ten books you have to read

40 Must Read Books of All Time (2024)

Must-read books: There are so many out there – so don’t waste your time on average books!

Still, it can take time to find books worth reading. That’s why we’ve compiled this epic must-read book list to make your life easier . It features 39 top books to read in popular categories, such as fiction, business, personal development, travel, and more.

So, if you’re wondering, “what book should I read next?” we’ve got you covered. This list is jam-packed with great books to read!

Now, let’s get into it. Just use the contents to jump to the section you’re most interested in, or start scrolling.

Start selling online now with Shopify

Classic Novels to Read

1. 1984 by george orwell.

1984 tells the futuristic story of a dystopian, totalitarian world where free will and love are forbidden. Although the year 1984 has long since passed, the prophecy of a society controlled by fear and lies is arguably more relevant now than ever.

→ Click Here to Launch Your Online Business with Shopify

2. the lord of the rings by j.r.r. tolkien.

Tolkien’s fantasy epic is one of the top must-read books out there. Set in Middle Earth – a world full of hobbits, elves, orcs, goblins, and wizards – The Lord of the Rings will take you on an unbelievable adventure.

3. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner is a moving story of an unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant. Set in Afghanistan during a time of tragedy and destruction, this unforgettable novel will have you hooked from start to finish.

4. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

This global bestseller took the world by storm. So, if you haven’t read J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, now may be the time. Join Harry Potter and his schoolmates as this must-read book transports you deep into a world of magic and monsters.

5. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five is arguably one of the greatest anti-war books ever written. This rich and amusing tale follows the life of Billy Pilgrim as he experiences World War II from a peculiar perspective.

6. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is undoubtedly one of the great books of all time. This renowned fantasy novel is set in Narnia, home to mythical beasts, talking animals, and warring kingdoms. The story follows a group of school children as they become entangled in this incredible world’s fate.

7. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the top must-read books of all time. Published in 1960, the story explores life in the Deep South during the early 20th century through the story of a man accused of a terrible crime. It’s poignant, humorous, and gripping.

8. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The Book Thief is a story of bravery, hope, and friendship in a time of Nazi tyranny. Narrated by Death itself, this novel will have you holding your breath for chapters at a time.

9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights is a classic novel published way back in 1847. This harrowing story, set on a lonely English moorland, follows Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s struggle with love, betrayal, and revenge. If you love dramatic novels, add this to your must-read book list.

10. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye is the classic coming-of-age story. It follows sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield’s adolescent journey of angst and alienation as he leaves his prep school and moves to New York City.

11. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre is often considered one of the must-read books of all time. It follows the emotions and experiences of a strong, unbroken woman who continued to grow morally and spiritually despite a troubled childhood and a sexist, repressed Victorian society.

12. Animal Farm by George Orwell

Orwell tells a fairy tale of a revolution against tyranny that ends in even more unjust totalitarianism. The animals on the farm are rife with idealism and desire to create a world of justice, equality, and progress. However, the new regimen attempts to control every aspect of the animals’ lives.

13. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian world shines a light on Western societies’ dependence on the media. The main character’s job is to find and burn any books he can find – until he begins to question everything. Considering the state of current politics and world affairs, this is one of the absolute must-read books in life.

14. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

This is a tale of four sisters with their own very different and very prominent personalities. The novel draws the reader deep into their lives as we get to know each of their flaws, joys, struggles, and fears.

15. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

Charlotte’s Web is a great reminder to be kind to all living creatures. This magical story takes place on a farm where a little girl tries to save her piglet from slaughter. Fern, the little girl, enlists the help of her farm friends to execute her clever plan. 

16. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

English author Mary Shelley tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a monster and brings it to life. This gripping novel evokes questions about what makes us human and what love and kindness truly mean. 

17. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men should be on every must-read book list. Set in the Great Depression, this is a controversial tale of friendship between two migrant workers in California. Filled with hope and tragedy, the two work towards the dream of owning land and pets.

18. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

In Guardians of the Galaxy, Arthur Dent sets off on a hilarious and fantastic adventure across the stars. He learns not to take the universe seriously as he meets all kinds of interesting characters.

19. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is said to be the quintessential novel of the Jazz Age. Set in 1922 amongst unfathomable indulgence and decadence, the novel highlights a man’s struggle to earn the love of the woman he’s obsessed with.

Business and Money Must-Read Books

20. think and grow rich by napoleon hill.

Think and Grow Rich is a classic bestseller that has sold millions of copies worldwide. It’s packed full of money-making tips, techniques, and strategies. If you want to improve your mindset around money, this book can potentially change your life completely.

21. Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T. Kiyosaki

Rich Dad Poor Dad explains how wealthy people and poorer people think differently. It challenges commonly held beliefs about money and explains how you don’t need to have a high income to become rich.

22. The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

If you want to learn how to invest, add this to your list of must-read books. Author Benjamin Graham is considered one of the greatest investment advisors of the twentieth century. In The Intelligent Investor , you’ll learn about Graham’s philosophy of ‘value investing’ and how to develop long-term strategies that are used by the most successful investors in the world.

23. Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio’s investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history. In Principles , Dalio shares everything he’s learned about investing, business, and life over the years.

24. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

In this New York Times bestseller, DR. Robert B. Cialdini reveals the psychology behind influence – and how to apply the principles of persuasion in business and everyday life.

Personal Development Books Everyone Should Read

25. how to win friends and influence people by dale carnegie.

First published in 1936, Dale Carnegie’s classic self-help book has stood the test of time. How to Win Friends and Influence People will teach you straightforward methods to improve your relationships – and as a result, your business and personal lives.

26. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

If you’ve ever tried to change a habit unsuccessfully, this should be one of your must-read books. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg reveals the empowering nature of how habits are formed and – crucially – how you can change them.

27. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle

The Power of Now has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into over 30 languages. This groundbreaking book has the potential to completely revolutionize how you experience life – making life far more joyous and prosperous in the process.

28. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk is one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma – something that virtually everyone experiences to some degree. The Body Keeps the Score unravels the science behind emotional and psychological trauma and offers new paths to recovery.

Science and Technology Books You Must-Read

29. a brief history of time by stephen hawking.

Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is one of the most famous books in science. It discusses the history of cosmology and its development from Ancient Greece through to the 1980s.

30. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt

If you’re interested in the truth behind controversial social issues, this book should be on your must-read book list. The authors reveal the facts behind issues, such as crime, shopping, and drugs. 

31. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is one of the top must-read books on technology. The author gives us a look at how personal data has become a new form of capital.

32. Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

Anna Wiener writes about the frantic, self-important, and often delusional work culture in Silicon Valley, and how millennials in tech are consumed by living a productive life. The Uncanny Valley is one of those books everyone should read. 

Travel and Adventure Books You Must-Read Before You Die

33. on the road by jack kerouac.

Inspired by Kerouac’s real-life adventures, On the Road tells the tale of two friends searching for meaning and rich experiences on a cross-country road trip.

34. Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

In Notes From a Small Island, Bill Bryson shares a hilarious commentary of his jaunt through the United Kingdom – from the center of government at Downing Street, London, to the Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands.

35. Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

Vagabonding is perhaps the only travel guide you’ll ever need. This must-read book provides practical tips on how to travel safely and spontaneously – and the philosophies you’ll need to enjoy the trip of a lifetime.

36. Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed thought she’d lost everything at 22. Then, her mother’s passing, family trouble, and divorce drove her to an impulsive decision – to walk more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Wild will inspire you to see your true self-worth and capabilities.

History and Biography Books Worth Reading

37. sapiens: a brief history of humankind by yuval noah harari.

If you’re looking for interesting books to read, Sapiens should be on your list. It details the development of human beings from the earliest stages until now. The author also shows how our current world systems will banish natural selection and adaptation. 

38. Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

Lists of must-read biographies almost always include this wonderful book. Mandela started writing this autobiography in prison and finished it right before becoming the president of South Africa. This inspiring story provides a glimpse into the end of apartheid and the blatant inequality in the country.

39. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World by Steve Brusatte

Do you find dinosaurs fascinating? If so, this is one of the must-read books on the subject. Steve Brusatte reveals the different dinosaurs that roamed the planet – and the different worlds in which they lived.

40. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson attempts to summarize the history of the Earth. He talks about nearly every aspect of the planet – how it formed, how much it weighs, it’s size, the stages it went through, the dangers inherent to it, and how humans have evolved. If you love science and history, this is a must-read book for you.

What Should I Read Next? 

If you’re wondering “what book should I read next,” look no further. In summary, here are 40 must-read books of all time:

• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T. Kiyosaki
• The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
• Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
• The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
• Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
• Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
• Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Must-Read Biographies and History Books

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World by Steve Brusatte
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Have we missed any must-read books? If so, leave a comment below to recommend some top books to read!

Want to Learn More?

• The 12 Best Books for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business
• How to Better Use What You Read in Books
• The 33 Best To Do List apps For Every Entrepreneur
• 11 Best Motivational Podcasts That Will Unleash Your Potential

The 200 Best Inspirational Business Quotes (2024)

Discover the top 200 business quotes to inspire success in 2024. Fuel your motivation and drive with timeless wisdom.

27 Hobby Ideas: Budget-Friendly & Fun To Try in 2024

Are you looking for hobby ideas that are fun and don't cost a pretty penny? Here are 27 that will leave you healthier a…

How To Make Money on YouTube: 9 Top Tips

Want to learn how to make money on YouTube? Good idea. YouTube offers tons of opportunities to convert views into cash—…

Oberlo uses cookies to provide necessary site functionality and improve your experience. By using our website, you agree to our privacy policy.

• Search Results

100 must-read classics, as chosen by our readers

They broke boundaries and challenged conceptions. We asked you for your must-read classics; from iconic bestsellers to lesser-known gems, these are your essential recommends. 

Everyone loves a  classic novel , but where to start? From  Jane Austen  to  Charles Dickens ,  Toni Morrison  to  Fyodor Dostoevsky , the fiction canon is so vast you can easily get lost in it.

So we asked our readers to tell us about their favourite classic books. The resulting list of must-reads is a perfect way to find inspiration to start your classics adventure. There's something for everyone, from family sagas and  dystopian fiction  to  romances  and historical fiction.

And if you enjoy this, you can also learn about our reader's favourite  books by female authors , most loved  children's books  and the  best memoirs  they've ever read.

You might also like...

How to read the longest classic books

Author, Henry Eliot, shares his tips on how to navigate some of the longest classic works and creative ways to find the time to see you through to the last page.

How to start building your classics collection

39 of the best literary and book podcasts for book lovers

The best short stories ever written

What's your favourite classic read? Let us know at  @penguinukbooks .

Books ranked in no particular order. Some answers have been edited for clarity and style.  

Image at top: Flynn Shore / Penguin

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our Privacy Policy

The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020

The fiction, nonfiction and poetry that deepened our understanding, ignited our curiosity and helped us escape —Andrew R. Chow, Eliana Dockterman, Mahita Gajanan, Annabel Gutterman, Suyin Haynes, Nate Hopper, Cady Lang and Lucas Wittmann

Actress by Anne Enright

The Address Book by Deirdre Mask

African American Poetry by Kevin Young (Editor)

Afterlife by Julia Alvarez

Agency by William Gibson

Begin Again by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Big Friendship by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour

A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Can't Even by Anne Helen Petersen

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

Cleanness by Garth Greenwell

Conditional Citizens by Laila Lalami

Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford

Culture Warlords by Talia Lavin

Days of Distraction by Alexandra Chang

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

The Dead Are Arising by Les Payne and Tamara Payne

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

The Dragons, the Giant, the Women by Wayétu Moore

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

The End of White Politics by Zerlina Maxwell

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Enter the Aardvark by Jessica Anthony

Followers by Megan Angelo

A Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker

His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie

Hitler by Volker Ullrich

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall

How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

I Don’t Want to Die Poor by Michael Arceneaux

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Laura van den Berg

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Intimations by Zadie Smith

Is Rape a Crime? by Michelle Bowdler

Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Just Us by Claudia Rankine

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Let’s Never Talk About This Again by Sara Faith Alterman

Luster by Raven Leilani

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

Memorial by Bryan Washington

Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

Nerve by Eva Holland

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han

Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford

Obit by Victoria Chang

Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide by Jia Lynn Yang

One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Open Book by Jessica Simpson

Party of Two by Jasmine Guillory

The Pink Line by Mark Gevisser

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

The Purpose of Power by Alicia Garza

Reaganland by Rick Perlstein

Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit

Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon

A Saint from Texas by Edmund White

Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan

She Come by It Natural by Sarah Smarsh

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

The Sword and the Shield by Peniel E. Joseph

To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Unfree Speech by Joshua Wong

Vanguard by Martha S. Jones

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

Wandering in Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins

Want by Lynn Steger Strong

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

Weather by Jenny Offill

Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda

Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui

Wow, No Thank You. by Samantha Irby

You Never Forget Your First by Alexis Coe

150 Glimpses of the Beatles by Craig Brown

Must reads: 50 best books of all time

Our edit of the best books to read is the perfect literary bucket list. from prize-winners to controversial classics that got everyone talking – these are must read books before you die. .

So many books, so little time. Many book lovers know the temptation of buying a beautiful new hardback, but what are the essential must reads? Spanning all genres and periods, our edit of the best books to read before you die is here to help.  

• Literary fiction books
• Classic books
• Sci-fi and fantasy books
• Non-fiction books
• Crime and thriller books
• Historical fiction books
• Books in translation
• Dystopian books

Literary books to read before you die

Shuggie bain, by douglas stuart.

Set in a poverty-stricken Glasgow in the early 1980s, Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning debut is a heartbreaking story which lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty and the limits of love. Agnes Bain has always dreamed of greater things, but when her husband abandons her she finds herself trapped in a decimated mining town with her three children, and descends deeper and deeper into drink. Her son Shuggie tries to help Agnes long after her other children have fled, but he too must abandon her to save himself. Shuggie is different, and he is picked on by the local children and condemned by adults. But he believes that if he tries his hardest he can escape this hopeless place.

White Noise

By don delillo.

Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life; a life that is going well enough, until a chemical spill from a train carriage releases an ‘Airborne Toxic Event’ and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear – his own mortality. The combination of social satire and metaphysical dilemma that Don DeLillo uses to expose our rampant consumerism and media saturation makes White Noise an unmissable work of modern fiction. 

American Psycho

By bret easton ellis.

One of the most controversial and talked-about novels in modern history, American Psycho is the story of Patrick Bateman, a New York City high-flier with a penchant for fine wines, slickly cut suits and brutal murder. As Bateman's obsession with his hedonistic passions comes to a head, he descends into madness, with macabre and darkly comedic repercussions. Read more about the controversial history of American Psycho .

Blood Meridian

By cormac mccarthy.

Written in 1985, Blood Meridian is set in the anarchic world opened up by America’s westward expansion. Through the hostile landscape of the Texas–Mexico border wanders the Kid, a fourteen year-old Tennessean who is quickly swept up in the relentless tide of blood. But the apparent chaos is not without its order: while Americans hunt Indians – collecting scalps as their bloody trophies – they too are stalked as prey. Powerful, mesmerizing and savagely beautiful, Blood Meridian is considered one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century.

The Line of Beauty

By alan hollinghurst.

This Booker Prize-winning novel bottles the essence of the 1980s, as the story follows a quest for beauty against a backdrop of politics, greed and friendships turned toxic. When twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy Feddens he is innocent of politics and money. But as he is swept up into the Feddens’ world, Nick must confront the collisions between his own desires, and a world he can never truly belong to. Alan Hollinghurst’s writing style is both stripped back and poetic, and its sensitivity makes this book a true standout. 

A Little Life

By hanya yanagihara.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and celebrated as ‘the great gay novel’ , Hanya Yanagihara’s immensely powerful story of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance has had a visceral impact on many a reader. Willem, Jude, Malcolm and JB meet at college in Massachusetts and form a firm friendship, moving to New York upon graduation. Over the years their friendships deepen and darken as they celebrate successes and face failures, but their greatest challenge is Jude himself – an increasingly broken man scarred by an unspeakable childhood. This is a book that will stay with you long after the last page.

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love. But when they both depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West, they are divided – Ifemelu heads for America, while Obinze plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. It takes fifteen years for them to be reunited again in a newly democratic Nigeria where their passion for their homeland – and each other – can finally blossom. A fearless, gripping novel that spans three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a must-read story of love and expectation set in a modern globalized world. 

The God of Small Things

By arundhati roy.

This Booker Prize-winning novel and 1990s literary sensation follows fraternal twins, Rahel and Estha, in the state of Kerala, India in 1969. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family. But when their English cousin and her mother arrive for a Christmas visit, the twins learn that things can change in a day. Covering themes of love, madness and hope, this story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet, readers will not be prepared for what lies at the heart of it. 

Don't Miss

The best literary fiction to read right now

Classic books to read before you die, pride and prejudice, by jane austen.

Named one of BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World, a copy of Pride and Prejudice is a worthy addition to any bookshelf. The story   shows how the headstrong Elizabeth Bennet and the aristocratic Mr Darcy must have their pride humbled and their prejudices dissolved before they can acknowledge their love for each other. Jane Austen serves up laughs, romance, sharp observations, life lessons and characters that still feel vividly alive today. A universally acknowledged classic.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

By arthur conan doyle.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes  is perhaps the greatest collection of detective stories ever written. From his residence at 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes solves a series of baffling and bizarre cases, including those of a man terrified by the arrival of an envelope containing orange pips, and a woman whose fiancé disappeared on his way to their wedding. Each story showcases the great detective's inimitable and extraordinary deductive powers, recounted to us by his faithful friend and colleague, Dr Watson.

Don Quixote

By miguel de cervantes.

Cervantes’s satirical observation of the human condition is classed as Europe’s first ‘modern’ novel and has sold over 500 million copies since it was first published in the early seventeenth-century. It follows Don Quixote and Sancho Panza – one of the original comedy duos – as they journey through sixteenth-century Spain in search of adventure. They face spirits, evil enchanters and giants in a quest to perform acts of valour worthy of Dulcinea, his lady love. Cervantes's words have made an impact across the globe with the book celebrating its 400th anniversary in 2005. 

David Copperfield

By charles dickens.

Partly modelled on Dickens’s own experiences,  David Copperfield  follows the eponymous hero from childhood struggles to a successful career as a novelist. Dickens' early scenes are particularly masterful, depicting the world as seen from the perspective of a fatherless small boy. David's idyllic life with his mother is then ruined when she marries again, this time to a domineering and cruel man. The great joy of this book lies in the outlandish cast of characters that Dickens vividly portrays in ways that will make you both laugh and cry. Dickens described David Copperfield as his ‘favourite child’ – and it is easy to see why. 

Wuthering Heights

By emily bronte.

A dark, haunting tale of passionate and destructive love, Wuthering Heights is one of the great romantic novels of the nineteenth century. Cathy and Heathcliff form an intense bond, but despite their love Cathy marries a rich suitor. But neither can forget the other, and while Cathy becomes increasingly unhappy, Heathcliff is driven by a lust for revenge that will echo through generations. Set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire moors, this is a dark novel with complicated characters who will hover doggedly in your thoughts long after the final page. 

The Great Gatsby

By f. scott fitzgerald.

Despite selling less than 20,000 copies in the first year of its publication,  The Great Gatsby  is now established as a literary classic. Gatsby lives mysteriously in a luxurious Long Island mansion, playing lavish host to hundreds of people. And yet no one seems to know him or how he became so rich. But Gatsby cares for one person alone – Daisy Buchanan. Little does he know that his infatuation will lead to tragedy and end in murder. A glittering but cynical portrait of the American Dream that beautifully captures the flamboyance and cruelty of America's Jazz Age, it is no wonder Fitzgerald’s novel has been adapted so many times.

Middlemarch

By george eliot.

A masterpiece of candid observation, emotional insight and transcending humour,  Middlemarch  is a truly monumental novel. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman set on filling her life with good deeds. She pursues the pompous Edward Casuabon, convinced that he embodies these principles, and becomes trapped in an unhappy marriage. Then there is Tertius Lydgate, an anguished progressive whose determination to bring modern medicine to the provinces is muddied by unrequited love. One of BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World, Middlemarch explores almost every subject of concern to modern life and so remains as culturally relevant today as it has ever been. 

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

By frederick douglass.

Portraying a key moment in the anti-slavery movement, this unique memoir tells the incredible story of a man's escape from enslavement and journey to freedom. Maryland, 1818. Frederick Douglass is born into a life of slavery. Spending his youth being passed from enslaver to enslaver, city to field, he is subjected to unimaginable cruelty. After eventually managing to escape, his memoir became hugely influential in the abolition of slavery, a goal that Douglass devoted his live to. In doing so, he has become one of the most celebrated political theorists in the world. 

Classic books to read at least once in your lifetime

Sci-fi and fantasy books to read before you die, children of time, by adrian tchaikovsky.

Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed novel  Children of Time , is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age – a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. Followed by Children of Ruin and Children of Memory , Adrian Tchaikovsky's space opera series is world-building at its finest. 

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

By douglas adams.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy  has been a radio show, TV show, stage play, comic book and film, and is and a work of utter comic genius by Douglas Adams. Since publication, it quickly became what can only be described as a phenomenon. A comedy sci-fi classic, this laugh-out-loud romp through space is the first of five books in the 'trilogy', and sees protagonist Arthur Dent narrowly escape the destruction of Earth by hitching a ride on a spaceship with his alien best friend Ford Prefect. And if nothing else, Arthur Dent will at least remind you to never forget a towel. 

War of the Worlds

By h. g. wells.

The inspiration for countless science fiction stories and novels, H. G. Wells’s classic is a must for any sci-fi fan’s bookshelf. Shooting stars tear across the night sky, then a gigantic artificial cylinder descends from Mars to land near London. Inquisitive locals gather round, only to be struck down by a murderous Heat-Ray. Can humanity survive this Martian onslaught? Written in semi-documentary style, the 1938 radio adaptation famously caused panic when listeners believed the fictional new bulletins were real. This novel about a terrifying alien invasion still grips readers to this day. 

Frankenstein

By mary shelley.

Mary Shelley's story of a man who creates a monster he cannot control was a precursor of modern science fiction and a must-read for any sci-fi fans wanting to understand the history of the genre. Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but wayward scientist, builds a human from dead flesh. Horrified at what he has done, he abandons his creation. The hideous creature learns language and becomes civilized but society rejects him. Spurned, he seeks vengeance on his creator. In 1831, Mary Shelley succumbed to conservative pressures and toned down elements of the work; this edition presents the work as originally intended.

by Colson Whitehead

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Colson Whitehead was inspired to write this apocalyptic sci-fi novel because of his teenage fascination with the work of Stephen King and Issac Asimov. A plague has ravaged the planet, and the population is divided into the living and the living dead. Mark Spitz is working on a task force to clear the infested from ‘Zone One’. He undertakes the mundane mission of malfunctioning zombie removal, the rigours of Post-Apocalypic Stress Disorder all while attempting to come to terms with a fallen world. But little does Mark Spitz know, things will quickly turn from bad to worse. 

by Frank Herbert

Before  The Matrix , before  Star Wars , before  Ender's Game  and  Neuromancer , there was  Dune –  widely considered one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever written. Melange, or 'spice', is the most valuable - and rarest - element in the universe. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world Arrakis. Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. And whoever controls the spice controls the universe. Against this backdrop, man as a political animal is laid completely bare and pertinent themes are explored, making Dune one of the epic sci-fi novels of the twentieth century. 

Stories of Your Life and Others

By ted chiang.

The debut collection from Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others features eight short stories exploring science fiction and the human experience, written in the author’s inimitable style. Each story explores a different world – from a flat Earth connected to the highs above by a soaring tower to alien worlds with unique concepts of reality – and the titular story which inspired the Academy-award-winning film Arrival , this collection is a fantastic introduction to the work of one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. 

The best new sci-fi books of 2023, and of all time

Non-fiction books to read before you die, by john carreyrou.

Bad Blood is the inside story of the astounding rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, a multibillion-dollar biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes. Brilliant Stanford dropout Holmes created a startup which promised to transform the medical industry. The company was valued at more than $9 billion, making Holmes herself a billionaire. But there was just one problem: the technology didn't work. This gripping true-life tale of corporate fraud has been made into an HBO series, The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried, and will later be adapted for the big screen. 

Empire of Pain

By patrick radden keefe.

Empire of Pain will leave your jaw gaping at the limitless potential of humankind – and not in a good way. Award-winning journalist Patrick Radden Keefe unpicks the story of the Sackler family, one of the richest families in the world whose greed and corruption led to a pandemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people. The book is full of bombshell revelations which will both make your blood boil and keep you turning the pages. Empire of Pain  is the story of a dynasty: a parable of twenty-first-century greed.

This is Going to Hurt

By adam kay.

Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, comedian and former junior doctor Adam Kay’s  This Is Going to Hurt  provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking by turns, these diaries are everything you wanted to know – and more than a few things you didn't – about life on and off the hospital ward. Now an award-winning multi-million copy bestseller, in 2022 This is Going to Hurt was adapted by the BBC into a TV series starring Ben Whishaw. What's more, you won't want to miss the audiobook , which is read by Adam himself and includes an expanded interview with comedian Mark Watson.

Black and British

By david olusoga.

In his award-winning book  Black and British , historian and broadcaster David Olusoga examines how black and white Britons have been intimately entwined for centuries. Drawing on new genetic and genealogical research, original records, expert testimony and contemporary interviews,  Black and British  shows how black British history is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation. This is a vital re-examination of a shared history that has hitherto been sidelined by our institutions. 

A Room of One's Own

By virginia woolf.

First published in 1929, this essay by Virginia Woolf is just as incisive and relevant today as when it was first delivered as a lecture at Cambridge University. Challenging the accepted thinking of the time, Woolf argues that women are not intrinsically lesser writers because of their gender, but because of the educational and economic restrictions placed on them by a patriarchal society. With the startling prose and poetic licence of a novelist, she makes a bid for freedom, emphasizing that the lack of an independent income, and the titular ‘room of one’s own’, prevents most women from reaching their full literary potential. 

A Brief History Of Time

By stephen hawking.

Was there a beginning of time? Could time run backwards? Is the universe infinite or does it have boundaries? These are just some of the questions considered in an internationally acclaimed masterpiece by one of the world's greatest thinkers. It begins by reviewing the great theories of the cosmos from Newton to Einstein, before delving into the secrets which still lie at the heart of space and time. To this day  A Brief History of Time  remains a staple of the scientific canon, and its succinct and clear language continues to introduce millions to the universe and its wonders.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

By dale carnegie.

Since its release in 1936,  How to Win Friends and Influence People  has sold more than 30 million copies. Millions of people around the world have improved their lives based on the teachings of Dale Carnegie. In  How to Win Friends and Influence People , he offers practical advice and techniques, in his exuberant and conversational style, for how to get out of a mental rut and make life more rewarding. A timeless bestseller, Dale Carnegie's first book is as relevant as ever before and will help you achieve your maximum potential in the complex and competitive modern age.

Unmissable non-fiction books for every type of reader

Crime and thriller books to read before you die, brighton rock, by graham greene.

Set among the seaside amusements and dilapidated boarding houses of Brighton’s pre-war underworld,  Brighton Rock  is both a gritty thriller and a study of a soul in torment. Pinkie Brown, a neurotic teenage gangster commits a brutal murder – but it does not go unnoticed. Rose, a naive young waitress at a rundown cafe, has the unwitting power to destroy his crucial alibi, and Ida Arnold, a woman bursting with easy certainties about what is right and wrong, has made it her mission to bring about justice and redemption. A classic of modern literature, it maps out the strange border between piety and savagery. 

Last Bus to Woodstock

By colin dexter.

Last Bus to Woodstock is the first novel in Colin Dexter's gripping Inspector Morse crime fiction series. The death of Sylvia Kaye figured dramatically in Thursday afternoon's edition of the Oxford Mail. By Friday evening Inspector Morse had informed the nation that the police were looking for a dangerous man – facing charges of wilful murder, sexual assault and rape. But as the obvious leads fade into twilight and darkness, Morse becomes more and more convinced that passion holds the key. This is the novel that began Colin Dexter's phenomenally successful series. 

by Gillian Flynn

This twisty psychological thriller became a phenomenon when it was published, selling over twenty million copies worldwide and being adapted into a hit film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. When Nick Dunne wakes up on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary to find his wife missing, he quickly becomes the police’s chief suspect. Amy’s friends reveal she was afraid of him, there are strange searches on his computer and persistent calls to his mobile phone, but Ben swears he knows nothing about any of this. So what really happened to Amy Dunne? 

Murder on the Orient Express

By agatha christie.

Agatha Christie belongs on any essential reading list, and Murder on the Orient Express is widely regarded as her most famous murder mystery. A train journey is delayed by thick snow. So when a passenger on the train is found murdered in his bed, it is the perfect opportunity for Agatha Christie's famous detective, Hercule Poirot, to prove his ability and solve the crime using the power of his brain. Now also a major motion picture, delve into the suspense, twists and turns of this story from the queen of mystery herself. 

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

By john le carré.

From one of our greatest storytellers, this enduring novel follows George Smiley – a troubled man on infinite compassion and also a single-mindedly ruthless adversary as a spy. A mole implanted decades ago by Moscow Centre has burrowed his way into the highest echelons of British Intelligence. His treachery has already blown some of its most vital operations and its best networks. It is clear that the double agent is one of its own kind.  Once identified, the traitor must be destroyed. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a modern classic in which John le Carré expertly creates a total vision of a secret world. 

Absolute Power

By david baldacci.

This conspiracy thriller imagines the dark heart of the White House, and an unsettling cover-up ordered by the president himself. In a heavily guarded mansion in the Virginian countryside, professional burglar and break-in artist, Luther Whitney, is trapped behind a one-way mirror. What he witnesses destroys his faith not only in justice, but all he holds dear. The book kicked off American crime giant David Baldacci’s career. Absolute Power is a powerful shot of exactly what he does best.

The best thriller books of 2023 and beyond

Historical fiction books to read before you die, burial rites, by hannah kent.

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, Burial Rites is a dark yet thrilling work of historical fiction. When a young woman is sentenced to death for murder in the remote wilds of Northern Iceland in 1829, a priest is given the task of proving her innocence and saving her life. With time running out, and the harsh Icelandic winter drawing ever near, will Agne’s secrets be uncovered and her life be spared? Based on a true story, with its sparse, atmospheric setting, and characters you feel like you can reach out and touch, Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites is an unputdownable must-read. 

The Pillars of the Earth

By ken follett.

Set in medieval England, this classic of historical fiction tells the story of a cathedral as it is being built, and the skill, ambition and chaos surrounding it. Ken Follett brings history to life through human stories, and this is his most popular book, introducing readers to the world of Kingsbridge , the city where the cathedral is constructed. An epic, spellbinding tale of ambition, anarchy, and absolute power set against the sprawling medieval canvas of twelfth-century England,  The Pillars of the Earth  is Ken Follett's historical masterpiece.

Discover all of Ken Follett's Kingsbridge novels, including new book The Armour of Light

By toni morrison.

This Pulitzer-prize winning novel is arguably the most iconic work of Toni Morrison, an essential and important voice of contemporary American literature. It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Morrison combines the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history in this enduring novel. 

Ross Poldark

By winston graham.

Ross Poldark  is the first novel in Winston Graham's hugely popular Poldark series , which has become a television phenomenon starring Aidan Turner. In the first book Ross Poldark, the eponymous hero, returns home to Cornwall, tired from a grim war in America. But the joyful homecoming he has anticipated turns sour, for his father is dead, his estate is derelict and the girl he loves is engaged to his cousin. Then, his sympathy for the destitute miners and farmers leads him to rescue an urchin girl –  an act which alters the course of his life. 

by Sebastian Faulks

Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. It is the story of Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman who arrives in Amiens in 1910. Over the course of the novel he suffers a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself.

The 50 best historical fiction books of all time

Books in translation to read before you die, before the coffee gets cold, by toshikazu kawaguchi.

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. But this opportunity is not without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . . Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful novel stole the hearts of readers the world over. Through it, we meet four visitors to the café and explore the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time?

Tao Te Ching

Lao Tzu's  Tao Te Ching  is the source of Zen Buddhism, and is probably the most broadly influential spiritual text in human history. According to legend, Lao Tzu left China at the age of eighty, saddened that men would not follow the path to natural goodness. At the border with Tibet, a guard asked him to record his teachings and the  Tao Te Ching  is what he wrote down before leaving. Lao Tzu's spirituality describes the Cosmos as a harmonious and generative organism, and it shows how the human is an integral part of that cosmos.

The Alchemist

By paulo coelho.

First published in Portuguese, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling over thirty million copies worldwide. The story follows Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who dreams of travelling the world in search of a worldly treasure as fabulous as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers, and from there into the Egyptian desert, where a fateful encounter with the alchemist awaits him. This is a magical fable about learning to listen to your heart, read the omens strewn along life's path and, above all follow your dreams.

by Shusaku Endo

When Father Rodrigues sets sail to Japan in the 1640s to help oppressed Christians and search for his missing former teacher, he discovers a land different to everything he’s ever known. Soon finding himself a victim of religious persecution, he’s forced to choose between his faith or the people he set out to save. A classic of its genre which caused major controversy when it was first published in 1967, Silence is an exploration of faith and suffering and a must-read for anyone with an interest in Japanese culture and history. 

Translated classics to add to your bucket list

Dystopian books to read before you die, station eleven, by emily st. john mandel.

One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage while performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America, and the world is never the same again. Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened. Emily St. John Mandel's carefully plotted time-slip narrative asks us big questions: if civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?

Nineteen Eighty-Four

By george orwell.

George Orwell ’s  Nineteen Eighty-Four  is one of the most famous and influential novels of the 20th century. The year is 1984. The country is impoverished and permanently at war, people are watched day and night by Big Brother and their every action and thought is controlled by the Thought Police. Winston Smith works in the department of propaganda, where his job is to rewrite the past. Spurred by his longing to escape, Winston rebels. This terrifying dystopia, which he created in a time of great social and political unrest, remains acutely relevant and influential to this day.

The City & The City

By china miéville.

A mind-bending tale of two cities that exist alongside each other in the same time and space, this book has won numerous awards. When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. China Miéville combines crime fiction with the metaphysical in this strange and gripping tale of murder and conspiracy.

The Handmaid's Tale

By margaret atwood.

This novel has become a cultural byword for all things dystopian. The book is set in the fictional Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian state in what was formerly known as the United States. In an age of declining birth rates, Offred, along with her fellow Handmaids, are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Yet even a repressive state cannot eradicate hope and desire. Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing,  The Handmaid's Tale  is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force. If you already love The Handmaid's Tale , discover what to read next with this tailored list. 

Never Let Me Go

By kazuo ishiguro.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2005, Never Let Me Go breaks the boundaries of the literary novel. Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Kazuo Ishiguro beautifully paints a story of love, friendship and memory, charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

The best dystopian novels of all time

You may also like, the 50 best fiction books of all time, 13 classic european novels to add to your reading list, our all-time favourite booker prize-winning and nominated novels.

We earn a commission for products purchased through some links in this article.

The top 10 books to read in your lifetime

From To Kill A Mockingbird to Wuthering Heights , these are the all-time literary classics everyone should have on their reading list

It seems as if every week – and especially at the start of a new year – there's another 'must read' hitting shelves, making it harder than ever to keep up with the zeitgeist when it comes to your personal book list. But while there are many, many novels out there to enjoy, some are considered arguably greater or more important than others – whether for their excellent prose, thought-provoking storylines or the boundaries they broke at the time of publishing. However much or little you like to dip into the pages of a novel, there are some books everyone should consider reading at least once in their life.

For more reading inspiration, see our guide to the best modern love stories , the ultimate thrillers , and our edit of uplifting memoirs and autobiographies to educate and inspire.

Harper Lee, 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

Harper Lee's classic tale set in 1930s Alabama is perhaps the seminal text on racial tensions in the Deep South. The story follows the white lawyer Atticus Finch as he attempts to save the life of Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. The innocence of the narrator – Finch's six-year-old daughter, Scout – only serves to highlight the unfairness and incomprehensibility of the situation. A true American classic, To Kill A Mockingbird approaches the thorny issue of racism in the USA with humour, warmth and compassion, making it widely recognised as one of the greatest books of the twentieth century. Lee published a follow-up novel in 2015, Go Set A Watchman , which is set in the 1950s and shows the progression of the characters two decades on. It not only confirms the brilliance of To Kill A Mockingbird , but adds new context and meaning to the classic.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Great Gatsby'

Short but oh-so-sweet, F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece has become synonymous with the Roaring Twenties and the death of the so-called American Dream. A modern tragedy, it charts the fall of Jay Gatsby, a newly minted millionaire, as he attempts to win back the love of his former sweetheart Daisy Buchanan, now married to another wealthy man. In his obsessive quest for wealth and status, as symbolised by Daisy, he neglects to see her true nature – which ultimately causes his downfall. Ironically, The Great Gatsby was not as much of a success as Fitzgerald's previous novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned . It was only posthumously that the book rose to prominence, and was even distributed freely amongst WWII American troops overseas to boost cultural morale. These days, it's regarded as Fitzgerland's magnum opus.

Emily Brontë, 'Wuthering Heights'

No reading list would be complete without Emily Brontë's gothic romance, Wuthering Heights . Written in 1847 as a reaction to the popular romantic fiction of Jane Austen, it is an altogether darker and more complicated tale, set within a frame narrative and spanning two generations. Featuring some of the most beautiful prose in the English canon, it describes the destructive relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling, amid the wild and feral atmosphere of the Yorkshire moors. Emily Brontë's sole published work, this evokes the violence of doomed romance and the creeping darkness of vengeance like no other novel.

Margaret Atwood, 'The Handmaid's Tale'

Set in a dystopian future, The Handmaid's Tale – now a major TV series – imagines a world in which an environmental catastrophe has led to the majority of the female population becoming infertile. When a fundamentalist religious group seizes control of what was once the USA, fertile women are rounded up and trained to be silent, nameless 'handmaids', forced to procreate with the men in power. An important feminist text, Margaret Atwood's novel explores the consequences of a reversal of women's rights. Atwood herself has said that when writing The Handmaid's Tale , she was scrupulous about including nothing that did not have a historical antecedent or a modern point of reference, making this much darker – and more horrifyingly real – than any other piece of science fiction.

Chinua Achebe, 'Things Fall Apart'

Okonkwo is the greatest wrestler and warrior alive, and is famous throughout West Africa – but when he accidentally kills a clansman, his life begins to unravel. Okonkwo is exiled, and when he returns, he finds missionaries and colonial governors have arrived in his village. First published in 1958, Nigerian-born Chinua Achebe's novel reshaped both African and world literature, and has gone on to sell over 10 million copies in forty-five languages. If you love it as much as we do, you'll be glad to know it's part of a trilogy: two novels ( Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease ) follow on, chronicling the fate of this African community.

George Orwell, '1984'

Perhaps the most brilliant ever dystopian depiction of a totalitarian society, 1984 is as much a historical and cultural polemic as it is an absorbing thriller. Words from the novel have permeated our commonplace lexicon ('doublethink' and 'Big Brother' among them) and the book continues to be influential today. As the critic and author Jonathan Freedland wrote about 1984 , "it has become a shorthand for... the surveillance state, for the power of the mass media to manipulate public opinion, history and even the truth". A book that encompasses freedom, betrayal and the power of protest, it's a cornerstone of British literature.

Jane Austen, 'Pride and Prejudice'

Austen’s most famous novel – and arguably one of the most famous ever written in the English language – manages to be at once witty, wry, modern and timeless. Focused on the courtship of Elizabeth Bennet (one of the great feminist heroes of literature) and Fitzwilliam Darcy, this is much more than just a traditional love story, and is chock-full of laugh-out-loud characters, playfulness and irony. A great introduction to Austen, if you like this, we'd recommend Persuasion , another classic featuring a strong heroine.

Toni Morrison, 'Beloved'

Part ghost story, part profound reflection on the evils of slavery, this Pulitzer-winning novel is American writer Morrison's crowning achievement. Dedicated to the ‘Sixty Million and more’ Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, the novel is set in the mid-1800s, in the aftermath of the American Civil War. It tells the story of Sethe, abandoned by her sons and living with her youngest daughter in Cincinnati, traumatised by memories of her past life as a slave at Sweet Home in Kentucky. When another Sweet Home survivor appears at her door, it heralds the arrival of another: a mysterious woman, calling herself 'Beloved'. An astonishing feat of storytelling, Beloved interweaves ideas of motherhood, family, folklore and community with the horrors of history.

J.D. Salinger, 'The Catcher in the Rye'

A witty and wise coming-of-age story, The Catcher in the Rye is a true timeless classic. It's Christmas and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school. He floats around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters, always thinking of his younger sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him. An elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the need for connection and the bewilderment of adolescence, this story is as relevant today as it was when it was first published in the 1950s.

