2023 Best Books
Can’t get enough bestsellers? This list is for you!
December 11, 2023
This compilation brings together the year’s best books from Time Magazine, the New York Times, the New York Public Library, and National Public Radio (NPR).
It includes a total of 126 books (wow!)—some of which appear on multiple lists!
All Four Lists
Our Share Of Night
Mariana Enriquez
United in grief after the death of the wife and mother they both loved, a young father and son travel to confront the terrifying legacy she bequeathed—a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
James McBride
When a skeleton is unearthed in the small, close-knit community of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania, in 1972, an unforgettable cast of characters—living on the margins of white, Christian America—closely guard a secret, especially when the truth is revealed about what happened and the part the town’s white establishment played in it.
The Bee Sting
Paul Murray
Avoiding the fact that his once-lucrative car business is going under, Dickie Barnes struggles to be a good person while his family falls apart, wondering if a single moment of bad luck can change the direction of a life and if there’s still time to find a happy ending.
Blackouts
Justin Torres
A young man tends to the dying soul of a person he knew only briefly and the pair trade stories as they wait for the end.
Three Lists
Chain-Gang All-Stars
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
The star of a popular, but controversial for-profit program in the private prison industry that basically turns prisoners into gladiators contemplates freedom.
The Talk
Darrin Bell
This graphic memoir by a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning offers a deeply personal meditation on the “the talk” parents must have with Black children about racism and the brutality that often accompanies it, a ritual attempt to keepkids safe and prepare them for a world that–to paraphrase Toni Morrison–does not love them.
Birnam Wood
Eleanor Catton
The founder of a guerilla gardening group that plants crops on roadsides, parks and neglected yards fights an enigmatic billionaire over a parcel of land.
All The Sinners Bleed
S.A. Cosby
Former FBI agent Titus Crown returns to his hometown and decides to run for sheriff to fight a bigoted police force and must trust his instincts when a serial killer appears to be hiding in plain sight.
Poverty, By America
Matthew Desmond
Drawing on history, research and original reporting, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, revealing there is so much poverty in America not in spite of our wealth but because of it, and builds a startingly original case for eliminating poverty in our country.
The Reformatory
Tananarive Due
In the Jim Crow South, twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., who can see ghosts, is sent to The Reformatory where boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, while his sister Gloria rallies everyone in Florida to get him out before it’s too late.
King
A Life
Jonathan Eig
Drawing on recently declassified FBI files, this first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon reveals the courageous and often emotionally troubled man who demanded peaceful protest but was rarely at peace with himself, while showing how his demands for racial and economic justice remain just as urgent today.
Liliana’s Invincible Summer
A Sister’s Search For Justice
Cristina Rivera Garza
The award-winning Mexican author recounts the story of her younger sister’s murder by an abusive ex-boyfriend and her struggles to come to terms with the pain of a life cut short.
The Wager
A Tale Of Shipwreck, Mutiny, And Murder
David Grann
In this tale of shipwreck, survival and savagery, the #1 New York Times best-selling author of Killers of the Flower Moon recounts the events on His Majesty’s Ship The Wager, a British vessel that left England in 1740 on a secret mission, resulting in a court martial that revealed a shocking truth.
This Other Eden
Paul Harding
Inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast, this novel brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters who struggle to preserve human dignity in the face of intolerance and injustice.
The Half Known Life
In Search Of Paradise
Pico Iyer
From Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, this thought-provoking book, tracing the author’s almost 50-year journey around the world, offers a surprising, original, often beautiful exploration of how we might come upon paradise in the midst of our lives.
Pineapple Street
Jenny Jackson
Darley, the eldest daughter in the closely-tied, carefully-guarded, old money Stockton family, made the classic feminine mistake and gave up her job for her children before she realized she’d sacrificed more of herself than she intended; Sasha married into the Stocktons, and finds herself the outsider looking into the fishbowl, wondering if she will ever understand their ways; and Georgianna, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t (and really shouldn’t) have, and must confront the kind of person she wants to be.
