Since its 2021 French-language publication in Paris, this work by Bolloré and Bonnassies has sold more than 400,000 copies. Now translated into English for the first time by West and Jones, the book offers a new introduction featuring endorsements from a range of scientists and religious leaders, including Nobel Prize-winning astronomers and Roman Catholic cardinals. This appeal to authority, both religious and scientific, distinguishes this volume from a genre of Christian apologetics that tends to reject, rather than embrace, scientific consensus. Central to the book’s argument is that contemporary scientific advancements have undone past emphases on materialist interpretations of the universe (and their parallel doubts of spirituality). According to the authors’ reasoned arguments, what now forms people’s present understanding of the universe—including quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Big Bang—puts “the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table,” given the underlying implications. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance, presupposes that if a cause exists behind the origin of the universe, then it must be atemporal, non-spatial, and immaterial. While the book’s contentions related to Christianity specifically, such as its belief in the “indisputable truths contained in the Bible,” may not be as convincing as its broader argument on how the idea of a creator God fits into contemporary scientific understanding, the volume nevertheless offers a refreshingly nuanced approach to the topic. From the work’s outset, the authors (academically trained in math and engineering) reject fundamentalist interpretations of creationism (such as claims that Earth is only 6,000 years old) as “fanciful beliefs” while challenging the philosophical underpinnings of a purely materialist understanding of the universe that may not fit into recent scientific paradigm shifts. Featuring over 500 pages and more than 600 research notes, this book strikes a balance between its academic foundations and an accessible writing style, complemented by dozens of photographs from various sources, diagrams, and charts.

In a preface, the author isn’t joking when he warns that Loading “isn’t a story you’ll wanna tell at parties”; rather, it’s “what crawls out when the screen gets a hard-on for your eyeballs,” and his cleverly designed layout opens each chapter with a warning: “If you want to stop the installation process, press the ‘Esc’ key.” Marshall, born Markus Jensen, endured a nightmarish childhood—a dad who rejected him, a drug-addicted mom, and a raging bully of a stepfather—and things didn’t go much better after he hit college, where his ex-boyfriend put their sex tape all over the internet, shortly after their breakup. Now, Marshall is a 30-something sex worker in Thread City who entertains male clients out of his hotel room and uploads the resulting sex videos, all in a grab for attention and money, which he achieves—although he feels like he’s starting to lose his humanity. Marshall feels “empty” and “hollow,” which, it turns out, makes him the perfect vehicle for a concoction someone feeds him during a feral orgy with 12 men. As it turns out, the participants have more than sex on their minds; they’re apostles of a new kind of god, merging humanity and computer code, which now gestates inside Marshall. It won’t take high technology for readers to figure out what Klarxon is getting at in this horror tale—in fact, he lays it all out in his introduction: It’s about our “hunger for content . . . a portrait of a world where nothing’s too extreme, too private, too sacred to be sold.” The author is obviously a gifted writer with a strong, if clangorous, voice (“His veins, he could see them, feel them, glowing from within, / blue lightning beneath translucent, alien skin”); a social conscience; and a salient point to make. Readers who don’t mind this book’s general lack of subtlety are sure to love it.

San Francisco, 2019: Until recently, attorney Ellie Benvenuto was a rising star at one of the city’s top law firms. Unfortunately, the responsibilities of her home life led to her unceremonious dismissal. The older of Ellie’s two young sons, Luca, was diagnosed with several disabling conditions, and Ellie—who has held primary custody of the boys since her divorce—needed more time to see to Luca’s needs than the firm was willing to give. Now, she works for the Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative, where the paychecks are significantly smaller and the cases are more emotionally draining. Even with her neighbor and best friend, Anika Owens, to lean on, Ellie struggles to figure out how to provide for her family in a world that seems to despise women. When her grandfather dies, the diary of Ellie’s great-great-grandmother, Theodora Ellis, comes into her possession. Teddy (as Theodora was known) recorded her life in the 19th century, including her overland journey from Chicago to San Francisco, her marriage to Klondike miner George DeLuca, and her pioneering work as an architect, suffragist, and philanthropist. As Ellie takes on a tricky case representing an injured immigrant worker and begins a hesitant new relationship with handsome neurosurgeon Sam Varma, she follows Teddy’s chronicle, which includes details of Teddy’s (and her husband’s) polyamorous relationship with an Indigenous couple and accounts of Teddy dressing as a man in order to move in male spaces. (“He seemed to have his eyes turned upwards, looking practically at the ceiling and I realized that my hat probably does add at least a foot to my height,” recounts Teddy of a colleague responding to her attire. “He told me he had never seen a woman in a tuxedo. I said, ‘Well you have now!’”) Can Teddy’s experiences from more than a century ago help Ellie make sense of the possibilities of her own time?

