current books new york

New York Times Best Sellers: Current List

• Current List
• 2024 Past New York Times Best Sellers
• 2023 New York Times Best Sellers
• 2022 New York Times Best Sellers

• Next: 2024 Past New York Times Best Sellers >>
• Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 11:14 AM
• URL: https://westportlibrary.libguides.com/NYTimesbestsellers

The Best Books We Read This Week

Our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads. Check back every Wednesday for new fiction and nonfiction recommendations.

Fiction & Poetry

Bitter Water Opera

Gia, the narrator of this début novella, is disenchanted with the modern world. She’s a film scholar whose long-term relationship is crumbling; in the rubble, she finds a new obsession, a dancer and recluse named Marta, who retreated to the desert in order to perform on her own terms, and who mysteriously appears after Gia writes to her. Of Marta, Gia thinks, “This was the kind of woman I thought I would be. Alone and powerful with creation.” With Marta’s help, Gia can find transcendence in everyday life again—in “miry water” and “wiry greenery, coiling”; in a beetle’s “thin, metallic sounds”; even in the taste of “strawberry-flavored melatonin.” Polek elegantly fashions an ode to small and privately felt moments of beauty, and to art’s capacity to reach through time.

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

Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution

Candice Vadala, better known as Candida Royalle, was an adult-movie actress turned feminist-porn pioneer. Few have tried with as much ardent, self-serious determination to remake the industry from the inside. With her production company, Femme, Royalle sought to make hardcore movies that would appeal to women and could be watched by couples. She was intent on “letting men see what many women actually want in bed.” In this assiduously researched, elegantly written new biography, the historian Jane Kamensky mines the depths of Royalle’s personal archive, at the core of which were the diaries she had kept almost continuously from the age of twelve. (There were also photos, videos, clippings, costumes, and correspondence.) Kamensky makes a strong case for her subject’s story as both unique and representative. Royalle, she writes, “was a product of the sexual revolution, her persona made possible, if not inevitable, by the era’s upheavals in demography, law, technology, and ideology.”

In this thoughtful and thorough new book, Ryback, a historian, has assembled an intensely specific chronicle of a single year: 1932. He details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to Adolf Hitler, someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. The book is a mordant accounting of Hitler’s establishment enablers, from the right-wing media magnate Alfred Hugenberg to General Kurt von Schleicher, two of many characters who schemed to use him as a stalking horse for their own ambitions. Ryback’s gift for detail joins with a keen sense for the black comedy of the period as he makes clear that Hitler didn’t seize power; he was given it.

Books & Fiction

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

This incisive biography aims to separate the historical Ashoka, who ruled a vast swath of the Indian subcontinent in the third century B.C., from the one of legend. Ashoka is commonly described as “the Buddhist ruler of India,” but in Olivelle’s rendering he is a ruler “who happened to be a Buddhist,” and whose devoutness was only a single aspect of a “unique and unprecedented” system of governance. Ashoka sought to unite a religiously diverse, polyglot people; his most radical innovation, Olivelle shows, was the “dharma community,” a top-down effort to give his subjects “a sense of belonging to the same moral empire.”

Pax Economica

A comprehensive account of the modern free-trade movement and a timely act of historical reclamation, this book illuminates the forgotten legacy of left-wing advocacy for liberalized markets. Palen, a historian, reveals the movement’s origins to be internationalist and cosmopolitan, led by socialists, pacifists, and feminists, who viewed expanded trade as the only practical way to achieve lasting peace in a newly globalized world. This fresh perspective complicates contemporary political archetypes of neoliberal free marketeers and “Made in America” populists, adding valuable context to our often overly simplistic economic discourse.

Here in Avalon

Dreams of escaping the mundane animate this fairy-tale-inflected thriller set in contemporary New York. The novel’s action centers on Cecilia, a flighty “seeker” whose mercurial bent leads her to abandon a new marriage, ditch her sister, Rose, and take up with a cultish, seafaring cabaret troupe that recruits lonely souls with the promise “Another life is possible.” Soon, Rose embarks on a mission to find Cecilia, blowing up her own relationship and career to follow her sister into a world of “time travelers” who tell “elegantly anachronistic riddles,” lionize unrequited love, and live to “preserve the magic.” Exploring the bond between the markedly different siblings, Burton examines their life styles—the bourgeois and the bohemian, the materialistic and the artistic—through a whimsical lens.

Last Week’s Picks

Help Wanted

Adelle Waldman is an expert at marshalling small details to conjure a particular milieu. Her first novel, “ The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. ,” caught the mores and signifiers of literary Brooklyn circa 2013 with the unflinching precision of a tattoo artist. In “ Help Wanted ,” her second novel, she uses detailed descriptions to animate the daily lives of a group of employees at Town Square, a superstore in the Hudson Valley. As her characters move through their routines, Waldman maintains a kind of steady presence, attentive but not intrusive. That the prose doesn’t soar is the point: thick with explication, the sentences are sandbags, loaded onto the page to drive home the cumulative weight of work. Town Square emerges as a complex social milieu with its own rules, and its own consequential choices. At the beginning of the book, a team chart occupies the space where readers of nineteenth-century novels might expect to see a family tree. It is simultaneously a joke, a homage, and a provocation for our unequal age: To what extent has work really usurped ancestry as a shaping force in people’s lives?

Wild Houses

In the opening chapter of this short, deftly written novel, two roughnecks in the employ of an Irish drug dealer abduct a teen-age boy named Doll English, hoping to extract repayment of a debt owed by Doll’s older brother. Doll is held at a remote safe house owned by a man who is mourning his deceased mother, while Doll’s girlfriend frantically searches for him. The kidnapping serves as a binding device, bringing together a small, carefully drawn cast of characters under unusual, high-pressure circumstances. The release of that pressure is sometimes violent, but it is also revelatory: Barrett is less concerned with suspense than with the ways in which people negotiate “that razor-thin border separating the possible from the actual.”

No Judgment

In “ No Judgment ,” Lauren Oyler, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker , collects a series of spry, wide-ranging essays that take on gossip, Goodreads, autofiction, Berlin, and more. Her essay on anxiety was excerpted on newyorker.com.

The Road from Belhaven

This novel follows Lizzie Craig, a young clairvoyant who lives on a farm with her grandparents in nineteenth-century Scotland. At first, Lizzie prays to be free of her “pictures,” as she foretells traumatic incidents that she has no power to change, but later she tries to harness her talent to see her own future. When Lizzie becomes enraptured by a young man from Glasgow, her grandmother warns that Lizzie’s choice of partner could alter her “road in life,” and Lizzie’s navigation of the boundary between girlhood and adulthood becomes more urgent. Inspired by the author’s mother, the novel gracefully evokes the magic and mystery of the rural world and the vitality and harshness of city life.

The Freaks Came Out to Write

In the opening pages of Romano’s raucous oral history of the  Village Voice , Howard Blum, a former staff writer, declares the paper “a precursor to the internet.” The Voice was founded in 1955, when the persistence of silence and constraint were more plausibly imagined than a world awash in personal truths; in its coverage of everything from City Hall to CBGB to the odd foreign revolution, the _Voice _demonstrated a radical embrace of the subjective, of lived experience over expertise. In Romano’s book, writers dish on their favorite editors, the paper’s peak era, and when and why it all seemed to go wrong. The story unfolds like the kind of epic, many-roomed party that invokes the spirit of other parties and their immortal ghosts.

The person exclaiming “martyr” in Kaveh Akbar’s novel “Martyr!” is Cyrus Shams, a poet and former alcoholic, who was also formerly addicted to drugs. Cyrus is in his late twenties. He’s anguished and ardent about the world and his place in it, and recovery has left him newly and painfully obsessed with his deficiencies. Desperate for purpose, he fixates on the idea of a death that retroactively splashes meaning back onto a life. He starts to collect stories about historical martyrs, such as Bobby Sands and Joan of Arc, for a book project, a suite of “elegies for people I’ve never met.” Cyrus’s obsession with martyrdom arises partly from the circumstances of his parents’ deaths. His mother, Roya, was a passenger on an Iranian plane that the United States Navy mistakenly shot out of the sky—an event based on the real-life destruction of Iran Air Flight 655 by the U.S.S. Vincennes, in 1988, near the end of the Iran-Iraq War. In “Martyr!,” Cyrus contrasts his mother’s humanity with the statistic that she became in the U.S. Her fate was “actuarial,” he says, “a rounding error.” Although Akbar, an acclaimed Iranian American poet, has incisive political points to make, he uses martyrdom primarily to think through more metaphysical questions about whether our pain matters, and to whom, and how it might be made to matter more.

Errand into the Maze

This astute biography, by a veteran  Village Voice  critic, traces the long career of Martha Graham, a choreographer who became one of the major figures of twentieth-century modernism. Born in 1894 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Graham came of age in an era when Americans mainly thought of dance as entertainment, a conception that she helped change through such groundbreaking pieces as “Primitive Mysteries” and “Appalachian Spring.” While detailing many of Graham’s romantic and artistic collaborations, Jowitt focusses on how Graham approached her work—as a performer, a choreographer, and a teacher—with a philosophical rigor that expanded the expressive possibilities of movement and established a uniquely American idiom.

A Map of Future Ruins

In 2020, a fire broke out at a refugee camp in the town of Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos, displacing thousands. In this finely woven meditation on “belonging, exclusion, and whiteness,” Markham, a Greek American journalist, travels to Greece to investigate the fire and its aftermath, including the conviction of six young Afghan asylum seekers. Her thoughts on the case—she ultimately finds it to be specious—mingle with gleanings from visits to locales central to her family’s history. “Every map is the product of a cartographer with allegiances,” she writes, eventually concluding that confronting the contemporary migration system’s injustices requires critically evaluating migrations of the past and the historical narratives about them.

Previous Picks

Goodbye Russia

This biography of Sergei Rachmaninoff focusses on the quarter century that he spent in exile in the United States, after the Russian Revolution, when he established himself across the West as a highly sought-after concert pianist. In place of extensive compositional analyses (during this time, the composer wrote only six new pieces), Maddocks offers a character study punctuated by colorful source material, including acerbic diary entries by Prokofiev, which betray both envy of and affection for his competitor. Maddocks notes such idiosyncrasies as Rachmaninoff’s infatuation with fast cars, but she also captures his sense of otherness; he never became fluent in English, and his yearning for a lost Russia shadowed his monumental success.

The Fetishist

The blooming and dissolution of a romance forms the core of this wistful, often funny, posthumously published novel. “Once Asian, never again Caucasian,” jokes Alma, a Korean American concert cellist, to Daniel, a white violinist, the first night they sleep together. Eventually, Alma will break off their engagement after discovering that Daniel, the book’s titular fetishist, has been having an affair with another Asian American woman. When that woman dies by suicide, her daughter seeks revenge. The resulting series of escalating high jinks, which includes the use of blowfish poison, verges on the farcical, but the novel’s major chord is one of rueful longing.

The Survivors of the Clotilda

The last known slave ship to reach U.S. soil, the Clotilda, arrived in 1860, more than fifty years after the transatlantic slave trade was federally outlawed. This history details the lives of the people it carried, from their kidnappings in West Africa to their deaths in the twentieth century. Durkin, a scholar of slavery and the African diaspora, traces them to communities in Alabama established by the formerly enslaved, such as Africatown and Gee’s Bend, and finds in their stories antecedents for the Harlem Renaissance and the civil-rights movement. Amid descriptions of child trafficking, sexual abuse, and racial violence, Durkin also celebrates the resilience and resistance of the Clotilda’s survivors. “Their lives were so much richer than the countless crimes committed against them,” she writes.

This episodic, philosophical novel orbits a group of loosely connected characters living between 1917 and 2025. It begins in France, during the First World War, with a British soldier lying on the ground after an explosion. We follow him home to North Yorkshire, where he works as a portrait photographer in whose images spirits begin to appear. Later, we meet his granddaughter, who provides medical care in war zones. Throughout, characters ponder the boundaries between the physical and the ineffable, the mortal and the spiritual. Sometimes they reach epigrammatic epiphanies, as when one realizes that “everything she had thought of as loss was something found.”

Byron: A Life in Ten Letters

Should one wish to tackle the great Romantic poet Lord Byron, there is no denying that his collected works loom like a fortress in your path. Even the recent Oxford edition of his work, which omits great swathes of it, runs to some eleven hundred pages; his letters and journals fill thirteen volumes in all. Luckily, there is an alternative: Stauffer’s compact biography, which is elegantly structured around a few choice pickings from Byron’s correspondence. Each letter affords Stauffer a chance to ruminate on whatever facet of the poet’s history and character happened to be glittering most brightly at the time, from his devotion to the cause of Greek independence in the fight against Ottoman rule to the libertinism for which he is famed. We are presented, for instance, with a jammed and breathless letter almost three thousand words long centered on a tempestuous baker’s wife with whom Byron had been involved in Venice. Stauffer comments, “One gets the sense that he could have kept going indefinitely with more juicy details, except he runs out of room.”

