book reviews 2022

The 20 best books of 2022, according to our critics

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Ask four critics to name their favorite books of any year and you’ll get an array of singular narratives. But if any theme emerged among our top 20 books of 2022, it was the individual struggle to shape the future in a range of hostile words: the harsh dystopias crafted by Celeste Ng and Sequoia Nagamatsu; the vicious liars who questioned Sandy Hook; the British colonizers Samuel Adams outwitted and the American colonizers bested by the great Native athlete Jim Thorpe. These are stories told brilliantly — substance meeting its match in style — in which reality might be inescapable, but hope is unkillable.

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The best books of 2022

Here are the divine debuts, vivid historical fictions, and shocking show-business memoirs that top this year's reading list.

In this crazy mixed-up world, there's still nothing quite like the forever pleasures of a quiet corner, a few undisturbed hours, and a great read. Whether they found their way via the breathless testimonials of BookTok or the old-fashioned face-to-face recommendations of a friend, the best novels and nonfiction of 2022 all come back to the same principle: Stories that touch on something true and captivating from the first page.

Below, a highly subjective list of EW staff favorites — including surprising sequels, cinematic fiction, and even fiction that started as cinema (see No. 8 on our list).

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

The most juicy, enveloping, tenderhearted novel of 2022 is.... about video games? It is but it isn't, of course; just trust that you don't need to know a PS5 console from a Commodore 64 to fall for Tomorrow from the opening paragraphs — a tart meet-cute between two college students that foretells not a romance, necessarily, but a lifelong bond. Sam is a junior at Harvard and Sadie goes to MIT; they're both brilliant and both constitutionally lonely, and their shared love of gaming will bring them from the chilly campuses of Cambridge to the early-aughts tech incubators of Venice Beach. Thorny questions of creative ownership and personal redemption swirl across 400 wildly readable pages, but the takeaway is, in the purest and most platonic sense, a love story, one that transcends both time and pixels. — Leah Greenblatt

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

Sequels are by almost every definition a diminishment; even as they expand on the world-building of their source material, they tend to lose something of the original's ineffable magic. Not Candy , Jennifer Egan's long-game followup to her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2011 triumph A Visit from the Goon Squad . Here, Goon 's wild tapestry of tech lords, gutter punks, and tennis-club moms are woven once again into a sweeping postmodern narrative (wherever social media is headed, Black Mirror hasn't even begun to imagine). But the novel — with its prismatic plotting and ever-shifting chorus of seekers, kooks, and visionaries — feels less like a house than a honeycomb full of fantastical rooms, each one alive and thrumming with bright, weird humanity. — Leah Greenblatt

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

After her bestseller Hamnet , Maggie O'Farrell returned with another work of thrilling historical fiction, this time centered around a little-known daughter of the powerful Medici family in Renaissance Florence. Lucrezia sees the world through the delicate eyes of a painter, but while a man of her station might have apprenticed to one of the great Italian artists of the time, Lucrezia is sold off like cattle once her older sister dies —forced to be the replacement bride of a powerful duke. O'Farrell's lyrical prose illuminates Lucrezia's artistic temperament, and all the mysteries that spring from a death declared in the first paragraph. — Lauren Morgan

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Trust' s title might strictly refer to the financial term, but as a verb, it won't you serve you to believe a thing in Hernan Diaz's Rashamon-like tale of a reclusive early Wall Street tycoon and his troubled, aristocratic bride. Diaz — whose 2017 debut, In the Distance , earned him a Pulitzer nod — explores one man's ruthless pursuit of capital in four distinct forms (a novel, a manuscript, a memoir, a diary), though the classic Great Man narrative itself turns out to be a Trojan horse for something far more feminist, subversive, and strange. (Recently, HBO announced that Kate Winslet will produce and star in a limited-series adaptation. )

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Celebrity memoirs are a dime a dozen, but few manage to combine show-business bombshells with a well-written story as compellingly as former iCarly star Jennette McCurdy . I'm Glad My Mom Died seized the zeitgeist upon its release, and not just because of that eye-popping title: McCurdy's revelations about the backlot realities of 2000s Nickelodeon sitcoms became a moment of catharsis for the millennial generation who grew up with them — an extreme portrait of difficult mother-daughter relationships, and a thought-provoking lesson on the harm that child acting can wreak behind the scenes. — Christian Holub

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews

Coming-of-age stories rarely come as fully formed as Different , Matthews' dazzling and wholly original debut. It's the early days of the second Obama administration, and 22-year-old Sneha — brown, queer, stranded in wintry Wisconsin — is attempting to navigate her first post-college corporate job, dating in the Midwest, and the ongoing legacy of her immigrant parents. Happy endings are as elusive here as a fat 401K or a balanced meal, but Matthews writes about things great (shame, poverty, identity) and small (drunk texts, dive bars) with such mordant wit, insight, and specificity, it feels like watching a new literary star being born in real time. — Leah Greenblatt

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

In the opening pages of Jessamine Chan's riveting dystopian debut, exhausted single mom Frida Liu leaves her toddler daughter alone for two hours, only to come home and be arrested for child endangerment. Frida's guilt for leaving little Harriet behind is genuine, but every step she takes to demonstrate repentance is interpreted as more proof that she's not fit to be a parent, and soon she lands in what is essentially a penitentiary for so-called bad mothers — a place where women are forced to parent a robotic child in the hopes that one day they might be reunited with their own. Under constant surveillance from the school's cameras and its exacting instructors, Frida knows she's engaged in a losing game, and Chan's chilling prose offers sharp commentary on modern motherhood and the impossible expectations it creates. — Lauren Morgan

Heat 2 by Michael Mann

Nearly three decades after his now-iconic heist thriller Heat hit theaters, filmmaker Michael Mann returns to the scene of the crime in unexpected form: a novel. Co-penned with Edgar-winning writer Meg Gardiner , Heat 2 jumps around in time, exploring the before-and-afters of characters like Al Pacino's relentless LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna and Val Kilmer's slippery thief Chris Shiherlis. For a director so well known for his visual impact, he turns out to be a propulsive prose stylist as well; Mann fans will find connections and parallels with many of his films, but any crime reader can feast on the meaty storytelling. — Christian Holub

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

Emily Henry ( Beach Read , People We Meet on Vacation ) has a gift for crafting love stories designed to hit readers right in the solar plexus; her novels are packed with banter and screwball scenarios, but underneath it all is always the fading bruise of melancholy. Book Lovers , with its prickly literary agent heroine, Nora, and standoffish editor, Charlie, is perhaps her most effective rendering of that yet: When Nora accompanies her sister, Libby, to the Hallmark-worthy town of Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for a getaway, she's plunged into Charlie's orbit, and the secret wounds of their pasts. But the pair finds a balm in their mutual love of words and storytelling, making Henry's yarn a love letter to bibliophiles — an ode to the risk of sharing one's heart, and the power of books to both expose and heal them. — Maureen Lee Lenker

Blood, Sweat, and Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan

New York Times journalist Kyle Buchanan details the bonkers construction of director George Miller's long-awaited and often seemingly-doomed fourth Mad Max movie via testimony from the filmmaker, Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, and a host of others. The result is an epic and – when it comes to the Theron-Hardy on-set relationship – acrimonious tale no less jaw-dropping than the movie itself. — Clark Collis

Also on our list: Stay True by Hua Hsu, Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet, The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken, If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver, In Love by Amy Bloom, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout, Dirtbag, Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald, Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perotta, The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty, Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart, A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney, Ancestor Trouble by Maud Newton, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man by Paul Newman, This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub, Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson.

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The Best Books of 2022 So Far

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One of the best parts of working at a magazine? The piles of books that arrive months before the rest of the world gets to see them. But the influx can often be overwhelming, so when something rises to the top, we like to take note. We have been collecting and curating our favorite titles all year; here we present our selection of the best books that have been published in 2022.  

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan (January 4)

The School for Good Mothers

Jessamine Chan’s debut—like all truly terrifying nightmares—starts off in a banal, familiar way: an utterly exhausted mother, in a moment of sleep-deprived despair, does the unthinkable (and yet understandable) and walks out of her apartment, leaving her baby behind. She doesn’t intend to be gone for long, but somehow time slips away, and before she realizes it, she’s been gone for hours. It’s a terrible thing to have done, and she knows it. But no degree of contrition will spare her from the authorities who descend, first removing her child and then transplanting her to an abandoned college campus turned dystopian re-education facility where she will, ostensibly, learn what it truly takes to be a good mother. The tool for her forensically monitored progress is an uncanny robot baby, meant to stimulate her, challenge her, and, crucially, record her every movement, from loving gestures to instants of inattention. The School for Good Mothers (Simon & Schuster) picks up the mantel of writers like Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro , with their skin-crawling themes of surveillance, control, and technology; but it also stands on its own as a remarkable, propulsive novel. — Chloe Schama

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez (January 4)

Olga Dies Dreaming

Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel is a vivacious account of Olga Acevedo’s life as a premier party planner to Manhattan’s elite—a demanding job that opens with the ordering of luxurious embroidered linen napkins for an exorbitantly priced wedding, some which Olga will pocket to impress her own family. The contiguity of Olga’s career life and her familial roots in Puerto Rican Brooklyn creates a tension that ultimately underlines the sacrifices each world constantly asks Olga to upkeep. Gonzalez’s story may be that of a woman seeking career success, love, and happiness, but the dynamic story amounts to a slow-burn chronicle of the American Dream, with moments of humor and bare-bones honesty throughout. —Carolina Gonzalez

Lost and Found by Kathryn Schulz (January 11)

Lost and Found

The first half of Kathryn Schulz’s new book, Lost and Found (Random House), a sensitive and timely meditation on loss and grief, is balanced by the celebration of love and joy in the second half. But rather than the spoonful-of-sugar structure that this division implies, the book is united—even in its darkest moments—as a lively exploration of some of the strongest emotions we humans have the luck to feel and a wondrous look at how they work in tandem. As Schulz puts it in the book: “What an astonishing thing to find someone. Loss may alter our sense of scale, reminding us that the world is overwhelmingly large while we are incredibly tiny. But finding does the same; the only difference is that it makes us marvel rather than despair.” The book grew out of a New Yorker meditation, “ Losing Streak ,” which chronicles the experience of misplacing the mundane and suffering the utmost loss, but it moves far beyond it—into the literary, historical, and philosophical roots of both poles of experience. It offers a sure- and light-footed wander through these heavy topics, though, written with grace and comedy as well as rigor. —C.S.

Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson (January 11)

Mouth to Mouth

A chance run-in at an airport between our nameless narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, and an acquaintance from college who has now become an art-world hotshot, Jeff Cook, sets the stage for Antoine Wilson’s taut, compulsive chamber piece of a novel, which you’ll struggle not to rip through in one sitting. (Thankfully it clocks in at a brisk 192 pages, allowing you to do just that.) After settling in an airport lounge, the enigmatic Jeff begins recounting a wild (and allegedly never-before-shared) tale that begins with him resuscitating a drowning man on a beach and discovering after the fact that the man he saved is a major art dealer. When Jeff pays a visit to his gallery and realizes the man doesn’t remember him, he slowly begins ingratiating himself into his life, climbing the ranks of his gallery and eventually even dating his daughter, in a story that carries distinct shades of Patricia Highsmith and Donna Tartt—but to tell any more would spoil the book’s thrilling surprises. It may not come with any sweeping messages or moral takeaways (although that ambivalence is surely the point), but Mouth to Mouth is an elegantly told and supremely gripping tale of serendipity and deception—and delivers a brilliant ending that will leave you guessing about everything that came before. —Liam Hess

I Came All This Way to Meet You by Jami Attenberg (January 11)

I Came All This Way to Meet You

Jami Attenberg’s 2017 novel, All Grown Up , was a bit of a gateway drug. It felt like it was made for me, in that it reminded me of me: a 30-something Jewish woman looking for love in the big city. I assumed, as often is the case for many fine novels, that this was also Attenberg’s story. Her latest book (and first memoir), I Came All This Way to Meet You (Ecco), reveals that the New Orleans–based writer is even more layered and idiosyncratic than her fictional characters. Her newest is an episodic collection of Attenberg’s life—her cross-country travels, debilitating injuries, bad plane rides, bad boyfriends—which are all told through her signature intimate and humorous style. But it’s her writing on her own work I found particularly revealing. “I became a fiction writer in the first place because stories are a beautiful place to hide,” she writes. I Came All This Way details the highs and lows of finding yourself through your work and living a creative life—it’s a thrill for superfans and newcomers alike. —Jessie Heyman

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara (January 11)

To Paradise

The confounding, brilliant, intricate, beautiful, horrific To Paradise is—if this string of adjectives did not sufficiently convey it—an extraordinary book. Divided into three seemingly distinct sections, positioned 100 years apart, the book is one part historical fiction (set in 1893), part present-ish-day chronicle (1993), and part futuristic sci-fi story (2093). (That last chapter, which must have been informed by, if not fully drafted within, the pandemic, presents a dystopian future filled with “cooling suits” required to venture outside and “decontamination chambers” to ward off the ever-present possibility of infection.) Those who consumed Yanagihara’s most recent work, A Little Life , will not be surprised that this book, like its predecessor, is interested in pain and suffering more than joy and happiness. But it is also a book full of gloriously painted scenes and tantalizing connection—and despite all its gutting turns, one that maintains an abiding hope for the possibility and power of love. (That may just be the only paradise truly on offer.) In and of themselves, some sections feel in some ways quite conventional, but taken together—with all of their extreme cliffhangers and unanswered questions—the stories seem to be asking: What do we want from a novel? Resolution is not available here, but some of the most poignant feelings that literature can elicit certainly are. —C.S.

Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School by Kendra James (January 18)

For years, the world of elite prep schools was thought of in only the most romanticized terms; lacrosse games, leaf-festooned campuses, and, of course, educational values that prepared America’s next generation of winners to ascend their thrones. Kendra James’s Admissions (Grand Central) is a thorough, necessary, and overdue repudiation of that trope. In the memoir, James—now an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment for independent prep schools—looks back at the three years she spent at Taft, a private boarding school in Connecticut, recalling the insidious yet not particularly subtle racism she faced as the first African-American legacy student at the predominantly white institution. Admissions is a tale in the mold of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep , but instead of relegating the racism that is so often found in “well-meaning liberal” space to a parenthetical, the book addresses it head-on, boldly naming the confusion, fear, and trauma that can so often come with being the only person who looks like you in any given room. —Emma Specter

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (February 1)

Vladimir: A Novel

The smartest take on campus culture comes by way of Julia May Jonas’s slyly hilarious Vladimir (Simon & Schuster). Don’t be dissuaded (or erroneously excited) by the romance-novel aesthetics of the cover. It’s the story of a somewhat lonely and embittered, and yet eminently appealing, English professor whose husband has been felled by a series of sexual assault allegations. But just how real were those allegations? It’s a question almost impossible to ask in real life, but deliciously explored here through our acerbic narrator, who has a quite pre-MeToo view of power, consent, and sexual politics. The titular Vladimir is a new professor in town and the subject of a crush on the part of the narrator that also veers off into deeply inappropriate territory. The novel works on several different registers at once, deftly layering comedy with subtle commentary in an entirely engrossing read. —C.S.

The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang (February 1)

The Family Chao

For Asians in America, the perpetual foreigners, it’s the eternal question regardless of birthplace: How exactly does one become American ? This interrogation is keenly felt by immigrants and their children in particular, as Lan Samantha Chang, director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, explores in-depth in The Family Chao (Norton), the story of the tyrannical proprietor of a small-town Wisconsin Chinese restaurant (The Fine Chao) and his three unhappy but obedient American-born sons (The brothers Karamahjong). When a scandal engulfs the Chaos, they’re forced to reconsider their place in the society they’ve toiled in and called home for decades, as well as their roles within the family itself. At times scathing and hilarious, the rollicking tale considers the thorny themes of assimilation, identity, pride, filial piety, transracial adoption, and interracial relationships. It’s a fine chaos indeed; you’ll never look at Chinese restaurant families the same. —L.W.M.

The Arc by Tory Henwood Hoen (February 8)

In her debut novel, The Arc (St. Martin’s Press), Tory Henwood Hoen has woven a bracingly entertaining antidote to the hellscape of online dating. Thirty-five-year-old branding wiz Ursula Bryne is in the grip of a third-life crisis, ambivalent about her job and unable to sustain a lasting relationship with anybody other than her cat. That is, until she is tapped to visit the lab of The Arc, a mysterious place that promises lasting love to those lucky enough to spend a week at its unnervingly glossy lab. Ursula is paired with Rafael, an improbably modest and handsome Yale grad blessed with a sense of humor and killer dance moves. The book wears its sci-fi lightly, focusing instead on anatomizing a whirlwind romance that begins to fray around the edges. As the duo’s faith in the arc’s highly proprietary pairing methodologies begins to falter, they are left to determine if they still buy into each other. Set in a privileged slice of pre-pandemic New York, the story has a sunny feel and a rich supply of semi-satirical backdrops, making pit stops at bro-infested tech conferences and members-only temples to fourth-wave feminism. With its intelligent and unfussy bent, the novel is foremost a plucky city romance that recalls the work of Laurie Colwin . Beneath the dystopian veil lies a thoroughly modern love story with old-fashioned heart. —Lauren Mechling

A Very Nice Girl by Imogen Crimp (February 8)

A Very Nice Girl

Imogen Crimp’s A Very Nice Girl (Henry Holt) follows Anna, a talented young opera singer who is defying her provincial parents to carve out an artistic life for herself in London. That bohemian existence can prove, at times, a bit trying (she has to share a bed with her roommate and moves into a quasi-feminist commune where tampons are deemed a tool of the patriarchy), and so she takes refuge in the sterile quarters of her finance-professional boyfriend. The book eschews easy “tale of two cities” contrasts, however, and asks some serious if lightly deployed questions about the sacrifices, rewards, and worth of an artistic life (and how you pay for it). With some steamy sex scenes in the mix, Crimp feels like she’s channeling something of the Sally Rooney style: interior and complex, but also unafraid to incorporate corporeal forces among all the others that govern us. This is high-class romance at its best. —C.S.

Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary by Johanna Kaplan (February 15)

Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary

A joy of discovery attends the publication of Johanna Kaplan’s Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary (Ecco)—a volume that gathers her cacophonous, mordantly funny stories from the 1960s and ’70s (and includes the contents of her prized debut, Other People’s Lives ). How had I never heard of Kaplan? You’ll wonder the same as you get swept up in the world of her slightly neurotic, status-aware postwar Jewish characters who mine humor from dislocation and anxiety. The bravura novella-length “Other People’s Lives” is the masterpiece here, a rollicking account of several days in the life of Louise Weil, a piercingly observant, mentally fragile young woman marooned in the ramshackle milieu of a Manhattan artistic couple who take a day trip to the country. It fizzes with the urbane energy of J.D. Salinger, Grace Paley, and Deborah Eisenberg—a restless delight. —Taylor Antrim

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka (February 22)

The Swimmers

The Swimmers , by Julie Otsuka, begins at an underground pool in an unnamed city, where regulars find almost-sacred refuge in their favorite lanes and go-to strokes. (Others—like the “binge swimmers” who periodically rush the pool to melt off holiday pounds—are tolerated more than welcomed.) Yet as Otsuka’s elegant third novel wends on, its focus narrows to one swimmer in particular: an older woman for whom the water is a stabilizing, comfortingly familiar force. Even as dementia sets in, Alice knows exactly who she is at the pool—that is, until it closes, and she’s thrust headlong into the swirling memories, strained relationships, and ever-fracturing sense of self that await her on land. —Marley Marius

Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett (March 1)

Checkout 19

The cryptic stream of consciousness that coursed through Claire-Louise Bennett’s 2015 debut short-story collection  Pond,  all told from the perspective of a single narrator who lives a solitary existence in a cottage on the west coast of Ireland, made her one of that year’s breakout new voices. Seven years later, Bennett returns with  Checkout 19,  a similarly impressionistic, and perhaps even more challenging, work of autofiction that further showcases her talents for blending the micro with the macro across a melting pot of genres, from seemingly autobiographical minutiae plumbed from her youth in Wiltshire to impressively erudite forays into literary criticism. While ostensibly it tells the story of a writer looking back on her formative years as a young woman, it’s easier to think about the book as a kind of tapestry. Once you allow yourself to get swept along by Bennett’s instinctive, synaptic abilities as a storyteller, the vivid textures of her sentences, and her subversive sense of humor,  Checkout 19  is a strange and delicious treat. —L.H.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire (March 1)

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice In Her Head

Warsan Shire is perhaps best known for having her work featured in Beyoncé Knowles’s 2016 feature-length film, Lemonade , but the British-Somali poet is charting a new course with her first full-length poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head (Random House), which weaves together the themes of migration, womanhood, Black identity, and intergenerational collection that Shire is so singularly gifted at exploring. Shire frequently draws on her own life to create her art, and the end result is a collection of poems that will shine as a beacon for marginalized communities everywhere (and, perhaps, inspire those who have always taken their own belonging for granted to think beyond the confines of their individual experience). —Emma Spector

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke (March 21)

The Invisible Kingdom

Chronic illness has been relegated to the margins of public consciousness for far too long, a reality that has only become more painfully stark since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago. Tens of millions of Americans live with chronic, often “invisible” illnesses, and Yale Review editor Meghan O’Rourke’s book is a searing and thoroughly researched exploration of the pain and confusion that many of them go through in their quest to have their health issues taken seriously by the medical establishment—and, often, the world at large. —E.S.

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (March 22)

Disorientation

Taiwanese American writer Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel, Disorientation , however, manages to tell a deeply vital and insightful story about Asian experience and identity in post-Trump America while still being absurdist to the point of IRL laughter. In the book, 29-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang experiences a rupture in her calm, orderly life of writing her dissertation on late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou (and coming home to her doting fiance, Stephen, a white literary translator with a penchant for mansplaining and Japanese-schoolgirl costumes) when she discovers that Chou is—wait for it—a total fiction, a character invented and embodied by one white man and propped up by another. Suddenly, Ingrid is thrust into a world of high-stakes espionage, book burnings, and campus protests and is forced to question the things most fundamental to her, including her field of study, her relationship, her friendships, and her identity as the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants living in the U.S. —E.S.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (April 5)

Young Mungo

Douglas Stuart’s new book bears a good deal of resemblance to his debut, Shuggie Bain , which was published quietly just before the pandemic to limited fanfare and then slowly became one of the most lauded novels of the year. (It was my personal favorite.) Young Mungo (Grove), like Shuggie , is told from the perspective of a young boy growing up in a Glasgow tenement with an alcoholic mother and little prospect of escape. But while Shuggie took the claustrophobia of that scenario and expanded it into a broad and treacherous emotional landscape, Young Mungo allows its protagonist to roam a bit wider, making it a more open and ambitious book. If Shuggie took after the great, detail-laden social realist novels of the late 19th century, Young Mungo feel more rooted in the 21st, with alternating settings, shifting time frames, and divergent plots that eventually converge to calamitous effect. Some early descriptions of the book, perhaps desiring to tamp down the inevitable bleakness of its premise, have emphasized a love affair that crosses religious and sectarian lines (and sheds new light on the divisions that plagued not just the more prominently troubled Ireland of the late 20th century but Scotland as well). And there is sporadic love (romantic and familial) to offer warmth and light within the novel’s terrifying expanse—but this is a book that sucks you into its darkness and makes you feel its profound, beating heart. —C.S.

Little Foxes Took Up Matches by Katya Kazbek (April 5)

Little Foxes Took Up Matches

In  Little Foxes Took Up Matches —a notable debut from the writer, editor, and translator Katya Kazbek—a sense of enchantment animates dreary post-Soviet Moscow, where a beautiful boy named Mitya lives in a crowded apartment on a stately old street. As a baby, Mitya swallowed an embroidery needle—or so he and his family believe—and he’s certain it made him immortal, like the folktale figure Koschei the Deathless; he discovers another kind of deliverance, and no small amount of danger, dressing up in his mother’s clothes, using her makeup, and letting his hair grow long. (He calls this persona Devchonka, or “girl.”) A queer coming-of-age narrative in every sense of the words, Kazbek’s novel is twisty, tragic, and deeply charming—an endearing exploration of the stories we tell and the people we find in order to live. —M.M.

Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong (April 5)

Time Is a Mother

In 2019, mere weeks after publishing his celebrated novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and receiving a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Ocean Vuong’s mother died following a short battle with breast cancer. Yet if the title of Time Is a Mother, Vuong’s second poetry collection, appears to suggest this might be a circumscribed exploration of grief in the aftermath of this event, its approach is unusually wide angle. Stories of personal loss are woven into vignettes and memories that explore the most sweeping of subjects—addiction, racism, war, death, family—through Vuong’s gentle, modest voice and the occasional touch of wry humor. So, too, does he once again prove himself the rare writer in whose hands experiments with form can become a thing of beauty in and of themselves. With On Earth , Vuong used his experience as a poet to reshape the contours of the first-person novel into something more amorphous; here, his experience with prose feeds back into his poetry through cinematic poems like “Künstlerroman” and “Not Even,” where full, novelistic paragraphs are delicately strung together with single-word stanzas, open and closing like concertina windows into the lives of those whose stories they tell. (One of the few more overt tributes to his mother consists simply of an itemized list of her Amazon purchases, before delivering a gut punch in the form of a “warrior mom” breast cancer awareness T-shirt.) After all, despite its technical prowess, the most striking thing about Vuong’s writing will always be its warm, beating heart even in the face of life’s cruelties. The penultimate poem, “Dear Rose,” is written directly to his mother as a kind of sensorial biography of her journey as an immigrant from Vietnam to America—napalm on a schoolhouse, bullets in amber, churning fish sauce, dew-speckled roses—images both dazzling and devastating; in the end she simply leaves “a pink rose blazing in the middle of the hospital.” It’s a body of work as hauntingly beautiful as it is ultimately hopeful, and very possibly Vuong’s best yet. —L.H.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (April 5)

The Candy House

Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House is something of a follow-up to her beloved A Visit From the Goon Squad . Composed of interconnected short pieces (featuring a few of the same characters that populated Goon Squad ), The Candy House is also united by the omnipresence of a sci-fi technology that doesn’t feel quite so far off from our current reality: a widely available memory download device that allows your consciousness (should you so desire) to live in an openly accessible cloud. The Candy House is a book that goes down deceptively easy. The writing is light and buoyant, the characters quite often a rollicking delight—energized by rock and roll; the countercultures of the ’60s and ’70s; high-wire acts of espionage; and technological subterfuge. But when you slow down and begin to parse the web that connects it all, the novel takes on increasing gravity. It’s a dazzling feat of literary construction that belies the profound questions at its core: Does technology aid our sense of narrative or obscure it? —C.S.

Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman (April 12)

Nobody Gets Out Alive

The funny, earthy, and compulsively readable stories in Leigh Newman’s debut collection, Nobody Gets Out Alive (Scribner), are about wildness in all its forms. The author’s home state of Alaska is vividly rendered in its untamed, frontier beauty—but so too are its denizens, who are fierce Alaskans with questionable taste in home decor and hilariously unrefined personalities. Newman, the author of a 2013 memoir, Still Points North (excerpted in Vogue ), which was also set in Alaska, is especially unsentimental on women—on girls kicking free of their fathers (or not); desperate mothers doing the best they can; and, in the prizewinning lead-off story, “Howl Palace,” a mordant widow who is not going gracefully into the good Alaskan night. Newman’s fiction recalls the flinty humor of Annie Proulx, Ann Patchett, and Antonya Nelson—excellent company to be in. —T.A. 

Hello Molly: A Memoir (April 12)

Hello, Molly!

Molly Shannon’s memoir is much more than a celebrity tell-all—it would have to be, since it starts with unimaginable tragedy: When she was four, her mother and baby sister died in a car accident while her father was driving them home from a party at which he’d been drinking. Hello, Molly! is a story of resilience and resourcefulness; her father cycled through various degrees of indulgence and sobriety for most of her life. (There are memorable scenes of him cleaning the house on speed.) But it sidesteps the trappings of addiction-adjacent memoirs, avoiding the easy stereotypes of suffering. Hello, Molly! is about one of the great comic actors of our era finding her footing, but it is also a loving portrait of a deeply unconventional parent, who launched his daughter (literally: when she still was just a child, he dared her to sneak onto a plane, and she succeeded) into the world. —C.S.

Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life by Delia Ephron (April 12)

Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

After the long illness and death of her older sister, Nora, and the long illness and death of her first husband, Jerry, Delia Ephron was stunned—if not entirely surprised—to learn in 2017 that she’d been diagnosed with leukemia. Her engaging, wise, and funny new memoir, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life , chronicles her fierce reckoning with cancer, with grief (“I took the sun setting personally,” she writes of the loneliness of early widowhood), with the life-affirming power of friendship, and, at age 72, with a new love—Peter, a Jungian psychiatrist who wrote Ephron a friendly email after she published an op-ed in the Times about trying to disconnect Jerry’s landline. (Her record of their courtship, conducted initially over email, is as breathlessly romantic as anything she’s put into a screenplay—and this is a woman who co-wrote You’ve Got Mail .) —M.M.

The Trouble With Happiness by Tove Ditlevsen (April 19)

The Trouble with Happiness: And Other Stories

One of the most (posthumously) lauded novelists of recent years, Tove Ditlevsen is known to most as the author of  The Copenhagen Trilogy,  a sprawling three-part memoir that chronicles both her interior life and major events of the 20th century. In this collection, the landscape is more compact, but the insight into human nature is no less poignant: A young girl watches her mother put on a costume, a temporary and tenuous escape threatened by the whims of the father; with calm remove, a woman imagines her married lover’s domestic life, a simmering, suppressed anger providing a more forceful undercurrent; a young pregnant couple looking to buy a house confronts the contraction of another family’s life at the moment they’re expanding theirs. These spare and sparkling stories summon deep wells of emotion without the slightest trace of sentimentality. —C.S.

The Palace Papers by Tina Brown (April 26)

The Palace Papers

Whether or not you will tune in for the much-discussed Season 5 of The Crown , The Palace Papers deserves a read. Tina Brown does not seem to have researched her subjects so much as lived with them: Indeed, her own career as a young journalist, and then an editor (of many magazines, including several owned by Condé Nast) circled the royal family, and so she writes with the kind of familiarity earned through years of fine-tuned observation. There is definite bias here, but it is the kind that only sharpens her depictions; she’s not afraid to let you know which occupants of the royal palaces she thinks are up to snuff and which she thinks should fade into oblivion. In this year of royal transition (as well as entertainment), The Palace Papers is a supremely satisfying read. —C.S.

When We Fell Apart by Soon Wiley (April 26)

When We Fell Apart

A young Korean American man reeling from the recent suicide of his girlfriend sets out to learn more about the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death in this powerful novel that delves unflinchingly into the deeply timely question of what it means to belong to more than one culture. Wiley’s protagonist’s experience of trying to find links between his California upbringing and his adult life in Seoul will resonate with anyone who has ever been asked, “Where are you  really  from?” —E.S.

The Last Days of Roger Federer, and Other Endings by Geoff Dyer (May 3)

The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings

If you’re coming to this book expecting an extended meditation on the late career of the titular tennis legend, you might be—well,  disappointed  isn’t the word, really: The book is dotted with such thoughts throughout. It’s true joy, though, is its buck-wild discursiveness. The entire book is a brooding, a searching, and an investigation—in three parts, each composed of exactly 60 more-or-less brief thoughts, about Dylan, Camus, John Berger, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Redford, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, Chuck Yeager, T.C. Boyle, Scorsese, J.M.W. Turner, Michelangelo, Boris Becker, Browning, Ruskin, the Battle of Britain, and yes, Roger Federer (that’s a wildly incomplete list from just the first 40 pages)—of what it means to come to the end of something: painting, writing, striving, playing, living. If you’ve read Dyer before, you know what you’re in for, and it’s in glorious abundance here: humor, memoir, wit, verve, pathos, and an arsenal of erudition. If this is your first immersion, simply be prepared to chase the wind. —Corey Seymour

Trust by Hernan Diaz (May 3)

What begins as a Henry James–esque chronicle of a Wall Street tycoon’s breathtaking ascent to power at the beginning of the 20th century reveals itself to be so much more in Hernan Diaz’s second novel, Trust: a rip-roaring, razor-sharp dissection of capitalism, class, greed, and the meaning of money itself that also manages to be a dazzling feat of storytelling on its own terms. Trust is a matryoshka doll of a novel, in which the layers peel back to reveal four alternative takes on the same narrative of the financial titan Andrew Bevel and, just as importantly, his wife, Mildred, each as riveting and full of surprises as the next. Its central theme of wealth—what it actually means, who it should belong to, how its relationship with some of the central mythologies of American life developed, and its inextricable linkage with the patriarchy—may feel both important and timely. But the uniquely brilliant way in which Diaz tells that story, as meticulously researched as it is narratively exhilarating, makes it a novel not just for the present age but for the ages. —L.H.

Linea Nigra by Jazmina Barrera (May 3)

Linea Nigra

For those unacquainted with the vocabulary that accompanies the childbearing process, the linea nigra refers to a dark vertical line that can appear to bisect a pregnant person’s abdomen. Essayist Jazmina Barrera takes that physical line and writes about and (metaphorically) beyond it, packing her narrative memoir full of carefully considered and exquisitely worded musings on motherhood. Barrera wrote throughout her first pregnancy and into the beginning of her journey as a mother, and the multilayered, deeply felt work that her life experience and obvious talent have combined to produce is eminently worthy of acclaim. —E.S.

A Hard Place to Leave: Stories From a Restless Life by Marcia DeSanctis (May 3)

A Hard Place to Leave

Longtime  Vogue  contributor Marcia DeSanctis recounts a peripatetic life—and the episodes that were less so. DeSanctis had a career as a tour guide, a TV producer (who worked, among other things, on Eastern European stories after the fall of the Berlin Wall), a cosmopolitan writer who marched to “the city’s incessant, invigorating drumbeat.” And then she moved to the quiet countryside, where she had to come to terms with a sense of herself that wasn’t based on constant movement and the frictions of foreign encounters. The essays in this collection (which include a tale of marital infidelity that made a marriage stronger  originally published in  Vogue ) might be framed as travel writing, but they are just as much stories of self-definition that take place here, there, and everywhere. —C.S. 

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub (May 17)

This Time Tomorrow

Known for her plucky voice and sweetly amusing ensemble comedies, Emma Straub returns with her most emotionally resonant work yet,  This Time Tomorrow.  On the night of her 40th birthday, a newly single and slightly intoxicated Alice drops by her father’s home, located on an Upper West Side alley that time and foot traffic forgot. She passes out and wakes up in 1996, transported back to a moment when her father was still her energetic 40-something roommate, not an ailing 73-year-old whom she faithfully visits at the hospital. Shuttling between her teenage and middle-aged lives, Alice attempts to engineer a new destiny for her father and experiments with a panoply of what-ifs, one of which lands her the guy that got away. All the while, she grapples with the headstrong and heartbreaking nature of time. Beneath the layers of ’90s nostalgia and sci-fi portals to the past lies something even more satisfying: a complicated tale that doesn’t feel the slightest bit complicated. —L.M.

The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker (May 17)

The Cherry Robbers

From the author of 2015 cult hit  Dietland  comes a more-than-worthy sophomore effort that follows Sylvia Wren—formerly known as Iris Chapel—the second youngest in a family of six heiress sisters, all seemingly cursed to live (and die) tragically. When Iris becomes Sylvia, she thinks she’s escaped her ominous familial fate, but has she? When we meet her in New Mexico in 2017, she’s an internationally famous yet reclusive artist ducking the attention of an overzealous journalist determined to track down the story of how Iris became Sylvia. Compelling, no? (Trust us, it is.) —E.S.

The Red Arrow by William Brewer (May 17)

The Red Arrow

Something old is new again in William Brewer’s The Red Arrow , a rollicking bildungsroman meets wellness-through-hallucinogenics debut. Our hero has risen from the sticks of West Virginia to become a penniless painter and writer in New York who lucks into a gorgeous tech-employed fiancée and a hefty book contract. Trouble ensues. The advance is spent, the novel is not written (even as we’re given vivid glimpses of what it could be), and a suicidal depression descends. But our protagonist lucks out again—a ghostwriting gig for a star physicist seems to pull him out of his hole—until more trouble strikes. The Red Arrow is about how to survive a creative life in 21st-century America, and its answer will surprise you. Brewer’s earnest description of psilocybin therapy turns a bravura comic novel into something deeper and stranger: an account of unexpected, hard-won joy. —T.A.

Either/Or by Elif Batuman (May 24)

Elif Batuman’s stupendous  Either/Or  is the hilarious follow-up to the author’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated  The Idiot , which introduced wannabe writer Selin during her first year at Harvard. Now a sophomore, Selin joins the literary magazine, attends campus costume parties, and visits a psychiatrist and Pilates classes, set pieces that dazzle with the author’s deadpan prose and superpowers of observation. “I thought humorlessness was the essence of stupidity,” Selin narrates, and by that metric Batuman is a genius, rendering human folly at its most colorful and borderline surreal. Readers of her essay collection,  The Possessed,  might notice stories that overlap with the author’s own life—and underscore that for lovers of literature, the line between life on and off the page is barely legible. –L.M.