The author’s descriptive prose is especially vibrant in the book’s Teddy sections, which sparkle with details of a former world. “The shaft I work currently goes 2,000 feet into the ground each day,” writes the woman of her days mining silver in Virginia City, Nevada. “I am lowered down like a rat in a bucket, straight into the mouth of the furnace. The heat is unbearable. The men work in overalls and nothing else, but I of course cannot take off my shirt.” The Ellie material is slightly duller by comparison, though Kanter St. Amour infuses her story with compellingly topical concerns about work, marginalization, and the struggles of parenthood. Though the narratives echo one another more than they directly interact, readers will draw the connections between Teddy’s eagerness to flaunt expectations for women in her own time and Ellie’s relatable struggles to lift up herself and the women around her. Thoughtful without ever losing its breezy pacing, this narrative will please readers of both contemporary and historical fiction.

Though he received a full scholarship after graduating high school in 1971, the author took a detour to embrace his interests in music and exploring some of America’s most remote wild places. The detour became an adventurous road that he ably chronicles in this memoir. Leaving behind his Long Island, New York, nightclub-junk-food-drug-filled life for healthy living in California, he encountered the first of his travels’ trials in 1978, when a poisonous scorpion sting sustained in remote Yelapa, Mexico, led to a near-death experience and a spiritual awakening. After recovering in Long Island, he returned to California. Backpacking en route to the Great Western Divide in 1980, Cooper saw a backpacker who had navigated an off-trail course; this was “the inspiration for [the author] becoming an expert cross-country navigator, planning and executing over the following decades scores of remote wilderness routes far from paint-by-number trails.” In 1981, he moved to Oregon, where he was successful as an audio engineer and could pursue his wilderness adventures. Classes and expeditions with the Sierra Club and the Obsidians (a club devoted to outdoor experiences in the Pacific Northwest) improved his mountaineering skills. With like-minded friends, he organized a series of risky and sardonically named Desert Death Marches, starting in 1994 with a 50-mile expedition through the Joshua Tree National Monument and culminating in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park in 2015. By then, at age 61, health issues and years of rugged backpacking had taken a toll on his body. Whether climbing, backpacking, whitewater rafting, or undergoing brain surgery, Cooper portrays his adventures in immersive detail. His descriptions of his experiences in untouched areas are lyrical: “I had that priceless feeling one gets only in very remote wilderness: a deep and abiding calm, primitively simple and absent of thought, unshackled from all obligation and carefree.” Throughout the book, the author depicts his friends and family with empathy. Lovers of the outdoors and armchair travelers alike will enjoy adventuring along with him.

Even though they’ve already had extensive experience courtsiding—that is, getting a tennis umpire to slow down his calls so they can place bets a second or two before the odds change—Halston Graham and her older brother, Skip, can’t do this on their own. So in the first of many deliberately engineered setbacks, Halston arranges to get caught at her job and spirited away by Blaggy Danchev, the big muscle for crime lord Anton Nikolov, so she can turn around and entice Nikolov and his minions into the heist. Armed with Nikolov’s backing and a perfect replica created by Wolfgang, her friend and accomplice, Halston worms her way into the confidence of fashion designer and art buff Enzio Bergamo and Echelon CEO Charles Waxman, both of whom will be instrumental to the scheme in ways they could never have imagined. The heist doesn’t go off without a hitch; there are many hitches, some real, some fake, before the prize is carried off and replaced with the copy. But that turns out to be only the opening act in an endless series of head-spinning felonies, complications, betrayals, and unmaskings that will keep the target audience turning pages far later into the night than they should. Canny fans will realize early on that they can stop reading any time and still have the satisfaction of having digested all the plot twists they can handle, and then some.