'Alias Emma,' by Ava Glass. (Bantam, 288 pages, $27.)
British spy Emma Makepeace stars in Ava Glass' James Bond-inspired spy novel. Makepeace — not her real name, of course — gets her first big assignment: to track down an innocent man wanted by the Russian government and bring him safely to MI6. This proves no simple task, and readers are the better for it.
Her target doesn't want her protection — and there are spies all over London trying to stop Emma in her tracks. Glass, aka Christi Daugherty, author of the YA Cimmeria Academy mystery series, has written a fast-paced thriller in the spirit of Ian Fleming, with a very modern twist.
'Amy & Lan,' by Sadie Jones. (Harper, 320 pages, $25.99.)
Amy and Lachlan, the child narrators of Sadie Jones' sixth novel, live on a bucolic commune in England with their parents, refugees of city living. The kids come of age playing unsupervised, feeling like the king and queen of an untouched utopia. But the real world encroaches on their idyll when long-buried fault lines shake the community, and Amy and Lan try to make sense of some very grown-up problems in their own childlike ways.
WASHINGTON POST
