top fiction books in 2022

The best new fiction of 2022 so far, from fantasy sequels to highly anticipated thrillers

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

• We gathered the top-rated and best-selling fiction books of 2022 so far.
• These picks include new historical fiction, romance, fantasy, and sci-fi books.
• For more great books, check out the best books of 2022 so far , according to Goodreads.

Every year brings new and amazing books to shelves everywhere, but it can be overwhelming to sort through hundreds of titles to find a book that truly stands out from the rest. Fortunately, with reviews from readers, bookshops, and editors, the most memorable new titles still rise to the top. 

To create this list of recommendations, we pulled readers' favorite new fiction books from a variety of sources including top-ranking titles on Goodreads , bestseller lists on Audible and Libro.fm , and books readers can't stop talking about on social media. From fantasy sequels to heart-pounding historical fiction, here is some of the best new fiction of 2022 so far.

The best fiction books of 2022 so far:

"black cake" by charmaine wilkerson.

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.81

Insightful, memorable, and masterfully written, " Black Cake " is a transportive and expansive novel that begins as Byron and Benny inherit a traditional Caribbean black cake and a voice recording in the wake of their mother's passing. In this story of heritage, memories, and history, the siblings must unravel their mother's story to create a new and deeper understanding of her, their family, and themselves.

"All My Rage" by Sabaa Tahir

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.99

Salahudin and Noor were more than best friends until a terrible fight destroyed their bond, leaving each of them to face their familial and personal challenges alone. As Sal tries to hold his family and their business together after his mother's passing and Noor attempts to avoid her uncle's wrath as she applies to college against his wishes, the two must decide the value of their friendship and what they need to move forward.

"Book Lovers" by Emily Henry

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.82

Emily Henry's latest beach-read romance follows Nora Stephens, an NYC literary agent whose own love life is far from perfect. When her sister, Libby, suggests a trip for just the two of them to a storybook-like town in North Carolina, Nora agrees in the hopes of becoming the heroine of her own story but almost immediately runs into Charlie Lastra, a brooding book editor — and her greatest rival. 

"Violeta" by Isabel Allende

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $22.84

" Violeta " is an epic new historical fiction novel about Violeta del Valle, born in 1920 in South America to a family of sons. Told in the form of a letter, Violeta's life spans a century of extraordinary events, from personal heartbreak and great triumphs to the fight for women's rights and two terrible pandemics.

"True Biz" by Sara Nović

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $18.91

At the River Valley School for the Deaf, Charlie is a new transfer student, Austin is the school's "golden boy," and February is their headmistress, fighting to keep the school open while juggling personal challenges of her own. " True Biz " follows the students and the school as they are rocked by personal, political, and familial unrest over a tumultuous year that will change their lives forever.

"House of Sky and Breath" by Sarah J. Maas

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.74

" House of Sky and Breath " is the highly anticipated sequel to Sarah J. Maas' " House of Earth and Blood ," both of which are loved by readers for the spellbinding magic systems, their deep care for the characters, and the exhilarating, suspenseful plot that keeps them invested for 800 pages. In this sequel, Bryce and Hunt have saved Cresent City and are looking for a moment of peace but as the rebels slowly chip away at the Asteri's power, the two know they cannot stay silent while others are oppressed.

"Lessons in Chemistry" by Bonnie Garmus

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $18.48

In this story set in 1960s California, Elizabeth Zott is a chemist whose male coworkers see her as little more than a woman in the way. When her career takes a sharp turn and she finds herself the star of a beloved American cooking show, people still aren't happy, as she not only takes a unique approach to cooking, but in many ways is teaching women to defy the status quo in this funny and feminist historical fiction read. 

"How High We Go in the Dark" by Sequoia Nagamatsu

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.99

As humanity is challenged with rebuilding after a climate plague reshapes life on Earth, this science fiction novel bends to follow linked narratives of those affected in a vast variety of ways, from a scientist searching for a cure to a painter and her granddaughter looking for a new home planet. Loved for its intricate and imitate connections between characters, themes, and stories, " How High We Go in the Dark " is a tale of compassion, resiliency, and hope.

"Daughter of the Moon Goddess" by Sue Lynn Tan

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $23.49

Inspired by the legend of the Chinese moon goddess, Chang'e, " Daughter of the Moon Goddess " is about Xingyin, who grew up on the moon, unaware that she is being hidden from the Celestial Emperor until her magic reveals her existence and she's forced to flee her home and leave her mother behind. To save her mother, Xingyin disguises her identity, learns mastery and magic alongside the emperor's son, and sets off on a dangerous quest of magic, honor, and betrayal.

"Young Mungo" by Douglas Stuart

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $23.99

Born into different religions, Mungo and James should be sworn enemies yet find safety in each other as their close friendship blooms into love. When Mungo is sent on a fishing trip with two of his mother's friends from AA, darker intentions arise in this story of masculinity, queerness, division, and violence. 

"This Time Tomorrow" by Emma Straub

Available for pre-order on Amazon and Bookshop , from $21.99

When Alice wakes up on the morning of her 40th birthday, she seems to have been transported back in time to 1996 to relive her 16th birthday. Though her father is ailing in the present day, she's reunited with her younger, full-of-life dad and, armed with decades of experience, relives the day with a new perspective, bringing new meaning to memories and leaving Alice wondering if she could — or should — change anything about that day.

"Reminders of Him" by Colleen Hoover

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.57

" Reminders of Him " is a Colleen Hoover story of redemption as Kenna Rowan returns to her town after a five-year prison sentence, hoping to reunite with her young daughter, though all those who knew her determinedly shut her out. Turning to the local bar owner, Ledger Ward, Kenna finds a remaining link to her daughter, but when the two form a deeper connection, romance brings greater risk and Kenna must find a way to fix the past in order to solidify a better future.

"Memphis" by Tara M. Stringfellow

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $18.28

During the summer of 1995, 10-year-old Joan moves with her mother and younger sister into their mother's family home in Memphis, fleeing their father's violence, though the home is marked by a history of violence all its own. In her grief, Joan begins to create portraits of the women in North Memphis and unravels a past, present, and future of matrilineal tradition, healing, and curses from the stories of those she encounters.

"Sea of Tranquility" by Emily St. John Mandel

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.25

Part time travel epic and part pandemic literature, " Sea of Tranquility " is a science fiction novel that spans centuries from an airship terminal in the Canadian wilderness in 1912 to a moon colony 300 years in the future to tell a story of humanity and the many ways we are impacted by a pandemic world. Unique, profound, and memorable, this new novel combines speculative and literary elements to take readers on a fast-paced journey.

"Four Treasures of the Sky" by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $18.69

Though Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for which she was named, everything changes when she's kidnapped and smuggled from China to America. " Four Treasures of the Sky " is a story of self-discovery, Chinese history and folklore, and the ways in which Daiyu had to continuously change herself to survive.

"The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea" by Axie Oh

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.99

In Mina's homeland, the people believe the Sea God curses their land with terrible storms and war so they sacrifice a beautiful maiden in the hopes their choice will one day be his "true bride" and end their suffering. When Shim Cheong, Mina's brother's beloved, is chosen as the sacrifice, Mina throws herself into the water in her place and is swept away to the Spirit Realm. There, she sets out to wake the Sea God and end her home's suffering once and for all.

"Brown Girls" by Daphne Palasi Andreades

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.31

In Queens, New York, young girls and women of color are growing up in the center of vibrant culture, learning to balance their immigrant heritage with the American world around them. " Brown Girls " reads like a literary poem dedicated to the young women who experience this unique crossroads as they make their own place in the world, a story that continues to resonate with many readers.

"Peach Blossom Spring" by Melissa Fu

Lily desperately wants to understand her family's heritage, but her father refuses to speak about his childhood and his story of fleeing his family home with his mother in 1938 as the Japanese army encroached on their land. " Peach Blossom Spring " is a powerful story of war, migration, and heritage that jumps across continents and centuries to convey the importance of telling our stories.

"Don't Cry for Me" by Daniel Black

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $22.48

As Jacob lays on his deathbed, he knows there are many truths he must share with his son, Isaac, though the two have not spoken in many years. Through letters, Jacob reveals ancestral stories, long-buried secrets, and hopeful explanations for his reaction to Isaac's being gay. " Don't Cry for Me " is an emotional historical fiction novel about reckoning, reconciliation, and healing.

"Take My Hand" by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $18.90

" Take My Hand " is a new historical fiction novel inspired by true events that begin with Civil Townsend in 1973 as she takes a job fresh out of nursing school at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic in Alabama. In her first week, she encounters 11- and 13-year-old sisters whose situation raises alarms for Civil. Decades later, Civil is ready to retire when history returns in this story of bravery, institutional racism and classism, and the ways Black communities have been targeted and attacked throughout history.

"The Diamond Eye" by Kate Quinn

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.87

Though Mila Pavlichenko's life in 1937 Ukraine revolves around her library job and her son, everything changes when Hilter invades and she's sent into war with a rifle, quickly becoming one of the deadliest snipers known to the Nazi regime. When her 300th kill makes national news, she's pulled from the war for a goodwill tour in America until an old enemy and new foe pull Mila into a battle deadlier than the war.

"Kaikeyi" by Vaishnavi Patel

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $21.99

" Kaikeyi " is a beautiful new retelling of "The Ramayana," an ancient Indian epic. In this retelling, Kaikeyi is raised in her father's kingdom, taught to revere and respect the gods yet never receives the help she needs. When Kaikeyi discovers the magic inside her, she transforms into a warrior and queen with the power to change the world for women until her past, destiny, and present collide and force her to weigh the consequences of resistance.

• Main content

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Best fiction of 2022

Dazzling invention from Jennifer Egan, a state-of-the nation tale from Jonathan Coe and impressive debut novels and short stories are among this year’s highlights

The best books of 2022

S ome of the year’s biggest books were the most divisive. In her follow-up to A Little Life, To Paradise (Picador), Hanya Yanagihara split the critics with an epic if inconclusive saga of privilege and suffering in three alternative Americas: a genderqueered late 19th century, the Aids-blasted 1980s, and a totalitarian future degraded by waves of pandemics. I was impressed by its vast canvas and portrayal of individual psychic damage set against seismic historical change.

There were mixed reactions, too, to Cormac McCarthy’s jet-black brace of novels The Passenger and Stella Maris (Picador), his first in 16 years; and to Ian McEwan’s Lessons (Cape), seen as both baggily self-indulgent and richly humane. Setting the protagonist’s life against the arc of postwar politics from the cold war to Brexit, and grappling with issues from the nature of creativity to the legacy of sexual abuse, it can be read as an indictment of the boomer generation who “ate all the cream”.

Also asking how we got here is Bournville by Jonathan Coe (Viking). With his third novel in four years, Coe is on a roll; he tracks the fortunes of a family through snapshots of communal experiences, from the Queen’s coronation through the 1966 World Cup to pandemic lockdown, in a moving, compassionate portrait of individual and national change.

Ali Smith’s response to lockdown was typically playful and profound; Companion Piece (Hamish Hamilton) sees the outside world impinge on one woman’s careful isolation, in a novel about the importance of making connections between words, eras and people. Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House (Corsair), meanwhile, harnesses a near-future technological advance – the ability to upload and share memories – to reflect on current concerns around surveillance and privacy with dazzling inventiveness. Mohsin Hamid’s fable The Last White Man (Hamish Hamilton) interrogates race, community and the meaning of the other in a society where skin colour is changing. And I loved Joy Williams’s menacing and madcap Harrow (Tuskar Rock), set in a surreal future of environmental breakdown and human exhaustion, a kind of Alice in Wonderland of the apocalypse.

Radical invention characterises Percival Everett’s devastatingly absurdist The Trees (Influx): focusing on a string of gruesome murders in Mississippi, it weaponises the genres of horror, comedy and detective fiction to lay open the history of lynching. In her rambunctious satire of Robert Mugabe’s fall, Glory (Chatto), NoViolet Bulawayo braids the allegory of Animal Farm with an oral storytelling tradition and a social media chorus decrying dictatorship and repression around the world. Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho (Galley Beggar) is another novel that plays with form, reclaiming hidden lesbian stories by tumbling together biography, scholarship and poetic flights of fancy in sketches of modernist artists and writers from Virginia Woolf to Colette and Josephine Baker. This one-of-a-kind book channels a spirit of righteous anger as well as lyrical freedom and joy.

Other standout novels illuminating the past include Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses (Bloomsbury), set in Northern Ireland during the 70s. Based around a dangerous affair between a young Catholic woman and an older Protestant man, it combines gorgeously direct and acute prose with an incisive eye for social detail. Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker prize with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort Of), a blistering murder-mystery-cum-ghost-story set amid the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil war that similarly focuses on the effort to preserve ordinary life in the face of sectarian violence. Catherine Chidgey’s Remote Sympathy (Europa) is an excellent investigation of communal guilt and obliviousness to Nazi atrocities, while in Trust (Picador) Hernan Diaz deconstructs capitalist excess and the illusion of money through different perspectives on the story of a New York financier. Maggie O’Farrell’s follow-up to Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait (Tinder), is a glittering Renaissance fable of a girl caught up in Italian aristocratic intrigue, and Kate Atkinson is on deliciously acerbic form in Shrines of Gaiety (Doubleday), exposing the underbelly of London nightlife in the roaring 20s. Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (W&N, translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel), in which a “clinic for the past” treats Alzheimer’s patients, plays with ideas of history and nostalgia to explore Europe’s 20th century and current confusion with wit and warmth.

