The authors argue that modern corporations are deeply out of touch with their customers, and they call this “The Great Distancing”; in their view, big companies have philosophically and operationally drifted away from creating a valuable customer experience (or CX), preferring to focus on shareholders and optimize internal processes. This puts firms at risk of becoming irrelevant, they assert, by missing opportunities and alienating customers. Mainstream management theories and business models focus too much on efficiency and siloed operations, they note, and not enough on delivering long-term, meaningful CX. The book proposes five areas (insights, strategy, blueprints, operating models, and culture) into which one must incorporate CX to counter this phenomenon. According to the authors, CX shouldn’t be a department or set of marketing tactics, but rather the substance of the entire business: Every product, interaction, and relationship, they say, needs to be part of it. The book provides assessment tools and practical frameworks to help leaders make this a reality. Overall, the authors present CX as a companywide capability that can drive growth, employee engagement, and operational efficiency. Stylistically, the book is clear, well-organized, and propelled by clear enthusiasm. The writing is concise and pragmatic, with bullet points galore, which will make it accessible to practitioners and executives alike. Issues such as corporate inertia, systems thinking, and empathy are explored at length, and convincing statistics and real-world anecdotes round out the arguments. At times, the “CX Champion” rhetoric romanticizes business challenges, and readers looking for empirical rigor or industry-specific playbooks may feel the advice to be somewhat conceptual. The book also often feels like a pitch for the authors’ consulting services. Still, it’s a convincing call for business leaders to work differently.

Set in near-future New York City, the premise is as simple as it is brutally effective: In an effort to combat rampant overpopulation, the city instituted a “controversial randomized extermination program” called the Kill Train initiative. Professional assassins murder all passengers on a random subway train by the end of the ride. The odds of being on a Kill Train are 1 in 10,000, so most of the populace are willing to take the chance when traveling throughout the city. Enter Vanessa Crow, a struggling single mother with a teenage daughter who is on the precipice of a mental breakdown. When circumstances force her onto a subway train, she knows the odds are in her favor as 580 passengers were just slaughtered on a Kill Train the day before. She fatefully meets an old college friend, Corwin, who reminds Vanessa of the badass woman she used to be. But when the two friends discover that they’re on a Kill Train, Vanessa is forced to battle much more than a group of psychotic killers. Powered by an intriguing, albeit absurd, concept and complemented by visually stunning (and potentially traumatizing) illustrations by Martina Niosi—dismembered and decapitated bodies, intestines hanging like party streamers, etc.—it’s Vanessa’s inner journey through past trauma that makes this graphic novel so memorable. Her problematic relationship with her mother, her unstable financial situation, and her tumultuous but intimate bond with her daughter make her a character that readers can not only understand and identify with but also root for as she fights for her life. Ass-kicking motherly characters like Terminator’s Sarah Connor and Alien’s Ellen Ripley have nothing on Cuartero-Briggs’ Crow.

In 1941 Leningrad, Katya Karavayeva, a former radio installer, finds herself in dire straits because “some senior Party official had taken the word of an envious liar,” resulting in her losing her Party membership and her job. Desperate to get herself back into the Party’s good graces, she leaves her 15-year-old daughter, Yelena, with her mother-in-law, Sofya, to join the Volunteer Corps; she’s soon helping to build antitank trenches near the town of Luga to thwart the invading German army. When her group finds itself under attack, Katya manages to escape with fellow comradeSvet Grigorova, a teenager with her own reasons for joining the Corps. Katya must rely on Svet’s survival skills to keep them alive as they stay hidden in the woods, and she learns much about herself in the process. After many months, Katya returns to her German-occupied hometown of Staraya Russa and begins to rebuild her life. There, Katya thinks about her choices that have led her into her current situation. She wants to atone for betraying her husband, who was arrested and imprisoned after she made a comment about his lack of patriotic devotion; she also dreams of returning to her daughter. After she joins the Soviet partisans, she gains a new perspective on the war—and on herself. Over the course of this follow-up to Lost Souls of Leningrad (2022), Parry richly develops her characters and crafts a compelling tale of second chances that will captivate readers; indeed, it grabs the reader’s attention with a tension-filled narrative right from the start. Her keen eye for detail, and her clear ability to infuse real-life history into her story, demonstrates her commitment and discipline when it comes to historical fiction. Newcomers will find that this series installment stands perfectly well on its own; however, they’ll surely be eager to read the next and final installment.

Jane Leigh—whose late husband, John Lo, was acquitted of killing a colleague at the law firm where he was a partner—is dying of cancer. When her children, Hunter, a reporter, and Brennan, an attorney, re-engage with each other during Jane’s final days, brother and sister realize they disagree on their father’s guilt. Their decision to try to solve this stone-cold case soon disrupts their schedules and psyches, and readers will find their sleuthing sound, if a little serendipitous, such as when an old family friend gives them access to confidential files. However, the best and most haunting writing in lawyer Suthammanont’s debut concerns John Lo himself, a first-generation Chinese American whose parents came from the region of Teochew culture. John recalls that his father expressed satisfaction (“pride was an overstatement”) with him only twice, when he graduated from college and when he got into law school: “John knew that was because it meant that his life would be better than his father’s.” His father gave John a springboard for success, but also the titular hollow spaces in his makeup—areas of dissatisfaction and longing that John unfortunately fills with alcohol, then with an affair with gorgeous associate Jessica DeSalvo, whose murder shatters his life. Chapters alternate between Then (before and after the murder) and Now (when Hunter and Brennan join forces), and while this is surely meant to destabilize readers, it also puts into stark relief how separate the experiences of an outsider parent can be from those of their multiracial children. While John Lo dealt with macro- and microaggressions from people in most areas of his life, Hunter and Brennan move through the same New York City world without friction, yet saddened and confused by their father’s deeds. It’s an intriguing, if ultimately slightly muddy, combination of sleuthing and character study from a talented writer.

“They were not normal, those girls”: This is the sentiment held by a majority of townsfolk in the riverside Oxfordshire village of Little Nettlebed not too long after the English Civil War. Sisters Anne, Elizabeth, Hester, Grace, and Mary Mansfield are “the fierce one, the pretty one, the tomboy, the nervous one, the youngest.” They range in age from 19 down to 6, have lost both their parents and, newly, their grandmother, leaving them to care for their farmer grandfather, who is losing his sight. No one can quite pinpoint what it is about them—their insular nature, their closeness, their standoffishness toward other villagers—but most of the townspeople keep their distance. When the town ferryman, the misogynistic alcoholic Pete Darling, claims to have seen the girls changing into dogs under cover of night, the rumor spreads through Little Nettlebed with lightning speed. Soon, the girls are being blamed for misfortunes: dead hens, falling levels of water in the river. As word spreads about the girls’ strange affliction and authority figures from the vicar to the doctor get involved, the town’s hysteria escalates until a catastrophic act of violence changes everything. Purvis shifts narration across multiple villagers, including Darling and the girls’ grandfather, to show the corrosive power of group mentality and social conformity—and to illuminate the simple bravery of being true to who you are. The novel is a master class in paranoia and strategic ambiguity. Like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” it shows that the horrors lurking beneath small-town life are timelessly unsettling.