This year we began adding a new feature to our articles — including our monthly previews and weekly editors’ choice columns — enabling people to save the books they’ve read and the ones they want to read. Thousands of you have made good use of it by adding titles to your personal reading lists. Here are the books published this year that New York Times readers say they’re most eager to dive into.
You can save the books you’re most excited about on a personal reading list, and find even more recommendations from our book experts.
Fiction
1. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
by Kiran Desai
Nearly two decades after her Booker Prize-winning novel, “The Inheritance of Loss,” Desai returns with an epic family saga about Sunny, a young New York journalist, and Sonia, an aspiring novelist in Vermont. Read our review.
2. Heartwood
by Amity Gaige
When an experienced hiker named Valerie goes missing on the Appalachian Trail, two other women — a veteran game warden and a lonely but lively former scientist stuck in a retirement community — must crack the case. Read our review.
3. What We Can Know
by Ian McEwan
In 2119, after a nuclear accident and climate change have reshaped society, a humanities professor becomes obsessed with a literary mystery: a famous poem, recited at a dinner party in 2014, that has been lost. Read our review.
4. Flesh
by David Szalay
Szalay’s Booker Prize-winning novel follows a lonely young man, Istvan, who grows up in a Hungarian housing project and gets swept along on a journey, peppered with sex and violence, to the upper echelons of British society. Read our review.
5. Stone Yard Devotional
by Charlotte Wood
Wood’s somber, exquisite novel centers on a 60-something atheist wildlife conservationist who leaves her husband and career to live in a convent near her rural Australian hometown. Read our review.
6. Angel Down
by Daniel Kraus
In France, during World War I, five American soldiers are sent on a mission into No Man’s Land to investigate the source of a mysterious shriek — but rather than finding a wounded comrade, they discover a literal fallen angel. Read our review.
7. The Director
by Daniel Kehlmann; translated by Ross Benjamin
Movie stars and Nazis are irresistible ingredients in any story, and Kehlmann’s smartly entertaining new novel about the great Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst offers both, detailing their once intimate, often symbiotic ties. Read our review.
8. The Sisters
by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
This gripping novel revolves around a trio of magnetic Swedish women — the Mikkola sisters, daughters of an eccentric Tunisian mother — and their childhood acquaintance Jonas, who bears a striking resemblance to the book’s author. Read our review.
9. Isola
by Allegra Goodman
Goodman’s novel traces the fate of a real-life 16th-century French noblewoman, Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, who was marooned on a desolate Canadian island by her unscrupulous guardian after falling in love with his aide. Read our review.
10. Buckeye
by Patrick Ryan
Ryan’s sweeping novel follows two complicated families in small-town Ohio whose lives intersect across the mid-20th century. Read our review.
11. These Summer Storms
by Sarah MacLean
The estranged daughter of an eccentric billionaire returns home after his death and gets pulled into a series of challenges stipulated in her father’s will — and administered by his attractive, enigmatic aide — in this propulsive, swoony family drama. Read our review.
12. Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
by Katie Yee
Yee’s delightful and quirky novel takes place during a series of pauses — between divorce and marriage, sickness and health, the unknown and the status quo. Read our review.
Nonfiction
1. A Marriage at Sea
by Sophie Elmhirst
Elmhirst’s tale of a young British couple in the 1970s who survived on a raft for 117 days after a whale capsized their sailboat is as much a meditation on intimacy as a remarkable adventure tale. Read our review.
2. There Is No Place for Us
by Brian Goldstone
Written by a journalist who also has a Ph.D. in anthropology, this powerful book details the plight of “the working homeless” in the rapidly gentrifying city of Atlanta, where someone with a full-time job can still get priced out of a place to live. Read our review.
3. The Fate of the Day
by Rick Atkinson
This book — the second in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Atkinson’s planned trilogy about the American Revolution — offers an exceptional, compulsively readable chronicle of the middle years of that multifront war. Read our review.
4. Mother Mary Comes to Me
by Arundhati Roy
The “God of Small Things” author channels warmth, moral clarity and a sweeping bird’s-eye view of modern India to tell the story of her life — and of how much she was shaped by her singular, strong-willed mother. Read our review.
5. Wild Thing
by Sue Prideaux
In this elegant biography, Prideaux draws on recently discovered source material to deliver an enthralling, myth-busting account of the artist Paul Gauguin, whose life was as inventive as his art. Read our review.
6. Careless People
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
For seven years, beginning in 2011, Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders who grew increasingly feckless, even as Facebook cozied up to authoritarian regimes. Read our review.
7. Mother Emanuel
by Kevin Sack
Written by a former New York Times reporter, this masterpiece of narrative nonfiction tells the story of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., “the most historic Black church in the South’s most historic city,” now best known as the site of an egregious act of barbarism: the killing of nine congregants in 2015 by a white supremacist. Read our review.
8. 1929
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
This novelistic portrait of history’s most spectacular financial collapse by Sorkin, a Times reporter, highlights the often tragic miscalculations of the bankers and politicians who perpetuated it. Read our review.
9. Awake
by Jen Hatmaker
A former queen bee in the world of online evangelicals chronicles the implosion of her 26-year marriage and her climb out from under that disaster. Read our review.
10. Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
by Barbara Demick
In this remarkable feat of reporting, Demick traces the divergent paths of twin girls born in China under the one-child rule. One grew up in China, while the other was kidnapped by a “family planning” agency and adopted by Americans who were unaware of her origins. Read our review.
11. The Arrogant Ape
by Christine Webb
Webb, a primatologist, explores the intelligence and sensitivity found throughout the animal world in this passionate argument against human exceptionalism. Read our review.
12. Raising Hare
by Chloe Dalton
During the Covid pandemic, Dalton stumbled across an abandoned brown leveret, or baby hare, in the English countryside near her home and decided to raise it despite knowing nothing about hares; her sweetly meditative memoir describes how this furry new housemate changed her outlook on life. Read our review.
The post The Books Times Readers Were Most Excited About This Year appeared first on New York Times.