Yellowface
R F Kuang
After the death of her literary rival in a freak accident, author June Hayward steals her just-finished masterpiece, sending it to her agent as her own work, but as emerging evidence threatens her success, she discovers just how far she’ll go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
North Woods
Daniel Mason
Exploring the many ways we’re connected to our environment and to one another across time, language and space, this sweeping collection of stories about a single house in the woods of New England is told through the lives of an extraordinary succession of inhabitants.
Hello Beautiful
Ann Napolitano
Awarded a college basketball scholarship away from his childhood home silenced by tragedy, a young man befriends a spirited young woman who welcomes him into her loving, loud, chaotic household.
Tom Lake
Ann Patchett
Recalling the past at her daughters’ request, Lara tells the story of a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance with, which causes her daughters to examine their own lives and reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
When Crack Was King
A People’s History Of A Misunderstood Era
Donovan X Ramsey
Following four individuals who give us a startling portrait of the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, this exacting work, weaving together research with voices of survivors, exposes the undeniable links between the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement and the consequences we live with today.
Victory City
Salman Rushdie
Giving rise to the great city Bisnaga, a wonder of the world, Pampa Kampana, the vessel for her namesake, the goddess Pampa, who has given her powers beyond her comprehension, attempts, over the centuries, to make good on the task the goddess set for her: women equal agency in a patriarchal world.
We Could Be So Good
Cat Sebastian
In the late 1950s–a hostile time for gay men–reporter Nick Russo forms an unlikely friendship with Andy Fleming, the son of a newspaper-tycoon father, and as they work closely together, they fall in love and must decide if, for the first time, they’re willing to fight.
How To Say Babylon
Safiya Sinclair
This stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her strict Rastafarian upbringing ruled by a father whose rigid beliefs, rage and paranoia led to violence shows how found her own power and provides a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we know little about.
Above Ground
Poems
Clint Smith
Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world.
My Name Is Barbra
Barbra Streisand
In her own words, the living legend tells the story of her life and extraordinary career, from growing up in Brooklyn to her first star-making appearances in NY nightclubs to her breakout performance in Funny Girl to the long string of successes in every medium in the years that followed.
Fire Weather
A True Story From A Hotter World
John Vaillant
In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. It was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. This book is a suspenseful account of one of North America’s most devastating forest fires–and a stark exploration of our dawning era of climate catastrophes.
The Covenant Of Water
Abraham Verghese
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, and set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, an epic of love, faith and medicine follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning.
Crook Manifesto
Colson Whitehead
A furniture store owner and ex-grifter leaves the straight and narrow path when he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter in 1971 Manhattan.
Master Slave Husband Wife
An Epic Journey From Slavery To Freedom
Ilyon Woo
In December 1848, a young enslaved couple named Ellen and William Craft traveled openly by rail, coach and steamship from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ellen, who passed for white, disguised herself as a wealthy disabled man, with William as “his” slave. Woo follows their journey north, and in joining the abolitionist lecture circuit. When the new Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 put them at risk, they fled from the United States. Their very existence challenged the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all.
Anansi’s Gold
The Man Who Looted The West, Outfoxed Washington, And Swindled The World
Yepoka Yeebo
The true story of how a charismatic scammer, John Ackah Blay-Miezah, deceived thousands of people worldwide, including officials and lawyers, when he claimed to hold a billion-dollar trust fund linked to Ghana’s former president, ousted by a junta.
Land Of Milk And Honey
C Pam Zhang
Accepting a job at a decadent, mountaintop colony, a young chef, with the help of her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter, is awakened to the pleasures of taste, touch and her own body until she is pushed beyond her boundaries in a plot to reshape the world far beyond the plate.
Two Lists
Family Lore
Elizabeth Acevedo
Follows the lives of several generations of women in the Marte family after gathering to honor Flor, who can predict the day someone will die, decides to throw herself a huge party as a living wake.