It was a good year for unhappy families. Charlotte Mendelson skewers narcissistic control in The Exhibitionist (Mantle), a darkly witty portrait of an artist on the slide who has spent decades squashing the life and creative energies out of his wife and children. Rebecca Wait’s I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (Riverrun) is a very funny, emotionally wise story of sibling rivalry and difficult mothers. There are no laughs, however, in Sarah Manguso’s chilling Very Cold People (Picador), an uncomfortable, deeply impressive account of how silence, snobbery and repression in a New England town allow the poison of abuse to trickle down the decades.

Ross Raisin has quietly become one of Britain’s most interesting novelists: A Hunger (Cape) explores the conflict between ambition and duty as a chef takes on a caring role when her husband develops dementia. Namwali Serpell’s second novel, The Furrows (Hogarth), brilliantly dramatises the psychic dislocations of grief over a lifetime through the story of a woman haunted by the memory of her younger brother, who died under her care in childhood. Douglas Stuart followed Booker winner Shuggie Bain with a tough and tender story of family dysfunction and first love in Young Mungo (Picador). And in Amy & Lan (Chatto), set on a ramshackle farm commune, Sadie Jones gives us a wonderfully achieved child’s-eye view of messy family interactions and the up-close life-and-death drama of the natural world.

Three hard-hitting debut novels shone out. An Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie (Wildfire) portrays a young Black man’s struggle to define what success might look like in a Bristol neighbourhood in the grip of gentrification. The book delves deep into faith, violence, addiction, ambition and love with power and grace. Jon Ransom’s The Whale Tattoo (Muswell), focusing on a gay working-class man in watery rural Norfolk, is lyrical, atmospheric and brutal by turns. And Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan (Rough Trade Books) punctures the bubbles of social media in a fierce tale of obsession and power dynamics.

after newsletter promotion

Set in the Pyrenees and giving voice to everything from mountains to storms, mushrooms to dogs, English-language debut When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà (Granta, translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem) is a playful, polyphonic triumph. Closer to home, poet Clare Pollard’s fiction debut, Delphi (Penguin), is an ingenious response to Covid, combining ancient Greek prophecy with the daily frustrations of lockdown to face up to our fears for the future. Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (Picador), a provocative post-MeToo morality tale about a female professor’s crush on a younger man, is sharp and deliciously readable; as is the huge hit Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday), which brings bite as well as charm to the tale of a super-rational scientist navigating sexism in early 60s America.

Three notable debut short-story collections introduced fresh, contemporary new voices. Saba Sams’s unsettling, full-throated Send Nudes (Bloomsbury) captures girls and young women on the brink of change; Jem Calder’s Reward System (Faber) smartly anatomises contemporary life in the relentless glare of the smartphone; and Gurnaik Johal’s We Move (Serpent’s Tail) delicately traces relationships and disconnections across a British-Punjabi community. Short-story virtuoso George Saunders returned to the form with Liberation Day (Bloomsbury), tragicomic allegories of try-hard regular folk caught up in hells beyond their understanding.

Emmanuel Carrère continues to spin his fascinating web of social observation and self-inquiry in Yoga (Cape, translated from French by John Lambert), charting personal and psychic upheaval in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. Yiyun Li’s richly mysterious The Book of Goose (4th Estate) marks a departure from her recent autofiction; but this tale of a passionate friendship between two young peasant girls in postwar France, and how they parse their shared will to create and to act upon the world, seems to hold many layers of truth about art, love and self-creation. Lastly, a small miracle from another genre-hopper: in Marigold and Rose (Carcanet), Nobel-winning poet Louise Glück presents the first year in the life of twin baby girls with formal and philosophical sleight of hand. This wry, read-in-a-sitting delight channels the myriad possibilities of fiction with a huge sense of fun.

• Best books of the year
• Best books 2022

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

50 notable works of fiction

The year’s best novels, short-story collections and works of fiction in translation.

‘All the Lovers in the Night,’ by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

The best-selling author of “ Breasts and Eggs ” tells the story of a Tokyo-based copy editor who buries a traumatic episode under a solitary, regimented existence. But when she discovers the liberating properties of alcohol, the past comes flooding back.

‘The Books of Jacob,’ by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

When Polish author Tokarczuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize for literature, the judges praised this hefty book. Finally, English speakers can see what all the fuss is about: a sprawling but consistently entertaining account of Jacob Frank , a real-life 18th-century mystic whose disciples believed he was the messiah.

‘City on Fire,’ by Don Winslow

Winslow, a crime fiction virtuoso, has designs on retiring after he completes the trilogy that this novel launched — a kind of Greek tragedy about organized crime in Providence, R.I. It all starts with Irish mobster Danny Ryan, who has to deal with the escalating fallout after his brother-in-law gets handsy with an Italian gangster’s girlfriend.

‘The Consequences: Stories,’ by Manuel Muñoz

California’s Central Valley in the 1980s and ’90s is the setting for most of the poignant stories in this collection. Muñoz, a three-time O. Henry Award winner, reveals the vastness of Mexican and Mexican American identity with tales of deportation, teen pregnancy, AIDS and the quotidian drudgery of farm work.

‘Cult Classic,’ by Sloane Crosley

Crosley, already known for piercing observations in such essay collections as “ I Was Told There’d Be Cake ,” takes aim at social media and start-up culture . The novel’s protagonist, Lola, is thinking about settling down — if only she could get over the parade of exes whose accomplishments haunt her news feed.

‘Dr. No,’ by Percival Everett

Shortly after his novel “ The Trees ” was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Everett released this very different book about a mathematician who specializes in the study of nothingness. As it turns out, that knowledge could be useful to an aspiring supervillain who will shell out millions in exchange for help in weaponizing naught.

‘Either/Or,’ by Elif Batuman

In this sequel to “The Idiot,” Batuman picks up the story of Selin Karadag as she begins her sophomore year at Harvard. After a summer spent pining over an unrequited love, the fledgling writer embarks on a series of sexual encounters in the hopes of uncovering some revelation — or at least inspiration.

‘Fencing With the King,’ by Diana Abu-Jaber

A Palestinian American woman, curious about her extended family, accompanies her father to a month-long birthday celebration for the king of Jordan. But when she begins piecing together puzzles of the past , she ends up at odds with her scheming uncle.

‘Forbidden City,’ by Vanessa Hua

In 1960s China, teenager Mei Xiang departs her small village to join Chairman Mao’s dance troupe, ultimately becoming his confidante and lover. Hua’s bestseller uses Mei’s decades-spanning story to consider the women who were used, then erased from the history of China’s Cultural Revolution.

‘The Foundling,’ by Ann Leary

A dark piece of history — the practice of incarcerating “feebleminded” women — inspires a twisting nail-biter with a caper of a climax . Protagonist Mary, an orphan, falls under the spell of the elegant doctor in charge of a home for women that turns out to be less altruistic than it appears.

‘Free Love,’ by Tessa Hadley

The year is 1967, and Phyllis Fischer embodies the suburban ideal : nice house, loving husband, two kids. But when a younger man she barely knows kisses her, Phyllis begins to question everything she thought she knew — and loved — about her life.

‘The Furrows,’ by Namwali Serpell

Serpell’s second novel is as stunning as her critically acclaimed first, “ The Old Drift .” Through this story of a woman whose brother disappeared when they were children, Serpell explores the disorienting, sometimes surreal effects of grief.

‘Glory,’ by NoViolet Bulawayo

Bulawayo’s second novel , and her second to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was inspired by the autocrats who have ruled the author’s native Zimbabwe. But in this brilliant allegorical satire, the characters based on Robert Mugabe, Emmerson Mnangagwa and others are stallions, goats and dogs.

‘Groundskeeping,’ by Lee Cole

You can choose your friends, but not your family. That’s one reminder in Cole’s emotionally rich debut about an aspiring writer who moves home to Kentucky, where his Trump-supporting uncle and grandfather complicate his budding relationship with the liberal daughter of Bosnian immigrants.

‘The Hero of This Book,’ by Elizabeth McCracken

When is a memoir not a memoir? McCracken straddles the line between real life and fiction in this story of a narrator whose trip to London prompts a deluge of memories about her late mother.

‘Horse,’ by Geraldine Brooks

The Pulitzer Prize winner offers a lesson in weaving together disparate narratives with this novel inspired by a real-life 19th-century racehorse . In the 1850s, the horse is trained by an enslaved boy; generations later, a man becomes obsessed with a discarded portrait of the horse just as a zoologist finds the animal’s bones in an attic. Inevitably, but never predictably, their stories intersect.

‘How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water,’ by Angie Cruz

The fourth novel by Women’s Prize finalist Cruz finds Cara Romero, a New Yorker from the Dominican Republic, unburdening herself to a woman meant to provide employment assistance. Instead, the woman ends up with 12 enlightening, sometimes hilarious sessions with Cara, who reveals the highs and lows of an eventful life.

‘Invisible Things,’ by Mat Johnson

What at first seems like a work of science fiction involving a group of astronauts who land on Jupiter’s moon grows into something broader and more trenchant — an accomplished work of cultural and political satire that calls to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s “ The Sirens of Titan ” and “ Cat’s Cradle ” and Robert A. Heinlein’s “ Stranger in a Strange Land .”

‘Jackie and Me,’ by Louis Bayard

A charming story that captures our ongoing fascination with the Kennedy marriage, “ Jackie & Me ” focuses on the years when Jack and Jackie were still two distinct individuals, a young man and a younger woman navigating their ways through Washington.

‘The Latecomer,’ by Jean Hanff Korelitz

There’s a jigsaw-puzzle thrill to Korelitz’s tale of a wealthy New York City family. Part farce, part revenge fantasy, the book reads like a latter-day Edith Wharton novel , as Korelitz (“ The Plot ”) simultaneously mocks and embraces these upper-class combatants.

‘Less Is Lost,’ by Andrew Sean Greer

Arthur Less, the hero of Greer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Less” (2017), is back . He’s living happily in San Francisco when he learns he owes 10 years of back rent and has only a month to come up with it. Hilarity ensues as our lovable, hapless protagonist is befallen by a series of accidents and misunderstandings.

‘Lessons,’ by Ian McEwan

McEwan, winner of the 1998 Booker for “ Amsterdam ,” tells the story of an ordinary man whose personal experience is woven into the social and political developments that have shaped all our lives, including the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the coronavirus pandemic. Through the tale of this imaginary life, McEwan deftly explores the interplay of will and chance, time and memory.

‘The Lioness,’ by Chris Bohjalian

From the author of “ The Flight Attendant ” and “ Hour of the Witch ,” this propulsive tale perfectly marries glamour and horror, as a group of Hollywood notables sets off on a safari in the Serengeti in the mid-1960s.

‘Lucky Breaks,’ by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky

This story collection is the first new full-length work of fiction out of Ukraine since Russia’s war with the country began. Slim but meaty, these tales — whose main players are women displaced by war — are both unsettling and illuminating.

‘Lucy by the Sea,’ by Elizabeth Strout

Lucy Barton returns , this time riding out the pandemic’s early wave with her ex-husband in Maine. Strout fans will delight in the appearance of beloved characters from previous novels, including Olive Kitteridge and Isabelle (“ Amy and Isabelle ”) as they struggle and hope — together but in isolation.

‘The Marriage Portrait,’ by Maggie O’Farrell

O’Farrell (“ Hamnet ”) drops us into the panicked mind of a teenage girl who knows that her husband is plotting to kill her. This is Florence in the 1550s — and the teen is Lucrezia de’Medici. In this masterful work , O’Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave the story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station.

‘Mercy Street,’ by Jennifer Haigh

Haigh’s restrained novel explores the precarious status of safe, legal abortion through the eyes of an experienced counselor at a reproductive-health clinic in downtown Boston, revealing the surprising ways lives intersect amid this divisive issue.

‘My Phantoms,’ by Gwendoline Riley

Bridget, the 40-something narrator of this quietly powerful novel, has, to put it mildly, a difficult relationship with her parents, particularly her mother. In deceptively simple prose, Riley delivers a compelling character study and an unflinching look at the complexity of family bonds.

‘Nightcrawling,’ by Leila Mottley

Inspired by a sexual exploitation scandal involving several police departments in the Bay Area , Mottley’s debut novel imagines the life of a 17-year-old African American high school dropout who is vulnerable to abuse. Mottley, who is 19, captures her narrator’s experience with painful, poetic beauty.

‘Olga Dies Dreaming,’ by Xochitl Gonzalez

Olga Isabel Acevedo is a 40-year-old dynamo from South Brooklyn who becomes an in-demand wedding planner — but she can’t seem to find romance herself. If you know anything about how romantic comedy works, you have some idea of how this story ends, but you’ll be completely surprised by how it gets there.

‘Our Missing Hearts,’ by Celeste Ng

As in her previous books, Ng (“ Little Fires Everywhere ,” “ Everything I Never Told You ”) explores race, family and belonging. Here the setting is a near-future dystopian America where 12-year-old Bird Gardner is searching for his estranged mother in a society where anti-Asian sentiment threatens his every move.

‘Our Wives Under the Sea,’ by Julia Armfield

Both a love story and a horror story, “ Our Wives ” follows a couple through some unusual twists in their relationship, as one spouse returns from a deep-sea expedition forever changed. There’s more than a drop of “ The Turn of the Screw ” in this exquisitely suspenseful debut novel.

