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.
Literary Fiction
Girl, 1983
by Linn Ullmann; translated by Martin Aitken
The Norwegian author’s new autofictional novel pieces together fragments of a troublimg trip she took to Paris when she was 16, at the request of a much older photographer. Our reviewer Nadja Spiegelman wrote that Ullmann “has created a reading experience as disorienting as one’s own ability to forget, capturing the way certain lapses of memory fuzz over into a white glare.” Read our review.
Romance
A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping
by Sangu Mandanna
Sera Swan was the most formidable magical prodigy in Britain until she drained her powers resurrecting her beloved, briefly dead great-aunt. Fifteen years later, she’s running a charmed inn with that same great-aunt when a handsome guest, a scholar of magic, tells her about a spell that might restore her power. Read our review.
Hard-boiled Crime novel
Florida Palms
by Joe Pan
Two aimless high school seniors go to work for a narcotics gang and end up in a far more sinister trade. Our reviewer, John Wray, noted that the pleasure of Pan’s novel lies less in plot detail and more in “the overall vibe of doom — a musky, Florida-specific stew of sweat, blood, swamp gas and amphetamine addiction.” Read our review.
Spy thriller
Pariah
by Dan Fesperman
In Fesperman’s latest novel, the C.I.A. turns to a celebrity — a disgraced, #MeToo’d comedian whose biggest fan is an Eastern European dictator — for a mission to that country (called Bolrovia, though it’s clearly a stand-in for Hungary). Christopher Bollen, who reviewed “Pariah” for us, wrote that Fesperman, “wielding a sharp eye for atmospheric detail and a finely tuned ear for comic relief, has proved to be one of the genre’s most exciting contemporary writers.” Read our review.
History
The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive
by Mathelinda Nabugodi
A scholar of British Romanticism, Nabugodi here doubles as a literary detective, probing the archives of the period’s most celebrated writers for traces of what she calls the “racial imaginary.” What she finds — in a prizewinning ode by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair and a teacup prized by William Wordsworth, among other artifacts — amounts to a hidden history, the largely unacknowledged effects on her subjects’ lives and imaginations of imperial Britain’s slave trade. Read our review.
Literary fiction
Pan
by Michael Clune
After suffering debilitating panic attacks, the teenage protagonist of Clune’s novel tries to identify the source of his anxiety, only to encounter increasingly complex and alarming mysteries instead of answers. He and his friends wonder whether his turmoil isn’t just psychiatric, and whether magic and myth might have something to do with it. Read our review.
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