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.
The Rose Field
by Philip Pullman
The beloved British fantasy author concludes his “Book of Dust” trilogy, set in the same world as the “His Dark Materials” series, with this book about the irrepressible Lyra Belacqua and her quest to find her daemon, Pan. The book is filled with what one of our reviewers once called “the familiar delights of Pullman’s work: its effortless clarity, its intelligence, its ineffable mix of coziness and darkness, innocence and experience.”
Memoir
When All the Men Wore Hats
by Susan Cheever
Susan Cheever is John Cheever’s daughter, and her new book — part memoir, part college seminar close-reading exercise and all wry, twinkling delight — recounts the stories behind her father’s celebrated short stories. “In a way, he was writing horror stories,” she writes. “Slowly, while the reader is lulled into submission … the darkness underneath it all begins to bubble up through the Persian rugs and sleeping retrievers, through the peony hedge and the orchard heavy with apples, and the rolled clay of the tennis courts.” Read our review.
reimagined western
Tom’s Crossing
by Mark Z. Danielewski
Set in small-town Utah in the 1980s, Danielewski’s eclectic 1,200-page adventure story follows two boys on their quest to save a pair of horses from the slaughterhouse. Our reviewer wrote that the novel “sifts gold from a slurry of genre conventions — Stetsons, palominos, Smith & Wesson rifles,” adding that Danielewski “has always reveled in bridging genre and high-gloss literature; here he blends police procedural, the horror of Stephen King and the postmodern density of David Foster Wallace.” Read our review.
Memoir
The Uncool
by Cameron Crowe
The rock journalist turned filmmaker really is uncool, he wants us to know: When he was on the road with musicians and bands, he eschewed drugs, alcohol and — seemingly — sex (though, as our critic Dwight Garner points out, “there’s something about his adoration in the presence of his rock heroes that makes it seem he’s losing his virginity every few pages”). If the book occasionally reads like a novelization of his hit movie “Almost Famous,” Garner says that’s just fine: “I’m not suggesting Crowe is making things up in this memoir. I’m merely suggesting that the stories he wrote for the movie may have been so reverberant that they began to subtly bleed into his own.” Read our review.
Essays
Dead and Alive
by Zadie Smith
This new nonfiction collection, filled with Smith’s crisp observations, is a smart, somber book informed by a sharp right turn in politics and a great deal of anxiety about how we look at and talk about art (and, by proxy, reality). Some of its best moments are found in her more personal writings: memories of not-quite-shed teenage selves or generous tributes to an older generation of writers — including Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel and Joan Didion, from whom Smith, as a young writer, once bummed a cigarette at a party, unaware of who she was. Read our review.
Romance
Cinder House
by Freya Marske
In this retelling of “Cinderella,” Ella is a ghost bound to the house where her stepmother murdered her. Slipping out one night, she befriends a fairy selling charms in the night market; soon she’s pining for a boy she sees watching the ballet. The reader anticipates the fairy-tale beats as though watching the early scenes of a horror film: A ball is announced; the prince will choose a bride. When the happy ending comes — as it must, at great cost — it’s dark and appropriately haunting. Read our review.
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