‘The Passenger,’ by Cormac McCarthy

The first novel from McCarthy, now 89, since “The Road” in 2006 features Bobby Western, a contemplative, haunted salvage diver. What starts at the pace of a thriller — with a mystery surrounding a private jet on the ocean floor — becomes an extended rumination on subjects from atomic bombs (Bobby’s father helped create them) to the inappropriate, obsessive love between a brother and sister.

‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,’ by Shehan Karunatilaka

The winner of this year’s Booker Prize is a very unlikely combination: a murder mystery and a zany comedy about military atrocities. Narrated by a dead man. In the second person. Karunatilaka has said the combination of tragedy and absurdity was inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, but his story drifts across Sri Lankan history and culture with a spirit entirely its own.

‘Salka Valka,’ by Halldór Laxness, translated by Philip Roughton

This newly retranslated novel by Laxness , the prolific Icelandic writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955, focuses on the fortitude and inner life of the title character, who has to make it on her own in a small village. Marxism vs. capitalism is one theme of the book as it charts the changing social and economic circumstances of the village over the course of about 20 years.

‘Sea of Tranquility,’ by Emily St. John Mandel

St. John Mandel’s follow-up to “Station Eleven” and “The Glass Hotel” is a curious thought experiment that opens in 1912 before hopping ahead to 2203 and then 2401. This is science fiction that keeps its science largely in abeyance, as dark matter for a story about loneliness, grief and finding purpose.

‘Shrines of Gaiety,’ by Kate Atkinson

Atkinson sets out to evoke — with gusto and precision — a lost Roaring Twenties London that, perhaps, never was. This is a sprawling and sparkling tale overrun with flappers, gangsters, disillusioned war veterans, crooked coppers, a serial killer, absinthe cocktails, teenage runaways and a bevy of Bright Young Things.

‘Signal Fires,’ by Dani Shapiro

Shapiro’s novel , which balances grief with grace, starts in 1985, when 15-year-old Theo Wilf crashes his mother’s Buick into a huge oak tree in the family’s front yard. The story then hops through time to fill in the details of that event and how the secrecy surrounding it shaped, or deformed, the lives of the Wilfs.

‘The Singularities,’ by John Banville

Every page of Banville’s latest beautifully written novel is an enigmatic delight. A man named Felix Mordaunt, just released from prison, wanders onto the property where he spent his boyhood. But is that really his name? And is this his ancestral home? Unreliability runs throughout.

‘The Stone World,’ by Joel Agee

Agee has published acclaimed nonfiction about his boyhood in East Germany with his mother and stepfather after the family migrated from Mexico. (His father was the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer James Agee.) This new novel , written with wondrous simplicity and depth, is a kind of fictional prequel: Set in an unnamed Mexican town in the 1940s, it tells the story of a quiet, sensitive boy named Peter.

‘Thrust,’ by Lidia Yuknavitch

“ Thrust ” is part history, part prophecy and all fever dream. Its chapters ebb and flow across 200 years in and around the New York Harbor, moving from 19th-century laborers toiling to erect the Statue of Liberty to a drowned East Coast in 2079. This sometimes surreal book offers a mind-blowing critique of America’s ideals.

‘To Paradise,’ by Hanya Yanagihara

Seven years after her novel “ A Little Life ,” Yanagihara returns with another epic , this one made up of three novella-length sections set in the past, present and future. The final one is a blistering analysis of what an endless cycle of pandemics can do to a society. “To Paradise” demonstrates the inexhaustible ingenuity of an author who keeps shattering expectations.

‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,’ by Gabrielle Zevin

This novel about two childhood friends who reunite in college and design a successful video game together is not really a workplace romance; it’s a novel about the romance of work. It portrays a creative partnership as intense and as fraught as a marriage, and it draws readers into the pioneering days of a vast entertainment industry too often scorned by bookworms.

‘Trespasses,’ by Louise Kennedy

Kennedy’s captivating first novel manages to be beautiful and devastating in equal measure. It’s set in Northern Ireland during the 1970s amid the Troubles. The book’s protagonist, 24-year-old Cushla Lavery, lives with her mother in a small, “mixed” town outside Belfast, and she emerges as a flawed, bruised but ultimately defiant heroine.

‘True Biz,’ by Sara Nović

“ True Biz ” follows an eventful year in the lives of students and a headmistress at a residential school for the deaf. Nović is a thoughtful tour guide through her own deaf culture, careful to explain what people unaware of her world may be missing, and providing mini history lessons and illustrations of vocabulary words in American Sign Language.

‘The Unfolding,’ by A.M. Homes

Homes’s latest novel is very funny and often unsettling. The sharp satire begins after the election of Barack Obama, when a major Republican donor referred to only as the Big Guy assembles a group of advisers who devise a long-term plan for retaking control of American politics.

‘Vladimir,’ by Julia May Jonas

Jonas’s provocative debut novel revolves around the fallout from accusations of sexual misconduct against the unnamed narrator’s husband, who is chair of the English department at the college where they both teach. The narrator is filled with both desire and shame about aging, and has at least one foot on the wrong side of #MeToo.

‘We All Want Impossible Things,’ by Catherine Newman

Genuinely heartbreaking and hilarious is a tough combination to pull off, but Newman does it in her first novel for adults. Edith and Ashley have been the closest of friends for more than 40 years. When Edith’s ovarian cancer diagnosis becomes terminal, the women contend with Edi’s transition into hospice. Tears mix with laughter in everyday moments, showing the power of female friendship.

‘The Whalebone Theatre,’ by Joanna Quinn

Quinn’s richly imagined and energetically told debut novel , set mostly in England before and during World War II, focuses on a creative young girl named Cristabel and her stepsiblings. These spunky, somewhat benignly neglected children, with a pedigree stretching from Charles Dickens to Lemony Snicket, might seem familiar, but they have their own peculiar and particular charm.

‘Yonder,’ by Jabari Asim

Set on a Southern plantation in 1852, “ Yonder ” explores with great depth the intertwined lives of four enslaved people, alternating between the points of view of each character. The final section of the book follows their exodus, a bold and dangerous journey whose outcome remains uncertain until the very last page.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

NPR's top picks for 2022 fiction books

Summer Thomad

Natalie Escobar

Rommel Wood

Karen Grigsby Bates

Four NPR staffers recommend new novels in an early taste of our annual Books We Love round-up: "How High We Go in the Dark," "Vladimir," "Mecca" and "The Candy House."

ALINA SELYUKH, HOST:

A lot of you look forward to NPR's Books We Love at the end of each year. And that's because it's a great resource for what new books to read as recommended by our staff and contributors. But why wait? We have some suggestions right now. Today, some of the best fiction of 2022 so far. We start with Code Switch producer Summer Thomad and a spellbinding fantasy novel about death.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SUMMER THOMAD, BYLINE: The book I'm recommending is "How High We Go In The Dark" by Sequoia Nagamatsu. It's about a world reeling from a climate catastrophe-driven plague. Sound familiar? From the earliest days of a pandemic to the impacts that linger centuries into the future, the plague forces humans to reckon with immeasurable grief and loss. But what I love most about this book is that despite all the doom and gloom, these stories are endlessly imaginative and rich with meaning. Though the world they're inhabiting is undeniably weak, Nagamatsu's characters maintain a sense of cosmic hope and humanity.

ROMMEL WOOD, BYLINE: My name is Rommel Wood, and I'm an associate producer in programming at NPR. I'm recommending the book "Vladimir," a novel by Julia May Jonas because when was the last time a book made you sit up from your couch and yell, what? Where is this going? This happened to me about three-quarters of the way into her debut novel. The book follows a nameless narrator, a 50-something tenured professor at a liberal arts college. She's married to a disgraced professor about to be drummed off campus due to a parade of former students coming forward with sexual misconduct allegations. But she isn't terribly concerned with his fate or the other women because she herself is infatuated with a new junior professor. In "Vladimir," Jonas carefully builds a house of matchsticks where our protagonist's desires safely live until she reaches a flash point that left me squirming and desperate to discover, how exactly is this going to end?

KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: I'm Karen Grigsby Bates. I'm the senior correspondent for Code Switch, NPR's podcast about race and identity. I selected "Mecca," a novel by Susan Straight. Straight writes a lot about the California we don't often see or hear about. The people she writes about are working-class refugees. They came west to escape racial violence and poverty from places like Texas, Mississippi and Oaxaca. And some come from communities who've even lived in the state for thousands of years. "Mecca" is a fine set of interwoven tales of these people. They're connected to each other by their love for the land, by their jobs, for each other, for all of those things. This Southern California is filled with desert highways and strip malls and small suburban houses where everyday people are sometimes faced with choices that are anything but. Straight's writing is both illuminous and sharp and bold. And these tales are told to richly layered family histories. Who'd love this book? People who suspect there's more to California than Kardashians, wildfires and serial killers.

NATALIE ESCOBAR, BYLINE: My name is Natalie Escobar, and I'm an associate editor on NPR's Culture Desk. I read "The Candy House" by Jennifer Egan. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Visit From The Goon Squad," and "The Candy House" is a follow up to her previous book. The basic premise is a little bit complicated. But there is this form of social media that basically allows users to upload all of their memories to something called the collective consciousness. And if they upload all their memories, they're also able to access all the memories of the users who have done the same. Each of the book's chapters is told through the eyes of different people whose lives are affected by this new technology that's so encompassing that it basically dictates a lot of how society runs. It's this sort of alternate universe type of book that really grapples with a lot of the questions of, what is technology, especially social media, doing to our lives in the way that we relate to each other as people? What would it look like to opt out of that? Is it possible? And because it's Jennifer Egan, it's a really beautifully written book. And I loved every moment of it.

SELYUKH: There you go. Glowing recommendations from NPR staff for "The Candy House," "Mecca," "Vladimir" and "How High We Go In The Dark." For more reading ideas, hop over to our Books We Love list at npr.org/bestbooks.

Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

• NONFICTION BOOKS
• BEST NONFICTION 2023
• BEST NONFICTION 2024
• Historical Biographies
• The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
• Philosophical Biographies
• World War 2
• World History
• American History
• British History
• Chinese History
• Russian History
• Ancient History (up to 500)
• Medieval History (500-1400)
• Military History
• Art History
• Travel Books
• Ancient Philosophy
• Contemporary Philosophy
• Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Great Philosophers
• Social & Political Philosophy
• Classical Studies
• New Science Books
• Maths & Statistics
• Popular Science
• Physics Books
• Climate Change Books
• How to Write
• English Grammar & Usage
• Books for Learning Languages
• Linguistics
• Political Ideologies
• Foreign Policy & International Relations
• American Politics
• British Politics
• Religious History Books
• Mental Health
• Neuroscience
• Child Psychology
• Film & Cinema
• Opera & Classical Music
• Behavioural Economics
• Development Economics
• Economic History
• Financial Crisis
• World Economies
• How to Invest
• Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
• Data Science Books
• Sex & Sexuality
• Death & Dying
• Food & Cooking
• Sports, Games & Hobbies
• FICTION BOOKS
• BEST FICTION 2023
• NEW Fiction
• World Literature
• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• Classic English Literature
• American Literature
• Comics & Graphic Novels
• Fairy Tales & Mythology
• Historical Fiction
• Crime Novels
• Science Fiction
• Short Stories
• South Africa
• United States
• Arctic & Antarctica
• Afghanistan
• Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
• Netherlands
• Kids Recommend Books for Kids
• High School Teachers Recommendations
• Prizewinning Kids' Books
• Popular Series Books for Kids
• BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
• Ages Baby-2
• Books for Teens and Young Adults
• THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
• BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2023
• BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2023
• Best Audiobooks for Kids
• Environment
• Best Books for Teens of 2023
• Best Kids' Books of 2023
• Political Novels
• New History Books
• New Literary Fiction
• New Historical Fiction
• New Biography
• New Memoirs
• New World Literature
• New Economics Books
• New Climate Books
• New Math Books
• New Philosophy Books
• New Psychology Books
• New Physics Books
• THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
• Actors Read Great Books
• Books Narrated by Their Authors
• Best Audiobook Thrillers
• Best History Audiobooks
• Nobel Literature Prize
• Booker Prize (fiction)
• Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
• Financial Times (nonfiction)
• Wolfson Prize (history)
• Royal Society (science)
• Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
• Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
• Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
• The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
• Audie Awards (audiobooks)

The Best Fiction Books » Best Fiction of 2022

Most recommended books.

