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.
Speculative fiction
What We Can Know
by Ian McEwan
In 2119, when a nuclear accident and climate change have reshaped society, a humanities professor becomes obsessed with a literary mystery: a famous poem — recited at a dinner party in 2014 — that has been lost. In a tale spanning multiple narrators and a full century, the professor chases down the poem’s origin, the dark secret that cast it into obscurity and the slippery nature of knowledge itself. “It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote, “a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.” Read our review.
Memoir
Awake
by Jen Hatmaker
Hatmaker was a queen bee in the world of online evangelicals — a writer, podcaster and pastor’s wife happily raising five children and tending to a thriving media career. Then she turned over in bed one night in July 2020 after hearing her husband voice-texting “I can’t quit you” to another woman, and watched her world fall apart. This memoir traces her climb out from under that disaster. Read our review.
Romance
The Austen Affair
by Madeline Bell
A bubbly teen soap actress and a serious British method actor, playing the leads in a new “Northanger Abbey” adaptation, suddenly find themselves 200 years in the past. Comic shenanigans abound as the couple scramble to fit in, but unless they can find their way back to the modern world, they’ll be trapped together forever. Read our review.
Workplace Fiction
Discontent
by Beatriz Serrano; translated by Mara Faye Lethem
A young creative at a Madrid ad agency does her best to do the least in this wry, incisive, darkly comic debut. “It’s a new view into the psyche of the disillusioned work force, or perhaps it’s just the same view with better benefits,” our reviewer Hilary Leichter wrote. “What does it look like when the intern class becomes the boss?” Read our review.
part memoir, part true crime
The Tragedy of True Crime
by John J. Lennon
Incarcerated at Sing Sing, where he is serving 28 years to life for murder, drug sales and gun possession, Lennon has built a distinguished career as a jailhouse journalist. In his first book, he unfolds his story while recounting those of four fellow inmates and highlighting the myriad frustrations, dangers and absurdities of prison life. Lennon “is not asking us to render final moral verdicts on these men, but rather to sit with their complexity and contradictions,” our reviewer, Pamela Colloff, wrote. Read our review.
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