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.
Literary Fiction
The Sisters
by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
This big, impressive novel revolves around a trio of magnetic Swedish women — the Mikkola sisters, daughters of an eccentric Tunisian mother and an absent Swedish father. As they crisscross the world from Stockholm to Tunis to New York, their everyday lives are recounted by their childhood friend Jonas. “With its accumulation of small, logistical details of life,” our critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote, “The Sisters” is a novel that “demands, and delivers.” Read our review.
Biography
Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh
by Robin Givhan
When Abloh was named head of men’s wear for Louis Vuitton in 2018, he became the first Black designer to serve as artistic director in the brand’s history. In “Make It Ours” — a biography both of the designer’s short, impactful life and of the changing face of luxury — Givhan shows how Abloh’s unusual path reflected not just a sea change for one house, but an industry figuring out its place in the modern world. Read our review.
Psychological Thriller
The Compound
by Aisling Rawle
In a house in the middle of a desert, 19 men and women — contestants on a reality show, all young, single and attractive — flirt and compete for “rewards” that range from the necessary (wood to build a front door, sunscreen, food) to the luxurious (makeup, clothing, diamond earrings). Rawle’s debut is an “Animal Farm” for our age of relentless materialism. Read our review.
Literary Fiction
The Girls Who Grew Big
by Leila Mottley
Mottley’s bold, bighearted new novel (after “Nightcrawling,” written the summer after she graduated from high school) follows a group of teenage moms in a small Florida town. Belittled and written off by family, friends and school, they band together for support and community. Mottley “writes with unabashed reverence for these young mothers, never sanitizing or romanticizing their lives but instead valuing them on the page in all the ways they are not valued in their lives,” wrote our reviewer, Nina LaCour. Read our review.
Fantasy
The Palm-Wine Drinkard
by Amos Tutuola
Blending folk tales and Yoruba oral traditions, this 1952 novel from Nigeria has been hailed as a forerunner of magical realism and a key influence for generations of African writers. The homebrew-loving narrator has lost his beloved “tapster,” the man who provides his extravagant supply of palm wine, to a deadly fall. Willing to do anything to get him back, the narrator sets out onto a land teeming with outlandish creatures and spells, seeking the place where the souls of the dead congregate. Read our review.
The post 5 New Books We Recommend This Week appeared first on New York Times.
