Every week, the 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.
thriller
A Violent Masterpiece
by Jordan Harper
In the grimy underbelly of Los Angeles, three unlikely people — a livestreaming influencer, a concierge to the fantastically rich and a lawyer who’s just been drafted to defend a pedophile producer — join forces to investigate the L.A. Ripper, a serial killer terrorizing the city. “‘A Violent Masterpiece’ reads like pure rage cooled into crystalline prose, each sentence a thrilling indictment of the corruption we live in,” our columnist Sarah Weinman wrote. “This is the noir novel for our times.” Read our review.
history
This Vast Enterprise
by Craig Fehrman
In 1804, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began their famous journey into the western reaches of North America, they did not set off alone. Through the perspectives of people who traveled with them, including the Shoshone teenager Sacagawea and an enslaved man named York, this surprising history reframes a well-known story, revealing it as a profoundly human adventure. Read our review.
memoir
When We See You Again
by Rachel Goldberg-Polin
Goldberg-Polin’s precise and devastating book chronicles the 328 days her son, Hersh, was held hostage in Gaza — and the days after that, as the family coped with Hersh’s execution. “Memoirs of mourning and faith are often described as ‘raw,’” our critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote. “This one is refined, precise and finely carved. … It is a paean to pain; a difficult gift.” Read our review.
literary fiction
The Palm House
by Gwendoline Riley
Pull up a seat at the pub and pour one out for Sequence, the culture magazine for London’s smart set. In Riley’s gentle elegy, Edmund Putnam’s decision to leave the staff sets off a flurry of gossip, nostalgia and regret among the not young but still restless — especially his longtime friend Laura, who narrates the story. Fans of Riley’s last two novels, “My Phantoms” and “First Love,” are likely to drink deeply. Read our review.
Political science
How to Be a Dissident
by Gal Beckerman
Beckerman, a former Book Review editor who is now a staff writer at The Atlantic, offers a compelling, clear look at famous renegades whose lives offer lessons for the rabble-rousers of today. Though it’s written as a guide, “the book can also be understood as one man’s reckoning with the existential questions posed by the rising tide of authoritarianism,” our reviewer Astra Taylor wrote. Read our review.
Gothic Fantasy
Weavingshaw
by Heba Al-Wasity
Al-Wasity’s haunting and romantic novel follows Leena Al-Sayer, a young refugee woman who can see ghosts, and St. Silas, a mysterious and supernatural Mafioso, as they embark on a quest that takes them through the urban underworld and eventually to the crumbling Weavingshaw estate, grappling with evils both supernatural (demons, possession) and horrifyingly real (displacement, the prison-industrial complex) along the way. Read our review.
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