Remembering Peasants

In this elegiac history, Joyce presents a painstaking account of a way of life to which, until recently, the vast majority of humanity was bound. Delving into the rhythms and rituals of peasant existence, Joyce shows how different our land-working ancestors were from us in their understanding of time, nature, and the body. “We have bodies, which we carry about in our minds, whereas they  were  their bodies,” he writes. The relative absence of peasants from the historical record, and the blinding speed with which they seem to have disappeared, prompt a moving final essay on the urgency of preserving our collective past. “Almost all of us are in one way or another the children of peasants,” Joyce writes. “If we are cut off from the past, we are also cut off from ourselves.”

Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers rose to fame when she was only twenty-three, after her début novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” wowed critics, who crowned her Faulkner’s successor. Precocity would both define and stifle her career. In her work, she probed the twilit zone between adolescence and adulthood, when impulse reigns. In her life, she often acted the child herself, relying on friends and family members to cook her meals, pour her drinks, listen to her self-flattery, and care for her through a series of illnesses. Dearborn’s biography is a marvel: admiring of the fiction and its startling imagination, but clear-eyed about how McCullers’s behavior hurt her work, herself, and those who loved her. In one sense, the same indulgent atmosphere that stunted her growth kept the link to late childhood alive.

In Ascension

In this capacious, broody work of speculative fiction, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, a Dutch microbiologist who had a turbulent childhood joins expeditions to the center of the earth and to the far reaches of space: first to a hydrothermal vent deep in the Atlantic Ocean, then to the rim of the Oort cloud, a sphere of icy objects surrounding our solar system. As her narration toggles between chronicles of her voyages and reflections on her personal life, each of these “two zones” is revealed to be a wonder of inscrutability. “So many times I had identified errors,” she thinks, “stemming from the original mistake of . . . predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there.”

Smoke and Ashes

A hybrid of horticultural and economic history, this book proposes that the opium poppy should be taken as “a historical force in its own right.” Ghosh touches on opium’s origins as a recreational drug—it was favored in the courts of the Mongol, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, each of which enhanced its potency in different ways—but he dwells on its use by Western colonizers. In the mid-eighteenth century, the British began a campaign to get the Chinese population hooked on opium produced in India, in the hope of correcting a trade imbalance. Ghosh details the illegal business that arose as a result—opium imports were banned in China—ultimately arguing that the British “racket” was “utterly indefensible by the standards of its own time as well as ours.”

The Riddles of the Sphinx

Fusing original historical research and memoir, this book is at once a feminist history of the crossword puzzle and an account of the author’s anorexia. Shechtman began to suffer from an eating disorder at the same time she became an avid constructor of crosswords; interrogating both through the lenses of feminist theory and psychoanalysis, she comes to see them as attempts at “reaching for sublimity—to become a boundless mind, to defeat matter.” Along the way, she unearths the legacies of the women—such as the New York Times’ first crossword editor—who shaped the crossword into the lively art form it is now. Two portions of the book were published on newyorker.com: one in the form of a memoir about the relationship between disordered eating and crossword construction, and another as an essay about how the field of crossword construction came to be dominated by men.

Reading Genesis

Fourteen Days

This round-robin novel was written by many illustrious hands—including Dave Eggers, John Grisham, Erica Jong, Celeste Ng, Ishmael Reed, and Meg Wolitzer—all left cozily anonymous in the linked storytelling. With a wink at Boccaccio’s Florentine narrators, filling their time with stories as a plague rages, these modern storytellers gather amid the COVID pandemic, on the roof of a run-down building on the Lower East Side. Each storyteller is identified by a single signifier—Eurovision, the Lady with the Rings—and the stories that the speakers unwind leap wildly about. An apron sewn in a suburban home-economics class becomes the subject of one narrative. Another storyteller recalls an art appraiser’s trip to the country and a scarring revelation about the wealthy collectors he is visiting: they keep the lid of their dead son’s coffin visible as a memento of their pain. The evasion of the central subject, the turn to subtext over text, the backward blessing of being “off the news”—all this rings true to the time, when symbolic experience overlayed all the other kinds.

This chronicle of our planet’s “silvery sister” begins with the explosive interaction, four and a half billion years ago, that split the moon from the Earth, and eventually encompasses the climatic chaos that is likely to ensue when it ultimately escapes our gravitational pull. Boyle inventories the ways in which the moon’s presence affects life on Earth—influencing menstrual cycles, dictating the timing of D Day—and how humans’ conception of it has evolved, changing from a deity to the basis for an astronomical calendar to a natural-resource bank. Throughout, the author orbits a central idea: that understanding the science and the history of the moon may help to unlock mysteries elsewhere in the universe.

In Klinenberg’s excellent book, we are given both micro-incident—closely reported scenes from the lives of representative New Yorkers struggling through the plague year—and macro-comment: cross-cultural, overarching chapters assess broader social forces. We meet, among others, an elementary-school principal and a Staten Island bar owner who exemplify the local experience of the pandemic; we’re also told of the history, complicated medical evaluation, and cultural consequences of such things as social distancing and masking. We meet many people who make convincing case studies because of the very contradictions of their experience. Sophia Zayas, a community organizer in the Bronx who worked “like a soldier on the front lines,” was nonetheless resistant to getting vaccinated, a decision that caused her, and her family, considerable suffering. Klinenberg sorts through her surprising mix of motives with a delicate feeling for the way that community folk wisdom—can the vaccines be trusted?—clashed with her trained public-service sensibility. Throughout his narrative, his engrossing mixture of closeup witness and broad-view sociology calls to mind the late Howard S. Becker’s insistence that the best sociology is always, in the first instance, wide-angle reporting.

Bitter Crop

This ambitious biography of the jazz singer Billie Holiday uses 1959, the tumultuous final year of her life, as a prism through which to view her career. Drawing its title from “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching that was Holiday’s best-selling recording, the book focusses on her experiences of racism and exploitation, and on her anxiety about government surveillance. In tracing Holiday’s longtime drug and alcohol use, which damaged her health and led to her spending nearly a year in prison for narcotics possession, Alexander also delves into the unwarranted sensationalism with which the press often covered these matters at the time. Holiday died at forty-four. Toward the end, she was frail—at one point weighing only ninety-nine pounds—but, as one concertgoer noted, “She still had her voice.”

To Be a Jew Today

Noah Feldman, a polymath and public intellectual at Harvard Law School, opens his new book, “To Be a Jew Today,” with two questions: “What’s the point of being a Jew? And, really, aside from Jews, who cares?” Feldman spends the first third of the book reviewing the major strains of contemporary Jewish belief: Traditionalists, for example, for whom the study of Torah is self-justifying; “Godless Jews,” who take pride in Jewish accomplishment and kvetching without much else. For Feldman, what’s characteristically Jewish about these camps is their ongoing struggle—with God, with Torah, with the rabbis, with each other—to determine for themselves the parameters of an authentically Jewish life. Jews are people who argue, ideally with quotes from sources, about what it means to be Jewish. For Feldman, the establishment of Israel has become the metanarrative that binds many contemporary Jews together. It has also turned Jews away from struggle and toward dogmatism. Feldman asks us to see criticism of the country as a deep expression of one’s relationship to tradition, and perhaps even an inevitable one. He aspires to return the notion of diaspora to the center of the tradition—to propose that Jewish life can be more vigorous, more sustainable, and more Jewish when it pitches its tents on the periphery.

Life on Earth

“If we are fractured / we are fractured / like stars / bred to shine / in every direction,” begins this small marvel of a poetry collection. Laux’s deft, muscular verse illuminates the sharp facets of everyday existence, rendering humble things—Bisquick, a sewing machine, waitressing, watching a neighbor look at porn—into opportunities to project memory and imagination. Beautifully constructed exercises in tender yet fierce attention, these poems bear witness to deaths in the family, to climate destruction, and to the ravages of U.S. history, even as they insist on intimacy and wonder.

The Adversary

An all-consuming, mutually destructive sibling rivalry propels this vibrant historical novel, set in a provincial port in nineteenth-century Newfoundland—“the backwoods of a backwards colony.” The antagonists are the inheritor of the largest business in the region and his older sister, who, through marriage, takes control of a competing enterprise. Amid their attempts to undermine and overtake each other, the community around them suffers “a spiralling accretion of chaos”: murder, pandemics, a cataclysmic storm, an attack by privateers, and a riot. By turns bawdy, violent, comic, and gruesome, Crummey’s novel presents a bleak portrait of colonial life and a potent rendering of the ways in which the “vicious, hateful helplessness” of a grudge can corrupt everything it touches.

In this memoir, two life-altering events—the birth of a daughter and the end of a marriage—are intertwined. When Jamison meets her ex-husband, a fellow-writer whom she calls C, she is newly thirty; he is a widower more than ten years older. At the time, she writes, “I was drowning in the revocability of my own life. I wanted the solidity of what you couldn’t undo.” As the book progresses, that ambition is realized—not just through the arrival of their child but also by transformations in her own being that are precipitated by her marriage and its eventual dissolution. Throughout, Jamison dwells on marital competitiveness, working motherhood, and the inheritances of love. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

This sweeping biography represents the first effort at a comprehensive account of the life of the civil-rights icon John Lewis. Lewis’s “almost surreal trajectory” begins with his childhood in a “static rural society seemingly impervious to change.” Arsenault frames what followed in terms of Lewis’s attempt to cultivate the spirit of “Beloved Community”—a term, coined by the theologian Josiah Royce, for a community “based on love.” As a boy, Lewis disapproved of the vengeful sermons at his home-town church; as a youthful protest leader, he adhered to nonviolence, even while being assaulted by bigots; in Congress, he rose above a culture of self-promotion and petty rivalries. Lewis, in Arsenault’s account, was unfailingly modest: watching a documentary about his life, he was “embarrassed by its hagiographical portrayal.”

Alphabetical Diaries

This unconventional text comprises diary-entry excerpts that are arranged according to the alphabetical order of their first letters. The sections derive their meaning not from chronology but from unexpected juxtapositions: “Dream of me yelling at my mother,  nothing I did was ever good enough for you!  Dresden. Drinking a lot.” The text is clotted with provocative rhetorical questions: “Why do I look for symbols? Why do women go mad? Why does one bra clasp in the front and the other in the back?” Rich with intimacies and disclosures, these fragments show an artist searching for the right way to arrange her life.

Twilight Territory

Set during the Japanese occupation of Indochina and its bloody aftermath, this novel of war is nimbly embroidered with a marriage story. In 1942, a Japanese major who is posted to the fishing town of Phan Thiet falls for a Viet shopkeeper when he witnesses her excoriating a corrupt official. The shopkeeper, despite her wariness of being viewed as a sympathizer, accedes to a courtship with the major, recognizing their shared “language of loss and loneliness,” and the two eventually marry. Soon, the major’s involvement with the resistance imperils his family, but his wife remains resolute, having long understood fate to be a force as pitiless as war: “Destiny was imprinted deeply. She saw it the way a river sensed the distant sea.”

To the Letter: Poems

In this philosophical collection that explores doubt—regarding language, God, and the prospect of repeating history—many poems address an unreachable “you” who could be a lover, a deity, or a ghost of someone long dead. Rosenthal’s translation draws out these poems’ shades of melancholy and whimsy, along with the slant and irregular rhymes that contribute to their uncanny humor. Różycki’s verse teems with sensuous, imaginatively rendered details: “that half-drunk cup of tea, the mirror / filled up with want, the strand of hair curling toward / the drain like the Silk Road through the Karakum / known as Tartary, the wall that defends the void.”

The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays

In these twenty-four essays, Acocella, a much loved staff writer from 1995 until her death, earlier this year, brings her inimitable verve to subjects as varied as Andy Warhol, swearing, the destruction of Pompeii, and Elena Ferrante. Throughout, she illuminates the ways in which her subjects’ personal lives, and the “moral experience” they came to encompass, fused with their artistic sensibilities. In an essay about Francis Bacon, the Irish-born English painter best known for his menacing paintings of human figures, she writes, “He wanted to make us bleed, and in order to do so, he had to show us the thing that bleeds, the body.” Twenty-two of the essays were originally written for the magazine.

For Buruma, a writer and historian, and a former editor of The New York Review of Books , the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s dedication to freedom of thought makes him a thinker for our moment. In this short biography, he highlights how Spinoza’s radical conjectures repeatedly put him at odds with religious and secular authorities. As a young man, he was expelled from Amsterdam’s Jewish community for his heretical views on God and the Bible. When his book “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus” was published, in 1670, its views on religion—specifically, the benefits of “allowing every man to think what he likes, and say what he thinks”—were so uncompromising that both author and publisher had to remain anonymous. Buruma observes that “intellectual freedom has once again become an important issue, even in countries, such as the United States, that pride themselves on being uniquely free.” In calling Spinoza a “messiah,” Buruma follows Heinrich Heine, the nineteenth-century German Jewish poet, who compared the philosopher to “his divine cousin, Jesus Christ. Like him, he suffered for his teachings. Like him, he wore the crown of thorns.”

