Every week, the critics and editors at the The New York Times Book Review pick the most interesting and notable new releases, from literary fiction and serious nonfiction to thrillers, romance novels, mysteries and everything in between.
You can save the books you’re most excited to read on a personal reading list, and find even more recommendations from our book experts.
Coming-of-Age Novel
What Kind of Paradise
by Janelle Brown
In Brown’s sixth (and best) novel, a father-daughter duo live off the grid in remotest Montana. Something isn’t quite right in their tightly controlled world; Jane, a perspicacious teenager, begins to realize that her father isn’t who he says he is. When she makes a courageous break for freedom, we find ourselves embedded in the early dot-com boom in San Francisco. If the Unabomber had a daughter, this could be her story. It will definitely make you think about our reliance on technology (especially if you’re squinting at a screen). Read our review.
Heart-Wrenching nonfiction
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins
by Barbara Demick
In her entrancing, disturbing book, Demick traces the wildly divergent paths of a pair of twin girls born in China under the one-child rule. Their parents sent one of the babies to live with relatives, hoping she’d evade the scrutiny of authorities. Instead, she was kidnapped by a “family planning” agency and adopted by Americans who were unaware of her origins. Demick’s characters are richly drawn, and this story, reported over many years, delivers an emotional wallop. Read our review.
Thriller
Never Flinch
by Stephen King
King interweaves two story lines in his latest novel, which brings back the brilliant and eccentric investigator Holly Gibney. The first narrative begins with an anonymous letter threatening to kill “13 innocents and one guilty” as a bizarre act of retribution; the detective on the case turns to Holly for help. The second follows a feminist writer on a lecture circuit that has been disrupted by a violent stalker; who better to hire for protection than Holly? King raises the stakes — and the body count — as the twin plots converge. Read our review.
Biography
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin
by Sue Prideaux
Paul Gauguin’s boldly colored, formally inventive artwork inspired painters from Van Gogh and Picasso to the German Expressionists. In this terrific biography, Prideaux draws on recently discovered source material to deliver an enthralling account of an artist whose life was as inventive as his art. Read our review.
Family Drama
Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
by Katie Yee
Yee’s delightful and quirky novel takes place during a pause — between divorce and marriage, sickness and health, the unknown and the status quo. The titular visit to a bar turns out not to be a setup for a joke, but a husband’s admission to his wife that he’s leaving her. Then our narrator — the soon-to-be-ex-wife — learns that she has cancer. She navigates both upheavals with dry humor, even finding it in her heart to write a most unexpected “Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual.” (Comes out July 22) Read our review.
Literary Fiction
Gingko Season
by Naomi Xu Elegant
This droll novel is about Penelope, a heartbroken 20-something working at a major museum in Philadelphia who meets a lab scientist and falls head over heels in love. It’s an unremarkable setup propelled by Penelope’s dry humor and populated with subtly drawn characters — the older couple she lives with; her opinionated college friends. Read our review.
True Crime
Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story
by Rich Cohen
Dulos, a wealthy, blonde Connecticut mother of five, disappeared without a trace in the midst of a contested divorce in 2019. Her body has never been found; her husband, Fotis, a luxury home builder, died by suicide not long after he was charged with her murder. Cohen tells this tale with skill and care, downplaying its luridness while exploring our queasy fascination with it. In his hands, it becomes a larger story of wealth in modern America. Read our review.
FAMILY DRAMA
A Family Matter
by Claire Lynch
Lynch’s moving and passionate novel unfolds from two sides of a divorce. First we see the wife’s perspective from the early 1980s, when she’s a young mother in love with another woman; four decades later, we get her ex-husband’s view as he’s receiving a cancer diagnosis. In the meantime, their only child believes her mother is dead until she finds evidence to the contrary. Now a young mother herself, she must piece together the puzzle of her own past. Read our review.
Literary Fiction
The South
by Tash Aw
Set over the course of one languid summer, this shimmering, sensual, psychologically rich novel follows the intertwining dramas of a Malaysian family grappling with expectations and personal secrets at their remote, run-down farm. At the center of the story is Jay, the family’s young, queer son, who finds himself developing a tense friendship/possible romance with the farm manager’s rebellious son. Read our review.
Fantasy
Harmattan Season
by Tochi Onyebuchi
Noir meets fantasy in Onyebuchi’s latest, about a chronically unlucky private eye who gets roped into a simmering war in French-colonized West Africa after a woman shows up bleeding at his house, mysteriously vanishes and then reappears floating in the sky, dead. Read our review.
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