Nevada by Imogen Binnie (June 7)

Originally published by Topside Press in 2013, Binnie’s debut novel—which follows a young, punk-aspiring trans woman who heads west from New York City in her ex-girlfriend’s stolen car, attempting to play the fraught role of role model to a younger, not-yet-out acolyte she meets in Nevada—is a beautiful and occasionally disturbing complication of the oh-so-American trope of the cross-country road trip.  Detransition, Baby  author Torrey Peters is just one of a long list of trans women writers who name Binnie as an influence, and it’s long past time for the cis reader to form a bond with the brilliance of her work. —E.S.

The Lovers by Paolo Cognetti (June 7)

In The Lovers , the celebrated Italian novelist Paolo Cognetti (author of 2018’s prize-winning debut The Eight Mountains ) has crafted a short novel of affecting elegance, set in and around the Italian Alpine town of Fontana Fredda. Our protagonist, Fausto, is a stalled writer who abandons his petit bourgeois life in Milan (and his former fiancée) for a rather more elemental existence in the mountains, where he finds work as a cook and begins an affair with Silvia, an alluring young waitress. There’s also Babette, the restaurant’s owner who “had also come from the city… though who knows when and how she got there,” and a flinty snow-cat driver called Santorso, a man forged—and eventually destroyed—by the wild surrounding landscape. Cognetti’s prose, translated into English by the poet Stash Luczkiw, knowingly calls Hemingway to mind (in one chapter, Fausto remembers teaching “In Another Country”), but the more important influence is Kent Haruf’s Plainsong . Here as there, a small community of simple people seems uncommonly beautiful. —M.M.

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun (June 14)

Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me

It’s a complicated thing, the father-daughter relationship, particularly when the two share a profession. So it’s fitting that Ada Calhoun’s  Also a Poet  is a complicated, difficult-to-encapsulate book: Labeled a memoir, it’s also Calhoun’s attempt to finish a biography of the New York School poet Frank O’Hara abandoned by her father, the longtime  New Yorker  art critic Peter Schjeldahl. The book is composed of unpublished interview transcripts, domestic scenes from her childhood on the Lower East Side (see Calhoun’s masterly  St. Mark’s Is Dead  for an expanded disquisition on the site of her youth), and a sweetly personal reckoning with the anxiety of influence. All this sounds like a pretty heady brew, but Calhoun’s voice is clear and cogent, a winning and personable guide. —C.S.

The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid (August 2)

The Last White Man

An unlikely love story is the warming center of Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man (Riverhead)—unlikely because the novel presents as the kind of cool, elegant fable Hamid has become known for. (His most recent, 2017’s masterful Exit West , used a magical realist trick to lay bare the exigencies of the refugee crisis.) Here, the characters find themselves subjected to a mysterious force that shifts their skin from white to a deep, undeniable brown. At first the change seems to affect only a few, but as it spreads, so do the attendant disruptions and paranoias. The book is obviously about race—Hamid has said that he has been mulling this work for 20 years, ever since the events of September 11 made him acutely aware of his own skin color—but it is also about the burgeoning love and chemistry between its two unabashedly physical main characters, Anders, a trainer at a gym, and Oona, a yoga instructor. Even when corporeal form seems a mysterious and mutable thing, the bond between the two acts as a bulwark against the unpredictability of the world. —C.S.

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews (August 2)

All This Could Be Different

Sarah Thankam Mathews wrote All This Could Be Different (Viking) in the first year of the pandemic, when COVID produced a drastic loss of her income. As founder of the mutual-aid organization Bed-Stuy Strong, she was galvanized by witnessing not only the catastrophes and flaws of ordinary humans but also their glorious capacity. Equal parts incandescent love story and frank explorations of everything from sexuality to work to racism, this debut novel—focused on the struggles of a queer young Indian woman in Milwaukee—evokes the precariousness of life for so many in 21st-century America and the necessity of showing up and breaking free if we truly want all this to be different. —L.W.M.

Amy & Lan by Sadie Jones (August 16)

Amy & Lan

Set deep in the bucolic fields of rural England, Sadie Jones’s new novel, Amy and Lan , charts five years in the lives of the two young children (and best friends) after whom the book is titled. Living in a commune of sorts, the duo are left largely to roam free, aside from the odd bit of fulfilling their duties on the farm, written with a particularly evocative eye for blood and muck. Things go south when entanglements between the adults start to draw their attention, and as Amy and Lan reach their early teenage years, these glimpses of grown-up life become an inescapable reality with devastating consequences. What at first reads as a deeply atmospheric bildungsroman (dung being the operative word here), Amy and Lan quietly builds to a cautionary tale of the good life turned sour. —L.H.

Touch by Olaf Olafsson (August 16)

In the Icelandic author (and erstwhile media executive) Olaf Olafsson’s delicate, absorbing new novel Touch , COVID lockdowns serve as a backdrop to the gentle unfolding of reawakened desire in its lead character, a 75-year-old Icelandic man who sets off on a journey to track down the Japanese woman who was his first great love back in 1960s London. His story begins with an out-of-the-blue Facebook message on the same evening he shutters his restaurant of 20 years, and continues to weave through past and present in an addictive structure of short, unnumbered chapters that also reflect his fraying recollections due to dementia. Really, to call Touch a pandemic novel would be doing it a disservice. With Olafsson’s gorgeous, lyrical writing, it feels weighted with deeper questions about memory, intergenerational trauma, and the enduring forces of love that can bridge decades and cultures—all reaching a denouement as satisfying as it is profoundly moving. —L.H.

The Hundred Waters by Lauren Acampora (August 23)

The Hundred Waters

In The Hundred Waters (Grove), Lauren Acampora’s quietly thrilling latest, a strange drama plays out between one Connecticut family and the 18-year-old son of their new neighbors. While Gabriel Steiger’s righteous anger about the climate crisis rivets 12-year-old Sylvie Rader, who lost a friend to cancer after toxic construction debris were buried in a nearby town, his dark features and compulsive creativity remind Sylvie’s mother, Louisa, of the man she loved before her husband, when she was a young photographer living in New York. The triangle that forms between mother, daughter, and the shifty boy next door is disquieting from the start, but as both relationships tip into disquieting new territory, the Raders’ lush, monied suburb stops feeling quite so staid. —M.M.

A Visible Man: A Memoir by Edward Enninful (September 6)

A Visible Man: A Memoir

Charting Enninful’s earliest days in Ghana to his family’s emigration to London (where they settled under the “soggy skies” and repressive policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain), to his rise to the EIC seat and his wedding—punctuated by an 11th-hour arrival by Rihanna— A Visible Man (Penguin Press) is both a chronicle of a singular life and a universally inspiring portrait of ambition. As Enninful writes in his introduction of his dubious stance toward memoir: “Why look back when you can look forward?” It’s our good fortune that he does both. —Chloe Schama

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv (September 13)

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Combining the cool poise of Janet Malcolm and the confessional bravery of Joan Didion, journalist and New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv challenges the way we think about mental illness in her absorbing debut, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us (FSG). Through half a dozen vivid case studies–one being the story of her own hospitalization at age six—she unravels medical diagnoses and demonstrates how societal narratives around illness take hold. The result is a fascinating and empathetic look at the mysterious ways our minds can fail us. —Taylor Antrim 

Lessons by Ian McEwan (September 13)

Ian McEwan’s new novel Lessons (Knopf) is rangingly ambitious, teasingly autobiographical, and unsettling in the manner of his best work, a story of monstrous behavior set against major tides of the last 70 years. Roland Baines, a kind of spectator to history, is our hero—the product of a quintessentially English boarding school, a frustrated poet, occasional tennis instructor, and better-than-average piano player. The episode that shapes his life occurs in the opening pages, during a piano lesson with Miriam Cornell, a young instructor at Roland’s school. While teaching him Bach, she pinches his bare leg, an act of sexual sadism that leads, eventually, to the real thing in her bed. Roland never quite recovers from this wildly predatory affair (he 14, she 25). And in adulthood, another villain awaits: his first wife, Alissa Baines, who leaves him and their newborn son so that she can pursue a soaring literary career unencumbered. How can a novel populated by such (notably female) cruelty feel so expansively humanist? Roland is both haunted by trauma and able to push away from it, toward love (a second marriage), parenthood, forgiveness, grace. Lessons is a luminous, beautifully written, and oddly gripping book about lives imperfectly lived. —T.A.

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (September 13)

Bliss Montage

We’re in the thick of a dystopian golden age, but the indisputable leader of the pandemic lit pack came out in 2018. Ling Ma’s Severance was half tongue-in-cheek critique of capitalism, half science fiction about a group of New Yorkers fleeing a fatal airborne epidemic believed to have originated in Shenzhen, China. In Bliss Montage (FSG), her panic-slicked and wildly inventive new short story collection, the author continues to mine anxieties particular to our time. The narrator of “Los Angeles” lives with her uncommunicative husband and her 100 ex-boyfriends. “G,” named after the recreational drug that two young women take together in order to become invisible, gives a new spin to the notion of “ghosting.” The awful term “geriatric pregnancy” becomes a literal horror story in “Tomorrow,” whose protagonist must conceal the arm that is developing on the outside of her body—a common aspect of high-risk pregnancies, her doctor crisply informs her. These eight tales don’t build up to traditional climaxes, but the tension between the familiar and the unfathomable pulses on every page. —Lauren Mechling

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout (September 20)

Lucy by the Sea

Elizabeth Strout has kept her readers well acquainted with the doings of Lucy Barton, a bestselling writer (like Strout herself) from a devastatingly poor background, twice married and now a widow with two adult daughters, who in last year’s diverting novel Oh, William forged a kind of chummy detente with her first husband, William, as he discovered a hidden past. In Strout’s poised and moving Lucy by the Sea (Random House), Lucy and William are fleeing Manhattan in the face of COVID and setting up a lockdown life in Maine. It is only in the steady hands of Strout, whose prose has an uncanny, plainspoken elegance, that you will want to relive those early months of wiping down groceries and social isolation. Here, the Maine landscape is gorgeously rendered in its COVID hush, and Strout balances the tension of viral spread with the complex minuet of Lucy and William coming to terms with their resentments and enduring love. This is a slim, beautifully controlled book that bursts with emotion. —T.A.