If Love Could Kill

From the Furies to “Kill Bill,” the figure of the avenging woman, evening the scales, has long entranced the public. But, as Anna Motz shows in this wrenching study, many women who turn to violence are not hurting their abusers, though often they have endured terrible abuse. They tend to hurt the people closest to them: their partners, their children, or themselves. Motz, a forensic psychotherapist, presents the stories of ten patients, managing the conflict between her feminist beliefs and the ghastly facts of the women’s crimes. Although she’s interested in the lore of female vengeance, she punctures its appeal. Such violence may look like an expression of agency, but it is the opposite, a reaction and a repetition.

Filterworld

The New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka chronicles the homogenization of digital culture and the quest to cultivate one’s own taste in an increasingly automated online world. An excerpt from the book appeared on newyorker.com, in the form of an essay on coming of age at the dawn of the social Internet.

Melancholy Wedgwood

In this unorthodox history, Moon, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, casts aside the traditional, heroic portrait of the English ceramicist and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood and envisions the potter as a symbol of Britain’s post-colonial melancholia. Touching lightly on the well-trodden terrain of Wedgwood’s biography, Moon focusses on the story’s “leftovers,” among them the amputation of Wedgwood’s leg; his wayward son, Tom; the figure of the Black man in his famous antislavery medallion; and the overworked laborers in his factory. Moon’s overarching thesis—that destructiveness is inherent in colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism—is nothing groundbreaking, but her mode of attack, at once bold and surreptitious, succeeds in challenging the established, too-cozy narrative about her subject.

The Taft Court

“Taft’s presidential perspective forever changed both the role of the chief justice and the institution of the Court,” Post argues in his landmark two-volume study. The book is an attempt to rescue the Taft years from oblivion, since, as Post points out, most of its jurisprudence had been “utterly effaced” within a decade of Taft’s death. But, if John Marshall’s Chief Justiceship established what the Court would be in the nineteenth century, Taft’s established what it would be in the twentieth, and even the twenty-first. Post, a professor of constitutional law who has a Ph.D. in American Civilization, searches for the origins of the Court’s current divisions. His book is rich with close readings of cases that rely on sources scarcely ever used before and benefits from deep and fruitful quantitative analysis absent in most studies of the Court. It restores the nineteen-twenties as a turning point in the Court’s history.

The key insight, or provocation, of “Slow Down” is to give the lie to we-can-have-it-all green capitalism. Saito highlights the Netherlands Fallacy, named for that country’s illusory attainment of both high living standards and low levels of pollution—a reality achieved by displacing externalities. It’s foolish to believe that “the Global North has solved its environmental problems simply through technological advancements and economic growth,” Saito writes. What the North actually did was off-load the “negative by-products of economic development—resource extraction, waste disposal, and the like” onto the Global South. If we’re serious about surviving our planetary crisis, Saito argues, then we must reject the ever-upward logic of gross domestic product, or G.D.P. (a combination of government spending, imports and exports, investments, and personal consumption). We will not be saved by a “green” economy of electric cars or geo-engineered skies. Slowing down—to a carbon footprint on the level of Europe and the U.S. in the nineteen-seventies—would mean less work and less clutter, he writes. Our kids may not make it, otherwise.

Wrong Norma

In a new collection of poems, short prose pieces, and even visual art, Carson explores various ideas and subjects, including Joseph Conrad, the act of swimming, foxes, Roget’s Thesaurus, the New Testament, and white bread. No matter the form, her language is what Alice Munro called “marvellously disturbing”—elliptical, evocative, electric with meaning. Several pieces, including “ 1 = 1 ,” appeared first in The New Yorker .

You Dreamed of Empires

This incantatory novel takes place in 1519, on the day when Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors arrived at Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. As they await an audience with the mercurial, mushroom-addled emperor, Moctezuma, the conquistadors navigate his labyrinthine palace, stumble upon sacrificial temples, and tend to their horses, all the while wondering if they are truly guests or, in fact, prisoners. Enrigue conjures both court intrigue and city life with grace. In metafictional flashes to present-day Mexico City, which sits atop Tenochtitlan’s ruins, and a startling counter-historical turn, the novel becomes a meditation on the early colonizers, their legacy, and the culture that they subsumed.

You Glow in the Dark

The short stories of Colanzi, a Bolivian writer, blend horror, fantasy, reporting, and history. One of the stories, “The Narrow Way,” first appeared in the magazine.

Why We Read

In this charming collection of essays, Reed digs into the many pleasures of reading, interweaving poignant and amusing stories from her life as a bibliophile and teacher to advocate for the many joys of a life spent between the pages. This piece was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Come and Get It

Agatha Paul, the narrator of this fizzy campus novel, is the acclaimed author of a book on “physical mourning.” During a visiting professorship at the University of Arkansas, she intends to conduct research on weddings. Yet the subject prickles—she is still reeling from a painful separation—and she soon pivots to a new topic: “How students navigate money.” Paul herself quickly becomes an object of fascination for many of the students, and the stakes are raised when one of them offers Paul the use of her room to eavesdrop on conversations between the undergraduates. Almost on a whim, Paul accepts, and small transgressions soon give way to larger ones.

This handsomely produced anthology of twin representations depicts vaudeville performers, subjects of torture, and the blue dresses with the puffed sleeves worn by the “Shining” twins. Viney collaborates with his identical twin, who contributes a foreword. Many of the book’s images of twins tend to show them shoulder to shoulder, facing the viewer, presenting themselves for our inspection. Only a handful show twins looking at each other. And how different those tender images of mutual regard feel—they lack the charge of the conventional twin pose, underscoring the tension Viney remarks between the actual “mundane” nature of being a twin and the titillated fascination it inspires. He invites readers to contemplate, and to learn from, the fractal nature of twin identity.

This novel follows a sixteen-year-old-girl named Margaret and her attempts to reckon with the death of her best friend in childhood, for which she was partly responsible. In time, Margaret’s role in the tragedy was relegated to rumor; when she confessed, her mother told her, “Never repeat that awful lie again.” Now, in adolescence, Margaret attempts to document the incident honestly, accompanied by Poor Deer, the physical embodiment of her guilt, who intervenes whenever Margaret begins to gloss over the truth. The author renders the four-year-old Margaret’s inner life with sensitive complexity, depicting an alert child logic that defies adults’ view of her as slow and unfeeling. In the present day, the novel considers whether its narrator’s tendency to reimagine the past might be repurposed to envision her future.

Disillusioned

This intrepid inquiry into the unfulfilled promise of America’s suburbs posits that a “deep-seated history of white control, racial exclusion, and systematic forgetting” has poisoned the great postwar residential experiment. It anatomizes a geographically scattered handful of failing public schools, incorporating the author’s conversations with five affected families. Herold, a white journalist raised in Penn Hills, a Pittsburgh suburb, peels back layers of structural racism, granting that “the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier were linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who lived there now.”

The narrator of this raw-nerved and plangent novel, a fiction writer who goes unnamed, addresses much of the book to her drug-addicted and intermittently violent adolescent daughter. Woven throughout her ruminations on her daughter’s struggles are the writer’s cascading reminiscences of her own fragmented childhood and the romance she rekindled with a married ex-lover when her daughter was young. Set in and around a muted London, the novel is a sustained meditation on the trials of family, marriage, and creativity. Writing is an act “of insane self-belief,” the narrator says. “The moment you listen to the opinions of others . . . you risk breaking the spell and, if you’re not careful, sanity creeps in.”

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

Blitzer weaves together a series of deeply personal portraits to trace the history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s a complicated tale, spanning the lives of multiple generations of migrants and lawmakers, in both Central America and Washington, D.C. Blitzer doesn’t pretend to offer easy policy solutions; instead, he devotedly and eloquently documents the undeniable cause of what has become a regional quagmire: the individual right and unfailing will to survive. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Tripping on Utopia

One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. One of the feats that the historian Benjamin Breen pulls off in his lively and engrossing new book is to make a cultural moment like the anonymous woman’s televised trip seem less incongruous than it might have been, if no less fascinating. He has an eye for the telling detail, and a gift for introducing even walk-on characters with brio. In Breen’s telling, the buttoned-down nineteen-fifties, not the freewheeling nineteen-sixties, brought together the ingredients for the first large-scale cultural experiment with consciousness-expanding substances. He depicts a rich and partly forgotten chapter before the hippie movement and before the war on drugs, encompassing not only the now notorious C.I.A. research into mind-altering drugs but also a lighter, brighter, more public dimension of better living through chemistry. “Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era,” Breen writes. “They ended it.”

Gibson, a professor of Renaissance and magical literature at the University of Exeter, has written eight books on the subject of witches. In her latest, she traverses seven centuries and several continents. There’s the trial of a Sámi woman, Kari, in seventeenth-century Finnmark; of a young religious zealot named Marie-Catherine Cadière, in eighteenth-century France; and of a twentieth-century politician, Bereng Lerotholi, in Basutoland, in present-day Lesotho. The experiences of the accused women (and a few accused men) are foregrounded, through novelistic descriptions of their lives before and after their persecution. The inevitable charisma of villainy makes the accusers vivid as well. But the most interesting character in the book is also its through line: the trial. Depicting a wide variety of legal codes and procedures, from poisonings and drownings to modern imprisonment, Gibson provides a robust examination of the judicial systems in which witch-hunting has thrived—and those in which, bit by bit, it has been stopped.

Forgottenness

This thoughtful novel connects two characters separated by a century: a present-day Ukrainian writer and the twentieth-century Polish Ukrainian nationalist Viacheslav Lypynskyi. In one thread, Maljartschuk plumbs Lypynskyi’s incendiary biography: born a Polish aristocrat, he served as a diplomat for the nascent Ukrainian state before living in exile when the Soviets took over. In another, the contemporary writer revisits her failed love affairs, and her grandparents’ experiences in the famine of 1932-33. As Maljartschuk makes the characters’ common history apparent, she compares it to a blue whale consuming plankton, “milling and chewing it into a homogenous mass, so that one life disappears without a trace, giving another, the next life, a chance.”

Behind You Is the Sea

Composed of linked stories, this novel explores the lives of Palestinian Americans in Baltimore. At a young man’s wedding to a white woman, his father agonizes over the gradual loss of the family’s cultural identity. A student finds that her objections to her high school’s production of “Aladdin” fall on willfully deaf ears. Elsewhere, girls and women are shunned for getting pregnant, or for being unable to bear children. Darraj writes with great emotional resonance about hope and disappointment. “His mouth opens in an O, like America has shocked him at last,” a girl says of her Palestinian-born father’s dying breath. “It’s like he finally understood he was never meant to win here.”

This hypnotic novella, written in the nineteen-sixties but appearing only now in the U.S., takes place after a nuclear cataclysm, and is narrated by a man living in a luxury resort that has been converted into a sanctuary for the rich. “We bought the commodity called survival,” he dryly notes, but, as the story unfolds and refugees stricken by radiation sickness pour in, the delusional nature of that notion becomes clear. Despite its brevity, the book is richly textured with insights about how money shapes one’s conception of safety, and how grasping the interconnectedness of the physical world is also to grasp one’s mortality. A resort guest imagines the radiation as light that “streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones . . . suddenly to reveal the innermost, vulnerable marrow.”

Who Owns This Sentence?

Virtually every song that Bruce Springsteen has ever written is now owned by Sony, which is reported to have paid five hundred and fifty million dollars for the catalogue. For Bellos, a comparative-literature professor at Princeton, and Montagu, an intellectual-property lawyer, the story of Sony’s big Springsteen buy epitomizes a troubling trend: the rights to a vast amount of created material—music, movies, books, art, games, computer software, scholarly articles, just about any cultural product people will pay to consume—are increasingly owned by a small number of large corporations and are not due to expire for a long time. The problem, they write, is that corporate control of cultural capital robs the commons. While warning against the overreach of contemporary copyright law, this lively, opinionated, and ultra-timely book also raises the alarm about the increasing dominance of artificial intelligence, a technology that threatens to bring the whole legal structure of copyright down.

American Zion

Park, a historian, traces Mormonism from its inception in New York, in 1830, to its struggle amid persecution in the mid-nineteenth century, to its present status as a global empire of more than seventeen million adherents. He posits that changes in the decade of Mormonism’s emergence—such as the vibrant growth of the American marketplace—eliminated élite education as a requirement for divine calling, creating an opportunity for a man like Joseph Smith, Jr., to found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Throughout, Park delves into Mormon history and lore to produce a picture of the institution as one that is both marginalized and marginalizing.

In April of 1984, a demonstration outside the Libyan Embassy in St. James’s Square, in London, brought supporters of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and his “popular revolution” up against protesters in opposition. The demonstration had barely begun when shots were fired from the Embassy’s windows. Eleven protesters were injured, and a policewoman was killed: all the spokes of Matar’s lingering, melancholy new novel connect to this transforming event. “My Friends” is narrated by a Libyan exile named Khaled Abd al Hady, who has lived in London for thirty-two years. One evening, in 2016, Khaled decides to walk home from St. Pancras station, where he has seen off an old friend who is heading for Paris, and he is drawn to return to the square because he was one of the demonstrators outside the Embassy back in 1984, alongside two Libyan men who would become his closest friends. As he walks, Khaled reprises the history of their intense triangular friendship, the undulations of their lives, and the shape and weight of their exile. Khaled himself maintains a mysterious inertia that turns Matar’s narrative into a deep and detailed exploration not so much of abandonment as of self-abandonment: the story of a man split in two, one who cannot quite tell the story that would make the parts cohere again.