Charles Dickens, 'Great Expectations'

An orphaned child with little or no prospects, Pip expects very little from life. But Pip's narrow existence is blown apart when he finds an escaped criminal, is summoned to visit a mysterious old woman and meets the icy beauty, Estella. Most astoundingly of all, an anonymous person gives him money to begin a new life in London. Credited by some with inventing the detective novel and one of the most popular novelists of his day, Dickens remains one of the best-loved writers in the English language – if you're going to read any of his works, make it Great Expectations . If it gives you a taste for the author, we'd also recommend Oliver Twist , A Tale of Two Cities , and David Copperfield ; the latter has recently reworked by Women's Prize for Fiction winner, Barbara Kingsolver .

6 unconventional films about female friendship

10 horror films to watch this Halloween

Pippa Bennett-Warner on her new BBC show

How to cook low-calorie comfort food

Why you need to watch Dumplin’

10 must-see coming-of-age movies

9 tips for decorating a small space

'Game of Thrones' character transformations

Meet Jessica Mulroney, Meghan Markle's best friend

Fortnum & Mason has launched a gin and tonic tea

You can now make your very own Prosecco

The Best Books of 2022

Each week, our editors and critics recommend the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Find our essential reads of 2022 below, or  check out our latest reviews .

The Essentials

Fiction & poetry.

The Nobel Prize winner’s most recent novel is a sweeping origin story of modern Tanzania, and a love story between two young runaways. Their search for a place in the world unfolds against the monumental absurdities of empire, focussing on the East African campaign of 1914-18 and the societies it violently remade. Afiya is an orphan, whose brother leaves her with abusive caregivers to fight for Germany’s Schutztruppe. Hamza, an escaped servant, also joins troops serving the German Empire, entering a brutal brawl for the continent at a time when “every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at least on a map: British East Africa, Deutsch-Ostafrika, África Oriental Portuguesa, Congo Belge.” The book interrogates the costs and rewards of the war’s circumstantial solidarities. For everyone, a longing for closeness is bedevilled by old shames and secrets.

When you make a purchase using a link on this page, we may receive a commission. Thank you for supporting  The New Yorker .

An Immense World

This book is filled with strange creatures and strange experiments; Yong is interested in what animals perceive, what they might communicate to us if they could. Humans see the world one way. Other species see it through very different eyes, and many don’t see it at all. Attempting to exchange one world view—or, to use the term Yong favors, Umwelt —for another may be frustrating, but, he argues, that’s what makes the effort worthwhile. It reminds us that, “for all our vaunted intelligence,” our Umwelt is just one among millions. Some species of scallop, for instance, have dozens of eyes; others have hundreds. We can learn a lot from the methods that animals use to sense their surroundings. And doing so can be, for us, mind-expanding.

Bad Mexicans

The nickname malos Mexicanos , translated in the title of this captivating history, is what the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz called the followers of the radical Ricardo Flores Magón, who, in 1911, helped depose him. The author, a U.C.L.A. historian and a MacArthur Fellow, writes that Magón and his band of magonistas “changed the course of history both north and south of the border.” She shows how their revolution fundamentally transformed the United States, as more than a million Mexicans migrated north. Although few Americans know about the event or the people behind it, Lytle Hernández argues powerfully that “you cannot understand U.S. history without Mexico and Mexicans.”

The Book of Goose

This novel dissects the intense friendship between two thirteen-year-olds, Agnès and Fabienne, in postwar rural France. Believing themselves “old enough for everything,” they stave off boredom with increasingly elaborate schemes. Fabienne begins dictating morbid tales to Agnès, and then engineers their publication under Agnès’s name. Agnès is celebrated as a child prodigy and her life assumes a new trajectory. The story unfolds in retrospect, after Agnès, now twenty-seven and living in Pennsylvania, learns of Fabienne’s death. Her recollections of their friendship and her brush with unearned fame have an ethereal tone, punctuated with sharp descriptions of adolescent convictions.

The Books of Jacob

The Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk’s epic novel follows the exploits of an eighteenth-century messianic religious leader as he travels through the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, continually reinventing himself. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

Checkout 19

A coming-of-age story in which no one comes of age, this novel is deliberate in its construction and yet aggressively resistant to definition. Dissected, it yields a conventional enough story: that of an intelligent working-class girl, in southwest England, who is encouraged to write by one of her teachers. For good and for ill, she both clings to and disowns her life. But Bennett is interested not in the shape of a life but in its substance: the prized darkness at the center of the human mind, the place where whatever is really real about us resides.

Chilean Poet

This charming novel follows Gonzalo, an aspiring poet, from his teen-age sonnets and sexual escapades to his relationship with a girlfriend, Carla, and her son, whom Gonzalo adopts as his stepson. (Gonzalo notes the unfortunate resonance between the Spanish for stepfather, padrastro , and poetastro , bad poet.) The stepson, Vicente, also wants to be a poet, and the second half of the novel sends up the Chilean literary scene as he guides a gringa journalist through a country where poetry is a national passion. As one character says, “Being a Chilean poet is like being a Peruvian chef or a Brazilian soccer player or a Venezuelan model.”

Constructing a Nervous System

In this follow-up to “Negroland,” Jefferson merges memoir and criticism. Drawing on material as disparate as Henry James, “The Wire,” “Othello,” and Black spirituals, she narrates moments of her life as they unfold in relation to “avatars,” models against which she conducts an “identity experiment.” “I must break myself into pieces,” she explains, “then rebuild.” Thus Ella Fitzgerald’s stage presence gestures toward a “black female destiny” of “scrutiny and our pity,” which a young Jefferson works to avoid; that of Josephine Baker demonstrates a way of embodying the influences of her predecessors. “Great soloists never perform entirely alone,” Jefferson writes, and the same is true of her.

Books & Fiction

Book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature, twice a week.

Continuous Creation

This final collection by the great Australian poet, who died in 2019, encompasses archness, reserve, lament, and tenderness. Murray’s reflections on political and social subjects, including Brexit, bushfires, and his country’s neglect of literature, swing from the charmingly reserved to the jarringly detached. His nature poetry is more charged: there are poems about pippies, green catbirds, Australian pelicans, and a weebill caught in the grille of Murray’s car. The earth’s physical landscape—especially that of rural Australia, one of Murray’s lifelong preoccupations—is rendered with extraordinary, often strange, beauty. Swallows in flight are “whipping over glass”; a willow tree is “jammed / with soft white pearl-shell // a cascade of faces / down tiers and staircases / becoming a shatter.”

Sharif was born in Turkey to Iranian parents, and the title of this collection evokes the extended “if” of someone enmeshed in the sadistic bureaucracy of American immigration. Facing a customs officer, the writer finds redress in knowing that her enemy “will be in a poem / where the argument will be // anti-American”—an insurrection that occurs only in the mind. Sharif’s collection imagines how a poet’s well-chosen lines might reject the arbitrary lines set by someone else’s customs. In these poems, the ostensible clarity of borders and checkpoints gives way to a terrain of fundamental uncertainty, a geography of elusive thresholds.

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

In this crisply written, prodigiously researched, and frequently astonishing new biography, Gage explains how Hoover maintained his image as an old-school embodiment of law and order for most of his long tenure as director of the F.B.I. Hoover was born on January 1, 1895, in Washington, D.C., the city in which he would always live. Hired at the Department of Justice in 1917, he hunkered down and never left. For a very long time, most Americans admired Hoover. But from the Palmer Raids to COINTELPRO , he was never able to understand movements aimed at expanding social or racial or gender equality as anything other than criminal conspiracies. “Hoover did as much as any individual in government to contain and cripple movements seeking social justice,” Gage writes, “and thus to limit the forms of democracy and governance that might have been possible.”

Getting Lost

Ernaux’s 1991 best-seller “Simple Passion,” a short narrative of her affair with A., as she calls her lover, conveyed the force with which desire can render the rest of life—the rest of the self—instantly void. A decade later, Ernaux did something surprising and published excerpts of the diary she had kept during the affair, which was released in the U.S. in September. Here is the sex and the torture of the waiting, unspooled in all its real-time wretchedness. Now called by his true initial, S., her lover turns out to be a thirty-five-year-old Soviet apparatchik whom the forty-eight-year-old Ernaux met on a writer’s junket to the U.S.S.R. The diary depicts the friction between her finely developed mind and the tyrannical demands of her body, and the gulf between her devotion to her lover and her awareness of his obvious mediocrity.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

Short-listed for the National Book Award, Kochai’s inventive début story collection details the toll that decades of war and the struggles of immigration have taken on Afghans and the Afghan diaspora in the United States. Several entries, including the title story , first appeared in the magazine.

The Invisible Kingdom

Delicately weaving her research on chronic illness with her personal experience of navigating an autoimmune disease, O’Rourke probes our understanding of what it means to be sick, asking us to reëxamine our tidy narratives of disease and reimagine our approaches to treatment. The book grew out of O’Rourke’s piece “ What’s Wrong with Me? ,” which ran in the magazine in 2013.

The Last White Man

In Hamid’s fifth novel, a white man wakes one morning to find that his skin has turned dark overnight, forcing him to question his sense of identity and his place in his family and city. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

McEwan’s latest novel tracks one man’s search for meaning in his relationships and in art, as his path intersects with historical events from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the COVID -19 pandemic. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

Magnificent Rebels

A buoyant work of intellectual history, Wulf’s chronicle of the early Romantics—which includes figures like the Schlegel brothers (August Wilhelm and Friedrich), and their partners, Caroline and Dorothea—is written as what was once termed the “higher gossip.” It concerns a period, in the late seventeen-nineties and early eighteen hundreds, when Jena, a small university town in Saxony, became home to a literary cenacle of men and women who “placed the self at the centre stage of their thinking.” They believed in free love and self-expression—although the women’s contributions were typically credited to the men in their lives. A steady and ominous undertone to all the cogitation and copulation is the rise of Napoleon from the ashes of the 1789 revolution in France to a conclusive military blow against the Germans that was also centered in the town: the Battle of Jena.

The Rabbit Hutch

Although there are actual rabbits in this ambitious novel, the “Hutch” of the title is the name given to an affordable-housing complex by its residents, in a post-industrial Indiana town. Gunty zooms in and out of the apartments, pushing the lives inside toward a forceful and violent climax; her central character is a gifted though troubled teen who grew up with foster families, has dropped out of high school, and calls herself Blandine. (Obsessed with female medieval mystics, she takes the name of a French martyr.) Despite offering a dissection of contemporary urban blight, the novel doesn’t let social concerns crowd out the individuality of its characters, and Blandine’s off-kilter brilliance is central to the achievement.

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

Born in 1722, the son of a Boston businessman, Samuel Adams studied at Harvard, worked for a while in the family malt business, and came into his own when, in the late seventeen-forties, he began to stand for local office. In detailing how Adams went on to shape every significant event in New England’s run-up to war, this biography weaves a pleasing tapestry of incident and inference. Schiff notes Adams’s uncanny ability to use the media for catalyzing public opinion and depicts him as a virtuoso of the eighteenth-century version of viral memes and fake news. The result is a wildly entertaining exploration of the roots of American political theatre.

The Song of the Cell

In an account that’s both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human understanding: from the seventeenth-century discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes. The book draws from “The Promise and Price of Cellular Therapies,” which originally appeared in the magazine in 2019.

In this intricate and heart-rending memoir, Hsu, a staff writer, tells the story of his college friendship with Ken. Both Asian American but from different backgrounds, they formed a bond that was cut short when Ken was murdered. Hsu describes his struggle to accept Ken’s death and also his friend’s lasting influence on his thinking. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

Strangers to Ourselves

Aviv, a staff writer, offers a groundbreaking exploration of mental illness and the mind, through a series of portraits that illuminate the connections between identity and diagnosis. Aviv’s original reporting , about the challenges of taking psychiatric drugs, first appeared in the magazine, in 2019.

This novel in four parts opens with a narrative about a mysterious Wall Street tycoon and his wife: “Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise.” Ending abruptly, this tale is followed by a fragmentary memoir of the same narrative events, but it contains important, disorienting factual differences. In the third section, the pieces start to connect, thanks to a new narrator—a plucky Brooklyn woman hired as a ghostwriter by the memoir’s author. Diaz cleverly weaves the disparate strands together while showing how our shifting perception of the story relates to wealth’s ability to “bend and align reality” to its own motives.

We Don’t Know Ourselves

This personal history of modern Ireland shows that history is a critical process in which eras helplessly recruit the agents of their own undoing. O’Toole’s book beautifully recounts the private story of his childhood and youth, while analyzing Ireland’s shameful, sometimes surreal postwar history. It pulses with righteous anticlericalism, and at its heart lies an eloquent outrage at what amounted to a vast religious penal colony. (In the mother-and-baby homes run by Catholic nuns, for instance, the newborn children of unmarried women were put up for adoption or neglected unto death.) O’Toole’s great gift is his extremely intelligent, mortally relentless critical examination, and here he details the past and the present of his own nation with episodes so pungent that reading the book is like reading a great tragicomic Irish novel.

Also Recommended

The Individualists

Zwolinski, a philosopher at the University of San Diego, and Tomasi, a political theorist at Brown, are committed libertarians who are appalled at the movement’s turn toward a harder-edged conservatism. Their book is a deep plunge into the ideology’s archives, in search of a “primordial libertarianism” that preceded the Cold War. They contend that the profound skepticism toward government and the political absolutism that characterize libertarians have animated movements across the political spectrum, and have, in the past, sometimes led adherents in progressive directions rather than conservative ones. As they see it, libertarianism once had a left-of-center valence—one that could still be reclaimed.

Western Lane

When three adolescent sisters in an Indian immigrant family in England lose their mother unexpectedly, in this début novel, their father, unable to process his grief, hopes that playing squash will provide his daughters with structure. “What he saw was the days stretching ahead of him without Ma, with us,” Gopi, the youngest, and the most talented player, observes. “All I could do was serve and volley or disappoint him.” The family is isolated, but a tournament provides a means for Gopi to connect with her father and transcend limitations. “A clean hit can stop time,” Gopi says. “Sometimes it can feel like the only peace there is.”

Young Bloomsbury

This lively group biography offers an intimate glimpse of the Bright Young Things, the artistic coterie that emerged in the nineteen-twenties as successors to the prewar Bloomsburyites. Members included Eddy Sackville-West, a novelist and cousin of Virginia Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West, and John Strachey, a journalist and cousin of Lytton Strachey. The author, herself a member of the Strachey clan, sees “transgressive sociability” as a hallmark of this generation, whose members were proto-“social influencers” and moved “seamlessly between gallery, studio, and nightclub.” She applauds the group’s embrace of sexual freedom, which gave queer members a sense of “life-affirming normality in a generally hostile adult world” and fostered “an inclusive way of living not seen again for another century.”

Opening in 1866 in New York with the arrival from Germany of Lazarus Morgenthau, a Bavarian Jew who’d lost a cigar empire to American tariffs, this book traces the ups and downs (but mostly ups) of the family’s fortunes over four generations, providing a window on a century and a half of the city’s history. Lazarus’s son Henry was a lawyer, a real-estate baron, and a diplomat, whose son Henry, Jr., served Franklin Roosevelt as Treasury Secretary;  his  son, Robert, was the city’s longest-serving District Attorney, who oversaw some three million cases. There’s enough here for four separate biographies, but Meier ably synthesizes the various strands, finding family likenesses among his disparate subjects.

My Phantoms

This short, savage novel depicts the sins of inadequate mothers and fathers with vengeful clarity. Bridget, the narrator, is a young, bookish woman who’s living in London and struggling to gain independence from her long-separated parents. Her father is a cruel boor, her mother is a damaged fool. Riley’s prose is confidently exact; with a few words, she can paint a dreary English January, a cramped Glasgow flat, or some breathtaking desolation. “I didn’t, as a rule, talk to her about anything that mattered to me,” Bridget says of her mother. “Why upset her by talking about things she couldn’t understand or enjoy?” With a quick eye for details, Riley renders a middle England full of petit-bourgeois anxieties and wounded people desperate to be normal, laying bare the dynamics of damage and survival.

City of Newsmen

McGarr, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, weighs the performance of the Washington press corps during the first decades of the Cold War, employing a close examination of archived correspondence to show that reporters in the nation’s capital knew perfectly well that officials were misleading them about national-security matters. McGarr believes that the press kept mum because they believed in what they saw as the central mission of Cold War policy: the defense of the North Atlantic community of nations. Even though newspapers were nominally in competition with one another, she writes, reporters and editors were subject to what she calls “horizontal pressure”—pressure to remain on good terms with their sources and their fellow-newsmen. The work of a thoughtful historian, “City of Newsmen” contemplates the relationship between government officials and the media by considering their societal role against the backdrop of a historical moment.

Cursed Bunny

The ten disquieting, bloody tales in this collection conjure a pitiless, almost folkloric world. A bunny-shaped lamp acts as a “cursed fetish” that extinguishes generations of a family and their misbegotten liquor empire; a woman who cannot find a father for her suddenly growing fetus is condemned to birth a “slightly iron-smelling, enormous blood clot.” In Chung’s universe of inventive horrors, brutality is endemic, and yet lyricism finds its place—in, for instance, a woman who is “transformed into thousands of water droplets and scattered into thin air,” or in the eye of a slain monster which is “shockingly deep and clear, and cruel.”

How Far the Light Reaches

Marine biology, cultural criticism, and memoir blend in this agile collection of essays, which brims with illuminating connections: between a potentially immortal jellyfish that is “always reinventing itself” and Imbler’s own sense of metamorphosis as a queer, biracial person; between the sand striker, an “ambush predator,” and a man who took advantage of Imbler during adolescence; between Imbler’s mother and an octopus species that starves to death while brooding eggs. Like the cuttlefish, which can change appearance “in a fraction of a second,” the book has a protean quality, and the way Imbler pays attention to animals living “an alternative way of life” without excessively anthropomorphizing them starts to seem like an ethical act.

Of Boys and Men

A British American scholar of inequality and social mobility, Reeves argues that the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn have left men bereft of what one sociologist has called "“ontological security.”" In Reeves’' view, men’s struggles are not reducible to a masculinity that is too toxic or too enfeebled but, rather, reflect the workings of the same structural forces that apply to every other group. A self-described “conscientious objector in the culture wars,” he aims to skip past moralizing and analyze men in the state that he finds them: beset by bewildering changes that they cannot adapt to. “Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls,” he contends.

Quilter’s memoir of conceiving a child through I.V.F. provides a history of the treatment and a sharp interrogation of her experiences. Recalling that she came to I.V.F. “driven by grief and fear and desire to take a course of action that is hard enough to endure, let alone question at the same time,” she asks how much of the yearning for a child is personal and how much is historically and culturally conditioned. How do we rethink reproductive technologies so that they don’t reproduce conservative ideas of motherhood, class, and race? Quilter notes that I.V.F. “anticipates the general tone of motherhood before you are even pregnant because it anticipates, even mimics, the notion of justified pain.”

The Lion House

Centering on the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent, which sparked the Ottoman Empire’s vast expansion in the sixteenth century, this tightly woven history depicts a Machiavellian world in which Ottoman and European leaders bargained ruthlessly over land, ships, and people. With cinematic sweep and a dash of humor, de Bellaigue tracks fast-flowing shifts of power among the ambitious: illegitimate sons become diplomats, foreign consorts are crowned queens, pirates turn pashas, and slaves are promoted to grand viziers. De Bellaigue is alert to a fragility inherent in empires, where even the most influential ministers have “power to enact the will of God or violate it” only while royal favor lasts.

This Afterlife

In this volume of selected and uncollected poems, Stallings’s formal ingenuity lends a music to her philosophically and narratively compelling verse. She draws inspiration from daily domestic life and from the mythology and history of Greece, where she resides, crafting clever yet profound meditations on love, motherhood, language, and time. A particular pleasure is seeing certain personae—Persephone, Daphne, and Alice (of Wonderland)—recur throughout, accompanied by ever-deepening resonances. “Song for the Women Poets” ends, “And part of you leaves Tartarus, / But part stays there to dwell— / You who are both Orpheus / And She he left in Hell.”

A Private Spy

In a new volume of his letters gathered by his son Tim Cornwell, the novelist John le Carré writes to an eclectic array of recipients: John Cheever, Ralph Fiennes, the president of an English book club in Siberia, the host of Desert Island Discs, and the former London station chief of the K.G.B. The correspondence that makes up “A Private Spy” is capacious in theme, but a steady through line is work. These are, for all intents and purposes, business letters. Even the personal ones are mostly to do with his career. That le Carré held the concept of vocation—of a job that could become a container for the self—with a certain degree of sacredness is suggested in the considered and empathetic way he doles out job advice. A career in fiction writing enabled him to avoid many of the moral compromises that plagued his characters, but he did not flaunt his good fortune. His letters reveal that he knew what he had achieved was unlikely and that such lifeboats are in short supply.

Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion

Set in Corona, Queens, in the nineteen-eighties, this novel is an ode to adolescence in the vein of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”—a book that young Razia, a first-generation Pakistani American, reads early in the story. As Razia strains against the restrictions imposed by her Muslim family, Rehman ably evokes the period—the  AIDS  epidemic, the deficiencies of the 7 train—and the texture of life in a jumble of immigrant communities. Once Razia’s peers start being married off, she comes to question her faith: “We were groomed like Christmas trees, thinking we were in the beautiful woods, thinking we were growing, but we were just being readied to be cut down.”

This quartet of novels, three of them previously untranslated, are a classic of Spanish postwar literature often compared to the works of Proust and Joyce. The first three parts form a Künstelerroman whose protagonist, Raúl, emerges as the ostensible author of the fourth part. As he urges himself to go “from literal transposition to the displacement and transmutation of narrative material,” we see him fictionalize events from the preceding volumes. In pages-long sentences, Goytisolo’s characters expound on the book’s true subjects: Barcelona and the tumult of the Franco years. The city’s streets, Goytisolo writes, “had not found and perhaps would never find a faithful chronicler for their grandeur and their misery.”

Dinner with Joseph Johnson

From the seventeen-seventies until 1809, Johnson, a London publisher and bookseller, held a weekly dinner above his shop. Guests, many of whom he published, included such luminaries as Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, William Cowper, and Joseph Priestley. As this history shows, Johnson supported his writers in myriad invaluable ways: he gave houseroom to Wollstonecraft when she had nowhere else to go, and he may have secured Paine’s release when he was jailed following the publication of “Rights of Man.” But Johnson’s greatest service to literature may have been the community he forged—“connected by a web that spun outwards from Johnson’s house through the medium of paper.”

The Mountain in the Sea

In the near future, at a touristy dive spot off the coast of Con Dao, in Vietnam, a species of extra-intelligent octopuses captures a young diver. The event piques the interest of an ambitious researcher, and soon it becomes clear that the cephalopods, who have a culture and a language of their own, are a violent spawn of the Anthropocene. Nayler moves through his packed plot briskly and often lyrically, pausing on images of animals sparring like children and drones with thoraxes resembling those of dragonflies. He punctuates scenes with the researcher’s philosophical insights about interspecies meaning-making and the risks and rewards of cross-cultural communication.

Sybil & Cyril

This joint biography of the modernist linocut artists Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power is a riveting tale of art and love between the wars. The two first met in Suffolk, England, around 1919, when he was a married father of four and she was an aspiring watercolorist. Their relationship endured for decades, taking them to London, where their experiments with linocutting—a technique Uglow praises for its “radical simplicity”—commenced. What began as a sideline would prove to be the medium through which they realized their shared goal of creating an “art of to-day” that communicated the ethos of modernity. Power’s stark, surreal images of London life, Uglow writes, captured the era’s “unease,” while Andrews’s visceral prints of the human form in motion marked a “rebellion” against Victorian prettiness.

American Caliph

In March, 1977, a Black Muslim organization, the Hanafis, seized three buildings in Washington, D.C., taking more than a hundred hostages. Their leader, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, had two demands: that he be allowed to “carry out Allah’s justice” on Nation of Islam members who killed his family, and that a bio-pic of the Prophet Muhammad be banned. This history adeptly weaves together narratives of the hostage negotiations, of feuding American Islamic groups, and of Khaalis’s life, which was shaped by race, theology, and the faulty “machinery of American justice.” Mufti observes, “Khaalis may have been acting under the Islamic title ‘khalifa,’ but he, and his actions, were, above all, American.”

Slouching Towards Utopia

This economic history takes up the period from 1870 to 2010—what its author calls the “long twentieth century”—and examines why, despite the vast wealth generated during that time, problems such as climate change and inequality persist. DeLong, an economics professor, searches for explanations in the work of the period’s major political and economic theorists, such as Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, tracing their ideas’ intellectual and practical legacies. If our ancestors could see this era, he imagines, they might marvel at humanity’s “technological and organizational powers,” but they’d also wonder why we have “done so little to build a truly human world, to approach within sight of any of our utopias.”

Visual Thinking

For decades, Grandin has built a career describing her experience as a thinker on the autism spectrum and advocating for the importance of putting unique perceptual gifts to good use. “Visual Thinking” makes a further case for the value of neurodiversity, contending that word-centric people have taken over the world, dominating boardrooms, newsrooms, legislatures and schools, resulting in a crisis in American ingenuity. “Imagine a world with no artists, industrial designers, or inventors,” Grandin writes. “No electricians, mechanics, architects, plumbers, or builders. These are our visual thinkers, many hiding in plain sight.” She builds upon her previous work, proposing the existence of a continuum of thought styles, each with its own advantages. “Most people don’t fully comprehend the way their mind works,” Grandin writes. But with striking concreteness, the author describes what appears to be going on in her head, and, quite possibly, yours.

Confidence Man

The Times reporter Maggie Haberman has been one of the most shrewd and consistent chroniclers of Donald Trump’s political career. In her journalism, she has honed a stable interpretation of Trump, evoking not a strongman but a showman, an egomaniac with shrewd instincts and bad opinions. In “ Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America ,” she mounts a similar argument. The book presents Trump as a bullshit artist whose grand theme is his own greatness. “Confidence Man,” which synthesizes years of reporting on Trump and his milieu, is among the first accounts of Trump’s Presidency to seriously consider its subject’s backstory, how he sprang from the overlapping scenes of New York real estate, city government, and media celebrity. The book’s thesis— Trump’s gonna Trump —is pointedly unglamorous, in keeping with Haberman’s deflationary assessments of Trump’s character.

The Easy Life

“La Vie Tranquille” (1944), Duras’s second novel—translated into English as “ The Easy Life ”—is a coming-of-age story that dwells on what a young woman must relinquish to the activity of tidying up life. Here, Duras’s sentences assume a voluptuousness that Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan do a remarkable job of translating. In a style differing from the bald obliquity that characterizes Duras’s more famous books and films, feelings and adjectives stick together like plums that have fallen from a tree and formed a putrid mass. The book sold out on its first printing, but its critical reception was lukewarm. “Despite the obvious talents of its author,” one reviewer wrote, the over-all effect was “a bit thin.” And yet “The Easy Life” is constructed with the same torqued intensity as all her fiction, seeding the problems that will eventually become Durassian preoccupations: the anguish of poverty, the vertigo of young love, the pull of biological conformity, and the struggle of women to reconcile the requirements of feminine competence with the disorganizing effects of sexual desire.

No One Left to Come Looking for You

In this novel, set in 1993, a bassist in his early twenties sporting the stage name Jack Shit investigates the disappearance of his drug-addled bandmate and his stolen Fender. As he pursues the mystery, Lipsyte takes the reader on a journey through the East Village at the height of the post-punk era, filled, in the bassist’s words, with “all of us kids who moved to New York years too late.” Though his cohort primarily frequents establishments in Alphabet City, they occasionally venture farther afield. “By the time you find what you’ve been seeking,” Jack observes, “you’re a different seeker.”

Professor Wala Kitu (Tagalog and Swahili for “Nothing Nothing”) is a specialist in nothing. At the outset of this waggish novel, he has been hired by a billionaire with the “idiotic” goal of becoming a Bond villain, who needs help breaking into Fort Knox—not for the gold, but to steal an empty box. Everett’s riffs on the maximalism of Ian Fleming’s franchise include inexplicable location changes, double crosses—one courtesy of the priest from “The Exorcist”—a shark pool as a murder weapon, and the casual extermination of large civilian populations. Throughout, he mines the concept of nothing not just for comedy but also for the rich conundrums it presents in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and life.

If Walls Could Speak

This richly detailed autobiography by the renowned architect weaves together memoir, a tour of select projects, and philosophical meditations. Born in Haifa in 1938, Safdie moved to Canada with his family when he was a teen-ager, and attained success at a young age: his master’s thesis, a system of modular housing units, was realized as Montreal’s Habitat 67 residential complex. It brought together many of his lasting preoccupations, including access to nature and high urban density. Safdie’s reflections on his other projects, which range from Jerusalem’s Holocaust History Museum—a structure built into a mountain, “cutting through like a spike”—to Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands, combine intellectual convictions with intuitions about the effects of space, light, sound, earth, and water, illuminating the impulses that have shaped his revolutionary works.

The Latecomer

In this saga of a fractured family, Phoebe Oppenheimer, the titular “latecomer,” narrates the inception, dissolution, and reconstitution of her clan. Cryopreserved as an embryo and born seventeen years after her in-vitro-fertilized siblings—triplets who “had been in full flight from one another as far back as their ancestral petri dish”—Phoebe corrals a stupendous array of subjects into her chronicle, among them art collecting, real-estate buying, chicken husbandry, intractable rivalries, hoarders, a secret child, and Mormon pageants. Turning on a disastrous clambake in Martha’s Vineyard on September 10, 2001, which transforms the family utterly, the novel unfolds at a thriller’s pace, with Korelitz leaving no loose threads in her complex tapestry of generational wealth and woes across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The Island of Extraordinary Captives

Between 1940 and 1945, as Great Britain warded off a Nazi invasion, it imposed a cruel irony at home: fearing domestic German sympathizers, authorities imprisoned thousands of “enemy aliens”—many of them Jewish refugees who had fled Hitler’s persecution. Parkin, a  New Yorker  contributing writer, focusses on a camp on the Isle of Man, where the internees included scholars, engineers, and artists who forged a miniature society, with lectures, soccer matches, theatre performances, and even a debate society. Parkin’s account, with its well-chosen central figures and attention to the trauma that some of the imprisoned carried for decades, is testimony to human fortitude despite callous, hypocritical injustice.

A Poison Like No Other

“Without plastic we’d have no modern medicine or gadgets or wire insulation to keep our homes from burning down,” Simon, a science journalist at Wired , writes. “But with plastic we’ve contaminated every corner of Earth.” He is particularly concerned about plastic’s tendency to devolve into microplastics. Plastic bags drift into the ocean, where they fall apart. As tires roll along, they abrade, sending clouds of plastic particles spinning into the air. Clothes made with plastics, which now comprise most items for sale, are constantly shedding fibres. Researchers have even found microplastics in human placentas. The hazards of ingesting large pieces of plastic include choking and perforation of the intestinal tract; the risks posed by microplastics are subtler, but not, Simon argues, any less serious. Many of the chemicals involved in the manufacture of plastics are carcinogens; these chemicals can leak as plastics fall apart. Microfibres can get pulled deep into the lungs. What effect does all this have on our systems? No one knows, but, as a researcher at England’s University of Portsmouth tells Simon, “We desperately need to find out.”

Seduced by Story

Brooks, a literary scholar, spent most of his career trying to impress upon readers the particular power of narrative, examining novels such as “ Great Expectations ” and “ Heart of Darkness ,” and revealing how they work. In “ Seduced by Story ,” he describes the horrifying feeling of having succeeded all too well, witnessing a “narrative takeover of reality” that has unfolded across decades. To illustrate this phenomenon, Brooks describes watching George W. Bush introduce his Cabinet, shortly before his Inauguration in 2001, and speaking warmly about the “stories that really explain what America can and should be about.” Brooks writes, “It was as if a fledgling I had nourished had become a predator.” His book thoughtfully scrutinizes a purely narrative understanding of the world, one that fails to recognize that living and telling might be different things.

The Passenger

McCarthy’s first novel since “The Road” tells the story of Bobby Western, the son of a Jewish physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Bobby is a Caltech dropout who went to Europe to race cars until a crash in 1972 landed him in a coma. The novel takes place in 1980. Bobby is working as a salvage diver, wakened to a world of grief; his brilliant and tortured sister, Alicia, has killed herself. He searches for a passenger missing from the wreckage of a private jet and is followed by strange men who may or may not work for the F.B.I. Officially, Bobby is pursued by the government, but really he’s pursued by the grief he feels at the loss of his sister, by the dubious legacy of his father’s work, and by the theological wounds shared by so many McCarthy heroes.

Stella Maris

“Stella Maris,” named for a psychiatric institution in Wisconsin that the twenty-year-old mathematician Alicia Western has checked herself into, is an addendum to “The Passenger” consisting of transcribed therapeutic conversations between Western and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen. These exchanges take place in 1972, with Western’s brother Bobby still unconscious in Italy, and Alicia contemplating her eventual suicide. Just as Alicia has left mathematics, she believes that the world has been abandoned by God, or that at best humankind is caught in a terrible struggle with some cruel deity. Together and apart, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” explore the diabolical potential of mathematics and the possibility that history is but a “rehearsal for its own extinction.”

We Are Not One

In this fearless account, Alterman, a journalist and a historian, sets out to describe the complex relationship between Israel and the U.S., at a moment when the former, having just elected the most conservative government in its history, is a distinctly red state, while, in the latter, Jews make up one of the bluest constituencies. He provides a scrupulous history of the crucial debates over Zionism, anti-Zionism, Palestine, the role of memory and the Holocaust, and America’s interactions with Israel. Alterman’s aim is not to flatter readers, no matter their ideological camp, but, rather, to scrutinize mythologies and fairy tales in order to make greater sense of why Israeli and American Jews, particularly in non-Orthodox communities, appear to be drifting farther apart.

The Grand Affair

As one of the premier portraitists of the Belle Époque, John Singer Sargent lived a life befitting his status: garnering praise at the Paris Salon, painting such figures as Isabella Stewart Gardner and Teddy Roosevelt, and socializing with luminaries like Henry James and Oscar Wilde. But, as this sensitive biography makes clear, Sargent also pursued less socially acceptable interests; he had an abiding fascination with the male nude and was involved in intimate, somewhat ambiguous relationships with same-sex friends and models. Fisher wisely avoids making sweeping claims about Sargent’s sexuality, choosing instead to examine how “the protected and sanctioned camaraderie of the studio” enabled the painter’s art and social life to take on quietly unconventional forms.

In this compact, minutely observed novel, the fate of a house in Florida—in which the three adult children of a recently deceased woman were raised—becomes the subject of delicate debate. Taking place in the lead-up to the first Christmas after the mother’s death, the story centers on her gathered offspring, their spouses, and their own children, employing a roving perspective to tease out each character’s response to loss and kinship. One of the sons considers his tribe “a small good gift,” whereas his wife is bewildered by the use of the word “family” in a way that “didn’t necessarily portend some sort of altercation.”

Scatterlings

Set in South Africa in 1927, this powerful novel chronicles the unravelling of a biracial family in the wake of the Immorality Act, which outlawed sexual relations between white and Black people. A winemaker of Dutch and English heritage; his wife, who was born to formerly enslaved parents in Jamaica; and their two daughters are “tumbled into chaos” by the new law. In despair, the mother makes a decision that costs two family members their lives; the surviving pair flee the country. Manenzhe situates this tragic tale within the broader context of the displacement and abuse of Africans caused by colonialism and the slave trade, but her achievement is to humanize the victims of that legacy, in a story that feels like an act of restoration.

They’re Going to Love You

“What I did was  forgivable ,” the narrator of this ruminative novel insists. Her offense, which brought about a rupture with her father years ago, is not immediately revealed. Now a former dancer trying to make it as a choreographer, she grapples with her father’s impending death by recalling wide-eyed adolescent visits to the Greenwich Village brownstone where he and his boyfriend nurtured gay artists at the height of the  AIDS  crisis. A lifelong sense that she is “no one’s best” has resulted in a string of arm’s-length adult relationships, she realizes, but her careful arrangement of the final farewell produces a late drive toward love and reconciliation.

The Grimkes

This multilayered history follows branches of a family of Southern slaveholders. On one side, there are the abolitionist sisters Angelina Grimke Weld and Sarah Grimke; on the other, stemming from their brother’s relationship with an enslaved woman named Nancy Weston, are Archibald Grimke, a co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., and his daughter, the writer Angelina Weld Grimke. The story opens in the eighteen-twenties, with the sisters quitting South Carolina for Philadelphia, where they encountered a vibrant Black-led abolitionist movement; only much later did they acknowledge their Black relatives. Greenidge faithfully documents the sisters’ activism, but her real concern is exploring the limits of white sympathy, a story vividly animated by her nuanced biographical portraits.

The White Mosque

Born to an American Mennonite mother and a Somali-born father, the author of this “palimpsestic quest” through Central Asia follows a group of nineteenth-century Mennonites who travelled from Ukraine to Uzbekistan to await the return of Jesus. Samatar blends travelogue with a larger meditation on faith, community, and colonization. She details the sense of alienation felt by many non-white Mennonites, including her own experiences dealing with racist gibes at school, and the patronizing attitudes that can underpin charitable efforts in the developing world. But she also acknowledges the sense of “tradition, community, mutual aid” that the faith offers. As a fellow-traveller reminds her, “You can’ t be a Mennonite alone.”

Ostensibly a collection of found documents assembled by a would-be biographer, this novel revolves around the nineteen-sixties fame and subsequent eclipse of an English therapist, Arthur Collins Braithwaite, who hoped to “bring down the ‘jerry-built edifice’ of psychiatry.” The novel switches between a documentary examination of Braithwaite’s life (including a retinue of historical figures, such as R. D. Laing) and the extravagant suspicions of a woman who, blaming him for her sister’s suicide, enrolls as his patient, under the alias Rebecca Smyth, to investigate. With its layers of imposture and unreliability, the novel suggests that our personhood is far more malleable than we believe.

A Heart That Works

Shortly after Delaney’s son Henry turned one, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He spent much of his life in hospitals, and died before he turned three. “A Heart That Works” tells the story of Henry’s life and Delaney’s grief. Alongside the recounting of panicked hospital visits, scary infections, and breathing-tube struggles, there are comic riffs and asides that wouldn’t be out of place in a Delaney standup set, or on his Twitter feed. Then Delaney yanks you back to grief. The pain comes less from horrifying details than from the way he lures us into contact with the very aspects of our lives that are easiest to ignore: our fragilities, our constant proximity to calamity, our powerlessness to control what life brings, or when. All the while, the jokes keep coming. It’s not hard to imagine some readers being repelled by the marriage of Delaney’s comic style with talk of grief. But cancer knows nothing of propriety, and neither does grief, and so Delaney—never terribly interested in propriety to begin with—doesn’t want to know, either.

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“It took Brian less than a week to decide that the ‘long goodbye’ of Alzheimer’s was not for him and less than a week for me to find Dignitas, at the end of several long Google paths,” recounts Amy Bloom in her lyrical, recursive memoir about her husband’s decision to end his life, at the Swiss nonprofit that offers assisted—or what it calls “accompanied”—suicide. The signs of Brian’s memory loss accrete gradually, then suddenly: he slowly loses interest in his many hobbies; a boss reprimands him for being “too slow” at work; he misplaces his car keys at a Stop & Shop. As clouds of disagreement linger longer between Bloom and her husband, she writes with unswerving honesty about the feeling of becoming newly estranged from him. Looping back and forth in the progression of Brian’s illness, the book is a work of remembering that is an intimate account both of a life shared with a man who was, for Bloom, “the sunrise and the sunset and all of the light in between,” and of putting back together the jagged pieces of one’s self in the wake of shattering loss.

Life Is Everywhere

Lucy Ives, in her dizzying novel, attempts the impossible task of building a set in which every emotional and physical detail is noted and accounted for. “Life Is Everywhere” holds out the hope that the novel might be a home to which everything belongs. At the same time, it illuminates the ways in which such novels operate like families unto themselves, absorbing so much apparent dysfunction while maintaining the illusion that all of their parts constitute a happy—or at least a believable—whole. Its books-within-books conceit is twisty and treacherous, and taken together its many stories read like an encyclopedia whose every entry is at its heart a story of intimate betrayal. The true pièce de résistance is the protagonist novel-within-a-novel by the protagonist, Erin, which contains “Life Is Everywhere”’s most fully realized, compelling, and suffocating adultery plot. Long after Erin writes her novel, she becomes aware of her own husband’s infidelity. We cannot protect ourselves from our fictions, Ives seems to say, not even those devised by our own hand, since we so utterly belong to them, too.

Hollywood: The Oral History

The special virtue of Basinger and Wasson’s work is its seamlessly sequential organization, so that talk about cinematographers flows neatly into talk about writers, which flows then into talk about actors, almost all of it magically mucilaged part to part. The net is cast wide; many glimmering fish are drawn up. Nobody who loves old movies won’t be tickled to discover that Clark Gable’s jackets in “Gone with the Wind” had padded shoulders, in an anachronistic, nineteen-thirties style, which differentiated him from all those other nineteenth-century Southern gents. The book also makes clear that cinema is a craft art, with an artisan foundation. That’s why it makes sense to have a many-voiced chorus tell this many-handed story: everyone’s voice counted.

