Books

He’s part dog, part man, a champion of justice—and the canine hero of the Fremont Main Library’s most checked-out book.  Since the beginning of the year, readers have checked out Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea...

Setting out to resolve a puzzling question about why women over the age of 50 choose or are forced into lives of fear over flat-out fun and fulfillment, New York Times bestselling writer Caroline Paul uncovered the...

Way back in the day, before everyone was hunched over their phones on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), it was common to see people reading newspapers, magazines and—it’s true—books. In line with its message of carrying people not...

Roach has been decorated with awards—including a lifetime achievement award well before her span of years is over—and her books have been published in 21 languages. She has written for National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times Magazine and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among others. Roach was an Osher Fellow with the San Francisco Exploratorium and a winner of the American Engineering Societies’ Engineering Journalism Award, a category for which, as her website jokes, “let’s be honest, she was the sole entrant.”

Gianna Davy's debut picture book, "No One Owns the Colors" (The Collective Book Studio), follows an unnamed lead character on a spirited, nature-filled romp through a panoply of colors and sentient beings. 

Nightcrawling (Knopf), the debut novel by Oakland-based Leila Mottley, rises for many readers to that “forever book” stature. Named youth poet laureate of Oakland in 2018, Mottley’s first foray as a published novelist—she wrote her first, unpublished novel at age 14—has landed on Oprah’s Book Club list, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, and has garnered rave reviews in trade and popular publications and media.

The annual visits to France and other locations in Europe provide similar fuel for the deeply researched novels she writes. ‘The Paris Showroom’ is set in Nazi-occupied Paris and begins in 1944, a little more than four years after the Germans invaded the city.