Unshrinking

Fatphobia, as defined by the author of this polemic, a Cornell philosophy professor, is a “set of false beliefs and inflated theories” about fat people which inform both health care and culture at large. Manne’s argument draws on personal experiences—she relates having gone on drastic diets and engaging in “dangerous, exploitative” relationships as a teen-ager—and on trenchant analyses of the ways in which fatness has been regarded throughout history. She proposes, for instance, that hatred of fatness is a consequence of racist ideas embedded in American culture in the era of slavery. Manne identifies “beauty and diet culture” as an additional culprit, and argues, “We are wronged bodies, not wrong ones.”

The Rebel’s Clinic

Frantz Fanon, the biographical subject of Shatz’s striking new book, saw the end of empire as a wrenching psychological event. Looking back on his Francophilic upbringing in Martinique, Fanon recognized an inferiority complex induced by empire. He saw worse when he took a post in a hospital in Algeria, in 1953. Unlike Martinique, Algeria had recently been scarred by violence, most notably in 1945, when, after a clash with nationalists, the French massacred thousands of Algerians. Individual traumas could be handled clinically, but what about societal ones? Fanon believed that the act of defying empire could cure Algerian neuroses. Shatz describes Fanon’s extremism as the “zeal of a convert”—just as Fanon spoke better French than the French, he became, as a revolutionary, “more Algerian than the Algerians.”

Books & Fiction

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.

Click here to subscribe

27 Modern New York Novels To Read Now

This post may contain affiliate links that earn us a commission at no extra cost to you.

With so many riveting New York novels published each year, how do you choose? Uncover the best contemporary books set in New York City and State to devour right now.

Growing up in CT, we spent quite a bit of time in New York. For us suburban folk, New York City can be a bit overwhelming.

However, we love all of the culture, museums, life, lights, theater, and food that NYC has to offer. Plus, cupcakes!

We also cannot get enough of the New York City books that publish every year. Like WW2 novels, New York books are quite plentiful.

So, what are some of the best books set in New York? Which New York novels should you read before you go?

Below, we are sharing favorite books set in New York City and State to take you there. Unearth books that will tour you through the New York Public Library and tell you where to grab a delicious fish sandwich.

We have NY train thrillers and a plethora of classic retellings.

Some of these New York City novels will invite you to lavish parties while others will send you into the dark underbelly of…InstaMoms. Let’s get started!

Road trip around the U.S. with the best books set in every state .

Grab your favorite New York novels here :

• Audible Plus : From Amazon, listen to Amazon Originals, podcasts, and audiobooks. They add new titles every week.
• Book of the Month : Get the month’s hottest new and upcoming titles from Book of the Month. You might snag an early release or debut author. Along with selecting a book a month, find terrific add-ons, both trendy and lesser-known titles.
• Amazon Prime Video – Stream thousands of ad-free movies and TV series on demand with Prime Video.
• Express VPN – Using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) allows you to view movies worldwide – and they help keep your information safe. Our writers couldn’t have such diverse film reviews without using a VPN.

Table of Contents

Best New York Novels

Books set in new york.

Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

When we first read the summary for Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane , we weren’t sure what all of the hype was about.

But then, we began reading this story and felt strong reverberations for humanity in our hearts. The first 100 pages emotionally wrecked us.

We were invested, and yes, Keane is brilliant, making Ask Again, Yes one of our top New York novels of all time.

Just like the relationships among its characters, Ask Again, Yes will put you back together, piece by piece. You may never be the same, though.

Peter and Kate grew up together. Their parents immigrated from England and Ireland. Both of their fathers worked together on the police force.

Peter’s mother non-fatally shoots Kate’s dad, halting their friendship and budding young love.

Over the course of 40 years, we watch both families evolve, fall apart, love others, disappear, and try to grow and move on from inescapable and intertwined pasts.

How do we overcome the worst in us, including forces we cannot always control? Are we the products of our childhoods? How healing and powerful is the act of forgiveness?

A brilliant book club book filled with emotion, real-life problems, and undying love, we almost don’t have words for how the pages of Ask Again, Yes will personally affect you – but we know they will.

This is one of those stories that changes you after reading it. We also think Ask Again, Yes is one of the absolute best books set in New York and NYC. Buy a copy of Ask Again, Yes .

Last Summer At The Golden Hotel by Elyssa Friedland

If you are looking for books set in New York perfect for summer reading, we highly suggest taking a family vacation at The Golden Hotel in the Catskills.

Plus, if you gobbled up all of Schitt’s Creek in under a month like we did, we think you’ll appreciate Friedland’s plot and characters.

Back in the day, all the wealthy New England families would flock to The Golden Hotel for contests, reunions, and elite debauchery.

Unfortunately, The Golden Hotel’s two proprietary families, the Goldmans and Weingolds, have failed to enter the 21st century.

With the state of the hotel in rapid decline, the owners must decide if they will sell this iconic Catskill getaway to casino planners.

As the families reunite for one final weekend and vote, their secrets and strongest desires unfold.

Most importantly, we meet their ‘new adult’ and cutting-edge children. How can these Millenials preserve the legacy of their youth?

A slow burn, dive deeper into dysfunctional family relationships, new romances, and age-old friendships.

We love a story with a tidy ending that isn’t predictable or always what you hoped for. The alternative solutions will hopefully make your heart sing.

For New York books, Last Summer At The Golden Hotel will appeal to readers who seek out generational family stories, books set at hotels , and endless nostalgia. Buy a copy of Last Summer At The Golden Hotel .

Not A Happy Family by Shari Lapena

Imagine a family where everyone is waiting for their vindictive and viciously cruel father to drop dead. Not only would they gain back their sanity and sense of self-worth, but they’d also inherit boatloads.

This is exactly the scenario that greets murder mystery lovers in Lapena’s Not A Happy Family.

One of the most gripping suspense books set in New York, this whodunnit has far too many perfect suspects. In fact, everyone appears guilty.

Upstate New York’s Brecken Hill is where want-to-be rich people dream of living. Fred and Sheila Merton are worth millions, but as we know, money can’t buy happiness…or love, tact, and decency.

Fred is hideous to his children, and at their annual Easter dinner, he shreds apart all three of them in front of their significant others.

The children may be different in their careers and attitudes, but they share one huge similarity: Their disgust for their father.

That night, both Mertons are brutally murdered, leaving the kids as suspects. Of course, they all lie to the police about that night and their whereabouts.

Their spouses are torn but equally troubled. Doubt exudes from every person.

We aren’t sure there is a character you’ll trust or actually like, but that’s the brilliance of Not A Happy Family.

For fast-paced, devour-worthy New York novels, start guessing the murderer from page one. Buy a copy of Not A Happy Family by Shari Lapena .

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

In 1982, Carly Kirk’s Aunt Viv mysteriously disappears from the Sun Down Motel in upstate New York. 

With her mother’s recent death and a love for true crime, Carly heads off to the little cursed town of Fell to investigate her aunt’s disappearance 30 years ago.

In a chilling timeline that jumps back and forth between Carly’s story in 2017 and her Aunt Viv’s in 1982, meet the unhappy ghosts at the Sun Down Motel. 

Smell the endless cigarette smoke, get locked in with the candy machine, and watch the drug deals and affairs go down while a young boy runs for the pool. 

Will Carly uncover the mystery of her aunt’s disappearance before getting caught up in a deadly tragedy of her own?

The Sun Down Motel is one of our favorite paranormal New York novels , and one that you will devour into the night…with all of the lights on and doors tightly shut.

If you like the My Favorite Murder podcast, the Ted Bundy Netflix series, or Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered , you’ll love The Sun Down Motel. Grab a copy of The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James .

Goodnight Beautiful by Amiee Molloy

One of the creepiest books set in New York, Goodnight Beautiful will make you want to go back and re-read the entire first half…

We got so tripped up on the twist, we kept re-reading the same few pages. That’s all we’ll say .

Kirkus Reviews named Molloy the “master of clever misdirection,” and you know from the start that something is about to go wrong. Will it be deadly?

Sexy playboy Sam Statler and his newlywed wife have just moved from fast-paced NYC to his small hometown in Chestnut Hill, NY to care for Sam’s ailing mother.

Sam is a pretty good therapist, and he and his wife love a little role-playing in and out of the bedroom.

We can’t say much more, but when Sam goes missing, everyone can’t help but wonder if he took his mother’s inheritance and ran. Or, is Sam lying hurt or even dead somewhere?

If unreliable narrators are your favorite, this heavily-set New York novel is for you. Goodnight Beautiful is full of shocking twists and turns.

You can also finish this one fairly quickly. Buy a copy of Goodnight Beautiful .

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

Are you craving an engrossing and provocative dark academia novel set in Upstate New York? Vladimir is a 2022 book release that will have your boozy book club talking for days.

It’s an age-old story: Our unnamed narrator’s husband sleeps with his younger students.

He is under investigation as the college hires a new but angsty power couple, one of whom is Vladimir.

With a keen sexual interest in Vladimir, the narrator plans one bizarre date at a secluded cabin that takes an even more unusual twist.

The slow-paced narrative promises to suspenseful propel readers forward in one of the best New York novels about sex and power set against age and academia.

Books set in New York don’t get any more deeply messed up and, dare we say, disgusting than this. John and his wife are truly detestable; yet, you cannot stop watching…or reading. Buy a copy of Vladimir .

The Change by Kirsten Miller

Craving New York novels with middle-aged, female protagonists? We most definitely were.

The Change is filled with strong and powerful women who aren’t afraid to talk about periods, sex, and menopause.

Laugh out loud with Nessa, Jo, and Harriet – all of whom have supernatural powers. Nessa can see the dead. Harriet is a witch, and Jo has fiery strength.

While on the beach in the rich, gated part of town, female teenage ghosts approach Nessa.

One of the young ghosts leads Nessa to her dead body, which is wrapped in a trash bag with a disturbingly neat bow.

The women work together to find the killer(s) and avenge these young women. Will the police take them seriously or are they in on it? Who can they lean on and trust?

And, can you get away with murder when you are rich? What does this say about the institutions that are supposed to protect us?

A novel that takes place in Long Island, New York, The Change will most appeal to witchy book lovers .

Find feminist themes of friendship, love, class, and careers. You’ll miss these ladies when the book is over.

We named The Change as one of the best novels of 2022 . Buy a copy of The Change .

Dava Shastri’s Last Day by Kirthana Ramisetti

One of the most thought-provoking and slow-burn books set in New York, Dava Shastri’s Last Day will have you thinking about the life you’ve led, the legacy you leave behind, and the sacrifices you’ve made to achieve that legacy.

Dava Shastri is indeed dying. Yet, she’s not dead yet as the news is reporting.

As her family sits in front of her on secluded Beatrix Island wondering why this is so, they quickly learn that Dava wants to see what the world is saying about her.

Rich, famous, and self-made, Dava has contributed so many wonderful things to the world and helped numerous people succeed.

Yet, as she reads her tributes, she’s shocked that the focus is on the bad. The news is filled with gossip and secrets, including an alleged love affair and a possible secret daughter.

Dava is complicated, imperfect, and utterly amazing, but will she and her children be able to recognize both the good and bad of her impact to reconcile their relationships before she passes away? Grab a copy of Dava Shastri’s Last Day .

YA Novels Set In New York

We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

Imagine crying your way through a novel on a Friday night. One of the best YA LGBTQ+ books set in New York (and also California ), don’t miss 2018 Printz award-winning novel, We Are Okay .

Perfect for new adults, LaCour’s emotional & poetic narrative will grab at your heart and never let go.

With poignant and finely examined themes of grief, mental health, and family, readers will appreciate the literary tie-ins as well as the complicated but heartfelt friendship between Marin and Mabel.

Who knew cereal bowls and paper snowflakes could be so affecting?

Mabel and Marin are best friends. An intimate night on the beach solidifies their love for each other, making them more than just friends.

When Marin’s grandfather doesn’t return from a walk on the beach, though, her life suddenly crumples. He was Marin’s only remaining family.

Marin flees to New York a month earlier than expected for college. Leaving without so much as a goodbye, Marin refuses to text back Mabel or clean up her grandfather’s messy secrets and mental illness.

Learning that her grandfather lied, Marin is hurt and orphaned. When Mabel shows up for a three-day visit around Christmas to try to reach her, Marin has to reconcile her loneliness, love, and a broken heart.

Those three days are incredibly powerful and will stay with us long after this book is closed.

For raw New York novels, We Are Okay will touch something in your soul.

The dual timelines add to the suspense of Marin’s future and provide insight into her healing process. Buy a copy of We Are Okay .

The Project by Courtney Summers

We devoured The Project as readers who are fascinated by shows like Kumare , Wild, Wild, Country , Bikram , and Waco . This is one of the best creepy YA New York novels about cults.