Everything the Light Touches

Four characters embark on journeys that bring them into close communion with nature, in this philosophical novel. A young Indian woman finds a sense of purpose in her country’s rural east. In the Edwardian era, an English botanist journeys to the same remote area, searching for a mythical tree. Carl Linnaeus, the father of biological classification, travels through Lapland, and Goethe develops his framework for perceiving the unity of a natural world in which “all is leaf.” Goethe’s rejection of the scientific wish to define nature and the mercantile one to extract value from it provides the book’s intellectual core. As one character muses, “How much harder to see things, in continuity, in extension, in expansion, as uninterruptedness.”

Beyond Measure

This book uses a seemingly simple question—How did our units of measurement originate?—to deliver a profound reflection on how we experience and describe the world. The author’s inquiry takes him from Cairo, where he visits a thousand-year-old device for measuring the Nile’s floodwaters, to an iron cabinet in Paris that houses the standard metre and kilogram produced after the French Revolution. If measurement constitutes, as Vincent believes, “a mirror to society itself,” then it is perhaps no surprise that its history is one of both ingenuity and oppression. Ultimately, Vincent writes, our “frameworks of order that seem inviolable because of their deep roots in tradition and authority are as changeable as anything else in life.”

How to Speak Whale

In this book, Mustill delves into the latest research on animal communication. “Is it too much of a leap to think we might someday decode the sperm whale click for ‘mother’?” Mustill writes. “For ‘pain’? For ‘hello’? The answer is, of course, that we cannot know until we try.” The book is borne along by his faith that whales have something intelligible to tell us and his hope that one day soon we’ll figure out what that is. It spurs one to imagine how transformative it would be if we could chat with whales about their love lives or their sorrows or their thoughts on the philosophy of language.** **“The more we learn about other animals and discover evidence of their manifold capacities, the more we care, and this alters how we treat them,” Mustill writes.

James Purdy

This biography of a cult writer and pioneer of queer fiction tries to reconcile mainstream neglect of his work with the acclaim he received from authors including Tennessee Williams and Susan Sontag. Purdy, who once insisted that “all of my work is a criticism of the United States,” specialized in a kind of “outlaw fiction.” His treatment of “passing” and his use of Black vernacular made Langston Hughes assume that he was Black. Snyder takes us from Purdy’s childhood on an Ohio farm to his final years in New York, in a tantalizing portrait of a man with a talent for alienating colleagues, but also for conveying “a tragic sense of life couched in dark laughter.”

In this multilayered novel about the sins and traumas of China’s past, two childhood friends reunite in their provincial home town after years apart. In the course of a winter night, their alternating monologues sift through their family histories, circling a fateful moment during the Cultural Revolution which left one man’s grandfather comatose and set the other’s up for an eminent medical career. As the two friends’ fortunes become increasingly intertwined, they also trade stories of their childhoods in the eighties, and the historical weight shouldered by their generation. “Blood ties are a form of violence, the way they yoke together people who feel nothing for each other,” Zhang writes.

A Left-Handed Woman

In a collection of profiles and essays originally written for The New Yorker , Thurman explores the mysterious intersection of the sensual life and the life of the mind. As she considers the triumphs and failures of our culture—literature, politics, fashion, art, sex—Thurman is both fiercely intelligent and disarmingly human.

Ted Kennedy: A Life

A sense of promise lost and regained imbues this biography of a figure whose long career encompassed the ascendancy of liberalism, its decline under Reagan, and the country’s descent into today’s partisanship. Kennedy continually reached across the aisle even as he saw the era of coalition-building come to an end. Hobbled by his struggle to measure up to his brothers, and by the grim shadow of the Chappaquiddick incident, he was nonetheless a standard-bearer of the left who, in his last years, helped seed a newly resilient and forward-looking strain of liberalism. By tracing this life of tragedy, tenacity, and service, Farrell draws a complex portrait of a man who, like his family—and perhaps his nation—was “always running to keep ahead of the darkness.”

Cheap Land Colorado

The book opens as Conover sets off to meet—and ultimately live with—the off-gridders of the San Luis Valley, in the south-central part of the state. The largest alpine valley in the world, it has an average elevation of more than seven and a half thousand feet. The cheap land can be found in a region known as “the flats,” where there is almost no infrastructure: no electricity, no sewer system, no pavement. Conover has a good eye for the particularity of life on the flats, in this valley that has become a magnet for the dispossessed, and the book is bursting with dreamers and druggies, drifters and grifters, the deluded, the dangerous, the salt of the earth.

Well of Souls

Tracing the development of the banjo, “a uniquely American instrument, crafted by people of African descent,” this meticulous history also illuminates the difficulties of unearthing a story rooted in the experiences of the enslaved. Gaddy close-reads every early depiction of the banjo she can find—a priest observing a calinda dance in Martinique in 1694, a 1785 watercolor from a plantation in South Carolina—while remaining critically alert to the overwhelmingly white (and usually pro-slavery) perspectives that document the instrument’s existence prior to the Civil War. Decoupling the banjo from the crude secular associations of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, she emphasizes in particular its significance in religious music.

The Backstreets

The narrator of this dark, existential novel—a startling literary document of urban alienation—is an Uyghur man roaming Ürümqi in search of a room to rent. As he wanders, he encounters menacing strangers, disembodied screams, trash. At work, he is revolted by the falsity of his colleagues and fixates on a sheet of random numbers, searching for combinations that might make sense of his predicament. “I don’t know anyone in this strange city, so it’s impossible for me to be friends or enemies with anyone,” he says, but enemies clearly exist. The author disappeared in 2018, presumably into one of China’s Xinjiang detention centers.

The Magic Kingdom

Harley Mann, the son of “educated White Northerners with an affection for abstract thought,” and the narrator of this slow-build tragic novel, recounts his youth and lovestruck early adulthood at New Bethany, the South Florida Shaker settlement where he moved with his siblings and widowed mother in 1902. (The book takes its inspiration from audio recordings made by the real Mann in 1971.) Like the plaster-of-Paris model of New Bethany that the adult Mann, having left Shaker life, painstakingly constructed, the novel presents “a specific moment plucked from the stream of time and memory and fixed like a butterfly pinned in a glass-fronted case.”

The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution

Who are we? What is our place in nature? In this history of evolution, Bashford moves across the generations of the Huxley family, tracing how a gifted brood of illustrious scholars and writers struggled to answer these questions, in the process shaping the outlooks we hold on the past and future of our species. Bashford focusses her chronicle on the two most evolutionarily minded Huxleys: Thomas Henry and his grandson Julian. Thomas Henry died in 1895, days after Julian turned eight. But, as an adult, Julian took after his grandfather. They were so alike that Bashford says they can even be thought of as “one very long-lived man, 1825–1975.” Yet the book is more than an account of how two writer-scientists fashioned and sold evolution. It is also about the implications that the men discerned in activities ranging from religion to conservation.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

In this magic-realist satire, the title character—a self-described “photographer, gambler, slut”—wakes up in the afterworld and has a week to discover who killed him. Set during the civil war in Sri Lanka in 1989, the novel follows Almeida as he attempts to find his murderer and help two friends obtain a cache of photographs incriminating those on all sides of the conflict, before they are purloined by others searching for them. The group includes government officials, separatist Tamil Tigers, communist rebels, Indian peacekeepers, and arms dealers, all of whom are willing to kill to accomplish their mission. When Almeida tracks down his murderer, he realizes that “every death is significant, even when every life appears not to be.”

Several years ago, Steven Sondheim accepted D. T. Max’s invitation to be profiled in this magazine—then decided against it. Then he reconsidered, and reconsidered again. But the bard of ambivalence kept talking through it all, and Max’s book places those autumnal conversations—some of which appeared, in edited form, on our Web site—center stage.

The Escape Artist

In 1944, the Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba, intent on piercing the “veil of ignorance” surrounding the Nazis’ crimes, related his and others’ experiences of the camp in the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Disseminated in the midst of the war, the report catalyzed an international response that would ultimately spare two hundred thousand Hungarian Jews. With the propulsion of a historical thriller, Freedland, a journalist, tracks Vrba’s work collecting the “data of the dead” even while imprisoned, driven by his conviction that facts could perhaps derail the Nazi extermination plan. As Freedland depicts world leaders’ failure to act expeditiously, he observes, “A horror is especially hard to comprehend if no one has ever witnessed anything like it before.”

Shirley Hazzard

This biography of an acclaimed novelist follows Hazzard from her early years in Australia and postwar Hong Kong through her adulthood among storied literary circles in New York City and Italy. Olubas traces the development of Hazzard’s longtime preoccupations with “mobile protagonists and their shifting worlds,” and with questions of truth, goodness, knowledge, and perspective. Carefully crafted—a page could be revised as many as thirty times—and signalling a “deep investment in destiny,” Hazzard’s richly layered novel “The Transit of Venus” led her husband, the biographer and Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller, to remark, “No one should have to read it for the first time.”

Botticelli’s Secret

In 1882, an Austro-Hungarian art collector purchased a set of drawings by Sandro Botticelli that had been languishing in private collections in France and England for centuries. In this wide-ranging history, Luzzi considers why the drawings, which illustrated eighty-eight cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy, had fallen into oblivion, and charts both Dante’s and Botticelli’s reputations across the ages. Many early critics found Botticelli’s drawings out of step with Dante’s text, arguing that the Renaissance artist’s sensual, full-bodied humans undermined the medieval poet’s “visceral yearning for God.” Luzzi, by contrast, reads Botticelli’s drawings as “a ‘poem’ in their own regard,” and as a crucial link in the “mapping of the human spirit’s transition” from one era to the next.

In 2012, after a wildly successful and hectic period during which he worked almost exclusively as a playwright, the Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse converted to Catholicism, quit drinking, and remarried. He then started composing “Septology,” a seven-volume novel written in a single sentence and exemplifying what he has described as his turn to “slow prose.” (The book was translated, by Damion Searls, for Fitzcarraldo Editions, in the U.K.; a U.S. edition is out this month, from Transit Books.) The novel’s narrator is a painter named Asle, a convert to Catholicism who’s grieving the death of his wife. The night before Christmas Eve, he finds his friend, also a painter named Asle, unconscious in an alley in Bergen, dying of alcohol poisoning. Their memories double, repeat, and gradually blur into a single voice, a diffuse consciousness capable of existing in many times and places at once. Though lacking a particularly doctrinal or dogmatic sense of religion, the novel raises the possibility of belief in the reality of the divine, as the fourteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart, whom Fosse has read intently, describes it: “It is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.”

A Shiver in the Leaves

Brutality and tenderness intertwine in this collection, which illuminates the inner life of a young gay Black man navigating desire, depression, family, and faith. Although the poems are haunted by historical and contemporary violence, they are also often rapturous, revelling in the pleasures of nature and of the body. Hughes’s primary mode is almost Romantic, aware of death’s ubiquitous presence, yet alive with feeling; allusions to Dickinson, Emerson, and Poe abound. For all there is to mourn, kinship provides a kind of compass. “I have wanted / nothing / to do with blackness / or laughter / or my life,” Hughes writes. “But, about love, / who owns the right, / really?”

Hotta, a Tokyo-born historian, takes on the life story and legacy of Shinichi Suzuki, the creator of the Suzuki method. Born in 1898 in the Japanese city of Nagoya, he was the son of a violin-maker, and, when young Suzuki became captivated by the singing tone of the violinist Mischa Elman, he persuaded his father to send him to Berlin, where he spent several formative years. The book explores the evolution of Suzuki’s conviction that the ability to play an instrument was not an inborn gift but a specific, learnable skill. He came to believe children could learn music the way that children learn language: naturally, through early and abundant exposure. But reducing his method to a system of music instruction, the biography argues, misses its larger point about education as a means of awakening human potential.

Indigenous Continent

In the opening pages of this book, Hämäläinen, a historian at Oxford, maintains that the America we know was—in its borders, shape, and culture—far from inevitable. Throughout the work, which details the rise and fall of early empires and Native responses to European colonial forays, Hämäläinen stresses the kinetic nature of Indigenous power. Even after the so-called colonial era, tribal nations often played a determining role in American history. Instead of a foreordained story of decline and victimization, Hämäläinen wants us to see a parade of contingencies, with tribal nations regularly giving as good as they got, or even better.

Metamorphoses

Ovid’s masterpiece contains nearly two hundred and fifty mythic tales of corporeal transformation, many of which have become central in art and culture. But Stephanie McCarter’s revisionist translation shows how often translators have obscured the sexual violence of these stories with euphemism. In an introduction, she argues that the prevalance of rape in the poem suggests that “Ovid felt such violence was worthy of critical interrogation,” and that we should read him “with an eye toward his full complexity—his beauty and his brutality.” Ultimately, she writes, “to wrestle with the unsavory aspects of ancient literature is to do the hard work of self-examination.”

Silicon chips undergird all of modern digital technology, yet only a handful of companies are capable of producing them or the nanometre-scale precision instruments required for their manufacture—making the industry “a triumph of efficiency,” Miller writes, but also creating “a staggering vulnerability.” This history traces the chips’ development, from their invention, in America, in the nineteen-fifties, to the establishment of a global supply chain concentrated in East Asia. Today, nearly all advanced processor chips are produced in Taiwan, and Miller mounts a convincing argument that shifting control of the industry could dramatically reshape the world’s economic and political orders.

Number One Is Walking

In the second book by the comedian Steve Martin and the cartoonist Harry Bliss, the actor wittily details his film career alongside his frequent collaborator’s humorous illustrations. This book was excerpted on newyorker.com

Power Failure

This absorbing seven-hundred-page opus on the rise and fall of General Electric contains a particularly compelling portrayal of the tenure of its fabled C.E.O., Jack Welch, who turned G.E. into a lean and disciplined profit machine. During the nineteen-seventies, the company was run by a modest, austere man named Reginald Jones, who believed that G.E. culture was best exemplified through mutual concern for one another. Welch, a homespun dynamo with blue-collar origins, did not view G.E. as one big, warm family. When he took over from Jones as C.E.O., he imposed his own sense of excellence on the company, through a series of principles that captivated his peers: your duty is always to enrich your shareholders. Shed any business that isn’t first or second in its market category. Fire nonperformers without regret. Cohan gives us a lot of alpha-male straight talk, and the book enables one to see how Welch emerged as a ruthless businessman who saw every interaction as a potential shakedown.

When We Were Sisters

A young Muslim American woman named Kausar narrates this hard-bitten but glimmering début novel, which chronicles her negotiation of the thorny path from childhood to adulthood. The story begins in Philadelphia, with the murder of Kausar’s widowed father, after which she and her sisters are relocated to New Jersey to live with an uncle who meets their practical needs, and nothing more. Asghar parses the confusion and hysteria surrounding female sexuality—especially calamitous for Kausar, whose body is “pretending to be a girl, even though I’m not.” The narrative is most affecting when Kausar turns to her faith, as when she prays, “Allah, forgive me for being janky.”

For Amanda Parrish Morgan, strollers aren’t just tools we use, or products we buy; they’re dense symbols, with no single or settled meaning, of our relationships to parenting . They tell us things: about what we want, what we can’t have, what we fear. The central strength of “Stroller,” a slim work of memoiristic cultural criticism, is not comprehensiveness but the way the stroller, and Morgan’s experience of her own strollering years, become an omnidirectional magnet, pulling disparate material into friendly proximity. Her own stroller years are almost over, and the closing pages of “Stroller” evoke the experience of looking at newly obsolete pieces of parenting gear in the garage or basement, feeling time and memory leak out as they transmogrify back into mere plastic and rubber.

Diaghilev’s Empire

In the early twentieth century, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes revitalized ballet, and the company remained at the forefront of the international avant-garde for decades. In this rich account, Christiansen, a critic and a self-described “incurable balletomane,” narrates its rise and fall under Diaghilev, a charismatic impresario whose creative orbit encompassed not only dancers, choreographers, and composers—among them Nijinsky, Balanchine, and Stravinsky—but also painters and writers, including Picasso and Cocteau. The professional achievements of these artists are evoked vividly, as are the personalities, romances, and rivalries whose tempestuous ebbs and flows shaped their work. Though little of the Ballets Russes repertoire survives today, Christiansen makes a convincing case for its indelible influence.

This book, by one of Romania’s leading avant-garde writers, presents itself as the diary of an unnamed failed poet who has become a schoolteacher. He relates memories of his sickly childhood and of his walks around Bucharest (“a museum of melancholy and the ruin of all things”), where, in front of a morgue, he encounters so-called anti-death protesters holding signs that read “NO to Being Buried Alive!” The novel’s title refers to a mysterious object on top of which his home is built, which causes levitation and rearranges rooms. As in the work of Kafka, whose diaries the narrator adores, the book’s horror and humor are born from examining “the tragic anomaly of the spirit dressed in flesh.”

The Hero of This Book

McCracken’s latest novel straddles the line between fiction and memoir, though she rejects the term “autofiction” as sounding “like it might be written by a robot, or a kiosk, or a European.” It is August, 2019, and the unnamed narrator, sightseeing in London, is haunted by the presence of her late mother, who grew up “disabled and Jewish in small-town Iowa,” was stubborn and bad with money, and was also brilliant and effervescent and a great appreciator of life. “Once somebody is dead, the world reveals all the things they might have enjoyed if they weren’t,” the narrator laments. McCracken delivers a searing meditation on loss and the impossibility of depicting, in art, the entirety of a person.

Properties of Thirst

Set around the time of Pearl Harbor, this poignant saga centers on the town of Lone Pine, in California’s Owens Valley, where Rocky Rhodes has built a beautiful home for his wife, a doctor and a cook of some renown. After she dies, of polio, he struggles to raise their son and daughter while trying to protect the area from the Los Angeles water authorities. The son, joyful and reckless, moves out at thirteen and joins the Navy at nineteen. When the government establishes a Japanese American internment camp on the land across from Rocky’s, the newcomers become enmeshed in the locals’ lives. The novel’s resounding theme, “You can’t save what you don’t love,” applies to people and landscapes alike.

An earlier version of this review misidentified the location of Lone Pine.

The Philosophy of Modern Song

From 2006 to 2009, Dylan hosted “Theme Time Radio Hour,” a weekly program on satellite radio. The programs were hilarious, campy nostalgia. Most important, you got to hear the often forgotten music that helped form him in some way. Dylan has published a kind of extension of the radio show, this rich, riffy, funny, and completely engaging book of essays. It’s immediately clear what you’re in for: Dylan wandering through the enormous record bin of his mind. In order to stave off creative exhaustion and intimations of mortality, he has, over and over again, returned to what fed him in the first place—the vast tradition of American song. What he tries to get across in this book is the feel of these songs, their atmosphere and internal life.

Arthur Miller

The longtime New Yorker theatre critic John Lahr explores the life and work of Arthur Miller, connecting the dots between the playwright’s personal and psychological development and the evolution of his plays. The book draws on Lahr’s piece in the magazine about the making of Willy Loman , the protagonist of Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”

The first major biography of Balanchine draws on a decade of research in Russian and American archives and interviews with his dancers. Homans, the dance critic at The New Yorker , charts the choreographer’s journey from Tsarist Russia to interwar Europe and, finally, New York, where he remade classical ballet. The book’s account of Balanchine’s return to his homeland, in 1962, first ran in the magazine.

The Other Side of Prospect

The result of eight years of reporting, this deft chronicle delves into the story of Bobby Johnson, a sixteen-year-old from New Haven, who, in 2006, was coerced into confessing to a brutal murder he didn’t commit. Dawidoff presents portraits of the individuals involved, juxtaposed with research on segregation, the Great Migration, and mass incarceration. Bobby, though widely considered innocent, was convicted because he “fit a false stereotype about how things worked in poor neighborhoods.” The book details his childhood, his time in prison, and—after a single-minded lawyer secures his release, in 2015—the challenges and the disorientation Bobby experiences upon reëntering society.

The Beloved Vision

This musical study charts the rise of Romanticism, in the nineteenth century, as composers came to see individual voice as the key to emotional expression, and began to assert their “existential being through a recognizable, even idiosyncratic musical language.” Walsh provides biographical sketches of composers and assessments of their work, and weaves in subplots across decades and geography—the impact of nationalism, the development of program music, the ubiquitous spectre of Beethoven. Observing that “obsolescence is always the lurking fate of music not quite of the front rank,” Walsh explores the influence of relatively obscure composers, such as Louise Farrenc and Heinrich Marschner, with generous, contagious curiosity.

Nights of Plague

The Nobel laureate’s latest novel opens like a starry romantic chronicle: a steamer is making its way at night to a gemlike island, the fictional Mingheria, in the Mediterranean. It is 1901. On board are three medical scientists, one accompanied by his wife, a princess, who spends much of the novel writing letters to her sister; the tale is supposedly constructed, by her great-granddaughter, from these letters. The group comes to Mingheria because of an outbreak of bubonic plague, and they have to deal with a shifting political landscape—one all too familiar to us in 2022. Yet what is most vital in this book is Pamuk’s lovingly obsessive creation of the island itself, a world so detailed that it shimmers like a memory palace. He places his humans in this “three-dimensional fairy tale” and observes what happens to the state when an epidemic tests its tolerances.

Can I Pet Your Dog?

The cartoonist Jeremy Nguyen illustrates this waggish guide to petting dogs (that don’t belong to you). This book was excerpted on newyorker.com

American Midnight

The four years of American history from 1917 to 1921 are underexamined, but, in this account, they emerge as pivotal. “Just as the war in Europe was being fought on several fronts, so was the war at home,” Hochschild writes. Vigilante groups and the government itself targeted labor unionists, socialists, immigrants, Blacks, Jews, and others perceived to be insufficiently patriotic. While narrating raids, arrests, lynchings, deportations, and instances of censorship, spying, and torture, Hochschild periodically checks in on an achingly conflicted Woodrow Wilson. When a member of his Administration suggested pardoning those who had been punished for opposing conscription, the President replied that, while the idea “appeals to me not a little, . . . I don’t feel that I can follow my heart just now.”

Kiki Man Ray

Kiki de Montparnasse was born Alice Prin, in a village far from the cosmopolitan Parisian enclave whose name she later adopted. One of the most popular artists’ models of the nineteen-twenties—as well as a cabaret star, painter, memoirist, and bon vivant—Kiki posed for artists including Soutine, Foujita, and, perhaps most fruitfully, the surrealist Man Ray. Braude’s biography argues that the pair’s long love affair was mutually galvanizing, and that Kiki was not just a muse but an artist in her own right. If she has largely faded from view, he writes, it is because “you can’t sell a dance at auction. You can’t sell a pose.”

In this novel of religious discovery, set in the seventh century, three Irish monks make a fraught journey from their monastery to Great Skellig, a craggy rock formation in the Atlantic that resembles “the most gigantic of cathedrals.” Switching perspectives among the monks, the narrative tracks their escalating discord as they endeavor to construct a new monastic settlement there. Donoghue evokes their devotional seriousness with a descriptive texture that is equally alert to a flock of cormorants taking flight “by some collusion,” or to the whittling of a makeshift pipe. As the men maintain routines of worship in the face of futility, the novel asks whether they should be answerable to God or to one another.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

This striking novel takes a formally inventive approach to a woman’s terminal-cancer diagnosis. Lia is a successful illustrator with a loving husband and preteen daughter, but their contentment is disrupted by the resurgence of her breast cancer. In Mortimer’s rendering, the cancer has its own voice and graphic style, and it guides readers through Lia’s most visceral life experiences: a strict religious upbringing; a destructive love affair; her treatments and her sense of the changes they wreak upon her body. Although Lia’s fate is telegraphed from the start, sadness is not allowed to crowd out wit and joy, and Mortimer asks readers to think about death as something that “does not happen in the first or third person, but in the second.”

The Joy of Quitting

Roberts’s autobiographical comics illustrate day-to-day life, incorporating humorous details from the author’s experiences raising her daughter and being in the workplace. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

I Love(ish) New York City

This collection of cartoons and essays explores the broad range of experiences, and the many ups and downs, one encounters while living in N.Y.C. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Where Did My Roommate Put My Charger?

In this activity book for adults, the cartoonist Sarah Kempa invites readers to solve the humorous complexities of adulthood—like finding lost items in an apartment, figuring out how to split a check, and creating the perfect dating profile. This book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

The Birdcatcher

With the plush scenery of a travelogue, the misshapen soul of a noir, and the anarchic spirit of a trickster tale, this novel revolves around three Black American expatriates. The narrator, Amanda, is a divorced travel writer invited to the island of Ibiza by her friend Catherine, a prize-winning sculptor, who “sometimes tries to kill her husband.” (“He puts her into an asylum, thinks she’s well, takes her out again, and she tries to kill him.”) Catherine is suspicious of Amanda’s intentions toward her husband, but, in Jones’s fearsome, fractured narrative, her potential for violence seems no more alarming than anything else that might befall these social outsiders.

The Black Period

In this lyrical memoir, Geter, a poet, sets down a powerful vision of Black life in the United States by intertwining dual origin stories: her own (she is the daughter of an African American man and a Muslim Nigerian woman) and the nation’s, with its history of Native genocide and African enslavement. Recounting the lives of her forebears (enslaved people, sharecroppers, artists), she expresses grief and rage, but she also sees the potential for liberation, which she terms “the Black Period,” a time both prospective and realized, “where, if not our bodies, then our minds could be free.” Again and again, she asks, “What would it look like to emerge from erasure?” Her father’s oil paintings and charcoal drawings, scattered throughout the book, provide one response.

Master of the Two Left Feet

This biography of the self-taught painter Morris Hirshfield (1872-1946) is also a study of the vagaries of artistic reputation. Hirshfield, a Russian Polish immigrant, worked as a tailor and a slipper-maker in Brooklyn before turning to art, in his mid-sixties. Championed by avant-garde luminaries including André Breton and Alfred Barr for his “primitive” approach to pattern and figuration, he enjoyed brief renown—with a solo show at moma, in 1943, and much press coverage—before being largely forgotten. Meyer situates Hirshfield’s idiosyncratic output in the popular imagery and fine art of the period, suggesting that he was savvier than his early admirers knew.

Listening for Ghosts

A man gets a phone call from a dead uncle, another finds his life transformed into a mutating, inexplicable dreamscape: in this collection of short fiction, Rabe explores the people and the memories that haunt us. Three of the stories, including “ Uncle Jim Called ,” first appeared in the magazine.

Liberation Day

A new collection from the wildly imaginative Saunders examines American life as we know it—and as we don’t—in a series of stories about characters grappling with sometimes nefarious political, social, and cultural forces. Several stories, including “ Ghoul ,” first appeared in the magazine.

Marigold and Rose

This slip of a book, the Nobel-winning poet’s first work of narrative prose, consists of the thoughts of twin baby girls, each named after a flower. Marigold is small, quiet, inward; Rose, born first, is loud, forgiving, and protective. Alongside an exploration of the dichotomies that bind the girls together are meditations on many of Glück’s familiar preoccupations: halves and wholes, familial inheritance, time’s passage, the psychic power of words. The innocence of the girls’ observations, bearing an infant clarity, pare many of the book’s subjects down to a revealing frankness. “Infinite possibility,” they think as they learn to walk. “Then an absence or loss. Safety, which had disappeared.”

The Slowworm’s Song

The narrator of this novel is a British former soldier and recovering alcoholic, who becomes unhinged after a letter summons him to Belfast to give evidence to a commission investigating a tragic incident that occurred in 1982, during the Troubles. Taking the form of a confession to his estranged daughter, the book works its way toward the life-altering event, which took place when he was a twenty-one-year-old recruit. Along the way, he recalls military training in Germany, his journey through rehab, and his current employment, at a rural garden center. His apologia represents a sincere redemptive attempt at “having a go at living.”

Bridge to the Sun

The long-overlooked role of Japanese Americans who fought against their ancestral land during the Second World War receives its due in this authoritative history. Many were recruited from internment camps, and worked variously as interpreters, translators, and interrogators. America’s ability to understand Japanese communications was “among the best kept secrets of the war,” Henderson writes. He skillfully refracts the conflict through the experiences of several veterans, including Kazuo Komoto, who received the Purple Heart after fighting in Guadalcanal and New Georgia, and Tom Sakamoto, who was part of a select cadre of Japanese Americans entrusted with top-secret information, and who witnessed Japan’s formal surrender. The book ends with a roster of the more than three thousand Japanese Americans who served.

The Chaos Machine

“The very structure of social media encourages polarization,” the author contends in this sobering investigation into the effects of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Tracking political movements that spread over social media, both in America and worldwide, Fisher describes how algorithms designed to “maximize our time on site” systematically promote extreme content that sparks moral outrage and forges group identities united by a sense of threat. “The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself,” he writes. Fisher speaks to researchers and industry insiders, who all seem to arrive at the same proposal: turn off the algorithms that reward engagement above all else.

Some of Them Will Carry Me

The female protagonists who appear in Scodellaro’s kinetic début collection of stories find themselves in absurdist and fantastical scenarios that interrogate the nature of subjectivity. “ A Triangle ” appeared in The New Yorker .

Love & Vermin

This collection brings together some of the many cartoons published by McPhail in The New Yorker , as well as a number of new cartoons and comics. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

For the writer Millet, novels, like people, tend to suffer from a blinkered, human-centric perspective. Instead of focussing on the “arc of the private individual,” as she puts it, Millet writes books that churn up atmosphere: something happens, and then something else happens; the cloudy design melts and shifts. More often than not, they also mourn our collapsing environment, the cost of our ill-gotten gains. In her latest novel, “Dinosaurs,” a man named Gil has just moved to Phoenix after breaking up with his girlfriend of fifteen years. He is handsome, embarrassingly wealthy, and desperate to be of use. He befriends a neighbor’s kid, who’s being bullied at school; takes up the cause of hawks and quail against a mystery poacher; and volunteers at a local women’s shelter. The story has a muted quality—Millet writes in the simple, enigmatic prose of books for children. But it’s also sharp and implacably funny, and, after one of Gil’s friends dies, it becomes a study in the nature of loss. For Millet, at least, there’s solace in the idea that we are infinitely bigger than ourselves.

The Betrothed

In Italy, Manzoni’s grand historical novel is considered a literary treasure almost on a par with Dante, but its reputation elsewhere has faded. In this new translation, the first in fifty years, it emerges as a work that anyone who cares about nineteenth-century fiction should want to read. Manzoni, the child of a genteel Lombard family, lived from 1785 to 1873, through the political turmoil stretching from the French Revolution to the great political cause of the Risorgimento—by which the peninsula became a united, independent nation. “The Betrothed” was written in service of that ideal, but it is set in the seventeenth century—the period of the Thirty Years’ War and of resurgent bubonic plague. It follows a young couple, Renzo and Lucia, whose engagement is thwarted by the fact that Lucia has caught the eye of a local Spanish lord, who is protected by a corrupt legal system. Separated, the couple are basically on the lam for most of the novel, sometimes helped and sometimes hurt by people they meet along the way. The book is a great pleasure to read, thanks to its romanticism, its sweep and danger and excitement, and the fullness of its ever-ramifying plot.

Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions

This début novel, formed of interlocking short stories, follows the lives of four Nigerian women who meet at boarding school in the nineteen-eighties and whose futures are drastically altered by a protest that they organize. The stories move backward and forward in time: we excavate nineteenth-century family roots and leap to 2050, when one character sacrifices herself for her son. Through the years, the four friends face various challenges. One encounters racism in Kraków; another, unhappy as a banker in New York, contemplates the “scalp-searing sun” and the bean pudding of home. Ogunyemi shows how early friendships can shape entangled alliances that define women’s lives.

Barefoot Doctor

During the Cultural Revolution, minimally trained “barefoot doctors” were sent to the Chinese countryside, providing basic medical services and folk remedies. The author of this novel was one of them, and she draws on her experiences in the story of Mrs. Yi, a village herbalist who gathers her remedies on a nearby mountain. She struggles to find a successor—either the flighty but kindhearted Gray, who loves herbs but fears patients, or Mia, from nearby Deserted Village—and events become increasingly surreal. As the mountain changes shape and ghosts visit the living, mysterious connections between the body and nature emerge.

The Portraitist

Little is known about the Dutch painter Frans Hals: no letters or diaries survive, and the only contemporary documents are unrevealing. But Nadler manages to construct a satisfying quasi-biography by using the milieu of seventeenth-century Haarlem. The city, Protestant and republican, had neither church nor monarchy to commission art, so artists relied on the patronage of private citizens—an advantage for Hals, who excelled at capturing the spirit of locals. His rough brushwork lent an air of improvisation to his boisterous depictions of soldiers, musicians, and tavern-goers. Though Hals has long been overshadowed by his contemporary Rembrandt, Nadler demonstrates why his peers held him to be “the modern painter par excellence.”

By Hands Now Known

This history of Jim Crow explores “slavery’s afterlife in law” from the nineteen-twenties to the sixties through the fates of Black Americans whose stories “were not meant to leave the South.” Some were “abducted from their homes, churches, fields, and other workplaces,” others murdered after flouting bus segregation. Burnham illuminates a continuum of white supremacy, dating back to slavery, that depended on the blurring of “formal and mob law” and on an often complicit federal government. “Law needed terror, and terror needed law,” she writes. She also examines Black Americans’ long-standing “practices of dissent and resistance” and describes reparations as an ethical imperative.

Burning Down the House

Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern, constructs a history of libertarianism, making a case that it has degraded from a pro-market economism to a blinkered worship of individual rights. The economist Friedrich Hayek, whom the author admires, wrote in favor of a “social minimum,” which, though bare, made room for a welfare state. But, as an economist, Hayek had “no clear account of rights,” Koppleman says. As a result, Hayek’s approach was displaced by an uncompromising rights-based liberalism. Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Nozick, figureheads of the characteristic late-twentieth-century form of libertarianism, had a different goal than their predecessors, Koppelman maintains, shrinking government not to advance economic efficiency but to protect the rights of property owners. This critical distinction—seeing each economic question as a matter of fundamental rights—obliterated the possibility of compromise, Koppelman writes; his book seeks a “middle way” in earnest.

Life Is Hard

In this book of stories and ideas, the philosopher Kieran Setiya argues that certain fundamental challenges—loneliness, injustice, failure, ill health, grief, and so on—are essentially unavoidable; even though a redemptive impulse “urges us to focus on the best in life,” it’s actually a mistake to turn away from the experiences that wound us. Drawing on a variety of thinkers and on his own experiences, Setiya shows that, instead of glossing over our own disappointments, it’s best to think about them in detail, discovering how they can help us grow tougher, kinder, wiser, more compassionate, and more realistic. The book, he writes, aims to offer “guidance in adversity,” showing us how we can remain hopeful without deluding ourselves or downplaying life’s difficulties.

Need to Know

How did we end up with the C.I.A., which marks its seventy-fifth anniversary this year? This account of the rise of American intelligence shows that the agency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, was only one element in a dramatic expansion of operations at the start of the Second World War. As Reynolds recounts, it was Army and Navy cryptography and reconnaissance units that handled most of the actual code-breaking and spying. The problem became the volume of raw intelligence, which gave rise to a need for an entity that could make sense of it and turn it into something that policymakers could use. Various intelligence agencies took up this responsibility during and after the war, and Reynolds, by engaging fully with the various contenders, manages to avoid retrofitting the history of U.S. intelligence around the assumption that the C.I.A. would inevitably emerge as the lead postwar organization.

Super-Infinite

Rundell, an Oxford scholar whose previous books have mostly been novels for children, titles her new biography of John Donne “Super-Infinite”—a word that would be equally at home in a mathematical theorem and a comic book. In fact, it was one of the poet’s many neologisms, used to describe the world that waits for us after death: “an infinite, a super-infinite, an unimaginable space.” For Rundell, it is a perfect example of Donne’s “absurd, grandiloquent, courageous, hungry” style, the way he dislocated language in pursuit of extremes. Born in 1572, Donne was most widely known in his lifetime as a priest. He served as the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1621 until his death, where his celebrated sermons—many of them pondering sickness and death—drew thousands. As a poet, Donne made a very different impression, seducing and mocking. In her attempt to fit these two faces together, Rundell writes with both the knowledge of an expert and the friendly passion of a proselytizer. Donne, she promises, “is protection against those who would tell you to narrow yourself, to follow fashion in your mode of thought.” His writing expresses “what he knew with such precision and flair that we can seize hold of it, and carry it with us.”

Sacred Nature

An urgent plea opens this nuanced exploration, by a veteran writer on religion, of our relationship to nature: if ecological disaster is to be avoided, Armstrong writes, “we need to recover the veneration of nature that human beings carefully cultivated for millennia.” What follows is a tour of how various spiritual traditions conceive of nature, with a focus on a common thread: an understanding of the natural world as a unified whole shot through by “an immanent sacred force.” This concept, prominent in Eastern thought, was also a feature of Western monotheist traditions before we began treating nature as “a mere resource.” “While it is essential to cut carbon emissions,” Armstrong writes, we also need to overhaul “our whole belief system.”

Poūkahangatus

This collection’s title poem, which describes itself as “An Essay About Indigenous Hair Dos and Don’ts,” mixes mythological and pop-cultural references with ruminations on female beauty, power, and inheritance: Medusa makes an appearance, as does Disney’s “Pocahontas.” Elsewhere, the poet, a Māori New Zealander, uses the film “Twilight” as a lens through which to examine racialized and gendered tensions of adolescence. Tibble’s smart, sexy, slang-studded verse is fanciful and dramatic, revelling in the pains and the pleasures of contemporary young womanhood yet undergirded by an acute sense of history. Her voice remains sure-footed across many registers, and the book, at its best, functions as an atlas for learning to explore the world on one’s own terms.

Lady Justice

In a richly layered set of profiles, a noted legal correspondent chronicles efforts by female lawyers to bolster democracy during the Trump Presidency. Some figures are familiar (the voting-rights champion Stacey Abrams), others less so (a co-founder of an organization that helps refugees seeking asylum). For all these women—and for Lithwick, who writes about her own sexual harassment by a former federal judge—law isn’t an “unassailable cathedral” but a “fragile arrangement of norms, suggestions, and rules.” Constitutional progress often takes a slow, zigzagging path rather than a linear one, and it is this, Lithwick muses, that “allows it to preserve histories that might otherwise be erased.”

Fen, Bog & Swamp

Proulx’s masterly exploration of the ecology and history of wetlands—and of humankind’s seemingly unstoppable desire to drain them—makes a powerful case for their protection. Her account of her love of swamps was excerpted in the magazine.

The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound

In 1968, three years after T. S. Eliot’s death, his drafts of “The Waste Land,” long thought lost, were unearthed in the New York Public Library. First published in 1971, edited by Eliot’s widow, they revolutionized the understanding of the poem’s creation, by making apparent Ezra Pound’s outsized editorial role, including many ruthless cuts, and also the input of Eliot’s troubled first wife, Vivienne. These pages—some handwritten, some typewritten, with wordless loops and slashes scrawled across the text and brusque observations at the side—have become famous in their own right, and, for the hundredth anniversary of the poem’s publication, the edition has been reissued, with extra material. If you badly wish to know how much Eliot spent on breakfast at the Albemarle Hotel, Margate, on the north coast of Kent, in October, 1921, your craving can now be satisfied, because his hotel bills are shown in all their glory. Few Eliot fans will be able to resist.

Piet Mondrian: A Life

The first thorough Mondrian biography since the nineteen-fifties to be published in English, this book is audacious in structure. Janssen drew on his profound knowledge to dispense with strict chronology and to write not only about his subject’s prodigious mind and eye but also from within them. Mondrian was born in the province of Utrecht in 1872 and came into his own during his first sojourn in Paris, beginning in 1911. Style, for Mondrian, served a quest to manifest soul-deep spirituality as a demonstrable fact of life. His aim, he said, was “to find things out.” He hit by accident on the potency of diamond formats—square or squarish canvases rotated forty-five degrees—to hint at the extension, invisibly, of rectilinear layouts beyond their material bounds, perhaps to infinity. He needn’t portray the complete universe. He could imply it.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

The work camps in the Albertan oil sands are cut off from the outside world; their inhabitants are a shadow population, at home neither in the barracks where they sleep nor among the families they have left behind. The Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton spent two years in the oil sands, working at three different mines, in order to pay off her student loans. Beaton’s remarkable account of this time, her first stand-alone book for adults, is both a graphic memoir and a work of reportage. “Ducks” is anchored by Beaton’s own story, but it seeks to show her as typical of a much larger swath of workers who are lured to the oil sands at the cost of their health, their dignity, and sometimes their lives. As a comic artist, Beaton is distinguished by the attention that she brings to the spaces between the panels of her drawings. In “Ducks,” she calls attention to a different kind of invisible space, and to the people who perform the punishing and lonely labor of the petroleum industry.

