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Fruit of the Dead

In Rachel Lyon's Fruit of the Dead , Cory Ansel, a directionless high school graduate, has had all her college applications rejected. After spending the summer working as a camp counselor, she is loath...

Beyond the Book

Demeter and Persephone

Rachel Lyon's novel Fruit of the Dead is based on the story of Demeter and Persephone from Greek mythology. In the original story, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, is devastated when her daughter ...

The Wide Wide Sea

By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and had earned a comfortable retirement. The Admiralty gave him a plum position: an honorary post at ...

The History of Grog

Hampton Sides' book The Wide Wide Sea records the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook and relays some of the exploits of his crew aboard the HMS Resolution. One of Cook's key ...

Flight of the Wild Swan

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), known variously as the "Lady with the Lamp" or the "Ministering Angel" of the Crimean War (1853–1856), elevated the role of nursing ...

The Crimean War and Disease

The Crimean War of 1853–1856 pitted the Russian Empire against an alliance of British, French, Turkish and Sardinian troops on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. Britain entered the war in ...

Ordinarily, upon sitting down to write a review of a guide to English language usage, I'd get myself pretty worked up, nervous about ensuring I didn't end a sentence with a preposition or forget what ...

The American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel

Anne Curzan, author of Says Who?, has some compelling bona fides when it comes to remarking upon English grammar and usage. Not only is she a linguistics professor, she was also for many years a ...

The Demon of Unrest

In the aftermath of the 1860 presidential election, the divided United States began to collapse as South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed by another six Southern states. Among the countless ...

Fort Sumter Today

As Erik Larson recounts in The Demon of Unrest, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter, off the coast of South Carolina, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12th, 1861. Thirty-six hours...

The Oscar-nominated film American Fiction (2023) and the Percival Everett novel it was based on, Erasure (2001), are about whose voices are heard and in what context. In the movie, Jeffrey Wright and ...

Reimagining the Classics from a New Perspective

Percival Everett's James is a reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved companion Jim. This kind of reconfiguration is a common source of inspiration ...

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Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung

Eve J. Chung's debut novel recounts a family's flight to Taiwan during China's Communist revolution.

The Stolen Child by Ann Hood

An unlikely duo ventures through France and Italy to solve the mystery of a child’s fate.

The Book Club

Only the Beautiful by Susan Meissner A heartrending story about a young mother’s fight to keep her daughter, and the terrible injustice that tears them apart.

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BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

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Dazzling debut novels, searing polemics, the history of humanity and trailblazing memoirs ... Read our pick of the best books since 2000

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I Feel Bad About My Neck

By nora ephron (2006).

Perhaps better known for her screenwriting ( Silkwood , When Harry Met Sally , Heartburn ), Ephron’s brand of smart theatrical humour is on best display in her essays. Confiding and self-deprecating, she has a way of always managing to sound like your best friend – even when writing about her apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. This wildly enjoyable collection includes her droll observations about ageing, vanity – and a scorching appraisal of Bill Clinton. Read the review

Broken Glass

By alain mabanckou (2005), translated by helen stevenson (2009).

The Congolese writer says he was “trying to break the French language” with Broken Glass – a black comedy told by a disgraced teacher without much in the way of full stops or paragraph breaks. As Mabanckou’s unreliable narrator munches his “bicycle chicken” and drinks his red wine, it becomes clear he has the history of Congo-Brazzaville and the whole of French literature in his sights. Read the review

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

By stieg larsson (2005), translated by steven t murray (2008).

Radical journalist Mikael Blomkvist forms an unlikely alliance with troubled young hacker Lisbeth Salander as they follow a trail of murder and malfeasance connected with one of Sweden’s most powerful families in the first novel of the bestselling Millennium trilogy. The high-level intrigue beguiled millions of readers, brought “Scandi noir” to prominence and inspired innumerable copycats. Read the review

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

By jk rowling (2000).

A generation grew up on Rowling’s all-conquering magical fantasies, but countless adults have also been enthralled by her immersive world. Book four, the first of the doorstoppers, marks the point where the series really takes off. The Triwizard Tournament provides pace and tension, and Rowling makes her boy wizard look death in the eye for the first time. Read the review

A Little Life

By hanya yanagihara (2015).

This operatically harrowing American gay melodrama became an unlikely bestseller, and one of the most divisive novels of the century so far. One man’s life is blighted by abuse and its aftermath, but also illuminated by love and friendship. Some readers wept all night, some condemned it as titillating and exploitative, but no one could deny its power. Read the review

Chronicles: Volume One

By bob dylan (2004).

Dylan’s reticence about his personal life is a central part of the singer-songwriter’s brand, so the gaps and omissions in this memoir come as no surprise. The result is both sharp and dreamy, sliding in and out of different phases of Dylan’s career but rooted in his earliest days as a Woody Guthrie wannabe in New York City. Fans are still waiting for volume two. Read the review

The Tipping Point

By malcolm gladwell (2000).

The New Yorker staff writer examines phenomena from shoe sales to crime rates through the lens of epidemiology, reaching his own tipping point, when he became a rock-star intellectual and unleashed a wave of quirky studies of contemporary society. Two decades on, Gladwell is often accused of oversimplification and cherry picking, but his idiosyncratic bestsellers have helped shape 21st-century culture. Read the review

by Nicola Barker (2007)

British fiction’s most anarchic author is as prolific as she is playful, but this freewheeling, visionary epic set around the Thames Gateway is her magnum opus. Barker brings her customary linguistic invention and wild humour to a tale about history’s hold on the present, as contemporary Ashford is haunted by the spirit of a medieval jester. Read the review

by Helen Dunmore (2001)

The Levin family battle against starvation in this novel set during the German siege of Leningrad. Anna digs tank traps and dodges patrols as she scavenges for wood, but the hand of history is hard to escape. Read the review

by M John Harrison (2002)

One of the most underrated prose writers demonstrates the literary firepower of science fiction at its best. Three narrative strands – spanning far-future space opera, contemporary unease and virtual-reality pastiche – are braided together for a breathtaking metaphysical voyage in pursuit of the mystery at the heart of reality. Read the review

by Jenny Erpenbeck (2008), translated by Susan Bernofsky (2010)

A grand house by a lake in the east of Germany is both the setting and main character of Erpenbeck’s third novel. The turbulent waves of 20th-century history crash over it as the house is sold by a Jewish family fleeing the Third Reich, requisitioned by the Russian army, reclaimed by exiles returning from Siberia, and sold again. Read the review

by Lorna Sage (2000)

A Whitbread prizewinning memoir, full of perfectly chosen phrases, that is one of the best accounts of family dysfunction ever written. Sage grew up with her grandparents, who hated each other: he was a drunken philandering vicar; his wife, having found his diaries, blackmailed him and lived in another part of the house. The author gets unwittingly pregnant at 16, yet the story has a happy ending. Read the review

Noughts & Crosses

By malorie blackman (2001).

Set in an alternative Britain, this groundbreaking piece of young adult fiction sees black people, called the Crosses, hold all the power and influence, while the noughts – white people – are marginalised and segregated. The former children’s laureate’s series is a crucial work for explaining racism to young readers.

Priestdaddy

By patricia lockwood (2017).

This may not be the only account of living in a religious household in the American midwest (in her youth, the author joined a group called God’s Gang, where they spoke in tongues), but it is surely the funniest. The author started out as the “poet laureate of Twitter”; her language is brilliant, and she has a completely original mind. Read the review

Adults in the Room

By yanis varoufakis (2017).

This memoir by the leather-jacketed economist of the six months he spent as Greece’s finance minister in 2015 at a time of economic and political crisis has been described as “one of the best political memoirs ever written”. He comes up against the IMF, the European institutions, Wall Street, billionaires and media owners and is told how the system works – as a result, his book is a telling description of modern power. Read the review

The God Delusion

By richard dawkins (2006).

A key text in the days when the “New Atheism” was much talked about, The God Delusion is a hard-hitting attack on religion, full of Dawkins’s confidence that faith produces fanatics and all arguments for God are ridiculous. What the evolutionary biologist lacks in philosophical sophistication, he makes up for in passion, and the book sold in huge numbers. Read the review

The Cost of Living

By deborah levy (2018).

“Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want ... ” The second part of Levy’s “living memoir”, in which she leaves her marriage, is a fascinating companion piece to her deep yet playful novels. Feminism, mythology and the daily grind come together for a book that combines emotion and intellect to dazzling effect. Read the review

Tell Me How It Ends

By valeria luiselli (2016), translated by luiselli with lizzie davis (2017).

As the hysteria over immigration to the US began to build in 2015, the Mexican novelist volunteered to work as an interpreter in New York’s federal immigration court. In this powerful series of essays she tells the poignant stories of the children she met, situating them in the wider context of the troubled relationship between the Americas. Read the review

by Neil Gaiman (2002)

From the Sandman comics to his fantasy epic American Gods to Twitter, Gaiman towers over the world of books. But this perfectly achieved children’s novella, in which a plucky young girl enters a parallel world where her “Other Mother” is a spooky copy of her real-life mum, with buttons for eyes, might be his finest hour: a properly scary modern myth which cuts right to the heart of childhood fears and desires. Read the review

by Jim Crace (2013)

Crace is fascinated by the moment when one era gives way to another. Here, it is the enclosure of the commons, a fulcrum of English history, that drives his story of dispossession and displacement. Set in a village without a name, the narrative dramatises what it’s like to see the world you know come to an end, in a severance of the connection between people and land that has deep relevance for our time of climate crisis and forced migration. Read the review

Stories of Your Life and Others

By ted chiang (2002).

Melancholic and transcendent, Chiang’s eight, high-concept sci-fi stories exploring the nature of language, maths, religion and physics racked up numerous awards and a wider audience when ‘Story of Your Life’ was adapted into the 2016 film Arrival . Read the review

The Spirit Level

By richard wilkinson and kate pickett (2009).

An eye-opening study, based on overwhelming evidence, which revealed that among rich countries, the “more equal societies almost always do better” for all. Growth matters less than inequality, the authors argued: whether the issue is life expectancy, infant mortality, crime rates, obesity, literacy or recycling, the Scandinavian countries, say, will always win out over, say, the UK. Read the review

The Fifth Season

By nk jemisin (2015).

Jemisin became the first African American author to win the best novel category at the Hugo awards for her first book in the Broken Earth trilogy. In her intricate and richly imagined far future universe, the world is ending, ripped apart by relentless earthquakes and volcanoes. Against this apocalyptic backdrop she explores urgent questions of power and enslavement through the eyes of three women. “As this genre finally acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalised matter and that all of us have a future,” she said in her acceptance speech, “so will go the world. (Soon, I hope.)”