When their parents die in a horrific car accident, Lo’s sister Bea joins The Unity Project, a charitable organization that isn’t quite what it seems. Let’s be real. The Unity Project is a cult.

Can Lo expose the group for what they really are? Or, will she fall under its leader’s charm? Can she rescue her sister?

The ending threw us for a loop, and you’ll feel for both of the sisters and their ill-fated decisions.

The Project has strong themes of pain, loss, and community. Grab a copy of The Project .

New York City Novels

In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

Would you change your life’s course if you had one seemingly real dream or premonition about the future? Could you prevent what you saw or was that outcome always inevitable?

This other-worldly scenario greets Dannie Kohan, a lawyer who has planned out the perfect life ever since her brother died in a drunk driving accident.

On the night of Dannie’s calculated engagement, she falls asleep only to ‘see’ herself, 5 years in the future, in the arms of another man.

Oftentimes we can all appreciate a short novel that you can finish in half a day. We devoured In Five Years by Rebecca Serle in under four hours. This is by far one of our all-time favorite books set in New York City, too.

Plus, if you are looking for a friendship and love story, In Five Years will leave you in tears while having all of the feels.

This is not your average love story, either, making the relationships all the more precious and powerful. The ending of the book completely threw us off balance.

TUL named In Five Years as one of the best books of 2020 . This NYC book would be awesome for book clubs. Grab a copy of In Five Years .

The Lions Of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis

If you love libraries , literature, and feminism, don’t miss The Lions Of Fifth Avenue , one of our favorite historical fiction books about New York City and its gorgeous library.

In 1913, Laura Lyons and her husband are residing in the New York Public Library superintendent’s apartment. We are jealous .

Although Laura has a lovely family, she wants more for her life, including a career and higher education. She joins a radical women’s rights club and begins studying for a journalism degree.

Laura is knocked off her current course (and feet) when she meets another strong woman. At the same time, the NYPL’s most valuable books start disappearing. Is her family responsible?

With intricate and alternating timelines, in 1993, readers meet Laura’s granddaughter, Sadie. As rare materials once again go missing from the NYPL, Sadie must explore her family’s mysterious past.

Can Sadie save her job while overcoming her own self-imposed spinsterhood? Will Sadie learn from the past?

The Lions Of Fifth Avenue is an evocative historical NYC novel and book about books filled with brilliant women. We loved being transported to New York in both the early and late 1900s.

Thrilling, enraging, and full of passion, you’ll cheer for these women who desire independence and want to leave their mark on the world. Buy a copy of The Lions of Fifth Avenue .

Too Good To Be True By Carola Lovering

A thriller set across New England — CT and MA — as well as NYC, and one of our BOTM selections , we enjoyed Too Good To Be True far more than expected. This NYC book recommendation is especially fitting for Lisa Jewell fans.

Skye Starling has OCD and is worried that she will never meet the perfect husband. Then, Burke Michaels enters the scene and gives her everything she could ever want. It all happens so fast. Is it…too good to be true?

Unfortunately, Burke is…well…married to someone else and something truly sinister is lurking behind the scenes. We also get to know more about Burke and his wife, Heather, through journal entries.

Heather has been with Burke since they were teenagers, and let’s just say that her youth greatly influenced her present situation.

We loved the multiple plot twists throughout Too Good To Be True , and we certainly didn’t see all of the jaw-dropping surprises coming our way.

We also appreciated that the ending wasn’t as neat or as predictable as it could have been. Heather’s obsessions added extra dimension and edge to the story.

Lastly, the plethora of gray areas promise to engage readers. Too Good To Be True would make for a great book club book. Buy a copy of Too Good To Be True By Carola Lovering .

Take The Uncorked Reading Challenge!

Travel around the world with our Uncorked Reading Challenge. Never be late to the party with unique new book releases. Get the latest movie and book lists straight to your inbox.

Sex And Vanity By Kevin Kwan

For Crazy Rich Asian fans, Kwan is back at it with a standalone and A Room With A View retelling, Sex And Vanity .

Travel to the fancy and elitist Amalfi Coast as well as NYC.

Although not quite as character and family-building as his first series, Sex and Vanity promises excessive wealth, a couture rom-com, and quite a few laughs.

Lucie first meets George Zao during a wild wedding weekend in Capri. Chinese-born but raised in Australia, George’s mom is both envied for her wealth but also ostracized for her gaudy taste.

Lucie is a Churchill with pilgrim blood from her father and Chinese-American roots from her mother.

Although Lucie doesn’t like George, they are caught via drone in a comprising situation. She desperately wants and needs him.

Fast forward years later when Lucie is now engaged to new wealth and chump, Cecil. Cecil is a bit of a pompous, racist slug.

With their engagement on the fritz, it’s timely that George has moved to New York City to work on eco-friendly architecture.

Lucie must learn to love herself before she can pick her man.

Kwan immerses readers in pop culture references like Mary Berry and Moira Rose. The excessive imagery paired with themes of racism, ethnicity, and culture, make for a strong New York City novel. Lucie may be no Rachel, but her story is more about self-awareness and love.

Along with being a lascivious and lavish book set in NYC, you’ll also find this title on our favorite island books and Italy books reading lists. Buy a copy of Sex And Vanity .

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

You might recognize bestselling author Casey McQuiston from Red, White, & Royal Blue — one of our favorite LGBTQ+ books perfect for new adults .

Now, One Last Stop is one of the most talked-about New York City books of 2021.

Meet twenty-three-year-old August. August has jumped from school to school all over the U.S.

Not quite lost but not yet found, August is intelligent and way cooler than she thinks — but she’s also never been seriously romantically involved.

When August meets a beautiful and mysterious woman on the train, her entire life’s outlook changes. However, Jane looks a little punk-style old-fashioned and is always on the same train as August.

Come to find out, Jane’s from the 1970s and displaced in time. Can August help release Jane from the train’s energy? And if she does, is she losing the love of her life forever?

A feel-good, older coming-of-age story, laugh out loud and be utterly dazzled with this popular time travel romance . You’ll love the friendships and community August builds in New York City.

If the Su Special sounds absolutely delicious and you love books with restaurants, don’t miss our foodie fiction reading list . Grab a copy of One Last Stop .

People We Meet On Vacation by Emily Henry

We debated putting People We Meet On Vacation on our New York books reading list, but parts of the novel do indeed take place in New York City.

In fact, working in NYC is part of the motivation behind Poppy’s career and life crisis. This title is also heavily set in Palm Springs, CA, and will transport you around the world for those tropical luxury vacations.

Travel bloggers can also appreciate that Poppy works for a travel magazine. While she has everything that she could ever want — paid for travel to beautiful and coveted destinations — Poppy isn’t happy.

Uninspired and heartbroken, Poppy’s struggling to write about exhilarating vacations. The fallout with her best friend and vacation buddy, Alex, does not help.

Find laugh-out-loud moments but also a somewhat tedious countdown over the years. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

The terrible AC in Palm Springs and meeting different people from around the world will engage you. Poppy’s boss is our hero.

One of the most talked-about summer NYC books of 2021 , we didn’t absolutely love People We Meet On Vacation as much as others. We are grumpy readers sometimes. However, we can appreciate that our readers adored this novel. We also loved Henry’s Beach Read — maybe we set the bar high. For a fun read about travel, why not, though. Grab your copy of People We Meet On Vacation .

Confessions On The 7:45 by Lisa Unger

Imagine meeting a stranger on a train who could forever change your life — and not in a good way.

Maybe sharing that nip started as an innocent gesture but the next thing you know, someone ends up missing…or dead. Clearly, Selena never read Highsmith.

If you enjoy surface-level train thrillers and fast-paced mysteries, Unger’s Confessions On The 7:45 will have you on edge wondering who is in charge here.

Similar to Pretty Little Wife by Darby Kane and inspired by Highsmith’s Strangers On A Train , Selena catches her husband sleeping with the nanny. She confesses this to a random train commuter. With the nanny now missing, who is responsible?

Something darker is at play. In the end, you’ll doubt your own ethics. This is one of the most chilling New York novels on this reading list. Buy a copy of Confessions On The 7:45 .

Happy & You Know It by Laura Hankin

Another Book Of The Month selection , Happy & You Know It is not our usual type of reading.

However, one of the most hilarious and relevant Instagram books set in New York City, watch as a rich mommy playgroup falls apart over affairs, Instagram, and… vitamins !?

Kicked out of her now-infamous band, Claire is broke and in desperate need of a job. Any job.

When the beautiful and seemingly perfect mom Instagrammer, Whitney, offers Claire a generous salary to play children’s songs for a tight playgroup, Claire immediately says yes.

Despite feeling like the hired help, Claire adores the playgroup and their children, even though she has nothing in common with them.

The closer they get, though, the more Claire realizes that their worlds are not so picture-perfect…

We appreciate the women’s relationships, worries, and growth as a light and humorous New York book. Plus, for fictional books about musicians , you cannot go wrong.

Happy & You Know It is captivating and fun, especially if you enjoy friendship novels . Grab a copy of Happy & You Know It .

The Most Beautiful Girl In Cuba by Chanel Cleeton

Chanel Cleeton is a goddess of historical fiction. Here at TUL, we gobbled up Cleeton’s The Last Train To Key West .

One of the most-anticipated 2021 books set in NYC and Cuba, The Most Beautiful Girl In Cuba is based on the true events and life of Evangelina Cisneros, a falsely accused Cuban prisoner.

Cisneros became a political symbol of the Cuban War of Independence. The story follows three women fighting for liberation in the late 1800s.

The competition between the newspapers, their values, women’s roles, and the importance of the media, especially relevant today, added depth to the plot.

Readers will witness the contradictions of the Gilded Age set against revolution. We championed the feminist tones and romances.

You’ll also learn much more about Cuban independence from the Spanish. Buy a copy of The Most Beautiful Girl In Cuba by Chanel Cleeton .

The Lies That Bind by Emily Giffin

For books about New York City and 9/11, Giffin was one of the first authors to create a fictional story capturing this horrific day and its aftermath.

In The Lies That Bind , Cecily Gardner wants to call her ex-boyfriend, Matthew. A mysterious and handsome man at the bar intervenes and tells her not to.

Over the course of drinks and meaningful conversation, they snuggle in under the sheets together. However, Cecily doesn’t even know his name.

Grant is a trader with a twin brother suffering from ALS. As Cecily falls for Grant, he tragically goes missing during 9/11, having worked in one of the Towers.

When Cecily sees Grant’s face on a missing person poster, a phone call changes Cecily’s current reality.

Encounter a spiderweb of lies and emotions. Giffin questions how we untangle deception and if the truth will really set us free.

Can we forgive and see our own imperfections? Is love still love even if it is grounded in lies? Is love ever pure? Grab a copy of The Lies That Bind .

Well-Behaved Indian Women by Saumya Dave

Simran is studying for a Master’s degree in psychology even though she dreams of pursuing journalism. Engaged to her high school sweetheart, she is also gearing up for a gossipy and large Indian wedding.

Filled with self-doubt, Simran meets her favorite writing idol. When she ends up kissing him, she realizes that she isn’t being true to herself.

Plus, her own mother, Nandini, is struggling within the confines of an arranged marriage and discriminatory career.

In India, Simran’s grandmother is working to change the oppressive and sexist educational system in an impoverished community.

All three women fight hard for their families, communities, and professions while trying to maintain a strong sense of selfhood. Not to mention they are battling sexism, racism, and prejudices.

Well-Behaved Indian Women is one of the most inspiring and beautiful slow-burn, multigenerational family books set in New York City. Find strong messaging and characters that resonate deeply within you.

The commendable ending truly emphasizes the women. Even more relevant today, Nandini’s struggles exemplify institutional white privilege. Grab a copy of Well-Behaved Indian Women .

Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

Find one of the first mainstream books set in NYC to address the recent global pandemic. Please know that this may be triggering for some.

On a lighter note, if you enjoy island-set books , you will also travel to the Galápagos.

Diana’s surgical resident partner, Finn, convinces Diana to take their vacation to Ecuador while he stays behind to battle the virus. No one realizes how serious things are about to get.

Diana arrives just as Isabela Island shuts down, and thankfully, a local grandmother adopts her. Diana doesn’t speak the language and nothing is open.

Falling into relaxing island life and getting to know the locals, including a young woman who self-harms, Diana reevaluates her current Type A life plan. She stops being a tourista too.

Diana will never leave the island as the same person — although beware of the enormous plot twist.

True to Picoult, find an edgy discussion about pandemic ‘politics’ and its devastating effects on hospitals and staff. Picoult also addresses themes of mental health, family, and the role of science.

Lastly, Picoult promises a book that will transport you to the Galápagos Islands . Swim with the sea lions and spy flamingos in pink lagoons. Read Wish You Were Here .

How To Marry Keanu Reeves In 90 Days by K.M. Jackson

For newer and hilarious rom-com books set in New York City, Bethany Lu Carlisle will have you chasing Keanu Reeves and his look-alikes all over NYC and LA. This is a feel-good, laugh-out-loud novel.