The Trees by Percival Everett

“How to explain The Trees ? It has so many disparate ingredients, which should not work together, but absolutely do. It is a gritty examination of the legacy of extreme racism and lynching in the Deep South. It’s a revenge thriller. It’s a buddy cop farce. It’s a detective novel with shades of the supernatural. And, well, it’s one of the best, most readable, funniest, and most hard-hitting novels I have ever read.” Cal Flyn , Five Books Editor

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

“The hero of this book is already dead. In the afterlife, he’s given a chance to revisit moments and places from his life, which took place during the Sri Lankan Civil War, in which the hero—who was a photographer—was ultimately killed. It’s a fantasy of a dead figure coming back, revisiting and understanding what happened, and also watching what the significance of their own life was. So at one level, it’s an enormous subject, almost a theological issue—what did this person do with their life? what does it add up to?—but it’s done, again, with enormous humour.” Neil MacGregor , Art Historians, Critics & Curator

The Books of Jacob: A Novel by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

“This book is attempting to embrace an entire world and culture, a particular period in Poland and Eastern Europe, and fold it into everything that can be known. It is a maximalist novel in that sense. There’s the theology of it, but also how market garden towns worked, how peasants lived, what beliefs people had and how those were challenged or changed. Both The Books of Jacob and A New Name are dealing with the numinous, a sense of God. But Jacob Frank is an apostate, he’s someone who is prepared to overturn centuries of his own religion in an attempt to create something new. Thanks to Olga—through Jenny—we get to witness this vast pageant of what it means to have lived through that time in Poland. It’s like a very, very large Bayeux Tapestry. But also, what it is to look back on that, given what we know now, because there are outside observers.” Frank Wynne , Translator

Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère

“This is a book that made me think: wow, I didn’t know we were allowed to do that. For all sorts of reasons—some moral—but many of them literary. Carrère does not hesitate to put his personal failings on display—nay, to parade them, in this book. Yoga charts his mental breakdown, after several self-congratulatory years of career success and marital bliss. His dramatic self-destruction spools out in slow motion—but there is something liberating in that for the reader, to see a writer dissect their own inner workings so mercilessly and under such a clear, bright light.” Cal Flyn , Five Books Editor

Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel by Harry Josephine Giles

“The action of Deep Wheel Orcadia is mostly set on or close to an isolated space station, at a crisis point in the solar system, and focuses on the working and private lives of the characters on board. You could decide to read the Orcadian version and then the English, or vice versa, or just one—but you’d miss so much if you only read half. I think you can pick up the Orcadian, as you might the Riddleyspeak in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker . It’s the sort of book the prize exists to draw attention to for die-hard scifi readers, and to make non-scifi readers question their assumptions about the genre.” Andrew M. Butler , Film Critics & Scholar

Browse book recommendations:

The Best Fiction Books

• Best Books by Nobel Prize in Literature Winners
• Best Fiction of 2021
• Best Fiction of 2022
• Best Fiction of 2023
• Contemporary Fiction
• Magical Realism
• Popular Fiction Books
• The Best Novels
• Thrillers (Books)
• Women's Fiction

With so many novels to choose from, it's not easy to find the best fiction of 2022, books that are really worth spending your time reading. To help, we've collected all our books recommendations relating to the best fiction of 2022 here.

We also have lists of the:

- mystery books 2022 - fantasy books 2022 - romance books of 2022 - science fiction books 2022 - historical fiction books 2022

Editor’s Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year , recommended by Cal Flyn

The Candy House: A Novel by Jennifer Egan

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer

Septology by Jon Fosse

Author and Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn highlights her favourite novels of 2022—from Jennifer Egan's highly anticipated follow-up to the multi-award-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad, to a debut novel by a twenty-something writer who gave voice to cancer, literally.

Author and Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn highlights her favourite novels of 2022—from Jennifer Egan’s highly anticipated follow-up to the multi-award-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad, to a debut novel by a twenty-something writer who gave voice to cancer, literally.

Award-Winning Novels of 2022 , recommended by Cal Flyn

The Book of Form and Emptiness: A Novel by Ruth Ozeki

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Any end-of-year list is necessarily partial; no one person could hope to read every novel published in the English language in any given year. That's why prize lists are so useful for guiding the casual reader's literary diet. Here, our deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a brief round-up of the books that ruled victorious during the 2022 awards season.

Any end-of-year list is necessarily partial; no one person could hope to read every novel published in the English language in any given year. That’s why prize lists are so useful for guiding the casual reader’s literary diet. Here, our deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a brief round-up of the books that ruled victorious during the 2022 awards season.

The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist , recommended by Neil MacGregor

Glory: A Novel by NoViolet Bulawayo

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best original novel written in the English language. We asked the art historian Neil MacGregor , chair of this year's judging panel, to talk us through the six novels that made the 2022 shortlist—and why fiction can be a most effective means of engaging us emotionally in social and political crisis elsewhere.

The Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best original novel written in the English language. We asked the art historian Neil MacGregor, chair of this year’s judging panel, to talk us through the six novels that made the 2022 shortlist—and why fiction can be a most effective means of engaging us emotionally in social and political crisis elsewhere.

The Best Thrillers of 2022 , recommended by Tosca Lee

Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

The Turnout by Megan Abbott

Rock, Paper, Scissors by Alice Feeney

These Toxic Things: A Thriller by Rachel Howzell Hall

Red Widow by Alma Katsu

I Am Not Who You Think I Am: A Novel by Eric Rickstad

Every year, the International Thriller Writers—an honorary organisation of authors—showcases the best new books in the genre at their annual awards. Here, bestselling author and the organisation's vice-president Tosca Lee talks us through the six-strong shortlist of books, and explains why 'Southern noir' writer S.A. Cosby won the title for the best thriller of 2022—only a year on from his last triumph.

Every year, the International Thriller Writers—an honorary organisation of authors—showcases the best new books in the genre at their annual awards. Here, bestselling author and the organisation’s vice-president Tosca Lee talks us through the six-strong shortlist of books, and explains why ‘Southern noir’ writer S.A. Cosby won the title for the best thriller of 2022—only a year on from his last triumph.

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist , recommended by Elizabeth Laird

Rose Nicolson: A Novel by Andrew Greig

News of the Dead by James Robertson

Fortune by Amanda Smyth

The Magician by Colm Tóibín

Every year, the Walter Scott Prize highlights the best new historical novels. In 2022, the shortlist comprises four fantastic works of historical fiction that immerse the reader in the past—from 16th-century Scotland to 1920s Trinidad—while confronting universal human dramas we still struggle with today. Elizabeth Laird , one of the judges, talks us through their choices this year.

Every year, the Walter Scott Prize highlights the best new historical novels. In 2022, the shortlist comprises four fantastic works of historical fiction that immerse the reader in the past—from 16th-century Scotland to 1920s Trinidad—while confronting universal human dramas we still struggle with today. Elizabeth Laird, one of the judges, talks us through their choices this year.

The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist , recommended by Andrew M. Butler

Klara and the Sun: A Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

A River Called Time by Courttia Newland

Wergen: The Alien Love War by Mercurio D Rivera

Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley

Every year, the judges for the Arthur C. Clarke Award select the best of the latest batch of new scifi books. In 2022, the science fiction award's shortlist includes new work from Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, a novel-in-verse from the Scottish writer Harry Josephine Giles, and a new title in Arkady Martine's beloved Teixcalaan series. Andrew M. Butler , academic and chair of the judges, talks us through the finalists.

Every year, the judges for the Arthur C. Clarke Award select the best of the latest batch of new scifi books. In 2022, the science fiction award’s shortlist includes new work from Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, a novel-in-verse from the Scottish writer Harry Josephine Giles, and a new title in Arkady Martine’s beloved Teixcalaan series. Andrew M. Butler, academic and chair of the judges, talks us through the finalists.

Notable New Novels of Fall 2022 , recommended by Cal Flyn

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Marriage Portrait: A Novel by Maggie O'Farrell & narrated by Genevieve Gaunt

Liberation Day: Stories by George Saunders

Our Share of Night: A Novel by Mariana Enriquez

The Furrows: An Elegy by Namwali Serpell

Fall is a busy time in publishing, as the biggest names in fiction prepare to release new books in the months leading up to Christmas. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up some of the most notable novels of Fall 2022—including two new books from the great American novelist Cormac McCarthy and a sumptuous work of historical fiction from Maggie O'Farrell.

Fall is a busy time in publishing, as the biggest names in fiction prepare to release new books in the months leading up to Christmas. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up some of the most notable novels of Fall 2022—including two new books from the great American novelist Cormac McCarthy and a sumptuous work of historical fiction from Maggie O’Farrell.

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist , recommended by Frank Wynne

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur

A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle

The International Booker Prize celebrates the best fiction in translation published over the previous year. Frank Wynne , acclaimed translator and chair of the 2022 judging panel, tells Five Books about the six novels that made the shortlist, and reminds readers that world literature need not be tough, consumed only in the interests of self-improvement—but is often joyful, surprising and full of feeling.

The International Booker Prize celebrates the best fiction in translation published over the previous year. Frank Wynne, acclaimed translator and chair of the 2022 judging panel, tells Five Books about the six novels that made the shortlist, and reminds readers that world literature need not be tough, consumed only in the interests of self-improvement—but is often joyful, surprising and full of feeling.

The Best Romance Books of 2022 , recommended by Katherine D. Morgan

The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen

Vanessa Jared’s Got a Man by LaQuette

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake

Do You Take This Man by Denise Williams

Digging Up Love by Chandra Blumberg

If you like your novels to end happily ever after, then do we have reading recommendations for you. Guest editor Katherine D. Morgan selects five of the best romance books of 2022, and offers a quick round-up of the love stories you should be looking forward to over the next few months.

Notable Novels of Spring 2022 , recommended by Cal Flyn

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

Pure Colour: A Novel by Sheila Heti

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

If you're nervous of what 2022 has in store for us, you're not alone. But at least there will be plenty of excellent new books to read. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of the notable novels of spring 2022, including exciting new work from Sheila Heti, Ali Smith and Marlon James.

If you’re nervous of what 2022 has in store for us, you’re not alone. But at least there will be plenty of excellent new books to read. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of the notable novels of spring 2022, including exciting new work from Sheila Heti, Ali Smith and Marlon James.

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

© Five Books 2024

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• Future Fables
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Just the Right Book
• Lit Century
• The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan
• New Books Network
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

The Best Reviewed Fiction of 2022

Featuring jennifer egan, emily st. john mandel, ian mcewan, celeste ng, olga tokarczuk, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction; Nonfiction; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; and Literature in Translation.

Today’s installment: Fiction .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf) 28 Rave • 9 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an interview with Emily St. John Mandel here

“In  Sea of Tranquility,  Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and her ability to project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart. As in Ishiguro, this is not born of some cheap, made-for-television, faux-emotional gimmick or mechanism, but of empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language … It is that aspect of  Sea of Tranquility, Mandel’s finely rendered, characteristically understated descriptions of the old-growth forests her characters walk through, the domed moon colonies some of them call home, the robot-tended fields they gaze over or the whooshing airship liftoff sound they hear even in their dreams, that will, for this reader at least, linger longest.”

–Laird Hunt ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (Scribner)

27 Rave • 13 Positive • 11 Mixed • 4 Pan

“… a dizzying and dazzling work that should end up on many Best of the Year lists … The Candy House requires exquisite attentiveness and extensive effort from its readers. But the work and the investment pay off richly, as each strain and thread and character reverberates in a kind of amplifying echo-wave with all the others, and the overarching tapestry emerges as ever more intricate and brilliantly conceived. Enacting the book’s dominant metaphor, Egan is presenting a version of Collective Consciousness: the blending and extension of selfhood across shared experience and identity. One of the book’s most fascinating implications, less patent but pervasive, is how this alternative model of perception does and doesn’t undermine traditional notions of literary consciousness …

As we follow the pebbles and crumbs Egan so cannily lays out, readers may feel at times as disoriented or wonderstruck as children making their way through a dark forest, at others electrifyingly clear-sighted, ecstatically certain of the novel’s wisdom, capacious philosophical range, truth and beauty. Charged with ‘a potency of ideas simmering,’ The Candy House is a marvel of a novel that testifies to the surpassing power of fiction to ‘roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.’”

–Pricilla Gilman ( The Boston Globe )

3. Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett (Riverhead)

26 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed

“ Pond is so unusual, and so unsettlingly pleasurable, that I thought it would be greedy to hope Bennett’s new novel, Checkout 19 , would be better. Lucky me: it is … Bennett is too committed to the oddity and specificity of her again-nameless narrator’s ideas to ever fall into the worn grooves of other people’s. Indeed, the novel is explicitly committed to the privacy of thought … Not many people are able to live this way; not many women or working-class characters get written this way. For the rooted among us, reading Checkout 19 can be utterly jarring. It is a portrait, like Pond; it’s also a call to come at least a little undone. Yes, really. It really is.”

–Lily Meyer ( NPR )

4. The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead)

26 Rave • 9 Positive • 4 Mixed • 1 Pan

“ The Books of Jacob is finally available here in a wondrous English translation by Jennifer Croft, and it’s just as awe-inspiring as the Nobel judges claimed when they praised Tokarczuk for showing ‘the supreme capacity of the novel to represent a case almost beyond human understanding.’ In terms of its scope and ambition, The Books of Jacob is beyond anything else I’ve ever read. Even its voluminous subtitle is a witty expression of Tokarczuk’s irrepressible, omnivorous reach … The challenges here—for author and reader—are considerable. After all, Tokarczuk isn’t revising our understanding of Mozart or presenting a fresh take on Catherine the Great. She’s excavating a shadowy figure who’s almost entirely unknown today …

As daunting as it sounds, The Books of Jacob is miraculously entertaining and consistently fascinating. Despite his best efforts, Frank never mastered alchemy, but Tokarczuk certainly has. Her light irony, delightfully conveyed by Croft’s translation, infuses many of the sections … The quality that makes The Books of Jacob so striking is its remarkable form. Tokarczuk has constructed her narrative as a collage of legends, letters, diary entries, rumors, hagiographies, political attacks and historical records … This is a story that grows simultaneously more detailed and more mysterious … Haunting and irresistible.”

