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.
Political BIOGRAPHY
The Improbable Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and the First Woman to Run for President
by Eden Collinsworth
Born dirt poor, Victoria Woodhull rose to heights of wealth and fame in the Gilded Age, reinventing herself along the way from a spiritual adviser and clairvoyant to a stockbroker and politician who became the first woman to found a Wall Street brokerage and the first woman to run for president. This lush and playful biography, which traces the extraordinary trajectory of what Collinsworth delicately calls a “controversial life,” suggests that Woodhull was especially adept at oscillating between truth and lies. Read our review.
THRILLER
Not Quite Dead Yet
by Holly Jackson
Can a dying woman solve her own (imminent) murder? When she receives the unpleasant news that an attack by an unknown assailant has caused her to have a brain aneurysm that will kill her within a week, Jet Mason decides to use this abbreviated time to hunt down the culprit. Is this scenario medically or logistically plausible? Who knows? But despite its bonkers premise, Jackson’s thriller is surprisingly suspenseful and compelling, as Jet uses go-for-broke ingenuity to untangle not just the present-day crime, but also old secrets bubbling up at home and in her small Vermont community. Read our review.
LITERARY BIOGRAPHY
Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
by Leo Damrosch
Damrosch’s thoughtful, informative biography of Robert Louis Stevenson introduces the 19th-century Scottish writer of “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped” with tributes to his sterling personality and to the pleasures of his fiction. An imperialist turned anti-imperialist who cherished other cultures and traveled widely for health reasons (frequently ill, he died at 44), Stevenson is rarely read or taught today, and is remembered mainly as the author of the brief, atypical story “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” But Damrosch makes a convincing case for him as a skilled stylist and innovative narrator. Read our review.
British History
The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642
by Jonathan Healey
Historians have long debated the underlying character of the civil war that tore England apart in the 1640s: Was it a broad-based struggle for popular sovereignty or a power struggle among elites? The last of the Reformation wars of religion or the first modern secular revolution? A reaction against Stuart absolutism or the expression of deeper social and economic forces? In this capacious and chatty chronicle of the buildup to battle, Healey, an Oxford historian, answers: Yes, all of the above. Along the way he peoples these debates with a vast and vividly drawn cast of characters, and wisely escapes the deadening simplifications of hindsight. Read our review.
Memoir
I Am Not Your Enemy
by Reality Winner
In 2017, Winner — an Air Force veteran who worked at a National Security Agency contractor — was prosecuted for leaking a five-page document about Russian hacking to an online news organization, and was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. The outlines of her story have been widely reported, but this personable and wide-ranging memoir affords Winner the chance to define herself on her own terms. The result is not a political screed, but rather a Pilgrim’s Progress through the contemporary United States. A century from now, readers looking to get acquainted with the America of our era could do worse than observe it through Winner, who roves with expressive irreverence through the prefab homes of her childhood, the halls of secret power and the cramped spaces of slummy prison cells. Read our review.
The post 5 Books We Loved This Week appeared first on New York Times.