Stay True by Hua Hsu (September 27)  

Hua Hsu’s steady, searching memoir, Stay True (Doubleday), brings a certain 1990s collegiate persona into clarion focus: the undergraduate who is highly cultivated in his interests (Pavement yes, Pearl Jam no; cigarettes yes, alcohol no; indie films yes, fraternity parties no), a young Gen Xer studiedly indifferent to mainstream culture, and rigorously obsessed with what’s cool. As an undergrad at Berkeley, Hsu was this person to a T and his memoir digs, in a lovely, low-key way beneath the surface of the pose. Hsu’s Taiwanese parents immigrated to the U.S. and harbored a kind of poignant enthusiasm for their new lives–especially his father who was interested in his son’s thoughts about everything and anything. Hsu is an intellectual slacker who studies rhetoric and political science, but is outwardly bored by most everything, a creator of Zines and a cultivator of misfit friends. One friend, named Ken, bucks the trend. Ken is handsome, into Dave Matthews, and likes (the horror!) swing dancing. Hua has a curious bond with him in spite of all that and then when Ken is killed in horrific circumstances, Hsu is unmoored. A moving portrait of a persona undone by tragedy. –T. A.

Foster by Claire Keegan (November 1)

In Claire Keegan’s Foster (Grove) , first published by The New Yorker as a short story in 2010 and now expanded to a novella, the Irish writer traces the journey of a nameless girl who is palmed off to distant relatives in a bucolic corner of rural County Wexford for a summer while her poverty-stricken, neglectful parents prepare for the birth of their next child. What unspools from there is a deceptively complex coming-of-age tale, both intimate and richly expansive, as the girl’s foster family provides her with the room and space to blossom, before a heartbreaking secret threatens to shatter her newfound idyll. Balancing Keegan’s delicate, sparing prose and masterful ear for dialogue with a tale that is almost overwhelming in its tenderness, Foster is a heart-wrenching treasure of a book that only serves to confirm Keegan’s place as one of contemporary Irish literature’s leading lights. —Liam Hess

Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono (November 1)

Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

Bono’s deeply personal memoir chronicles his earliest memories, the formation of his band, the meeting of his wife when he was still a teen (he joined the band the same week that he first asked her to go out with him). The book is also about his father, a figure that loomed over him, especially after the early death of his mother, with almost comic nonchalance regarding his son’s epically blossoming career. (It took a meeting with Princess Di, arranged by his son, to truly ruffle him.) It is about Ireland, the legacy of the violence that raged through much of the 20th century, and Africa, and also the promise of America. It is not a short or compact book. But do you want that from the man behind some of the most stirring and soaring ballads of all time? Sink into your plush chair of choice with this one in your lap and the stereo blasting. —C.S.

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The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2022

Merve emre on gerald murnane, casey cep on harry crews, maggie doherty on cormac mccarthy, and more.

Way back in the mid-aughts when I first started writing about books, pitching a print publication was the only reliable way for book critics to get paid, and third-person point of view was all the vogue. Much has changed in the years since: Newspaper and magazine book sections have shuttered, many digital outlets offer compensation when they can, and first-person criticism has become much more pervasive.

I don’t celebrate all these changes, but I’m certain of one thing in particular: I love book reviews and critical essays written in the first-person. Done well, they are generous invitations into the lives of critics—and into their memory palaces. With that in mind, most of my picks for the best book reviews of 2022 were written in the first person this year.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

Adam Dalva on Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story , translated by Joel Rotenberg ( Los Angeles Review of Books )

Dalva’s review of Chess Story is a great example of the power of a first-person point of view—he doesn’t just examine the book, he narrates his own journey to understand it.

“In my own quest to understand Chess Story, I gradually realized that I would have to learn the game it centers on. And that has led me into a second obsession, much more problematic: I have fallen passionately in love with online bullet chess.”

Merve Emre on Gerald Murnane’s Last Letter to a Reader ( The New Yorker )

Merve Emre’s analysis of Gerald Murnane’s final book is a beautiful piece of writing. I love how she opens on a note of suspense, pulling you into a story you can’t stop reading.

“On most evenings this past spring, the man who lives across the street sat at his small desk, turned on the lamp, and began to write as the light faded. The white curtains in his room were seldom drawn. From where I sat, I had a clear view of him, and he, were he to look up from his writing, would have had a clear view of a house across the street, where a woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion was seated by a window, watching him write. At the moment he glanced up from his page, the woman supposed him to be contemplating the look, or perhaps the sound, of the sentence he had just written. The sentence was this: ‘Since then I have tried to avoid those rooms that grow steadily more crowded with works to explain away Time.’”

Minyoung Lee on Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family ( Chicago Review of Books )

Lee brings her own experience to bear in this insightful review of a novel about Korean Americans in the diaspora. (Disclosure: I founded the Chicago Review of Books in 2016, but stepped back from an editorial role in 2019.)

“In diaspora communities, it’s not uncommon to find cultural practices from the homeland, even after they’ve become unpopular or forgotten there. This is colloquially referred to as ‘the immigrant time capsule effect.’ It can be experienced in many of the ethnic enclaves in the U.S. My first impression of Los Angeles’ Koreatown when I visited in the 2010s, for example, was that it felt very much like Seoul in the 1980s. Grocery stores were even selling canned grape drinks that were popular when I was a child but that I haven’t seen since.”

Chelsea Leu on Thuận’s Chinatown , translated by Nguyen An Lý ( Astra )

Astra magazine’s “ bangers only ” editorial policy led to some spectacular reviews, like this Chelsea Leu number that opens with a fascinating linguistics lesson.

“It was in high school Latin that I learned that language could have moods, and that one of those moods was the subjunctive. We use the indicative mood for statements of fact, but the subjunctive (which barely exists in English anymore) expresses possibilities, wishes, hopes and fears: ‘I wouldn’t trust those Greeks bearing gifts if I were you.’ More recently, I’ve learned there exists a whole class of moods called irrealis moods, of which the subjunctive is merely one flavor. André Aciman’s recent essay collection, Homo Irrealis, is entirely dedicated to these moods, celebrating the fact that they express sentiments that fly in the face of settled reality.”

Casey Cep on Harry Crews’ A Childhood: The Biography of a Place ( The New Yorker )

Cep is a magician when it comes to capturing a sense of place, as evidenced by her book about Harper Lee, Furious Hours , and this review of a book about another Southern writer, Harry Crews.

“Dehairing a shoat is the sort of thing Crews knew all about, along with cooking possum, cleaning a rooster’s craw, making moonshine, trapping birds, tanning hides, and getting rid of screwworms. Although he lived until 2012, Crews and his books—sixteen novels, two essay collections, and a memoir—recall a bygone era. The best of what he wrote evokes W.P.A. guides or Foxfire books, full of gripping folklore and hardscrabble lives, stories from the back of beyond about a time when the world seemed black and white in all possible senses.”

Victoria Chang and Dean Rader on Roger Reeves’ Best Barbarian ( Los Angeles Review of Books )

Last year I professed my love for “reviews in dialogue” between two critics, and Chang and Rader continue to be masters of the form in this conversation about Roger Reeves’ second poetry collection.

“Victoria: Do you have thoughts on the flow of the poems or allusions? I have a feeling you will talk about the biblical references. But I’m most curious to hear what you have to say about the purpose of the allusions and references. Is the speaker agreeing with them, subverting them, both? Is the speaker using them as a way to press against or think against, or toward? I know you will say something smart and insightful.”

“Dean: That is a lot of pressure. I’ll try not to let you down.”

Maggie Doherty on Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris ( The New Republic )

I didn’t think anyone could persuade me to read another Cormac McCarthy novel after The Road, but Maggie Doherty makes every book sound fascinating by making it part of a bigger, true story.

“Such is the paradox of The Passenger , a novel at once highly attuned to the pleasures of collective life and resistant to the very idea of it. Unlike the violent, stylized books for which McCarthy is best known, this new novel is loose, warm, colloquial. It explores the sustaining, if impermanent, bonds formed among male friends. It’s full of theories and anecdotes, memories and stories, all voiced by some of the liveliest characters McCarthy has ever crafted. The Passenger is McCarthy’s first novel in over 15 years; its coda, S tella Maris , is published in December. Together, the books represent a new, perhaps final direction for McCarthy. The Passenger in particular is McCarthy’s most peopled novel, his most polyphonic—and it’s wonderfully entertaining, in a way that few of his previous books have been. It is also his loneliest novel yet.”

Allison Bulger on Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria , translated by Max Lawton ( Words Without Borders )

I’m always interested in how critics find new ways to start a review, and Bulger’s opening lines here are a particularly sharp hook.

“Of all the jobs esteemed translator Larissa Volokhonsky has rejected, only one text was physically removed from her apartment on the Villa Poirier in Paris.

‘Take it back,’ she said. ‘Rid me of its presence.’