–Ron Charles ( The Washington Post )

5. Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (Grove)

27 Rave • 5 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan

“… moving … Stuart writes like an angel … masterful … if Stuart has not departed much from the scaffolding of his debut novel, he has managed to produce a story with a very different shape and pace … The raw poetry of Stuart’s prose is perfect to catch the open spirit of this handsome boy, with his strange facial tics … The way Stuart carves out this oasis amid a rising tide of homophobia infuses these scenes with almost unbearable poignancy … Stuart quickly proves himself an extraordinarily effective thriller writer. He’s capable of pulling the strings of suspense excruciatingly tight while still sensitively exploring the confused mind of this gentle adolescent trying to make sense of his sexuality …

The result is a novel that moves toward two crises simultaneously: whatever happened with James in Glasgow and whatever might happen to Mungo in the Scottish wilds. The one is a foregone calamity we can only intuit; the other an approaching horror we can only dread. But even as Stuart draws these timelines together like a pair of scissors, he creates a little space for Mungo’s future, a little mercy for this buoyant young man.”

6. Lessons by Ian McEwan (Knopf)

23 Rave • 10 Positive • 4 Mixed • 3 Pan

“Nobody is better at writing about entropy, indignity and ejaculation—among other topics—than Ian McEwan … One of McEwan’s talents is to mingle the lovely with the nasty … McEwan can make a reader feel as though she has bent forward to sniff a rose and received instead the odor of old sewage … McEwan’s use of global events in his fiction tends to be judicious and revealing … These all serve as reminders that history is occurring. And maybe some readers do, in fact, require that reminder. But Roland is so passive that one gets the sense he’d be exactly the same guy in any other century, only with a different haircut … One way to read Lessons is as a self-repudiation of the maneuver at which McEwan has become virtuosic. More authors should repudiate their virtuosity. The results are exciting.”

–Molly Young ( The New York Times )

7. Either/Or by Elif Batuman (Penguin Press)

18 Rave • 12 Positive • 3 Mixed Read an interview with Elif Batuman here

“The book gallops along at a brisk pace, rich with cultural touchstones of the time, and one finishes hungry for more. I reread The Idiot before reading Either/Or and after almost 800 cumulative pages, I still wasn’t sated. Batuman possesses a rare ability to successfully flood the reader with granular facts, emotional vulnerability, dry humor, and a philosophical undercurrent without losing the reader in a sea of noise … What makes a life or story exceptional enough to create art? What art is exceptional, entertaining, and engaging enough to sustain nearly a thousand pages? Selin’s existential crisis within the collegiate crucible haunts every thoughtful reader … The novel stands on its own as a rich exploration of life’s aesthetic and moral crossroads as a space to linger—not race through. Spare me sanctimonious fictional characters locked in the anguish of their regretful late twenties and early thirties: May our bold heroine Selin return to campus and stir up more drama before departing abroad again.”

–Lauren LeBlanc ( The Boston Globe )

8. Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (Penguin)

21 Rave • 5 Positive • 4 Mixed

“Stunning … One of Ng’s most poignant tricks in this novel is to bury its central tragedy…in the middle of the action. This raises the narrative from the specific story of a confused boy and his defeated father to a reflection on the universal bond between parents and children … Our Missing Hearts will land differently for individual readers. One element we shouldn’t miss is Ng’s bold reversal of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. It is the drive for conformity, the suppression of our glorious cacophony, that will doom us. And it is the expression of individual souls that will save us.”

–Bethanne Patrick ( The Lost Angeles Times )

9. Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead)

22 Rave • 3 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an interview with Hernan Diaz here

“[An] enthralling tour de force … Each story talks to the others, and the conversation is both combative and revelatory … As an American epic, Trust gives The Great Gatsby a run for its money … Diaz’s debut, In the Distance , was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Trust fulfills that book’s promise, and then some … Wordplay is Trust ’s currency … In Diaz’s accomplished hands we circle ever closer to the black hole at the core of Trust … Trust is a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery … He spins a larger parable, then, plumbing sex and power, causation and complicity. Mostly, though, Trust is a literary page-turner, with a wealth of puns and elegant prose, fun as hell to read.”

–Hamilton Cain ( Oprah Daily )

10. Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

20 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an interview with Ling Ma here

“The strangeness of living in a body is exposed, the absurdity of carrying race and gender on one’s face, all against the backdrop of an America in ruin … Ma’s meticulously-crafted mood and characterization … Ma’s gift for endings is evident … Ma masterfully captures her characters’ double consciousness, always seeing themselves through the white gaze, in stunning and bold new ways … Even the weaker stories in the book…are redeemed by Ma’s restrained prose style, dry humor, and clever gut-punch endings. But all this technical prowess doesn’t mean the collection lacks a heart. First- and second-generation Americans who might have been invisible for most of their lives are seen and held lovingly in Ma’s fiction.”

–Bruna Dantas Lobato ( Astra )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Previous Article

Next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

Follow us on Twitter

Napoleonic Conspiracy Theories, Unsociable Shabbiness, and More Occupational Hazards of the Second-Hand Book Trade

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

The 20 best books of 2022, according to our critics

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Ask four critics to name their favorite books of any year and you’ll get an array of singular narratives. But if any theme emerged among our top 20 books of 2022, it was the individual struggle to shape the future in a range of hostile words: the harsh dystopias crafted by Celeste Ng and Sequoia Nagamatsu; the vicious liars who questioned Sandy Hook; the British colonizers Samuel Adams outwitted and the American colonizers bested by the great Native athlete Jim Thorpe. These are stories told brilliantly — substance meeting its match in style — in which reality might be inescapable, but hope is unkillable.

The 5 best novels of 2022, according to Mark Athitakis

We asked four book critics to pick their favorites books published in 2022. Here are Mark Athitakis’ top 5 novels of the year.

Dec. 4, 2022

The 5 best fiction books of 2022, according to Bethanne Patrick

We asked our critics to pick their top books of 2022. Bethanne Patrick’s five favorites include Celeste Ng’s latest and newcomers that blew her away.

The 5 best nonfiction books of 2022, according to Mary Ann Gwinn

As 2022 nears an end, we ask four book critics to pick their favorites of the year. Here are Mary Ann Gwinn’s top nonfiction books.

The 5 best books of 2022, according to Jessica Ferri

We asked our critics to pick their top books of 2022. Jessica Ferri’s five favorites reframe mental illness, school shootings, aging and motherhood.

More From the Los Angeles Times

The week’s bestselling books, March 31

March 27, 2024

Storytellers can inspire climate action without killing hope

March 26, 2024

Entertainment & Arts

Sacha Baron Cohen counters Rebel Wilson after she claims reps ‘bullied’ her over book

March 25, 2024

The week’s bestselling books, March 24

March 20, 2024

Watch CBS News

Best fiction books of 2022, according to the New York Public Library

By Carolin Lehmann

December 14, 2022 / 11:35 AM EST / Essentials

CBS Essentials is created independently of the CBS News editorial staff. We may receive commissions from some links to products on this page. Promotions are subject to availability and retailer terms.

If you're looking for a new work of fiction to cozy up with this winter, check out the New York Public Library's 2022 best fiction books for adults list. It features 10 fiction reads, in no particular order, picked out by expert librarians. 

Below, the best fiction books of 2022 according to the  New York Public Library . Find reads from "Diary of a Void" by Emi Yagi to "Foster" by Claire Keegan . Borrow these best books from your own local library to read yourself, or use the Amazon links below to pick up books to gift during the holidays.

Prefer to listen to audio books?  Audible  has a $5.95 per month for four months intro offer, or a 30-day free trial available right now.

The 10 best fiction books of 2022

Here's the New York Public Library list of the best fiction books.

• "Diary of a Void" by Emi Yagi  ( hardcover, $13 after coupon |  Kindle, $10 )

• Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham ( paperback, $18 | Kindle, $5 )

• "Foster" by Claire Keegan ( hardcover, $18 | Kindle, $9 )

• "Kick the Latch" by Kathryn Scanlan  ( paperback, $15 |  Kindle, $10 )

• "Men in My Situation" by Per Petterson  ( paperback, $17 | Kindle, $14 )

• "My Volcano" by John Elizabeth Stintzi  ( paperback, $16 |  Kindle, $9 )

• "No One Left to Come Looking for You" by Sam Lipsyte  ( hardcover, $22 |  Kindle, $13 )

• "Saint Sebastian's Abyss" by Mark Haber  ( paperback, $17 |  Kindle, $10 )

"Vladimir" by Julia May Jonas ( paperback, $17 | Kindle $13 )

"When I Sing, Mountains Dance" by Irene Solà ( paperback, $16 | Kindle, $10 )

The bestselling books of 2022 on Amazon

Want more reading recs? Then check out the 10 bestselling books of 2022 on Amazon below.

'It Ends with Us' by Colleen Hoover

This tale of first loves and domestic violence is thought-provoking and proves things just aren't that black and white.

"Should we be defined by the worst thing we have done?"  an Amazon reviewer asks . "Hoover makes you really think about the gray areas and this book has given me lots of food for thought."

"It Ends with Us" by Colleen Hoover (paperback), $8 after coupon

"It Ends with Us" by Colleen Hoover (Kindle), $11

2. 'Where the Crawdads Sing' by Delia Owens

Read the book before you watch the movie on Netflix. Can you solve this small-town murder-mystery? It's a tale of isolation and nature.

"What a stunning love letter to the marshlands and suspenseful coming-of-age story,"  an Amazon reviewer says . 

"Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens (paperback), $8 after coupon

"Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens (hardback), $12

3. 'It Starts with Us' by Colleen Hoover

The second bestselling Colleen Hoover book? "It Starts with Us," the sequel to "It Ends with Us." Find out what happens to Lily next in this book that switches between the perspectives of Lily and Atlas. 

"This book had the closure that was needed from the first,"  an Amazon reviewer says .

"It Starts with Us" by Colleen Hoover (paperback), $9 after coupon

"It Starts with Us" by Colleen Hoover (Kindle), $14

4. 'Verity' by Colleen Hoover

Up next is a Colleen Hoover psychological thriller. A struggling writer is hired to finish an injured bestselling author's book series, but she finds her unfinished autobiography in her office which contains chilling admissions. 

"The tale careens to a jaw-dropping conclusion that will keep readers thinking, discussing and debating Hoover's extremely clever and nuanced tale, as well as her deliciously intriguing and morally ambiguous characters (who may prove themselves to be not as ambiguous as originally thought) for a very, very long time,"  an Amazon reviewer says .

"Verity" by Colleen Hoover (paperback), $9 after coupon

"Verity" by Colleen Hoover (Kindle), $12

5. 'Atomic Habits' by James Clear

Change your habits with the help of this book. The author walks you through building good habits and breaking bad ones with simple behaviors.

"'Atomic Habits' by James Clear is one of those rare books that I immediately read twice in a row,"  an Amazon reviewer says . "It is filled with dozens of science-backed and actionable nuggets of wisdom."

"Atomic Habits" by James Clear (hardcover), $10 after coupon

"Atomic Habits" by James Clear (Kindle), $13

6. 'Reminders of Him' by Colleen Hoover

This Colleen Hoover romance novel follows a mother who went to prison for a tragic mistake. What happens when she's released?

"I'd suggest this book to anyone who likes quick, deep reads with elements that will leave you tearing up with everything from sadness to sentimentality,"  an Amazon reviewer says .

"Reminders of Him" by Colleen Hoover (paperback), $8 after coupon

"Reminders of Him" by Colleen Hoover (Kindle), free with Kindle Unlimited

7. 'Ugly Love' by Colleen Hoover

This next Colleen Hoover read is about a friends-with-benefits agreement gone awry. 

"I'm sad I don't have more time with Miles and Tate but I am so glad that I was able to spend one wonderful afternoon/evening in their world with them and I know I will never forget this amazing, beautiful, ugly love story!"  an Amazon reviewer says .

"Ugly Love" by Colleen Hoover (paperback), $8 after coupon

"Ugly Love" by Colleen Hoover (Kindle), $11

8. 'The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo' by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Read "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" before  the Netflix film  comes out. Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo hires an unknown magazine reporter to write her memoir. Find out how their lives intersect.

"On top of this being a powerful book about race, sexuality, misogyny, and having to conform to societies norms, the true meaning I took from this book is that life is short, so damn short, and we shouldn't spend it pretending to be something we aren't,"  an Amazon reviewer says .

"The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" by Taylor Jenkins Reid (paperback), $8 after coupon

"The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Kindle), $15

9. 'The Body Keeps the Score' by Bessel van der Kolk

Trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk explains how trauma reshapes both the body and brain and explores innovative treatments.

"The scientific information, the validation and the information on how to heal trauma has made this book absolutely priceless to me,"  an Amazon reviewer says .

"The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk (paperback), $9 after coupon

"The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk (Kindle), $15

10. 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' by Eric Carle

On a lighter note, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" remains a classic. This board book teaches counting and days of the week to little ones.

"I read it as a kid, and now I can read it to my nephew, who loves it!"  an Amazon reviewer says .

"The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle (board book), $4 after coupon

"The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle (Kindle), $9

Related content from CBS Essentials

• Tech Gift Guide 2022: The best tech stocking stuffers from Apple, Samsung and more (plus holiday deals)
• The best Christmas trees and Christmas tree deals you can shop right now
• Christmas 2022 gift guide: Best holiday deals under $100
• Don't miss this Walmart free money deal: How to save $10 on your next Walmart order
• Holiday gift guide 2022: The best gifts under $50 this Christmas and Hanukkah

Carolin Lehmann is an expert in health, fitness, furniture, apparel, gift guides and books for CBS Essentials. She's always testing new products to recommend. Some of her current favorites include Stanley cups and Alo Yoga workout sets.