Signs Preceding the End of the World

By yuri herrera (2009), translated by lisa dillman (2015).

Makina sets off from her village in Mexico with a package from a local gangster and a message for her brother, who has been gone for three years. The story of her crossing to the US examines the blurring of boundaries, the commingling of languages and the blending of identities that complicate the idea of an eventual return. Read the review

Thinking, Fast and Slow

By daniel kahneman (2011).

The Nobel laureate’s unexpected bestseller, on the minutiae of decision-making, divides the brain into two. System One makes judgments quickly, intuitively and automatically, as when a batsman decides whether to cut or pull. System Two is slow, calculated and deliberate, like long division. But psychologist Kahneman argues that, although System Two thinks it is in control, many of our decisions are really made by System One. Read the review

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

By olga tokarczuk (2009), translated by antonia lloyd-jones (2018).

In this existential eco-thriller, a William Blake-obsessed eccentric investigates the murders of men and animals in a remote Polish village. More accessible and focused than Flights , the novel that won Tokarczuk the Man International Booker prize, it is no less profound in its examination of how atavistic male impulses, emboldened by the new rightwing politics of Europe, are endangering people, communities and nature itself. Read the review

Days Without End

By sebastian barry (2016).

In this savagely beautiful novel set during the Indian wars and American civil war, a young Irish boy flees famine-struck Sligo for Missouri. There he finds lifelong companionship with another emigrant, and they join the army on its brutal journey west, laying waste to Indian settlements. Viscerally focused and intense, yet imbued with the grandeur of the landscape, the book explores love, gender and survival with a rare, luminous power. Read the review

Nothing to Envy

By barbara demick (2009).

Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick interviewed around 100 North Korean defectors for this propulsive work of narrative non-fiction, but she focuses on just six, all from the north-eastern city of Chongjin – closed to foreigners and less media-ready than Pyongyang. North Korea is revealed to be rife with poverty, corruption and violence but populated by resilient people with a remarkable ability to see past the propaganda all around them. Read the review

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

By shoshana zuboff (2019).

An agenda-setting book that is devastating about the extent to which big tech sets out to manipulate us for profit. Not simply another expression of the “techlash”, Zuboff’s ambitious study identifies a new form of capitalism, one involving the monitoring and shaping of our behaviour, often without our knowledge, with profound implications for democracy. “Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us.” Read the review

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

By chris ware (2000).

At the time when Ware won the Guardian first book award, no graphic novel had previously won a generalist literary prize. Emotional and artistic complexity are perfectly poised in this account of a listless 36-year-old office dogsbody who is thrown into an existential crisis by an encounter with his estranged dad. Read the review

Notes on a Scandal

By zoë heller (2003).

Sheba, a middle-aged teacher at a London comprehensive, begins an affair with her 15-year-old student - but we hear about it from a fellow teacher, the needy Barbara, whose obsessive nature drives the narrative. With shades of Patricia Highsmith, this teasing investigation into sex, class and loneliness is a dark marvel. Read the review

The Infatuations

By javier marías (2011), translated by margaret jull costa (2013).

The Spanish master examines chance, love and death in the story of an apparently random killing that gradually reveals hidden depths. Marías constructs an elegant murder mystery from his trademark labyrinthine sentences, but this investigation is in pursuit of much meatier questions than whodunnit. Read the review

The Constant Gardener

By john le carré (2001).

The master of the cold war thriller turned his attention to the new world order in this chilling investigation into the corruption powering big pharma in Africa. Based on the case of a rogue antibiotics trial that killed and maimed children in Nigeria in the 1990s, it has all the dash and authority of his earlier novels while precisely and presciently anatomising the dangers of a rampant neo-imperialist capitalism. Read the review

The Silence of the Girls

By pat barker (2018).

If the western literary canon is founded on Homer, then it is founded on women’s silence. Barker’s extraordinary intervention, in which she replays the events of the Iliad from the point of view of the enslaved Trojan women, chimed with both the #MeToo movement and a wider drive to foreground suppressed voices. In a world still at war, it has chilling contemporary resonance. Read the review

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

By carlo rovelli (2014).

A theoretical physicist opens a window on to the great questions of the universe with this 96-page overview of modern physics. Rovelli’s keen insight and striking metaphors make this the best introduction to subjects including relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology, elementary particles and entropy outside of a course in advanced physics. Read the review

by Gillian Flynn (2012)

The deliciously dark US crime thriller that launched a thousand imitators and took the concept of the unreliable narrator to new heights. A woman disappears: we think we know whodunit, but we’re wrong. Flynn’s stylishly written portrait of a toxic marriage set against a backdrop of social and economic insecurity combines psychological depth with sheer unputdownable flair. Read the review

by Stephen King (2000)

Written after a near-fatal accident, this combination of memoir and masterclass by fiction’s most successful modern storyteller showcases the blunt, casual brilliance of King at his best. As well as being genuinely useful, it’s a fascinating chronicle of literary persistence, and of a lifelong love affair with language and narrative. Read the review

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By rebecca skloot (2010).

Henrietta Lacks was a black American who died in agony of cancer in a “coloured” hospital ward in 1951. Her cells, taken without her knowledge during a biopsy, went on to change medical history, being used around the world to develop countless drugs. Skloot skilfully tells the extraordinary scientific story, but in this book the voices of the Lacks children are crucial – they have struggled desperately even as billions have been made from their mother’s “HeLa” cells. Read the review

Mother’s Milk

By edward st aubyn (2006).

The fourth of the autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels finds the wealthy protagonist – whose flight from atrocious memories of child abuse into drug abuse was the focus of the first books – beginning to grope after redemption. Elegant wit and subtle psychology lift grim subject matter into seductive brilliance. Read the review

This House of Grief

By helen garner (2014).

A man drives his three sons into a deep pond and swims out, leaving them to drown. But was it an accident? This 2005 tragedy caught the attention of one of Australia’s greatest living writers. Garner puts herself centre stage in an account of Robert Farquharson’s trial that combines forensic detail and rich humanity. Read the review

by Alice Oswald (2002)

This book-length poem is a mesmerising tapestry of “the river’s mutterings”, based on three years of recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. From swimmers to sewage workers, boatbuilders to bailiffs, salmon fishers to ferryman, the voices are varied and vividly brought to life. Read the review

The Beauty of the Husband

By anne carson (2002).

One of Canada’s most celebrated poets examines love and desire in a collection that describes itself as “a fictional essay in 39 tangos”. Carson charts the course of a doomed marriage in loose-limbed lines that follow the switchbacks of thought and feeling from first meeting through multiple infidelities to arrive at eventual divorce.

by Tony Judt (2005)

This grand survey of Europe since 1945 begins with the devastation left behind by the second world war and offers a panoramic narrative of the cold war from its beginnings to the collapse of the Soviet bloc – a part of which Judt witnessed firsthand in Czechoslovakia’s velvet revolution. A very complex story is told with page-turning urgency and what may now be read as nostalgic faith in “the European idea”. Read the review

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

By michael chabon (2000).

A love story to the golden age of comics in New York, Chabon’s Pulitzer-winner features two Jewish cousins, one smuggled out of occupied Prague, who create an anti-fascist comic book superhero called The Escapist. Their own adventures are as exciting and highly coloured as the ones they write and draw in this generous, open-hearted, deeply lovable rollercoaster of a book. Read the review

by Robert Macfarlane (2019)

A beautifully written and profound book, which takes the form of a series of (often hair-raising and claustrophobic) voyages underground – from the fjords of the Arctic to the Parisian catacombs. Trips below the surface inspire reflections on “deep” geological time and raise urgent questions about the human impact on planet Earth. Read the review

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

By michael pollan (2006).

An entertaining and highly influential book from the writer best known for his advice: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” The author follows four meals on their journey from field to plate – including one from McDonald’s and a locally sourced organic feast. Pollan is a skilled, amusing storyteller and The Omnivore’s Dilemma changed both food writing and the way we see food. Read the review

Women & Power

By mary beard (2017).

Based on Beard’s lectures on women’s voices and how they have been silenced, Women and Power was an enormous publishing success in the “ #MeToo ”’ year 2017. An exploration of misogyny, the origins of “gendered speech” in the classical era and the problems the male world has with strong women, this slim manifesto became an instant feminist classic. Read the review

True History of the Kelly Gang

By peter carey (2000).

Carey’s second Booker winner is an irresistible tour de force of literary ventriloquism: the supposed autobiography of 19th-century Australian outlaw and “wild colonial boy” Ned Kelly, inspired by a fragment of Kelly’s own prose and written as a glorious rush of semi-punctuated vernacular storytelling. Mythic and tender by turns, these are tall tales from a lost frontier. Read the review

Small Island

By andrea levy (2004).

Pitted against a backdrop of prejudice, this London-set novel is told by four protagonists – Hortense and Gilbert, Jamaican migrants, and a stereotypically English couple, Queenie and Bernard. These varied perspectives, illuminated by love and loyalty, combine to create a thoughtful mosaic depicting the complex beginnings of Britain’s multicultural society. Read the review

by Colm Tóibín (2009)

Tóibín’s sixth novel is set in the 1950s, when more than 400,000 people left Ireland, and considers the emotional and existential impact of emigration on one young woman. Eilis makes a life for herself in New York, but is drawn back by the possibilities of the life she has lost at home. A universal story of love, endurance and missed chances, made radiant through Tóibín’s measured prose and tender understatement. Read the review

Oryx and Crake

By margaret atwood (2003).

In the first book in her dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, the Booker winner speculates about the havoc science can wreak on the world. The big warning here – don’t trust corporations to run the planet – is blaring louder and louder as the century progresses. Read the review

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

By jeanette winterson (2011).

The title is the question Winterson’s adoptive mother asked as she threw her daughter out, aged 16, for having a girlfriend. The autobiographical story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , and the trials of Winterson’s later life, is urgent, wise and moving. Read the review

Night Watch

By terry pratchett (2002).

Pratchett’s mighty Discworld series is a high point in modern fiction: a parody of fantasy literature that deepened and darkened over the decades to create incisive satires of our own world. The 29th book, focusing on unlikely heroes, displays all his fierce intelligence, anger and wild humour, in a story that’s moral, humane – and hilarious. Read the review

by Marjane Satrapi (2000-2003), translated by Mattias Ripa (2003-2004)

Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel follows her coming-of-age in the lead up to and during the Iranian revolution. In this riotous memoir, Satrapi focuses on one young life to reveal a hidden history.

