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.
family epic
American Hagwon
by Min Jin Lee
The third novel in Lee’s planned quartet about the Korean diaspora (after “Free Food for Millionaires” and “Pachinko”) revolves around a hagwon, or cram school, in Southern California. Set between 1992 and 2007, against the backdrop of the Asian financial crisis and early social media, and skillfully eliding the narrative challenges of 9/11, the Great Recession and iPhones, “American Hagwon” has the wonderful muchness of a 19th-century novel. Read our review.
Medical INVESTIGATION
The Vanishing Family
by Robert Kolker
“The Vanishing Family” is Kolker’s gripping follow-up to the best-selling “Hidden Valley Road,” in which his subject was a family of 12 siblings, six of whom developed schizophrenia. Here, in calm, purposeful prose, he brings his signature brand of deep narrative reportage to the story of a large Pennsylvania clan in which the children each have a 50 percent chance of contracting a rare form of early-onset dementia. His explanations of complex neuroscience are lucid; his descriptions of the family’s experience deeply compassionate. What does it mean, he asks, to know your biological fate? Read our review.
historical fiction
The Barman of the Ritz
by Philippe Collin
This is a different sort of World War II novel, less about heroism or villainy than the myriad compromises of daily life under German occupation. Deftly translated from the French by Frank Wynne, it’s Collin’s attempt “to capture the conflicting emotions that may have preoccupied Frank Meier,” the famed real-life bartender who spent the war plying his trade at Paris’s premier luxury hotel, serving Pink Ladies to Hermann Göring and acting as a middleman in a clandestine art-for-fake-passport exchange. Read our review.
memoir
This Cursed Beautiful Land
by Evan Gershkovich
In 2023, Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal journalist and son of Soviet refugees, traveled to a steakhouse in the Ural Mountains to report on the Russian military and ended up in prison on espionage charges. His memoir, written after his release the following summer, details his time in prison, his loss of nostalgia for the place his parents once called home and the rise of authoritarianism under Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Read our review.
Literary fiction
The Radiance
by Ayad Akhtar
Akhtar’s third novel is at once a self-searching, metaphysical monologue and a page-turning drama about a playwright and novelist named Ayad Akhtar who has recently moved to the Hudson Valley from New York City. A pickup truck nearly kills him while he’s riding his bike, and when he comes out of a postoperative coma he is subtly, but utterly, changed. Even as he becomes enmeshed in the departmental dramas of the college where he teaches, the titular radiance drapes over his experience of the world an ambient, pleasurable veil of empathy and peace. Read our review.
biography
Darkness Becomes Bright
by Emily Ogden
Decades before authors like Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire and Walter Pater — the marquee names in the aestheticism and decadence movements of the late 19th century — fought for the right to be depraved, the father of the American Gothic, Edgar Allan Poe, was not just embodying their ideal of “art for art’s sake,” he was taking it to its grisliest extremes. Read our review.
literary fiction
The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman
by Deesha Philyaw
The wife of a megachurch pastor in Georgia prides herself on combining a life of Scripture with one of over-the-top wealth, designer clothes and her own highly profitable personal brand. An invitation to compete in a pageant for pastors’ wives opens up a can of worms from her working-class, fatherless past, jeopardizing her already precarious place in the social hierarchy. Read our review.
historical fiction
May We Feed the King
by Rebecca Perry
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this novel follows an unnamed curator who specializes in historical re-enactments. Working in a 750-year-old British palace, she finds herself drawn to one medieval king in particular — and then, almost as if a portal opens, we find ourselves back in time with him. As the king refuses to behave like one — i.e., to hassle, tax or slaughter anybody — Perry deftly evokes the court’s descent into confusion and paranoia. What happens if a king is a man of no appetites or desires? “How will he master a horse, and swipe men down in battle, if he cannot tear meat from a bone?” Read our review.
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