Big Swiss
Jen Beagin
A woman in upstate New York who works transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach becomes infatuated with one of his clients, a repressed married woman from Switzerland who has a refreshing attitude towards trauma.
The Postcard
Anne Berest
Fifteen years after the arrival of an anonymous postcard with the names of her maternal great-grandparents and their children—all killed at Auschwitz—Anne Berest is moved to discover who sent it and why and embarks on a journey to learn the fate of the Rabinovitch family.
The Rediscovery Of America
Native Peoples And The Unmaking Of Us History
Ned Blackhawk
A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.
All The Beauty In The World
The Metropolitan Museum Of Art And Me
Patrick Bringley
A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.
Witness
Stories
Jamel Brinkley
Set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, this collection of ten stories, introducing a wide range of unforgettable characters, presents portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief and the meaning of home.
A Guest In The House
Emily Carroll
In Emily Carroll’s haunting adult graphic novel horror story A Guest in the House, a young woman marries a kind dentist only to realize that there’s a dark mystery surrounding his former wife’s death.
The Adventures Of Amina Al-Sirafi
Shannon Chakraborty
While trying to settle into a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural, Amina al-Sirafi, one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, is offered a job she cannot refuse, but soon discovers this final chance atglory comes with a high price–her soul.
A Living Remedy
Nicole Chung
The best-selling author of All You Can Ever Know returns with a memoir of her experiences as a Korean adoptee and the challenges she faced holding on to family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy.
The Guest
Emma Cline
After a misstep at a dinner party makes her no longer welcome in Long Island, Alex, gifted with the ability to navigate the desires of others, sticks around, spending the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.
Monsters
A Fan’s Dilemma
Claire Dederer
Exploring the audience’s relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, a New York Times bestselling author, book critic, essayist and reporter, in this candid, deeply personal book, discusses whether and how we can separate artists from their art.
A Fever In The Heartland
The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot To Take Over America, And The Woman Who Stopped Them
Timothy Egan
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist traces the Ku Klux Klan’s rise to power in the 1920s, driven by the con man D.C. Stephenson, and how a seemingly powerless woman named Madge Oberholtzer brought them to their knees.
Time’s Echo
The Second World War, The Holocaust, And The Music Of Remembrance
Jeremy Eichler
Proposing new ways of listening to history, an award-winning critic and cultural historian shows how four towering composers—Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten—lived through World War II and the Holocaust, transforming their experiences into deeply moving, transcendent works of music that echo lost time.
The Wren, The Wren
Anne Enright
Centering around celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh, who was lauded in public but was carelessly selfish at home, three generations of McDaragh women must contend with inheritances—poetic wonder, abandonment and a sustaining love—in this intricately woven tapestry of longing, betrayal and hope.
The Vaster Wilds
Lauren Groff
Escaping from a colonial settlement in the wilderness, a servant girl, with nothing but her wits, a few possessions and some faith, is tested beyond the limits of her imagination, forcing her to question her belief of everything her own civilization taught her.
Spare
Prince Harry
With its raw, unflinching honesty, Prince Harry’s memoir—in which he discusses the effect of his mother Princess Diana’s death on his life—is full of insight, revelation, self-examination and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.
Waiting To Be Arrested At Night
A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir Of China’s Genocide
Tahir Hamut Izgil
In this story of the political, social and cultural destruction of his homeland, a prominent poet and intellectual calls our attention to one of the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises: the persecution of the Uyghur people—a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China.
Age Of Vice
Deepti Kapoor
After a speeding car kills five people late at night in New Delhi, the driver, a shell-shocked servant is unable to explain the series of strange events that lead to the crime.
Doppelganger
A Trip Into The Mirror World
Naomi Klein
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who.
