Rovelli writes with enthusiastic reverence about our amazing universe. Marvelling at our scientific advances, he emphasizes the recurring need to change our minds about what we thought we knew. This is challenging, “and the difficulty lies not so much with the new concept as it does with becoming liberated from old ones.”

I knew David Cornwell—the man the reading and moviegoing world knows as John Le Carre—worked as a spy and a diplomat, but I knew nothing about his family. This series of vignettes, published when he was 85, provide some wonderful glimpses into his life.

“If a tech company is not trying to sell you a product, you are the product they are selling.” The setting of this tale is up to the minute, and like other great contemporary mysteries, it comments on society as currently constituted.

Among the chief delights of reading Osman’s work are his fresh turns of phrase and flights of fancy. Chris, the local policeman is bitter after being ruthlessly sidelined by the high-handed SIO Jill Regan of the National Crime squad. Fantasizing about solving the murder ahead of both Regan and the Thursday Murder club, he imagines retired MI6 officer Elizabeth and her three intrepid pensioner friends “starting a gunfight in a hollowed-out volcano.”

Yesterday afternoon, I sat down on the back porch to take a quick peek inside Uncontrolled Flight before plunging back into some editing work I needed to finish. At 11 pm, I was in the same chair, reading the last page of the novel. 

…Indeed, existentialism heralded all kinds of social revolutions. Along with producing Beauvoir’s foundational feminist text, it “offered gay people encouragement to live in the way that felt right, rather than trying to fit in with others’ ideas of how they should be.” It also appealed to “those oppressed on grounds of race or class, or…fighting colonialism…a change of perspective.” While he worked out his philosophy of non-violent resistance, Martin Luther King read Sartre, Heidigger, and Paul Tillich.

In March, Eleanor Catton visited Vancouver to converse with Bill Richardson about Birnam Wood. Lesley Hurtig, artistic director of the local Writer’s Fest, characterized the novel as “a stunning takedown of late capitalism,” and Bill Richardson found many parts of it laugh-out-loud funny.

Some say ruthless cutting is a sign you’re a real writer. According to novelist Bianca Marais, other milestones are finding beta readers to critique your drafts, and critiquing the work of others. Reading other people’s unpublished manuscripts can reveal their uncut darlings, which inspires me to find and cut my own.

Scott J. Shapiro is a Yale professor of law and philosophy. For a change of pace, he directs the Yale Cybersecurity Lab. Built around the historic “five extraordinary hacks” mentioned in the sub-title, the book is full of charm and humour. It is also strewn with fascinating bits of historical and sociological detail.

Books are doorways into other lives. Through her non-fiction, I’ve been visiting the life of this Irish journalist, who came to professional writing after other lives as a university lecturer and a television producer for BBC and RTE.

As usual, Khan delivers a fast paced story even as he grounds us in a post-independence Bombay we can see, hear, feel and smell. The characters are interesting and believable. Add a few sly cultural references, some historic detail, and a couple of philosophical questions, and presto — an unputdownable book .

Author Joseph O’Connor grew up near the house where Synge lived with his mother, and was strongly aware of its atmosphere — redolent of Edwardian Dublin. Though the story of the star-crossed theatrical lovers is well-researched, Ghost Light is entirely a work of fiction and takes “immense liberties with fact.” The author even apologizes to the “noble ghosts” of Lady Gregory, WB Yeats, and Sean O’Casey for “not changing the names of the innocent.”

In promulgating his original and unorthodox philosophy, Tim Freke reminds us of Einstein’s idea that the human mind is incapable of understanding the universe. Even so, Freke puts forth some fascinating and credible thoughts on the nature of reality. In doing so, he addresses some of the pressing moral problems of our time and offers great hope.

In the second of this series, ex-Kolkata police officer Kamil Rahman is still working illegally in London, but he’s gone up in the world. Formerly a lowly waiter in Tandoori Knights, he is now a cook. There are other changes as well. His friend and roommate Anjoli is running the restaurant while her parents are away on a long visit to India. When Kamil falls for a beautiful green eyed nursing student, the duo of amateur investigators expands to form a triumvirate: “the cook, the nurse, and the restauranteur.”

In Durton, everyone knows everybody else, people are unwilling to give up secrets to an outsider. In the face of this resistance, Michaels must unearth a variety of unsavoury truths to get to the bottom of what happened to the missing child.

Claire McGowan’s Paula Maguire series brilliantly portrays the long term consequences of the Irish Troubles through generations. This book also explores social attitudes toward food and hunger. After the temporary Missing Persons Research Unit of Ballyterrin is disbanded, cross-border cooperation between Irish police forces of North and South is “back to being intermittent and suspicious.” Among the population of the North, the willingness to help police is often grudging, sometimes entirely absent.

This novella features one of my favourite Perry characters, the redoubtable and now quite elderly Vespasia. Happily married to Victor Narraway, retired head of Special Branch, she accompanies him to a country house to take part in a Christmas gathering. She is aware that her husband has an assignment to carry out, but at first she does not know what it is.

In the Northern Irish borderlands, police forces from North and South work together with the Missing Persons Response Unit, the MPRU, on past and present cases. Undecided about a critical decision of her own, forensic psychologist Paula Maguire can’t decide whether she’s thinking too much or too little. When in mid-winter her unit must search frantically for missing babies and pregnant women, Paula is forced to face her past.