In 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was killed in Mexico. In ‘Liliana’s Invincible Summer’ her sister, Cristina, sets out to figure out what happened.

In ‘My Xanthi,’ a now-adult Nick reads his nanny’s old letters and comes face to face with the brutality of her life in wartime Greece.

How do geniuses gain mastery of skills? To try to answer the question, Gopnik plays guinea pig.

The novel tracks the search for a lost book within the book, also called ‘Monkey,’ as well as the writer of that unusual book.