The Divider

In this history of the Trump Presidency, Glasser, a staff writer, and Baker, a Times journalist, take us inside the White House to describe the fantastical degree of instability during Trump’s time in office, and the growing gulf between his values and those of the officials that surrounded him. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

It’s natural when trying to understand a reversal in reputation as spectacular as Rudy Giuliani’s to wonder whether he was all that great to begin with, and Kirtzman’s lively biography reviews Giuliani’s entire career in that revisionist spirit. He details how Giuliani became regarded as a paragon of leadership because of his exemplary comportment in the aftermath of September 11th; and then how he quickly realized that his “reputation for integrity could be squeezed like a washcloth for all types of moneymaking ventures.” By 2007, Giuliani’s worth was estimated to be thirty million dollars. Yet his work for Donald Trump has reportedly brought him to the brink of bankruptcy. What happened? Giuliani was seduced by Mammon, Kirtzman suggests, and righteousness morphed into self-righteousness.

First published in German in 1963, and now reissued in a lucid translation, Haushofer’s cult classic details the eerie experience of a woman who, on vacation in the Alps, wakes one morning to find she is entirely alone in the world, confined to a parcel of land by an invisible barrier. The narrator, alone with a few animals, establishes a kind of separatist commune deep in the woods. She spends much of the book shedding her old self. The novel is a dystopian one that gradually becomes a utopian one: our narrator makes a new community, creating a new life so fulfilling and engrossing that it is not clear she would wish to rejoin the old, ordinary, damaged society, even if she could. Haushofer’s inhabitation of animality is remarkably tender.

The Serpent Coiled in Naples

In a travelogue exploring the cultural and historical richness of Naples, Kociejowski emerges as a great questioner. He professes to be shy, but something about his enthusiasm (“the engine that drives the universe,” he notes) evidently elicits answers. Perhaps it’s because he asks the right people, the kind of people you would glimpse in a foreign city and wish to get to know. His new book takes on some of the largest questions that come with searching for the soul of this stupendous city: Has paganism survived Christianity in subtle or not so subtle ways? Do people think differently about death when living in immediate reach of a large volcano? For all the book’s exalted aims, though, the tone remains light, the content varied, the sense of mission wholly personal. The experience is more of an intellectual joyride than a standard history.

Alive at the End of the World

The apocalypse is a many-faced phenomenon in this collection, several poems from which were published in The New Yorker . Jones creates a kaleidoscope of shared and private grief—mass shootings, American racism, a mother’s death—which also celebrates the ingenuity that it takes to survive.

I Walk Between the Raindrops

Boyle, in his twelfth short-story collection, finds so much humor in the casual twists and turns of fate that you may forget that the stories address such serious subjects as alcoholism, COVID -19, and animal research. Several entries, including the title story , first appeared in the magazine.

Bliss Montage

The follow-up to Ma’s début novel, “Severance,” is a surreal and unnerving collection of stories that explores the nature of connection and autonomy. The story “ Peking Duck ” first appeared in the magazine’s annual Fiction Issue.

Two Nurses, Smoking

In his virtuoso sixth collection, Means explores the ways in which we attempt to make sense of the past in order to achieve some kind of equilibrium in the present. The title story , among others, first appeared in the magazine.

The Storm Is Here

In 2020, Mogelson, a staff writer known for his dispatches from war zones overseas, returned home to document a year of tumult in America. The pieces he filed from across the country climaxed in a remarkable first-person account of the invasion of the U.S. Capitol . Drawing on this work, his book searingly captures a country being torn apart both by phantom grievances and by genuine social injustice.

Lucy by the Sea

Like all of Strout’s novels, this one has an anecdotal surface that belies a firm underlying structure. It begins with William, Lucy’s first husband, from whom she is long divorced, plucking her from her mournfully comfortable existence in New York City when the pandemic begins. They relocate to a house perched on a cliff over a rocky shore in Maine. Holed up together, they start getting on each other’s nerves, and revisit the tensions of their marriage. He tires of hearing her talk about the depressing plight of her brother; Lucy finds herself hating William every evening after dinner, because he doesn’t really listen to her. Strout skillfully builds her fiction out of the little slights and kindnesses that make up the architecture of human relationships.

Less Is Lost

Picking up the plot nine months after his Pulitzer-winning “Less” left off, Greer’s sequel sends Less, a gay middle-aged novelist, on another roving adventure, this one across the continental United States; the novel advances by way of a series of road-trip encounters with characters who are mostly also “characters.” Less spends a great deal of time in R.V. parks, where he nervously tries to camouflage his sexuality by purchasing “a red bandanna, wraparound sunglasses, a hoot ’n’ holler T-shirt, flip-flops, a baseball cap, a cowboy hat, a bolo tie, and six miniature American flags.” His countrymen often mistake him for a foreigner, a fair confusion when it comes to a member of that dreaded coastal caste, the publishing world. To a globe-trotting “Minor American Novelist,” nowhere could be more exotic than America itself.

The Furrows

Serpell’s second novel batters against the fixities of language like a moth at a windowpane. The main narrator recounts the story of how, when she was twelve, her seven-year-old brother Wayne disappeared beneath the ocean’s waves, “the great grooves in the water” like furrows in a field. That story is, it turns out, a story, one account of how Wayne went away; whether or not the going away was a death cleaves the family. But, though the novel’s story lines turn and twist, the precision of Serpell’s language remains under exquisite control—while reminding us on every page that every story is necessarily an act of falsification.

[To] The Last [Be] Human

Compiling four of Graham’s recent poetry collections—“Sea Change,” “Place,” “Fast,” and “Runaway”—this volume is a monumental exploration of consciousness in an age of ecological, political, and existential crisis. Several poems, including “ I Won’t Live Long ,” were originally published in The New Yorker .

Kick the Latch

Perched ambiguously between novel and oral history, this work of fiction is based on interviews that Scanlan conducted with an Iowa-born horse trainer named Sonia. She narrates Sonia’s life in a series of vignettes that play out across the gritty, intoxicating fever dream of the horse-racing world, as Sonia travels from race to race, living in trailers and motels. Her life is bound by the constant, gruelling rhythm of her work—“Four o’clock feed, seven days a week”—but whenever she is talking about horses, tenderness cuts through her stoicism like vinegar through oil. The work is structured by recurring themes: the violence and pleasures of intimacy, the balm and exhaustion of hard work, our bonds with animals and with our own animal natures—those surges of desire and aggression that unseat and rearrange us.

Fathers and Children

The good news is that your son, Arkady, is home from university; the not-so-good news is that he’s brought his dear friend Bazarov, a revolutionary who despises everything you wishy-washy liberals represent and has persuaded your son to join him in his “nihilist” creed. First published in 1862, in Russian, the book caused a furor upon its release. Young radicals felt targeted by the portrayal of the radical Bazarov (brilliant, intemperate, unaccountably rude); liberals felt that the book gave the radicals too much credit. Through the tensions between the ideological orientation of Arkady and Bazarov and that of their fathers, Turgenev probes the point at which belief tips over into fanaticism, and captures the inevitable rupture among parents and their children. This new English translation can be workmanlike and literal (starting with its title) but has inspired moments, and provides a worthy occasion to return to Turgenev’s masterpiece.

If I Survive You

The eight linked stories in this ravishing début largely concern three men living in Miami: an older man who fled Jamaica in the nineteen-seventies with his wife, Sanya; their elder son, a budding guitarist who’s prone to wise-stoner tautologies (“We all have to be what we have to be”); and the younger son, bookish and ironic, and the most frequent narrator. Escoffery’s fiction is marked by ingenuity. One tale unfolds in Jamaican patois; another dips in and out of Black American idioms. The book, about an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet, delights in mocking the trope of an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet. It feels thrillingly free.

One Beautiful Spring Day

Each panel in Jim Woodring’s huge new graphic novel is drawn in a style that looks like an eccentric woodcut. The effect is something like Doré meets Dalí: stories of pure dream logic rendered as reverently as an etching of the infant Christ. Woodring has published four book-length comics and an enormous collection of short stories that follow the distressing adventures of his hero, a woodland creature called Frank, who lives in a dreamlike world filled with deserts, forests, minareted castles, hot-air balloons, a devil, and the occasional cylindrical chicken. The Frank stories are both foreign and lucid, a set of gnomic parables that always end in a puff of irony or ambiguity. They leave behind not broad moral lessons but the harsh laws and uncrossable boundaries that apply only in a fictional world unlike any other.

Diary of a Void

The gambit of Emi Yagi’s début novel is seductive enough to prop up a more ordinary book: a woman in her mid-thirties, sick of being treated like dirt at her office job, pretends to be pregnant, causing her colleagues to shower her with accommodations. “Diary of a Void,” translated into a rinsed, clear English by David Boyd and Lucy North, begins as a standard-issue workplace novel and turns into something deeper and weirder. Yagi wants to press on broad assumptions about life, vitality, and spirit, and where these qualities can be found. Blurring the lines between fertility and barrenness, the animate and the inanimate, “Diary of a Void” advances a passionate case for female interiority, for women’s creative pulse and rich inner life. Why, the novel seems to ask, is it necessary to sequester life within certain borders, and to guard those borders so obsessively?

One Person, One Vote

This timely book is an excellent, if gloomy, guide to the abuse (or maybe just the use) of an apparently mundane feature of our system of elections: districting. “The only traditional districting principle that has been ubiquitous in America since before the founding,” Seabrook writes, “is the gerrymander itself.” That’s the way the system was set up: there was partisan gerrymandering even in the colonies. Seabrook goes on to detail, among other things, the way that New York’s districting was solidified under a handshake agreement that gave each party control of the process for one legislative chamber; and how the gridlock, backroom dealing, and inequitable distribution of resources of what Seabrook calls New York’s “criminal oligarchy” are a result of parties trying to create as many safe districts for their candidates as possible.

Laboratories Against Democracy

Grumbach is a quantitative political scientist, and his data suggest that, although some state governments have moved to the extremes, public opinion in those states has remained fairly stable. He therefore describes the country as “under entrenched minority rule.” What explains the political shift, he thinks, is that all politics has become national. National groups, he maintains, have exploited low-information environments to increasingly dominate the state level of politics and freeze out the opposition. “Antidemocratic interests need only to take control of a state government for a short period of time,” Grumbach points out, “to implement changes that make it harder for their opponents to participate in politics at all levels. ”

No Land in Sight

This latest offering from Simic, a longtime New Yorker contributor , features his signature impish, uncanny take on metaphysics. As he contemplates memory, death, and the detritus of daily life, Simic makes the world itself his interlocutor, projecting his imagination onto the inanimate and in-between.

Agent Josephine

A dancer, a singer, and the most celebrated night-club entertainer of her era, Josephine Baker might have been the smoothest operator of the twentieth century. She first captivated Parisians in 1925, when she appeared on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, nude save for her feathers. Had Baker’s career been restricted to her role as an entertainer, it would have had the allure of a thriller. But, during the war years, she was also—as this book by a British journalist chronicles with much fresh detail—a spy in the most literal sense, using a touring performer’s freedom of movement to transport intelligence documents. Later, the French government accorded her the Légion d’Honneur for military service.

Last Letter to a Reader

This book gives us the writing lifetime of the reclusive, gnarly master of contemporary Australian literature: it reflects on his previous work, fourteen strange and brilliant books, most of them concerned with the twinned acts of reading and of writing about the act of reading. Murnane’s supreme conviction as a writer is that the images in our mind may be more real than the objects that surround us, and his writing often gives the act of thinking a shape and a sound. These essays are an extraordinary effort made to retrieve an irretrievable entity: the time of thinking, the time of living, “the book being written continually on one’s heart.”

The Last Resort

Delving into the histories of more than twenty beachfront locales, from the Jersey shore to Indonesia, this chronicle of corrosive tourism describes a pattern of overdevelopment that, in our current ecological moment, “implies an end to the beach vacation as we know it.” The “nautical playgrounds” that Stodola surveys face coastal erosion, rising sea levels, wastewater leakage, and even Atlantis-like submersion. They also tend to segregate tourists from locals. Correctives such as taxing long-haul flights and transplanting man-made coral onto vanishing reefs can help, but Stodola believes that the resorts of the future will be “prohibitively expensive” and pushed back from the shore: the “paradise fantasy” must be reimagined, with the beach in a less central role.

An Honest Living

Set amid New York’s rare-book trade, this slow-burning début crime novel is also an atmospheric homage to the film “Chinatown.” The narrator, a former corporate lawyer who now undertakes quasi-legal freelance work, is hired by a woman to investigate her husband’s plans to sell a collection of old books owned by her family. The case leads him to A. M. Byrne, “the best American novelist under the age of fifty,” and to Byrne’s father, a wealthy businessman who has a scheme to redevelop the Brooklyn waterfront. The book is driven less by its plot than by a conflict between yearning and resignation. “Sometimes a conspiracy is just another word for life carrying on without you noticing it,” the narrator says.

In these essays by a poet, arts writer, and self-identified “queer brown butch,” encounters in Los Angeles and the Southwest with aging punks, border activists, lesbian legends, and others give rise to explorations of Latinx identity, cultural resistance, and the role of art. In one essay, Gutiérrez recounts a foray into the desert with a group of aid workers supplying water to migrants, and reflects on the “deep and complex matrices” that connect her to immigrants, including her Mexican father and Salvadoran mother. “I have been spared the experience of crossing the desert,” she writes. Still, the landscape cannot be separated from its history of violence, and there is no desert vista “that doesn’t have the uncanny attached to it.”

Girls They Write Songs About

This prickly-coy novel centers on two women who move to New York in the nineteen-nineties to become writers—or, as one of them, the narrator, puts it, “to be seen as an overpoweringly singular instance of late-twentieth-century womanhood.” The women meet and become friends while working at a music magazine, but the narrator opens her account by telling us that she and the other woman no longer speak. What shattered the friendship? Bauer is a crackerjack chronicler of the slide into humility which follows ravenous early adulthood, when “we felt that we owed the books we’d read proof that we were as open and free as they had commanded us to be.”

All That Moves Us

The chief of pediatric neurosurgery at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Wellons writes unsparingly of his chosen specialty, and “the nearly unbearable pain that we must at times unleash upon our patients.” We see Wellons operate on patients with tumors, blood-vessel malformations, brain swelling, developmental problems, and damage from trauma. The severity of the situations he confronts becomes an opportunity to prevent the direst outcomes, “not always, but most of the time.” He tells a number of stories in which he takes responsibility for irreparable mistakes. But he avoids growing isolated by perfectionism and imperiousness, turning to colleagues and mentors who reconcile him to human imperfection.

There have always been two views of Putin: in one, he is a pragmatic statesman, doing what he can for Russia under difficult circumstances; in the other, he is an ideologue, bent on restoring something like the Soviet empire to its 1945 borders. Short’s book, the most comprehensive English-language biography to date of the Russian leader, depicts Putin as a fairly impressive but also typical product of a patriotic working-class Soviet family of the nineteen-fifties.Young Putin was an indifferent student and an enthusiastic street brawler. In college, he was recruited by the K.G.B., becoming a middling officer with a short fuse. In 1985, he was dispatched to East Germany, by spy standards a backwater. His rise to the presidency was in many ways accidental; Putin found himself in the right place at the right time over and over, and he impressed the right people with his diligence and his loyalty. If some of his supporters were disappointed by their man, Short writes, others got exactly what they wanted, and much more.

Bitter Orange Tree

In this novel of remembrance and regret, Zuhour, an Omani student at a British university, obsessed with the possibility of “regaining or restoring just one moment from the past,” reflects on her grandmother, who has recently died. Described by Zuhour as a “mountain” of fortitude, she was born the daughter of a renowned horseman who left the family after the death of her mother. Much of the grandmother’s life story takes place in the context of devastating waves of drought, inflation, and famine, and Alharthi marshals these elements to construct a mosaic of history with women’s crushing vulnerability at its center.

This ambitious history offers the first unified picture of resistance against Nazi Germany in the many countries it invaded, including Poland, where the Reich’s brutality sparked immediate rebellion; the Balkans, where partisan activity devolved into civil war; and France, where collaborationist policies delayed the population’s sense of urgency. Kochanski examines clandestine presses, intelligence efforts, sabotage, armed uprisings, and civilian protests, noting that resisters’ motives and methods varied widely, and that some stories have been distorted by nationalist narratives. Dispensing with heroics and highlighting the imperfect, human nature of the underground, she nevertheless depicts a vital defense of dignity, spirit, and the future, mounted against all odds.

During the investigation of a bomb scare on the Paris Métro, the nameless passenger who narrates this novel recounts her journey from postwar Hanoi to twenty-first-century Belleville and reflects on her past marriage to an architect belonging to Vietnam’s Han Chinese minority. When border disputes with China sparked Sinophobia in Hanoi, he abandoned her and their son and headed for Saigon’s populous Chinatown. Aside from glimpses of a book that the narrator is writing, the novel unfolds in one unbroken paragraph, a virtuosic stream-of-consciousness mapping of the afterlives of diaspora.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

One of America’s first Black writers to achieve international acclaim, Dunbar was born to former slaves, in 1872. After submitting his writing to newspapers in his mid-teens, he went on to become a literary celebrity, reciting his poems on regional tours. However, his most popular work, dialect poetry, made him feel like “a caged bird,” forced to pander to white audiences. In this biography, Jarrett aims to cut through “the myths of his celebrity to the facts of his life.” Drawing on Dunbar’s sizable correspondence with friends, family, and benefactors, Jarrett illustrates his struggle to reconcile his professional success with a sense of himself as a failure—an errant husband, an alcoholic, and, above all, a Black artist who couldn’t liberate his community from racial stereotypes.

Salka Valka

Nowhere in the novels of Laxness (1902-1998) is the conflict between the shining ideal of socialism and the dignity of individual people on plainer display than in this one from 1931, and the new translation captures the Icelandic writer’s singular dour-droll tone with uncanny grace. Roiling with “unruly vitality,” young Salka arrives with her mother one night in a coastal village. Tall and strong, she’s determined to buy herself a pair of trousers soon “and stop being a girl.” Surviving the predations of a local drunk, Salka falls for a Communist revolutionary—but she’s too alive as a character to conform to any ideology.

In this evocative memoir of working as a seasonal farmhand in upstate New York and Vermont, Gaydos offers what, at first, reads like a straightforward catalogue of farm life: how pigs are raised and slaughtered; how radishes are harvested; where farmhands sleep. But the tranquil simplicity belies a deeper purpose. The farms where Gaydos works are independent, their output extremely vulnerable to the whims of nature; she has seen crops fail and “worms rot a flock of sheep from the hooves up.” And people are scarcely less vulnerable than livestock: a farmhand contracts Lyme disease; Gaydos has a miscarriage. Our dominion over nature, it becomes clear, is incomplete. The reason Gaydos likes farming, she writes, is that “one simply must accept the outcome.”

One’s Company

A random moment of luck sets this novel in motion: Bonnie, a thirtysomething grocery-store worker plagued by a persistent sense of “wrongness” and by memories of a traumatic robbery, wins the lottery and gets the chance to leave her old life behind. She decides to exist in her favorite TV show, “Three’s Company”—by moving alone to a rural locale, re-creating all the show’s sets, and the characters’ lives, one after another. “So many people wanted to solve their problem of self,” she thinks. “I wanted to trash it entirely.” When external forces intrude—in the form of storms, urban explorers, an old friend who’s determined to save her from herself—Bonnie is forced to reckon with the controlled world she has created.

Nightcrawling

Kiara, the narrator of this searing novel, is a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout in East Oakland, California, who has to take care of the boys in her life—an immature older brother, an addict-neighbor’s young son—despite not having anyone to take care of her. After a man forces himself on her, she reasons that her body will be used with or without her consent and turns to sex work. Her johns range from men as destitute as she is to the local police. Careful not to portray Kiara as a victim, Mottley shows us the pleasures of family, friendship, and love. The result is an intimate portrait of a young Black woman searching for autonomy and fulfillment in a society designed to deny her both.

I Used to Live Here Once

The Dominica-born British novelist Jean Rhys (1890-1979), whose “Wide Sargasso Sea” (1966) became a key text in feminist and post-colonial literature, lived a tempestuous bohemian life—rich in marriages, affairs, drink-fuelled rows—much of which she mined to create the heroines of her first four novels. This enthralling new biography powerfully evokes the Caribbean world of Rhys’s girlhood, whose dynamics of prejudice, abuse, and complicity she never really escaped, and her later life, through which the constant theme of poverty runs like a watermark through a pound note. But, where other biographers have read Rhys’s works in a reductive spirit of quasi-psychiatric diagnosis, Seymour shows that Rhys’s heroines are not mere alter egos, and, refreshingly, treats the novels as fully autonomous works of art.

Hollywood Ending

Auletta, a contributor since 1977, writes about the life, career, and downfall of the former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, whom he first profiled in 2002. His account of Weinstein’s criminal trial in New York was excerpted in the magazine.

Picasso’s War

The creation of a market for Picasso’s work in the United States took almost thirty years, from the first American Picasso show, in 1911, to the MOMA blockbuster (“Picasso: Forty Years of His Art”), in 1939, which, Eakin writes, “electrified the city.” His book isn’t really about Picasso; rather, it offers a gripping and thorough history of modern American taste-making. Its principals are the dealers, gallery owners, curators, and critics who make up the art world—figures like John Quinn, a collector, and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. Modern art’s journey to American success, we learn, was propelled by transatlantic cultural exchange and the mysterious and ever-shifting elements that combine to create cultural prestige.

Everything I Need I Get from You

When the Internet-culture reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany first encountered One Direction , the summer after her freshman year at college, she was sad and sick of herself. Her first impressions of the British-Irish boy band—bland songs, “too much shiny brown hair”—were overtaken by a weird sense of enchantment. Tiffany’s wistful, winning, and unexpectedly funny book sets out to explain why she “and millions of others needed something like One Direction as badly as we did,” and “how the things we did in response to that need changed the online world for just about everybody.” One of Tiffany’s most provocative arguments is that fans have drafted the Internet’s operating manual. She also evokes the intimacy of the fan-artist relationship: how your chosen mania can become the lens through which you process the world. The book draws intriguing parallels between fandom and religious experience, teasing out the mystical quality of fans’ devotion, how oddly close we can feel to icons we’ve never met.

Drawn Together

Based on chats with real-life couples, de Recat’s book ruminates on the nature of love and includes hilarious and poignant details from the relationships that the author surveyed. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

One of America’s first champion thoroughbreds, Lexington (1850-75), stands at the center of this deft novel, which moves between the present day and the Civil War era in a polyphonic examination of the fraught racial aspects of horse racing in U.S. history. Theo, a Nigerian American art historian, finds a portrait of a horse in his neighbor’s trash, and meets Jess, an Australian scientist who is involved in analyzing the recently discovered skeleton of a powerful stallion. Back in Lexington’s lifetime, we meet his young groom, Jarret, living in slavery and torn between his desire for freedom and his devotion to the animal. These narratives and others gradually fit together to create a picture of the artistic, athletic, and scientific passions that horses can inspire in humans.

The Pope at War

Afraid of jeopardizing the Vatican’s precarious neutrality during the Second World War, Pius XII was so reluctant to upset Mussolini and Hitler that he refused to publicly condemn the slaughter of Europe’s Jews. Yet he has retained many defenders, and his legacy has been much debated, in part because his papers were sealed until 2020. Drawing on these newly available documents, this history offers both a masterly character study of a flawed, tormented leader and a cautionary tale about the perils of both-sides-ism. Although the Pope managed to protect the papacy during a tumultuous period, Kertzer definitively concludes that “as a moral leader, Pius XII must be judged a failure.”

Geography Is Destiny

Ten thousand years of British history are condensed in a book that seeks to explain what led to Brexit. A pattern emerges in which Continental innovations (in agriculture, technology, religion, and governance) have invariably pushed northwestward, with the Isles repeatedly facing encroachment and population replacement. The pattern was disrupted in the imperial age, but this, Morris contends, was a blip, whereas the anxieties that produced Brexit—immigration, identity, ownership—represent the norm. Looking to the future, Morris predicts that, as the globe continues to shrink, “Beijing, not Brussels,” will become the focus of Britain’s encroachment angst.

In this novel of medieval grotesquerie, Lapvona is a realm where cruelty reigns. Marek, a disfigured boy, and his father, Jude, a shepherd, live a life of squalor until an accident results in Marek’s being adopted by Lapvona’s slovenly lord, Villiam. While Marek grows fat on the castle’s delicacies, Jude and the other villagers go hungry during a drought. Alternating between scenes of idle decadence and of desperate struggle for survival, the novel abounds with violence, cannibalism, and magic, while human compassion flickers only occasionally. Moshfegh’s brutal vision can make for grim reading, but it has a coherence that is rare in contemporary fiction.

New and Selected Stories

The primary tension in Rivera Garza’s fiction is between the unruly intensities of sexual desire and the political disciplining of the body, and it’s at its most concentrated in this latest translation of the Mexican-born writer’s work. The book assembles pieces from three collections first published in Spanish, and adds a new collection of flash fiction. In her earliest fiction, we are introduced to a recurrent narrator named Xian, “a slacker and occasional thief and queer liar,” who slinks through the world with an attractive insouciance; in another collection, men seeking women from their pasts trip from one metaphysical plane to another—from dream world to waking life, from the harsh present to the glow of memory.

A Trail of Crab Tracks

This concluding novel in an epic historical trilogy about Cameroon reimagines a nation by reimagining the novel: ranging back and forth across time, weaving real-world figures amid fictional characters, and shifting among languages to powerful effect. Tanou, a middle-aged professor at an American university, attempts to come to terms with his father’s history, one entwined with the birth of the Cameroonian state. Tanou’s immense thirst for his father’s recognition and approval is the emotional engine that powers the novel, even as his father’s far more dramatic history of colonial tragedy unspools around it; ultimately, the two narratives fuse into one, yielding a singularly complex interrogation of the relationship between thought and action, between writing and the world.

In this reissue of a 2013 classic of trans fiction, twenty-nine-year-old Maria Griffiths addresses other trans women in popular blog posts on the early-two-thousands Internet, showing, through her own life, where trans women often go wrong. But Maria can’t get her offline life together. The novel brilliantly contrasts the useful things she says with the dumb things she does. A road trip to Nevada, in a car stolen from her ex-girlfriend, is her attempt to find out what she really wants. The book introduces its readers to a trans woman’s consciousness from the inside while strenuously resisting what Burt calls the “Trans 101” stance; it does not, as Binnie says in a new afterword, seek “validation from cis people.” The tone is defiant, terse, not quite cynical, and sometimes flip. Authenticity, not uplift, is the point.

In this collection of articles that originally appeared in The New Yorker , Keefe, a staff writer, finds artful dodgers lurking across the globe—from Wall Street boardrooms and Amsterdam apartments to West African mines .

The Hangman and His Wife

Assassinated in 1942 by Czechoslovak resistance fighters, the Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich left few traces of his life, but Dougherty, who died in 2013, spent decades researching this account of his rise, most notably through interviews with Heydrich’s widow, Lina. The son of an opera singer, Heydrich was dismissed from the Navy before becoming Heinrich Himmler’s deputy and then the head of the Gestapo. Dubbed “the man with the iron heart” by Hitler, he comes across as an opportunist rather than as a true believer. Lina, willfully refusing to accept her husband’s role in atrocities, claims that his importance is “always overrated.” In photographs, she says, “he’s shown where he really belongs, always in the second rank.”

Approaching the arch-Romantic poet through “Nine Poems and One Epitaph,” this brief biography blends close readings of Keats’s output with anecdotes gleaned from his letters and the accounts of contemporaries. Miller draws parallels between art and life—“To Autumn” is linked to political unrest, “The Eve of St. Agnes” to a woman with whom Keats had a relationship—without insisting on perfect correspondences. There are some personal asides, but the focus is on Keats’s complex life and style, and the book’s deftness and passion make it an excellent introduction to a poet who remains influential for his ambiguities and for language that “resists any final definition.”

Imaginary Languages

Expanding on a study published in France in 1984, a noted linguist surveys the history of language invention, an enterprise undertaken by centuries of “lunatic lovers of language,” for reasons philosophical, political, artistic, and arcane. Yaguello recounts the utopian impulses behind projects like Esperanto and Volapük; speculative fiction’s explorations of linguistic theory; and the search, rooted in Judeo-Christian mythology, for an original, universal tongue. The mind-bending nature of the book’s subject, which offers seemingly infinite paths of inquiry, could overwhelm, but Yaguello relates the material with gusto, offering an idiosyncratic, illuminating perspective on the development of Western thought.

Fire Island

This richly textured history of a place “equal parts real and imagined,” which has served as a queer summertime mecca for more than a century, unfolds like a pageant, populated by notable figures who have sought sun, sex, and solace on its beaches. Against a backdrop of tea dances, costume parties, and anonymous sexual encounters, we meet W. H. Auden, smoking at daybreak; Patricia Highsmith, brawling in Duffy’s Bar; Frank O’Hara, killed by a dune buggy. Parlett captures the giddy excesses, but his real aim is to show how a community sought to define, protect, liberate, and celebrate themselves, realizing “the fantasy of a world away from shame and silence.”

In the artist Anne Truitt’s final journal, the prose is as unembellished and direct in impact as her sculptures. Truitt remained an evenhanded witness to her own life, the pleasure of visits from grandchildren running alongside her grief at a friend’s passing. As in her art, Truitt was constantly making monoliths of memory—including the moment a half century before when she understood what she wanted to do with her life: “And one day . . . it occurred to me that if I made a sculpture it would just stand there and time would roll over its head and the light would come and the light would go and it would be continuously revealed.” Her journals offer a model of discipline and open-ended inquiry and a welcome counterweight to the kind of anxieties that so often accompany a creative practice.

The Twilight World

The Japanese lieutenant Hiroo Onoda emerged from hiding, in 1974, after fighting the Second World War for twenty-nine years. He’d been deployed to the Philippine island of Lubang in 1944, when he was twenty-two, and had received secret orders to hold his position even as the Imperial Army withdrew from its airfield there. Trained in military intelligence, he dismissed all outside communication as propaganda. The director Werner Herzog has made Onoda the subject of his wondrous first novel. In Herzog’s lightly mythologized version of the story, Lubang exists outside of time, and Onoda’s war has the eerie gravity of a thought experiment come to life. Herzog, who has made a career studying the emptiness of meaning-making, celebrates his subject’s crusade even as he dismisses its abject triviality; it takes a kindred spirit to admire someone who held himself hostage to a lost cause.

Tracy Flick Can’t Win

Tracy Flick, the teen-age star of “Election,” Perrotta’s 1998 novel, was ambitious, assertive, a little crazed in her quest to become student-body president. She seemed in the suburbs but not of them: destined for genuine greatness. She could not have known how the world—illness, economic hardship, grief—would crush her, conspiring with sexism to stamp out her hope, her spark. This sequel, set in New Jersey around the end of 2018 and imbued with the author’s sense of ironized grace, finds Tracy, now in her mid-forties, grappling with topics that were only nascent in “Election”: What does it mean to be special? What is the nature of success, of failure? The book pores over these questions like an honors student before midterms.

Streets of Gold

Abramitzky and Boustan, professors of economics at Stanford and Princeton, respectively, make a powerful case for the benefits of immigration, not only to migrants but to their hosts. Seeing the long-run benefits requires measurement “at the pace of generations, rather than years,” they contend. Many of their arguments come from their analysis of genealogical records collected by Ancestry.com, which, in combination with detailed census records, debunk the idea that earlier waves of European migrants were more industrious and more culturally assimilable than contemporary migrants from elsewhere. Even if migrants arrive poor, “one generation later their children more than pay for their parents’ debts,” Abramitzky and Boustan write.

Although structured around a retracing of significant walks taken by Henry David Thoreau, this book quickly reveals itself to be less a historical reënactment than a series of meditations on the things that, now as then, fill our lives—breakups and new relationships, family history and its reverberations, nature and our rapidly changing place within it—all informed by Thoreau’s luminous, lyrical prose. From the shores of Cape Cod to the heights of Mt. Katahdin, Shattuck finds moments of sublimity (the call of a loon, the comfort of friendship) and disillusionment (health problems, tourists), but his main message is the primacy of love, for both the people around us and the world we inhabit.

School Days

Having once been a pupil at the ultra-preppy boarding school where he teaches, Sam Brandt, the protagonist of this novel, is approached by the headmaster to investigate a recent allegation of a decades-old sexual assault by an unspecified faculty member. As Sam starts digging, we are transported back to 1964, where febrile schoolboy crushes abound and students are enraptured by one particularly charismatic teacher. Meanwhile, Sam is forming a sense of his own gay identity, after spending his adulthood closeted and married. The book neatly encompasses much of modern gay history—pre-Stonewall secrecy, AIDS , today’s climate of openness—but, as Sam mulls the paths his classmates have taken, it also becomes a sensitive evocation of late middle age.

Metaphysical Animals

In postwar Oxford, the four philosophers at the heart of this absorbing history—Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch—came together to give new life to moral philosophy. As Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman write, prewar British philosophy had been dominated by logical positivists who dismissed inquiry into the nature of goodness as “nonsense.” But the war presented urgent moral questions, not to mention new opportunities for women in academia. In the following decades, each of this book’s subjects produced work that, in seeking to reconnect “human life, action and perception” with morality, remains vitally relevant.

Part travelogue, part geopolitical study, this freewheeling book examines the kaleidoscopic histories and cultures of the countries fringing the Adriatic Sea. Kaplan begins in Italy, contemplating the region’s ascendancy under the Venetian Republic, and then enters the “more politically fragile terrain” of Slovenia and Montenegro. His central thesis is that the Adriatic may soon, once again, take on global significance, as the Western maritime terminus of China’s Belt and Road Initiative; Trieste will be linked with Hong Kong. Today’s Adriatic, Kaplan writes, is a “geographical metaphor for an age that is passing: the modern age itself in Europe.”

When Bran, the protagonist of this offbeat bildungsroman, is ten years old, her mother joins a Buddhist colony, abandoning her to the dubious care of her common-law stepfather. His family belongs to a motorcycle gang, evades taxes on principle, houses Bran in a mice-infested lean-to, and compels her to work unpaid in its plant nursery. Yet Bran emerges into her twenties with a cheerfully demented optimism. She sheep-sits for strangers, works as a barista, makes avant-garde student films, and falls in love with a magnetic, disturbed college student, who introduces her to literature. He praises the artless outlook that makes Bran and the novel captivating: “You’re still using your eyes to see the world, instead of adopting the proper skewed perspective of an egomaniac.”

Love Marriage

Set in London, this quick-footed and absorbing novel begins with Yasmin, a young doctor, newly engaged, fretting about her Indian-born parents’ meeting with the mother of her fiancé, Joe. In front of this woman, a wealthy white feminist activist, Yasmin cringes at her mother’s clothes and her sincere father’s imperviousness to sarcasm, “a level of Englishness to which he could never aspire.” The playful clash of cultures evolves into a subtle exploration of the ways in which both immigrant and nonimmigrant families have shaped their children, transmitting unexplored trauma across generations. As Joe tries to maintain boundaries with his mother, his therapist tells him, “What we do not know controls us.”

Fight Like Hell

This history of American labor places today’s resurgence of union activity in the context of past struggles, ranging from the textile mills of New England in the eighteen-forties to the emergence of flight attendants, in the nineteen-thirties. Employers, seeking “docility” in marginalized people, have sometimes pitted groups against one another: in response to Chinese-exclusion policies, Hawaiian sugar-plantation owners brought in Japanese workers, who were in turn replaced by Filipinos. Kelly’s broad view makes it possible to see resonances across history and locale. Like the New York garment workers who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in 1911, many of the Bangladeshi workers killed in the Dhaka factory collapse of 2013 made clothes for American companies.

Stepping Back from the Ledge

The author of this memoir reckons with her mother’s suicide, a decade ago in Grand Canyon National Park, and with the agonizing conviction that she was to blame for it. Not long before, Trujillo had told her mother that her stepfather had sexually abused her for years. In unvarnished prose, she conjures the despair that gripped her in the aftermath of the death: “My grandma blamed me, as did my mom’s sister and her brother.” Later, Trujillo, a journalist, uses park-service reports to reconstruct a time line of her mother’s final journey. Hoping thereby to understand her mother’s decision, she instead confronts how, in cases of suicide, “only one person ‘gets’ an ending; the rest of us are left with a story abandoned mid-sentence.”

Acts of Service

Having a devoted, dependable girlfriend doesn’t stop Eve, the narrator of this début novel, from posting nude selfies online or from becoming involved with a couple, Olivia and Nathan, who respond to the pictures. Olivia is a painter with a day job at a family investment firm, where Nathan is her boss. Eve finds herself intoxicated by Nathan’s masculinity, which draws her into “a state of grotesque candor,” even as she frets over Olivia’s well-being and struggles to reconcile her ideas of gender politics with the discovery of pleasure and abandon. Her adventure, she realizes, presents all the issues that preoccupy her—“desire, sex, gender, attention, intimacy, vanity, and power”—in such a way that she can “study them like fruit in a bowl.”

Time Shelter

In this antic fantasy of European politics, narrated by a fictionalized version of the author, an enigmatic friend of his designs “a clinic of the past,” which soothes Alzheimer’s patients with environments from a time they can still remember. As the treatment gains prominence, feverish nostalgia grips the continent. People dress up in national costumes, and there is a Brexit-style referendum to return to the past (though the countries disagree on the era). In the East, there are socialist rallies and even a re-assassination of Franz Ferdinand. “History is still news,” Gospodinov writes, cunningly drawing attention to the violence that the past wreaks on the present.

The Shores of Bohemia

From roughly 1910 to 1960, Cape Cod was a yeasty outpost for lefty artists and intellectuals—“Greenwich Village sunburnt,” as the editor Floyd Dell said of Provincetown. Mary McCarthy lived and set her barbed novel “A Charmed Life” on the Cape. Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams felt able to do their best work there. Robert Motherwell wrote of “the radiant summer light of Provincetown that rivals the Greek islands.” In this admiring chronicle, the author shows how, across half a century of tippling, rabble-rousing, and bed-hopping on the Cape, “a movement that shaped American art, literature, design, and theater rose and fell like the tides on its shores.”

Two Wheels Good

In the history of the bicycle, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. As Rosen relates, the Laufmaschine was invented in 1817: it had a wooden frame, a leather saddle, two in-line wheels, and no pedals; you scooted around on it. In England, they_ _were called “swiftwalkers.” Lately, posh toddlers, the newest preschool jet set, roll around on modern swiftwalkers, marketed as “wooden balance bikes.” If you bike all your life, there’s a fair chance you’ll bike the whole history of bicycles—a history that this book examines through a set of quirky and kaleidoscopic stories. To ride a bike is to come as close to flying by your own power as humans ever will, Rosen observes. No part of you touches the ground. You ride on air.

What’s Good

Levin Becker disapproves of those who would insist on “instrumentalizing rap as a vector of sociopolitical insight without also revelling and rejoicing in its vital sense of play.” Rhyme is, of course, central to rap, and a key part of Levin Becker’s mission is to defend rap’s frequent use of imperfect rhymes as a superior form of “slanting” language, responsive to American speech in all its variety. What emerges is an argument that American hip-hop, wrongly characterized as an “authentic” form of expression, a “street” idiom, is both levelling and exalting; it has renewed the language of American song by broadening its resources and sharpening its ear.

Spin Dictators

Guriev and Treisman offer a social-scientific perspective on the mechanics of new autocrats and their common world view. They draw a yin-and-yang distinction between “fear dictators,” the classic kind, and “spin dictators,” the contemporary kind. What emerges as the central observation is that the new generation of authoritarians, whether fully fledged or still aspirant, as in the U.S., usually exploit the apparent levers of democratic politics but use more discreet forms of manipulation to extend their rule: rather than cancel elections, they rig them; rather than outlaw opposition media, they marginalize them; sooner than start a gulag, they put constraints on Google.

The Letters of Thom Gunn

Gunn’s letters are a primer both on literature and on the poet himself, a British expatriate who spent most of his life in San Francisco, and who had a tendency, in his work, to hide in plain sight. In these letters, he relays the aftermath of his mother’s suicide and the losses he experienced during the AIDS crisis in tones of measured anguish; the letters are also full of his love for leather and motorcycles, and his sometimes childlike reaching for the ecstatic. If death is the most vivid, indelible thing life offers us, Gunn’s writing asks again and again, how do we make the best of both life and death?

The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

As the nation confronts a deepening struggle with inequality, political unrest, and a climate in crisis, McKibben, a longtime contributor, looks back at two events that occurred during his childhood in Lexington, Massachusetts—the birthplace of the revolution—to try to understand how we got here. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

The Last Days of Roger Federer

The twilight of careers underpins these kaleidoscopic musings on artistic and sporting endeavors. Dyer considers the late phase of Bob Dylan, the mythology surrounding Nietzsche’s decline and death, and the drive of talented people to keep going. Andy Murray, hobbled by injury, “persisted in coming back for more even if more meant less and less”; Willem de Kooning, blind and suffering from dementia, made paintings in which “the obstacle became the path.” An irony of endings, Dyer writes, is that “lastness is oddly self-perpetuating. For a while at least, one last thing generates and leads to another.”