More Essentials

How to watch today's Clemson vs. Alabama men's NCAA March Madness Elite 8 game: Livestream options, more

Find out how and when to watch the Clemson Tigers vs. Alabama Crimson Tide men's NCAA March Madness Elite 8 game.

See Caitlin Clark play: How to watch today's Iowa vs. Colorado women's NCAA March Madness Sweet 16 game

Caitlin Clark is headed to the Sweet 16. Find out when and how to watch the Iowa Hawkeyes' March Madness game today.

How to watch today's Illinois vs. UConn men's NCAA March Madness Elite 8 game: Livestream options, more

Track UConn and Illinois' Elite 8 NCAA March Madness game with everything you need to know to watch today's game.

See Angel Reese play: How to watch today's LSU vs. UCLA women's NCAA March Madness Sweet 16 game

Saturday plans locked in: Find out how and when to watch the LSU vs. UCLA women's March Madness Sweet 16 showdown.

The best desktop computers in 2024 for every type of family

Our in-house consumer tech experts have compiled this roundup of the best desktop PCs currently available to Windows and MacOS users.

10 ways to upgrade your living room with picks from Amazon, West Elm and more

We found the best furniture and decorative items to level up your living room for spring.

Save 23% on the rarely discounted Cuisinart bread maker on Amazon

We've been tracking this product for months and it's finally on sale at Amazon.

Save hundreds on the new 2024 Samsung Frame TV with Amazon Prime (plus get a free 65" TV)

Here's how to order the new 2024 edition of Samsung's Frame TV and save money.

The best video doorbells for 2024 screen everything that darkens your doorstep

Grab a new video doorbell to enhance your home's security and feel safer -- from anywhere.

She bought a $100 tail and used it for a "magical" mermaid career

Professional mermaids can teach classes, participate in competitions, perform at parties or events or swim in aquariums.

Powerball jackpot nears $935 million after months with no winner

No one has won Powerball's top prize since New Year's Day.

American Airlines changes its policy for bringing pets on flights

Under the carrier's old policy, pets were counted as carry-ons despite a steep charge passengers pay to bring animals into the cabin.

Majority of U.S. bridges lack impact protection. Will anything change?

There are 4,207 bridges in the U.S. that allow ships to pass under them. Of those, only 36% are described as having functional pier protection.

• updated 59M ago

What consumers should know about health supplement linked to 5 deaths

Products containing red yeast rice and meant to lower cholesterol are also sold in the U.S., but what they contain can be murky.

California set to hike wages for fast-food workers to $20 per hour

Starting April 1, the minimum wage for most fast-food workers in California will jump to $20 an hour — the highest in the U.S.

"Cowboy Carter," Beyoncé's first country album, has arrived

Beyoncé's new album, featuring collaborations with some of country music's biggest names, including Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, has already reached No. 2 on Apple Music.

Fulton County DA Fani Willis plans to take a lead role in trying Trump case

Two weeks after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis survived a bid​ by defense lawyers to have her disqualified from the Georgia election interference case​, she has all but taken over the case personally,

Trump asks appeals court to review ruling letting Willis stay on Georgia case

Former President Donald Trump and other defendants have submitted an application to appeal a ruling allowing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to remain on the case.

Biden to visit Baltimore next week as response to bridge collapse continues

The Biden administration said Thursday it approved $60 million in immediate federal aid to help in the aftermath of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse.

Trump allies hope to raise $33 million at Florida fundraiser

Wealthy GOP donors hope to raise more than $33 million at a fundraiser next week, a total that would eclipse the eye-popping $26 million​ President Biden raised in New York.

EPA sets strict emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks and buses

Officials said the standards will help clean up some of the nation's largest sources of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

HealthWatch

For-Profit Companies Open Psychiatric Hospitals in Areas Clamoring for Care

State institutions and community hospitals have closed inpatient mental health units, often citing staffing and financial challenges. Now, for-profit companies are opening psychiatric hospitals to fill the void.

What is meningococcal disease? Symptoms to know as CDC warns of spike

The CDC is warning about a rise in meningococcal disease, a rare bacterial illnesses than can lead to meningitis and possible death. Here's what to know about symptoms, transmission and treatment.

Was her baby's air-ambulance ride not medically necessary?

Cigna determined 3-month-old's air-ambulance ride arranged by hospital was not medically necessary, leaving his parents with nearly six-figure bill.

Reproductive rights experts weigh in on abortion, IVF battles across U.S.

From abortion restrictions to IVF bans, reproductive rights for women in the U.S. have never been more uncertain.

Convoy carrying Gaza aid departs Cyprus amid hunger concerns

An international charity says a three-ship convoy carrying supplies from the World Central Kitchen left Cyprus Saturday.

Christians in Jerusalem cautiously celebrate Easter amid war

Many Christians who might normally participate in pilgrimages to Jerusalem stayed away, but those who came said they weren't afraid.

Pope Francis will preside over Easter Vigil after skipping Good Friday

The Vatican's daily bulletin confirmed Francis would lead the lengthy vigil in St. Peter's Basilica.

4 U.N. military observers wounded in an explosion, officials say

The military observers are part of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization.

Entertainment

Legendary MLB pitcher finds new passion

Randy Johnson spent 22 seasons as one of the most dominating pitchers that Major League Baseball has ever seen, but now he's making a name for himself in a new field.

Louis Gossett Jr. dies at 87

Louis Gossett Jr. made history as the first Black man to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the drama "An Officer and a Gentleman." Now, tributes to the actor are pouring in after his death at 87. Michelle Miller reports on his career and legacy.

Remembering actor Louis Gossett Jr.

Hollywood is mourning the death of Louis Gossett Jr., who died Friday at the age of 87. Gossett was the first Black man to win an Oscar for a supporting role in 1983 for the film "An Officer and a Gentleman." Michelle Miller looks back on his life and career.

Leah Remini earns college degree at age 53

Remini, 53, posted on social media on Thursday that she received an associate's degree from New York University.

How AI powered robots are helping small farms

From labor shortages to environmental impacts, farmers are looking to AI to help revolutionize the agriculture industry. One California startup, Farm-ng, is tapping into the power of AI and robotics to perform a wide range of tasks, including seeding, weeding and harvesting.

Phone companies shifting to eSIMs

Phone manufacturers, including Apple, are moving away from physical SIM cards toward eSIMs for newer phone models. The change could cause headaches for customers. Lisa Eadicicco, a senior editor for CNET, joined CBS News to discuss the shift.

Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years

Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in the sudden collapse of the FTX crypto exchange. Prosecutors say he defrauded customers out of more than $8 billion, one of the largest financial crimes in U.S. history. Errol Barnett reports.

Scientists working on AI tech to match dogs to jobs and owners

Researchers in London are developing an AI tool to sort dogs into 5 categories, in a bid to match pooches with their perfect owners.

AI tool could match dogs with perfect owners

CBS News' Ian Lee meets researchers in London who are developing an AI tool to sort dogs into 5 categories, in a bid to match pooches with their perfect owners.

Report: 1 billion meals wasted daily in 2022

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, humans wasted 19% of all available food in 2022. That's equivalent to one billion meals per day. Brian Roe, agricultural and environmental economics professor at Ohio State University, joins CBS News to discuss the implications.

Australia races to save last few earless dragons in the wild

The critically endangered dragons will likely be extinct in the next 20 years without conservation efforts, experts say.

90% of some of the world's wine regions could disappear, study finds

Climate change means wine could soon have a higher alcohol content — but spoil faster and smell worse.

NASA gives warning ahead of total solar eclipse

NASA has a warning for people who want to take a peek at next month's total solar eclipse. CBS News' Lilia Luciano has more.

California man convicted of killing his mother is captured in Mexico

Authorities say Ike Nicholas Souzer was captured a week after he walked away from a halfway house.

Inmate escapes jail, then fatally struck by hit-and-run driver

Matthew Ornellas Jr. scaled a fence with razor wire, and officers gave chase but lost sight of him when he entered a dense brush area, officials said.

California woman says her bloody bedroom was not a crime scene

Jane Dorotik was convicted of her husband's murder but says some so-called bloodstains presented at trial were never tested and others were not blood at all.

New evidence helps free convicted woman

After nearly two decades behind bars for her husband's murder, a California woman's relentless quest for a reexamination of the evidence reveals flaws. "48 Hours" correspondent Erin Moriarty unravels her journey to freedom.

Woman accused of killing girl beaten to death by mob in Mexico

The mob formed after an 8-year-old girl disappeared and her body was found on a road on the outskirts of the city.

New image reveals "twisted" magnetic fields around our black hole

Supermassive black holes are believed to have emerged very early in the universe but their creation remains a mystery.

Soyuz crew docks at space station after 2-day rendezvous

NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson is replacing Loral O'Hara, who's wrapping up a six-month stay aboard the space station.

Earth was just slammed with a "severe" geomagnetic storm

NOAA said people as far south as Alabama may have seen the northern lights and that the sun could expel the strongest type of solar flares over the next few days.

How to see the penumbral lunar eclipse, March's full moon

As March's full Worm Moon rises late Sunday into early Monday, it will travel through the Earth's penumbra — the faint outer part of its shadow — creating a penumbral eclipse.

Russia launches one-man, two-woman crew to space station

NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, making her third flight, will spend six months aboard the station, replacing astronaut Loral O'Hara.

Latest Galleries

Notable Deaths in 2024

A look back at the esteemed personalities who've left us this year, who'd touched us with their innovation, creativity and humanity.

PHOTOS: Baltimore bridge collapses after cargo ship rams into overpass

The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed early Tuesday, March 26 after a column was struck by a container ship that reportedly lost power, sending vehicles and people into the Patapsco River.

Could an Alabama woman have shot herself twice?

When Tiffiney Crawford was found dead inside her van, authorities believed she might have taken her own life. But could she shoot herself twice in the head with her non-dominant hand?

CBS newsman Charles Osgood (1933-2024)

We look back at the life and career of the longtime host of "Sunday Morning," and "one of the most enduring and most endearing" people in broadcasting.

Texas couple investigates teen daughter's unusual death

Cayley Mandadi's mother and stepfather go to extreme lengths to prove her death was no accident.

Latest CBS News Videos

Eye on America: Preserving national landmarks

In Connecticut, we meet the preservationists who are giving dilapidated lighthouses new life. Then in California, we learn about the efforts to restore an iconic fishing boat. Watch these stories and more on "Eye on America" with host Michelle Miller.

Shane Smith & The Saints perform "It's Been A While"

Shane Smith & The Saints have wowed fans across the country with their unique blend of Texas country, Celtic-inspired folk and hard-hitting rock music. Over the last decade, they've released three independent albums and performed over 1,000 live shows. This month, they finally released their much-anticipated studio album "Norther." Now, making their national television debut, here is Shane Smith & The Saints with "It's Been A While."

Shane Smith & The Saints perform "All I See Is You"

Shane Smith & The Saints have wowed fans across the country with their unique blend of Texas country, Celtic-inspired folk and hard-hitting rock music. Over the last decade, they've released three independent albums and performed over 1,000 live shows. This month, they finally released their much-anticipated studio album "Norther." Now, making their national television debut, here is Shane Smith & The Saints with "All I See Is You."

Shane Smith & The Saints perform "The Greys Between"

Shane Smith & The Saints have wowed fans across the country with their unique blend of Texas country, Celtic-inspired folk and hard-hitting rock music. Over the last decade, they've released three independent albums and performed over 1,000 live shows. This month, they finally released their much-anticipated studio album "Norther." Now, making their national television debut, here is Shane Smith & The Saints with "The Greys Between."

The Dish: Ryan Fernandez

Ryan Fernandez' culinary career started as a side gig. Now, the chef — born in India and raised in Ireland and Texas — is whipping up unique dishes, combining the flavors of his childhood with Southern classics. Jeff Glor reports.

Best Sellers in Books for 2024

• ← Previous page
• Next page →

• 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

• Entertainment

Here Are the 12 New Books You Should Read in April

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

T he best books coming in April include historian Erik Larson ’s latest nonfiction thriller, former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey ’s meditation on writing, and Salman Rushdie ’s agonizing account of the brutal knife attack he suffered two years ago. Other notable releases include a pair of career-spanning anthologies that celebrate the works of cultural critic Maggie Nelson and historian Nell Irvin Painter , as well as Amor Towles ’ first collection of short stories. Alyssa Cole ’s new mystery features a protagonist struggling with dissociative identity disorder, while former therapist Patric Gagne hopes to recontextualize the term “sociopath” with her debut memoir of the same name. 

Here, the 12 best books to read this month.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories , Julia Alvarez (April 2)

In Julia Alvarez ’s seventh adult novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, acclaimed writer Alma Cruz inherits a piece of her homeland, the Dominican Republic. After the death of her close friend and fellow author, Alma decides to retire and turn her plot of land into a graveyard for the unpublished tales she’d like to finally put to rest. But just because Alma is ready to abandon her characters, some of whom are based on real historical figures, it doesn’t mean they are ready to go peacefully. Mystical and moving, The Cemetery of Untold Stories shows why some stories must be told no matter how hard you try to bury them.

