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
Love, Sex, and Frankenstein
by Caroline Lea
Do we need yet another account of the creation of Mary Shelley’s monster masterpiece? Yes: Lea gives us an eminently credible, eminently anguished 18-year-old Mary, two years into her scandalous elopement with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, “shifting the temperature of her moods in response to his” and realizing that she and her infant son are totally dependent on a feckless man who inspires both devotion and fury. Read our review.
Poetry
The Poems of Seamus Heaney
Heaney won the Nobel Prize in 1995 and died in 2013; this vast collection gathers all of his work into one volume for the first time and amplifies a reader’s understanding of his towering accomplishment by putting the meticulous grandeur of each book into the context of uncollected and unpublished poems, many of them excellent and all of them illuminating. Read our review.
Spy thriller
The Predicament
by William Boyd
This is the second book in Boyd’s delicious historical espionage series featuring Gabriel Dax, an English travel writer pulled into reluctant spydom in the early 1960s. Its predecessor, “Gabriel’s Moon,” put Dax in the center of the events surrounding the assassination of the Congolese president Patrice Lumumba in 1961; this book sends him to Berlin in 1962, where President John F. Kennedy is preparing to give his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Read our review.
history
Mexico
by Paul Gillingham
This lively, engaging history of Mexico, which begins with the Spanish conquest, shows that the country has thrived for centuries because of its diversity, not in spite of it. The novelist Álvaro Enrigue, who reviewed it for us, noted that although the book “does sustain the very rude tradition of marking the beginning of the land’s history with the arrival of Europeans,” it’s because Gillingham “thinks that what was truly distinctive about New Spain — and the Mexican republic that followed it — is the fact that this was the first place on earth in which so many radically different communities had to find a way to share common values, feelings and traditions.” Read our review.
Historical fiction
The Girl in the Green Dress
by Mariah Fredericks
In 1950, the former New Yorker writer Morris Markey was found dead, shot through the head. A year earlier, he had written an article about Joseph Elwell, a fixture of New York society who’d died under similar circumstances in 1920. From these two still unsolved cases, Fredericks has constructed a lively return to Jazz Age Manhattan, featuring a guest appearance by 20-year-old Zelda Fitzgerald. Read our review.
Biography
Crick
by Matthew Cobb
This biography of Francis Crick paints a detailed and nuanced portrait of the complicated, brilliant, insecure, jealous and often quite difficult biologist. Our reviewer, Janice P. Nimura, wrote that Cobb succeeds at the “tricky middle path: a life vivid enough to engage readers who haven’t thought about the double helix since high school, and detailed enough to satisfy the scientists.” Read our review.
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