“The cursed title was Blue Lard (1999) by Vladimir Sorokin, known to some as Russia’s De Sade, and Volokhonsky’s revulsion was par for the course. It would be twenty years before another translator, Max Lawton, would provide eight Sorokin works unseen in the West, including Blue Lard , in which a clone of Khrushchev sodomizes a clone of Stalin.”

Summer Farah on Solmaz Sharif’s Customs ( Cleveland Review of Books )

Farah’s nuanced review of Solmaz Sharif’s new poetry collection further illustrates the potency of a first-person voice.

“Our poets write of our martyrs and resist alongside them; sometimes, I wonder, what life will be like after we are free, and what a truly free Palestine looks like. Last spring, the hashtag “#غرد_كأنها_حرة” circulated on Twitter, a collection of Palestinians imagining life as if our land was free; people imagined themselves moving from Akka to Ramallah with ease, returning to their homes their grandparents left in 1948, and traveling across the Levant without the obstacle of borders. This stanza acknowledges there is more work to be done than just ridding ourselves of the obvious systems that oppress us; decolonization and anti-imperial work are more holistic than we know. Sharif’s work is about attunement to the ways imperialism is ingrained into our lives, our speech, our poetry; this moment is direct in that acknowledgement.”

Nicole LeFebvre on Dorthe Nors’ A Line in the World ( On the Seawall )

LeFebvre opens this review like she’s writing a memoir or a personal essay—an unexpected joy that would be very hard to do in third-person.

“Each morning when I wake up, I hear the gentle crash and lull of waves on a beach. ‘Gather, scatter,’ as Dorthe Nors describes the sound. My eyes open and blink, adjusting to the dark. The sun’s not up yet. I scoot back into my partner’s body, kept asleep by the rhythmic thrum of the white noise machine, which covers the cars idling in the 7-Eleven parking lot, the motorcyclists showing off their scary-high speeds. For a few minutes, I accept the illusion of a calmer, quiet life. ‘Gather, scatter.’ A life by the sea.”

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Book reviews: 47 of the best novels of 2022

New releases include The Singularities by John Banville and Saha by Cho Nam-Joo

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1. The Singularities by John Banville

2. saha by cho nam-joo (trans. jamie chang), 3. bournville by jonathan coe.

• 4. Molly & the Captain by Anthony Quinn

5. Darling by India Knight

6. the passenger by cormac mccarthy, 7. demon copperhead by barbara kingsolver, 8. liberation day by george saunders, 9. lucy by the sea by elizabeth strout, 10. the romantic by william boyd, 11. the marriage portrait by maggie o’farrell, 12. carrie soto is back by taylor jenkins reid, 13. lessons by ian mcewan, 14. the ink black heart by robert galbraith, 15. haven by emma donoghue, 16. trust by hernan diaz, 17. the last white man by mohsin hamid, 18. a hunger by ross raisin, 19. acts of service by lillian fishman, 20. the twilight world by werner herzog, 21. the exhibitionist by charlotte mendelson, 22. vladimir by julia may jonas, 23. to paradise by hanya yanagihara, 24. joan by katherine j. chen, 25. the house of fortune by jessie burton, 26. the seaplane on final approach by rebecca rukeyser, 27. the young accomplice by benjamin wood, 28. the sidekick by benjamin markovits, 29. nonfiction: a novel by julie myerson, 30. you have a friend in 10a by maggie shipstead, 31. very cold people by sarah manguso, 32. trespasses by louise kennedy, 33. elizabeth finch by julian barnes, 34. the candy house by jennifer egan, 35. companion piece by ali smith, 36. young mungo by douglas stuart, 37. sell us the rope by stephen may, 38. french braid by anne tyler, 39. good intentions by kasim ali, 40. the school for good mothers by jessamine chan, 41. pure colour by sheila heti, 42. a previous life by edmund white, 43. a class of their own by matt knott, 44. our country friends by gary shteyngart, 45. scary monsters by michelle de kretser, 46. free love by tessa hadley, 47. the fell by sarah moss.

As the author of three trilogies, John Banville is “no stranger to using recurring characters”, said Ian Critchley in Literary Review . But The Singularities takes this to extremes: so stuffed is it with “old Banville protagonists” that it is close to being a “literary greatest-hits collection”. The setting is Arden House – the crumbling Irish country house from Banville’s 2009 work The Infinities . Various characters from that work are joined by William Jaybey (from The Newton Letter ) and Freddie Montgomery (from The Book of Evidence ), among others. One doesn’t begrudge Banville his “game with his readers”: The Singularities is a “pleasure to read”.

With its “assembly of characters” and country house setting, this novel seems to have the “makings of a whodunnit”, said Tom Ball in The Times . But “no one dies”, or even falls out; and, in fact, little of consequence happens. Fortunately, “you don’t read Banville for his taut plots”. You read him because, every few pages, there’s a sentence “so perfectly contrived it stops you for a moment, achingly, like a beautiful stranger passing in the street”.

Knopf 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

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The South Korean writer Cho Nam-Joo is best known for her 2016 novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 , said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The i Paper . A story of “everyday sexism”, it sold more than a million copies in South Korea and sparked a national conversation about the status of women. Cho’s latest novel, Saha , is “just as political” – though this time the focus is on class. Set in a dystopian future, the novel follows a disparate group of characters who live in some dilapidated buildings on the outskirts of “Town”, a fiercely hierarchical “privatised city-nation” where all aspects of life are tightly controlled. Offering a powerful critique of “plutocracy, systemic inequality” and “gendered violence”, the novel is “utterly captivating”.

Cho’s dystopia is “not particularly original”, and her plotting can be “surprisingly loose”, said Mia Levitin in The Daily Telegraph . But the novel’s characterisation is “touching” – and its themes are certainly powerful. At a time of rising global inequality – South Korea’s economy is dominated by “mega-corporations” – this is a book that “resonates widely”.

Scribner 240pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state-of-the-nation novel,” said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman . But one who can is Jonathan Coe. His latest charts 75 years of British history, following the lives of a single family, headed by matriarch Mary Lamb, who live on the outskirts of Birmingham, near the Bournville factory. Coe covers so much ground in just 350 pages by alighting only on key moments: VE Day in 1945; the Queen’s coronation; the 1966 World Cup; the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The result is a “piercing” satire on Englishness that is “designed to make you think by making you laugh”. This is a warm and comforting book, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times – like a “mug of hot chocolate”.

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The final section, set during Covid-19, is very moving, said J.S. Barnes in Literary Review . But much of this novel is “flat and formulaic”. The use of hindsight is clunky: when Mary visits The Mousetrap in 1953, she thinks: “I imagine it will be closing before very long.” It feels like a “procession through well-worn territory”, rather than something designed to “excite or entertain”.

Viking 368pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

4. Molly & the Captain by Anthony Quinn

Anthony Quinn is a “fine prose stylist, able to evoke the past with vivid immediacy”, said Alex Preston in The Observer . His ninth novel is a sweeping epic that consists of three interlinked sections. In the 1780s, Laura Merrymount – daughter of the Gainsborough-esque portraitist William Merrymount – strives to escape from her father’s shadow and become a painter herself. In Chelsea a century later, we meet the young artist Paul Stransom and his sister Maggie – who abandoned her own dreams of becoming an artist to care for their dying mother. And finally, in 1980s Kentish Town another artist, Nell Cantrip, suddenly acquires late-career fame. Marked by its “intricate”, immaculate plotting, this novel is a “rollicking read”.

I found the plotting a bit predictable, and the characterisation heavy-handed, said Imogen Hermes Gowar in The Guardian . But the book has interesting things to say “about women’s work and talent, and the life cycle of art”; and it is deftly put together by a writer who delights in the “granular details of an era”, while also understanding its broad sweep.

Abacus 432pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

India Knight’s new book is a “contemporary reimagining” of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love , said Christina Patterson in The Sunday Times . Updating “such a beloved novel” certainly isn’t easy – but Knight has pulled off the task with aplomb. In her version, the four Radlett children – Linda, Louisa, Jassy and Robin – are not the progeny of an English lord, but of an ageing and reclusive rock star. Desperate to protect his children from “modern life”, he has purchased a “vast Norfolk estate” – and it’s there that we first encounter Linda and her siblings, through the eyes of their cousin Franny. The narrative tracks their passage to adulthood, and their romantic entanglements – centred on “Linda’s pursuit of love”.

Darling works because, as in Mitford’s original, the details are so “bang on”, said Emma Beddington in The Spectator . Sometimes, Knight artfully tweaks them: she replaces hunting with swimming, and gives her adult characters jobs (Linda runs a café in Dalston). Mitford “diehards can rest easy: your blood vessels are safe with this faithful, fiercely funny homage”.

Fig Tree 288pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Cormac McCarthy’s first novel in 16 years explores “the very boundaries of human understanding”, said Nicholas Mancusi in Time . Investigating a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico, diver Bobby Western discovers that one passenger is missing; soon he is being harassed by government agents. But the pretence that this is a thriller doesn’t last long: chapters in which Bobby discusses the meaning of life alternate with ones in which his maths genius sister Alice experiences schizophrenic hallucinations. It’s a deeply weird book, held together by “chuckle-out-loud” humour. A companion novel, Stella Maris , focusing on Alice, does little to explain it – but together they are “staggering”.

Sorry, said James Walton in The Times , but I can’t remember a recent novel so wildly indifferent to what its readers might enjoy, or even understand. The conversations that make up the bulk of it, ranging from nuclear physics to Kennedy’s assassination, are a complete ragbag. McCarthy’s gift for description and dialogue remains undiminished, but there’s no escaping the sense that The Passenger is “a big old mess”.