A Sister’s Story

The sisters from the author’s previous novel, “A Girl Returned”—a stoic narrator and her fiery younger sister, Adriana—reappear in this unsettling companion tale. The narrator, now a professor in France, returns to her home town, on the coast of Abruzzo, after Adriana has a mysterious accident. Her renewed immersion in the town’s social rhythms, particularly in the gritty fishermen’s quarter, brings back powerful memories—of the end of her marriage to a gentle yet duplicitous husband, of Adriana’s harried arrival at her house with a baby. “I felt intensely the unease of being her sister,” the narrator says of Adriana, as she moves fluidly between the past and the present, sifting years of unarticulated emotions.

Life on the Rocks

This book on the plight of coral reefs spikes the normally glum discourse about ocean conservation with a measure of capitalist techno-optimism, arguing that a combination of marine science and smart business could yet bring salvation. The heroes here are various public-private partnerships: commercial coral farms in Bali; a reef-restoration project in Sulawesi; debt swaps and “blue bonds” for ocean protection in Seychelles; even a geo-engineered “cloud brightening” plan for the Great Barrier Reef. Berwald interweaves the insights of conservationists and entrepreneurs with a parallel narrative of her daughter’s struggles with O.C.D., suggesting that complex problems call for radical solutions.

Who Killed Jane Stanford?

In his engaging new book, the historian Richard White investigates the mysterious death of Jane Stanford, the widow of the railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, in 1905. When a violent spasm threw her from her bed, Stanford had told the doctor who rushed to her care, “I have been poisoned.” Authorities insisted that Stanford could not have been murdered, for the kindly widow had no enemies. But as White investigates her murder he finds that Stanford’s sanitized public persona masked a reality that was both more scandalous and more strange. The mystery of her death turns out to hinge on the mystery of her life: how a woman at the turn of the twentieth century could amass such power, and how she could disguise that power from the public.

The Revenge of Power

A foreign-policy maven’s account of how recent demagogues have come to power and used the tools of our time—social media, the society of spectacle—to promote one-man rule and the suppression of dissent, the book excels in the mordant detailing of its profiles. It contains portrayals of certain second-tier autocrats—less famous than Putin and Erdoğan, but exemplary of the rise of what Naím calls “3P” (populist, polarizing, and post-truth) politicians. He details how these autocrats often follow a similar, and, to Americans, depressingly familiar route: after improbable success as loudmouth entertainers, not taken seriously by the political establishment, they attract a passionate minority and then, suddenly, they’re in power.

Everything Abridged

Dayle’s witty collection of stories provides social commentary with a satirical twist, breaking down American racism and politics. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

This sequel to Batuman’s first novel, “The Idiot,” takes her protagonist, Selin, through sophomore year of college and a hilarious and poignant series of intellectual and sexual explorations. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

Rouge Street

These three intricate novellas converge on the author’s home city, Shenyang, recalling the gritty neighborhoods of his childhood, in the early nineties, which were populated by drunks, gamblers, and laid-off factory workers. In sparse, vernacular prose, Shuang uses fabulist noir to evoke the pace of social change: a hollow-boned inventor dreams of creating a flying machine; children fall into an icy lake and encounter a gigantic fish; a string of violent carjackings dredges up submerged memories. “The past has nothing to do with the present,” one character admonishes, and Shuang’s multi-voiced narratives both challenge and confirm that maxim, conveying the contested legacies of recent Chinese history.

“Controlling what you wear is a proxy for controlling what you do,” Hyland writes in this examination not only of fashion but also of sartorial life more generally. Hyland finds meaning in what we wear, whether in the nineteenth-century vogue for bloomers or in courtroom attire, which is chosen to convey its wearer’s respectability. Indeed, even an anti-fashion impulse can yield fashionable results. Hyland shows how normcore, which “annihilated the idea of personal style and its emphasis on individuality,” arose as a street look just as online forums for self-expression, such as blogs and Instagram, were becoming coöpted by corporate sponsors.

Journeys to Heaven and Hell

Ehrman follows up his masterly history of concepts of the afterlife with one about narratives in which a living soul—like Dante led by Virgil—is given a tour of what awaits us after death. Focussing on pre-Christian and early-Christian literature, Ehrman shows how Homer’s egalitarian afterlife, where all meet the same fate, gave way to Virgil’s version, where an elect few enjoy eternal rewards while the rest suffer torments. Early Christians imagined Hell as a punishment for nonbelievers, but it was gradually cast as an elaborate realm that terrorized even the faithful. As Ehrman notes, in every era, such tales aimed to teach readers “how to live in the here and now.”

Little Rabbit

Queer, young, and finishing her first novel at an artists’ residency, the narrator of this unusual erotic tale is the last person who would expect to find herself in bed with a rich and powerful older man. Even more challenging to her self-conception is that the man, a successful choreographer, is intent on dominating her, in the bedroom and beyond—and that she enjoys submitting to him. Her queer friends are horrified that she would, as her roommate puts it, be “some man’s little woman,” but the narrator finds this less constrictive than her old life. Songsiridej’s sex scenes are notably arresting, both in their urgency and in the way they reveal competing interpretations of the erotic domain.

Essential Labor

A mother of two, Angela Garbes spent most of the first year and a half of the pandemic both caring for her children and struggling to write. The experience led her to examine how caregiving “came to be seen as naturally female, which is to say invisible and undervalued,” and why it’s conceived as “low-wage labor, rather than highly skilled work that is essential, creative, and influential.” She began to see her frustrations mirrored all around her, as a larger reckoning with the broken American care structure began emerging in the news. “Essential Labor” is Garbes’s attempt to harness the parental desperation and civic potential of the past two years. It’s partly a history of caregiving in the United States. It’s also a call for a guaranteed decent income for domestic workers and caregivers, parents included. Above all, it is an argument that care should be public and universal—that the grace and affirmation that women are asked to bestow on their children should not be limited to mothers, or to parents, or to the private sphere. As a lived-in argument for radicalized parenting, “Essential Labor” is a landmark and a lightning storm, a gift that will be passed hand to hand for years.

Private Notebooks

Wittgenstein’s surviving notebooks from the first half of the First World War, now available in the first facing-page English translation, contain remarks that are clearly an embryonic form of the “Tractatus,” along with personal remarks on religion, masturbation, and the quotidian business of being at war. Taken out of context, Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks can seem perilously close to kitsch, or mere displays of cleverness. But he possessed a virtue rarer than cleverness: that of depth. He rarely doubted his authority to tell people how to live, and, even now, seven decades after his death, his conduct and character continue to invite lively speculation.

With an uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, this novel navigates a reality riven by violence, race, class, and sex. It vividly depicts an ailing society inured to its own cruelty, and Melchor’s supple sentences are alive to the rhythms of speech. The book largely takes place in the gated community of Paradais, but it is firmly situated in the teen-age male psyche: that of Polo, who works in Paradais as a gardener. The milieu is largely one of luxury and wealth, insulated from what happens outside its perimeter. All borders are porous, however, and this porousness, in the shape of the unlikely friendship between Polo and the odious Franco, another teen-ager who lives in the community with his grandparents, will harrow the supposed sanctuary.

Ancestor Trouble

An interest in genealogy, for those not drawn to it, can seem “at best, embarrassing, if not a sign of narcissism and pitiable aspiration,” Newton acknowledges in this candid account about her own genealogical obsession. But, whatever you think about genealogy, it has profound ramifications for you. Family and citizenship law codifies privileges and exclusions based on lineage. Today’s addictive Web sites and sleekly packaged DNA kits rest on deep, if not always acknowledged, assumptions about the fixity of status, race, ethnicity, and nationality. Newton has a keen appreciation for the way ancestry inflects the social, material, legal, and medical conditions of nearly everybody’s life, and she illuminates how each way that humans have conceived of ancestry has been layered onto others.

In the Early Times

After Friend’s erudite, emotionally remote father dies, he comes across a cache of his personal writings and begins to reassess his family history. The result is a memoir that traces generations of crosscurrents of love, ambition, and unresolved yearning. Friend is a staff writer, and an excerpt from the book ran in the magazine.

In the heightened climate crisis imagined in this novel, birds drop en masse from the sky and heat waves cause baseball players to faint mid-game. Willa, the daughter of paranoid survivalists, leaves Boston for the Bahamas in search of a group of eco-warriors, led by a man who propounds a carbon-negative life style calculated to appeal to society’s élite, offering “the promise of more, not less.” Willa’s account of what happens when the leader goes missing is intercut with scenes from her earlier life, involving her influencer-wannabe cousins, dumpster diving, and her infatuation with a Harvard professor. Partly satirical, the book is also an urgent, absorbing story that asks how we are meant to live.

The marginalized residents of Lagos in this début novel—queer lovers, restless spirits, and survivors of sexual violence—rely on increasingly fantastical forms of disguise in order to survive: lies, masks, bodysuits. But true salvation comes from self-revelation and the community that it forges. Village women sharing stories of abuse vanish into thin air, leaving their abusers abandoned. A dominatrix transmutes her clients’ shame until it is “submitted, regulated, rewritten into power.” Socialites relate their sorrows to a dressmaker, who then creates outfits to conceal pain. In a world that seeks to consign to the shadows those who don’t conform, Osunde’s vagabonds act as an illuminating force for one another. “If they say we don’t exist,” a woman asks her lover, “how come I can see you?”

Taking its title from that of George Balanchine’s first American ballet, which premièred in 1934, this personal history by a former New York City Ballet dancer blends various accounts of the work’s—and the company’s—creation and evolution. In addition to providing a wealth of ballet lore, trivia, and insightful interpretation, Bentley is not afraid to get technical; she describes steps, combinations, entrances, and exits from the perspective of the corps. In endeavoring to conjure the transcendent lyricism of Balanchine’s vision and Tchaikovsky’s score, the book goes further, touching on deeper, stranger ideas about the symbiosis between life and art.

Activities of Daily Living

Alice, the protagonist of Lisa Hsiao Chen’s engrossing début novel, has constructed her life around an amorphous “project” that involves learning all she can about Tehching Hsieh, the Taiwanese American artist who engaged in a series of yearlong performance pieces in the late seventies and early eighties. When Alice isn’t working on her project, she is tending to her stepfather, who suffers from dementia; his demise is meandering and cruelly slow. Her thoughts often drift back to Hsieh, who provides a model for living slowly, deliberately, and counterproductively. Time is all that Alice and her stepfather have left together, yet it cannot be maximized through the haze of his dementia. Embracing the artist’s perspective gives her the license to see life as we know it—the life of bottom lines and optimization—as strange and inhumane.

Homesickness

With dark humor and lyrical expansiveness, Barrett’s second collection of stories captures the weirdness and beauty of seemingly ordinary lives in the West of Ireland and Canada. Several of these, including “ A Shooting in Rathreedane ,” first appeared in the magazine.

I’m More Dateable than a Plate of Refried Beans

With a collection of short stories and quizzes, Hogan, a comedian,  determines how dateable we really are. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

The Premonitions Bureau

A remarkable true story of death foretold, Knight’s first book originated in the magazine. In it, he recounts how a British psychiatrist set up an office to collect dreams and forebodings from the public, in the hope of preventing disasters.

La Nijinska

Long overshadowed by her older brother, the tragic virtuoso Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska (1891-1972) was also an important dancer and choreographer, and this scrupulous biography illuminates the formidable scope of her accomplishments. Nijinska made integral contributions to her brother’s legendary dances, staged groundbreaking creations of her own (including “Les Noces” and “Les Biches”), and trained future stars such as Frederick Ashton, Cyd Charisse, and Maria Tallchief. Garafola documents the ways in which a misogynistic establishment undermined Nijinska’s achievements and argues that, despite this, her ideas about the relationship between movement and music and her gender-bending experiments in abstraction helped shape the modern art of ballet.

How Strange a Season

Women’s homeownership and its promise of security are at stake in this closely observed story collection. A rancher concocts a peculiar side business to save the property she inherited from her mother; a divorcing woman must decide whether to move to California to claim the glass house her grandmother left her; a matriarch’s fear of losing her family home compels her to send her barely adult daughter down a life-altering path. In several stories, climate change looms, but casting darker shadows are the book’s many absent or inadequate parents. One character is convinced that her forebears’ missteps are “inside of her, like the rings of a felled tree.”

Populated entirely by animals, this novel slyly invokes “Animal Farm” while depicting more recent political struggles. The protagonist is a goat named Destiny, an exile returning to the fictional African nation of Jidada after the ouster of its longtime autocrat, Old Horse (explicitly modelled on Robert Mugabe), by a new authoritarian, called the Savior. Destiny delves into the taboo subject of political disappearances, and her fearlessness catalyzes a citizenry whose most potent act of defiance is to name the dead in public. Bulawayo’s chronicle of the new government’s corruption and the old one’s brutality dramatizes Zimbabwean history while also illuminating the challenges of many developing nations.

Didn’t We Almost Have It All

Fusing biography and cultural criticism, this consideration of Whitney Houston is also a study of reputation. Houston, born in 1963 in Newark, cultivated her voice in church and under the tutelage of her mother, a gospel singer; she also suffered sexual abuse and began using cocaine at a young age. Such troubles—and an important same-sex relationship—made living in the public eye fraught. Even at her most successful (she remains the only recording artist to have had seven consecutive No. 1 hits), she was dismissed as a “yuppie icon,” with some Black radio stations refusing to play her music. Kennedy, however, highlights her “sisterhood” with younger Black singers, including Faith Evans and Monica.

Sergeyich is an eastern Ukrainian Everyman, living in the “grey zone”—the twenty miles or so between the armed camps of Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed troops, three years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. In loving detail, Kurkov, a Kyiv-based novelist, describes Sergeyich’s care for his bees, his nighttime preparations, his careful rationing. But when the shelling becomes too much for Sergeyich’s bees (and maybe for Sergeyich), he embarks on a journey in his trusty old Lada, travelling through Ukraine proper and eventually to Crimea, where an “inspection” of one of his beehives by the Russian security service leaves his bees in an altered state, looking sickly and gray. Although grounded deeply in the disturbing reality of war, “Grey Bees” sometimes has the feeling of a fable.

Gathering Blossoms Under Fire

Gathering thirty-five years’ worth of Walker’s journals, from 1965 to 2000, this volume shows she always sensed—even before a word of hers had been published—that all her writing, including the most diaristic, could well be destined for a public audience. The pages of the journal leave a record of both the pulsing epiphanies and the irritations of daily existence (“risk makes my back ache”), and chart, for a dimly perceived intimate reader, the progress of a literary pilgrim. “It has dawned on me lately that insecurity is one of the biggest killers of art,” she writes. Pain, joy, spells of depression, unease, engagement, even disaffection: all are material. Its entries accumulate to tell a story about accumulation—of pages, prizes, lovers, real estate, renown—and its perpetual inadequacy.

The Trees Witness Everything

In this collection, the constraints of the waka, a Japanese syllabic form, yield highly compressed, surreal meditations on time, desire, and the movements of the mind itself. Chang’s poems, some of which have appeared in the magazine, document a practice of sustained observation and imagination.

Making History

When we listen to a tale, we need to take into account the teller. This is a supremely entertaining survey of those who craft history, from Herodotus to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sketching their backgrounds and personalities, summarizing their output, and identifying their agendas. The coverage is epic. As Cohen says, it is a great irony of writing about the past that “any author is the prisoner of their character and circumstances yet often they are the making of him.” But a very good thing about this book is that, despite its premise, it is not reductive or debunking. Whatever Cohen writes about he writes about with brio.

Winslow Homer

Cross’s scrupulous new account of Homer’s life and work is a pleasure to read, despite the inevitable difficulties of a subject about whom so little is known. Cross calls him “a misfit by nature” or even a “human periscope”—a man who liked to observe others without being seen. Homer, at twenty-six, was a professional artist-reporter, his drawings often reproduced in the illustrated press, but he aspired to be a painter. In the spring of 1862, he observed the sharpshooting soldiers trained to use telescopic rifles while encamped with the Union Army at the Virginia front; “Sharpshooter,” completed in 1863, was likely his first oil painting, and Cross details how Homer continued to turn out paintings and drawings with quiet intensity, creating our richest artistic record of the Civil War.

Africa’s Struggle for Its Art

Bénédicte Savoy’s revelatory new book charts the course of an all-but-forgotten movement to reclaim African art expropriated under colonial rule. For twenty years, beginning in the nineteen-sixties, Africa’s decade of independence, battles over the restitution of stolen cultural property raged at conferences and exhibitions. In the quiet offices of Europe’s ethnographic collections, museum professionals mounted a white-gloved resistance, centered on West Germany, where Savoy unearths a coördinated effort to block restitution claims. The bureaucratic counter-revolution extended to sabotaging international committees, ostracizing dissenters, and denigrating African claimants as unfit to conserve their heritage. The most essential tactic was secrecy, particularly the concealment of inventories and provenance information. Savoy’s investigation yields a riveting scholarly whodunnit that doubles as a timely warning, in her words, that “museums also lie.”

The Genesis Machine

Predicting that technologies for editing and programming DNA will bring a “great transformation” in our conception of life, the authors of this introduction to “synthetic biology” set out a road map for navigating the field’s opportunities and perils. If harnessed responsibly, these technologies may help humankind secure its food supply, combat climate change, and eradicate disease. Conversely, what will happen if, say, technology that’s intended to study and fight viruses is instead used to unleash them as bioweapons, or if wealthy people begin genetically “enhancing” their offspring? Answering these and other difficult questions will require robust public dialogues, which this book seeks to initiate now.

Woman, Eating

The chief trait that Lydia, the protagonist of this artful vampire novel, shares with monsters of old is hunger. A “Buffy”-watching, British Japanese Malaysian performance artist interning in London’s gallery scene, she is anxious and overwhelmed, torn between vampiric urges and human scruples. Most traditional lore doesn’t apply; Lydia won’t be destroyed by the sight of a cross or combust in direct sunlight (acute sunburn notwithstanding). But her vampire mother has taught her that their kind are “unnatural, disgusting, and ugly.” As Lydia encounters new people, including a pleasant artist turned property manager, and a new boss, a man with more influence than decency, she comes to understand what it is to become something “that is neither demon nor human.”

Whole Earth

This biography of Stewart Brand, the creator of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” explores the varied career of a “quixotic intellectual troubadour.” An early techno-utopian—he coined the phrase “information wants to be free” and was the first journalist to use the term “personal computer”—Brand also organized parties for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and helped spark the environmental movement, befriending such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Brian Eno, and the California governor Jerry Brown along the way. What emerges is a view of an insistently holistic thinker unafraid to pursue idiosyncratic ideas and possessing “an uncanny sixth sense for being in the right place at the right time.”

Mercy Street

Dedicated “to the one in four” American women who has had an abortion, this novel revolves around a counsellor at an abortion clinic, a protester, and a would-be domestic terrorist who rants that abortion is theft as well as murder, because “there was a second, invisible victim, a man robbed of his progeny.” The novel’s central figure, the counsellor, is the most fully realized, experiencing her own path to motherhood while remaining devoted to her work. Musing on the way that anti-abortion arguments turn people into vessels for the production of babies, she asks, “What was the point of making yet another person, when the woman herself—a person who already existed—counted for so little?”

Let There Be Light

In this graphic novel, Finck reimagines the Book of Genesis with God as a woman, and a few other key updates. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

The Believer

The line between fact and fiction blurs to revelatory effect in this account of ghost hunters, death doulas, six-day creationists, U.F.O. investigators, and others who hold ideas at odds with, as the author judiciously puts it, “more accepted realities.” Krasnostein spends years among her subjects, in Australia and the U.S., hoping to reach an intimate understanding of what drives their devotion. Though her approach is journalistic, pure objectivity proves impossible; an attempt to bond with a group of Mennonite women in the Bronx falters because “they believe I am going to Hell and I believe they may already be living in one.” Ultimately, it is Krasnostein’s dawning awareness of herself as a believer which brings a kind of enlightenment.

The narrator of this timely mystery is a sentient book—a first edition of “Rebellion” by Joseph Roth—that “can tell when history is in danger of repeating itself.” Having once belonged to a Jewish professor and having narrowly escaped Nazi book burning while hidden beneath a student’s coat, the volume is now in the hands of that student’s granddaughter, an artist who has travelled from New York to Berlin in an effort to locate a place depicted in a hand-drawn map on a blank page. The book—variously stolen, returned, defaced by a neo-Nazi, incorporated into an art work—repeatedly bears witness to lovers’ desperate hopes for stability amid political violence.

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

In Buenos Aires, a young auction-house employee turned art critic narrates her obsessive quest to find and understand a notorious art forger. Her search is propelled by disenchantment with the art world and a “melancholic desire for some intangible thing.” The novel considers whether forgery itself can be original—“I sometimes wonder if art fraud wasn’t the twentieth century’s single greatest piece of art”—and circles themes of truth, falsehood, legend, and virtuosity. According to the narrator, “Reality is perhaps a thing too inherently ruinous for there to be any abiding certainty about it.”

The Subplot

In addition to providing succinct assessments of such writers as the Nobel laureate Mo Yan, the dissident Ma Jian, and the science-fiction visionary Liu Cixin, this survey of contemporary Chinese literature considers less prominent figures. We learn about migrant-worker poets who record the dislocations of factory life, writers from the persecuted Uyghur and Tibetan minorities, and the legions of Internet writers who compete for the attention of four hundred and thirty million online readers. Walsh writes, “Modern Chinese fiction is a mixture of staggering invention, bravery, and humanity, as well as soul-crushing submission and pragmatism—a confusing and intricate tapestry that offers a beguiling impression of Chinese society itself.”

A Childhood

Crews’s memoir, first published in 1978 and now reissued, is one of the finest ever written by an American. The author’s childhood unfolds in the thirties and forties, and the place that the memoir brings to life is Bacon County, Georgia, where Crews’s parents, Ray and Myrtice, were tenant farmers. Storytelling was something everyone in Bacon County did, and Crews paid attention. Although the tone of his memoir is anything but inspirational, the book itself is inherently so: we know that the little boy grows up to be the writer he always wanted to be. But the beauty of Crews’s writing is that it animates nostalgia and then annihilates it.

Animal Person

The second collection of stories from MacLeod explores a series of chance encounters between relatives, strangers, and even people and animals. One of the stories first appeared in the magazine.

The Candy House

In this genre-bending sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” Egan imagines a technology that allows users to “externalize” their memories and to access a digitized collective unconscious. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

McGrath, a staff writer, explores the life and the disappearance of Dick Conant, a long-distance canoeist, whose boat was found washed up in North Carolina with no one in it. He first reported the story in the magazine, in 2015.

My Fourth Time, We Drowned

In 2018, Hayden, an Irish journalist, received a Facebook message from an Eritrean man imprisoned in a migrant detention center in Tripoli. His missive afforded her a window into the horrors faced by African refugees seeking a Mediterranean route to Europe. Through interviews with hundreds of migrants, whose remarks punctuate the text, and humanitarian workers, Hayden learns of Libyan warehouses where starving detainees are held in scorching temperatures, raped and beaten, and sold to traffickers. While documenting these cruelties, Hayden also examines how Western institutions like the European Union perpetuate the conditions that allow them to take place.

Run and Hide

An examination of “rising India” that casts a critical eye on its self-made men, Mishra’s novel follows three college classmates who are bonded by sexual trauma and desperate to escape their “dire lower-middle-class straits.” While two of them—a hedge-fund billionaire and a brash public intellectual—struggle with the vertiginous heights to which they have elevated themselves, the narrator, who has retreated to a mountain village to work as a translator, avoids becoming ensnared in similar dilemmas until he begins a romance with a wealthy woman. Written in lucid prose, with a keen sense for sociological detail, the novel is a study of figures “dazzled by their own hard-won freedom.”

Dream-Child

This electrifying portrait of Charles Lamb is the first full-length biography of the Romantic-era essayist, poet, and satirist to appear since 1905. Perhaps best remembered as the co-author, with his sister, Mary, of “Tales from Shakespeare,” and as the interlocutor of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lamb has long been regarded as a benevolent figure who cared for his sister after she murdered their mother in a psychotic break. This idealized rendering elides the Lamb who confronted drinking problems and depression, and whose urbane first-person essays—identified by Wilson as forerunners of those by Virginia Woolf and David Foster Wallace—exhibited a complicated embrace of city life and of modernity.

The White Girl

This novel, set in a remote Australian town in the nineteen-sixties, centers on an Aborigine woman, Odette, and her granddaughter, whose unusually light complexion draws the interest of a police officer intent on exercising the state’s legal guardianship of Indigenous children. As Odette attempts to protect her granddaughter, she finds that bureaucracy can dictate harsh consequences for performing innocuous actions without the prescribed permissions. While dramatizing the legal tightrope that Odette must walk, Birch illustrates how Australia’s policies dehumanized not only the Indigenous people they sought to control—often by taking children from their families and placing them in white mission schools—but also the white people who were complicit in enforcing them.

Butler to the World

For the past several years, Bullough, a former Russia correspondent, has guided “kleptocracy tours” around London, explaining how dirty money from abroad has transformed the city. His book argues that England actively solicited such corrupting influences, by letting “some of the worst people in existence” know that it was open for business. Here, oligarchs could find access to everything from shopping at Harrods to “reputation managers” for inconvenient backstories. What’s most apt about Bullough’s butler analogy is the appearance of gray-flannel propriety, and the ways it can impart an aura of respectability to even the most disreputable fortune.

Aurelia, Aurélia

In this impressionistic wisp of a memoir, a well-known novelist reflects on the death of her husband, Eric, from cancer. Davis approaches grief slantways. Her chapters, essay-like, often seem to be about something else—having to get off a train during a snowstorm, a friend’s new piano—but then, suddenly, there’s Eric, saying something about home or requesting that the pianist friend play at his memorial. Davis’s dogged inquisitiveness makes it hard for her to find peace with her loss, but it offers moments of clarity. “The skin held the parts together,” she writes, of the brutal mechanics of illness. “Then the corruption set in and the unity of the body was forever destroyed.”

Lucky Breaks

Published in Ukraine in 2018, these surreal short stories by a noted photographer probe the experiences of women from the Donbas region, many of whom fled the separatist conflict that erupted in 2014 and now live as refugees in Kyiv. The stories, ethnographic in perspective but Gogolian in register, gravitate toward inexplicable disappearances, repressed memories, and phantasmagoria. Belorusets writes of “the deep penetration of traumatic historical events into the fantasies . . . of everyday life” and richly evokes the fatalistic humor of her marginalized characters, one of whom observes, “If you had the luck to be born here, you take things as they come.”

Covering some five hundred and fifty million years, this history of the Earth’s ecology proceeds in reverse chronological order. Each chapter focusses on a single place and time, from the relatively familiar vistas of Pleistocene Alaska to the teeming microbial mats of Ediacaran Australia. These accounts touch on some paleontological favorites—mammoths, dinosaurs, trilobites—but the real stars are the fantastical environments that once characterized our planet, including Antarctic rain forests, glass-sponge reefs, and valleys dominated by giant fungi. As alien as such vistas may seem, Halliday shows that contemporary ecosystems are subject to the same evolutionary and climatological forces, in ways that may point to an over-warm, plastic-strewn future.

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

The historian Deborah Cohen’s latest book is a loose group portrait of the legendary American foreign correspondents who came up in the freewheeling period between the two World Wars. “Last Call” is as effervescent, for more than four hundred pages, as its winsome and hyperactive characters, and it blends scholarly attention to topics such as psychoanalysis and Wilsonian liberal internationalism with novelistic renderings of its subjects’ dizzying trajectories abroad. These writers all struck out in a time when American foreign bureaus still had fluid norms and plucky stringers could elbow their way onto almost any beat. By the ends of their careers, they had created the model for writing about world affairs for the decades in which, as Cohen writes, “the United States went from hemispheric power to global hegemon.”

Let’s Get Physical

For women, good advice about exercise has been particularly hard to separate from the pressure to diet and look hot. This history of women and exercise chronicles the rise of various fitness trends, and their founders, since the fifties, including Lotte Berk, whose family fled to London as Jewish refugees from Nazism, and who opened a dance studio that led to the barre method; and Judi Sheppard Missett, a lanky blonde who developed Jazzercise. But Friedman shows how the trajectories of these various trends converge: though they offer women an outlet for their energy, these pastimes harden into life styles, particular body types get exalted and fetishized, and some of the fun seeps out.

Every Good Boy Does Fine

Billed as “a love story, in music lessons,” this memoir by a MacArthur-winning pianist began as an article in the magazine . With self-deprecating humor, Denk charts his progress from awkward, precocious boyhood to awkward, precocious adulthood and classical-music eminence via the many teachers he had along the way. He also attempts—in a sequence of interludes examining rhythm, harmony, and so on—to account for music’s hold over us.

Sweat: A History of Exercise

Exercise is evoked as freedom and play in this charming and idiosyncratic book. A blend of history and memoir, it does not count its steps, Fitbit style, but, quite appealingly, meanders. Hayes, while chronicling his pursuit of boxing, biking, swimming, running, yoga, and lifting, sprinkles in bits of exercise history that happen to capture his genial curiosity: from the late-nineteenth-century career of the circus strongman and bodybuilding impresario Eugen Sandow to the little-known story of an “unassuming British epidemiologist” named Jeremy Morris, who, in the late nineteen-forties, brought quantitative methods to observations of physical activity by studying thousands of London transit workers.

Defenestrate

The protagonist of this novel, which riffs gently on the historical Defenestrations of Prague, is a young American woman whose family is dogged by a propensity for falling out of windows. Family lore says that it all started with a Prague forebear who shoved a stonemason out of a window, thinking that the man was having an affair with one of his daughters. The perpetrator fled to America, apparently cursed: his kin are continually falling off or out of things and learn to “keep far back from balcony railings.” When the protagonist’s beloved brother defenestrates himself, she begins to ask questions about the origin myth she’s been told.

Civil Rights Queen

This nuanced biography of Constance Baker Motley examines the paradoxes in the remarkable life of a “first”: the first Black woman elected to the New York State Senate, the first female Manhattan borough president, the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Motley gained national fame as a lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, where she worked on Brown v. Board of Education and fought to desegregate Southern public universities. She forged high-profile connections—including ones with Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr.—but her identity profoundly shaped her career; she was passed over for promotions or was given them by people interested “in anointing an outsider to an important role.” That Motley is little known today is “a kind of historical malpractice,” Brown-Nagin writes; this book is a convincing corrective.

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water

In 2016, while reporting in Afghanistan, the author of this startling, humane account of the “refugee underground” abandoned his passports in order to pass as an Afghan migrant fleeing war-stricken Kabul. Entrusting his life to smugglers, illegally crossing from Bulgaria into Turkey, and boarding an “overgrown pool toy” of a boat to Lesbos, Aikins logs the often fatal obstacles that refugees face and provides an impassioned critique of cruel border policies. “In liberal democracies, the border has a unique power to transmute ordinary needs into criminal desires,” he writes.

Be Pregnant

Taken from chats with real-life couples,Viti’s guide for expectant mothers book ruminates on the nature of love and includes funny and poignant details from the relationships that the author surveys. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

The Trials of Harry S. Truman

Truman emerges in this biography as the ultimate accidental President, a pipsqueak senator from Independence, Missouri, who had been Vice-President for less than three months when Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Once Truman assumed office, global events seemed to proceed according to their own logic and momentum. Truman’s unschooled, salt-of-the-earth pose was not always what the moment called for, but this nuanced biography has sympathy for a man whose Everyman pragmatism often put him at odds with advisers who thought that they were better than he was. Truman’s major strength as a chief executive was his ability to comprehend and synthesize the learned views of these many experts, borrowing other men’s visions in order to meet the daunting challenges he inherited—above all, preventing the world from descending into a nuclear-armed Third World War.

Foreverland

According to the author and advice columnist Heather Havrilesky, marriage is a cure for misanthropy—not because it erases our aversion to human particularity but because it teaches us to love in spite of our inevitable aggravation. Unlike the many memoirs that double as thinly veiled advertisements for their authors, “Foreverland” ventures occasionally unflattering honesty. Havrilesky is unafraid to admit to nursing unseemly sentiments that most of us would go to great lengths to conceal. Her aim is to remind us that a husband is “only human.” Lifelong monogamy is not an idyll, nor is it a casual undertaking. It is, in her words, “the world’s most impossible endurance challenge.” In its own sardonic and skeptical fashion, “Foreverland” is a tender book, full of touching descriptions of falling and staying in love, even in the face of the profound frustrations that inevitably spring from prolonged interpersonal contact.

The Door-Man

The narrator of this novel, Piedmont Livingston Kinsolver III, is a doorman at a fancy apartment building on Central Park West, who, unbeknownst to his colleagues, commutes home to a penthouse on upper Fifth Avenue. The job, he says, affords him “solitude and invisibility,” the thrill of “hiding out inside one’s own life,” and the chance to “keep an eye on things” at the Central Park Reservoir. The reservoir’s water, it turns out, originates at a Catskills dam that submerged the Kinsolver ancestral home. When mysterious fossils appear at the reservoir, Kinsolver is forced to confront family secrets, including murder and incest, connected with a paleontological discovery made by one of his forebears at the dam site.

This vivid group biography captures the moment, at the end of the eighteenth century, when Jena, a small university town, suddenly emerged as the “intellectual and cultural center of Germany.” Neumann’s cast of writers and philosophers includes Fichte, Novalis, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, and Caroline and Wilhelm Schelling, with cameo appearances from such luminaries as Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel. Neumann is adept both at conveying the gossip, feuds, and eccentricities of this tight-knit milieu and at grappling with his subjects’ political and philosophical ideas, which were crucial to the development of German Romanticism.

The Hummingbird

“How do you begin telling the story of a great love when you know it ended in disaster?” this novel asks. Its answer is to narrate the life of its protagonist, a Florentine ophthalmologist named Marco Carrera, out of sequence. We see him first as a husband and father, and later as a boy and as a grandfather; we learn about the dissolution of his family, his wife’s mental instability, and the infidelities of both of them. Letters, e-mails, poetry, and telephone transcripts are interspersed throughout. The temporal leaps, though sometimes disorienting, cunningly mimic the eddying, insistent nature of memory itself.

Born of Lakes and Plains

A new way of looking at the American West emerges in this history of the mixing and marrying of Indigenous people and settlers. Beginning with the fur trade, Hyde shows how marriage and procreation were crucial to integrating newcomers and building alliances. Commerce relied on networks of kin, and, as Native American clans would share knowledge only with those they considered family, mixed-descent children were vital intermediaries. The stories of five families through the nineteenth century illustrate how these intermediaries were also vulnerable to racist and expansionist policies. Though some were forced to hide their heritage, Hyde highlights their acts of agency, and tells “a narrative of our past with shared blood at its heart.”

The Turning Point

Douglas-Fairhurst’s second biography of Charles Dickens takes up a year in his subject’s life, 1851, and walks us through it virtually week by week. Dickens gave his full energy and attention to everything he did, and the book consists of closeups of Dickens editing his magazine Household Words; producing a play called “Not So Bad as We Seem”; running a home for “fallen women”; and buying and renovating a large London town house, on Tavistock Square. Yet Douglas-Fairhurst enriches not only our appreciation of Dickens’s personal circumstances but also the social, political, and literary circumstances in which the author, that year, began writing his ambitious condition-of-England novel, “Bleak House.”

What's So Funny?

In this memoir, Sipress describes his dreamy but sometimes oppressive childhood on the Upper West Side, and how he defied the expectations of his immigrant, business-man father to become a cartoonist. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Sex and the Single Panda

In this humorous survey of love in the animal kingdom, Ramirez illustrates the sometimes “revolting” romantic proclivities of species from flies to meerkats, and suggests that humans aren’t necessarily so different. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Walter F. White, the subject of this urgent, much needed biography, led the N.A.A.C.P. from 1929 until his death, in 1955. He joined in 1918, working undercover in the South—a light-skinned Black man, he could pass as white—to investigate lynchings, identifying perpetrators and sending reports to the press and to state capitols. White’s career, beginning three years after “The Birth of a Nation” came out and ending just before the Montgomery bus boycott, allows Baime to portray an entire society struggling and failing to reckon with its legacy of racial terror. None of the killers in the forty-one murders White investigated were convicted. And, though he spent decades campaigning for a federal anti-lynching law, only now does such a bill (named for Emmett Till) look set to pass Congress.

The Torqued Man

This début spy novel juxtaposes two manuscripts supposedly found in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. One tells the story of Frank Pike, an ex-I.R.A. fighter recruited by the Nazis to fan anti-British sentiment in Ireland, through the fastidious diary of his besotted German handler, Adrian de Groot. The other—dismissed by de Groot as a “puerile espionage potboiler”—narrates the same time line from the perspective of Pike’s mythical alter ego, Finn McCool, who embarks on a murder spree targeting Nazi doctors. As the chapters alternate between the manuscripts, two irreconcilable portraits of Pike emerge, while de Groot’s love for the Irishman gradually emboldens him to political resistance.

The Founders

In 1998 and 1999, seven young men, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, founded two companies with related but distinct goals: Confinity aimed to facilitate the transmission of money between PalmPilots; X.com sought to unify all the offerings of the financial sector, such as bank accounts, investment funds, and transfers. The story of the companies’ bitter rivalry and eventual merger into the now ubiquitous platform PayPal is the subject of this entertaining history, which draws on interviews with founders and other staff. Soni’s account memorably renders the personalities involved and engages with ideas about financial sovereignty, open-source technology, and the place of politics in Silicon Valley.

Phyllis, the protagonist of this novel set in England in 1967, lives a neat suburban life with her husband and their two children until she meets Nicholas, the twentysomething son of family friends. They begin an affair, and Phyllis, frequenting Nicholas’s grungy London digs and mixing with artists and counterculture intellectuals, feels a passion she has not experienced before. Hadley brilliantly renders both Phyllis’s flight from domesticity and her family’s attempts to deal with the social consequences of her absence. The radicalism of the cultural moment is underscored by the emergence of family secrets, once buried in the name of class and decorum and now fuelling raw desires.

Florine Stettheimer

The painter and scenic designer Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) pioneered Pop subjects and Pop manners without Pop strategies. She’s a tricky subject: on the one hand, she was a perfect heroine for a feminist-minded art history; on the other, Stettheimer belonged, unashamedly, to a world of privilege. In the first extensive and scholarly biography of the artist, the art historian Barbara Bloemink unravels this contradiction by detailing how Stettheimer’s originality lay in how unapologetically she embraced her own condition, how clearly she looked at her world as it was. Stettheimer’s big pictures like “Spring Sale at Bendel’s” (1921) and “The Cathedrals of Broadway” (1929) kid the absurdities they show, and yet approve of society’s investment in the absurdities.

Scattered All Over the Earth

Playful and deeply inventive, Tawada’s novel imagines a world in which Japan has disappeared. She applies fairy-tale conventions—mistaken identity, unexpected metamorphosis—to the dilemmas of finding linguistic shelter in a world of rising seas and ceaseless migration, achieving realism through surrealism. Stranded in Denmark, a refugee named Hiruko searches for fellow-survivors, torn between longing for her mother tongue and the desire to fashion a new one. Her odyssey becomes a test of the commonplace idea that, as one character puts it, “the language of a native speaker is perfectly fused with her soul.”

American Shtetl

Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers offer an extraordinary and riveting account, based on fifteen years of research, of perhaps the most triumphant separatist group in American history. They are the Satmars, among the most exacting and most successful of the Hasidic dynasties, who have built, within a daily commute’s distance from New York, their own village, Kiryas Joel. One of the running themes of “American Shtetl” is that the Satmars’ success was due to the absorption of American norms, values, and tactics. As the authors write in their prologue, the community’s insularity, homogeneity, and political empowerment “are characteristics that have been actively fostered by America’s political, legal, and economic institutions.” With this insight, Stolzenberg and Myers put their extremely detailed, quasi-ethnographic case study in the service of a broad theoretical end. “American Shtetl” provides an unambiguous historical refutation of the idea that liberalism renders meaningful community impossible. It can also be read as a cautionary tale about how the dynamics of separatist communities unfold.

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama

In his humorous memoir, Odenkirk shares stories about how he went from “Saturday Night Live” and “Mr. Show” to “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Rebels Against the Raj

An eminent historian of India and biographer of Gandhi turns his attention to seven “white-skinned heroes and heroines”—allies in the country’s bid to end colonial rule. Among them are the British theosophist Annie Besant, a leading figure in the home-rule movement until she was eclipsed by Gandhi (who’d been inspired by her as a boy); B. G. Horniman, a radical British editor; and Samuel Stokes, a Pennsylvania Quaker who helped eliminate forced labor. Guha notes that his subjects campaigned not only for freedom but also against numerous social ills, such as environmental abuse and caste-based discrimination, laying the groundwork for a movement that, he writes, “may yet be relevant for India’s future.”

