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
The Ha-Ha
by Jennifer Dawson
Originally published in 1961, this unjustly overlooked first novel features a young Englishwoman, modeled on the author, who suffers a breakdown while studying at Oxford and is sent to a mental hospital where she is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Dawson’s compassionate, wryly comic take on her protagonist’s ordeal earned her a prestigious prize and readers including Sylvia Plath, shortly before her death. Read our review.
Marriage drama
Some Bright Nowhere
by Ann Packer
The author of “The Dive from Clausen’s Pier” and “The Children’s Crusade,” Packer is known for her quiet, emotionally intelligent explorations of domestic tension. In her latest novel, Eliot and Claire’s long and happy marriage is upended when Claire, who is terminally ill, decides that she wants a different kind of death — one that doesn’t necessarily involve her devoted husband of nearly four decades. Read our review.
History
The American Revolution
by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns
Ward and Burns, the dynamic duo behind popular historical documentaries on the Civil War and the Vietnam War, are here with an illustrated companion to their new series on the American battle for independence from the British. The book is sprawling in every sense, conveying the full continental grandeur of North America. We see the familiar battlegrounds — Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Yorktown — but the story also ranges into the deep interior, and toward Canada and the Caribbean. Read our review.
literary fiction
The Land in Winter
by Andrew Miller
A finalist for this year’s Booker Prize, this beautifully detailed novel, set in Britain during the harsh chill of 1962-1963, observes the lives of two couples who are stranded between the hidebound postwar conventions of their youth and the new permissive age that awaits just around the corner. Read our review.
Mystery
Lit
by Tim Sandlin
Kasey Cobb, divorced and dealing with the vagaries of middle age, chances upon a bonfire in the parking lot of his small-town library, where a pastor and some of his followers are pitching books into the flames. That’s just the beginning of the trouble, of course; a few chapters later the pastor is dead. “Lit” unfurls at a languid pace — the crime does get solved, but spending time with Sandlin’s quirky, unforgettable characters is a lot more important. Read our review.
LITERARY FICTION
The White Hot
by Quiara Alegría Hudes
The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s slim, harrowing novel is written in the form of a letter from a young mother to the daughter she’s abandoned in her quest to quell the incendiary rages — that would be the “white-hot” of the title — that send her spiraling away from her child. Read our review.
LITERARY FICTION
The Slip
by Lucas Schaefer
After arriving in Austin in the summer of 1998, the troubled teenage boy at the center of Schaefer’s impressive debut connects with a swaggering Haitian boxer, falls for a Russian phone sex operator (or so he thinks) and then vanishes forever. A decade later, new clues emerge in the mystery of his disappearance, involving colorful characters of all stripes and a wild plot that twists and swings like a welterweight. Read our review.
HISTORY
Fateful Hours
by Volker Ullrich | translated by Jefferson Chase
The road map to authoritarian disaster is laid out in gleamingly sinister detail by Ullrich, a German historian. He moves inch by inch through the political machinations that began with the establishment of Germany’s first democratically elected government, in 1919, and ended with the chancellorship of Hitler. Read our review.
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