Tommy Orange will speak on Tuesday at the university’s Hemmingson Ballroom.

Citing security concerns, publisher cancels national book tour for controversial novel.

At a bank in the border town of Nogales, a Mexican woman named Lydia attempts to withdraw cash from her dead mother’s account. She needs $11,000 to pay a smuggler to lead her and her 9-year-old son into the United States. But when the bank manager asks for documentation, Lydia can’t supply any. Less than two weeks earlier, her mother, her husband and the rest of her family were murdered at an afternoon barbecue. Lydia and her son, Luca, have since then been on the run. Up to this point, two-thirds of the way through Jeanine Cummins’ thrilling and devastating “American Dirt,” I’d devoured the novel in a dry-eyed adrenalin rush. Lydia, Luca and the teenage Honduran sisters they’re traveling with – who are fleeing gang violence – leap on top of freight trains. They endure kidnapping, rape and the constant threat of death. “If there’s one good thing about terror,” Lydia thinks wryly, “it’s that it’s more immediate than grief.”

“Circe” – a book that explores the perspective of a witch-goddess who appears in Homer’s “Odyssey” – was the area’s most circulated library book in 2019, with 961 checkouts in the Spokane Public Library and 563 in the Spokane County Library District.

Audiobooks will be coming to the Pasadena Park Elementary School library this spring thanks to a $10,500 grant from the Hagan Foundation.

The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association picked Spokane author’s novel as one of the six best from the region in 2019.

Reading is a cornerstone of conversation, and we like to talk at The Spokesman-Review. What newspaper doesn’t like a good story?