Bright Young Women
Jessica Knoll
In 1978, Tina Cannon, when two women vanish without a trace, believes they are targets of the All-American Sex Killer and learning about the massacre at a Florida State University sorority, heads to the Sunshine State where she is on a collision course with one last impending tragedy.
I Have Some Questions For You
Rebecca Makkai
A successful film professor returns to teach at her alma mater and becomes determined to investigate a closed murder case.
Absolution
Alice McDermott
Sixty years after they lived as wives of American servicemen in early 1960s Vietnam, two women reconnect and relieve their shared experiences in Saigon.
Shubeik Lubeik
Dina Muhammad
A brilliantly original debut graphic novel that imagines a fantastical alternate Cairo where wishes really do come true. Shubeik Lubeik—a fairy tale rhyme that means ‘your wish is my command’ in Arabic—is the story of three people who are navigating a world where wishes are literally for sale.
Take What You Need
Idra Novey
Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, Take What You Need follows the estrangement and reconciliation of stepmother and daughter, Jean and Leah. Leah always felt her path diverged from Jean’s and left her hometown without looking back, making a life for herself in the city as a young mother and academic. Now that Jean’s gone, Leah must return to sort through all Jean has left behind. What she wasn’t expecting to find was Jean’s studio filled with metal sculptures born from the scraps of Pennsylvania’s industrial history–its beauty challenging all she had initially thought of her hometown, and her own skepticism for why Jean had held onto it so dearly.
The Rachel Incident
Caroline O’Donoghue
Roommates and best friends Rachel and James, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while Ireland is in chaos, find their fates intertwined with a married professor, with whom Rachel falls in love, and his glamorous, well-connected bourgeois wife through a series of secrets and compromises.
Pageboy
Elliot Page
The Oscar-nominated star who, after the success of Juno, became one of the world’s most beloved actors, reveals how his career turned into a nightmare as he navigated criticism and abuse in Hollywood until he had enough and stepped into who he truly is with defiance, strength and joy.
The End Of Drum-Time
Hanna Pylv�inen
An epic love story about a young reindeer herder and a minister’s daughter in the 19th century Arctic Circle.
Starter Villain
John Scalzi
When his long-lost uncle dies, leaving him his supervillain business, Charlie, as rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital come after him, finds going bad looking pretty good with unionized dolphins, hyperintelligent talking spy cats and a terrifying henchperson at his side.
The Fraud
Zadie Smith
In 1873 Victorian London, with the city mesmerized by the ‘Tichborne Trial,’ wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claims he is the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title, Mrs. Eliza Touchet becomes determined to find out if he’s really who he says he is or if he’s a fraud.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful
Maggie Smith
The award-winning poet explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself, interweaving snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness and narrative itself and revealing how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something beautiful.
Safe And Sound
A Renter-Friendly Guide To Home Repair
Mercury Stardust
Helping you feel safer and in more control of your own life, a transwoman and professional maintenance technician provides this DIY home improvement book that includes guidance for over 50 simple home maintenance projects as well as advice tailored to renters to minimize permanent changes.
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice For Murderers
Jesse Q Sutanto
When she discovers a dead man in the middle of her tea shop, Vera Wong, a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands, calls the police but not before swiping the flash drive from the body, setting a trap for the killer that becomes complicated by unexpected friendships with her customers.
The 272
The Families Who Were Enslaved And Sold To Build The American Catholic Church
Rachel L Swarns
Following one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement, this powerful account illustrates how the Catholic Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to help finance its expansion, bringing to light the people whose forced labor helped to build the largest denomination in the nation.
Ink Blood Sister Scribe
Emma T�rzs
Two estranged half sisters tasked with guarding their family’s library of magical books must work together to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection–a tale of familial loyalty and betrayal, and the pursuit of magic and power.
My Murder
Katie Williams
Recently brought back to life and returned to her grieving family by a government project, Lou, the victim of a serial killer, readapts to being a mother and wife but wonders how much she can really trust those around her as she sets out to figure out the circumstances of her death.
