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
33 Place Brugmann
by Alice Austen
In this elegant, absorbing tale, half a dozen longtime residents of an apartment building in World War II-era Brussels share their perspectives, including Charlotte Sauvin, an aspiring artist secretly married to a Jewish man. Unlike some of her neighbors — the Jewish family who escape to England, the Russian seamstress who follows her lover to France — Charlotte remains in Brussels: “Just as you got used to one thing, there was another. It was always happening to someone else, until it wasn’t, and by then it was too late.”
Biography
Clint: The Man and the Movies
by Shawn Levy
A new biography looks at the decades-long career of an American original who captured the country’s complex moral universe. A.O. Scott, who reviewed it for us, called it “an intelligent and energetic chronicle that encompasses high-flown critique, lowdown tabloid gossip and savvy show-business reportage.”
Thriller
Hotel Ukraine
by Martin Cruz Smith
The great Moscow detective Arkady Renko, first introduced in Smith’s 1981 classic “Gorky Park,” bids readers adieu in this melancholy novel. As Smith writes movingly in the acknowledgments, Parkinson’s disease, which he has had for decades and which Arkady also grapples with, “takes no prisoners, and now I have finished my last book. There is only one Arkady, and I will miss him.” So will we. But “Hotel Ukraine,” set in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, is a fitting send-off.
Spies! Cold War! Books!
The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature
by Charlie English
This rollicking account of the C.I.A.’s mission to smuggle contraband books and magazines into the Eastern bloc focuses on how the operation unfolded in Poland in the 1980s. As our reviewer Joseph Finder wrote, “English’s book is a bracing reminder that, not so long ago, forbidden literature really could help tip the balance of history.”
romance
Time Loops and Meet Cutes
by Jackie Lau
After eating a magical dumpling at a Toronto night market, Noelle finds herself living the same June day over and over — the Wordle answer never changes, her bank account never empties — and running into the same attractive brew pub owner. But the more times she introduces herself to Cam, the harder it gets that he can’t remember her. As June becomes July becomes August, Cam can’t shake the feeling that he’s forgotten something important, creating a breathless, elegant tension.
Business
Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
by Megan Greenwell
Greenwell was the editor of the online sports magazine Deadspin when it was sold to a private equity firm that proceeded to run it into the ground. The experience led her not only to quit her job but to investigate the dubious logic and considerable human costs of an industry that puts shareholder profits above all else — even at the expense of the companies it acquires and the workers it manages.
Historical Fiction
The Rarest Fruit
by Gaëlle Bélem
The island of Réunion, a French territory off the east coast of Africa, is known for its vanilla. Less well known is this extraordinary story of Edmond Albius, an enslaved boy who, in 1841, figured out how to hand-pollinate vanilla orchids, allowing the wider world to experience the flavor.
Adventure
The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda
by Nathalia Holt
In 1928-29, Theodore Roosevelt’s two eldest sons went on a swashbuckling global mission to prove the existence of the then-mythical panda bear. Our reviewer, Joshua Hammer, called Holt’s chronicle an “immersive, sometimes harrowing account of the siblings’ Himalayan adventure.”
Mystery
History Lessons
by Zoe B. Wallbrook
Daphne Ouverture, a junior professor specializing in French colonialism, prefers “spending her time with the dead over the living” until she’s drawn into the murder investigation of a colleague. As our columnist Sarah Weinman wrote, “I’ve longed for an academia mystery that hearkens back to classic authors like Helen Eustis and Amanda Cross, and Wallbrook delivers. ‘History Lessons’ brilliantly mixes pointed satire, fabulous characters and a thoughtful meditation on whose fortunes get to rise, and whose are ground down on the altar of power.”
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