part mystery and part political thriller set during the Cold War.

Ellah Allfrey reviews Kinder Than Solitude, by Yiyun Li.

For 44 years, British author Penelope Lively has been publishing children's books, short stories and novels. Her latest book, Dancing Fish and Ammonites, is subtitled "A Memoir," but critic Ellah Allfrey says it is "more a collection of thoughts, a scattering of advice and a reading list to treasure."

Rachel Joyce's new novel offers two parallel narratives: the 1972 story of Byron, an anxious schoolboy, and the present-day account of Jim, a supermarket worker who has spent most of his life in institutional care. But critic Ellah Allfrey says that the novel is made up of two distinct and unequal parts.

Novelist Chang Rae Lee is known for his sober depictions of things you can probably imagine — like war and spies, family and immigration. So it might surprise you that his newest novel, On Such a Full Sea, is a dystopia that begins in a place called B-mor, a town that — a very long time ago — was known as Baltimore.