One List
Unscripted
The Epic Battle For A Media Empire And The Redstone Family Legacy
James B Stewart, Rachel Abrams
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists recount the shocking struggle for power and control of Paramount and the dysfunction, misconduct and deceit that threatened the future of this media empire.
What An Owl Knows
The New Science Of The World’s Most Enigmatic Birds
Jennifer Ackerman
Illuminating the rich biology and natural history of owls, the most elusive of birds—and often a symbol of wisdom, knowledge and foresight—the New York Times best-selling author of The Genius of Birds takes us around the globe and through human history to understand the complex nature of these extraordinary creatures.
Mrs Nash’s Ashes
Sarah Adler
Reluctant travel companions, starry-eyed romantic Millicent and cynical writer Hollis take the road trip of a lifetime to deliver the ashes of Millicent’s elderly best friend to the woman she fell in love with nearly 80 years ago, upending what they both believe about true love.
The Three Of Us
Ore Agbaje-Williams
Told from three different viewpoints over the course of one day, this domestic comedy follows a wife, her husband and her best friend as long-standing tensions between all of them come to a breaking point, throwing everyone’s integrity into question and their relationships into chaos.
The Future
Naomi Alderman
While a few billionaires lead the world to certain doom, Martha Einkorn, working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything, and Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, when their paths unexpectedly cross, work together to prevent the cataclysmic end of civilization.
What You Are Looking For Is In The Library
Michiko Aoyama
This tribute to the magic of libraries, friendship and community follows Tokyo’s most mysterious librarian, Sayuri Komachi, as she gives her visitors one unexpected book, which has life-altering consequences, giving the borrower the motivation they didn’t realize they need to change their life.
The Man In The Mcintosh Suit
Rina Ayuyang
The year is 1929 and Bobot is just another migrant worker in rural California. Or rather, a migrant worker with a law degree from the Philippines reduced to manual labor in America. Bobot, like so many other young Filipinos, finds himself bunking in the fields, picking fruit by day. When his cousin writes claiming to have spotted his estranged wife in nearby San Francisco, he swipes a co-worker’s favorite nightclub suit and heads to the big city to find her. What follows is classic noir with seedy dives, mouthy pool sharks, and obsession.
Humanly Possible
Seven Hundred Years Of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, And Hope
Sarah Bakewell
In this sweeping new history, Sarah Bakewell, herself a lifelong humanist, illuminates the very personal, individual, and, well, human matter of humanism and takes readers on a grand intellectual adventure.
Fair Play
How Sports Shape The Gender Debates
Katie Barnes
An award-winning LGBTQ+ journalist traces the evolution of women’s sports as a pastime and a political arena, where equality and fairness have been fought over for generations, and discusses the controversy surrounding trans athletes and the much-needed solution that seeks to preserve opportunities for all going forward.
Prophet
Helen Macdonald, Sin Blach�
Called in to investigate a mysterious death in the UK, American intelligence officer Adam Rubenstein and ex-MI6 agent Sunil Rao embark on the most dangerous and otherworldly mission of their lives involving a substance called Prophet that weaponizes people’s fondest memories against them.
Mott Street
A Chinese American Family’s Story Of Exclusion And Homecoming
Ava Chin
Beautifully written, meticulously researched and tremendously resonant, this sweeping narrative history of the Chinese Exclusion Act traces the story of her pioneering family members’ epic journey to lay down roots in America, piecing together how they bore and resisted the weight of the Exclusion laws.
Lives Of The Wives
Five Literary Marriages
Carmela Ciuraru
A witty look at the complex and fascinating but tumultuous marriages of five well known figures in the literary world, including British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, and authors Roald Dahl and Kingsley Amis.