Human Chain

By seamus heaney (2010).

The Nobel laureate tends to the fragments of memory and loss with moving precision in his final poetry collection. A book of elegies and echoes, these poems are infused with a haunting sense of pathos, with a line often left hanging to suspend the reader in longing and regret. Read the review

Levels of Life

By julian barnes (2013).

The British novelist combines fiction and non-fiction to form a searing essay on grief and love for his late wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh. Barnes divides the book into three parts with disparate themes – 19th-century ballooning, photography and marriage. Their convergence is wonderfully achieved. Read the review

Hope in the Dark

By rebecca solnit (2004).

Writing against “the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq”, the US thinker finds optimism in political activism and its ability to change the world. The book ranges widely from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, to the invention of Viagra. Read the review

Citizen: An American Lyric

By claudia rankine (2014).

From the slow emergency response in the black suburbs destroyed by hurricane Katrina to a mother trying to move her daughter away from a black passenger on a plane, the poet’s award-winning prose work confronts the history of racism in the US and asks: regardless of their actual status, who truly gets to be a citizen? Read the review

by Michael Lewis (2010)

The author of The Big Short has made a career out of rendering the most opaque subject matter entertaining and comprehensible: Moneyball tells the story of how geeks outsmarted jocks to revolutionise baseball using maths. But you do not need to know or care about the sport, because – as with all Lewis’s best writing – it’s all about how the story is told. Read the review

by Ian McEwan (2001)

There are echoes of DH Lawrence and EM Forster in McEwan’s finely tuned dissection of memory and guilt. The fates of three young people are altered by a young girl’s lie at the close of a sweltering day on a country estate in 1935. Lifelong remorse, the horror of war and devastating twists are to follow in an elegant, deeply felt meditation on the power of love and art. Read the review

The Year of Magical Thinking

By joan didion (2005).

With cold, clear, precise prose, Didion gives an account of the year her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, collapsed from a fatal heart attack in their home. Her devastating examination of grief and widowhood changed the nature of writing about bereavement. Read the review

White Teeth

By zadie smith (2000).

Set around the unlikely bond between two wartime friends, Smith’s debut brilliantly captures Britain’s multicultural spirit, and offers a compelling insight into immigrant family life.

The Line of Beauty

By alan hollinghurst (2004).

Oxford graduate Nick Guest has the questionable good fortune of moving into the grand west London home of a rising Tory MP. Thatcher-era degeneracy is lavishly displayed as Nick falls in love with the son of a supermarket magnate, and the novel records how Aids began to poison gay life in London. In peerless prose, Hollinghurst captures something close to the spirit of an age. Read the review

The Green Road

By anne enright (2015).

A reunion dominates the Irish novelist’s family drama, but the individual stories of the five members of the Madigan clan – the matriarch, Rosaleen, and her children, Dan, Emmet, Constance and Hanna, who escape and are bound to return – are beautifully held in balance. When the Madigans do finally come together halfway through the book, Enright masterfully reminds us of the weight of history and family. Read the review

by Martin Amis (2000)

Known for the firecracker phrases and broad satires of his fiction, Amis presented a much warmer face in his memoir. His life is haunted by the disappearance of his cousin Lucy, who is revealed 20 years later to have been murdered by Fred West. But Amis also has much fun recollecting his “velvet-suited, snakeskin-booted” youth, and paints a moving portrait of his father’s comic gusto as old age reduces him to a kind of “anti-Kingsley”. Read the review

The Hare with Amber Eyes

By edmund de waal (2010).

In this exquisite family memoir, the ceramicist explains how he came to inherit a collection of 264 netsuke – small Japanese ornaments – from his great-uncle. The unlikely survival of the netsuke entails De Waal telling a story that moves from Paris to Austria under the Nazis to Japan, and he beautifully conjures a sense of place. The book doubles as a set of profound reflections on objects and what they mean to us. Read the review

Outline by Rachel

Cusk (2014).

This startling work of autofiction, which signalled a new direction for Cusk, follows an author teaching a creative writing course over one hot summer in Athens. She leads storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She hears from other people about relationships, ambition, solitude, intimacy and “the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women”. The end result is sublime. Read the review

by Alison Bechdel (2006)

The American cartoonist’s darkly humorous memoir tells the story of how her closeted gay father killed himself a few months after she came out as a lesbian. This pioneering work, which later became a musical, helped shape the modern genre of “graphic memoir”, combining detailed and beautiful panels with remarkable emotional depth. Read the review

The Emperor of All Maladies

By siddhartha mukherjee (2010).

“Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.” In adapting the opening lines of Anna Karenina , Mukherjee sets out the breathtaking ambition of his study of cancer: not only to share the knowledge of a practising oncologist but to take his readers on a literary and historical journey. Read the review

The Argonauts

By maggie nelson (2015).

An electrifying memoir that captured a moment in thinking about gender, and also changed the world of books. The story, told in fragments, is of Nelson’s pregnancy, which unfolds at the same time as her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, is beginning testosterone injections: “the summer of our changing bodies”. Strikingly honest, originally written, with a galaxy of intellectual reference points, it is essentially a love story; one that seems to make a new way of living possible. Read the review

The Underground Railroad

By colson whitehead (2016).

A thrilling, genre-bending tale of escape from slavery in the American deep south, this Pulitzer prize-winner combines extraordinary prose and uncomfortable truths. Two slaves flee their masters using the underground railroad, the network of abolitionists who helped slaves out of the south, wonderfully reimagined by Whitehead as a steampunk vision of a literal train. Read the review

A Death in the Family

By karl ove knausgaard (2009), translated by don bartlett (2012).

The first instalment of Knausgaard’s relentlessly self-examining six-volume series My Struggle revolves around the life and death of his alcoholic father. Whether or not you regard him as the Proust of memoir, his compulsive honesty created a new benchmark for autofiction. Read the review

by Carol Ann Duffy (2005)

A moving, book-length poem from the UK’s first female poet laureate, Rapture won the TS Eliot prize in 2005. From falling in love to betrayal and separation, Duffy reimagines romance with refreshing originality. Read the review

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

By alice munro (2001).

Canada’s observant and humane short story writer, who won the Nobel in 2013, is at her best in this collection. A housekeeper’s fate is changed by the pranks of her employer’s teenager daughter; an incorrigible flirt gracefully accepts his wife’s new romance in her care home. No character acts as at first expected in Munro’s stories, which are attuned to the tiniest shifts in perception. Read the review

Capital in the Twenty First Century

By thomas piketty (2013), translated by arthur goldhammer (2014).

The beautifully written product of 15 years of research, Capital made its author an intellectual star – the modern Marx – and opened readers’ eyes to how neoliberalism produces vastly increased inequalities. Full of data, theories and historical analysis, its message is clear, and prophetic: unless governments increase tax, the new and grotesque wealth levels of the rich will encourage political instability. Read the review

Normal People

By sally rooney (2018).

Rooney’s second novel, a love story between two clever and damaged young people coming of age in contemporary Ireland, confirmed her status as a literary superstar. Her focus is on the dislocation and uncertainty of millennial life, but her elegant prose has universal appeal. Read the review

A Visit from The Goon Squad

By jennifer egan (2011).

Inspired by both Proust and The Sopranos , Egan’s Pulitzer-winning comedy follows several characters in and around the US music industry, but is really a book about memory and kinship, time and narrative, continuity and disconnection. Read the review

The Noonday Demon

By andrew solomon (2001).

Emerging from Solomon’s own painful experience, this “anatomy” of depression examines its many faces – plus its science, sociology and treatment. The book’s combination of honesty, scholarly rigour and poetry made it a benchmark in literary memoir and understanding of mental health. Read the review

Tenth of December

By george saunders (2013).

This warm yet biting collection of short stories by the Booker-winning American author will restore your faith in humanity. No matter how weird the setting – a futuristic prison lab, a middle-class home where human lawn ornaments are employed as a status symbol – in these surreal satires of post-crash life Saunders reminds us of the meaning we find in small moments. Read the review

by Yuval Noah Harari (2011), translated by Harari with John Purcell and Haim Watzman (2014)

In his Olympian history of humanity, Harari documents the numerous revolutions Homo sapiens has undergone over the last 70,000 years: from new leaps in cognitive reasoning to agriculture, science and industry, the era of information and the possibilities of biotechnology. Harari’s scope may be too wide for some, but this engaging work topped the charts and made millions marvel. Read the review

Life After Life

By kate atkinson (2013).

Atkinson examines family, history and the power of fiction as she tells the story of a woman born in 1910 – and then tells it again, and again, and again. Ursula Todd’s multiple lives see her strangled at birth, drowned on a Cornish beach, trapped in an awful marriage and visiting Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden. But this dizzying fictional construction is grounded by such emotional intelligence that her heroine’s struggles always feel painfully, joyously real. Read the review

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night‑Time

By mark haddon (2003).

Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone becomes absorbed in the mystery of a dog’s demise, meticulously investigating through diagrams, timetables, maps and maths problems. Haddon’s fascinating portrayal of an unconventional mind was a crossover hit with both adults and children and was adapted into a very successful stage play. Read the review

The Shock Doctrine

By naomi klein (2007).

In this urgent examination of free-market fundamentalism, Klein argues – with accompanying reportage – that the social breakdowns witnessed during decades of neoliberal economic policies are not accidental, but in fact integral to the functioning of the free market, which relies on disaster and human suffering to function. Read the review

by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

A father and his young son, “each the other’s world entire”, trawl across the ruins of post-apocalyptic America in this terrifying but tender story told with biblical conviction. The slide into savagery as civilisation collapses is harrowing material, but McCarthy’s metaphysical efforts to imagine a cold dark universe where the light of humanity is winking out are what make the novel such a powerful ecological warning. Read the review

The Corrections

By jonathan franzen (2001).

The members of one ordinarily unhappy American family struggle to adjust to the shifting axes of their worlds over the final decades of the 20th century. Franzen’s move into realism reaped huge literary rewards: exploring both domestic and national conflict, this family saga is clever, funny and outrageously readable. Read the review

The Sixth Extinction

By elizabeth kolbert (2014).

The science journalist examines with clarity and memorable detail the current crisis of plant and animal loss caused by human civilisation (over the past half billion years, there have been five mass extinctions on Earth; we are causing another). Kolbert considers both ecosystems – the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon rainforest – and the lives of some extinct and soon-to-be extinct creatures including the Sumatran rhino and “the most beautiful bird in the world”, the black-faced honeycreeper of Maui. Read the review

Fingersmith

By sarah waters (2002).

