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.
Memoir
Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Ukraine
By Olia Hercules
In this vivid, bittersweet memoir, Hercules, a Ukrainian food writer and chef, traces her family’s resistance to oppression via piercing portraits of her formidable grandmothers, among others. Our critic Alexandra Jacobs singled out Hercules’s gifts as a nature writer — an “Annie Dillard of dill” — who sketches for readers a “Technicolor dreamscape of what is being ravaged and lost.” Read our review.
Biography
Baldwin: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs
In this tender new biography, Boggs goes far beyond other scholars in tracing how James Baldwin’s relationships affected his work. Charles Blow, who reviewed the book for us, called it “stunning,” writing that “the reader is immersed in the man of Baldwin, the chaos and the preternatural talent, the tragedy and the aching heart, the flesh that itches to be touched and the voice that will not be suppressed.” Read our review.
Romance
August Lane
by Regina Black
Our columnist, Olivia Waite, described this second-chance romance set in the country music world as “a sullen, smoldering ember that’s one breath away from blazing into an inferno,” adding, “This is not the aw-shucks kind of country: It’s the murder ballads, the rolling thunder, the long black road — and the best romance I’ve read all year.” Read our review.
paranormal Thriller
Departure 37
by Scott Carson
Part Cold War thriller, part “Twilight Zone” episode and part Stephen King-like yarn about regular people in extraordinary circumstances, this book opens as hundreds of American pilots begin receiving phone calls from their mothers (some of whom are dead). Read our review.
history
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
by Bench Ansfield
In the 1970s, tens of thousands of housing units in poor communities of color across the United States went up in flames. Ansfield shows that the vast majority of these fires, which were typically blamed on tenants, were in fact set by landlords; racist housing and insurance practices made it more profitable to burn buildings than to rent them. Read our review.
Biography
Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State
by Caleb Gayle
Gayle, a journalist and contributing writer to The Times Magazine, revisits the gripping yet long overlooked story of Edward McCabe — a businessman, politician and big-dream idealist who, in the wake of the Civil War and the disappointments of Reconstruction, tried to make his vision of an all-Black state in the newly opened territory of Oklahoma a reality. Read our review.
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