Monica
Daniel Clowes
Monica is a series of interconnected narratives that collectively tell the life story–actually, stories–of its title character. Clowes calls upon a lifetime of inspiration to create the most complex and personal graphic novel of his distinguished career. Rich with visual detail, an impeccable ear for language and dialogue, and thrilling twists, Monica is a multilayered masterpiece in comics form that alludes to many of the genres that have defined the medium–war, romance, horror, crime, the supernatural, etc.–but in a mysterious, uncategorizable, and quintessentially Clowesian way that rewards multiple readings.
Tremor
Teju Cole
Masterfully exploring what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world, this startling work of realism and invention examines the passage of time and how we mark it, reckoning with human survival amidst history’s brutality as well as demonstration the possibility of joy.
Ripe
Sarah Rose Etter
Trapped in a corporate nightmare, Cassie, plagued by a miniature black hole that feeds on her depression and anxiety, ends up unexpectedly pregnant after her CEO demands she cross an illegal threshold and must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are really worth it.
A House For Alice
Diana Evans
The matriarch of the Pitt family yearns to return to Nigeria to live out her final years but her trip is made more complicated by her arguing daughters and a fire that kills her estranged husband.
Nothing Special
Nicole Flattery
In 1966 New York City, 17-year-old Mae drops out of school to work as a typist for the artist Andy Warhol and, transcribing the recordings of conversations and experiences with his many famous friends, becomes obsessed with the tapes, grappling with the thin line between art and voyeurism.
Wifedom
Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
Anna Funder
Drawing on newly discovered letters from George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, to her best friend, an award-winning author recreates the marriage behind some of the most famous literary works of the 20th century, pondering the question of what it takes to be a writer—and what it is to be a wife.
Crossings
How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future Of Our Planet
Ben Goldfarb
Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, but we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. In Crossings, Ben Goldfarb delves into the new science of road ecology to explore how roads have transformed our world.
Red Queen
Juan G�mez-Jurado
After a personal trauma, Antonia Scott, whose ability to reconstruct crimes and solve baffling murders is legendary, refuses to continue her work until she is drawn into a macabre, ritualistic murder investigation by a desperate police officer with his own agenda. 100,000 first printing.
Marry Me By Midnight
Felicia Grossman
To save her business in 1832 London, heiress Isabelle Lira must quickly marry a powerful ally outside of her rivals’ sphere of influence, and offers synagogue custodian Aaron Ellenberg money for a new life if he vets her suitors, only to find herself falling for this man she cannot have.
After The Funeral And Other Stories
Tessa Hadley
This latest addition to the celebrated author’s body of work features twelve stories that illuminate the shifting tides and enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom hidden beneath the undercurrents of ordinary relationships.
Battle Of Ink And Ice
A Sensational Story Of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, And The Making Of Modern Media
Darrell Hartman
The story of American explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, who both claimed to have discovered the North Pole and the two New York City newspapers that fanned the flames of the so-called polar controversy.
The Great Reclamation
Rachel Heng
With the future of their fishing village in jeopardy after the Japanese army invades Singapore, Ah Boon, gifted with the unique ability to locate bountiful, movable islands that no one else can find, and Siok Mei, the spirited girl he has come to love, must decide who they want to be.
An Island Princess Starts A Scandal
Adriana Herrera
Enjoying one last summer of freedom before being trapped in a loveless marriage, Manuela accepts an invitation to show her paintings in Paris.
The Trap
Catherine Ryan Howard
An unsettling mystery inspired by a series of still-unsolved disappearances in Ireland in the nineties, wherein one young woman risks everything to catch a faceless killer.
What Happened To Ruthy Ramirez
Claire Jim�nez
When she spots her missing sister, Ruthy, who disappeared when she was 13, on her TV screen in Catfight, a raunchy reality show, Jessica, along with her younger sister, mother, and her mother’s holy roller best friend, set out on a family road trip to find the truth.
Greek Lessons
Han Kang
A young Korean woman losing her ability to speak befriends a Greek language teacher who is losing his sight, and soon they discover they have even more in common.
