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, fantasies, 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.
coming-of-age novel
Hollywood, Ending
by John Green
Green, the best-selling Y.A. author, makes his adult fiction debut with a vividly imagined story of modern fame. His characters, actors in their early 20s, navigate a thorny Hollywood landscape filled with film-industry veterans: exacting directors, weary publicists, cunning agents and cynical journalists. Read our review.
Memoir
No Land to Stand On
by Mahmoud Khalil
As a Palestinian born and raised in a refugee camp in Syria, Mahmoud Khalil — the activist and former Columbia graduate student detained by ICE — grew up with a dark understanding of unchecked state power. “In Assad’s Syria, there was no such thing as legal rights,” he says in his quietly shattering memoir about his ordeal in ICE detention. “No warrant, no lawyer, no phone call. You disappeared, and if you were lucky, someone might find out where they had taken you.” In this country, or so he believed, the rules were different. Read our review.
Literary fiction
Said the Dead
by Doireann Ni Ghriofa
A lyric fusion of biography, ghost story, memoir and poetry, this melancholy novel conjures fuller lives for women found in the real-life casebooks of a defunct asylum in Cork, Ireland, along the River Lee. The chorus of these patient voices coalesces around the extraordinary doctor who cared for them: Dr. Lucia Strangman, the first female psychiatrist in Ireland’s mental health system. Read our review.
Memoir
Swan Song
by Charles Spencer
Nearly 30 years ago, Spencer delivered a famously blistering eulogy at the funeral of his sister, the Princess of Wales. His anger has not cooled: While “Swan Song” is most compelling as a postcard from the siblings’ upper-class British childhood, it’s also a lacerating indictment of the country’s tabloid press and the Windsor family, especially Prince Charles. Read our review.
Poetry
Otherwhere
by Carolyn Forché
For 50 years Forché has been a leading poet of witness to political turmoil and social injustice; her work, generously sampled here alongside a gathering of new poems, is almost reportorial, with datelines from Paris to Poland to El Salvador. These poems can be plangent, permissive, questing or quizzical, but they consistently offer fresh language for witness and grief, inviting us to orient ourselves from the inside of a situation with greater empathy. Read our review.
history
The Age of Cures
by Barry Werth
Werth tells the story of how, in 20th-century America, patent medicines and research science converged to create a model for drug discovery and development that has saved hundreds of millions of lives, made pharmaceutical companies trillions of dollars and helped secure America’s place as the world’s foremost superpower. Read our review.
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