When Lu discovers that her lifelong crush, Keanu Reeves, is getting married in 90 days, her world implodes. He’s supposed to stay sexy, single, and gainfully employed forever.

On top of this heartbreaking news, as a talented artist, Lu is letting a lucrative and much-needed job offer sit on the table. The company isn’t quite letting Lu be herself, and she questions their approach.

Determined to stop Keanu Reeves from the biggest mistake of his life, Lu and her best guy friend non-creepily stalk Reeves. Tru has the hookups, but he also has another agenda.

Both Tru and Lu have unspoken fears as well as longtime crushes on each other. Can Lu prevent the future while letting go of the past? Grab your copy of How To Marry Keanu Reeves In 90 Days .

The Cloisters by Katy Hays

Fans of atmospheric dark academia novels will feel the heat of the summer – and the pressure of the academic world – in The Cloisters .

Ann heads to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in hopes that her summer job will prove her worthiness in the elite academic world.

However, when the position is no longer available, The Cloisters’ suspicious staff eagerly adopt her. We soon learn that everyone is out for themselves and will do anything to shine in the spotlight.

What will Ann sacrifice, and will she survive?

Is her fate already written in the tarot cards she’s researching?

New York City novels don’t get any more deadly or gripping than this. Grab your copy of The Cloisters .

YA Books Set In New York City

Everywhere, Always by Jennifer Ann Shore

If you are looking for feel-good YA indie books set in NYC that will make your eyes misty, pick up Everywhere, Always .

You know that we love Jennifer Ann Shore for New Wave , In The Now , The Extended Summer of Anna and Jeremy , and Metallic Red .

As Avery overcomes the tragic loss of her mother, she finds herself suddenly gaining an entirely new family and life. You may think that you already know this story — where fitting in is hard and her stepmother and siblings are evil.

However, Shore shakes this old narrative into something much more fulfilling and kind. What a beautiful surprise.

Watch as Avery navigates the streets of NYC while her new world both adopts and fully embraces her. You’ll want to hug each and every character as they guide Avery to find herself, peace, and love.

Funny yet deeply touching, this is our favorite YA book and coming-of-age story by Shore so far. Buy a copy of Everywhere Always by Jennifer Ann Shore .

Anna K by Jenny Lee

If you are looking for the YA version of Kevin Kwan (with more drinking and drugs), you’ll love this over-the-top romance written in honor of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina , Anna K . Can you tell that we love New York City novels that are classic retellings, too?

Add in a little Gossip Girl, and I am sure that conservative parents are going to be a little less than pleased with this one. Plus, if you watch Riverdale , this New York City book is for you.

Like Anna Karenina , Anna K. is long, alludes to many of Tolstoy’s characters and their tragedies, and references Tolstoy himself.

How you tie Tolstoy into a Kim Kardashian-like sex tape is beyond us, but we are here for it. Plus, Lee addresses drug addiction, mental illness, and dysfunctional families.

Lee also tours readers through high society NYC teenage life. Explore love triangles, bad and good parenting, and teenage romance.

Anna K is your everywoman, and we hope that you fall for her story as much as we did. Grab your copy of Anna K .

The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

Back in our public library days, we read The Sun Is Also A Star with our teen book club. Everyone was instantly hooked on Yoon, who you might remember from Everything, Everything .

Both a National Book Award Finalist and Michael L. Printz Honor Book, this is one of our top YA New York novels for teens because it is heartwarming yet addresses harder and real immigration issues.

Over the course of one day in New York City, Natasha and Daniel get to know and fall for each other. Daniel is heading to a college interview that he promised his family.

Meanwhile, Natasha’s family is about to be immediately deported to Jamaica. Told in alternating storylines, we watch as their lives keep coming together. Buy a copy of The Sun Is Also A Star .

Follow a blogger who takes literary dates across NYC:

One of our favorite and beloved bloggers, Lauren, has an entire blog with NYC books and literary dates that follow the plots of their stories. Check out Lauren’s website, Literary Dates , to travel “from page to place” with books set in New York City. We know you’ll love her hilarious voice and creative bookish dates.

More Most-Talked-About New York Novels In Our TBR Pile:

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan (we watched the TV series)

City Of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern – also on our Dark Academia Book List

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi – also on our sisters reading list

Save Your Favorite New York Novels For Later

Snag your favorite New York novels here:

What New York City books do you love? What are your favorite books set in New York?

While there are tons of classic books set in New York City, what are your favorite contemporary books? Which books set in New York have transported you there?

Lastly, have you read any of the New York novels above? Which ones did you love? Not love? Let us know in the comments.

P.S. If you love books set in big cities, don’t miss these books set in Los Angeles, CA (and more).

Big City Book Lists

Rome – Ancient & Modern Day Books About London Paris Books

More Books Across America Reading Lists To Love:

Best Books In Every State Books Set In MA Books About Salem, MA & The Witch Trials North American Reading Guide

Christine Frascarelli

I love this list. In fact I love New York City (and State) fiction, I wrote a romantic legal thriller and its sequel. The first is deeply rooted in lower Manhattan and the second is deeply rooted in Westchester County. it’s so easy to do this, because Manhattan is like another character; it’s such a rich tapestry it definitely makes for more than a “backdrop.” Thank you for this list.

Thank you so much, Dawn!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• New York Times Best Sellers

Audio Fiction

• Audio Nonfiction

First Lie Wins

• By: Ashley Elston
• Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
• Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 9,390
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 9,099
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 9,097

Evie Porter has everything a nice, Southern girl could want: a perfect, doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence and a garden, a fancy group of friends. The only catch: Evie Porter doesn’t exist....

• 5 out of 5 stars

What’s The lie?

• By Luke Schafer on 01-13-24

1. First Lie Wins

• Release date: 01-02-24
• Language: English
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 9,390 ratings

Failed to add items

Add to cart failed., add to wish list failed., remove from wishlist failed., adding to library failed, follow podcast failed, unfollow podcast failed.

Regular price: $20.25 or 1 credit

Sale price: $20.25 or 1 credit

House of Flame and Shadow

• Crescent City, Book 3
• By: Sarah J. Maas
• Narrated by: Elizabeth Evans
• Length: 29 hrs and 42 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 9,258
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 9,049
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 9,048

Bryce Quinlan never expected to see a world other than Midgard, but now that she has, all she wants is to get back. Everything she loves is in Midgard: her family, her friends, her mate. Stranded in a strange new world, she's going to need all her wits about her to get home again....

Amazing story

• By 📚Erin 📚 on 02-08-24

2. House of Flame and Shadow

• Series: Crescent City , Book 3
• Release date: 01-30-24
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 9,258 ratings

Regular price: $49.95 or 1 credit

Sale price: $49.95 or 1 credit

Fourth Wing

• Empyrean, Book 1
• By: Rebecca Yarros
• Narrated by: Rebecca Soler, Teddy Hamilton
• Length: 21 hrs and 22 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 27,855
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 26,002
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 26,006

Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders from USA Today bestselling author Rebecca Yarros....

• 3 out of 5 stars

Erotica with Dragons

• By Trev on 05-13-23

3. Fourth Wing

• Narrated by: Rebecca Soler , Teddy Hamilton
• Series: Empyrean , Book 1
• Release date: 05-02-23
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 27,855 ratings

Regular price: $25.79 or 1 credit

Sale price: $25.79 or 1 credit

• Empyrean, Book 2
• Length: 28 hrs and 16 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 17,386
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 16,486
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 16,483

Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College―Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky....

• 2 out of 5 stars

I wish I could throw this book off a cliff.

• By Rebekah L Johnson on 11-10-23

4. Iron Flame

• Series: Empyrean , Book 2
• Release date: 11-07-23
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 17,386 ratings

Regular price: $30.09 or 1 credit

Sale price: $30.09 or 1 credit

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

• By: James McBride
• Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
• Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 5,683
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 5,352
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 5,351

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well....

Multiple Stories Obfuscate Narrative

• By Stephnsea on 08-12-23

5. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

• Release date: 08-08-23
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 5,683 ratings

Regular price: $22.50 or 1 credit

Sale price: $22.50 or 1 credit

• By: Ann Patchett
• Narrated by: Meryl Streep
• Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 11,093
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 10,375
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 10,362

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake....

• 1 out of 5 stars

So incredibly boring

• By Rhonda Morrison on 08-05-23

6. Tom Lake

• Release date: 08-01-23
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 11,093 ratings

Regular price: $24.29 or 1 credit

Sale price: $24.29 or 1 credit

None of This Is True

• By: Lisa Jewell
• Narrated by: Kristin Atherton, Ayesha Antoine, Louise Brealey, and others
• Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 7,627
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 7,005
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 6,997

Lisa Jewell returns with a scintillating new psychological thriller about a woman who finds herself the subject of her own popular true crime podcast....

Victim shaming a teen girl?

• By Lisa & Travis on 08-11-23

7. None of This Is True

• Narrated by: Kristin Atherton , Ayesha Antoine , Louise Brealey , Alix Dunmore , Elliot Fitzpatrick , Lisa Jewell , Thomas Judd , Dominic Thorburn , Nicola Walker , Jenny Walser
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 7,627 ratings

Regular price: $18.74 or 1 credit

Sale price: $18.74 or 1 credit

House of Earth and Blood

• Crescent City, Book 1
• Length: 27 hrs and 50 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 29,385
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 26,561
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 26,478

The bestselling author invites listeners into a new fantasy world with a half-human, half-Fae heroine seeking revenge.

What a disappointment

• By Hollie Morales on 03-09-20

8. House of Earth and Blood

• Series: Crescent City , Book 1
• Release date: 03-03-20
• 5 out of 5 stars 29,385 ratings

Remarkably Bright Creatures

• By: Shelby Van Pelt
• Narrated by: Marin Ireland, Michael Urie
• Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 37,509
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 34,120
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 34,043

After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up....

Hidden gem, incredible narration!

• By Christine T on 05-17-22

9. Remarkably Bright Creatures

• Narrated by: Marin Ireland , Michael Urie
• Release date: 05-03-22
• 5 out of 5 stars 37,509 ratings

Regular price: $25.19 or 1 credit

Sale price: $25.19 or 1 credit

Lessons in Chemistry

• By: Bonnie Garmus
• Narrated by: Miranda Raison, Bonnie Garmus, Pandora Sykes
• Length: 11 hrs and 55 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 32,483
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 28,594
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 28,520

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one....

Making my 3 adult daughters read this

• By Teresa H. on 04-07-22

10. Lessons in Chemistry

• Narrated by: Miranda Raison , Bonnie Garmus , Pandora Sykes
• Release date: 04-05-22
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 32,483 ratings

House of Sky and Breath

• Crescent City, Book 2
• Length: 27 hrs and 42 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 20,468
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 18,500
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 18,432

In this second installment in the Crescent City series, Bryce and Hunt are pulled into a battle between the rebels and the Asteri.

20 hr prologue to 7 hr book and 1 hr not-finale

• By 🔥 Phx17 🔥 on 02-20-22

11. House of Sky and Breath

• Series: Crescent City , Book 2
• Release date: 02-15-22
• 5 out of 5 stars 20,468 ratings

Random in Death

• An Eve Dallas Novel
• By: J. D. Robb
• Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
• Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 1,699
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 1,606
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,603

In the new crime thriller from #1 New York Times -bestselling J.D. Robb, a small and easily concealed weapon wreaks havoc, and the killer is just a face in the crowd....

Great narration, meh book

• By amcoll on 01-26-24

12. Random in Death

• Series: In Death , Book 58
• Release date: 01-23-24
• 5 out of 5 stars 1,699 ratings

Regular price: $20.24 or 1 credit

Sale price: $20.24 or 1 credit

The Covenant of Water

• By: Abraham Verghese
• Narrated by: Abraham Verghese
• Length: 31 hrs and 16 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 6,157
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 5,388
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 5,377

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere....

Story Telling At Its Best

• By Regina on 05-06-23

13. The Covenant of Water

• 4.5 out of 5 stars 6,157 ratings

Demon Copperhead

• By: Barbara Kingsolver
• Narrated by: Charlie Thurston
• Length: 21 hrs and 3 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 22,546
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 20,380
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 20,313

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival....

Wow! It’s a Masterpiece

• By Billy on 10-25-22

14. Demon Copperhead

• Release date: 10-18-22
• 5 out of 5 stars 22,546 ratings

Regular price: $40.49 or 1 credit

Sale price: $40.49 or 1 credit

A Court of Silver Flames (2 of 2) (Dramatized Adaptation)

• A Court of Thorns and Roses, Book 5
• Narrated by: Colleen Delany, Shawn K. Jain, Wyn Delano, and others
• Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
• Original Recording
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 269
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 208
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 208

Nesta Archeron has always been prickly-proud, swift to anger, and slow to forgive. And ever since being forced into the Cauldron and becoming High Fae against her will, she's struggled to find a place for herself within the strange, deadly world she inhabits....

