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
Paper Girl
by Beth Macy
In books like “Factory Man” and “Dopesick,” Macy chronicled how global offshoring and the opioid epidemic have hollowed out rural life. Here, in a moving combination of memoir and reportage, she explores the country’s political divide by returning to the place she grew up — Urbana, Ohio — and documenting its descent from once-flourishing town into entrenched poverty and acrimony. Read our review.
coming-of-age novel
What a Time to Be Alive
by Jenny Mustard
A Swedish university student tries to figure out who she is in this measured, gorgeous novel from Mustard, who, our reviewer Katie Yee wrote, “is in command of the senses in a way that makes the reader feel alive alongside the characters: the shock of cold water when you first dip in for a swim, the deliciously indulgent feeling of biting right to the core of a cinnamon bun.” Read our review.
thriller
The Good Liar
by Denise Mina
The murders of a rich aristocrat and his fiancée have been solved — or have they? Mina, an award-winning Scottish mystery writer, threads questions of class, privilege and establishment conspiracy into a riveting tale that travels down many unexpected paths. Read our review.
Politics
The Conservative Frontier
by Jeff Roche
How did desolate, arid West Texas produce a political ethos that would come to dominate Texas, and, in time, the entire Republican Party? “As Roche tells it,” our reviewer Paul Begala wrote, “the remorseless plains of West Texas contain the headwaters of a mighty current that runs from the John Birch Society to Barry Goldwater and up through Ronald Reagan to the country beyond.” Read our review.
historical fiction
Ginster
by Siegfried Kracauer
First published in 1928 and now translated into English for the first time, this is the German antiwar novel you may not have heard of: a wry, darkly humorous counterpart to Erich Maria Remarque’s sobering mainstay “All Quiet on the Western Front.” The titular German conscript may remain far from the battlefields, but the book is no less pointed in its take on wartime hypocrisies and misuses of power. Read our review.
history
38 Londres Street
by Philippe Sands
This marvelous, absorbing book considers the case of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who eluded efforts to bring him to account for state-sponsored terror. Sands is a consummate storyteller, weaving together narrative threads while teasing out heavy themes through his research and the many people who open up to him. Read our review.
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