Dream Count
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
It’s been years since Adichie, the author of “Americanah,” released a work of fiction; now she returns with the stories of four women navigating life during the pandemic. Centered on Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer based in the United States, the story also swivels to her cousin, her best friend and her housekeeper, as each woman grapples with familial and romantic love.
Raising Hare
By Chloe Dalton
During the height of the Covid lockdowns, a workaholic British writer and political adviser rescues a newborn hare — and soon adapts her frenetic existence to the daily rhythms and environmental awareness introduced by her furry new housemate. “I’d been waiting for life to go back to normal,” Dalton writes, “but if I could derive this much pleasure from something so simple, what else might be waiting to be discovered?”
The Unworthy
By Agustina Bazterrica; translated by Sarah Moses
The Argentine writer’s slim, suspenseful third novel is a dystopian eco-horror story set in a religious order called the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, which promises a sadistic kind of salvation from the global drought and hunger beyond its walls. When a wanderer arrives at the Sisterhood’s walls seeking refuge, the narrator and the convent’s leaders must contend with a compassion they’ve long been missing.
The Trouble of Color
By Martha S. Jones
In a deeply personal work of social history, Jones, an award-winning writer and scholar, looks back at more than 100 years of her own family’s experience to examine how America’s “jagged color line” has shaped their destinies and sense of identity. From enslavement to “passing” to anti-miscegenation laws, no one in the six generations Jones chronicles has been untouched by the question of color.
The Antidote
By Karen Russell
In April 1935, an otherwise sunny Sunday afternoon in America’s Dust Bowl turned black in a powerful storm that gave the region its name. The “Swamplandia!” author’s latest, historical novel imagines the event’s effects on five distinct characters — including a farmer and his niece, a photographer and a mystical “prairie witch” — in the fictional Uz, Neb.
Stag Dance
By Torrey Peters
In her new collection, which gathers three stories and a long novella, Peters introduces a series of explosive scenarios — a hormone-destroying pandemic, an unexpected boarding school romance, a gender-bending party of lumberjacks, a taboo fling at a trans women’s community weekend — that explore the complexities of queerness and trans life.
Care and Feeding
By Laurie Woolever
Woolever’s memoir of life in the food world’s fast lane is populated with boldfaced names; she worked closely with both Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. But ultimately, this is her story — one of being a woman in a changing industry, as problematic as it is exciting.
We Tell Ourselves Stories
By Alissa Wilkinson
Joan Didion grew up in the California of Hollywood’s Golden Age and with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, worked in the film industry writing screenplays. In this fresh take on the iconic writer, Wilkinson, a New York Times film critic, argues that the movies — from Didion’s childhood obsession with John Wayne to her aesthetic of dread and estrangement and the cinematic shots that structured her work — profoundly shaped her outlook on the country and her signature style.
On Air
By Steve Oney
It is a truth universally acknowledged: Public radio has always needed support from listeners like you. In this brash, swear-y backroom history, a decade and a half in the making, Oney shows how a loose network of radio stations called NPR struggled to stay on the airwaves and became a singular force in American life.
Hypochondria
By Will Rees
Part philosophical treatise, part memoir, part history, Rees’s genre-bending meditation on hypochondria references everyone from Freud to Kafka to Seinfeld in a provocative search to find out why, exactly, we believe we’re sick.
Sunrise on the Reaping
By Suzanne Collins
Fans of apocalyptic fiction can rejoice: Collins is back with another installment of her best-selling “Hunger Games” series. This book focuses on the 50th running of the titular games — in which adolescent tributes must compete in a battle royale to the death — and its eventual champion, Haymitch Abernathy, whom readers of the original trilogy will know as Katniss Everdeen’s louche mentor.
Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One
By Kristen Arnett
What do a lesbian clown, an aquarium store, an older magician and an existential crisis have in common? They all feature in Arnett’s latest, a funny and heartfelt tale of one woman grappling with grief, love and how to move forward.
Red Scare
By Clay Risen
Conspiracy thinking run amok? Antifascist institutions turning against themselves? A cowed public terrified of its government? With more than a few winks at the present, Risen, a New York Times journalist, draws readers into the zealous panic that seized Capitol Hill in the 1940s and ’50s and explores the culture beyond McCarthyism that made it possible.
Theft
By Abdulrazak Gurnah
The Nobel laureate’s 11th novel follows three young people in post-revolutionary Tanzania: Karim, a gifted student and future government official who was all but abandoned by his mother as a child; his schoolteacher wife, Fauzia, whose adult life is overshadowed by her bouts of childhood illness; and Badar, a servant who becomes entangled in the couple’s lives as they get older.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
By Stephen Graham Jones
Jones’s latest horror novel opens with a discovery: A century-old diary is found in the walls of a parsonage. Inside is the story of Good Stab, a Blackfoot man who was turned into a vampire after a massacre of Indigenous people and, using his terrifying new powers, sought revenge for America’s sins.
Abundance
By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and the Atlantic writer Derek Thompson want you to hold space to dream about utopia. No need to tighten the belt, they argue: We have everything we need to build the future that liberals want, clean energy and affordable housing included, today! Their book explains how.
The Colony
By Annika Norlin; translated by Alice E. Olson
In the Swedish musician’s disturbing, engrossing first novel, an incongruous group of individuals — a rootless Hungarian man, an animal-rights activist, a woman who murdered her husband, an ant specialist and her unwanted child — form a tiny, virtually silent commune cut off from society. Taking place over many years, with interludes into the characters’ back stories, “The Colony” asks: Is this an Edenic laboratory of human cooperation, or something more like a cult?
Twist
By Colum McCann
McCann’s latest novel takes readers onto a cable repair ship, whose crew maintains the vast network of undersea tubes that carry the world’s data and power the internet. Among those on board are an Irish journalist hoping to revive his career and the crew’s chief, who must contend with a series of cable breaks off the western coast of Africa.
Elphie
By Gregory Maguire
Thanks to Maguire’s “Wicked” (and the musical it inspired), we know what college life was like for the green girl who became L. Frank Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West. This prequel — Maguire’s eighth foray into the land of Oz — immerses readers in Elphaba’s childhood as the elder daughter of a fanatical father and a self-involved mother, prone to jealousy but full of hope.
There Is No Place for Us
By Brian Goldstone
The phrase “working homeless” should be an oxymoron but, as this book shows, in America it describes a common reality. Goldstone, a journalist based in Atlanta, follows five local families through stints of couch-surfing, car-living and squalid extended-stay hotels, all while the adults struggle to hold down jobs — heartbreaking evidence that, as he writes, there isn’t a single city in the country where “a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.”
Yoko
By David Sheff
Sheff first interviewed John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1980, months before the former Beatle was murdered. He and Ono stayed connected; now he’s produced a capacious biography, foregrounding her work as an avant-garde artist and musician and attempting, once and for all, to banish the stereotyping that has shadowed her for decades.
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