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.
Historical fiction
Fonseca
by Jessica Francis Kane
In 1952, the yet-to-be novelist Penelope Fitzgerald visited a deeply eccentric expat household in Mexico with her 6-year-old son. Now Kane has fictionalized that trip with an understated wit and bittersweet wisdom reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s own work. Read our review.
Memoir
The Broken King
by Michael Thomas
In his bracing new memoir, Thomas considers the lives of several men in his family as well as his own battles with trauma, anger and mental illness. He covers a broad range of Black experience in America, from the successes and failures of his father, an artist-philosopher and absentee parent, to the criminal history of his brother and the relatively privileged upbringings of his two sons. Thomas Chatterton Williams, who reviewed it for us, wrote that “with a virtuosic command of language and an eagle eye for punishing detail, Thomas has rendered beautifully an excruciating existence from which it is impossible to turn away.” Read our review.
CULTURAL history
The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America
by David Baron
Baron chronicles the lasting influence of the Mars mania that gripped America in the early 1900s, capturing the imaginations of Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell, generating speculative news headlines, fueling astronomical ambitions and leaving an indelible imprint on our culture. “It’s yet another angle on the Gilded Age, refracted through telescopes from grand hilltop observatories,” our critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote. Read our review.
Literary Fiction
Vulture
by Phoebe Greenwood
Greenwood, a former war correspondent, skewers the news industry in this novel set in Gaza during a brief but intense 2012 conflict. The narrator is a young reporter determined to land a major story — even if it means ignoring ethical boundaries and safety precautions. She cuts a deal with the relative of a powerful resistance fighter for access, but the toll proves to be far higher than she expected. Read our review.
Speculative Fiction
Katabasis
by R.F. Kuang
Two rival graduate students form an unsteady alliance to track down their esteemed Magick professor Jacob Grimes, who happens to be in hell. “Only a writer as thoughtful and skilled as Kuang could make a literal journey through hell so fun and so poignant,” our reviewer, Kiersten White, wrote. “Count me among the countless others hoping for dozens more weird, dense, unapologetic novels from her.” Read our review.
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