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What Book Should You Read Next?

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

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By The New York Times Books Staff

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

Fiction | Nonfiction

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

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

I want a great American book full of humanity

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store , by James McBride

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

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I’d like an intricate, immersive fantasy

The book of love , by kelly link.

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

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

Demon copperhead , by barbara kingsolver.

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

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

The bee sting , by paul murray.

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

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

The women , by kristin hannah.

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

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

Tom lake , by ann patchett.

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

I’d like to be wowed by a historical masterpiece

The fraud , by zadie smith.

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

I’d like a smart romantic comedy that avoids cliché

Good material , by dolly alderton.

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

How about a heartwarming novel to suit any mood?

Remarkably bright creatures , by shelby van pelt.

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

I plan on watching the Oscars

Killers of the flower moon , by david grann.

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

I’d like a nuanced look at the border crisis

Everyone who is gone is here , by jonathan blitzer.

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

Teach me about a forgotten chapter of American history

Madness , by antonia hylton.

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

I can’t learn enough about WWII

Judgment at tokyo , by gary j. bass.

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

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

King: a life , by jonathan eig.

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

I want a dramatic history that reads like a novel

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

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

I want to hear Britney’s side of the story

The woman in me , by britney spears.

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

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

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

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

Honestly, I really like reading about animals

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

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

Take down a dazzling, erudite rabbit hole

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

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

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

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