Already loved the book

• By Jason on 11-02-23

15. A Court of Silver Flames (2 of 2) (Dramatized Adaptation)

• Narrated by: Colleen Delany , Shawn K. Jain , Wyn Delano , Natalie Van Sistine , Jon Vertullo , Aure Nash , Renee Dorian , Anthony Palmini , Melody Muze , Nora Achrati , Matthew Bassett
• Series: A Court of Thorns and Roses , Book 5 part 2, Dramatized Adaptation
• Release date: 10-30-23
• 5 out of 5 stars 269 ratings
• Help Center
• Redeem promo code
• About Audible
• Business Inquiries
• Audible in the News
• Accessibility
• ACX for Creators
• Bestsellers
• New releases
• Non-English Audiobooks
• Latino & Hispanic Voices
• Audible in Chinese
• How to listen
• Listen on Apple Devices
• Listen in the car
• Whispersync for Voice

• The New York Times® Best Sellers

For the week of March 31, 2024

Hardcover Fiction best sellers

Popular in Books

• Award Winners
• Editors' Picks
• Best Sellers and More
• Amazon Book Review Blog

Combined Print & E-Book Fiction best sellers

Trade Paperback Fiction best sellers

Hardcover Nonfiction best sellers

Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction best sellers

Paperback Nonfiction best sellers

Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous best sellers

Young Adult Hardcover best sellers

Children's Middle Grade Hardcover best sellers

Children's picture books

Children's Series best sellers

The New York Times® is a registered trademark of The New York Times Company, which is not affiliated with and does not sponsor or endorse the services of Amazon.com.

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Start Selling with Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023

Always books. Never boring.

View All posts by Community

Our cup runneth over with best books lists right now, and The New Yorker’s best books of 2023 is one of the latest lists to emerge. Funnily enough, no matter how many of these kinds of lists we read, it’s always interesting to see another — to note the overlap between lists, see books that perhaps hadn’t gotten a lot of buzz this year, and to read each publication’s editors’ notes.

So let’s dive in. This year, The New Yorker divided its list into three categories: The Essentials, Nonfiction, and Fiction & Poetry.

The Essentials

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan)

Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster)

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove)

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (Melville)

Fiction & Poetry

The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey (Knopf)

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi (Gillian Flynn)

For a full list of The New Yorker’s best books of 2023, click here .

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in  Breaking in Books .

You Might Also Like

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Cash-strapped Trump is now selling $60 Bibles, U.S. Constitution included

Rachel Treisman

Then-President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., during a controversial 2020 photo-op. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Then-President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., during a controversial 2020 photo-op.

Former President Donald Trump is bringing together church and state in a gilded package for his latest venture, a $60 "God Bless The USA" Bible complete with copies of the nation's founding documents.

Trump announced the launch of the leather-bound, large-print, King James Bible in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday — a day after the social media company surged in its trading debut and two days after a New York appeals court extended his bond deadline to comply with a ruling in a civil fraud case and slashed the bond amount by 61%.

"Happy Holy Week! Let's Make America Pray Again," Trump wrote. "As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible."

Consider This from NPR

Why trump's persecution narrative resonates with christian supporters.

The Bible is inspired by "God Bless the USA," the patriotic Lee Greenwood anthem that has been a fixture at many a Trump rally (and has a long political history dating back to Ronald Reagan). It is the only Bible endorsed by Trump as well as Greenwood, according to its promotional website .

The Bible is only available online and sells for $59.99 (considerably more expensive than the traditional Bibles sold at major retailers, or those available for free at many churches and hotels). It includes Greenwood's handwritten chorus of its titular song as well as copies of historical documents including the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Pledge of Allegiance.

"Many of you have never read them and don't know the liberties and rights you have as Americans, and how you are being threatened to lose those rights," Trump said in a three-minute video advertisement.

"Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country, and I truly believe that we need to bring them back and we have to bring them back fast."

'You gotta be tough': White evangelicals remain enthusiastic about Donald Trump

Trump critics on both sides of the aisle quickly criticized the product, characterizing it as self-serving and hypocritical.

Conservative political commentator Charlie Sykes slammed him for "commodifying the Bible during Holy Week," while Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota critiqued him for "literally taking a holy book and selling it, and putting it out there in order to make money for his campaign."

Trump says the money isn't going to his campaign, but more on that below.

Klobuchar added that Trump's public attacks on others are "not consistent with the teachings of the Bible," calling this "one more moment of hypocrisy." Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser for anti-Trump Republican PAC the Lincoln Project, called it "blasphemous ."

And former Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, trolled Trump with a social media post alluding to his alleged extramarital affairs.

"Happy Holy Week, Donald," she wrote. "Instead of selling Bibles, you should probably buy one. And read it, including Exodus 20:14 ."

Christianity is an increasingly prominent part of his campaign

Trump has made a point of cultivating Christian supporters since his 2016 presidential campaign and remains popular with white evangelicals despite his multiple divorces, insults toward marginalized groups and allegations of extramarital affairs and sexual assault.

And his narrative of being persecuted — including in the courts — appears to resonate with his many Christian supporters.

Trump has increasingly embraced Christian nationalist ideas in public. He promised a convention of religious broadcasters last month that he would use a second term to defend Christian values from the "radical left," swearing that "no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration."

He made similar comments in the Bible promotional video, in which he warned that "Christians are under siege" and the country is "going haywire" because it lost religion.

What to know about the debut of Trump's $399 golden, high-top sneakers

"We must defend God in the public square and not allow the media or the left-wing groups to silence, censor or discriminate against us," he said. "We have to bring Christianity back into our lives and back into what will be again a great nation."

Trump himself is not known to be particularly religious or a regular churchgoer. He long identified as Presbyterian but announced in 2020 that he identified as nondenominational .

A Pew Research Center survey released earlier this month found that most people with positive views of Trump don't see him as especially religious, but think he stands up for people with religious beliefs like their own.

Trump said in the promotional video that he has many Bibles at home.

"It's my favorite book," he said, echoing a comment he's made in previous years. "It's a lot of people's favorite book."

The Impact Of Christian Nationalism On American Democracy

Trump's relationship to the Bible has been a point of discussion and sometimes controversy over the years.

In 2020, amid protests over George Floyd's murder, he posed with a Bible outside a Washington, D.C., church, for which he was widely criticized. U.S. Park Police and National Guard troops had tear-gassed peaceful protesters in the area beforehand, seemingly to make way for the photo-op, though a watchdog report the following year determined otherwise .

That same year, a clip of a 2015 Bloomberg interview, in which Trump declines to name his favorite — or any — Bible verse resurfaced on social media and went viral.

Bible sales are unlikely to solve Trump's financial problems

An FAQ section on the Bible website says no profits will go to Trump's reelection campaign.

"GodBlessTheUSABible.com is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign," it says.

However, the site adds that it uses Trump's name, likeness and image "under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC."

Trump is listed as the manager, president, secretary and treasurer of CIC Ventures LLC in a financial disclosure from last year.

Here's what happens if Trump can't pay his $454 million bond

Trump's sales pitch focuses on bringing religion back to America.

"I want to have a lot of people have it," he said at one point in the video. "You have to have it for your heart and for your soul."

But many are wondering whether Trump has something else to gain from Bible sales while facing under mounting financial pressure.

There's his presidential reelection campaign, which has raised only about half of what Biden's has so far this cycle. Trump acknowledged Monday that he "might" spend his own money on his campaign, something he hasn't done since 2016.

There's also his mounting legal expenses, as he faces four criminal indictments and numerous civil cases. Trump posted bond to support a $83.3 million jury award granted to writer E. Jean Carroll in a defamation case earlier this month, and was due to put up another $454 million in a civil fraud case this past Monday.

Trump is on the verge of a windfall of billions of dollars. Here are 3 things to know

His lawyers had said last week that they had approached 30 companies for help making bond, but doing so was a "practical impossibility" — prompting New York's attorney general to confirm that if Trump did not pay, she would move to seize his assets . On Monday, the appeals court reduced the bond amount to $175 million and gave Trump another 10 days to post it.

Trump has evidently been trying to raise money in other ways.

The day after the civil fraud judgment was announced, he debuted a line of $399 golden, high-top sneakers , which sold out in hours . The company behind his social media app, Truth Social, started trading on the Nasdaq exchange on Tuesday, which could deliver him a windfall of more than $3 billion — though he can't sell his shares for another six months.

• Donald J. Trump
• sales pitch
• Christianity

New York judge says FDNY booing of Letitia James, pro-Trump chants not about politics, 'has to do with race'

B rooklyn Federal Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis reportedly cited the incident involving members of the New York City Fire Department booing state Attorney General Letitia James and chanting in favor of former President Trump last month in suggesting that a racist culture persists at the FDNY. 

Garaufis recently ordered FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh and the city’s Corporation Counsel, Sylvia Hinds-Radix, to appear before him at a status conference scheduled to discuss the settlement in the Vulcan Society of Black firefighters’ case against the FDNY in May, the New York Daily News reported. 

At the last status conference on March 14, Vulcan Society President Regina Wilson complained to Garaufis about a March 8 incident where some members of the FDNY booed James and chanted "Trump! Trump! Trump!" as the attorney general took the stage during a promotion ceremony at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn. 

It happened weeks after Trump was also found liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages in the civil fraud case brought against him, his family and the Trump Organization by James. 

"I don’t know if you had an opportunity to just see the vile nature of these members even when we were at Christian Cultural Center where they started booing and saying ‘Trump, Trump Trump,’ while Letitia James was at the podium," Wilson said, referencing the incident that sparked an internal probe and prompted Kavanaugh to apologize. "This behavior is who this department is. Not all of them, but a large portion of them. So when Black people go to work and have to deal with this and you don’t get any help or support really from the department, it’s horrific." 

FDNY REVERSES COURSE ON 'HUNT' FOR FIREFIGHTERS WHO BOOED LETITIA JAMES, CHEERED DONALD TRUMP

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

"Get the EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] office straightened out. Take some of your brilliant lawyers from the Corporation Counsel and put them in there and start holding hearings. That’s not a request, that’s a direction," Garaufis responded, according to N.Y. Daily News. "I’ve lived in New York City all my life. I know what the problem is. And believe me, front and center is what happened the other day. This doesn’t have to do with politics, this has to do with race."

The Vulcan Society accused the city of discrimination in a 2007 lawsuit, which the city agreed to settle for $98 million in back pay and benefits for aspiring minority firefighters in 2014. 

While the case was still ongoing in 2011, Garaufis ruled that firefighter exams intentionally discriminated against Black people, according to the Daily News. A federal appeals court later overturned that conclusion but allowed Garaufis’ proposed solutions, including the appointment of a federal monitor, to stand. 

Wilson has long lamented about a backlog of EEO complaints, which are supposed to be fully investigated within 90 days, according to city policy. 

At last month’s hearing, FDNY officials argued the department has just half the investigative attorneys on staff compared to the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic . They said EEO cases are being assigned to lawyers in other FDNY bureaus and to the Law Department while the FDNY works to hire more people to combat address the shortage. 

FDNY ‘LOOKING INTO’ STAFF WHO BOOED NY AG LETITIA JAMES, CHEERED FOR TRUMP AT CEREMONY

"You have 900 lawyers sitting doing other things in the Corporation Counsel’s office and lawyers all over the city government. Put them on detail, they already work for you, and do it. One hundred eighty days is not acceptable," Garaufis said. "And I want the commissioner here at the next meeting."

"I don’t know what she’s doing, but she’s not working on this. And she’s a former judge. I doubt she’d be too happy about having her orders ignored and her instructions ignored," Garaufis added of Hinds-Radix. 

"Commissioner Kavanagh and the FDNY is committed to providing a professional work environment free of discrimination and harassment for all Department employees, which is why we continue to work with our city partners so we can effectively re-staff the EEO office ," FDNY spokesman James Long said, according to the Daily News. 

He reportedly added that FDNY top brass are "having ongoing conversations with our members about decorum during department events."

CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"The FDNY takes every EEO complaint seriously, diligently investigates each complaint, and is committed to addressing the complaint backlog," Law Department spokesman Nicholas Paolucci told the newspaper. "The court has previously expressed appreciation for the Corporation Counsel’s active engagement in finding solutions in the past, and continued to acknowledge that a lot of the city’s efforts have been done well. We’ll be updating the court on how we plan to further assist the FDNY EEO Office."

Original article source: New York judge says FDNY booing of Letitia James, pro-Trump chants not about politics, 'has to do with race'

Advertisement

New york knicks at miami heat odds, picks and predictions, share this article.

The  New York Knicks   (44-30) square off against the Miami Heat (41-33) Tuesday with tip-off from Kaseya Center set for 7:30 p.m. ET. Let’s analyze BetMGM Sportsbook’s lines around the Knicks vs. Heat odds and make our expert NBA picks and predictions .

Season series: Knicks lead 2-0

The Knicks are coming off a heartbreaking 113-112 home loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder Sunday. G Jalen Brunson followed up his 61-point performance with 30. Knicks not named Brunson shot just 9-for-32 (28%) from 3-point land in the Sunday defeat. The Knicks remain in 4th place, a half-game behind the Cleveland Cavaliers in the East. They’re 7-3 over the last 10.