Moving from the underworld dens of Victorian London to the boudoirs of country house gothic, and hingeing on the seduction of an heiress, Waters’s third novel is a drippingly atmospheric thriller, a smart study of innocence and experience, and a sensuous lesbian love story – with a plot twist to make the reader gasp. Read the review

Nickel and Dimed

By barbara ehrenreich (2001).

In this modern classic of reportage, Ehrenreich chronicled her attempts to live on the minimum wage in three American states. Working first as a waitress, then a cleaner and a nursing home aide, she still struggled to survive, and the stories of her co-workers are shocking. The US economy as she experienced it is full of routine humiliation, with demands as high as the rewards are low. Two decades on, this still reads like urgent news. Read the review

The Plot Against America

By philip roth (2004).

What if aviator Charles Lindbergh, who once called Hitler “a great man”, had won the US presidency in a landslide victory and signed a treaty with Nazi Germany? Paranoid yet plausible, Roth’s alternative-world novel is only more relevant in the age of Trump. Read the review

My Brilliant Friend

By elena ferrante (2011), translated by ann goldstein (2012).

Powerfully intimate and unashamedly domestic, the first in Ferrante’s Neapolitan series established her as a literary sensation. This and the three novels that followed documented the ways misogyny and violence could determine lives, as well as the history of Italy in the late 20th century.

Half of a Yellow Sun

By chimamanda ngozi adichie (2006).

When Nigerian author Adichie was growing up, the Biafran war “hovered over everything”. Her sweeping, evocative novel, which won the Orange prize, charts the political and personal struggles of those caught up in the conflict and explores the brutal legacy of colonialism in Africa. Read the review

Cloud Atlas

David mitchell (2004).

The epic that made Mitchell’s name is a Russian doll of a book, nesting stories within stories and spanning centuries and genres with aplomb. From a 19th-century seafarer to a tale from beyond the end of civilisation, via 1970s nuclear intrigue and the testimony of a future clone, these dizzying narratives are delicately interlinked, highlighting the echoes and recurrences of the vast human symphony. Read the review

by Ali Smith (2016)

Smith began writing her Seasonal Quartet, a still-ongoing experiment in quickfire publishing, against the background of the EU referendum. The resulting “first Brexit novel” isn’t just a snapshot of a newly divided Britain, but a dazzling exploration into love and art, time and dreams, life and death, all done with her customary invention and wit. Read the review

Between the World and Me

By ta-nehisi coates (2015).

Coates’s impassioned meditation on what it means to be a black American today made him one of the country’s most important intellectuals and writers. Having grown up the son of a former Black Panther on the violent streets of Baltimore, he has a voice that is challenging but also poetic. Between the World and Me takes the form of a letter to his teenage son, and ranges from the daily reality of racial injustice and police violence to the history of slavery and the civil war: white people, he writes, will never remember “the scale of theft that enriched them”. Read the review

The Amber Spyglass

By philip pullman (2000).

Children’s fiction came of age when the final part of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy became the first book for younger readers to win the Whitbread book of the year award. Pullman has brought imaginative fire and storytelling bravado to the weightiest of subjects: religion, free will, totalitarian structures and the human drive to learn, rebel and grow. Here Asriel’s struggle against the Authority reaches its climax, Lyra and Will journey to the Land of the Dead, and Mary investigates the mysterious elementary particles that lend their name to his current trilogy: The Book of Dust. The Hollywood-fuelled commercial success achieved by JK Rowling may have eluded Pullman so far, but his sophisticated reworking of Paradise Lost helped adult readers throw off any embarrassment at enjoying fiction written for children – and publishing has never looked back. Read the review

by WG Sebald (2001), translated by Anthea Bell (2001)

Sebald died in a car crash in 2001, but his genre-defying mix of fact and fiction, keen sense of the moral weight of history and interleaving of inner and outer journeys have had a huge influence on the contemporary literary landscape. His final work, the typically allusive life story of one man, charts the Jewish disapora and lost 20th century with heartbreaking power. Read the review

Never Let Me Go

By kazuo ishiguro (2005).

From his 1989 Booker winner The Remains of the Day to 2015’s The Buried Giant , Nobel laureate Ishiguro writes profound, puzzling allegories about history, nationalism and the individual’s place in a world that is always beyond our understanding. His sixth novel, a love triangle set among human clones in an alternative 1990s England, brings exquisite understatement to its exploration of mortality, loss and what it means to be human. Read the review

Secondhand Time

By svetlana alexievich (2013), translated by bela shayevich (2016).

The Belarusian Nobel laureate recorded thousands of hours of testimony from ordinary people to create this oral history of the Soviet Union and its end. Writers, waiters, doctors, soldiers, former Kremlin apparatchiks, gulag survivors: all are given space to tell their stories, share their anger and betrayal, and voice their worries about the transition to capitalism. An unforgettable book, which is both an act of catharsis and a profound demonstration of empathy.

by Marilynne Robinson (2004)

Robinson’s meditative, deeply philosophical novel is told through letters written by elderly preacher John Ames in the 1950s to his young son who, when he finally reaches an adulthood his father won’t see, will at least have this posthumous one-sided conversation: “While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been.” This is a book about legacy, a record of a pocket of America that will never return, a reminder of the heartbreaking, ephemeral beauty that can be found in everyday life. As Ames concludes, to his son and himself: “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” Read the review

by Hilary Mantel (2009)

Mantel had been publishing for a quarter century before the project that made her a phenomenon, set to be concluded with the third part of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light , next March. To read her story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell at the Tudor court, detailing the making of a new England and the self-creation of a new kind of man, is to step into the stream of her irresistibly authoritative present tense and find oneself looking out from behind her hero’s eyes. The surface details are sensuously, vividly immediate, the language as fresh as new paint; but her exploration of power, fate and fortune is also deeply considered and constantly in dialogue with our own era, as we are shaped and created by the past. In this book we have, as she intended, “a sense of history listening and talking to itself”. Read the review

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The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2021

Merve emre on simone de beauvoir, justin taylor on joy williams, and more.

The older I get, the more I’m interested in critics who play around with form and style. Mixing genres, experimenting with voice and structure, and tapping into personal experience are some of my favorite devices, though I still have a soft spot for the formal limitations of an 800-word newspaper writeup. From longform online essays to crisp perspectives in print, here are my 10 favorite book reviews of 2021.

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

Parul Sehgal on Soyica Diggs Colbert’s Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry ( New York Times )

Sehgal deftly takes on the style of the theatre in her review of a book about Chicago’s greatest playwright, by opening her first paragraph like the first scene in a play.

“The curtain rises on a dim, drab room. An alarm sounds, and a woman wakes. She tries to rouse her sleeping child and husband, calling out: ‘Get up!’ It is the opening scene—and the injunction—of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun , the story of a Black family living on the South Side of Chicago.”

Merve Emre on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables (tr. Lauren Elkin) ( The New Yorker )

Emre always helps readers see things in a new way, in this case not just Simone de Beauvoir’s lost novel, but also Simone de Beauvoir herself.

“To read The Inseparables is to learn what could have been, and to judge what was a little more harshly. It is to see in the memoirs a lingering refusal to give Zaza the autonomy that everyone in life seems to have denied her at the greatest possible cost. And it is to see in The Second Sex an inability, or perhaps an unwillingness, to make as affirmative a case as possible for lesbian identity.”

Victoria Chang and Dean Rader on Douglas Kearney’s Sho ( Los Angeles Review of Books )

Reviews-in-dialogue are my new favorite thing. I love how naturalistic and conversational they are, as the form really allows critics to be themselves. Chang and Rader are a joy to read.

“Kearney’s body of work is very much about play with language, yet, that somehow feels like it diminishes the political aspects of his poems and his body of work. Perhaps play itself in Kearney’s work is a political act. I find this tension fascinating because on the one hand, I often get carried away in Kearney’s language (and the conceptual aspects of his work), but I’m also acutely aware of the humanity in his work (or the exploration of anti-humanity). In this way, maybe play and the political are not mutually exclusive. Maybe for Kearney, play = confrontation.”

J. Howard Rosier on Frederick Seidel’s Selected Poems ( Poetry Foundation )

Rosier does a great job bringing paratext to bear on the text itself, in this case interviews and Seidel’s other work.

“For a poet as revered as Seidel, there are scant mentions of turns of phrase being Seidelian, few poetic narratives or structures construed as Seidelesque. Chalk it up to the oddity of a formalist disassociating form from content; Seidel uses form like a hypnotist to mesmerize readers so that they are sedated, or at the very least put at ease, in spite of his content.”

Sheila Liming on Edith Wharton’s Ghosts ( Cleveland Review of Books )

Every editor’s dream assignment is a critic with deep subject matter expertise, and you can’t beat Liming—author of What A Library Means to A Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books —writing about Wharton’s ghost stories.

“Here are ‘fetches’ (ominous doppelgangers) of Celtic superstition, zombie mistresses rising from the grave, and ghost dogs, even. But for each of these paranormal threats there is an equally normal, equally mundane, and equally human villain attached to the story. In this way, Wharton’s Ghosts can be read and interpreted in concert with many of her better-known works, including novels like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence , which tell stories of everyday human malice.”

Meg Ringer on Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand ( Chicago Review of Books )

Some of the best reviews are the product of a critic who brings personal experience into their analysis of the book at hand. Ringer’s perspective on Lean Fall Stand is full of unique insights and emotional power. (Disclosure: I founded the Chicago Review of Books in 2016, but stepped back from an editorial role in 2019.)

“Though there was a time—before we met, before his diagnosis—when my husband traveled to Antarctica, Robert and Anna’s story is not ours. It is barely even close. But Lean Fall Stand reads like a meditation on the questions we all must someday face: Who am I? What can I stand? Who will be there when I fall?”

Ryan Ruby on Peter Weiss ( The Point )

Speaking of hybrids between personal essays and reviews, Ruby’s experience discovering the work of Weiss during the 2016 election is riveting stuff.

“By creating physical objects that survive their creators and the world in which they were made, the artist helps to manufacture the continuity of our collective experience of historical time, and to the extent that it distinguishes itself, the work of art can become a symbol of that continuity. ‘Imagination lived so long as human beings who resisted lived,’ the narrator writes, but in the end what Weiss demonstrates in The Aesthetic of Resistance is that the converse is also true, and just as important, then as now, for what the imagination always has and always will resist is death.”