Buy Now : The Cemetery of Untold Stories on Bookshop | Amazon

Village Weavers , Myriam J. A. Chancy (April 2)

For fans of Elena Ferrante : Myriam J. A. Chancy’s Village Weavers is a wistful look at a complicated female friendship that spans decades and continents. Growing up in1940s Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Gertie and Sisi are the best of friends until a devastating secret that bonds their families tears them apart. The book follows the two women as they fall in and out of one another’s lives amid a violent dictatorship, and struggle with infertility and terminal illness. When Sisi gets an unexpected call from Gertie in 2002, decades after they last spoke, she must decide whether she is ready to forgive—or forget—all that they have shared.

Buy Now : Village Weavers on Bookshop | Amazon

Sociopath , Patric Gagne (April 2)

Writer and former therapist Patric Gagne first discovered she was a sociopath in college. But, in her provocative debut memoir, Sociopath , she admits that there were signs long before she was diagnosed. With incredible candor, she details the violent outbursts she exhibited as a child that would lead to near run-ins with the law in her teens and 20s. “Most of the time I felt nothing,” she writes, “so I did bad things to make the nothingness go away.” Despite her lifelong lack of empathy, shame, and guilt, she has become a loving wife and mother, something she knows doesn’t fit with pop culture’s portrayal of sociopaths as murderers, villains, and monsters. In her memoir, Gagne looks to destigmatize the often misunderstood mental disorder, now more commonly known as antisocial personality disorder , while offering compassion to those, like her, who are trying to change what it means to be a sociopath.

Buy Now : Sociopath on Bookshop | Amazon

We Loved It All , Lydia Millet (April 2)

Lydia Millet ’s first foray into nonfiction, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life, questions what humans lose when they ignore their connection to the animal kingdom. With great passion and indignation, the acclaimed novelist behind 2022’s Dinosaurs takes aim at corporations whose greed has endangered the world’s wildlife. She looks at how the “ Crying Indian” anti-litter campaign from the 1970s allowed big business to place the onus on consumers to clean up the environmental mess they played the largest role in causing. By sharing personal anecdotes about her own childhood, as well as the experiences of raising her son and daughter, Millet shows how caring about the smallest creatures that live among us is tied to the fight for economic justice around the globe. With her mournful yet often hopeful rumination on our current state of existence, Millet reminds us that we are not alone in this world.

Buy Now : We Loved It All on Bookshop | Amazon

Like Love , Maggie Nelson (April 2)

Like Love draws on two decades of Maggie Nelson’s career as a critic of art in all its forms. The collection of previously published work, arranged in chronological order, includes essays on, tributes to, and conversations with creatives the author deeply admires: musician Björk, poet Eileen Myles, fine artist Kara Walker , the late queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick , novelist Ben Lerner , philosopher Judith Butler , and writer and theater critic Hilton Als, whose words inspired the book’s title. When examining the art she loves, Nelson uses incisive and analytical prose, but her scholarly style doesn’t take away from the joy she feels for the work. “Words aren’t just what’s left,” she writes of why we need criticism. “They’re what we have to offer.”

Buy Now : Like Love on Bookshop | Amazon

Table for Two , Amor Towles (April 2)

Amor Towles ’ Table For Two is an intimate collection of six short stories that take place in early 2000s New York, and a 1930s Hollywood-set novella that picks up where his 2011 debut, Rules of Civility , left off. The book, which was written while he was meant to be working on his fourth novel , focuses on brief but fateful encounters between strangers, would-be business partners, and estranged relatives. Most of these conversations take place at a table set for two, the perfect place to share a tête-à-tête about forgery or bootlegging or even the blackmailing of screen legend Olivia de Havilland . Table For Two is a smorgasbord of deliciously mischievous tales imbued with Towles’ signature wit and worldliness.

Buy Now : Table for Two on Bookshop | Amazon

The House of Being , Natasha Trethewey (April 9)

In The House of Being, which was originally delivered as a 2022 prize lecture at Yale University, Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey takes readers back to her grandmother’s home outside of Gulfport, Miss., where the author learned to read and write. It was there that her neighbors flew Confederate flags with pride, and her late mother—whose death at the hands of her ex-husband was the focus of Trethewey’s best-selling 2020 memoir, Memorial Drive — took to singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” any time she passed one. It was also where, Trethewey would later learn, formerly enslaved men and women were educated after the Civil War, their stories lost to time because they had not been written down. With The House of Being, Trethewey doesn’t just explore the reasons why she writes. She also offers a compassionate argument for why we must all be the authors of our own stories.

Buy Now : The House of Being on Bookshop | Amazon

One of Us Knows , Alyssa Cole (April 16)

Best-selling author Alyssa Cole ’s latest novel, One of Us Knows, is a paranoia-filled murder mystery full of twists and turns. Preservationist Kenetria “Ken” Nash has taken a job as the caretaker of a gothic castle on a remote island on the Hudson River in the hopes of getting back on her feet. For the last six years, Ken has struggled with dissociative identity disorder, which causes her to, without much warning, “switch” between multiple identities. Lately, Ken has found it harder to keep her “headmates”—precocious toddler Keke, judgy perfectionist Della, and the sophisticated Solomon, to name a few—in check. When a man from Ken’s past is found dead in the historic home, she must enlist her headmates’ help in hopes of clearing her name, all the while knowing she could be the killer she is looking for.

Buy Now : One of Us Knows on Bookshop | Amazon

Knife , Salman Rushdie (April 16)

On Aug. 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was stabbed nearly 10 times while at a speaking engagement in western New York. With his new memoir, Knife, Rushdie writes about the violent attack that left him with PTSD , limited mobility in his left hand, and the loss of sight in his right eye, offering an intimate and often harrowing account of what happened that day and what life has been like for him since. (The trial for Rushdie’s alleged attacker , who has been charged with attempted murder, has been postponed due to the release of this book, since it can serve as potential evidence.) Rushdie has said that writing Knife was an important step in the healing process. “This was a necessary book for me to write,” he said in a statement . “A way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art.”

Buy Now : Knife on Bookshop | Amazon

I Just Keep Talking , Nell Irvin Painter (April 23)

For the past five decades, acclaimed writer, artist, historian, and critic Nell Irvin Painter’s work has felt ahead of its time. I Just Keep Talking, a decades-spanning collection of more than 40 of her previously published essays, shows just how prescient her work really was. The anthology includes a 1982 essay on the effect white educators’ reluctance to teach Black resistance would have on how the history of slavery is taught in America . In other pieces, she examines how Spike Lee ’s film Malcolm X reinvented the activist and breaks down the gender and racial stereotypes that hurt Anita Hill ’s case against Clarence Thomas during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing. A more recent essay from 2022 offers a strong warning to Democrats: If you “jettison voting rights in order to court white voters without college degrees,” she writes, you’ll risk repeating the mistakes of Reconstruction . This insightful anthology shows why Painter, now 81 years old, is still one of the most important voices in America.

Buy Now : I Just Keep Talking on Bookshop | Amazon

Lucky , Jane Smiley (April 23)

As the title of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley ’s coming-of-age novel Lucky implies, protagonist Jodie Rattler has always been more fortunate than most. While attending college at Penn State in the 1960s, Jodie decides she’d like to become a folk singer, so she records a song that becomes a surprise hit. She soon finds herself living like a true bohemian, recording an album in New York, touring the country, and earning comparisons to musical luminaries like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell . But as the pressure builds for her to leave school and focus on her music career full time, she finds herself questioning her future. Lucky offers a tender look at one young woman’s journey to understand who she has become and who she’d like to be when she finally grows up.

Buy Now : Lucky on Bookshop | Amazon

The Demon of Unrest , Erik Larson (April 30)

After tackling World War II by focusing on Winston Churchill’s leadership during the Blitz with The Splendid and the Vile , one of TIME’s best books of 2020 , Erik Larson returns with a historical nonfiction thriller set before the start of the U.S. Civil War . The Demon of Unrest looks at the chaotic five-month period between the November 1860 election of President Abraham Lincoln and the April 1861 surrender of Fort Sumter , which marked the official beginning of the war. Using journals, slave ledgers, plantation records, and secret correspondence, Larson offers an intriguing look at a young country on the brink of collapse. He reexamines the lead-up to the four-year conflict by putting the focus not only on the rebellion’s major players, but also on those on the periphery: Maj. Robert Anderson, the Union commander at Fort Sumter, Edmund Ruffin, an agricultural reformer and ardent secessionist, James H. Hammond, a senator and wealthy plantation owner from South Carolina, and Mary Boykin Chesnut, the wealthy wife of a lawyer and senator whose diary became an invaluable resource for the author.

Buy Now : The Demon of Unrest on Bookshop | Amazon

More Must-Reads From TIME

• Jane Fonda Champions Climate Action for Every Generation
• Biden’s Campaign Is In Trouble. Will the Turnaround Plan Work?
• Why We're Spending So Much Money Now
• The Financial Influencers Women Actually Want to Listen To
• Breaker Sunny Choi Is Heading to Paris
• Why TV Can’t Stop Making Silly Shows About Lady Journalists
• The Case for Wearing Shoes in the House
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

You May Also Like

The Best Sci-Fi Books of 2024 (So Far)

Posted: March 6, 2024 | Last updated: March 11, 2024

The opening page of Malka Older’s new book says simply, “There are other ways to live.” That idea carries through so many of this year’s best science fiction books, which are full of questions about how we might live differently with each other, on our troubled planet or in the furthest reaches of space. Science fiction, as Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, is not predictive but descriptive, and what contemporary science fiction authors are so often describing is a world that seems to be less and less built for humans to thrive in it. We are still close enough to 2020 that we’re reading books that have their roots in that particularly tumultuous year—roots that dig deep into surveillance , capitalism , protest , inequity , and failures to learn from the past.

But there are other worlds, other ways to thrive—and other ways to replicate humanity’s worst failings, too. This year’s best books don’t shy away from who we’ve been, and who we are, but they also brim with a fierce curiosity about who we might become. As Martin MacInnes writes in the glorious In Ascension , “The original science-fiction story—the impossible adventure full of wonder and awe—was merely the existence of the species, all the movements she and her sister and their family and every other living person had shared.”

Below, listed in publication order, are our favorite science fiction books of the year (so far). Watch this space for updates; we’ll continue adding to our list as the year unfolds.

1) Your Utopia, by Bora Chung (translated by Anton Hur)

Bora Chung’s impressive second collection sets its tone with its title: if a utopia is yours, can it be shared? Can it be anyone else’s? There’s a melancholy and a wryness to these stories, in which lonely people (or other beings) try to connect, or protect, or simply survive. In “The End of the Voyage,” the urge to consume dooms humanity. In “A Song for Sleep,” an AI elevator does its best to care for a resident of its building. The elevator seems kind, but its knowledge of the building’s inhabitants is due to an alarming level of surveillance. Through the prism of her singular imagination, Chung looks sharply at the ways the world we’ve made doesn’t suit us: corporate greed is a frequent enemy, whether it’s focused on controlling the natural world (“Seed”) or extending its own existence (“The Center for Immortality Research”). These are stories to sit with, to read one at a time and savor.

2) The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, by Malka Older

The second volume in Malka Older’s utterly delightful Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti series finds Mossa searching for a missing student—a case that expands to include over a dozen missing people. The mystery is satisfying, but the heart of this story is the tentative and endearing relationship between Mossa and the academic Pleiti, the Watson to Mossa’s Holmes, who narrates the bulk of their tale. Older packs a ton into barely 200 pages: academic wrangling, space libertarians, the state of the distant and troubled Earth, a visit to the moon of Io, a trip on Giant’s fascinating railcars, and so much more. This is distinctly a cozy mystery, but also a space opera in miniature. Part of what Older so beautifully illustrates is the way humanity might bring its history and culture—food, tea, language, rituals, fears—into the alien landscapes of space. You can read this one without reading the first book, The Mimicking of Known Successes , but why deprive yourself?

3) In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes

MacInnes’s third novel—longlisted for last year’s Booker Prize—is simply like nothing else I’ve ever read. In Ascension centers on Leigh, a marine biologist who spent a troubled childhood in Rotterdam before venturing far from home: to a distant island, to the depths of the ocean, to the Mojave Desert, and eventually to the stars. But that sounds so simple, and this book is expansively, engrossingly complex, meticulously observed and quietly moving. As Leigh’s work turns confidential and mysterious, involving strange phenomena that connect to her deep-sea adventure, MacInnes details her focus on algae with the same care and consideration that he uses to depict her relationship with her mother, her sister, her colleagues, and her world. This isn’t a book that offers anything approaching a tidy resolution. What it offers instead is the texture of an entire life, reflected and refracted by the lives around it. It’s as immersive and astonishing as the deep-sea dive Leigh takes, a journey through a familiar world made freshly, improbably new.

4) Those Beyond the Wall, by Micaiah Johnson

If this were a ranking of the most memorable characters of the year, Scales would be at the top. A mechanic by assignment but a killer by skill, she’s one of many lieutenants to the Emperor of Ashtown, a desert community that exists outside the walls of privileged Wiley City. Ashtown is not an easy place to live, even when you’re the Emperor’s favorite. But when mangled bodies start appearing, no one is safe, and it will take the combined efforts of Scales, her least-favorite colleague, a disgraced scientist, the Emperor, and a worldwalker to save them—all of them. Johnson’s second book, a standalone set in the same world as her The Space Between Worlds , is fueled by the rage that comes from love. When you love a people, love a place, and that people and place are treated as lesser and disposable, rage is inevitable. (As Johnson writes in the author’s note, “Rage is a beacon calling out to others.”) Complicated, deadly, and absolutely full of secrets, Scales is one hell of a narrator, and her sharp, distinctive voice propels this story though desert, city, multiverse, and her own hidden history. Those Beyond the Wall is a novel about holding tight to community in the face of devastation, and it is a triumph.

