Every week, the critics and editors at the 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
Family of Spies
by Christine Kuehn
Kuehn lived most of her life not knowing her family’s shocking secret: During World War II, her German Jewish aunt and grandparents worked as spies for the Nazis and the Japanese — and their activities led directly to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Kuehn weaves together the past and present in this propulsive story of lies, survival and reckonings. Read our review.
biography
Troublemaker
by Carla Kaplan
One of the six famous Mitford sisters, Jessica — known as Decca, a childhood nickname — was a left-wing activist first and muckraking journalist second, best known for “The American Way of Death,” her scathing 1963 exposé of the funeral industry. “Troublemaker” is a doggedly researched and resolutely modern new biography that refuses to reduce this most beautifully messy and complicated of Mitfords to bon mots. Read our review.
economic history
Capitalism
by Sven Beckert
In this bold new book, Beckert traces the origins of our modern economy, from global port cities to the halls of power. Previous histories have usually treated capitalism as a European invention, but Beckert, as ambitious as he is erudite, shows how capitalism arose as a global phenomenon, the peculiar behavior of a few merchants in places as far apart as Cairo and Changzhou. Read our review.
History
The Dream Factory
by Daniel Swift
James Burbage’s London playhouse, “the Theater” — built in 1576 — is the subject of Swift’s book, the first comprehensive popular account of the place that effectively established the idea of commercial drama. Less about Shakespeare than it is about Burbage — as well as the men who constructed, financed, operated and performed at the Theater — “The Dream Factory” turns accounts of landlords arguing about mortgages and carpenters assembling wooden columns into riveting reading. Read our review.
Thriller
Best Offer Wins
by Marisa Kashino
Home-buying as guerrilla warfare: That’s the premise of this darkly comic debut. Margo and husband, Ian, have already lost out on 11 houses, thanks to the privileged hordes willing to waive inspections and pay all cash, and Margo — determined not to lose another — has become unhinged in her feral attempt to score a renovated 1940s colonial before it hits the market. (Just picture Amy Dunne of “Gone Girl” as a client on “House Hunters.”) Read our review.
Pop Culture
Blank Space
by W. David Marx
The century is one-quarter over, so naturally we’re due for a look back. In this polemical history, Marx, a critic with deep pop culture bona fides, sifts through the onslaught of content both online and off, from the lineup at Lollapalooza to “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” NFTs, TikTok and A.I. slop, decrying a culture that is overwhelming but artistically banal. “Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention,” he declares, “there is now a blank space.” Read our critic’s notebook.
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