Cobalt Red
How The Blood Of The Congo Powers Our Lives
Siddharth Kara
An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation—and the moral implications that affect us all.
Holly
Stephen King
Formerly shy private detective Holly Gibney reluctantly agrees to search for a client’s missing daughter, which may have something to do with an unholy secret being harbored in the basement of a pair of semi-retired octogenarian academics.
You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live
Ten Weeks In Birmingham That Changed America
Paul Kix
Taking readers behind the scenes of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s pivotal 10-week campaign in 1963 to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, a journalist zeroes in on its specific history and its echoes throughout our culture now.
The Maniac
Benjam�n Labatut
A novel centered on Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, a prodigy whose gifts terrified those around him, shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake, confronting us with the deepest questions we face as a species.
The Deadline
Essays
Jill Lepore
Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented–but armed–aimlessness.
August Blue
Deborah Levy
After glimpsing her identical double shopping in Athens, Elsa spends a month pursuing her doppelganger, resulting in an uncanny, erotic encounter in the summer rain.
White Cat, Black Dog
Stories
Kelly Link
Inspired by the Brothers Grimm, 17th-century French lore and Scottish ballads, this clever collection of reinvented fairy tales expertly blends realism and the speculative as characters hunt for love, connection, revenge or their own sense of purpose.
Built From The Fire
The Epic Story Of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street: One Hundred Years In The Neighborhood That Refused To Be Erased
Victor Luckerson
Focusing on one family’s experiences, this history of Tulsa’s Greenwood district, known as the ‘Black Wall Street’ traces its origins, the 1921 race massacre that decimated the area and its eventual urban renewal and gentrification.
Knockout
Sarah MacLean
One of the Hell’s Belles—a group of vigilantes operating outside the notice of most of London, Lady Imogen Loveless, who has a penchant for experiments and explosives, meets her match in a brilliant detective who, caught up in her chaotic world, tempts her like no other.
The Deluge
Stephen Markley
In 2013 California, environmental scientist Tony Pietrus, after receiving a death threat, is linked to a colorful cast of characters, including a brazen young activist who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.
How Not To Kill Yourself
A Portrait Of The Suicidal Mind
Clancy Martin
Based on his viral essay ‘I’m Still Here,’ the acclaimed writer and professor of philosophy chronicles his own multiple suicide attempts and discusses how the desire to kill oneself is almost always temporary and avoidable.
Against The Currant
Olivia Matthews
When the disgruntled owner of a rival bakery is murdered after getting a rise out of her, Lyndsay Murray, the owner of Spice Isle Bakery, falls under suspicion and most prove her innocence while dealing with her overprotective and meddlesome family.
The Quiet Tenant
Cl�mence Michallon
A kidnapper and serial killer, widower Aidan Thomas, a hardworking family man and beloved figure in his community, moves with his 13-year-old daughter to a new town, taking along Rachel, the woman he’s earmarked for death who tests the boundaries of her new living situation to escape.
Wild Girls
How The Outdoors Shaped The Women Who Challenged A Nation
Tiya Miles
In this beautiful, meditative work, an award-winning historian profiles trailblazing women of all races in the 19th and 20th centuries who acted on their confidence in the natural world, bringing new context to misunderstood icons and underappreciated figures.
The Nursery
Szilvia Molnar
Struggling with postpartum depression, a new mother, ill at ease with this state of perpetual giving, carrying, and feeding, strikes up a tentative friendship with her ailing upstairs neighbor, but they are both running out of time, and something is soon to crack.
Owner Of A Lonely Heart
Bich Minh Nguyen
In this memoir about parenthood, absence and the condition of being a refugee, the author, who fled Saigon for America at the end of the Vietnam War, while her mother stayed behind, tells a coming-of-age story spanning her Midwestern childhood, her first meeting with her mother and becoming a parent herself.