Justin Taylor on Joy Williams’ Harrow ( Bookforum )

I love a good delayed lede. In this marvelous example, the title of the book Taylor’s reviewing doesn’t even appear until more than 800 words have passed.

“I drove across the Everglades in May. I had originally planned to take Alligator Alley, but someone tipped me off that, in the twenty years since I left South Florida, the historically wild and lonesome stretch of road had been fully incorporated into I-75, turned into a standard highway corridor with tall concrete walls on both sides, designed to keep the traffic noise in and the alligators out.”

Lauren LeBlanc on Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You ( Los Angeles Times )

Ruffin’s fiction does a lot of interesting things with place, and LeBlanc smartly centers her review on New Orleans, as well as the way Ruffin subverts geographical expectations.

“Several recent story collections (Bryan Washington’s Lot and Dantiel W. Moniz’s Blood Milk Heat spring to mind) present geographies as characters. While Ruffin’s stories can’t help but transport the reader to humid, sunken, decaying New Orleans, it’s too easy to say this book is merely a set of love songs to the city. What makes such collections ring true is the way they subvert conventional knowledge.”

Victor LaValle on James Han Mattson’s Reprieve ( New York Times )

Opening a review with a question can be a powerful way to focus a reader’s attention, as LaValle does here with a compelling lede drawn from his own insights as a horror fiction writer.

“Why do people enjoy being scared? This is a pretty common question for those of us who write horror, or stories tinged with horror, and maybe for those who design roller coasters too. Why do some people take pleasure in terror?”

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12 books NPR staffers loved in 2021 that might surprise you

Mia Estrada

In what has become an annual tradition, NPR's staff and regular book critics bring you a mighty year-end guide of Books We Love . In 2021, you can find more than 360 recommendations ranging from cookbooks to realistic fiction and from graphic novels to tell-all tales.

Here are the Books We Love: 360+ great 2021 reads recommended by NPR

Here are a handful of some of the most interesting staff picks — you may even find some choices that surprise you! — like The Secret History of Home Economics and Fat Chance, Charlie Vega.

We hope you enjoy our full slate of selections — and take some time to browse through for awhile!

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith

" Build Your House Around My Body begins with the disappearance of a young woman named Winnie, and works its way backwards through time, telling a story of unfinished business and long-delayed revenge. Some of its set pieces are familiar from Hollywood horror movies and Brothers Grimm fairy tales – there's an exorcism and a haunted forest. But because this book is set in Vietnam, the forest is an overgrown rubber tree plantation and the exorcism doesn't have crucifixes or holy water. It's a sprawling novel that tells a ghost story spanning generations, drawing the reader into its supernatural world." — Ari Shapiro , host, All Things Considered

Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World by Wil Haygood

"Billed as 'One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World,' this fascinating, exhaustively researched and gorgeously written tome delves deep into the background of everything from D.W. Griffith's monstrous silent Birth of a Nation , to teenager Darnella Frazier's video of the murder of George Floyd. If you've ever wondered why you can't see the Sidney Poitier/Dorothy Dandridge Porgy and Bess , or why Spike Lee had to borrow money to fly to Cannes to win Best Young Director for She's Gotta Have It , or why ... nah, I should stop. So many treasures to unearth, you'll want to do it yourself." — Bob Mondello , movie critic, Culture Desk

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

"Michelle Zauner's debut memoir eloquently lays out the complexity and the ongoing grief of losing a parent in your 20s, just as your own life is about to start. Zauner, who heads the indie band Japanese Breakfast, writes about how she turned to Korean food as a way to process her grief when her mother, her only tie to Korean culture, died of cancer. The book, which was first excerpted as viral New Yorker essay in 2018, reflects on how cooking and eating the food that her mom once prepared gives her a way to connect to her identity. As someone who also lost a parent in my 20s, it's hard to convey the loss of identity and confusion that I faced, so I'm so thankful this book exists." — Alyssa Jeong Perry , producer, Code Switch

Fat Chance, Charlie Vega by Crystal Maldonado

"I'm glad there's a wave of YA books with fat protagonists, but the characters often possess a level of self-confidence that's too good to be true. Crystal Maldonado has created a much-needed believable protagonist with teenage and adult readers. Charlie Vega is a fat, glasses-wearing, biracial Puerto Rican with a diet-pushing mother and a beautiful, athletic best friend. When her classmate Brian pursues a romantic relationship, Charlie is plagued with-self doubt. The book is propelled by conflicts both internal and external. I'm glad this book isn't body-positive escapism, but rather a well-observed story of fat teenage life." — Jessica Reedy , producer/editor, Pop Culture Happy Hour

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke

"Kristen Radtke looks at the science of loneliness and its presence in American society – and interweaves it with poignant stories from her own life. She dives into its evolutionary purpose while retracing the surprising places where loneliness comes up: in TV laugh tracks, in the much-venerated lone cowboys in American pop culture. All the while, she shares her own brushes with isolation – mourning the end of a TV series, scrolling through her phone in bed, witnessing the death of her grandmother. It's a deeply engaging, masterful work of science and heart, and incredibly timely as the pandemic continues on." — Malaka Gharib , deputy editor, Goats and Soda, author of I Was Their American Dream

Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994-2007) by Dan Ozzi

"Let breathe new dawn - this art is dead / No sense of original thought in the mainstream" goes a lyric in the opening track of Against Me!'s first major-label album – one I (wrongly) thought sucked before ever having heard it, simply because it was on a major label. In Sellout , Dan Ozzi examines this intersection among bands trying to make a mark in the world, music labels hoping to make a buck off them and fans feeling betrayed by their idols. Even if you never spent time on punknews.org arguing about the taxonomy of "folk punk," it's a question that exists in every art form: How much is it worth to get paid? — Andrew Limbong , reporter, Culture Desk

Somebody's Daughter by Ashley C. Ford

Code Switch

To love and not forgive.

"Ashley Ford's riveting memoir is an honest, heartbreaking story about her father's incarceration and the resulting family trauma. Her story is about race and family and about how the choices we make, plus those forced upon us, can complicate the trajectory of our lives. Ford writes with a refreshing and riveting candor. As a fellow Hoosier, I found the book particularly compelling because it is not only a coming-of-age Midwestern tale with all the typical concerns about body image and mother-daughter tension, but also a sharp commentary on the harsh realities of growing up as a Black person in Indiana. Ford also gives us an important glimpse of how prison shapes the daughters left behind." — Asma Khalid , White House correspondent, Washington Desk

The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

Book Reviews

Intimacy is nothing to be ashamed of in helen hoang's powerful new romance.

"Anna Sun is a talented violinist in the Bay Area whose disappointing boyfriend springs a proposal on her: an open relationship. While processing her boyfriend's request and battling a creative block, Anna meets Quan and wonders if he might be the real deal. I love this book because it deals with issues that feel really relevant to today, such as creative burnout, bad boyfriends and neurodivergence, which Helen Hoang explores through these deeply rich and heartfelt characters." — Candice Lim , production assistant, Pop Culture Happy Hour

The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life by Kyle Beachy

"The year 2021 is the year of skateboarding. The "rebel" pursuit was transformed into an Olympic sport. Thrasher magazine, skateboarding's bible, turned 40. And many have picked up skateboards for the first time. So The Most Fun Thing couldn't have come at a better time. Kyle Beachy is a longtime skater and writing professor. His memoir, compiled from essays that span a decade, ponder the meaning of skateboarding. "What percentage of skateboarding, I wonder, is talking about skateboarding?" he writes. "Half, probably. There is such rich joy to be found in these debates without stakes." Even as they "go nowhere, slowly." — Milton Guevara , production assistant, Morning Edition

The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live by Danielle Dreilinger

"The secret's out! Before I read this book, home economics was just a class that I took in junior high with the aptly named Mrs. Housekeeper. But in reading this book, I discovered that in the early 20th century, the field provided jobs for women in the sciences, corporations and government. And despite a flirtation with the eugenics movement, it was an area in which Black women could, and did, make significant contributions. Danielle Dreilinger also makes the case that cooking and managing a budget are invaluable lessons for all children and should still be part of the school curriculum. — Emiko Tamagawa , senior producer, Here & Now

The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel

"I'm among the weirdos who responded to the pandemic by upping my workouts, which made Alison Bechdel's latest graphic novel feel unexpectedly timely. A lifelong fitness freak, who's embraced everything from martial arts to mountaineering, Bechdel applies the same rigor to her analysis of her quest for a mind/body connection, which contains the sort of psychoanalytic layers, self-deprecating charm and ambitious complexities her fans have come to expect." — Neda Ulaby , correspondent, Culture Desk

Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey Into the Heart of Desire by Tracy Clark-Flory

"As a woman, dating men is kind of exhausting – especially when you consider all of the ways women's understanding of our own sexuality is shaped by the male gaze. In her new memoir, Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey Into the Heart of Desire, Jezebel writer Tracy Clark-Flory unpacks the different ways women are taught to be passive objects of lust, rather than active participants in sex. Through a combination of personal stories, previous reporting and feminist theory, Clark-Flory decodes the messy yet massively rewarding journey of taking agency over one's pleasure, with or without a partner." — Isabella Gomez Sarmiento , assistant producer, Weekend Edition

To read more recommendations from staff members, you can explore the "Staff Picks" section on the 2021 Books We Love website.

The 13 Best Book Review Sites and Book Rating Sites

Knowing where to buy books can be challenging. So, here are the best book review sites to help you avoid buying books that you'll regret reading.

Nobody likes to spend money on a new book only to face that overwhelming feeling of disappointment when it doesn't live up to your expectations. The solution is to check out a few book review sites before you hit the shops. The greater the diversity of opinions you can gather, the more confidence you can have that you'll enjoy the title.

Which book review and book rating sites are worth considering? Here are the best ones.

1. Goodreads

Goodreads is arguably the leading online community for book lovers. If you want some inspiration for which novel or biography to read next, this is the book review site to visit.

There's an endless number of user-generated reading lists to explore, and Goodreads itself publishes dozens of "best of" lists across a number of categories. You can do a book search by plot or subject , or join book discussions and reading groups with thousands of members.

You can participate in the community by adding your own rankings to books you've read and leaving reviews for other people to check out. Occasionally, there are even bonus events like question and answer sessions with authors.

2. LibraryThing

LibraryThing is the self-proclaimed largest book club in the world. It has more than 2.3 million members and is one of the best social networking platforms for book lovers .