5) The Siege of Burning Grass, by Premee Mohamed

The latest work from the astonishingly prolific Mohamed (who has three books out this year alone) is a visceral yet intimate story about violence, nationalism, and war. Injured, captured, and tortured by his own side in an endless conflict, the famous pacifist Alefret is sent on a mission to infiltrate an enemy city. With him is Qhudur, a fanatic who will do anything for victory. Mohamed’s bio-technical setting is vivid and unusual—trained medical wasps, floating cities, and lightspiders dot these pages—but the heart of her story is Alefret’s moral struggle. Would killing Qhudur, an act of violence, lead to peace? When does violence become a habit that a country cannot break? How can a person hold tight to their ideals even amid suffering? How can stories and myths help sustain us? But The Siege of Burning Grass isn’t just a thoughtful consideration of war and pacifism; it’s also a feat of worldbuilding, moral complexity, and taut, precisely paced storytelling. After this, I’m ready to hunt down everything else Mohamed has ever written.

6) These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, by Izzy Wasserstein

In post-climate disaster America, in what’s left of Kansas City, a woman named Dora investigates a death in the anarchist commune to which she once belonged. She’s certain her ex didn’t overdose, but finding out what really happened isn’t going to be easy. Wasserstein excels at the near-future details of her SF-techno-mystery, but she shines even more when it comes to the unexpected connection between Dora and the person sent to kill her—a person who is wearing her pre-transition face. These Fragile Graces is at once a stylish noir and an exploration of identity, gender, selfhood, control, consent, and intimacy. Wasserstein more than pulls it off—everything here feels lived-in and real, from the details of the commune’s processes to the corporate powers that treat people as disposable or replaceable. Dora’s distinctive, terse voice is one I keep hearing in my head, long after the last page. Maybe, if we’re lucky, she’ll find more mysteries to solve.

7) Floating Hotel, by Grace Curtis

In her second novel, Curtis makes an impeccable balancing act look easy. Floating Hotel is, on the surface, a cozy sort of tale about the staff at the titular spaceship, the Grand Abeona Hotel, which endlessly traverses the same route, catering to wealthy people among the stars. Young, miserable Carl stows away on the hotel as a kid; decades later, he’s risen to the post of manager, now a gentle charmer with a soothing word for everyone. When a peculiar academic conference converges with the search for the Lamplighter (a seditious, anti-Empire figure whose broadsides appear between chapters), the fate of the hotel—and its endearing staff—is called into question. But Curtis doesn’t let the spies, codes, and mysteries take over the story; there’s still time for illicit movie nights and anxious musical performances. Floating Hotel is rich with kindness, with big-hearted characters from every corner of the ship, but it also has teeth, a working-class sensibility, and a rebellious heart. This one is a treat.

8) Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead

“Generation ship novel in verse” is a series of words I had never considered until I read Oliver K. Langmead’s ambitious and immersive Calypso . While the engineers slept, the crew of the Calypso experienced a schism. When Rochelle—whose role is to question Sigmund, the expedition’s leader—wakes, nothing is as she expects, and nothing goes as planned. Four narrators tell the tale: Rochelle, a woman of faith; Catherine, a biologist; the Herald, who relates the ship’s history; and Sigmund, whose narrative is largely set in his own past. Their voices take different shapes; the Herald’s words are squared off, blocky and challenging, while Catherine’s words bend and twist, branching outward more dramatically as she gets closer to the culmination of her role. In a stunning central chapter that’s part body horror and part triumphant act of creation, Catherine transforms, filling a planet with myriad forms of life. Outside of that section, Langmead’s verse creates a sense of spareness, of space unfilled, that echoes the loneliness Rochelle feels. Like so many generation ship stories, this is an elegantly told meditation on how we can’t leave ourselves behind. Any new world will be seeded with what we know, what we’ve learned, who we are, for better or for worse.

9) Lake of Souls, by Ann Leckie

This complete collection of Leckie’s short fiction contains both science fiction and fantasy stories, but the SF stories make up a full half of the book—and are unmissable. They range from flash fiction to a creation myth from the world of the Imperial Radch to “The Justified,” a haunting story about power, mortality, and choice. The title novelette follows a sentient crustacean—called a “lobster dog” by the anthropologist who crash-lands on its planet—as it leaves home, looking for answers about its world and existence. (I would read an entire novel about the lobster dogs, or about the bird-people who transmit their histories through songs.) Every one of these stories is masterfully told, but the standout is “She Commands Me and I Obey,” which depicts a moment of political turmoil through the eyes of a young monk watching a momentous sports game. Tense, affecting, and layered, it’s a perfect example of Leckie’s gift for knowing exactly the right perspective from which to tell her stories. A child, an elder, a guard on a ship’s journey through troubled space: it is a gift to spend time with these characters.

10) The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain, by Sofia Samatar

Samatar’s latest is a breathtaking novella that resonates like a new myth made of familiar materials. Deep in the bowels of a spaceship, a boy is imprisoned, linked to others by the chain around his ankle. A professor who wears a lighter anklet works to free him, to elevate him to the level of a student, to give him an opportunity. Neither of them have names; nor do the guards, nor the prophet who encourages the boy’s art. They are individuals, but also archetypes, strong and aching, as they move through Samatar’s critical look at labor, exploitation, community, hierarchy, revolution, and worn-out narratives about acceptance and tolerance that do not allow space for real freedom. This story has its roots in academia, but it’s about any organization built to sustain itself at the expense of those who toil within it. Samatar’s gorgeous prose rings clear as a bell. There are no easy answers here, only a sense of possibility, of— as she puts it —“an invitation to exist in the cracks.''

More for You

Republicans blocking Biden’s historic judicial nominee wasn’t surprising. The Democrats who joined them were.

New York governor ridiculed by Long Islanders for appearing at slain NYPD officer's wake

18 Most Common Items People Forget When Writing a Will

10 Things You Should Never Clean with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser

Doctor shares what happens to our bodies moments before we die

Who Won the Oscar for Best Actor the Year You Were Born?

Steelers' Mike Tomlin Detailed That Russell Wilson Is 'Driven' Not Hungry

Costco Is Making A Big Change To Its Rotisserie Chicken & Shoppers Are Divided

12 Japanese Cars That Aren’t Worth the Cost

18 Things You’ll Still Want to Do After 60 But Probably Can’t

What Vitamins Should Not Be Taken Together?

You Shouldn’t Be Able to Pay With Cash OR a Card at a National Park. They Should Be Free.

America's most popular small dog breed isn't a chihuahua, according to data. See the top 30.

57 Stars Who Landed Different Roles Than They Originally Auditioned For

Panera Is Launching A Bunch Of Exciting New Menu Items, So Obviously I Had To Conduct A Taste Test

Patriots special teams ace announces retirement

Defense asks hush-money judge to let Trump continue verbally attacking the judge's daughter

Georgia legislature passes new immigration enforcement bill following Laken Riley’s killing

9 Chickweed Lane by Brooke McEldowney

Shaquille O’Neal Wants To Learn How Ben Simmons Can Make $80 Million And Play Only 55 Games

Advertisement

Supported by

editors’ choice

8 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

• Share full article

Our fiction recommendations this week include a “gleeful romp” of a series mystery, along with three novels by some heavy-hitting young writers: Téa Obreht, Helen Oyeyemi and Tommy Orange. (How heavy-hitting, and how young? Consider that Obreht was included in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” issue in 2010 — and she’s still under 40 today. So is Oyeyemi, who was one of Granta’s “Best Young British Novelists” in 2013, while Orange, at 42, has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the John Leonard Prize and the American Book Award. The future is in good hands.)

In nonfiction, we recommend a painter’s memoir, a group biography of three jazz giants, a posthumous essay collection by the great critic Joan Acocella and a journalist’s look at American citizens trying to come to terms with a divided country. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

THE MORNINGSIDE Téa Obreht

After being displaced from their homeland, Silvia and her mother move into the Morningside, a weather-beaten luxury apartment building in “Island City,” a sinking version of New York in the middle of all-out climate collapse. Silvia learns about her heritage through the folk tales her aunt Ena tells her, and becomes fascinated with the mysterious woman who lives in the penthouse apartment.

“I marveled at the subtle beauty and precision of Obreht’s prose. … Even in the face of catastrophe, there’s solace to be found in art.”

From Jessamine Chan’s review

Random House | $29

A GRAVE ROBBERY Deanna Raybourn

In their ninth crime-solving tale, the Victorian-era adventuress and butterfly hunter Veronica Speedwell and her partner discover that a wax mannequin is actually a dead young woman, expertly preserved.

“Throw in an assortment of delightful side characters and an engaging tamarin monkey, and what you have is the very definition of a gleeful romp.”

From Sarah Weinman’s crime column

Berkley | $28

THE BLOODIED NIGHTGOWN: And Other Essays Joan Acocella

Acocella, who died in January, may have been best known as one of our finest dance critics. But as this posthumous collection shows, she brought the same rigor, passion and insight to all the art she consumed. Whether her subject is genre fiction, “Beowulf” or Marilynne Robinson, Acocella’s knowledge and enthusiasm are hard to match. We will not see her like again.

"Some critics are haters, but Acocella began writing criticism because she loved — first dance, and then much of the best of Western culture. She let life bring her closer to art."

From Joanna Biggs’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $35

WANDERING STARS Tommy Orange

This follow-up to Orange’s debut, “There There,” is part prequel and part sequel; it trails the young survivor of a 19th-century massacre of Native Americans, chronicling not just his harsh fate but those of his descendants. In its second half, the novel enters 21st-century Oakland, following the family in the aftermath of a shooting.

“Orange’s ability to highlight the contradictory forces that coexist within friendships, familial relationships and the characters themselves ... makes ‘Wandering Stars’ a towering achievement.”

From Jonathan Escoffery’s review

Knopf | $29

PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE Helen Oyeyemi

In Oyeyemi’s latest magical realist adventure, our hero is a woman named Hero, and she is hurtling through the city of Prague, with a shape-shifting book about Prague, during a bachelorette weekend. But Hero doesn’t seem to be directing the novel’s action; the story itself seems to be calling the shots.

“Her stock-in-trade has always been tales at their least domesticated. … In this novel, they have all the autonomy, charisma and messiness of living beings — and demand the same respect.”

From Chelsea Leu’s review

Riverhead | $28

3 SHADES OF BLUE: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool James Kaplan

On one memorable occasion in 1959, three outstanding musicians came together for what may be the greatest jazz record ever, Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” Kaplan, the author of a Frank Sinatra biography, traces the lives of his protagonists in compelling fashion; he may not be a jazz expert but he knows how to tell a good story.

“Kaplan has framed '3 Shades of Blue' as both a chronicle of a golden age and a lament for its decline and fall. One doesn’t have to accept the decline-and-fall part to acknowledge that he has done a lovely job of evoking the golden age.”

From Peter Keepnews’s review

Penguin Press | $35

WITH DARKNESS CAME STARS: A Memoir Audrey Flack

From her early days as an Abstract Expressionist who hung out with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning at the Cedar Bar to her later success as a pioneering photorealist, Flack worked and lived at the center of New York’s art world over her long career; here she chronicles the triumphs, the slights, the sexism and the gossip, all with equal relish.

“Flack is a natural, unfiltered storyteller. … The person who emerges from her pages is someone who never doubts she has somewhere to go.”

From Prudence Peiffer’s review

Penn State University Press | $37.50

AN AMERICAN DREAMER: Life in a Divided Country David Finkel

Agile and bracing, Finkel’s book trails a small network of people struggling in the tumultuous period between the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. At the center is Brent Cummings, a white Iraq war veteran who is trying to cope with a country he no longer recognizes.

“Adroitly assembles these stories into a poignant account of the social and political mood in the United States. … A timely and compelling argument for tolerance and moral character in times of extreme antagonism.”

From John Knight’s review

Random House | $32

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 .

Explore ideas, tips guide and info Alia Aprilette

Npr Best Books 2024 Non Fiction

• Home   /   2024   /  

Npr Best Books 2024 Non Fiction . In august of 2022, salman rushdie—the writer of books including midnight's children and the satanic verses —survived a vicious attack a lecture. Nonfiction books published in 2024.

Foreign policy, and even vladimir putin. $35) the story of how jazz arrived at the pinnacle of american culture in 1959 and how towering.

11 Books We're Looking Forward To The First Few Months Of The Year Are Stacked With Exciting And Interesting Reads.

The best nonfiction books published in 2023 included a revelatory.

3 Shades Of Blue By James Kaplan (Penguin Press:

Books we love returns with 380+ new titles handpicked by npr staff and trusted critics.

$20 At Amazon $27 At Bookshop.org.

Images references :, below, you’ll discover the exceptional nonfiction we recommend for the first few months of..

Searching for a song you heard between stories?

$35) The Story Of How Jazz Arrived At The Pinnacle Of American Culture In 1959 And How Towering.

This year will be full of uncertainties, but its roster of forthcoming.

January 3, 2024, 12:01 Am Pst.