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
Buckeye
by Patrick Ryan
The old-fashioned sweep of Ryan’s doorstop novel, about two complicated families in small-town Ohio that intersect across the mid-20th century, feels intrinsically American in the way of a Thornton Wilder play or an Andrew Wyeth painting. Jess Walter, who reviewed it for us, called it “omniscient, sweeping, almost defiantly sentimental”; “the book, he added, “is a reminder of the deep pleasure of following a cast of characters over their entire lives, through births, deaths, marriages, tragedies and, in this case, hard-won reconciliations.” Read our review.
Memoir
The Season
by Helen Garner
When her grandson makes it onto his local under-16 Australian rules football team, Garner — widely considered one of Australia’s greatest living writers — finds herself drawn into his obsession with “footy,” as the game is known. This ode to the antipodean sport is also the personal story of a boy navigating the modern world and intergenerational relationships. Read our review.
WEIRD FICTION
Trip
by Amie Barrodale
Barrodale’s transcendent and dazzlingly weird first novel is about a mother and son adrift — in the afterlife and in the South Atlantic, respectively. (She dies in Nepal at a conference about death; he’s 15 and autistic, and stranded on a sailboat as a hurricane bears down.) Their relationship forms the emotional core of the book, a steadying source of clarity amid the wilder details. The story’s inscrutable moments eventually “take on a sort of beauty,” Chelsea Leu writes in her review, and “the novel’s strangeness comes to seem entirely intentional, and brilliant.” Read our review.
MEMOIR
Mother Mary Comes to Me
by Arundhati Roy
To the long, sonorous roll call of difficult mothers in literature, add Mary Roy — Mrs. Roy to you, and, most tellingly, to her own daughter. That daughter is Arundhati Roy, who won a Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, “The God of Small Things,” and who uses this polished new memoir to recall the imperious and volatile woman who raised her, instilling by example a fierce love of education and social justice even as she hurled insults and, occasionally, crockery. Read our review.
History
The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America
by Mark Whitaker
Six decades after his death, Malcolm’s influence remains inexhaustible and promiscuous. The words he weaponized against racist mythologies and liberal pieties alike have forever changed how we talk about race, religion and America’s role in the world. In “The Afterlife of Malcolm X,” Whitaker, a former Newsweek editor in chief, endeavors to give Malcolm’s profound impact an account worthy of its sprawl and significance. Read our review.
Animal Science
The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters
by Christine Webb
Webb, a primatologist, belongs to a growing subfield of ecologists, naturalists and evolutionary biologists who posit that animals have minds and all that goes with them, including feelings, intentions, agency and consciousness. Her book argues against the pervasive belief in human exceptionalism — specifically, the belief that humans are exceptionally intelligent — and shows how data supporting the supposed chasm between human and animal intelligence has been systematically rigged in our favor. Read our review.
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