With a free account, you can add up to 200 books to your library and share them with other users. But it's in the other areas where LibraryThing can claim to be one of the best book review sites.

Naturally, there are ratings, user reviews, and tags. But be sure to click on the Zeitgeist tab at the top of the page. It contains masses of information, including the top books by rating, by the number of reviews, by authors, and loads more.

3. Book Riot

Book Riot is a blog. It publishes listicles on dozens of different topics, many of which review the best books in a certain genre. To give you an idea, some recent articles include Keeping Hoping Alive: 11 Thrilling YA Survival Stories and The Best Historical Fiction Books You’ve Never Heard Of .

Of course, there's also plenty of non-reading list content. If you have a general affinity for literature, Book Riot is definitely worth adding to the list of websites you browse every day.

Bookish is a site that all members of book clubs should know about. It helps you prep for your next meeting with discussion guides, book quizzes, and book games. There are even food and drink suggestions, as well as playlist recommendations.

But the site is more than just book club meetings. It also offers lots of editorial content. That comes in the form of author interviews, opinion essays, book reviews and recommendations, reading challenges, and giveaways.

Be sure to look at the Must-Reads section of the site regularly to get the latest book reviews. Also, it goes without saying that the people behind Bookish are book lovers, too. To get a glimpse of what they’re reading, check out their Staff Reads articles.

5. Booklist

Booklist is a print magazine that also offers an online portal. Trusted experts from the American Library Association write all the book reviews.

You can see snippets of reviews for different books. However, to read them in full, you will need to subscribe. An annual plan for this book review site costs $184.95 per year.

6. Fantasy Book Review

Fantasy Book Review should be high on the list for anyone who is a fan of fantasy works. The book review site publishes reviews for both children's books and adults' books.

It has a section on the top fantasy books of all time and a continually updated list of must-read books for each year. You can also search through the recommended books by sub-genres such as Sword and Sorcery, Parallel Worlds, and Epic Fantasy.

7. LoveReading

LoveReading is one of the most popular book review sites in the UK, but American audiences will find it to be equally useful.

The site is divided into fiction and non-fiction works. In each area, it publishes weekly staff picks, books of the month, debuts of the month, ebooks of the month, audiobooks of the month, and the nationwide bestsellers. Each book on every list has a full review that you can read for free.

Make sure you also check out their Highlights tab to get book reviews for selected titles of the month. In Collections , you'll also find themed reading lists such as World War One Literature and Green Reads .

Kirkus has been involved in producing book reviews since the 1930s. This book review site looks at the week's bestselling books, and provides lengthy critiques for each one.

As you'd expect, you'll also find dozens of "best of" lists and individual book reviews across many categories and genres.

And while you're on the site, make sure you click on the Kirkus Prize section. You can look at all the past winners and finalists, complete with the accompanying reviews of their books.

Although Reddit is a social media site, you can use it to get book reviews of famous books, or almost any other book for that matter! Reddit has a Subreddit, r/books, that is dedicated to book reviews and reading lists.

The subreddit has weekly scheduled threads about a particular topic or genre. Anyone can then chip in with their opinions about which books are recommendable. Several new threads are published every day, with people discussing their latest discovery with an accompanying book rating or review.

You'll also discover a weekly recommendation thread. Recent threads have included subjects such as Favorite Books About Climate Science , Literature of Indigenous Peoples , and Books Set in the Desert . There’s also a weekly What are you Reading? discussion and frequent AMAs.

For more social media-like platforms, check out these must-have apps for book lovers .

10. YouTube

YouTube is not the type of place that immediately springs to mind when you think of the best book review sites online.

Nonetheless, there are several engaging YouTube channels that frequently offer opinions on books they've read. You’ll easily find book reviews of famous books here.

Some of the most notable book review YouTube channels include Better Than Food: Book Reviews , Little Book Owl , PolandBananasBooks , and Rincey Reads .

Amazon is probably one of your go-to site when you want to buy something. If you don’t mind used copies, it’s also one of the best websites to buy second-hand books .

Now, to get book reviews, just search and click on a title, then scroll down to see the ratings and what others who have bought the book are saying. It’s a quick way to have an overview of the book’s rating. If you spot the words Look Inside above the book cover, it means you get to preview the first few pages of the book, too!

Regardless of the praises or criticisms you have heard from other book review sites, reading a sample is the most direct way to help you gauge the content’s potential and see whether the author’s writing style suits your tastes.

12. StoryGraph

StoryGraph is another good book review site that's worth checking out. The book rating is determined by the site's large community of readers. Key in the title of a book you're interested in and click on it in StoryGraph's search results to have an overall view of its rating.

Each book review provides information on the moods and pacing of the story. It also indicates whether the tale is plot or character-driven, what readers feel about the extent of character development, how lovable the characters generally are, and the diversity of the cast.

13. London Review of Books

The London Review of Books is a magazine that covers a range of subjects such as culture, literature, and philosophy. Part of its content includes amazingly detailed book reviews. If you feel that most modern book reviews are too brief for your liking, the London Review of Books should suit you best.

You'll gain insight into the flow and themes of the story, as well as a more thorough picture of the events taking place in the book.

Read Book Reviews Before You Buy

The book review sites we've discussed will appeal to different types of readers. Some people will be more comfortable with the easy-to-interpret book rating systems; others will prefer extensive reviews written by experienced professionals.

Although it’s easy to be tempted by a gorgeous book cover, it’s always best to have a quick look at the book reviews before actually buying a copy. This way, you can save your money and spend it on the books that you’ll be proud to display on your shelves for a long time. And check out recommendations, as well, to help you find what's worth reading.

Join Discovery, the new community for book lovers

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Blog – Posted on Friday, May 01

The best book review sites for enthusiastic readers.

Book lovers, stop us if you’ve heard this one before: you’ve just finished a mind-blowing book and you need to hear some discussion about it. What do you do? Dive straight into the limitless realm of the Internet and search for book review sites, of course. 

Or here’s another scenario: you’ve finished reading a novel and now you’re searching for something to fill the void. Maybe you want more of the same, or maybe something completely different to switch things up. You’ll probably also scour the Internet for ratings and trustworthy recommendations. 

Fortunately, there are endless review blogs and book review sites that you can peruse. Un fortunately, not every one of them features a wide enough variety to help you. But don’t worry: we’ve got you covered with ten of the best book review sites to satisfy the bookworm in you. If you want to cut to the chase and get a personalized pick for a book review site in 30 seconds, we first recommend taking this quick quiz:

Which review community should you join?

Find out which review community is best for your style. Takes 30 seconds!

Then read on for the full explanation of all of the best book review sites out there!

1. Goodreads 

It’s impossible not to mention Goodreads when discussing book communities: it’s the Facebook of book reviews — the ultimate social media platform for bibliophiles. If you’ve somehow managed to go this long without stumbling upon this omnipresent site, here’s the run-down: you can use Goodreads to organize, display, and discuss your virtual bookshelf with other users. 

Goodreads recommendations are based on your listed interests. You can follow authors and book influencers ranging from Celeste Ng to Bill Gates . This allows you to see all their reviews, which vary from compact one-liners to critical analysis, and watch the new reviews roll in. For a quick verdict, just take a look at the star rating that they give the book. 

Also if you like to browse lists, Goodreads compiles the best and most popular books for every genre. There’s also the annual Goodreads’ Choice Awards to celebrate each year’s new releases, where you can cast your vote or peruse the list of contenders to find a new book to read. It’s a site for every kind of reader, with abundant ways to comment and interact. 

2. LibraryThing

This is the OG of all online book catalogues and discussion boards — take a look and you’ll see that it’s an oldie but a goodie. Of course, the basic functions of LibraryThing are rather similar to Goodreads: there are millions of books that readers can add to their lists, as well as review with star ratings.

While the interface harks back to the earlier days of the world wide web, LibraryThing has a secret weapon that’ll appeal to all readers, especially modern ones: their Zeitgeist . This page displays the latest crème de la crème of the whole site, from the most popular books to the hottest reviews , which you can also write with the help of a good book review template . Just a glance shows that the readers here know how to read between the lines and wield their words!

So if you’re hoping to read or share some in-depth literary thoughts with fellow sharp-minded users , LibraryThing is the site to browse. (You can even access it without creating an account!) 

3. Reedsy Discovery 

Now, if you’re searching for some hidden gems to peruse, Reedsy Discovery ’s got your back. While our blog features everything from classics to contemporary hits, Discovery’s specialty is indie publications, many of which are accompanied with succinct comments from experienced reviewers . There’s no better way to broaden your horizon! 

Moreover, if casual and creative reviews are more your cup of tea, then rejoice: the burgeoning community of readers on Discovery can leave comments, one-line reviews, and video reviews (calling all Booktubers!) on just about any book. It’s a fun and interactive way to geek out over your favorite reads and discover all the coolest new titles you won’t find anywhere else.

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4. LoveReading 

Though it’s UK-based, this prolific site caters to audiences around the world. LoveReading is strictly a reviewing site, with a base of staff writers and carefully selected contributors, so you know the reviews are top-notch. The staff often give quite personal reading experiences in their reviews, which make their recommendations very endearing, like they’re from a close friend. They even offer you presents — well, if you think of giveaways as presents! 

LoveReading covers books from every genre you can think of. They also have weekly, monthly, and yearly list features to keep you up to date with the latest stellar releases, so you’ll never be in want of something to pore over. 

5. The Millions 

In search of reviews that really dive into the themes, metaphors, and overall executions of interesting and highbrow books? The Millions has got you covered. 

Written by a collection of seasoned critics, these reviews are speckled with memorable quotes, elegant analysis, and plentiful comparisons to other works — which means extra reading recommendations for you! If contemporary and literary fictions are your go-tos, then The Millions is the site for all your lit nerd needs. 

6. SFBook Reviews 

Those who think quantity and quality don’t go hand in hand, you clearly haven’t encountered SFBook Review . The five reviewers on the team here share two common and important goals: firstly, to follow the outpour of new titles in the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres every year, and secondly, to give thoughtful reviews to as many of them as possible.

This team knows their SFF niches inside out, so their verdicts are very credible. Still, their reviews are quite friendly and personal — they discuss other related books and share their reading experiences to help you make your own reading choices. 

7. Bookpage

Bookpage features all kinds of genres: from children’s books to nonfiction, from the works of household names to debut authors, and so much more. Their format is neat and straightforward — they bring you the volumes they think are most worthwhile, recommending them to you by summarizing and concisely commenting on the prose, the theme, and the plot of each chosen book.