Eating to Extinction

This chronicle of the local relationships between humans and what we eat reveals a pattern with dire implications for the future of food. “Where nature creates diversity, the food system crushes it,” Saladino writes. Mass production and globalization are eradicating the small, the wild, and the unique, at a cost to our stomachs and to traditional ways of life. Saladino extolls ancient strains of Anatolian wheat, sees an African pea grown in the American South as an act of culinary resistance, and observes that plants and animals modified for higher yields are often susceptible to disease and reliant on ever-dwindling resources. Ultimately, the most dangerous thing about our appetites is how they threaten to consume our increasingly fragile food system.

Strangers I Know

Blending fiction, essay, and memoir, this narrative migrates from the Italian American neighborhood of Bensonhurst to rural southern Italy and contemporary London, and encompasses autobiographical episodes, musings on film and music, and current events. At its heart is the story of Durastanti’s charismatic parents, both deaf, who came to America from Italy only to return. “The story of a family is more like a map than a novel,” Durastanti writes, as the work expands to encompass lovers, teachers, and other relatives. Her inventive approach yields touching portraits of the characters, while respecting their ultimate unknowability.

You Don’t Know Us Negroes

Among the fifty pieces compiled in the first book-length collection of Zora Neale Hurston’s short nonfiction are the well-known essays “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” and “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” Both are emblematic of the proud, bristling Southern woman with whom we’ve become familiar, as is “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” which provides a window into the studious side of Hurston. Yet reading any of those individual texts differs from knowing their author as an essayist. The latter requires letting go of the agonizing business of saving Hurston, who the writer and linguist John McWhorter has called “America’s favorite black conservative,” from her politics. What emerges from the sum of these writings is a Hurston who cannot be easily construed as a champion of race pride, which she once called “a luxury I cannot afford.” “The realization that Negroes are no better nor no worse, and at times just as boring as everybody else, will hardly kill off the population of the nation,” she writes in the titular essay. We can trace variations on this point across the collection.

Black Cloud Rising

Inspired by real events, Wright Faladé’s novel is about Richard Etheridge, the son of an enslaved woman and her master, who joins an all-Black regiment during the American Civil War and takes on the Confederacy. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

Index, a History of the

In this engaging study, the humble index emerges as an unexpected site of anxieties and tensions. From its beginnings, in the fifteenth century, it was viewed as both a miraculous time-saver and a threat to depth and concentration. As indexes gained in popularity, appearing in novels, poetry, and political writing, fears about their misuse intensified, sometimes justifiably; in the eighteenth century, the Whigs and the Tories produced mock indexes of each other’s literature. Duncan draws rich parallels to anxieties surrounding our own “age of search” and makes an impassioned case for the continued relevance of the human-crafted index, which he calls a “child of the imagination.”

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat

The author of this memoir, best known for his role as Logan Roy, on “Succession,” offers a bold, funny account of his path from an impoverished boyhood in Scotland to the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, and Hollywood. The narrative is punctuated with gossip (“Did I forget to mention that I got touched up by Princess Margaret once?”), frank appraisals of industry bigwigs (Johnny Depp is “so overblown, so overrated”), and reflections on his own shortcomings as a spouse and a father. At its core, though, the book is a meditation on craft and a paean to acting, which is, for Cox, “an almost spiritual experience. . . . about reflecting back to people how we are.”

The Great Mrs. Elias

Using hitherto overlooked documents, this novel reconstructs the life of Hannah Elias, who was born in poverty in Philadelphia in 1865 but became, at the turn of the century, one of the wealthiest Black women in the country. In this telling, Elias, confident that she is destined for greatness, joins New York’s “sisterhood” of sex workers and meets a rich client whose pillow talk consists of finance lessons. Putting her unorthodox education to use, Elias amasses a real-estate fortune, but the empire teeters after her unexpected connection to the murder, in 1903, of the civic leader Andrew Haswell Green. Chase-Riboud’s narrative challenges us to confront the ways in which race, class, and gender inform whose lives are deemed worthy of remembering.

Last Resort

Caleb, the protagonist of this novel of literary-world chicanery, is an aspiring Brooklyn writer who discovers his voice by pinching someone else’s story. An acquaintance, Avi, tells him about a torrid affair in Greece, and Caleb, abandoning his own lacklustre project, fashions the material into something that neither of them could have produced alone. This gets him a lucrative book deal, but Avi and others quickly recognize themselves in the story. In the ensuing acrimony, Lipstein gleefully scrutinizes the nature of success in an industry that runs as much on vanity as on financial gain. The book’s command of contemporary-hipster details is wincingly precise, and Caleb’s voice, initially charming, gradually reveals his incompetent careerism.

Pure Colour

This is an explicitly mystical novel about the creation of art and the creation of the universe, about the uses and abuses of doubt. The world in its pages is created by a God who manifests himself within it as three art critics, and their descendants include our protagonist, Mira, who’s training to be a critic and cherishes beauty, and the cool and detached Annie, who cherishes justice. Its characters feel constructed out of cobwebs, and the plot is sketched swiftly and faintly—Mira is, for some time, trapped in a leaf; she eventually tumbles out. She wonders if she can cease thinking of herself as someone “who another person could see, evaluate, and finally judge.” The novel wants to recast criticism as a form of intimacy.

Cold Enough for Snow

A mother and daughter meet in Japan for vacation. They take walks, ride trains, visit art galleries, eat in restaurants, and shop for gifts. This is just about all the surface action in the Australian author Jessica Au’s slim and sly second novel. Au’s narrator keeps prodding her mother to open up; her mother resists. By the last page, the daughter still doesn’t have the information she seems to have been searching for. The trip isn’t a bust, though, and neither is the book that it yields. The narrator may not have unearthed any secrets from her mother’s past, but the two have let their hours intertwine and paid attention to the same things. We can sense their intimacy in the soft, patient warmth of Au’s prose. “Cold Enough for Snow” understands the impulse to treat other people—especially our parents—as mysteries to be solved, but makes the quiet case for another approach, one that we might simply call, for lack of any more technical term, being together while we can.

All the Flowers Kneeling

In dramatic yet precise poems like “ Bioluminescence ,” this début collection transforms trauma into a site of self-invention. Tran plumbs myth and history alongside personal experience—as a descendant of Vietnamese refugees, as a rape survivor, and foremost as an artist—to achieve an exquisite lyricism.

The story of how a philosophy of performance pioneered in pre-Revolutionary Russia made its way to New York, took over Hollywood, and changed American acting for good is the subject of this entertaining and illuminating chronicle. Method acting was popularized in large part by Lee Strasberg, a Polish-born American actor, who adopted, redesigned, and implemented the techniques of Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian theatre director. Strasberg encouraged actors—his students included James Dean and Paul Newman—to comb through their lives for strong emotions they could deploy on stage. When Stella Adler split from him, she denounced his ways as “sick and schizophrenic,” while nurturing the likes of Marlon Brando. That people couldn’t agree on what the method was, exactly, made it all the more powerful.

Mead’s moving memoir, which originated as an essay for this magazine, chronicles her wrenching decision to leave New York, where she lived for decades, and return to her native England—a place that feels at once like home and a foreign land.

Very Cold People

The poet and memoirist Sarah Manguso’s début novel has a fairy-tale quality, a ring of the nursery rhyme lent by its symmetries, prototypical figures, and brutality. Ruthie, an only child growing up in the fictional town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is sharply attuned to a force that she doesn’t understand and that Manguso suggests is some combination of class, whiteness, and the widespread sexual abuse of children. “Very Cold People” is itself a very cold book, with banks of white space piled up around Manguso’s short, accretive paragraphs. Ruthie’s halting narration and lack of affect suggest a girl caught within a net of pain; the task of the book is to unmask each node in the net, moving suspensefully inward to unearth the threats the town has ushered out of sight. Manguso adds nuance to her story by investigating how substitution and silence can be misguided acts of love, not just symptoms of damage: she knows how loving something so much that you are afraid to love it at all is not the same as not loving it.

The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson

In 1948, when the witness to a fatal shooting in a small Georgia town claimed that the attacker “sounded like a Negro,” the police arrested a Black sharecropper named Clarence Henderson. This history, by an Atlanta-based investigative reporter, examines the bizarre process by which Henderson was sentenced to death for murder in three separate trials but avoided execution each time. Using a range of archival sources, Joyner illustrates Henderson’s vulnerable position as a Black defendant, and shows how external factors—such as the introduction of lie-detection and ballistics analysis and the rivalry between the N.A.A.C.P. and the Communist Party, which were both determined to come to his defense—shaped the legal proceedings in unexpected ways.

This history of endangered languages assesses the political causes of their precariousness. Those in power—whether they speak English, Mandarin, or Hebrew—often hold condescending attitudes toward Indigenous languages and work to marginalize them. For nations undergoing colonial conflicts, such as Hawaii and Wales in the nineteenth century, a drastic decline can happen in the span of a lifetime. Languages are not only repositories of heritages but also a rallying point for self-determination movements, which perhaps explains why the preservation of local languages is sometimes criminalized as an act of separatism.

Bibliolepsy

The protagonist of this hypnotic coming-of-age novel is a young Filipina who becomes obsessed with literature, to the point of illness. Orphaned at age eight, when her parents disappear from an interisland ferry, she continues to grieve into her adolescence, when she is seduced by the work of Dickens and Dostoyevsky alongside that of such Filipino writers as Estrella Alfon and José Rizal. Feeling her passion for books as a “quickening between the thighs and in the points of the breast,” she seeks solace in the company of lovers who share her infatuation, among them a typewriter repairman and a politician. At the same time, she becomes a reluctant observer of the country’s political transformations, including the 1986 edsa Revolution, with its “confetti” sky filled with Yellow Pages, which led to the expulsion of Ferdinand Marcos.

The School for Good Mothers

This début novel takes place in a world where mothers are subject to strict state surveillance. When the protagonist, who is struggling to balance work and child care after her husband abandons her for a younger woman, leaves her daughter, a toddler, home alone for a few hours, she lands in a state-run rehabilitation program. She is told that she’ll get her child back if she’s able to “hone her maternal instincts,” but she seems destined to fail: the program deems human emotions—flashes of frustration, pangs of desire—incompatible with responsible parenthood.

Buster Keaton

Every detail of Keaton’s life and work is in this immense year-by-year account of Keaton as an artist and a man, starting with his birth, in 1895. (Curtis painstakingly clarifies which of two potential midwives attended to the matter.) Keaton’s father raised him to star in a brutal comedy act and instilled a lifelong mastery of the gag; we hear about gags that Keaton helped invent for Abbott and Costello in his later, apparently fallow, years. Keaton seems to have been one of those comic geniuses who, when not working, never felt entirely alive, and Curtis is particularly good on how his early years were key to understanding the core of his art: being anti-sentimental to the point of seeming coldhearted.

Thank You, Mr. Nixon

Eleven linked stories take on U.S.-China relations during the past fifty years, as seen through the eyes of Chinese nationals and expatriates. Two of the stories, including “ Detective Dog ,” first appeared in the magazine.

This expansive history documents the transformation of clothing manufacture from a handmade practice, rich with personal significance, to a mass-production industry. Thanhauser toggles between scenes of Louis XIV’s court, where the fashion season was invented, and Phoenix, Arizona, where Navajo weaving revivalists engage in the recovery of ancestral traditions. Elegantly chronicling how textile production came to be defined by worker exploitation, misogyny, environmental devastation, and colonialism, Thanhauser writes, “Our clothes are never neutral, and cannot be.” Yet she also finds space to appreciate sartorial marvels and to celebrate the loom aficionados, “denimheads,” and “wool enthusiasts” who aim for a more ethical, analog future.

The Fortune Men

Set in postwar Cardiff, in the multiethnic docklands of Tiger Bay, this novel retells the life of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor who was executed in 1952, for a murder he did not commit. Arriving in Wales from British Somaliland, he encounters an “army of workers pulled in from all over the world”; he marries, starts an interracial family, and becomes disillusioned as he experiences white men “treating you like you’re the final insult.” The novel poignantly imagines Mattan’s trial and his time in jail, as his hopes of freedom dwindle. Mohamed underscores Mattan’s confidence in his good character—his belief that “the truth kill the lie”—while also showing how, “as each witness takes the stand, his previous estimation of his own power diminishes.”

Joan Is Okay

Outwardly self-contained but inwardly often seething, the narrator of this novel, Joan, is a thirty-six-year-old Chinese American I.C.U. doctor. “A female brain is worth nothing,” she thinks. “Four lobes of the cerebrum, and I have sometimes imagined one of mine labeled rage .” She tends to let others talk—a habit from years of immigration worries—and is surrounded by well-meaning men keen to do the talking. At work, she is exceedingly capable, the kind of doctor with whom, in the worst circumstances, one can expect “a death handled well,” but she struggles to handle her father’s death. As she grieves, she keeps recalling their last chat—rushed, because Manhattan parking cost $17.99 an hour.

The Secret Listener

This candid memoir by a self-described “ingenue in Mao’s court,” who worked in China’s Central Film Bureau, gives a personal dimension to the turmoil of the country’s recent past. Tracing her life from a childhood in Shanghai to her participation at the heart of the revolution in Beijing and her eventual exile, Chen gives a firsthand account of famine and terror during Mao’s long reign. At the book’s center is her marriage to a man with family ties to the Party élite, whose members fall prey to purges and counterpurges. Chen frames her remembrance as a bold demand for China “to face its Maoist past bravely and unflinchingly, and especially to restore the humanity of its victims.”

The Stars Are Not Yet Bells

Through the fog of dementia, Elle, the narrator of this novel, recounts her life on an island off the coast of Georgia during the Second World War. She, her husband, and a man named Gabriel (with whom she is in love, and who poses as her cousin) have come to mine an enigmatic mineral, Caeruleum, that glows blue in the coastal waters. They hope that its gemlike properties, or perhaps even its pharmaceutical ones, will make them rich. But events surrounding their excavations lead Elle to wonder if “beauty and death are coincident, codependent.” As her thoughts move back and forth in time, dual mysteries rise to the surface: what happened to her grasp on reality and what happened to Gabriel?

South to America

Structured as a journey, with chapters organized by location, this history of the American South examines its subject from both personal and sociopolitical perspectives. Perry, an Alabama-born Princeton professor, encounters a Confederate reënactor in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and visits the Equal Justice Initiative’s museum, in Montgomery, Alabama, which is situated near a parole office. She draws connections between the past and contemporary experience—for instance, she reads Thomas Jefferson’s racist observations on Black people in the light of her own Ancestry.com results. Threading her protagonists’ narratives through the book, Perry admits to “a bit of navel-gazing” but observes that, “if you gaze anywhere with a critical eye, you do have to look at your own belly, too.”

The Uninnocent

When the author of this fragmentary memoir was at law school, a teen-age cousin had a psychotic break and killed a young boy. Blake, now a law professor, traces the aftermath of the killing and her attempts to comprehend it, examining Anna Freud’s writing on defense mechanisms after a psychotherapist tells her that “a psychotic break is just intense fear.” Having kept her distance from her cousin, Blake eventually corresponds with him and visits him in prison. She avoids neat conclusions or a sense of absolution, but her legal background and her insights yield a thought-provoking consideration of the limits of our criminal justice system.

The Swank Hotel

Unfolding amid the 2008 financial crisis, this hypnotic, antic novel revolves around two sisters: Emilie, who works at a drab job in a nondescript town where she has bought an “adorable starter home”; and Adeline, who suffers from mental illness and has gone missing. News arrives that Ad has committed suicide, then that she survived, and Em flies to be with her in Kansas City. Corin conveys a sense that insanity is everywhere: in the sisters’ family history, in a colleague’s affair, in news items and the plot of a television documentary. “The mad see the unseen,” she writes. “What the collective suspects but can’t express, a perpetual frictionless swing from object to subject.”

In place of a standard social history of silent comedy, much less a standard biography, Stevens offers a series of pas de deux between Buster Keaton and other personages of his time, who shared one or another of his preoccupations or projects. It includes an illuminating chapter on Keaton and Robert Sherwood, who was early to recognize Keaton’s greatness, and argues that Keaton’s art was informed by the same social revolutions as the European avant-garde. It is the kind of account that makes more of overlapping horizontal “frames” than of direct chronological history, and Stevens pulls it off dexterously, taking up the big question: What made Keaton’s solo work seem so modern?

This memoir of growing up amid Albania’s transition to a democracy is bounded by two revolutions: the violent uprisings against the Communist regime in 1990, and those that took place seven years later, against the depredations of the economic “shock therapy” that followed its collapse. Ypi, who was twelve at the time of the first protests, writes with compassion and dry humor of the dismantling of the world view—in which socialism meant that “everyone was already free”—that she internalized in grade school. As the reductive tenets of proletarian struggle give way to the equally facile doctrines of capitalism and privatization, she finds the latter, which has devastated Albania’s economy, to be deeply flawed. She ultimately launches a search for a new definition of “freedom” that would tame “the violence of the state” in all its forms.

It’s Getting Dark

The characters in this absorbing story collection are bound by loss—of love, of fortune, of the lives they once had, or the ones they’ve missed out on. In one tale, a man discovers a flirtatious e-mail on his girlfriend’s computer and, assuming the interlocutor’s name, carries on a written affair with her. In another, a model imagines switching places with a sculpture of herself, situated in the home of a well-to-do businessman. Though moody, the collection is tinged with hope, as when a tarot-card reader tells a woman, “I can see how everything will end. What I can’t see is what we make of it, what we’ll look back on. And that’s what happiness is.”

Addiction is variously described as a brain disease, a personal demon, and an epidemic. This compelling history holds that it is simply “part of humanity.” Fisher, an addiction physician and a recovering addict, illustrates the “terrifying breakdown of reason” that accompanies the condition by drawing on patients’ anecdotes and on his own experience. He also highlights the ways in which stigmas—such as the “firewater” myth, which held that Native Americans were uniquely vulnerable to alcohol addiction—have provided “ideological cover” for policing certain groups.

In Case of Emergency

This novel, published in Iran in 2008, takes place in Tehran in the course of a day when the city has been flung into chaos by a series of earthquakes. Shadi, the young, disaffected narrator, is less concerned with the disaster than she is with locating her next opium fix. Rather than flee the city with her family, she spends the day traversing it, getting high with various misfit friends and making observations about Tehrani society with her acerbic wit. Her sardonic commentary is interspersed with sensual descriptions of her highs, and of the periodic quakes roiling the ground beneath her. “I wish I could sink, pour into the earth and dance with her,” she declares. “Let the tremors crawl through my body. I don’t want them to stop.”

I Came All This Way to Meet You

Attenberg’s memoir traces a peripatetic life, as she switches jobs and cities and figures out who she is as a writer—and what it takes to sustain a career. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Lost & Found

By bringing the story of her father’s death together with the story of how she met her wife, and refracting those experiences through a lifetime of reading, Schulz’s memoir intricately upends our ideas about the nature of grief and love. The book grew out of the piece “ When Things Go Missing ,” which Schulz wrote for the magazine in 2017.

In November, 2019, on the day after the London Bridge knife attacks, the author of this experimental work of nonfiction learned that both the killer and one of his victims were people she knew. Usman Khan, the perpetrator, had been her student in a prison education program, and Jack Merritt, whom Khan stabbed to death, was her colleague. Taneja probes her own experience of the tragedy, surveys its public and private aftershocks, and scrutinizes the clichés that populate narratives of terror: stereotypes about young men who become radicalized, impenetrable institutional language that obscures more than it discloses, and the perennial, futile search for causes.

Pushing Cool

Tracking the evolution of a century’s worth of targeted marketing, this history documents the sinister engineering of a Black consumer preference for menthol cigarettes. Wailoo details how Big Tobacco placed billboards in inner-city neighborhoods, strategically funded Black enterprises, and marshalled a vast network of influencers—from Ebony to the N.A.A.C.P.—to yoke ideas of Black authenticity to smoking menthols. His case study concludes with reflections on the resonant presence of menthol cigarettes in the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd, linking the dire plea “I can’t breathe” to tobacco’s long-term assault on Black lives.

The Wedding Party

Set from 5 A.M. to 5 P.M. on a single December day in 1982, this novel introduces readers to the boisterous milieu of a siheyuan , one of Beijing’s traditional multifamily courtyard residences, via the story of the Xue family’s wedding banquet. Guests come and go—opera singers, factory workers, doctors, bureaucrats, literary editors—all of whom have experienced the vicissitudes of the country’s tumultuous history. Liu intertwines the stories of these lives with the spectacle of a rapidly changing Beijing, modern telecommunications arriving just as traditional shops and alleys vanish. A lovingly rendered portrait of a city and its inhabitants, the novel is also an act of preservation for the siheyuan , whose “strict proportions contain untold multitudes.”

The Women I Love

This mordant novel takes the form of a diary, with sections named for the women who have most profoundly shaped the narrator’s life: his mistress, his girlfriend, his sister-in-law, his sister, and his mother. The diary’s purpose, he claims, is to see if he can describe them without resorting to stereotypes, and if he can wrest himself from the lifelong habits of “a typical Italian” (“Guys like me are incapable of truly being alone and analyzing our own emotions”). As the novel charts the narrator’s transformation from an aspiring poet to an editor of frivolous books at a commercial publishing house, he has flashes of insight even as he inadvertently reveals the depths of his misogyny.

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Kyle Chayka

By Eric Lach

By Amanda Petrusich

By Nick Paumgarten

• Search Please fill out this field.
• Manage Your Subscription
• Give a Gift Subscription
• Newsletters
• Sweepstakes

We independently evaluate all recommended products and services. If you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation. Learn more .

• Entertainment

34 Great Books to Suit Any Mood or Interest

With all these choices (humor! thrills! non-snobby cultural criticism!) you're bound to find your next great read.

There are several science-backed benefits of reading real books —relaxation being one of them. Count falling asleep faster as another health benefit of reading a book before bed . It can also be a fun summer activity for when you're short on funds. And, starting or joining a book club not only boosts your cognitive skills but also fills your schedule with an activity that can improve your emotional health and combat cabin fever —all too common during COVID. The Great Gatsby, for example, is a classic book that's perfect for any book club. It's also a great book to revisit when you're feeling nostalgic for the past . Those in their 20s might want books that offer valuable lessons on life, love, and friendship. Whatever the subject, a few good books tucked in a care package can't help but brighten anyone's day.

When we're looking for good books to read, we browse bestseller lists, click around Goodreads and Instagram, and ask friends for their recommendations. But the usual blanket categories and genres can be a bit too broad, and often, we've found that we get the best recommendations when we choose books based on our mood or our interests.

If you're looking for interesting books to read, we've compiled a list of 34 super-specific recommendations you won't be able to put down. This list has you covered, no matter how you're feeling.

If You're Looking for an Honest Story About Losing a Mother

Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner This is the memoir and debut book of Michelle Zauner, lead singer of the indie band Japanese Breakfast . Zauner writes about growing up Korean American and how losing her mother to cancer when she was 25 forced her to reconnect with her identity. It's a story of Zauner's grief and an exploration of all the gifts (language, food, history) her mother left behind. Zauner's memoir would be a wonderful addition to the growing list of great mother-daughter books .

If You're Looking for a Novel That Reads Like Poetry

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous , by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet and his debut novel is written in the form of a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Exploring race, class, and masculinity, the novel handles difficult topics with beauty and the kind of lines that will hang in the air long after you've set the book down.

If You Like Sharp Humor and Quick Reads

One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , by Scaachi Koul

Written by Buzzfeed senior writer Scaachi Koul, this collection of essays is rich with relatable humor, no matter how specific the scenarios. Koul invites the reader into some of her most miserable and mortifying life moments, from feeling like an outsider as the daughter of Indian immigrants in Canada to shaving her knuckles to fit in at school.

If You Want to Remember bell hooks

All About Love , by bell hooks

Feminist scholar and activist bell hooks died in 2021 at age 69, but her works have long been and will remain timeless. Her 1999 book is, as the title says, all about love, from personal, psychological, and philosophical perspectives.

If You Really Missed Traveling (and Anthony Bourdain)

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever

Had to cancel your dream vacation due to the pandemic? This posthumous collection of essays and reflections captures the late travel and food writer and TV host Anthony Bourdain's favorite places on the planet—and may just inspire your future travels.

If You Want Something a Little Dishy

Good Company by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

This summer-perfect read about secrets in a marriage offers an insider's glimpse into the New York theater and Hollywood scenes.

If You Need to Be Reminded of (the Greatness of) the Great Outdoors

Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens

Kya grows up wild and nearly alone along the North Carolina shores, where the natural world becomes her classroom and her great love. (It may just encourage you to go outside and commune with yourself and your nearest stretch of wilderness.)

If You're Worried You're a Helicopter Mom

Girls With Bright Futures, by Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman

This thriller follows three moms as they go into overdrive to try to get their daughters a single, coveted spot at Stanford—including possibly attempted murder. (So no, you're doing just fine!)

If You Ever Wondered What Life Was Like in Your Dream House

The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

Spoiler alert: Life isn't as perfect on the inside of a dream house as it appears. This artful portrait of a dysfunctional family—and the house they inhabit—is worthy book club fare.

If You Appreciate Great Dialogue

Normal People , by Sally Rooney

If you haven't yet read Rooney's Normal People or her 2017 debut, Conversations with Friends , the Irish author's novels are great books to read if you like biting dialogue and stories about messy, real relationships.

If There Aren't Enough True Crime Podcasts for You

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland , by Patrick Radden Keefe

We'll say it: There are tons of true crime books and podcasts—but very few of them actually solve said crimes or offer much in the way of new information (of course, no shame in getting a rundown or entertaining commentary!). But this fact is what sets Say Nothing apart. You don't need to know much about the conflict in Northern Ireland to immediately be sucked into Keefe's reporting and writing, then completely enraptured when he starts to figure out who murdered Jean McConville.

If You Want Something a Little...Unsettling

Trust Exercise , by Susan Choi

In Choi's experimental coming of age novel, which won the 2019 National Book Award for fiction, two theater kids, Sarah and David, fall in love and explore their relationship for their craft under the watchful eye of their drama teacher. The twists are unexpected and the setting—a high-pressure arts school in the 1980s—is pitch-perfect. You'll want to talk about it with everyone.

If You're Looking to Learn Something

Wine Simple: A Totally Approachable Guide from a World-Class Sommelier , by Aldo Sohm and Christine Muhlke

Aldo Sohm has been named the best sommelier in the world and oversees the wine program at one of New York City's top restaurants. Despite such accolades, he and Christine Muhlke have written a highly approachable handbook. Full of fun charts and illustrations, the unfussy Wine Simple demystifies everything from buzzy natural wines to tasting like a pro at your next dinner out.

If You Want to Read Cultural Criticism Without the Usual Snobbery

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion , by Jia Tolentino

In her debut collection of nine original essays, the popular NewYorker.com writer interrogates everything from millennial scammers to the Internet. It's compulsively readable, thanks in large part to Tolentino's own self-reflection and autobiographical elements.

If You Want to Spend a Little Less Time on Your Phone

24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week, by Tiffany Shlain

In 24/6, filmmaker and popular speaker Shlain introduces readers to what she calls a "Technology Shabbat"—the one day, every week, where she and her family turn off all electronic devices. Beyond detailing the many ways she and her family have benefited, Shlain gives helpful, reassuring advice for embracing your own tech shabbat and curbing device use.

If You Can't Read Enough About Hygge, Lagom, and Swedish Death Cleaning

The Book of Ichigo Ichie: The Art of Making the Most of Every Moment, the Japanese Way , by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

You've death-cleaned your home. You hygge with the best of them come winter. But have you heard of ichigo ichie, the Japanese art of savoring the moment, yet? Let the authors of The Book of Ichigo Ichie be your guides.

If You Just Finished Binge Watching and Reading The Handmaid's Tale

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

A lot of books claim to be "the next Handmaid's Tale ," but Women Talking really fits the bill. This feminist fiction novel about a group of Mennonite women who are drugged and attacked by men from their community is particularly haunting because it's based on real events. Margaret Atwood herself says the story "could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale ," so it has the official stamp of approval. If you're feeling helpless about the state of the world, Women Talking will inspire you to stand up, use your voice, and keep fighting.

If You're Happy With a Smart, Grown-Up Romance

The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang

Stella is great with numbers, but because she has Asperger's, she's not so great at romance. To gain experience, she hires an escort to practice and perfect her skills in the bedroom—and accidentally falls in love with him. Helen Hoang's #ownvoices novel is equal parts sweet and steamy. After reading The Kiss Quotient , you can jump immediately into the next book in the trilogy: The Bride Test , a companion novel about a woman searching for love and an autistic man who doesn't know if he can return her feelings.

If Oddball Families Make You Smile

Mostly Dead Things, by Kristen Arnett

Everyone's family has their strange quirks, and Jessa's is no exception. After her father commits suicide in their family's taxidermy shop, their behavior gets even stranger; for starters, her mom begins making aggressive and sexually suggestive taxidermy art. Jessa takes over the business and tries to be strong for everyone but struggles to reach her loved ones that refuse to talk about their issues. Mostly Dead Things is one of the strangest, most bizarre books you'll ever read—in the best possible way.

If You're Down for a Literary Masterpiece You Can Read in One Sitting

Looker, by Laura Sims

Sometimes, it's hard to categorize a book into just one genre. Looker isn't exactly a thriller or a mystery, but it contains elements of both. It offers a peek into the mind of an unnamed woman growing more and more unstable by the page. As she mourns her own broken life, she becomes obsessed with her neighbor, a famous actress. While Looker is short—less than 200 pages—it's packed with themes of obsession, jealousy, and madness. Laura Sims made every word count.

If You Want a Good Cry (Two Boxes of Tissues, Minimum)

The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, by Nina Riggs

This memoir, published posthumously, sets out to answer the question: How do you make your life meaningful when you know your time is limited?

If You Wore Out Your Copy of Like Water for Chocolate

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender

Fans of magic realism should dig into this tale of a young girl whose mother's despair is a key ingredient in her desserts.

If You Just Went Through a Breakup

Alone Time , by Stephanie Rosenbloom

​​ Four cities, four seasons, and countless tables for one. In this memoir, Stephanie Rosenbloom explores the joys of solo adventuring.

If You Love Quirky Science and Psychology

Swearing Is Good For You , by Emma Byrne

A damn good read, packed with scientific proof that sometimes it's OK to drop a few f-bombs.

If You Want to Fulfill Your Fantasies of Working on a Winery

The Shortest Way Home , by Miriam Parker

When Hannah finds herself with everything she's ever wanted (at least she thinks so?), she can't resist giving it all up for a dream she never knew she had.

If You've Been Looking for Another Book Like Where'd You Go Bernadette

What You Don't Know About About Charlie Outlaw , by Leah Stewart

A quirky tale of two Hollywood stars who break up only to find themselves needing each other more than ever—especially after one of them is kidnapped on a desert island.

If You're Breastfeeding Your Cluster Feeding Baby

Gmorning, Gnight!: Little Pep Talks for Me & You , by Lin-Manuel Miranda

You know you want Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda to be your best friend. While you may not be able to join his entourage and follow him around all day, you can get his book. Inspired by his lovely messages to his fans on Twitter, this illustrated collection of sayings will encourage you to seize the day, the night, and all of the other hours in between.

If You Want to Be Put Into a Good Mood

Becoming , by Michelle Obama

Former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama has lived an accomplished life, but it hasn't been without hardships. In Becoming , Obama weaves the story of her inspiring life, from the years she spent growing up on the South Side of Chicago to her life in the White House. You will earn to a new appreciation of the former First Lady when you learn about all the things she's experienced—and triumphed over—and her story will inspire you to live a more daring life.

If You're About to Have a Baby

Overwhelmed , by Brigid Schulte

You've probably heard by now that you won't be sleeping much after you welcome your bundle of joy (and noise) into the world. Parenthood can be challenging and exhausting, but you don't have to feel like you've lost yourself while you're creating a life for someone else. Journalist Brigid Schulte lays out how our always-on culture can get the best of us and what you can do to take back some time for yourself.

If You're in Love

Kafka on the Shore , by Haruki Murakami

A novel of fantastical magic realism, Kafka on the Shore has a vivid, dreamy plot. Even more accomplished is the novel's turn of phrase, like this quote: "Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time." With hundreds of lines like that one, Kafka on the Shore will have you going back again and again to find more gorgeous words to describe your own ardor.

If You're In a Bad Mood

I Remember Nothing , by Nora Ephron

Do you have one of those friends that can complain about anything, but their complaints are entertaining, literary delights? No? Well, Nora Ephron can satisfy that itch. In I Remember Nothing , Ephron, the late writer and creator of beloved movies like You've Got Mail, holds forth on the weird and wonderful changes that define modern life. Don't read this book in public: People will keep giving you weird looks when you can't stop laughing.

If You're Feeling Ready for a Vacation

Flâneuse , by Lauren Elkin

Each of us holds a desire to wander, but for Lauren Elkin, the urge is irresistible. In Flâneuse, Elkin meanders through the great cities of the world, including New York, Paris, Venice, and London, ruminating on the culture of strolling through cities and what it means to explore as a woman.

If You're Getting Hitched

The Wedding Date , by Jasmine Guillory

If you're about to get married, and you're planning a huge party for your nuptials, take a minute to see your wedding from your guests' perspective: attending a wedding without a plus one has the potential to be nerve-racking. In Jasmine Guillory's fun romance, The Wedding Date, Alex Monroe and Drew Nichols solve their potential date-less embarrassment by faking a relationship, and the result is as juicy and delightful as you can imagine.

If You're in the Mood for a Spine-Tingling Stories

The Thirteenth Tale , by Diane Setterfield

The Thirteenth Tale is a novel for book lovers. Although it's anything but cozy, it's the perfect book to read in chilly winter . Biographer Margaret Lea is tasked with telling the life story of the enigmatic author Vida Winter, whose lauded collection of stories is missing the eponymous 13th tale. As Winter unravels her life's story for Lea, her mysterious past of Victorian-gothic proportions unfolds.

Related Articles

Join Discovery, the new community for book lovers

Trust book recommendations from real people, not robots 🤓

Blog – Posted on Monday, Jan 28

100 books to read before you die.

Prepare yourself for some frightening news: you have, according to LitHub , only a finite amount of time left in your life to read. The average American, for instance, reads 12 books a year. Assuming that you’re over 25 years old, that would mean that you only have approximately 700 books — max — in your future.

Are you suddenly feeling the tightening coil of mortality? Great. If you’re now wondering where you should start, we’ve got you covered. Here are 100 books to read before you die.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great books out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized book recommendation  😉

Which book should you read next?

Discover the perfect book for you. Takes 30 seconds!

1. 1984 by George Orwell

Set in 1984, Winston Smith must overcome a frightening enemy: an omniscient government with an agenda. This is the book that became a standard-bearer for dystopian fiction and introduced Big Brother into our everyday vocabulary. Perhaps the mightiest of George Orwell’s works.

2. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

A young boy and a slave in 19th-century Louisiana must find their way home — with only the Mississippi River for a guide. This slender book by Mark Twain’s is so well-regarded that it’s said by many to be The Great American Novel.

3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

In 1891, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first short story to feature Sherlock Holmes. Sharp and engrossing, this collection shows how exactly Sherlock Holmes became a cultural phenomenon and the most recognizable detective of all time.

4. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Written in only two weeks, The Alchemist has sold more than two million copies worldwide — and the magical story of Santiago’s journey to the pyramids of Egypt continues to enchant readers worldwide. A dreamy triumph.

5. The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges’ keen insight and philosophical wisdom is on full display in this acclaimed short story collection. From “The Immortal” to “The House of Asterion,” the stories within are glittering, haunting examples of worlds created by a master of magic realism.

6. Animal Farm by George Orwell

When Old Major the boar dies on Manor Farm, two young pigs named Snowball and Napoleon rise to create new leadership in this allegorical book that is supposed to mirror the Russian Revolution of 1917 — and the ensuing Stalinist Soviet Union. Animal Farm is a stunning achievement, and not just because Orwell proved that a story about pigs can be terrifying.

7. Aesop's Fables by Aesop

This enduring collection of tales was passed down through oral tradition more than two millennia ago. More than simple stories, Aesop’s stories reflect every aspect of human nature.

8. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Alice is only a young seven-year old girl when she notices a White Rabbit with a pocket watch running by. Thus begins Alice’s adventures in a land that is not all that it seems. Lewis Carroll published this novel in 1865, sending it down the rabbit hole and straight into the hallowed halls of children’s most treasured literature.

9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

If you like lengthy books in which to immerse yourself, then this is a real treat. This epic novel tells the parallel stories of Anna Karenina and Konstantin Levin over a span of 800+ pages — dealing with social change, politics, theology, and philosophy in nineteenth-century Russia all the while.

10. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

To read Anne of the Green Gables is to fall in love with its characters — particularly its protagonist, a fiery young girl with an imagination the size of castles. From coming-of-age arcs to the occasional drunken episode, this beloved classic by L.M. Montgomery has it all: laughs, pain, and heart.

Looking for something new to read?

Trust real people, not robots, to give you book recommendations.

Or sign up with an email address

11. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

As William Faulkner attested: “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” This is the grueling story of the Bundren family’s slow, tortuous journey to bury Addie, their wife and mother, in her hometown of Mississippi.  

12. Beloved by Toni Morrison

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award, Beloved is Toni Morrison’s magnum opus about Sethe, a former slave whose house may or may not be haunted by the ghost of the baby she had to murder. A peerless work about slavery, race, and the bonds of family.  

13. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

This children's book has an unmistakably distinct narrator — Death. Set in Nazi Germany, it follows Liesel, a young girl in her new foster care home. As the world around her begins to crumble, Liesel must find solace in books and the power of words.

14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

One of the giants of the dystopian genre. Having already shaken up the literary world when it was first published, Brave New World is relevant even today as it urges readers to ask questions about autonomy, hedonism, and our definition of “utopia.”

15. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

In a testimony to Albert Einstein's admiration of The Brothers Karamazov , novelist C.P. Snow once wrote, " The Brothers Karamazov — that for him in 1919 was the supreme summit of all literature." You can step into Einstein’s footsteps yourself by reading this powerful, stirring meditation on God and the power of free will.

16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier, longs to return home. But that is a little hard when he is situated in the middle of nowhere — or, more specifically, the fictional island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea. A searing satire that is defining of its times.

17. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Meet Holden Caulfield: a teenager who, with no plans in mind, decides to leave his boarding school in Pennsylvania and head back home to New York. In The Catcher in the Rye , J.D. Salinger has created perhaps the original “cynical adolescent” — and a wistful story about the meaning of youth.

18. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Eleven-year-old Charlie Bucket’s life is turned upside down when he finds a Golden Ticket that gives him access to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. So are young readers’ heads, as they experience the magic of the Chocolate Factory (and Oompa-Loompas) for the first time in Roald Dahl’s cherished children’s book.

19. Charlotte's Web by E. B White

Wilbur, the runt of his litter, is spared from certain death, thanks to a little girl named Fern. But his life takes a turn when he is sold to Homer Zuckerman, who eventually plans to butcher him, and meets a kind-hearted spider called Charlotte. Charlotte's Web is a staple of children’s literature — and the bestselling children’s paperback of all time.

20. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

In the 1890s, a young dog named Buck hears the call of the wild. But can he answer it, especially when nature and man’s cruelty are stacked against him? This rugged, gripping novel has inspired millions of adventures for many years.

21. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

It is an indeterminate year in the future and Alex is arrested by the government in the midst of an ultraviolent youth cultural rebellion. A Clockwork Orange is one of the most enduring examinations of good and evil, and what it means to be free to choose one or the other.

22. The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

Reading P.G. Wodehouse is one of the few things in life that will reliably delight. And The Code of the Woosters is Wodehouse at his sparkling best: a romp through Britain with an uproarious cast, including Jeeves, Bertie, and cow-creamers.

23. The Collected of Edgar Allan Po by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is synonymous with horror today and this is the collection that proves it. Packed with his best short stories, including “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” it completely presents Poe’s dark imagination and uncanny ability to capture the shadowy depths of the human heart.

24. The Color Purple: A Novel by Alice Walker

The acclaimed story of two women and the strength of their bond in the racist society of 1980s America. The Color Purple won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, deservedly making Alice Walker the first African-American woman to receive the award.

25. Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Young Coraline Jones has just moved into an old house when she discovers a mysterious door. What lies beyond might even be beyond the limits of your wildest imagination in this dark fantasy novella that has become a universal favorite.

26. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Edmond Dantès, a young Frenchman, is falsely accused and imprisoned without trial in an island fortress off the coast of France — until the day he escapes and sets out to avenge himself. The Count of Monte Cristo is revenge tale for the ages.

27. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In this 1866 epic novel, a poor student in St. Petersburg makes the fateful decision to rob and kill an elderly pawnbroker for her money. The work that made Fyodor Dostoevsky one of the greats, Crime and Punishment remains a hallmark study of greed, morality, and the dangers of radicalism.

28. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Narrated by Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year old with autism, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is the story of the night that Christopher finds a dead dog — and the fallout. Haddon invites readers to see the world through another’s eyes in this captivating mystery novel with a twist that instantly became one of the must-read books of the 21st-century.

29. The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

Lying on his deathbed, corrupt soldier and politician Artemio Cruz is surrounded by family and a priest as they attempt to coax him into confessing his betrayals and crooked dealings. The Death of Artemio Cruz is a milestone in the boom of Latin-American literature .

30. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun

Inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s short story of the same title, “Diary of a Madman” made Lu Xun one of the leading Chinese writers of his time. But there’s more to Xun than just “Diary of a Madman,” as evidenced by this complete collection of his short stories.

Are you craving more short story collections like Diary of a Madman and Other Stories? You can get your fill in this post that has 21 of the best short story collections .

31. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Anne Frank was 13 years old when she and her family went in hiding. Of the diary that was published posthumously by Frank’s father, John F. Kennedy once said: "Of all the multitudes who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank."

32. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Few authors are so exalted that they’re recognized by their first names, and even fewer books are as lofty as The Divine Comedy . Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven is a feat of imagination and an undisputed giant in world literature.

33. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Considered one of the greatest works in the pantheon of world literature, Don Quixote follows the ill-fated adventures of Alonso Quixano: a middle-aged man who loses his sanity and believes himself to be one of the knights in shining armor he has read about in chivalric books.

34. Dracula by Bram Stoker

A small band of friends must stop Count Dracula from coming to England and spreading the curse of the undead all over the continent. Published in 1897, Dracula boasts the original vampire and lastingly re-defined gothic fantasy.

35. Emma by Jane Austen

In Regency England, a young woman named Emma Woodhouse is determined to matchmake the friends around her. Hijinks and plenty of revelations of the heart ensue. Of her titular character, Jane Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." But anyone who reads the book will end up falling in love with imperfect and high-spirited Emma.

36. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Perhaps the singular work that doubles as both an incisive commentary on mass media and a bookworm’s worst nightmare. In Ray Bradbury’s towering dystopian masterpiece, Guy Montag is a conflicted fireman who is intimately familiar with fahrenheit 451: the temperature at which books burn.

37. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The grandfather of monster fiction, Frankenstein has fanned the imaginations of horror and suspense lovers around the world. Mary Shelley’s enduring legacy of a mad scientist and his tortured, anguished creation (with a badass name ) is to this day considered to be the first science-fiction book ever written.

38. The Giver by Lois Lowry

12-year old Jonas lives in a seemingly utopian society. However, when he is assigned to take over as the next Receiver of Memory, he discovers that there’s more to his community than meets the eye. An astute, lyrical children’s book.  

39. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

A retelling of John Milton’s Paradise Lost for the 21st century, The Golden Compass transports readers into a world of animal familiars, parallel universes, and brave young girls who could make a difference.

40. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

“Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.” Beautiful illustrations and perfect rhyme have made Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon a cherished favorite of children everywhere.

41. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Pip’s journey from a poor apprentice to a gentleman has become the stuff of literary legend. First published in 1861, Great Expectations remains one of Charles Dickens’ finest and most famous works .

42. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

When Nick Carraway settles down in decadent 1920s New York for a summer, he has no idea what awaits him in the booming parties, Daisy Buchanan, and the mysterious figure at the center of it all, Jay Gatsby. In The Great Gatsby , F. Scott Fitzgerald has crafted a masterwork for the ages and a haunting contemplation of the American Dream.

43. Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Often said to be Disney for grown-ups. Beware: Grimm's Fairy Tales are much crueler and cruder than the stories that most children know.

44. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Savage and brilliant, Jonathan Swift bends his satirical eye on humankind himself in Gulliver’s Travels . Gulliver's Travels is one of the bestselling parodies of all time for a reason.

45. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Who is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark — and is he truly seeing the ghost of his father or is he going mad? William Shakespeare’s most famous work boasts not only one of the most quoted lines in history (“To be or not to be”), but also the complex character who ever belonged on stage (Hamlet).

46. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

In this terrifying vision of the future, Margaret Atwood imagines a society governed by gender discrimination. More than a tour de force in the dystopian genre, The Handmaid’s Tale is a grim, evergreen inquisition of identity, marriage, and what it means to be free.

47. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

The worldwide phenomenon of the boy who lived is known by pretty much every child and adult alive today, but if you haven’t given it a chance yet, this is the time to do it. Follow eleven-year-old Harry, Ron, and Hermione as they grow up, study magic, and learn how to defeat the Dark Lord — and try to make it out alive.

Have you read Harry Potter and you're not sated yet? Don't forget to check out these 20 great books like Harry Potter .

48. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Charles Marlow is dispatched to the Congo in Africa on behalf of a Belgian trading company — but he gets more than he bargained for in the jungle’s literal heart of darkness. A grim masterpiece that catapulted Joseph Conrad among the ranks of the great writers.  

49. Here's to You, Jesusa! by Elena Poniatowska

Fiery and penetrating, this passionate story of one of Mexico’s most challenging times provides the unique perspective of women in the midst of heated combat as they struggle to survive.

50. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Arthur Dent is the only man who survived the destruction of Earth. Now he must journey through the galaxy, alongside an alien writer who’s working on an electronic book that’s only called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy .

51. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Bilbo Baggins only wanted a peaceful dinner party. What he gets instead is something that’s not perhaps to his taste: a band of twelve dwarves in his house, a dragon to defeat, and an epic adventure. And it all begins with this iconic first line: “In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit.”

52. Holes by Louis Sachar

Stanley Yelnats is that unlucky boy who gets sent to Camp Green Lake: a Texan juvenile corrections facility where boys dig holes all day in a dried-up lake. In this popular children’s book, three storylines intertwine to solve century-old mysteries.

53. Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar

An ingenious, one-of-a-kind novel — literally. The story of Horacio Oliveira, a well-read bohemian, is divided into 155 chapters that can be read in multiple orders: sequentially or by following the suggested reading guide, which prompts readers to jump around various chapters and makes 99 of the 155 chapters expendable.

54. The Iliad by Homer

Having been born into an age of heroes and warriors, Homer created a work of art that was deserving of them. Relive the fall of Troy and the glory of Achilles in this epic poem that has survived for a couple thousand years and counting.

55. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

A young black man grows up in the South before moving to New York and becoming a spokesman for “the Brotherhood” in 1950s Harlem. Invisible Man is key part of American literature that probingly examines racism, black identity, and why some are more invisible in society than others.

56. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

This landmark novel that re-defined narrative consciousness centers on the eponymous Jane Eyre , an orphan born in 1800s England. As Jane grows up, she takes her destiny into her own hands — which becomes particularly poignant when she meets the brooding Mr. Rochester at Thornfield Hall.

57. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

This definitive science fiction novel shares the story of Otto Lidenbrock: a professor who ventures to nowhere else but the center of the Earth with his nephew Axel, and Hans, a guide.

58. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Considered by many to be one of the most luminous literary works of the 19th-century, Les Misérables spans the tumultuous 17 years from 1815 to 1932, during which politics, justice, religion, and love all come to a head in the June Rebellion in Paris.

59. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Pi Patel is only a young boy when his freighter to North America sinks and he’s stuck on a small lifeboat with an orangutan, a hyena — and a tiger. Dramatic, humorous, and thoughtful, Yann Martel’s book made waves when it was published in 2001.

60. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

Lions, witches, talking fauns, and Turkish delights — oh my! C.S. Lewis’ allegorical story about the four Pevensie siblings who walk into a closet and disappear into the land of Narnia has captivated children (and adults) for decades.

61. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Not many stories are as unanimously beloved as this short one by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Once readers find themselves the shoes of the little prince and seeing through his eyes, they won’t be able to look away.

62. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

The four March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy — grow up and come of age in this seminal work of family drama. They might be women, but they are by no means little in the halls of great literature.

63. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive quest for 12-year old Dolores Haze has haunted and captivated audiences for decades. Lolita is dark, sardonic, and ultimately genius study of madness and unreliability.  

64. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

No author casts a greater shadow over one genre quite like J.R.R. Tolkien and epic fantasy . Start here with the trilogy that launched it all: The Lord of the Rings and Frodo’s quest to rid Middle-Earth of Sauron once and for all.

65. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fell in love when they were young and were untimely torn apart by Fermina’s father. But what happens when Florentino never forgets about Fermina — and decides to make his intentions known again after fifty years of separation? Love in the Time of Cholera is a towering magical realist classic.

66. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Who is Madame Bovary? Gustave Flaubert once replied: “Madame Bovary, c'est moi.” And so he does show through this undisputedly great novel that Madame Bovary — a longing, brutally, introspective, hedonistic woman — lives in all of us.

67. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

What would you do if you wake up one morning and discover that you are now an insect? Franz Kafka answers this burning question in this short novel, regarded by many as a master stroke of genius.

68. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Man faces off against white whale in this 700-page story that remains one of the grandest works about morality and the nature of obsession. A must-read, and not just for the adventure.

69. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Clarissa Dalloway said that she would buy the flowers herself, or so begins Mrs Dalloway . More than a mere story, Virginia Woolf breathes new life into stream of consciousness storytelling in this probing, gentle, and deeply transformative portrait of one ordinary woman’s mind.

70. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

The most famous of Christie’s detective stories featuring Monsieur Poirot and his formidable ‘grey cells.’ When a snowstorm grounds the luxurious Orient Express, death ensues onboard — and it’s up to the detective to piece together the puzzle, especially since everyone on the train seems to have an alibi. Looking for more books by the Mistress of Mystery? We've got you covered with the 10 best Agatha Christie books .

71. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

George Milton and Lennie Small make an odd couple, working on California’s dusty ranches and dreaming of a shack of their own. But all might be lost when they move to a new farm — even each other. This is Steinbeck at his peak in this heart-wrenching story about friendship and loss. (And he didn't just write one amazing book — head to our guide to the 15 best John Steinbeck books to discover more!)

72. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

In this short novel, Santiago is an old fisherman who one day happens upon a marlin that might be able to make him rich. One of Hemingway’s best , The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953.

73. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Young Oliver Twist is an orphaned boy living on the streets when he escapes to London in the 1800s. But that’s just the start of his story, as Oliver goes on to befriend a gang of juvenile thieves — and a pickpocket named The Artful Dodger.  

74. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez covers seven generations of one family while exploring themes of fatalism, subjectivity, death, and time in a world where magical elements combine seamlessly with real life. One of the most important works in Spanish literature and a landmark of magical realism in its own right.

75. One Thousand and One Nights by Unknown

You might vaguely know the gist of the story behind One Thousand and One Arabian Nights , but have you ever actually read it before? This is the must-read translation, as new bride Scheherazade must wittily come up with new tales to escape her execution night after night.

76. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Adela Quested is to be engaged to Ronny Moore in Chandrapore, which necessitates a journey to India in the 1920s. This novel, regarded as one of the must-read books of the twentieth century, was instrumental in launching a postcolonial discourse against the backdrop of the Indian independence movement.

77. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

In the town of Comala, where ghosts are indistinguishable from the living, young Juan Preciado goes to look for his estranged father. In his only published novel, Rulfo weaves together a story that’s told in such a way that readers are left wondering who’s truly alive and who's dead — and whether there’s more to the town than first meets the eye.

78. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

From the mind of Norton Juster comes a magical journey. Milo is a young boy who’s beyond bored of everything — that is, until a tollbooth appears in his room one day and transports him into a land that’s the opposite of dull. The Phantom Tollbooth is a classic children's fantasy.

79. Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

You won’t find many characters like Pippi Longstocking. Freckled, red-haired, and nine-years old, Pippi also happens to be the strongest girl in the world: she can lift a horse with one hand . Think of all the adventures she can go on with strength like that!

80. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The source of film and TV adaptations, sequels, and several hundred reimaginings, Pride and Prejudice is one of the cornerstones of English literature. Through wit, sarcasm, and humor, this 19th-century novel centers on the five unmarried (gasp!) Bennet sisters while exploring themes of family, society, and, yes, love.

81. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Stevens, a butler in post-World War II England, takes a trip through the countryside. This celebrated novel is all the more powerful for its deceptive simplicity, as it shows that the quietest stories are sometimes the most dangerous.

82. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s masterpiece tells the story of two young lovers separated by a bitter family feud. Featuring one of the most well-known couples ever, Romeo and Juliet has launched a legion of fans.

83. A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

The Baudelaire siblings have the worst luck ever. No wonder their stories are called A Series of Unfortunate Events . First their parents die in a fire, then they are shipped off to a remote house — and then they discover that their new caretaker, Count Olaf, wants to kill them! Now they must have their wits about them and rely on each other more than ever if they are to survive Count Olaf’s schemes.

84. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Young Daniel Sampere finds The Shadow of the Wind in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. In this story-within-a-story, Daniel uncovers the mystery behind the book’s author and must now protect it from someone who’s determined to burn every single copy in existence.

85. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Under Kurt Vonnegut’s sure touch, Billy Pilgrim’s journey through time during World War II is rendered scathingly well, making Slaughterhouse-Five one of the most greatest anti-war books ever written.

86. The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata

As the patriarch of his family in Kamakura, Ogata Shingo is troubled when his memory begins failing and he keeps hearing the mountains shaking in his sleep. A sparse and beautiful meditation on old age from a celebrated Nobel Prize-winning author.  

87. The Stranger by Albert Camus

In Albert Camus’ own words: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” Such is the absurdity of life that Meursault faces in this dense crowning jewe l of Camus’ career.

88. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

Dating to the early years of the eleventh-century, this ancient classic of Japanese literature is the famous portrayal of Hikaru Genji’s life, love affairs, and aristocratic customs in Heian Period Japan.

89. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

The first novel in an acclaimed trilogy, Things Fall Apart is the seminal novel of the African experience. More than that, it is a wrenching tragedy of one man’s futile fight against change as British rule overcomes the land.

90. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

In this classic novel of adventure, d’Artagnan is a young man in search of his destiny when he joins the Musketeers of the Guard. But his life intertwines inextricably with another’s journey when he meets Athos, Porthos, and Aramis: the King’s most elite musketeers.

91. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Scout Finch is an ordinary girl living with her brother and father in Alabama when the arrest of a black man, Tom Robinson, upends everyone’s lives. A coming-of-age in the South becomes a gripping courtroom thriller in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book that may rank up there as one of the most beloved books of all time .

92. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Buried gold is the name and pirates are the game in this 1883 story by Robert Louis Stevenson, which became the definitive adventure book for many generations of readers.

93. Ulysses by James Joyce

Controversial and magnificent, Ulysses is James Joyce’s answer to the modernist movement: a puzzlingly sweeping novel that centers on the day of one Leopold Bloom in Dublin.

94. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Up there as one of the greatest works ever written, War and Peace is Tolstoy’s epic account of two young men and one young woman, as they stand amidst the swirling spectre of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812.

95. Watership Down by Richard Adams

Hazel, Fiver, Blackberry, and crew are the hardiest band of adventurers that you’ll ever meet, with one caveat: they’re rabbits. And they’re on the escape, looking for a new warren to call home. Watership Down is a classic for children and adults alike.

96. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

Haven’t you read Winnie the Pooh yet? Think, think, think! No? Gosh, you really haven’t? Oh, bother! Well, don’t worry, there’s still time to fix that catastrophic error by picking up this cornerstone of children’s literature and joining Winnie, Piglet, and friends on the journey of a lifetime.

97. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

A young and distressed woman dressed entirely in white one day appears to Walter Hartright, kicking off the plot of The Woman in White , often described as one of the finest mystery novels ever written.  

98. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Dorothy and friends go on an adventure, and who knows what awaits them at the end of the Yellow Brick Road? Frank L. Baum’s treasured classic was famously adapted into the first color film ever made, which is befitting of this whimsical, charmingly bright story.

99. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

It was a dark and stormy night… when Mrs. Whatsit walks through the door of 13-year old Meg Murry’s house, shortly followed by Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which. A bewitching, groundbreaking fantasy that's a feat of worldbuilding by a master of the genre.

100. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë's only novel is a staggering tour de force: a violent, gothic tragedy about the passionate, tempestuous affair between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff — and the havoc that it threatens to wreak upon the moors.

Continue reading

More posts from across the blog.

50 Best Feminist Books to Dismantle the Patriarchy

Grow your "To Be Read" pile with these essential feminist books — novels, memoirs, poems, and essays that will spark the fire of feminism in any reader.

The 40 Most Festive Christmas Books to Get You in the Holiday Spirit

Snow is falling, fires are crackling, the smell of gingerbread houses wafts through the air. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is being blared inside every merrily decorated department store. It can only mean one thing!

Kindle Cloud Reader 101: What It Is and How to Use It

Much has been made of the eBook’s rise this decade. More of them are being published than ever, and the vast majority are sold through Amazon, the dominant player in online book and eBook retailing. From self-published titles to New York Times bestseller...

Heard about Reedsy Discovery?

Or sign up with an

Or sign up with your social account

• Submit your book
• Reviewer directory

Free Download: Reading checklist

Finally complete your literary bucket list. Sign up to get this free download.

The 23 most popular books of the past year, according to Goodreads members

When you buy through our links, Business Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

• If you're looking for a great new book, it can be difficult to know where to start.
• The books on this list are the most popular reads among Goodreads members in the past year.
• The titles range from new romances to classics and everything in between.

Because there are nearly infinite books in the world, it can be difficult to know which one to pick up next. When I don't know what to read, I turn to fellow readers for the books they've read and adored, gravitating towards the titles I hear my friends mention over and over again. 

Similarly, the internet can provide plenty of word-of-mouth reviews and rankings. The books on this list come from the most popular Goodreads members picked up in the last year, according to the 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge (where readers aim to read as many books as they can in one year). Goodreads is the world's largest platform for readers to rate, review, and discover new book recommendations, with over 125 million members sharing their favorite reads.

If you're looking to start off the new year right with a great new read, here are some of the most popular books readers are snagging right now. 

The 23 most popular books right now, according to Goodreads members:

"the midnight library" by matt haig.

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.29

Nora Seed feels stuck in her life, bound to the choices she made that she still isn't sure were right. When Nora is ready to leave it all behind, she finds herself in a peculiar library, where each of the infinite books offers a portal to a parallel world, showing her all the many ways her life could have been slightly or drastically different, had she made other decisions.

"The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue" by V.E. Schwab

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.19

" The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue " is a genre-bending fantasy book about a young woman named Addie who, in 1714, makes a bargain with a dark god and becomes cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Addie's story spans three centuries and countless countries — until she meets a boy in New York City in 2014 who can finally remember her.

"The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.42

Evelyn Hugo was an iconic Hollywood actress, just as notoriously remembered for her seven marriages as she was for her movie performances. Finally ready to tell her story, Evelyn Hugo chooses a little-known journalist named Monique, who goes to Evelyn's luxurious apartment to hear the truth behind Evelyn's lifetime of friendships, ambitions, and many loves.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $7.19

Considered one of the greatest novels of all time , " To Kill a Mockingbird " is an unforgettable historical fiction novel from 1960 that follows young Jean Louise Finch during a time of great racial inequality in her community. Her father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer defending a Black man wrongly accused of a terrible crime as he faces a community desperate for a guilty conviction.

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.44

" The Great Gatsby " is a classic about the wealthy Jay Gatsby, set during the Jazz Age in New York. When Nick Carraway moved to Long Island to find a job in New York City as a bond salesman, he meets his next-door neighbor, Jay Gatsby, who throws extravagant parties and is constantly in pursuit of the stunning Daisy Buchanan.

"Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.98

Kya Clark is known to most as the "Marsh Girl," running barefoot and wild in her quiet fishing village, having attended only one day of school. When a popular young boy is murdered, Kya's story unravels as the town accuses her of causing his death.

"1984" by George Orwell

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $7.48

" 1984 " is an iconic science fiction novel that imagines a dystopian future ruled by a totalitarian state, perpetually at war and at the mercy of strong propaganda. Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical records to conform to the state's version of events while secretly dreaming of rebellion and imagining what life would be like without Big Brother.

"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $5.47

" Pride and Prejudice " is a cherished, classic Jane Austen romance between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Loved for their unique relationship comprised of witty banter and flirting, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy fall for each other in this story of class, wealth, and the duty of marriage.

"The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $10.35

In this Greek mythology-inspired tale , Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled by his father because of a misunderstanding when he meets the legendary Achilles. As the two form a unique relationship, Helen of Sparta is kidnapped and Achilles, along with all the heroes in Greece, joins the cause against Troy as they face a choice between love and fate.

"The Vanishing Half" by Brit Bennett

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $15.70

Though the Vignes twin sisters grew up identical in their small, southern community, their lives split in young adulthood as one sister now lives in the same community with her Black daughter while the other passes for white in a white community. A beautiful story of influence and decisions emerges as their lives intersect over generations when their daughters finally meet.

"The Guest List" by Lucy Foley

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.09

Set on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, a fascinating group of friends and family converge to celebrate the marriage of a rising television star and an ambitious magazine publisher. When someone is found dead, everyone becomes a suspect with their own strange and mysterious potential motives.

"People We Meet on Vacation" by Emily Henry

Alex and Poppy became best friends on a happenstance summer road trip in college, spurring a tradition of summer trips together — until two years ago, when everything changed between them. Though they haven't spoken since, Poppy desperately needs her best friend back and reaches out to Alex to see if they can try to rekindle their friendship in this adorable romance.

"It Ends with Us" by Colleen Hoover

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.99

Ryle Kincaid is a stunning, assertive neurosurgeon with a soft spot for only Lily, who can't believe her luck that there's a spark between them. As the two fall into a passionate relationship, Lily can't help but think of her first love, Atlas. As her relationship with Ryle becomes more and more complicated, Atlas reappears and further complicates everything.

"The Four Winds" by Kristin Hannah

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $14

" The Four Winds " is an award-winning historical fiction novel that illuminates the Dust Bowl era of the Great Depression, where farmers faced deadly droughts that often forced them from their land. To learn more about why we love this book, you can check out our review here.

"Malibu Rising" by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.80

Famous surfer Nina Riva is preparing to host her iconic, annual party with her equally famous siblings, though she doesn't know the party will be literally up in flames by morning. As each sibling's story unravels, this historical fiction novel traverses from the party in 1983 to the Rivas' childhood, revealing long-buried secrets and spinning the present entirely out of control.

"The Silent Patient" by Alex Michaelides

Alicia Berenson had a seemingly perfect life with a painting career, a beautiful home, and a photographer husband until one night her husband returned home and Alicia shot him five times in the face and never spoke again. As Theo Faber, a criminal psychotherapist, attempts to work with Alicia to get her to talk, his own twisted motives emerge in this gripping psychological thriller with many versions of the truth.

"Anxious People" by Fredrik Backman

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.12

When a bank robbery goes terribly wrong, eight strangers find themselves being held hostage in an apartment with more in common than they imagined. Each anxious for their own reasons, the tensions mount as the police surround the apartment in this thought-provoking story of compassion where all the pieces slowly fit together.

"Red, White & Royal Blue" by Casey McQuiston

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.97

First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz has a long-running nemesis: Prince Henry. When the tabloids catch the two in a confrontation, the plan for damage control includes staging a fake friendship between the boys in this fun, fan-favorite Queer romance.

"Normal People" by Sally Rooney

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.33

Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other in school, dropping the facade when Connell picks his mother up from a housekeeping job at Marianne's house. The two form a peculiar connection, drifting apart and back together over the years in this story about class, friendship, and human nature.

"The Hobbit, or There and Back Again" by J.R.R. Tolkien

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.92

Originally written for the author's children, " The Hobbit " is a beloved prequel to the " Lord of the Rings " series where readers are introduced to the fantasy world of Middle-earth. When Bilbo Baggins is tricked into hosting a party, the wizard Gandalf convinces him to join him and a group of dwarves on an adventure to retrieve a treasure guarded by a dragon, igniting an epic tale adored by readers of all ages.

"Beach Read" by Emily Henry

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $7.35

January Andrews is a bestselling romance author, plagued with writer's block and staying at a beach house to try and write a new novel by her editor's deadline. When she meets the next-door literary fiction writer named Augustus, they decide to switch genres in an attempt to escape their creative ruts.

"The Last Thing He Told Me" by Laura Dave

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.50

Before Hannah's new husband, Owen, disappears, he manages to slip her a note reading "protect her," which she knows refers to his 16-year-old daughter, Bailey. When the FBI arrests Owen's boss and comes to their home unannounced, Hannah and Bailey realize Owen isn't who they thought and must uncover the truth behind his disappearance while building a future together of their own.

"The Duke and I" by Julia Quinn

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $8.27

" The Duke and I " is the first Regency-era romance in the " Bridgerton " series, about Daphne Bridgerton who agrees to a fake courtship with Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings. While Daphne needs her own prospects to soar and the Duke intends to avoid marriage altogether, their plan seems to be working perfectly — until the two can't deny the spark that seems to be igniting between them. If you love this book already, check out our list of other Julia Quinn novels to find your next great romance read. 

• Main content

What Book Should You Read Next?

Finding a book you’ll love can be daunting. Let us help.

Supported by

• Share full article

By The New York Times Books Staff

• Published April 16, 2023 Updated Feb. 20, 2024

Fiction | Nonfiction

For more recommendations, subscribe to our Read Like the Wind newsletter, check out our romance columnist’s favorite books of the year so far or visit our What to Read page.

At The New York Times Book Review, we write about thousands of books every year. Many of them are good. Some are even great. But we get that sometimes you just want to know, “What should I read that is good or great for me ? Well, here you go — a running list of some of the year’s best, most interesting, most talked-about books. Check back next month to see what we’ve added.

We chose the 10 best books of 2023. See the full list .

I want a great American book full of humanity

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store , by James McBride

McBride’s latest opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the remains’ connection to one town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history. But rather than a straightforward whodunit, McBride weaves an intimate tale of community.

Local bookstores | Barnes and Noble | Amazon

I’d like an intricate, immersive fantasy

The book of love , by kelly link.

Link, a Pulitzer finalist and master of short stories, pushes our understanding of what a fantasy novel can be. Here, she follows three teenagers who return from the dead and compete for the chance to remain alive in a series of magical challenges, spinning a rich tale full of secrets and the supernatural.

Local booksellers | Barnes and Noble | Amazon

I want to read a book everyone is (still) talking about

Demon copperhead , by barbara kingsolver.

Kingsolver’s powerful novel, published in 2022, is a close retelling of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield” set in contemporary Appalachia. The story gallops through issues including childhood poverty, opioid addiction and rural dispossession even as its larger focus remains squarely on the question of how an artist’s consciousness is formed. Like Dickens, Kingsolver is unblushingly political and works on a sprawling scale, animating her pages with an abundance of charm and the presence of seemingly every creeping thing that has ever crept upon the earth.

Introduce me to a family I’ll love (even if they break my heart)

The bee sting , by paul murray.

This tragicomic novel follows a once wealthy, now ailing Irish family, the Barneses, as they struggle with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons.

How about a thrilling, wrenching story that puts heroic women at the center?

The women , by kristin hannah.

The best-selling author of “The Nightingale” follows a San Diego debutante who works as an Army nurse during the Vietnam War. “Hannah’s real superpower is her ability to hook you along from catastrophe to catastrophe, sometimes peering between your fingers, because you simply cannot give up on her characters,” our reviewer wrote.

I’d like a cozy story that appreciates the little things

Tom lake , by ann patchett.

Set on a cherry orchard during the recent pandemic, this novel has echoes of both Anton Chekhov and Thornton Wilder. It follows three sisters in their 20s quarantining with their mother and drawing out stories from her past as an actress.

I’d like to be wowed by a historical masterpiece

The fraud , by zadie smith.

Based on a celebrated 19th-century criminal trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

I’d like a smart romantic comedy that avoids cliché

Good material , by dolly alderton.

Alderton’s novel, about a 35-year-old man struggling to make sense of a breakup, delivers the most delightful aspects of romantic comedy — snappy dialogue, realistic relationship dynamics, funny meet-cutes and misunderstandings — and leaves behind clichéd gender roles and the traditional marriage plot.

How about a heartwarming novel to suit any mood?

Remarkably bright creatures , by shelby van pelt.

This debut novel, a runaway best seller, follows a widow named Tova who starts working overnight shifts at a nearby aquarium, where she forms a bond with an octopus named Marcellus. As they grow closer, it turns out that Marcellus holds the key to one of her most painful episodes: the disappearance, decades ago, of her son.

I plan on watching the Oscars

Killers of the flower moon , by david grann.

Now that you’ve sat through the nearly four-hour film adaptation, why not read the source material? This true-crime story follows the story of the Osage Nation, driven onto land in Oklahoma and made rich by the immense oil deposits later discovered underneath. Then, members of the tribe started to turn up dead. “The crime story it tells is appalling, and stocked with authentic heroes and villains,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote of the book, back in 2017. “It will make you cringe at man’s inhumanity to man.”

I’d like a nuanced look at the border crisis

Everyone who is gone is here , by jonathan blitzer.

This timely and instructive history, from a New Yorker staff writer, situates the immigration crisis as the outcome of a long and vexed entanglement between the United States and its southern neighbors.

Teach me about a forgotten chapter of American history

Madness , by antonia hylton.

Hylton investigates the hidden history of Crownsville Hospital, a segregated asylum on 1,500 acres in Anne Arundel County, Md., that operated for over 90 years. The story has resonance today — particularly regarding America’s continuing failure to care for Black minds.

I can’t learn enough about WWII

Judgment at tokyo , by gary j. bass.

Written by a veteran journalist and Princeton professor, this immersive look at the prosecution of Japanese war crimes offers an elegant account of a moment that shaped the politics of the region and of the Cold War to come.

I want a revelatory biography of someone I thought I knew everything about

King: a life , by jonathan eig.

The first comprehensive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, Eig’s book draws on a landslide of recently released government documents as well as letters and interviews. This is a book worthy of its subject: both an intimate study of a complex and flawed human being and a journalistic account of a civil rights titan.

I want a dramatic history that reads like a novel

Master slave husband wife: an epic journey from slavery to freedom , by ilyon woo.

Woo’s book recounts a daring feat: the successful flight north from Georgia in 1848 by an enslaved couple disguised as a sickly young white planter and his male slave. But her meticulous retelling is equally a feat — of research, storytelling, sympathy and insight.

I want to hear Britney’s side of the story

The woman in me , by britney spears.

Spears is stronger than ever in her long-awaited memoir. She reveals plenty about her life in the spotlight, but tempers well-earned bitterness with an enduring, insistent optimism.

I’d like a moving memoir about friendship and mental illness

The best minds: a story of friendship, madness, and the tragedy of good intentions , by jonathan rosen.

In his engrossing new memoir, Rosen pieces together how he and his brilliant childhood friend, Michael Laudor, ended up taking sharply divergent paths. (Laudor came to prominence as a Yale Law School graduate working to destigmatize schizophrenia, but later killed his pregnant girlfriend.) Rosen brings plenty of compassion to this gripping reconstruction of Laudor’s life and their friendship.

Honestly, I really like reading about animals

What an owl knows: the new science of the world’s most enigmatic birds , by jennifer ackerman.

There are some 260 species of owls spread across every continent except Antarctica, and in this fascinating book, Ackerman explains why the birds are both naturally wondrous and culturally significant.

Take down a dazzling, erudite rabbit hole

Doppelganger: a trip into the mirror world , by naomi klein.

After she was repeatedly confused online with the feminist scholar turned anti-vaxxer Naomi Wolf, Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine” and other progressive books, turned the experience into this sober, stylish account of the lure of disdain and paranoia.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

Stephen King, who has dominated horror fiction for decades , published his first novel, “Carrie,” in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains the book’s enduring appeal .

The actress Rebel Wilson, known for roles in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, gets vulnerable about her weight loss, sexuality and money  in her new memoir.

“City in Ruins” is the third novel in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism .

​​Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation,” is “wildly optimistic” about Gen Z. Here’s why .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Advertisement

More From Forbes

The 30 greatest book series of all time.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

British writer J.K. Rowling signs copies of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" for public school ... [+] children at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood on October 15, 2007.

From fantasy bodies of work to epic sagas, the vast world of literature contains classic books that have had a significant impact on popular culture, people, and places. Many of these books, which have become series, have captured the hearts and imaginations of readers of all ages worldwide and remain some of the most intriguing—and lucrative—pieces of literature ever to be published. This article compiles a list of the 30 greatest book series of all time, highlighting the plots and characters that have fascinated us, annoyed us, or made us thoroughly loathe them.

Top Book Series

This article covers a range of genres from fantasy to science fiction, and rankings are based on specific factors, including critical acclaim, commercial success, mass appeal, and cultural impact among readers of all ages over the years. From J.K. Rowling’s magical wizarding world to George R.R. Martin’s epic to C.S. Lewis’s magical musings, these series and their authors have earned reputations as the world’s literary elite.

30. The Expanse Series By James S.A. Corey

James S.A. Corey is the joint pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and their The Expanse Series is a space opera body of work that sends readers to an otherworldly reality powered by escapism. In this futuristic reality, humanity is colonized by the solar system, giving rise to a complex web of conspiracy, political intrigue and the discovery of alien technology. The nine-book series, was originally published in 2011, and adapted into a hit TV show The Expanse, which adapted six out of the nine books in the series.

Who should read: Readers who are intrigued by epic space stories with complex characters, intricate plotting and high-stakes conflicts will be entertained by this series. It is available at Hachette Book Group .

29. The Southern Reach By Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy is set in the horrifying and surreal backdrop of Area X, an isolated location that has been isolated from the rest of civilization for years. The series follows a team of scientists and explorers as they venture into the heart of this mysterious territory. As they venture out deeper into Area X, they begin to experience strange physical transformations that challenge their understanding of reality and their own identities. There is no official television adaptation of The Southern Reach Trilogy, however, the first novel in the three-part series, Annihilation , was adapted into a film in 2018.

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024

Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024.

Who should read: Readers who enjoy atmospheric and immersive storytelling, as well as those who appreciate horror will be drawn to this series. It is available at Macmillan Publishers .

28. Mistborn By Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy is proof that magic, intrigue and revolution can collide in ways that breathe life into stories. Sanderson tells the story of Vin, a young street thief with a troubled past, who discovers that she possesses rare and powerful allomantic abilities. As she makes her way through the rough and tumble streets of the Final Empire, she becomes involved in a rebellion against the tyrannical Lord Ruler that forces her to join forces with a group of skilled rebels to form a revolution. Sanderson’s apt storytelling in this series is an evergreen literary output that stays with readers long after they turn the final page.

Who should read: Fans of epic fantasy, heist stories and political intrigue will find much to love in Sanderson’s seasoned blend of magic and adventure. The Mistborn is series is currently available on the Macmillan Publishers website, and a feature film adaptation of the series is currently in the works.

27. The Red Rising Saga By Pierce Brown

These books, which eerily mirror real-life issues of discrimination and classism, is a gripping science fiction series that transports readers to a dystopian future where society is divided into color-coded castes, each with its own responsibilities and privileges. At the heart of the saga is the protagonist, Darrow, a young Red miner who embarks on a grueling journey of rebellion and redemption that will change the fate of humanity.

Who should read: This book is ideal for readers who are passionate about social justice and drawn to coming-of-age storylines. The series is available to readers on Penguin House . Brown published the series between 2014 and 2021, and the story unfolds across five novels, with a sixth installment in the works and available for pre-order.

26. Thursday Next Series By Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next Series is a body of work that readers have found delightfully quirky with an inventive collection of novels that transports readers to an alternate version of England. First published between 2001 and 2012, the series follows the adventures of a literary detective called Special Operative as she navigates a world where books are not just objects of leisure but important members of society, with serious consequences for tampering or altering them.

Who should read: This book is perfect for readers who are literature fans to the core. Fforde has plans to publish more books in this series but currently, the series contains seven books and is available on Penguin Books .

25. The Bartimaeus Trilogy By Jonathan Stroud

Writers like Jonathan Stroud are able to thrive in their careers as authors because their uncanny ability to intertwine multiple themes to create a richly layered narrative of intrigue, adventure and rebellion. His book The Bartimaeus Trilogy, which was released between 2003 and 2005, consists of four books and is set against the backdrop of an imaginative world ruled by powerful magicians. Stroud weaves together a body of work that explores complex themes of tyranny, corruption and the struggle for freedom. At the heart of the series is the witty and cunning Djinni Bartimaeus, whose sharp wit and quick tongue provide a refreshing perspective on the events around him. In 2019, Start Media optioned the film and television rights to the adult fantasy series, but there has been no word on the progress of the project.

Who should read: While the series is marketed as young adult fiction, its depth and sophistication make it a rewarding read for readers of all ages. The series is available on Random House .

24. The Kingkiller Chronicle By Patrick Rothfus

Fantasy series can often become boring after a while, with some readers losing interest after the first three books, but that is far from the case here. With The Kingkiller Chronicle, Patrick Rothus keeps readers’ eyes glued to the pages by employing some of the finest skills in an author’s arsenal. Kvothe, the primary character in the book, is a figure whose life story unfolds across the pages, revealing a tale of triumph and tragedy, love and loss, and the pursuit of knowledge and power. Rothus’ episodic storytelling comes alive through Kvothe, who recounts his life story to a scribe, making the series an immersive read. Although there have been attempts to adapt the series into a movie or TV show, there are reportedly some ongoing challenges with this.

Who should read: The Kingkiller Chronicle is an excellent read for a diverse range of audiences, including fans of episodic storytelling and fantasy. The first two books of the fantasy trilogy were published between 2007 and 2011, and the series is available on Penguin Random House .

23. Riyria Revelations By Michael J. Sullivan

Michael J. Sullivan’s Riyria Revelations is an epic series that complements fantasy literature with complex characters who draw in readers with their personal stories. The series follows two protagonists, Royce Melborn, a cunning thief with a checkered past, and Hadrian Blackwater, a talented swordsman, as they embark on a thrilling journey replete with intrigue, dark mystery and dangerous adversaries. The six-book series, published between 2011 and 2012, shows that Sullivan is a master of his craft who has the ability to bring the pages of a book to life with a diverse cast of characters ranging from noble knights to ruthless villains, each with complex personalities. Although the series does not have a TV adaptation, Audible has created dramatized adaptations of the series.

Who should read: Riyria Revelations is a good read for people who enjoy complex plots and complicated protagonists. The series is available on Hachette Book Group .

22. The Witcher Saga By Andrzej Sapkowski

Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher Saga is a series of fantasy novels that has intrigued audiences with a plot that takes readers down the road of a dark and politically turbulent world, filled with magic, monsters and moral ambiguity. Sapkowski introduces readers to Geralt of Rivia, a skilled monster hunter (known as a Witcher), as he navigates his intricate and thrilling world. With its origins in Polish folklore and mythology, The Witcher Saga is comprised of six books, and gained a loyal fanbase for its vivid characters, rich storytelling and exploration of complex themes. Netflix adapted Sapkowski’s work for the silver screen a few years ago, and it got mixed reviews by critics.

Who should read: The Witcher Saga is a perfect book for readers who enjoy reading about complex characters and analyzing political themes. The Witcher Saga was published by Hatchette Book Group .

21. The Belgariad By David Eddings

At the heart of David Eddings’ The Belgariad lies the intriguing story of Garion, a small-town farm boy whose ordinary life takes a significant turn after he discovers his true identity as the heir to a legendary lineage of sorcerers. The coming-of-age books show Garion embarking on a journey of self-discovery, guided by the enigmatic sorcerer Belgarath and accompanied by a colorful cast of companions. Through Garion, Eddings thrusts readers into a world of magic, ancient prophecies, dark conspiracies and epic battles against the forces of darkness. The series is comprised of five books which Eddings wrote over the course of two years.

Who should read: The Belgariad is perfect for young readers and those looking for heroic storylines. The series can be found on the Grim Oak website.

20. The Earthsea Cycle By Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Earthsea Cycle is a remarkable series of fantasy books set in the archipelago of Earthsea, a fictional world characterized by vast seas, endless islands and magic. Although Le Guin intended the series to be a short story, she ended up turning the body of work into a series after realizing that she had grown as a writer and had more to say to share with her readers. Celebrated for its richly imagined world, philosophical depth and exploration of timeless themes, Le Guin’s The Earthsea is undoubtely a fan favorite . In 2006, the book was adapted into a movie called Tales from Earthsea.

Who should read: While The Earthsea Cycle is suitable for readers of all ages, young adult readers, in particular, may appreciate the series’ coming-of-age themes, relatable characters and moral dilemmas. The Earthsea Cycle is available on Simon & Schuster .