The Heat are in the top Play-In Tournament spot at 7th and trail the Indiana Pacers for 6th by a game. They’re coming off convincing, 142-82 and 119-107 wins over the Portland Trail Blazers and Washington Wizards. In the Wiz game Sunday, C Bam Adebayo had 22 points, 10 boards and 5 assists.

Knicks at Heat odds

Provided by BetMGM Sportsbook ; access USA TODAY Sports Scores and Sports Betting Odds hub for a full list. Lines last updated at 12:06 p.m. ET.

• Moneyline (ML) : Knicks +125 (bet $100 to win $125) | Heat -150 (bet $150 to win $100)
• Against the spread (ATS) : Knicks +2.5 (-105) | Heat -2.5 (-115)
• Over/Under (O/U) : 206.5 (O: -110 | U: -110)

Knicks at Heat key injuries

• F OG Anunoby   (elbow) out
• F Julius Randle (shoulder) out
• C Mitchell Robinson (ankle) questionable
• G Tyler Herro (foot) out
• G Caleb Martin (ankle) questionable
• F Duncan Robinson (back) questionable
• G Terry Rozier (knee) probable

For most recent updates: Official NBA injury report .

Play our free daily Pick’em Challenge and win! Play now !

Knicks at Heat and predictions

Heat 111, Knicks 106

The Knicks are 2-0 against the Heat this season, but both games were at MSG. The teams are an even 5-5 over the last 10 meetings, but Miami has won all 4 at home. I look for Miami to make it 5 in a row, and it’s not priced out of our pocket yet.

You can take HEAT -150 or look to the spread.

Against the spread

Each Heat win in Miami in this 10-game window has been by 4+ points. This 2.5-point window is right at my limit that I’d lay on the spread. F Jimmy Butler has kind of been on cruise control, averaging 14.2 PPG while shooting 45.4% (15-for-33) during the stretch. I’d look for him to ramp it up Tuesday night.

Take the HEAT -2.5 (-115) .

This is a smaller total than I envisioned at 1st glance. The Heat are 4-6 O/U over the last 10, and the Knicks are 6-4. This is the 2nd-lowest total in this matchup in the last 10 meetings.

Take the OVER 206.5 (-110) .

For more sports betting picks and tips , check out SportsbookWire.com and BetFTW .

Follow Ryan Dodson on Twitter/X . Follow SportsbookWire on Twitter/X and like us on Facebook .

Access more NBA coverage: HoopsHype | Bulls Wire | Celtics Wire | Nets Wire  |  Rockets Wire  |  Sixers Wire  |  Spurs Wire  |  Thunder Wire  |  Warriors Wire  | LeBron Wire |  Rookie Wire  |  List Wire

Like this article?

Sign up for our newsletter to get updates to your inbox, and also receive offers from us, our affiliates and partners. By signing up you agree to our Privacy Policy

More NBA Picks and Predictions

San antonio spurs at denver nuggets odds, picks and predictions, houston rockets at minnesota timberwolves odds, picks and predictions, nba betting promos & bonuses | best nba betting sites & odds for tuesday, april 2.

Gannett may earn revenue from sports betting operators for audience referrals to betting services. Sports betting operators have no influence over nor are any such revenues in any way dependent on or linked to the newsrooms or news coverage. Terms apply, see operator site for Terms and Conditions. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, help is available. Call the National Council on Problem Gambling 24/7 at 1-800-GAMBLER (NJ, OH), 1-800-522-4700 (CO), 1-800-BETS-OFF (IA), 1-800-9-WITH-IT (IN). Must be 21 or older to gamble. Sports betting and gambling are not legal in all locations. Be sure to comply with laws applicable where you reside.

Oklahoma City Thunder at Philadelphia 76ers odds, picks and predictions

Los Angeles Lakers at Toronto Raptors odds, picks and predictions

Texas Rangers at Tampa Bay Rays odds, picks and predictions

Sports betting resources.

Sports Scores and Odds Hub Sports Betting Legality Map Parlay Calculator

Most Popular

Phoenix suns at new orleans pelicans odds, picks and predictions, atlanta hawks at chicago bulls odds, picks and predictions, san francisco giants at los angeles dodgers odds, picks and predictions, cincinnati reds at philadelphia phillies odds, picks and predictions, new york yankees at arizona diamondbacks odds, picks and predictions, brooklyn nets at indiana pacers odds, picks and predictions, kansas city royals at baltimore orioles odds, picks and predictions.

Please enter an email address.

Thanks for signing up.

Please check your email for a confirmation.

Something went wrong.

17 New Books Coming in April

New novels from Emily Henry, Jo Piazza and Rachel Khong; a history of five ballerinas at the Dance Theater of Harlem; Salman Rushdie’s memoir and more.

Credit... The New York Times

Supported by

• Share full article

The Cemetery of Untold Stories , by Julia Alvarez

After decades in America, a Dominican writer named Alma Cruz “retires” to a scrappy piece of real estate she’s inherited in her homeland. But a riot of stories — historical, magical, irrepressible — are still fighting to be told, so she builds a graveyard where their spirits can rise once more.

Algonquin, April 2

The Mango Tree , by Annabelle Tometich

The felony that opens Tometich’s sweet, sharp memoir sets the tone for the whole story: Her mother has been arrested for brandishing a gun at a would-be mango thief. No one is shocked — Tometich’s mother is a force of nature, and her beloved mango tree is the metaphorical center of their sometimes chaotic, often complicated family.

Little, Brown, April 2

The Sicilian Inheritance , by Jo Piazza

Twinned narratives guide the fizzy, food-y latest from Piazza: the modern-day saga of a flailing Philadelphia chef who honors the dying wish of a beloved great-aunt by journeying back to her ancestral Italian homeland, and flashbacks to the plucky great-grandmother whose battle against the constraints of early-20th-century Sicilian womanhood may have ended in her murder.

Dutton, April 2

Sociopath , by Patric Gagne

“Rules do not factor into my decision-making,” the author, a Ph.D. in psychology, writes. “I’m capable of almost anything.” Her new memoir argues that this personality type is more common, and more complicated, than we think.

Simon & Schuster, April 2

Fi , by Alexandra Fuller

In her fifth memoir, Fuller writes about the sudden, unexplained death of her 21-year-old son. She also writes about his too-short life, and explores the adage about life going on. Does it, really? And if so, how?

Grove, April 9

The Limits , by Nell Freudenberger

There’s little limit to the ambitions of Freudenberger’s hefty new novel, which skips from a small volcanic island in the South Pacific to the concrete canyons of Manhattan in a complex tale of co-parenting, second marriages, class and climate change. (Also, coral reefs.)

Knopf, April 9

Somehow , by Anne Lamott

“Thoughts on Love” is the subtitle of Lamott’s 20th book, which considers the subject in its romantic, platonic and spiritual varieties.

Riverhead, April 9

The Wide Wide Sea , by Hampton Sides

When the British naval officer James Cook set off for his voyage across the globe in 1776, his ostensible goal was to ferry Mai, a handsome and witty Tahitian man, back to Polynesia. But, as Sides shows in this vivid recounting, the leitmotif of what became Cook’s final journey was his confrontation with the dire results of his meddling in the region.

Doubleday, April 9

The Wives , by Simone Gorrindo

When Gorrindo’s husband joined an army unit and was promptly deployed overseas, the New York-based journalist was not just relocated to a base in Georgia, but to a completely new life. “The Wives” — both memoir and love letter — is a tribute to the community of women she found there, a unique source of support unlike any she had ever known.

Scout Press, April 9

Knife , by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new memoir is a detailed account of the harrowing events of Aug. 12, 2022, when he was attacked onstage at a public talk. More than 30 years after the supreme leader of Iran issued a fatwa on his life, the writer turns to his craft to “make sense of the unthinkable.”

Random House, April 16

A Body Made of Glass , by Caroline Crampton

Crampton, a British journalist, weaves her own cancer diagnosis, and its cure, into this cultural history of hypochondria, which also considers such literary figures as Charles Darwin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Philip Larkin.

Ecco, April 23

Funny Story , by Emily Henry

Henry’s latest contribution to the library of lightheartedness is a novel of opposites. What happens when spurned lovers team up against the people who hurt them? Bonus points because one character in this love square happens to be a small town librarian.

Berkley, April 23

Reboot , by Justin Taylor

This satire of modern media and pop culture follows a former child actor who is trying to revive the TV show that made him famous. Taylor delves into the worlds of online fandom while exploring the inner life of a man seeking redemption — and something meaningful to do.

Pantheon, April 23

The Demon of Unrest , by Erik Larson

Abraham Lincoln hadn’t even settled into his new job as president of the United States when the country he was narrowly elected to lead began to crack apart. Larson, a best-selling historian, traces the figures who tried to stop the American Civil War from happening in the lead-up to the attack on Fort Sumter.

Crown, April 30

A Life Impossible, by Steve Gleason and Jeff Duncan

In 2011, Steve Gleason, a former safety for the New Orleans Saints, learned that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (A.L.S.) and was told he had three years to live. “A Life Impossible” is his memoir of marriage, fatherhood, his football career and surviving the last decade.

Knopf, April 30

Real Americans , by Rachel Khong

Khong’s sophomore novel is a tale about the evolution of one family over the course of generations. As the story opens, Lily, who is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, begins a love affair with Matthew, the wealthy son of an aristocratic family. But as Lily and her child eventually learn, their family history is more complicated than it seems.

The Swans of Harlem , by Karen Valby

In the wake of M.L.K.’s assassination, the George Balanchine protégé Arthur Mitchell felt compelled to establish a space where Black bodies could break the lily-white codes of ballet and hold center stage. And so the Dance Theater of Harlem was born — and with it, the careers of five “swans” whose journey through the cultural, political and physical tumult of the times Valby chronicles here.

Pantheon, April 30

Explore More in Books

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

James McBride’s novel sold a million copies, and he isn’t sure how he feels about that, as he considers the critical and commercial success  of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.”

How did gender become a scary word? Judith Butler, the theorist who got us talking about the subject , has answers.

You never know what’s going to go wrong in these graphic novels, where Circus tigers, giant spiders, shifting borders and motherhood all threaten to end life as we know it .

When the author Tommy Orange received an impassioned email from a teacher in the Bronx, he dropped everything to visit the students  who inspired it.

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

Advertisement

More from the Review

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest

• The New York Review of Books: recent articles and content from nybooks.com
• The Reader's Catalog and NYR Shop: gifts for readers and NYR merchandise offers
• New York Review Books: news and offers about the books we publish
• I consent to having NYR add my email to their mailing list.
• Hidden Form Source

April 18, 2024

Current Issue

In Translation

Across the Moominverse

Small books bearing great burdens, the Moomins contain the whole arsenal of Western literature.

January 18, 2024 issue

A Eulogy of Failed Remembrance

The Ghost in the Labyrinth

December 21, 2023 issue

Patterns of Uprooting

In the Streets of Barcelona

Invasion, Day by Day

Yevgenia Belorusets’s War Diary is rigorous in its focus on the interior life, asking what it means to be at home during a war.

December 7, 2023 issue

Strangers in the City

In Seven Empty House s, the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin revives the rioplatense short story tradition, which was born at the turn of the century and reached a peak during the Latin American Boom.

Virtuosos of Self-Deception

Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery , originally published in 1948, is a slippery, feverish, dreamlike book that refuses to adapt to the conventions of what a novel ought to be.

November 2, 2023 issue

Staying Alive

Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall is a gripping drama of survival that plays with the conventions of the “last man” genre.

April 18, 2024 issue

‘An Archaic Country,’ Dark and Bright

A new collection of stories by the novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya celebrates the women of Russia, countering the frequent bleakness and tragedy of their lives with tenderness and optimism.

March 21, 2024 issue

Nefer’s Mission

Sara Gallardo’s 1958 novel January , about a young woman’s quest for an abortion, became a touchstone in Argentine feminists’ twenty-first-century fight for the right to choose.

In Search of His Vocation

The best description of In Search of Lost Time may come from what Proust calls dreams in its opening pages: “a formidable game with time.”

Scrupulous Extravagance

The Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist Alejo Carpentier depicted revolution’s promise as well as its folly.

February 22, 2024 issue

When the Barbarians Take Over

Uwe Wittstock’s new account of writers considering whether to flee or to remain in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power sheds light on the choices faced by many writers in India and Russia today.

Rhapsodies in Bop

A recent exhibition at the Morgan showed how thoroughly at home the poet Blaise Cendrars was among visual artists.

Up All Night

Harald Voetmann’s protagonists live in the distant past, but are prototypically modern: men of science who are intent on outrunning our primal nightmare.

Ghosts of Aracataca

In a series of early short stories and novellas based on his childhood memories, Gabriel García Márquez found the style, voice, and sense of place that culminate in One Hundred Years of Solitude .

Punning for Germany

The strange experience of youth in Thomas Brussig’s East Germany.

October 19, 2023 issue

The latest releases from New York Review Books

Loved and Missed

Robert Glück

Pier Paolo Pasolini

An Ordinary Youth

Walter Kempowski

Amelia Rosselli

Poor Helpless Comics!

Ed Subitzky

Subscribe and save 50%!

Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

Already a subscriber? Sign in