A Thread Of Violence
A Story Of Truth, Invention, And Murder
Mark O’Connell
An award-winning author tells the true crime tale of a Dublin socialite who squandered all his money and planned and executed a 1982 bank robbery that left two innocent people dead and whose conviction created an infamous political scandal.
A History Of Burning
Janika Oza
Taken from his village in India to work on the East African Railway for the British, Pirbhai spends his life reconciling an act he committed to survive that will haunt his family’s future for years to come.
The Slip
The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever
Prudence Peiffer
In this multifaceted biographical portrait and riveting historical account, an art historian takes readers back to mid-20th-century NYC and to Coenties Slip, which was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists who created a unique community of creative expression and experimentation that changed the course of American art.
Wandering Souls
Cecile Pin
Seeking refuge in the UK after the last American troops leave Vietnam, Anh and her younger brothers, in a London plagued by social inequality and raging anti-immigrant sentiment, find their paths diverging as time passes, wondering if love alone can keep them together.
The Best Minds
A Story Of Friendship, Madness, And The Tragedy Of Good Intentions
Jonathan Rosen
An acclaimed author investigates the forces that led his closest childhood friend, a paranoid schizophrenic with brilliant promise who defied the odds and graduated from Yale Law School, to kill the woman he loved, in this exploration of the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.
The Good Life
Lessons From The World’s Longest Scientific Study Of Happiness
Robert Waldinger, Marc Schulz
The directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, drawing from the personal stories of hundreds of participants, reveal that relationships in all their forms, from friendships and romantic partnerships to Bible study groups, contribute to a happier, healthier life.
The Undertow
Scenes From A Slow Civil War
Jeff Sharlet
One of America’s finest reporters and essayists explores the powerful currents beneath the roiled waters of a nation coming apart. Across the country, men “of God” glorify materialism, a gluttony of the soul, while citing Scripture and preparing for civil war–a firestorm they long for as an absolution and exaltation. Lies, greed, and glorification of war boom through microphones at hipster megachurches that once upon a time might have preached peace and understanding. Political rallies are as aflame with need and giddy expectation as religious revivals. Framing this dangerous vision, Sharlet remembers and celebrates the courage of those who sing a different song of community, and of an America long dreamt of and yet to be fully born, dedicated to justice and freedom for all.
River Sing Me Home
Eleanor Shearer
In 1834 Barbados, after the master of the Providence plantation in Barbados refuses to let them go even though the king has decreed an end to slavery, Rachel escapes and embarks on a grueling, dangerous journey to find her five children who survived at birth and were sold.
Up Home
One Girl’s Journey
Ruth Simmons
Both an origin story set in the segregated South and an uplifting story of girlhood, the first Black president of an Ivy League University who has inspired generations of students as she herself made history depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today.
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone
Benjamin Stevenson
A self-published author of crime novel writing guides attends a reunion with his family of expert killers and investigates when a body is found outside in the snow as another storm approaches.
A Day In The Life Of Abed Salama
Anatomy Of A Jerusalem Tragedy
Nathan Thrall
Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day.
The Nigerwife
Vanessa Walters
When her niece, Nicole, a part of the Nigerwives—a community of foreign women married to wealthy Nigerian men—disappears, Claudine digs into Nicole’s life, uncovering a dark side filled with secrets, isolation and violence that threatens to expose her own buried history.
Let Us Descend
Jesmyn Ward
In the years before the Civil War, Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, struggles through the miles-long march, seeks comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother, opening herself to a world beyond this world.
Holding Pattern
Jenny Xie
Searching for direction after a humiliating breakup, a young woman returns to her Oakland home and finds herself planning her own mother’s wedding to a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur.
The Exceptions
Nancy Hopkins, Mit, And The Fight For Women In Science
Kate Zernike
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist tells the powerful—and inspiring—story of Nancy Hopkins, a reluctant feminist who, in 1999, became the leader of 16 female scientists who forced MIT to publicly admit it had been discriminating against its female faculty for years.