In addition to this, Bookpage also features author interviews and articles that unearth the deeper themes and purposes of certain books. If you’re a true book lover seeking like-minded literary aficionados, this may be the perfect place for you.

8. Book Riot 

Avid readers, you’ve probably stumbled upon Book Riot more times than you can remember. While it’s not a site that individually assesses titles, it has lists for everything — from timeless literary giants to the top books in each genre. What’s more, Book Riot has lots of thinkpieces that dive deep into the way certain titles make readers feel — be it exhilarated, motivated, or enraged — and that’s really all you need to know when deciding to embark on a new reading adventure. 

Additionally, if you’d rather listen to discussions and reviews rather than read them, you'll be happy to know that Book Riot has a range of podcasts for you to choose from. 

9. NetGalley 

NetGalley is another platform bringing you new and unconventional recommendations. They specialize in connecting authors who are publishing to readers who’d like to preview and put in their two cents. While the database of books available here are not the most expansive, those that are featured are certainly worth your time. 

Readers can benefit most from NetGalley via their book recommendation site, Bookish , where the staff reviewers update you with their recent reads and in-depth thoughts on those reads. Along with that, Bookish also has book club kits, equipped with comprehension questions and discussion points, to help readers explore stories mindfully. 

10. BookBub

While it’s very similar to Goodreads, BookBub focuses more on connecting readers to books that might suit them specifically — which is partly why you’ll see plenty of bargains and deals promoted on the site.

Because of this promotional value, BookBub has quite a strong author community. Diana Gabaldon and Gillian Flynn , for instance, are constantly recommending books on their accounts. So if you’d like to tag along with your favorite author, this is an excellent website to visit. The only drawback of BookBub is that they only have community reviews from users based in the US, and you have to sign up in order to read them. 

With these ten sites, you’ll be sure to find your little community of fellow book lovers regardless of what your interests are. Here’s to exciting TBR lists and nourished minds!

If you want to try your hand at reviewing, we’ve got a little guide to help you out ! On the other hand, if you want to plough away at your books, why not consider the Kindle Cloud Reader ?

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Here Are the 14 New Books You Should Read in May

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.

F rom Brittney Griner ’s eagerly anticipated memoir to a long-awaited sequel to Colm Tóibín’s beloved novel Brooklyn , the best books coming in May offer a range of choices for every reader. Those looking for a good laugh should check out the latest high-society comedy from Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan or filmmaker Miranda July’s first novel in 10 years, which offers a profoundly humorous take on menopause and mortality. R.O. Kwon ’s sensual followup to her 2018 best-seller The Incendiaries is sure to keep readers on their toes, while scholar Deborah Paredez’s tribute to America’s finest divas offers an important lesson in pop-culture etymology.    

Here, the 14 new books to read this month.

Coming Home , Brittney Griner (May 7)

On Feb. 17, 2022, WNBA player Brittney Griner was detained in Russia , where she played professionally in the offseason, for possessing cannabis oil, a substance that is illegal in the country. (At the time, Griner’s Russian lawyers stated that she had been prescribed medical cannabis for pain management by her doctors in the U.S.) The celebrated athlete was sentenced to nine years in prison for drug smuggling and served in a Russian penal colony until the U.S. government was able to broker a prisoner swap in December 2022, trading her for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout . Griner’s memoir, Coming Home, which she co-authored with Michelle Burford, details all of this and more, offering a raw look at the harrowing experience that has turned her into an outspoken advocate for Americans who have been wrongfully detained abroad .

Buy Now : Coming Home on Bookshop | Amazon

Shanghailanders , Juli Min (May 7)

Juli Min’s ambitious debut novel, Shanghailanders, is a thrilling, futuristic family drama that captures the joys, disappointments, and inside jokes of one Shanghai family in reverse chronological order. Starting in 2040 and working its way back to 2014, the book unspools the shared and separate lives of the wealthy Yangs: Chinese real estate investor Leo, his elegant Japanese French wife Eko, their precocious eldest daughters Yumi and Yoko, and the baby of the family, aspiring actress Kiko. By giving readers the gift of hindsight, Min shows how one enigmatic family falls apart and comes back together over several decades.

Buy Now : Shanghailanders on Bookshop | Amazon

Long Island , Colm Tóibín (May 7)

Best-selling Irish author Colm Tóibín returns with Long Island, a well-observed sequel to his much loved 2009 novel Brooklyn , set 20 years after Eilis, the inscrutable heroine of the aforementioned book, emigrated from Ireland. Picking up in the spring of 1976, Eilis, now in her 40s, is still married to Italian American plumber Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbs outside of New York City with their two teenage children and her in-laws. All is well, if a little boring, until she is confronted by an irate Irishman who claims Tony has gotten his wife pregnant and he plans to leave the baby on Eilis’ doorstep once it’s born. Tóibín’s 11th novel offers an absorbing look at a middle-aged woman at a crossroads in not only her marriage, but also in a life she worries has gone unfulfilled.

Buy Now : Long Island on Bookshop | Amazon

The Skunks , Fiona Warnick (May 7)

In Fiona Warnick’s quirky debut, The Skunks, Isabel returns to her hometown after college graduation to take on a few odd jobs and figure out what she wants to do with her life. To take her mind off of her post-adolescent fears and anxieties, she starts thinking about the book’s titular creatures. Specifically, the three baby skunks that unexpectedly show up in the yard of the place she is house sitting. Their presence forces her to ponder life’s existential questions—and question her own romantic desires. The Skunks is a hilarious look at post-grad life and the loneliness, uncertainty, and occasional joy that comes with it.

Buy Now : The Skunks on Bookshop | Amazon

All Fours , Miranda July (May 14)

Filmmaker, artist, and best-selling author Miranda July’s first novel in a decade is an intimate, fearless, and sexy coming-of-middle-age story about a woman hellbent on reinventing herself. All Fours begins with the unnamed narrator, a 45-year-old semi-famous artist, learning that someone has been peering into her window with a telephoto lens. She decides to leave her husband and child behind to drive from Los Angeles to New York for a writing retreat. Unfortunately, she only makes it as far as Monrovia, Calif., less than an hour from home. It’s there she finds herself tackling fluctuating hormones, an increased libido, and a rather impractical motel room renovation in this wonderfully weird adventure.

Buy Now : All Fours on Bookshop | Amazon

Blue Ruin , Hari Kunzru (May 14)

Hari Kunzru ’s seventh novel, Blue Ruin, is a provocative portrait of a once-promising artist as a disillusioned man of a certain age. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Jay, a 40-something undocumented performance artist, is living out of his car and delivering groceries to wealthy residents in upstate New York. On one of his runs, he finds himself face-to-face with Alice, a woman he dated nearly two decades earlier. Alice invites him to ride out the crisis in the luxurious home where she is quarantining with her painter husband, the art school rival for whom she ghosted Jay. The unexpected run-in leads to a possible big career break for Jay, who worries the deal may just cost him his soul.

Buy Now : Blue Ruin on Bookshop | Amazon

This Strange Eventful History , Claire Messud (May 14)

This Strange Eventful History is a sprawling yet intimate saga that draws inspiration from author Claire Messud’s own family history. (She has called this novel, her seventh, the “most significant work” of her life.) Spanning several decades, from 1940 to 2010, Messud follows the Cassar family, a fictional French Algerian clan first displaced by World War II, and again, nearly 20 years later, by Algeria’s war of independence . With great empathy, Messud shows the effects war, colonialism, and later sovereignty had on three generations of the Cassars, most notably, the family’s youngest member, aspiring writer Chloe, a stand-in for Messud, who believes the truth will finally set her relatives free.

Buy Now : This Strange Eventful History on Bookshop | Amazon

Very Bad Company , Emma Rosenblum (May 14)

With her latest novel, Very Bad Company , best-selling author and journalist Emma Rosenblum takes a page from Rian Johnson ’s Knives Out playbook. Despite her lack of experience, former TV producer Caitlin Levy is hired as the new head of events at Aurora, a trendy ad-tech startup led by an eccentric CEO. To welcome her to the team, Caitlin is invited to take part in Aurora’s annual corporate retreat in Miami. This year, the company is preparing for an impending billion-dollar merger. But when one of Aurora’s high-level executives turns up dead, everyone on sight is forced to ignore the crisis so as to not sink the deal. What ensues is a darkly funny mystery about toxic corporate culture.

Buy Now : Very Bad Company on Bookshop | Amazon

In Tongues , Thomas Grattan (May 21)

In Thomas Grattan’s rollicking sophomore release, In Tongues, the charming if naive Gordon moves from Minnesota to New York City where he gets a job walking the dogs of Manhattan’s elite, including gallery owners Phillip and Nicola. Soon he is hobnobbing and bed-hopping with the high-powered couple, turning their lives upside down with little regard for the consequences of his actions. In this delightfully modern comedy of manners, Gordon wonders if he has the ability to change his ways as he begins to understand the damage his impulses have caused.

Buy Now : In Tongues on Bookshop | Amazon

Lies and Weddings , Kevin Kwan (May 21)

From Kevin Kwan , the author of Crazy Rich Asians, a high comedy sure to delight fans of Jane Austen . Rufus Leung Gresham, the protagonist of Lies and Weddings , is the future Earl of Greshambury (a clever nod to the fictional setting of Anthony Trollope’s 1858 novel Doctor Thorne ) and son of a former Hong Kong supermodel. He’s also been buried underneath a mountain of debt thanks to his family’s reckless spending. To dig himself out, Rufus’ always scheming mother suggests he find a wealthy woman to marry at his sister’s upcoming high-society wedding. What could possibly go wrong?

Buy Now : Lies and Weddings on Bookshop | Amazon

Exhibit , R. O. Kwon (May 21)

R. O. Kwon’s Exhibit is a hypnotic queer love story full of lust and longing. The sultry novel follows two women, talented photographer Jin and injured prima ballerina Lidija, and the ancient familial curse that stands to keep them apart. Exhibit is a haunting romance about desire, obsession, and ambition that is sure to get your heart rate up.

Buy Now : Exhibit on Bookshop | Amazon

American Diva , Deborah Paredez (May 21)

Fifteen years ago, poet and cultural critic Deborah Paredez tackled the posthumous legacy of Selena Quintanilla with Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory . Now, with American Diva, she has put together an insightful ode to the famous women— Aretha Franklin , Tina Turner , and Serena Williams , to name a few—who have come to embody the often misconstrued term. Combining cultural criticism and memoir, Paredez shows how the word “diva,” once used to describe a powerhouse opera singer, evolved to become a condemnation of confident and powerful women, many of whom are women of color. American Diva is Paredez’s attempt to reclaim the word.