19. Crazy Rich Asians By Kevin Kwan

Kevin Kwan’s over-the-top trilogy Crazy Rich Asians is a body of work that is brimming with larger-than-life characters and their opulent lifestyles. The New York Times bestseller tells the story of protagonist Rachel Chu, a New Yorker, who falls madly in love with Nicholas Young, who happens to come from an affluent Singaporean family. Rachel is unaware of this fortune until she and Nick take a trip that reveals a lot of unexpected plot twists. This kicks off an exciting foray into wealth, exuberance and everything in between. In 2018, the series was adapted into a movie.

Who should read: This book is recommended for readers who like a good plot twist. The series is available on Penguin Random House .

Henry Golding and his wife Liv Lo attend the Singapore premiere of "Crazy Rich Asians" on August 21, ... [+] 2018.

18. Goosebumps By R. L. Stine

R.L. Stine revolutionized the world of fiction for young readers when he released the Goosebumps series . The spine-tingling saga was first released in 1992 with the release of Welcome to Dead House , Stine’s ominous invitation into a world lurking with darkness and mystery. Since the initial release, Stine has continued to publish a steady stream of new additions to the series, ensuring that the Goosebumps franchise remains as vibrant, evergreen and unsettling as ever. What makes Stine’s creation a timeless body of work is that it gives his audience a literary playground with which to explore the darker corners of their imaginations. Each tale is carefully crafted to deliver a powerful blend of suspense, mystery and spine-tingling horror, and all 240 books in the series have served their purpose. The series has inspired the 2015 American horror comedy film Goosebumps .

Who should read: This series is an especially good fit for young readers who enjoy the thrill of a good scare. It is available for purchase on Simon & Schuster .

17. The Dresden Files By Jim Butcher

Spanning an impressive 17 books (and counting) and written over the course of more than two decades, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files is a spellbinding narrative collection with elements of noir mystery, supernatural intrigue and pulse-pounding action. The New York Times bestselling series has attracted readers because of its layered approach to the art of storytelling. At the heart of the series is Harry Dresden, a wizard and private investigator who operates in the shadows of modern-day Chicago. Butcher’s vivid prose comes alive through Dresden, who gives readers a vicarious insight into life in the windy metropolis, while navigating the gritty streets of the city and facing off vengeful vampires and malevolent creatures.

Who should read: Anyone who is intrigued by dark mystery and adventure would find this book fascinating. The 17-part series can be purchased on Penguin Random House .

16. Percy Jackson & the Olympians By Rick Riordan

Rick Riordan introduced readers to the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series with the 2005 debut of the series titled The Lightning Thief . The series underscores the modern-day world of demigods and Greek mythology through the perspective of Percy Jackson, a spirited teenager who discovers that he is the son of Poseidon, the sea god. Although the series centers on Greek mythology, Riordan weaves in elements like adventure, humor, and fantasy to give readers with a diverse palate a wide range of material. Riordan published five of the books in this series over the course of four years and all of the books have remained culturally appealing to young readers over the years. In 2023, Disney+ adapted the body of work into a TV series.

Who should read: This series is recommended for readers who are intrigued by greek mythology, thrillers and adventure. This series is available on Penguin Random House .

15. The Hardy Boys By Franklin W. Dixon (Pseudonym)

Since its first release in 1927, The Hardy Boys series has continued to captivate readers with over 190 thrilling installments, making it one of the longest-running and most beloved mystery series in literary history. Set in the fictional town of Bayport, the Hardy Boys series chronicles the daring adventures of two curious, intellectually sharp brothers, Frank and Joe Hardy. The two have a keen knack for solving mysteries that stump even the most seasoned adult detectives by confronting danger, outwitting cunning adversaries and upholding justice in each action-packed tale. The Hardy Boys series is a body of work that has spanned nearly a century, but has managed to maintain its popularity across generations. This has led to numerous adaptations for television, with the most recent offering being Hulu’s 2020 spin on the series.

Who should read: Fans of detective and mystery books would find this series appealing. The books can be purchased on Simon & Schuster ’s website.

14. The Foundation Series By Isaac Asimov

Published between 1951 and 1993, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is a cornerstone for classic science fiction. Set against the backdrop of a universe inhabited by countless worlds and civilizations, the story serves as the perfect opportunity for Asimov to bring the main characters to life as they explore political intrigue, scientific speculation, and philosophical inquiry with depth and complexity. The series follows a group of exiles who have taken it upon themselves to save humanity from the throes of the Galactic Empire. At the core of the story is Hari Seldon, whose uncanny theories of psychohistory allow him to predict the future with precision, foreseeing the inevitable collapse of the Galactic Empire and the onset of a dark age that will last thousands of years. The science fiction series has been adapted for television and is available on Apple TV Plus.

Who should read: This is a perfect book for readers who are curious about science fiction’s potential to explore complex ideas and intricate plots. The Foundation Series can be purchased on The Penguin Random House website.

13. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy By Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is a comedic science fiction saga that follows the misadventures of Arthur Dent, his protagonist, who is swept off Earth just before its destruction and embarks on a journey through the cosmos with his eccentric alien friend, Ford Prefect. What sets Adams’ franchise apart is his unique concoction of irreverent humor and thought-provoking philosophical themes. At its core, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is more than just a series of zany escapades—it is a humorous journey of self-discovery and enlightenment. The series has since been adapted to various other formats. In 1981, BBC adapted the television show in the United Kingdom for TV.

Who should read: Readers who enjoy philosophy with a healthy dose of laughter will like the five-book series, which can be purchased on the Penguin Random House website.

12. His Dark Materials By Philip Pullman

In his book His Dark Materials , Philip Pullman leans into multiple genres and themes, including fantasy, adventure and philosophical inquiry to set a parallel universe in motion. In this series, the souls of humans manifest themselves as sentient animal companions, which Pullman refers to as daemons. Through his masterful ability to create characters that challenge and entertain the reader, Pullman brings Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, his two spirited protagonists, to life as they embark on a journey of self-discovery and rebellion against oppressive forces. Pullman blurs the lines between dark adventure and philosophical depth, which is appealing to readers of all ages. He wrote the series between 1995 and 2000, and in 2019, BBC One and HBO premiered the fantasy drama series His Dark Materials based on this series.

Who should read: Fans of thought-provoking fantasy seeking more than just escapism will find His Dark Materials to be a rewarding and enriching experience. The four-book series can be purchased on the Scholastic website.

Jack Thorne, Jane Tranter, Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson and Lin-Manuel Miranda of "His Dark Materials" ... [+] speak onstage during the HBO Summer TCA Panels on July 24, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California.

11. The Dark Tower By Stephen King

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series is arguably his magnum opus. The body of work defies categorization, blending elements of fantasy, science fiction and horror into a seamless blend. As usual, King leans into his powerful storytelling abilities by introducing readers to Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger and a lone figure on a quest to reach the enigmatic Dark Tower — a mythical figure that holds the key to saving a world that is quickly becoming distinct. The book highlights Roland’s journey as it leads him to confront his inner demons and make sacrifices to reach his ultimate goal. The series spans eight novels, and as he always does, King finds a way to sweep readers into the fictional world of his characters in the most memorable and remarkable ways. In 2017, the series was adapted into a movie called The Dark Tower , featuring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey.

Who should read: Lovers of fiction, fantasy and adventure will find this book fascinating and entertaining. It can be purchased on the Simon & Schuster website.

10. Wheel of Time By Robert Jordan

Drawing from deep mythology and diverse cultures and traditions, The Wheel of Time series draws readers in with its epic scope and timeless themes of destiny, sacrifice and the nature of power. Robert Jordan’s body of work is not just a saga that ushers readers into its thick plot throughout fourteen volumes, it also immerses readers in a world where the forces of Light and Shadow collide in a power struggle for the fate of existence itself. At the core of the story is Rand al’Thor, a young man from a modest background who discovers he is the Dragon Reborn, a prophesied champion destined to confront the Dark One and change the course of the Wheel of Time. The series is reportedly being adapted into a movie trilogy that is in the works.

Who should read: This book is perfect for anyone who enjoys long reads and is committed to following the plot of a story, no matter how extended it is, to see it through to the end. The book can be found on Macmillan .

9. Discworld By Terry Pratchett

In Discworld , Terry Pratchett’s boundless whimsical imagination takes flight within the confines of a flat, disc-shaped world perched on the backs of four colossal elephants standing atop a giant turtle. In this fantastical world, magical wizards, mischievous dragons and eccentric characters bring the pages to life, inviting readers to embark on a journey that is a vivid exploration of both the absurd and the fantastical. Over the course of 32 years, the English author crafted 41 books, each brimming with its unique sense of sharp wit, satirical humor and idiosyncratic social commentary. Since its release, the series has garnered a loyal fanbase and critical acclaim for its unparalleled imagination and insightful exploration of societal norms. Although there have been some attempts to turn Discworld into a film adaptation, none has truly been successful.

Who should read: This book is a good fit for readers who are intrigued by fantasy and good humor. The book can be found on the Harper Collins website.

Author Sir Terry Pratchett leaves hand imprints and his signature in concrete while fans of his ... [+] "Discworld" novels look on at Kingwell Rise, Wincanton, England.

8. A Song of Ice and Fire By George R.R. Martin

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is a powerful epic with unexpected plot twists and turns. The story is set in the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos, where noble houses vie for power and the threat of supernatural forces is ever looming. Through the series, Martin invites readers into a world where power is a double-edged sword, and loyalty can be a deadly flaw. Martin first published the first book in the series in 1996, and while five books have been released to date, he is reportedly working on the sixth novel, The Winds of Winter. His seventh novel in the series, A Dream of Spring, is allegedly also in the works. Thanks to its adaptation into the hit HBO television series Game of Thrones, Martin’s brain child has also become a TV fan-favorite.

Who should read: Lovers of fiction, fantasy and mystery would be happy with this book. Currently, it is available on Penguin Random House .

7. Outlander By Diana Gabaldon

Diana Gabaldon’s nine-book series Outlander is a treasure trove of creative mastery, time travel and apt storytelling. The historical romantic novels follow the story of British nurse Claire Randall, who time travels to 18th-century Scotland and finds love and adventure with the enigmatic Jamie Fraser. The encounter changes the course of Claire’s life and opens up her world to endless possibilities beyond anything she could have imagined. Gabaldon first published the first book in the nine-part series in 1991, and there are reports that she will publish a 10th sometime in the future. In 2014, the book series was adapted into a seven-season historical drama television series that premiered on Starz.

Who should read: This is a perfect book for readers who enjoy vivid imagery and are fans of complex characters. The series can be purchased on Simon & Schuster ’s website.

6. Fifty Shades By E. L. James

Cult classic Fifty Shades is an erotic six-book series by British author E. L. James that took the world by storm when he released the series, and fans soon fell in love with its provocative storyline and steamy romance. The series follows the intense relationship between literature student Anastasia Steele and mysterious billionaire Christian Grey as they navigate the complex nature of their relationship and the power dynamic within it. Set against the backdrop of Seattle, Washington, the Fifty Shades series explores themes of dominance and submission, boldly pushing the boundaries of what is accepted in conventional romance literature . In 2015, the books were adapted into an erotic romantic film series, which brought in a box office worldwide profit of $569.7 million against a budget of $40 million.

Who should read: Readers who are comfortable with intense character dynamics and are comfortable with explicit content will find Fifty Shades an engaging and provocative read. The series is available on Penguin Random House .

5. The Hunger Games By Suzanne Collins

In modern-day cult classic The Hunger Games , Suzanne Collins creates a dystopian trilogy that follows the main character, Katniss Everdeen, as she navigates the brutal Hunger Games, a televised fight to the death, and becomes a symbol of strength, courage and rebellion against the oppressive Capitol. As Katniss navigates the arena and all of the things that come with it, she is not only in survival mode, she transforms into a source of strength and hope for the oppressed districts, embodying the qualities of strength, courage and defiance in the face of tyranny. Collins plays into themes that rely on justice in the face of blatant injustice and advocacy for the oppressed when no one else will speak up for them. Collins’ body of work was adapted into the wildly popular The Hunger Games film series, featuring Jennifer Lawrence, who brought Katniss to life on the silver screen.

Who should read: This book is a perfect fit for fans of dystopian fiction, action-packed thrillers and strong female protagonists. The series is available for purchase on the Scholastic website.

Jennifer Lawrence attends the Spanish premiere of the film "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" on ... [+] November 13, 2013 in Madrid.

4. Twilight Saga By Stephenie Meyer

Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga is arguably one of the best fantasy storylines in modern history. The story unfolds in the small, rainy town of Forks, Washington, where Bella Swan, a reserved and introspective teenager, relocates to live with her father. There, she encounters the enigmatic Edward Cullen, a vampire with a compelling allure and a dangerous secret. As their forbidden romance blossoms, Bella becomes entangled in a world of immortal beings, werewolves and ageless supernatural conflicts. The book broaches several genres, inviting readers to explore several themes and sub themes, including romance, fantasy, suspense and horror. The book series inspired the mega-successful adaptation, The Twilight Saga , which spun five films and has grossed a staggering $5.28 billion worldwide.

Who should read: Fans of paranormal romance and supernatural drama will find themselves captivated by the Twilight Saga ’s storyline. This series is available through the series’ official publisher, Hachette Book Group .

3. The Chronicles of Narnia By C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia is a classic series of seven fantasy novels, each with a self-contained story that contributes to the overarching narrative of Narnia’s philosophy and mythology. Through this series, Lewis guides readers on a mystical journey that begins with an enchanted wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and culminates in the final book, The Last Battle . In the series, Lewis explores themes of moral goodness, courage, sacrifice and redemption. The book has had a significant impact on readers of all ages, and some have even said that it carries themes that are arguably biblical. The classic was written between 1949 and 1954 and three out of the seven books in the series were adapted for the big screen, where they grossed $1.5 billion.

Who should read: Chronicles of Narnia is perfect for people who love philosophy and religion. The book’s timeless charm and captivating storytelling will enchant children and adults alike. Fans of fantasy, adventure and Christian allegory will also find a lot to appreciate in Lewis’s imaginative world. This series is available on Harper Collins .

A complete seven-book boxed set of C.S. Lewis' classic "Chronicles of Narnia" series.

2. The Lord of the Rings By J.R.R. Tolkien

Set in the fictional world of Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings , has amassed a cult-like following for its intricate storytelling, complex characters and mass appeal. Tolkien’s masterpiece follows the quest to destroy the One Ring and defeat the Dark Lord Sauron, while leaning into universal feel-good themes like heroism, triumph over evil, and friendship. The series includes four books and is one of the most critical pieces of literature in the fantasy genre. Although Tolkien wrote the books between 1937 and 1949, it continues to be a a widely celebrated classic, even in the 21st century. To date, the body of work has sold over 150 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 40 languages. Because of its commercial success, it was adapted into six movies , collectively grossing over $2.9 billion worldwide.

Who should read: This series is perfect for intellectually curious readers who are interested in fantasy and complex characters. Harper Collins currently offers the series on its website.

1. Harry Potter Series By J.K. Rowling

Inarguably one of the most beloved book series of all time, J.K. Rowling struck gold with her multi-billion-dollar Harry Potter franchise. The series follows the journey of a young wizard, Harry Potter, who attends Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and battles the evil wizard Voldemort. Rowling’s vivid depiction of the complex characters in the story and the forces that shape their worlds, against the ultimate battle of good against evil, forms the backbone of the storyline. The series consists of seven books, published over a decade, from 1997 through 2007.

With over 600 million copies sold worldwide, the Harry Potter series has become a literary phenomenon, and has been translated into numerous languages, inspiring a generation of readers and an equally lucrative film franchise.

Who should read: Readers of all ages enjoy magical adventures and stories about timeless themes of friendship and courage in the face of adversity. To purchase the Harry Potter series, visit Scholastic .

What Are The Best Fantasy Book Series?

Robert Jordan kicked off The Wheel of Time series with his first release of The Eye of the World in 1990. This epic saga follows the journey of Rand al'Thor as he battles against the forces of the Dark One to save the world from destruction. Another fan-favorite is A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, which debuted with A Game of Thrones in 1996. Set in Westeros, the series is celebrated for its complex characters and epic battles for power.

What Are The Best Sci-Fi Book Series?

Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games is a standout series that changed the trajectory of Science Fiction in the 21st century when it was published in 2008. Set in a dystopian future where children are forced to fight to the death in televised competitions, the series follows the story of Katniss Everdeen as she boldly navigates a revolution against the Capitol. Many literature critics have affirmed that The Hunger Games is a modern science fiction classic.

What Are The Best Romance Book Series? 

Set in the small town of Forks, Washington, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight is considered one of the most powerful romance stories of all time, and it follows the romance between Bella Swan, a teenage girl, and Edward Cullen, a vampire. Although their love is taboo, the story makes for an intriguing read and explores complex themes of love, sacrifice, and the supernatural as Bella and Edward navigate the challenges of their forbidden romance. 

Bottom Line

Some of the most best-selling book series of all time have gripping storylines that showcase epic fantasies, fascinating thrillers and feature multi-faceted characters that have left their imprint on literature.

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

The 10 Books That Scientists Say Can Make A Difference In The Climate Crisis

Shopping Writer for HuffPost

On Assignment For HuffPost

This story originally appeared in HuffPost’s Books newsletter. Sign up here for weekly book news, author interviews and more.

The climate crisis can often feel terrifying and, like any effort to slow its progression, utterly futile. But before you resolve yourself to complete apathy, many environmental scientists have a more optimistic view of things — and, more importantly, comprehensive plans of action that anyone and everyone should take.

I reached out to a couple of environmental agencies to find out which books can not only educate readers on climate change but spur us into action, effectively taking one step towards a more hospitable future for all.

Scientists, conservationists and other environment experts from groups like The Nature Conservancy helped compile the following list of science-based reads that are vital, not just for Earth Day, but for every day of the year.

HuffPost and its publishing partners may receive a commission from some purchases made via links on this page. Every item is independently curated by the HuffPost Shopping team. Prices and availability are subject to change.

From Our Partner

Huffpost shopping’s best finds, more in shopping.

Men's Health

35 Non-Fiction Books We’re Excited to Read in 2024

Posted: April 10, 2024 | Last updated: April 10, 2024

WAS ONE OF your 2024 goals to read more? Or maybe learn something new? Non-fiction is the perfect book genre to open your mind and ease yourself back into reading. And with such a broad category of books, there's something for everyone. Historical deep-dives (perfect for someone who gets lost down Wikipedia rabbit holes), self-help books (expert-driven reads when you need advice), and everything in between all fall under this wide umbrella.

Reading books doesn't just give you a new hobby, it's also a way to become more mentally fit . Real Simple reports reading can help you relax, make you more empathetic, and may even decrease your risk of Alzheimer's disease. In a world where we're all tied to screens, there's no doubt it's great to take a break every once in a while and enjoy the tactile feel of turning the pages of a great read. And once you get into non-fiction, who knows? You may even take the next step and jump into a fun genre read like fantasy or sci-fi (we've got great 2024 picks for those too, if you're interested).

2024 is another great year for non-fiction books. We've got science-based explorations of memory, various books on how to inject more positivity into your life, and even meditations on deer (yes, deer ) to help you feel more in touch with the outdoors . And if you're a big pop culture nerd, there's also exciting books on music, movies, and sports that'll teach you the ins and outs of those exciting industries that fans (us included!) can't get enough of.

1) The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors

Those interested in nature writing, or at least how humans connect to the world around them, will enjoy The Age of Deer . Erika Howsare explores the constant presence of deer, interviewing animal control officers, a museum interpreter examining the history of deers, and even a woman who raises orphaned fawns.

Release Date: January 2

2) Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

If climate change has you worried about the future of the planet, check out Not the End of the World . This 2024 read will not only provide some uplifting news about the state of the world, but also offers guidance on how to create a more sustainable lifestyle and contribute to a better planet.

Release Date: January 9

3) Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age

Rather than looking at aging as an emotional obstacle, what if you could avoid a midlife crisis altogether? Learning to Love Midlife wants to help readers see getting older as an exciting new chapter in life.

Release Date: January 16

4) Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading

Chris Anderson, the head of TED (as in the viral TED Talks), wants to help the world become more optimistic. His advice? Be more generous. In providing various anecdotes, including his personal narrative of TED's increasing popularity, Anderson wants to prove that kindness and charity can lead to a better society.

Release Date: January 23

5) Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

6) Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

We at Men's Health are all about helping readers improve their sex lives. So of course we're excited about Come Together , which seeks to dispel myths people have about sex in relationships (sexual satisfaction doesn't have to wane over time ) and examines the common obstacles that stops couples from having great sex lives, along with how to get over them.

Release Date: January 30

7) Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science

8) Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection

While Come Together will help you fix your sex life, Fight Right wants to help you fix how you approach conflict. When tension arises in your relationship, Drs. John and Julie Gottman want to ensure you stay calm and work to find understanding when you and your partner are at odds.

9) Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture Is Bad for Business--and How to Fix It

If you've ever been called a "workaholic," this book is for you. Whether you're a manager or just a very stressed employee, Malissa Clark breaks down why constantly working is bad for both individuals and for businesses.

Release Date: February 6

10) Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs

11) The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

While you may think your partner is the only friend you need, this book is set out to prove you wrong. Rhaina Cohen argues that not only are friendships important, but they should be considered just as important, if not more, than romantic relationships.

Release Date: February 13

12) Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Deep dive into Hollywood history with this look at Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?–starting with the original 1962 play, then the 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and the story's lasting impact today.

13) The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without

Fasting is a fascinating part of our social, religious, and political history. John Oakes looks to examine how the idea of fasting (both in terms of food and in terms of more spiritual ideas of "fasting") have impacted humans over time, and how the idea of doing less overall can improve our lives.

14) Practical Optimism: The Art, Science, and Practice of Exceptional Well-Being

It's easy to fall into pessimism and obsess over the worst. That's why Practical Optimism looks to give readers a way to cope during hardship, while maintaining an overall bright outlook on life. No matter what's getting you down, Practical Optimism wants to show you there's still things worth looking forward to.

Release Date: February 20

15) Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters

Take a deep dive into the latest research on memory with Why We Remember . In addition to teaching you how to recall things better, the book explores the power of memory in our lives, and how we can, through memory, improve our brain's relationship to trauma, healing, and more.

16) Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

Imagine yourself at work, stumbling through a presentation, frustrated you can't get your point across. Charles Duhigg's Supercommunicators wants to ensure nothing ever gets lost in translation for you again with this book on how storytelling skills can improve how you have conversations.

17) Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down

When your mental health takes a dip, Languishing is here for you. Corey Keyes' new book aims to reconstruct how we see self-help and mental wellness, while building up readers' resilience to get through hardships.

18) Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

Avoid burnout with Slow Productivity , a book that looks to teach employees everywhere that the key to doing your best isn't in working to your limit, but slowing down and changing your expectations. If work overwhelms you and you're eager for a change, you might want to check out this upcoming read.

Release Date: March 5

19) 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

If you're a fan of music history, 3 Shades of Blue dives into the creation of the jazz album Kind of Blue , made by three of the genre's greats–Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans, along with many, many others involved in the project. Get an inside look into how great music is made, and explore the moment jazz reached its popularity peak.

20) The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots

Daniela Rus, a computer scientist, answers all the questions you may have about the future of robotics and how it's intertwined with the future of humanity. This optimistic look at our technological future is great for anyone who loves deep dives into science.

21) Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball

Baseball fans will love this biography of Pete Rose, who became one of the sport's great players and managers before becoming embroiled in a major betting scandal in the 1980s. O'Brien's book details Rose's career and his downfall from interviews with Rose, his associates, and archival records.

Release Date: March 26

22) Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing

Want to improve your work-life balance and learn how to use your time wisely? Google's Executive Productivity Advisor (yes, that's a real title) provides actionable steps and advice for how to become the best version of you both at work and in your personal life

Release Date: April 2

23) Somehow: Thoughts on Love

Somehow is a meditative look at how love impacts our lives. With anecdotes from her own life, Lamott offers a warming dive into how we all share affection, and provides lessons for anyone who needs to appreciate the love in their life more.

Release Date: April 9

24) The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

If you've ever wondered how social media has changed how you see the rest of the world, The Age of Magical Overthinking is exactly the book for you. Montell explores how the Internet and constantly being online has made us chronic overthinkers and anxious, irrational beings. And, of course, she offers a reprieve from the chaos of the modern age.

25) Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World

Whether you want to climb Mount Everest or are terrified of heights, you'll find an interesting read in Everest, Inc., which charts the history of the Himalayan guiding industry, the sole reason so many people have been able to achieve the major fear of climbing Everest each year. It's an exploration of the unsung heroes of mountain climbing.

Release Date: April 16

26) The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

The Devil in the White City author Erik Larson is back with another historical retelling, this one detailing one of America's most pivotal moments: starting with Abraham Lincoln's election and going all the way to the start of the Civil War. History buffs and readers looking to dip their toes into a nonfiction story for the first time alike will enjoy Larson's newest book.

Release Date: April 30

27) The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains

28) Feel It All: A Therapist's Guide to Reimagining Your Relationship with Sex

Casey Tanner is a therapist who's ready to hep readers reclaim their sex lives and relationships. In Feel It All, Tanner breaks down mythos about sex and relationships that have plagued us for far too long, and reveals how you can heal past trauma, redefine sex in your life, and find your way to deeper intimacy.

Release Date: May 14

29) Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

This biography explores the largely unexamined life of Elaine May, the multihyphenate Hollywood star who is known for her reclusive lifestyle and impressive (but limited) resume as a director. Courogen pulls back the curtain on May's life and mystery, seeking to give the director, actor, writer, and comedian her long-delayed due.

Release Date: June 4

30) Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

31) Hip-Hop Is History

32) The Unvanquished: The Untold Story of Lincoln’s Special Forces, the Manhunt for Mosby’s Rangers, and the Shadow War That Forged America’s Special Operations

33) Baseball: The Movie

34) How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind: Forget the Fairy Tale and Get Real

35) How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain

More for you.

Putin's Kremlin Responds to Donald Trump's Ukraine Peace Plan

Matthew McConaughey says there's an 'initiation process' in Hollywood

Common over-the-counter medicine linked to increased dementia risk

False claim Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson said he regrets voting for Joe Biden in 2020 | Fact check

Mars Inc. and other companies make not-so-sweet change to popular candy bars: 'Not a decision we have taken lightly'

7 CDs You Probably Owned, Threw Out and Now Are Worth Bank

European Union's Only Nuclear-Powered Navy Is Getting Ready for War

The Best Film Debuts in Movie History

Guest-list style at the White House State Dinner

Here’s How Long You Should Walk Every Day to Keep Your Heart Healthy

Woman with rare syndrome left allergic to ‘everything’ except just four foods

16 Compliments You Didn’t Realize Are Actually Pretty Insulting

US Ally Intercepts Chinese Warships in Pacific

Norwegian Cruise Line cancels more than a dozen upcoming cruises

Eye injuries after solar eclipse surge following phenomenon

J.K. Rowling says 'Harry Potter' stars who've criticized her anti-trans views 'can save their apologies'

Famous Roles That 16 Actors Never Want to Play Again

Doctor shares what happens to our bodies moments before we die

‘This wasn’t our decision’: Cirque du Soleil forced by Hard Rock Las Vegas to close ‘The Beatles Love’ after 18 years

I Lost 50lbs With 3 Lifestyle Changes

Screen Rant

10 books to read while you wait for true detective season 5.

True Detective season 5 is confirmed, but it won’t premiere for quite some time. Fortunately, there are plenty of books for those missing the show.

• True Detective season 5 is confirmed, but it won't arrive for quite some time. There are many books fans can read in the meantime.
• Books with gruesome crime scenes and southern gothic settings are perfect for fans of True Detective seasons 1-3.
• Numerous novels have settings and themes similar to True Detective: Night Country.

True Detective season 5 is already confirmed after the success of Night Country, but it'll be a while before it arrives — and fans may be looking for books and shows like True Detective to consume in the meantime . There's no shortage of thrillers and crime fiction out there, but HBO's hit series strikes a distinct tone when it comes to the unusual cases it covers. This is true for all four seasons of True Detective , but the first and Night Country are especially successful at creating an eerie, atmospheric backdrop and tone over the course of their runs.

True Detective is also known for its leads, as the show tends to follow detectives with compelling dynamics that hook viewers from the jump. This can be less easy to find in thrillers and crime books, but it's not impossible. There's a book out there for every True Detective fan , but which they choose will depend on what they love about the series. From books tackling bizarre and brutal cases to novels set in a dark, frozen atmosphere like Night Country, there's plenty of fiction to dive into until True Detective season 5 debuts.

10 The Devil All The Time By Donald Ray Pollock

Why it's perfect for true detective fans: its southern gothic setting, complex characters, & eerie storylines.

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock has a southern gothic atmosphere that will appeal to fans of True Detective seasons 1 and 3. The 2011 novel is set in rural Ohio and West Virginia, and it follows a range of characters, all of whom offer a complexity on par with those in the HBO show — especially Arvin Eugene Russell, who's trying to be a good man despite the violence constantly unfolding around and within him. There are quite a few eerie throughlines in The Devil All the Time, but the book is an exploration of religion at its core.

If the themes and setting aren't enough to convince True Detective fans to read The Devil All the Time, they can also check out the Netflix adaptation of Pollock's book . With Tom Holland in the lead, it makes for a solid watch. It's not quite as compelling as True Detective itself, but it'll hold fans over until the next outing arrives.

9 All The White Spaces By Ally Wilkes

Why it's perfect for fans of true detective: its icy & eerie backdrop, allusions to the supernatural.

While The Devil All the Time is perfect for fans of True Detective 's earlier seasons, Ally Wilkes' All the White Spaces may be more suitable for those looking for stories like Night Country . Set on the heels of World War I, the novel follows Jonathan Morgan as he stows away on an explorers' ship headed to the Antarctic. While Jonathan is hoping for a journey of self-discovery, during which he'll be able to embrace his true gender identity, what he gets is far scarier. The expedition realizes something's off about where they've landed, but they're alone and increasingly on edge, leaving them at the mercy of whatever it is.

Anyone wishing Night Country leaned further into horror would do well to pick Wilkes' novel up

​​​ The eerie, icy vibes of All the White Spaces are perfect for anyone who enjoyed Night Country 's backdrop and allusions to the supernatural. In fact, anyone wishing Night Country leaned further into horror would do well to pick Wilkes' novel up. It will keep readers on edge from cover to cover, making it an ideal way to fill the time between seasons of True Detective.

8 Bone White By Ronald Malfi

Why it's perfect for fans of true detective: set in alaska, features spirituality & local superstition.

Another great follow-up to True Detective: Night Country is Bone White by Ronald Malfi , a book that delivers on the eerie vibes of the HBO series and the Alaskan setting. Bone White is set in the town of Dread's Hand, Alaska, where a killer has been leading law enforcement to his victims' graves. The book's lead, Paul, ventures to Dread's Hand for closure, as the town is where his brother disappeared years ago. But while Paul expects to make peace with this tragedy during this trip, he's in for a surprise. Local superstition gets him more wrapped up in the mystery, leading to a tense ride.

7 Never Whistle At Night Edited By Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst

Why it's perfect for fans of true detective: its exploration of indigenous characters & legends, its darker themes.

Never Whistle at Night is a collection of horror stories by Indigenous authors, and it's the perfect read for anyone who enjoyed the Indigenous representation in True Detective: Night Country . Not every story within this collection is reminiscent of the HBO series. However, there are a few that will scratch that itch while waiting for True Detective season 5. Several tales, like "Kushtuka," explore Indigenous legends, making them ideal for those who enjoy the supernatural teases of Night Country . And other stories, like "Quantum," take a more grounded approach — but one that's as harrowing as True Detective nonetheless.

6 City Under One Roof By Iris Yamashita

Why it's perfect for fans of true detective: alaskan setting, small town with secrets, & a detective duo.

Another thrilling mystery set in Alaska is City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita , a novel that isn't exactly like True Detective: Night Country but does have a similar feel. Yamashita's story follows Detective Cara Kennedy as she attempts to uncover the truth behind a murder in a small Alaskan town. Everyone in this town resides in a single building, and they're all tight-lipped when it comes to Cara's investigation.

Another thrilling mystery set in Alaska is City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita, a novel that isn't exactly like True Detective: Night Country but does have a similar feel.

A small town full of secrets is the perfect setup for True Detective fans, and City Under One Roof also boasts a detective duo and mysterious severed limbs. The latter is reminiscent of Night Country, while the former is present in every season of the HBO show. Needless to say, Yamashita's novel is worth reading, especially for those eager to get their hands on True Detective season 5.

5 Dark Places By Gillian Flynn

Why it's perfect for fans of true detective: a gruesome story, rural setting, & focus on satanic rituals.

Gillian Flynn is well known for Gone Girl, but Dark Places has a more fitting vibe for those who enjoy True Detective . The 2009 novel is set in rural America, and it's got a thrilling mystery at its core — along with some fairly gruesome moments that could give the HBO series a run for its money. Dark Places follows Libby Day, whose testimony put her teenage brother in prison for killing their family. Decades later, Libby is forced to question whether she got it right — and whether there's still a killer on the loose. The backdrop, brutality, and focus on satanic rituals will appeal to fans of True Detective.

4 Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

Why it's perfect for true detective fans: it's southern noir, contains complex & entertaining character dynamics.

Razorblade Tears fits into the southern noir category , which already makes it a great choice for fans of True Detective 's early seasons. S.A. Cosby's novel sees two fathers from Virginia investigating the murders of their sons in the hopes of enacting revenge. Their quest for vengeance is made complicated by the racial divide between the two characters — one is a white man who's never had to explore his own prejudice, while the other is a Black man who's dealt with his share of racism living in the South — and their disapproval of their sons' LGBTQ+ lifestyles.

The unlikely dynamic between its leads and its setting make it especially great for those missing True Detective.

Cosby's story explores its social themes with impressive care, all while painting a narrative that's action-packed and thrilling. For these reasons, Razorblade Tears is a must-read for anyone looking for incredible thriller books . However, the unlikely dynamic between its leads and its setting make it especially great for those missing True Detective.

3 The Black Dahlia By James Ellroy

Why it's perfect for true detective fans: a solid pair of detectives & gruesome murder investigation.

James Ellroy's work is great for True Detective fans generally, and The Black Dahlia is the perfect entry point to the author's work . The novel takes on the real-life Black Dahlia case from 1947, which saw Elizabeth Short being gruesomely murdered by a killer who was never identified. Ellroy's book fictionalizes the real case, setting a pair of detectives up to track down the person responsible for Elizabeth's death. The brutality of the case alone makes The Black Dahlia an ideal follow-up to True Detective. However, Ellroy's detectives, Lee and Bucky, also make a solid team reminiscent of Rust Cohle and Marty Hart or Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro.

2 Broken Monsters By Lauren Beukes

Why it's perfect for true detective fans: ghastly crime scenes, a thrilling narrative.

Ghastly crime scenes are par for the course in True Detective, and the one in Lauren Beukes' Broken Monsters is just as terrible as anything the HBO series has done . Set in Detroit, Broken Monsters follows Detective Gabriella Versado as she tries to solve the number of a boy whose body was found melded with that of a deer. This will no doubt bring back memories of True Detective season 1, though Broken Monsters' gruesome murders don't stop there. And as Gabriella tries to investigate, other characters' storylines unfold, leading up to the book's big reveal. This book is sure to hook fans of True Detective from start to finish.

1 Galveston By Nic Pizzolatto

Why it's perfect for true detective fans: written by the show's creator, is very atmospheric.

Nic Pizzolatto has gotten a lot of heat for his criticisms of True Detective: Night Country , but those looking for the feeling of seasons 1-3 — all of which Pizzolatto was in charge of — can check out his own book , Galveston. Of course, they shouldn't go into it expecting an identical story. While Galveston has the moody atmosphere of the HBO show, its plot centers Roy Cady, who's forced to go on the run from his loan shark boss after he realizes the man wants him dead. His journey becomes intertwined with that of a girl named Rocky, who ends up joining him on his adventure.

Galveston will take True Detective fans from New Orleans to Texas, entertaining them with unlikely character dynamics, atmospheric backdrops, and plenty of thrills. Those missing Pizzolatto's take on the show will no doubt find something to love about his book. It's an ideal story to add to one's TBR ahead of True Detective season 5.

Here are some other laws Arizona had on the books in 1864

Arizona sprang into existence in February 1863, just under halfway through the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln, having signed the act that created the new territory, appointed judges to administer it. Among them was a native New Yorker, William T. Howell .

The appointed governor, John Goodwin, soon determined that the laws established at the territory’s founding (imported from New Mexico) didn’t work. He tasked Howell with writing Arizona’s first set of laws and procedures, a job Howell began with the help of a former Wisconsin governor, Coles Bashford. In late 1864, the Howell Code , Arizona’s first set of laws, was born.

And on Tuesday, its original ban on abortion again became Arizona’s legal standard.

Sign up for the How to Read This Chart newsletter

The decision by Arizona’s Supreme Court to revive that initial ban triggered an enormous backlash and elevated difficult political questions for Republicans nationally and in the state. It also spurred no small amount of scoffing about how archaic the law must be, given the year of its provenance. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), for example, pointed out that Arizona relied on dirt roads when the territorial legislature passed the Howell Code.

Those particular complaints, though, miss the point. It isn’t that the law is old that makes it a dubious fit for the moment. After all, the Bill of Rights is old and it contains rules and guidelines that deserve to be maintained. Instead, the point is that the Howell Code was a product of its time and its time’s morality , a point that is made more obvious when considering other elements of the law that clearly do not conform to 2024 beliefs.

The most obvious difference between now and then that is reflected in the Howell Code is that the United States was, at the time, at war with Southern secessionists desperate to maintain the institution of slavery. (Coincidentally, Tuesday also marked the anniversary of the South’s final surrender.) Slavery was not allowed in Arizona, but the Howell Code does recognize it as a legal issue. Section 55 of Chapter 10 (“Of Crimes and Punishments”) makes it illegal to entice Black people to leave Arizona so that they can be sold into slavery.

The prohibition on abortion comes a bit before that, just after the section banning duels. Section 45, focused initially on making intentional poisoning a crime, also establishes the ban on abortion:

“[E]very person who shall administer or cause to be administered or taken, any medicinal substances, or shall use or cause to be used any instruments whatever, with the intention· to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child, and shall be thereof duly convicted, shall be punished by imprisonment in the Territorial prison for a term not less than two years nor more than five years: Provided, that no physician shall be affected by the last clause of this section, who in the discharge of his professional duties deems it necessary to produce the miscarriage of any woman in order to save her life.”

This is the origin of the law that remains on the books .

Consider, though, the other prohibitions that surround the initial Howell language. A bit before that, for example, the code establishes what constitutes a murder or a manslaughter. In Section 34, it also creates the category of “excusable homicides.” Those include situations such as when “a man is at work with an axe, and the head flies off and kills a bystander” or “a parent is moderately correcting his child, or a master his servant or scholar.” Only when that correction is “moderate,” mind you. Exceed the bounds of moderation correction, and you’re subject to more severe charges.

Section 38 offers another assessment of pregnancy.

“If any woman shall endeavor, privately, either by herself or the procurement of others, to conceal the death of any issue of her body, male or female, which, if born alive, would be a bastard, so that it may not come to light, whether it shall have been murdered or not,” it reads, “every such mother being convicted thereof shall suffer imprisonment in the county jail for a term not exceeding one year.”

In other words, if you were to become pregnant out of wedlock and have a miscarriage — and then conceal it — you could go to jail for a year. If you disagreed with this rule, of course, you had little recourse. Only “white male citizens” of the United States or Mexico who’d lived in the territory for six months were allowed to vote.

In Section 47, the Howell Code addresses rape, which is defined as “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” It also specifies penalties for having “carnal knowledge of any female child under the age of ten years, either with or without her consent.” To put a fine point on it, the “consent” at issue there is purportedly coming from a 9-year-old.

Many of the punishments identified for criminal actions result in execution. There’s even a stipulation that those who “by willful and corrupt perjury or subornation of perjury” get someone convicted and executed for a crime might themselves be subject to capital punishment.

Here, again, we encounter a specific rule centered on women. If there was “good reason” to believe that a condemned woman was pregnant, the Code states, the sheriff could ask a panel of three doctors to determine her status to the best of her ability. If she wasn’t pregnant, she was executed. If she was, she was allowed to live — until she gave birth, at which point the governor could once again move the execution forward.

There are other reminders that this is a legal framework centered around the frontier, from sanctions for refusing to join a posse or the rules governing citizen’s arrests. There’s also an interesting process established for holding accountable elected officials. The Howell Code establishes that third parties could level accusations of misconduct against sitting officials, forcing the official to appear at a hearing. Barring admission, a jury trial ensued and could leave to removal from office. Safe to say, some prominent elected officials would rather not have that be the national standard.

The Arizona Supreme Court decision Tuesday did not immediately revert the state law on abortion to the standard established in 1864, allowing two weeks for challenges. Should those challenges fail, though, women in Arizona could face criminal punishment for seeking an abortion, in keeping with the mores of a 19th-century society in which parents were allowed to accidentally beat their children to death and 9-year-olds were considered capable of giving consent to sexual encounters.