Every week, critics and editors at 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.
Thriller
King of Ashes
by S.A. Cosby
In Cosby’s fifth Southern noir thriller, a wealthy Atlanta investment banker returns to his Virginia hometown after a car crash leaves his father in a coma, only to find the rest of his family threatened by a deadly gang. “What follows is a gripping roller coaster ride of escalating danger in cars and crematories, punctuated by pulpy moments of dark glamour in the bedroom and the club,” our reviewer, Chanelle Benz, wrote. “The story overflows with immersive velocity and crackling sensory details.” Read our review.
True Crime
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
by Caroline Fraser
This work of speculative true crime returns Fraser to the Pacific Northwest where she grew up, a region once known for both its toxic industry — including a mammoth copper smelter in Tacoma, Wash. — and its serial killers. Fraser provocatively connects the two, tracing suggestive links between the poisoned air, water and soil, and the violence perpetrated by men like Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and Gary Ridgway. Read our review.
Literary Fiction
So Far Gone
by Jess Walter
The latest novel by the best-selling author of “Beautiful Ruins” is a buoyant, witty family caper set in rural northeastern Washington State, where a retired journalist lives off the grid — no phone, no running water, only a single dirt road connecting him to the outside world. Then one day his young grandchildren arrive on his doorstep to tell him that their mother, his daughter, has gone missing. As our reviewer, Hamilton Cain, wrote, “A reckoning’s afoot.” Read our review.
tales of excess
The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich
by Evan Osnos
In this collection of profiles, Osnos, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, chronicles the lifestyles of the richest: the megayacht owners, tech disrupters, Ponzi schemers and hedge funders who in the past several years have gone from merely überwealthy to obscenely so. Toggling between extravagances like simulated World War II battles and dueling luxury disaster refuges, Osnos takes the reader deep into our new Gilded Age. Read our review.
Mystery
A Murder for Miss Hortense
by Mel Pennant
Pennant, a British playwright, moves into prose territory with the first in a new mystery series, one that stretches the cozy form in appealing ways. Miss Hortense is a no-nonsense retired nurse and Jamaican immigrant who has lived for decades in a tidy Birmingham suburb awash in minor drama. When deaths in the community stir unwelcome memories, Miss Hortense decides to investigate. Read our review.
Memoir
Homework
by Geoff Dyer
Dyer has managed to write about an entirely different topic for each of his books, from tennis to yoga to D.H. Lawrence. He turns the lens on himself in his latest, reflecting on his working-class roots in postwar Britain and the seemingly trivial but unforgettable childhood moments that shaped him. His memoir is a story of transformation, both an individual’s and a nation’s. Read our review.
Fantasy
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
by V.E. Schwab
Schwab, best known for novels like “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” and “Vicious,” returns with a time-sweeping, character-juggling, lesbian vampire mystery that moves between 1532 Spain, 1827 London and 2019 Boston. Our reviewer, Everdeen Mason, described it as “a tale told sharply, but sweetly enough it goes down as easy as that happy-hour cocktail that, surprisingly, knocks you flat.” Read our review.
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