Buy Now : American Diva on Bookshop | Amazon

Accordion Eulogies , Noé Álvarez (May 28)

Growing up, Noé Álvarez’s working class Mexican immigrant parents rarely spoke of his larger-than-life grandfather. All Álvarez ever knew of the relative who was more myth than man was that he played the accordion and possibly put a curse on his descendents with his questionable behavior. In his poignant new memoir, Accordion Eulogies, Álvarez traces the history of the humble titular instrument in hopes of better understanding his own family’s mysterious lineage. With empathy and humor, the author dares to find the root cause of his generational trauma with the hope of finally breaking the cycle.

Buy Now : Accordion Eulogies on Bookshop | Amazon

In These Streets , Josiah Bates (May 28)

With In These Streets, journalist and former TIME reporter Josiah Bates takes a closer look at the recent surge in gun violence throughout the United States, particularly in marginalized communities. Bates travels the country speaking with those on the frontlines of what many have deemed a public health crisis that has only gotten worse since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. He interviews victims, perpetrators, activists, law enforcement, and academics in hopes of gaining new insight into the epidemic.

Buy Now : In These Streets on Bookshop | Amazon

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The Most Haunting Photo Book I’ve Touched

It’s incredibly difficult to describe Olga Karlovac once you look through her images. She’s not a landscape photographer, but she shoots landscapes that even the staunchest support of Adams would fall for. She’s not a street photographer, but she does street photography in a way that Diado Moriyama would commend. And Olga’s work includes portraiture that doesn’t draw influence from other visual media the same way that so many pieces on social media do. But instead, Olga’s work holistically embraces her own identity and finds comfort in her own skin like one would a silk kimono. With every turn of the page of her latest book, Elsewhere, it seems like Olga’s camera is aided by a poltergeist that provides a blessing like no other.

That’s to say that Olga’s work isn’t just otherworldly and cosmic; it’s simply imagined and brought into fruition by its creator in a way that very few of us can conjure. Perhaps most importantly, it plays with black and white in a way that we’ve only ever seen otherwise in expensive Taschen books and on handheld device screens. By that, we mean that Elsewhere plays with the idea of dark mode, light mode, and embraces the idea of the expandable spread.

Truly, Olga cannot be contained. Yet, at the same time, her photographs have a sense of authenticity that’s sorely missing in much of modern photography. I don’t believe I should contain her either, but if you took the best of several Magnum photographers and put them into one person, the work would look like Olga’s. She embraces camera shake, blur, blown-out highlights, shadows that are too deep, and all the gray spaces in between in a very masterful way.

We named Olga Karlovac as one of the most inspirational photographers of 2023 , and we’ve also previously featured her work. With the Ricoh GR in hand, she photographs the world around her in a way that so many can only dream of — literally because they’re unsure of how to make art like this or would feel like they’d be jeered at by peers.

“Usually I spot something (and) feel drawn to it — it can be a person walking across the street, it can be the rooftop of an old house, the men behind the corner running away,  actually anything. As I shoot a lot while walking, driving in a tram or a car, everything happens very quickly.” Olga Karlovac, in our previous interview

Elsewhere starts with a simple forward and uses the square format to make the most of Olga’s work. Sometimes, the images are split down the middle in various ways. But Olga’s work is esoteric, and those who vibe with it will deeply feel every photograph when they page through the book at a slow pace. For that reason, I truly recommend that you take a look at it on a day off and when you’re personally feeling like you’re in a good place. With that said, Elsewhere can make the perfect morning cup of coffee or tea even better.

Several photographers shoot in black and white. But not many of them embrace the intricacies that the format allows you to get away with. Olga’s images embrace lots of photographic flaws, sometimes looking like charcoal sketches that embrace smears. It’s for this reason and her incredible work overall that we award this book five out of five stars and give it our Editor’s Choice award.

Elsewhere by Olga Karlovac can be purchased directly from Olga .

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Pulitzer Prizes 2024: A Guide to the Winning Books and Finalists

Jayne Anne Phillips won the fiction award for “Night Watch,” while Jonathan Eig and Ilyon Woo shared the biography prize.

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By Elizabeth A. Harris and Joumana Khatib

Eighteen books were recognized as winners or finalists for the Pulitzer Prize on Monday, in the categories of history, memoir, poetry, general nonfiction, fiction and biography, which had two winners.

Night Watch , by Jayne Anne Phillips

A story about a mother and daughter set in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, W.Va., after the Civil War. “Night Watch,” which was also longlisted for the National Book Award, is about surviving war and its aftermath. “I consider Phillips to be among the greatest and most intuitive of American writers,” wrote our critic Dwight Garner.

Fiction finalist: Wednesday’s Child: Stories , by Yiyun Li

A short story collection written over the course of a decade that examines aging and loss. The stories touch on a woman who makes a spreadsheet of every person she’s lost, a middle-aged practitioner of Eastern medicine and an 88-year-old biologist.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Fiction finalist: Same Bed Different Dreams , by Ed Park

An imagined alternate history of Korea that includes assassins, slasher films and the dangers of social media. In a review in The Times, the critic Hamilton Cain called the book “wonderfully suspenseful, like watching a circus performer juggle a dozen torches; will one slip his agile hands?”

Random House

No Right to an Honest Living , by Jacqueline Jones

Jones, a historian and a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, examines the hypocrisy of Boston before the Civil War. The city was known for its antislavery rhetoric and as the center of abolitionism, but Black residents endured “casual cruelty” in the work force and were condemned to lives of poverty without the chance for equal employment.

Basic Books

History finalist: Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion , by Elliott West

This is an examination of the American West and its physical and cultural transformation in the 19th century. The book covers the 1840s, when the West was home to various Native cultures, and moves through the next three decades, when the area was organized into states and territories and connected by railroads and telegraph wires.

University of Nebraska Press

History finalist: American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the U.S. Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, by Michael Willrich

This book is a history of the American anarchist movement in the early 20th century. While many working class immigrants saw it as heroic, others considered it a frightening foreign ideology.

King: A Life , by Jonathan Eig

This major study of the civil rights icon draws on a landslide of recently released White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I. documents, letters, oral histories and other material. Eig shows a masterly command of his research, showing King in intimate moments, and arguing that his nonviolence has been mistaken for passivity. Put simply, our critic Dwight Garner wrote, “Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.”

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom , by Ilyon Woo

In 1848, William and Ellen Craft, an enslaved couple, disguised themselves as a sick, wealthy white man traveling with his male slave and headed north. Woo tells the story of their stunning, perilous journey in novelistic detail, tracing their path through the United States and eventual passage to England, where they wrote a popular book about their escape.

Simon & Schuster

Biography finalist: “ Larry McMurtry: A Life ,” by Tracy Daugherty

This is the first comprehensive biography of McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Lonesome Dove” and “The Last Picture Show,” among other novels. Daugherty has also written biographies of Joseph Heller and Joan Didion, and his latest “reads a bit like one of McMurtry’s novels,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote in his review. “Elegy and humor bleed into each other.”

St. Martin’s Press

MEMOIR OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice , by Cristina Rivera Garza

In 1990, Rivera Garza’s 20-year-old sister was killed, and the case is a jumping-off point for this searching, personal examination of femicide in Mexico. The book is “one of the most effective resurrections of a murder victim I have ever read,” our reviewer, Katherine Dykstra, wrote. “Rivera Garza draws her sister, then complicates that drawing and then complicates the complication, creating layer upon layer of nuance.”

Memoir finalist: The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight , by Andrew Leland

The author, a longtime editor and podcaster, details his life with retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that is gradually causing him to lose his vision. His writing is “jazzy and intelligent,” our critic Alexandra Jacobs said, “with licks of understated humor.” Yet Leland also “rigorously explores the disability’s most troubling corners,” resulting in an affecting study of vision and its limits.

Penguin Press

Memoir finalist: The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions , by Jonathan Rosen

In this account of his friendship with Michael Laudor, who came to prominence as a Yale student trying to publicly destigmatize mental illness and later was convicted of stabbing his pregnant girlfriend to death, Rosen offers a look at the boundaries between brilliance and insanity. Our critic Alexandra Jacobs called it “an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph.”

GENERAL NONFICTION

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy , by Nathan Thrall

This book tells the story of a deadly bus crash outside Jerusalem through the eyes of a Palestinian father whose 5-year-old died in the accident. The father’s agony is compounded by the physical and legal restrictions that shape the lives of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Thrall also examines the political, bureaucratic and personal decisions that contributed to the crash, and “vignettes of individual guilt come up against stark political realities,” our reviewer Rozina Ali wrote.

Metropolitan Books

General nonfiction finalist: Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World , by John Vaillant

In 2016, wildfires tore through Fort McMurray, in the Canadian province of Alberta. Vaillant details how the fire began, how it traveled and the wreckage it left behind, weaving a story of a warming climate, a massive oil reserve and the apocalyptic fallout. The heart of the story, of course, is the fire itself: “Vaillant anthropomorphizes fire,” our reviewer David Enrich wrote. “Not only does it grow and breathe and search for food; it strategizes. It hunts. It lays in wait for months, even years.”

General nonfiction finalist: Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives , by Siddharth Kara

Cobalt is an essential mineral used in the lithium-ion rechargeable batteries that power devices from smartphones to electric vehicle. This book, from an academic who has studied modern slavery, examines the horrors of cobalt mining, particularly the hazardous conditions and subsistence pay that workers face.

Tripas: Poems, by Brandon Som

In this collection, Som celebrates his multicultural heritage and family memories, writing about his grandmother, who was Chicana and worked nights on an assembly line at a Motorola factory, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran a corner store.

Georgia Review Books

Poetry finalist: Information Desk: An Epic , by Robyn Schiff

Schiff chronicles her five years working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where she answered mostly one question. As she writes in “Information Desk,” the “catechism/commences: Where’s the bathroom? / Where’s / the bathroom? Can you direct me to a / men’s room? ” Writing about the book for The Times, Maggie Lange called it “a searing yet reverent book-length poem, containing as many jokes as it does social critiques.”

Penguin Poets

Poetry finalist: To 2040, by Jorie Graham

Graham’s 15th poetry collection is narrated by a speaker looking toward the future while reflecting on her own mortality. The collection begins with questions stated as fact: “Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.”

Copper Canyon Press

  More about Elizabeth A. Harris

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