Picador 400pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel is a retelling of David Copperfield , transposed to the “valleys of southwest Virginia at the height of America’s opioid crisis”, said James Riding in The Times . Demon Copperhead, the “rambunctious hero”, is “born in a trailer to a teenage single mother”, and grows up in a world of neglectful child protection services and dubious guardians. The characters are all recognisable from the Dickens novel – but appear in new guises: “Steerforth becomes Fast Forward, a pill-popping quarterback; Uriah Heep is U-Haul, a football coach’s errand boy”. Daring and entertaining, Demon Copperhead is “shockingly successful” – “like Dickens directed by the Coen brothers”.

It’s a promising premise, not least because in its extreme inequality, post-industrial America resembles Victorian England, said Jessa Crispin in The Daily Telegraph . Yet while Kingsolver closely cleaves to the story of the original, she “breaks the most important rule of working in the Dickensian mode”: the need to “show the reader a good time”. Hers is a retelling “beset by earnestness” – and as a result it falls flat.

Faber 560pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Besides being a Booker Prize winner with his only novel, Lincoln in the Bardo , George Saunders is “routinely hailed as the world’s best short story writer”, said James Walton in The Daily Telegraph . The American’s dazzling new collection – his first since 2013’s Tenth of December – shows why he garners such acclaim. As is customary in a Saunders collection, quite a few of the tales are “deeply strange”: in the title story, three people are kept permanently “pinioned to a wall”, enacting scenes from American history; another story is set in a theme park that has never received any visitors. Around half the tales, however, explore “recognisable social and political dilemmas”: two employees clashing at work; a mother’s despair about the state of America after her son is pushed over by a tramp. And whether Saunders is engaging with contemporary reality, or “taking us somewhere else entirely”, he never forgets that the most important duty of a writer is to make his work “winningly readable”.

Tenth of December was a “marvellous” collection, but unfortunately Liberation Day doesn’t hit the same heights, said Charles Finch in the Los Angeles Times . Although “the standard of Saunders’ writing remains astronomically high”, there are times here when he seems almost on auto-pilot, reprising themes and situations he has previously explored. It’s true that if you’ve read Saunders before, then parts of Liberation Day will sound “like self-parody”, said John Self in The Times . But then again, “it’s churlish to knock a true original for repeating himself”. When he’s at his best, Saunders’ “oblique, farcical, tragic” view of the world still has the ability to “take the top of your head off”.

Bloomsbury 256pp £18.99; The Week bookshop £14.99

“Elizabeth Strout is writing masterpieces at a pace you might not suspect from their spaciousness and steady beauty,” said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian . Lucy by the Sea is the third sequel to her acclaimed bestseller My Name is Lucy Barton . It takes place early during the pandemic, when Lucy and her ex-husband, William, leave New York for a friend’s empty beach house in Maine – for “just a few weeks”, he says. It is “a study of a later-life reunion between a man and woman who married in their 20s”. It isn’t “a tender tale”, as William isn’t an easy man to like, but it is “as fine a pandemic novel as one could hope for”.

Over the course of three Lucy Barton books, Strout has “created one of the most quizzical characters in modern fiction”, said Claire Allfree in The Times . Still, even this “avid fan” found herself wondering whether this instalment is “surplus to requirements”. This, sadly, is a novel that “mistakes simplistic observation for subtle insight, bathos for pathos”, and Lucy herself is “downright annoying”. I disagree entirely, said Julie Myerson in The Observer . Lucy by the Sea is a wonderful evocation of lockdown life. It is “her most nuanced – and intensely moving – Lucy Barton novel yet”.

Viking 304pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

William Boyd’s 17th novel – his first set in the 19th century – is an “old-fashioned bildungsroman” that follows its “hero, Cashel Greville Ross, through a long and peripatetic life”, said Lucy Atkins in The Sunday Times .

After growing up in Ireland and Oxford, Cashel “impulsively joins the army” and finds himself “facing the French bayonets at the Battle of Waterloo”. He subsequently “hangs out” with Byron and Shelley in Italy, spends time in east India and New England, and becomes an opium addict, an author and a diplomat. Although the authorial winks can be groan-inducing – “Shelley can barely swim”, a friend of the poet declares – it is a “masterclass” in narrative construction and its ending is “genuinely poignant”.

Boyd is “as magically readable as ever”, said Jake Kerridge in The Daily Telegraph . But amid the non-stop action and “endless verbal anachronisms”, Cashel never quite emerges as a fully rounded character. Compared with Boyd’s previous “whole life novels”, such as Any Human Heart and Sweet Caress , The Romantic feels “glaringly synthetic”.

Viking 464pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Maggie O’Farrell’s last novel, the brilliant Hamnet , “fleshed out” the lives of Shakespeare’s children, said Elizabeth Lowry in The Daily Telegraph . Her latest brings another neglected historical figure into the light – the noblewoman Lucrezia de’ Medici. In 1560, a 16-year-old Lucrezia left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso d’Este, heir to the Duke of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio. “Within a year, she was dead”; it was rumoured Alfonso had killed her. Taking these “suggestive details” as inspiration (as Robert Browning did in his famous poem My Last Duchess ), O’Farrell “constructs a convincing human drama”.

O’Farrell is a master of visual description, said Claire Allfree in The Times . A tiger moves “like honey dripping from a spoon”; through a window, the sound of sobbing drifts upwards “like smoke”. Yet the “headily perfumed” prose proves oddly dulling: rather than “springing forth messily alive”, Lucrezia seems “trapped beneath the weight” of the “relentless” description. Although it sets out to bring Lucrezia back to life, it ends up being a “bloodless book”.

Tinder Press 438pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

Taylor Jenkins Reid is a TikTok phenomenon, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph . Thanks in part to BookTok – the social media app’s books community – her novels about glamorous women finding fame and fortune have sold in their millions. Continuing with that “winning strategy”, her latest centres on a “hotshot American tennis pro”.

Carrie Soto is a former world No. 1, who has won a record 20 grand slams. Now in her late 30s, she mounts an “unlikely comeback”, prompted by the emergence of a new star, Londoner Nicki Chan. This is a “compulsive, soapy page-turner” with “more substance than the average beach read”. In short, it’s an “ace” of an “escapist romp”.

Jenkins Reid has a “nose for a cultural moment”, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times . And so this book’s appearance so soon after the retirement of Serena Williams – clearly an inspiration for Carrie – is “coincidental but not surprising”. Don’t expect “psychological depth”; “fundamentally, this is a sports story”, with whole chapters devoted to single matches. But it’s certainly very “fun to read”.

Hutchinson Heinemann 384pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Ian McEwan’s novels are often “lean, controlled enquiries” into specific historical moments, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The New Statesman : 1950s Germany in The Innocent ; the Thatcherite 1980s in A Child in Time . But his 18th is very different – “baggier and more protean” than any of its predecessors. It’s also, “to my mind, McEwan’s best novel in 20 years”. His protagonist, Roland Baines, is a baby boomer who bears a strong resemblance to his creator, were his creator “not a hugely successful novelist”. Roland spends his childhood in Libya, then “attends a state-run boarding school” in England. And like McEwan, he discovers as an adult that he has a long-lost brother. Yet his life is notable for its lack of direction: he “scratches out a living as a hotel lounge pianist, an occasional tennis coach and a hack”. Humble and wise, Lessons is “an intimate but sprawling story about an ordinary man’s reckoning with existence”.

As is often the case for McEwan’s protagonists, Roland’s life “hinges” on a single traumatic episode, said Edmund Gordon in the TLS . Aged 14, he begins an affair with his piano teacher, Miss Cornell – a relationship which, while he “isn’t exactly a reluctant participant”, nonetheless wounds him. A second trauma follows in his 30s, when Roland’s German-born wife, Alissa, abandons him and their baby son to pursue her ambition of becoming a novelist, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . While Roland is left a single parent, Alissa – somewhat implausibly – becomes “Germany’s greatest writer”. As the decades pass, the “social and domestic cavalcade of Roland’s life” plays out against the backdrop of “momentous global happenings” – from 9/11 to the Covid lockdowns. A “vividly detailed lifetime chronicle”, Lessons is a “tour de force”.

Yet it has its problems, said Claire Lowdon in The Spectator . This is a novel full of dropped storylines and non sequiturs, and McEwan can’t resist those “overbearing news bulletins” that have peppered his recent work (“The Profumo affair was only a year away” etc.). Still, Lessons is consistently enjoyable, and there’s something to be said for the “novelty” of reading a McEwan novel that feels more like “a Jonathan Franzen”. At the age of 74, his desire to try new things is impressive. “Despite the rambling and the rushed patches, here is a whole, unruly life between the covers of a single book: a literary feat of undeniable majesty.”

Cape 496pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

This new crime novel by J.K. Rowling, using her Robert Galbraith pseudonym, has Cormoran Strike, her Afghan-War-veteran-turned-private detective, getting to grips with the world of online trolls, said Joan Smith in The Sunday Times .

Strike and his partner Robin are called to investigate the stabbing to death of a woman named Edie. She was the co-creator of a YouTube cartoon featuring “ghoulish” characters cavorting in a cemetery, and the finger of suspicion falls on a gamer known as “Anomie”, who had subjected Edie to a “torrent of lurid accusation” after claiming that she’d ripped off his ideas.

While the novel works as a “superlative piece of crime fiction”, its subject matter also feels highly pointed: Rowling has herself faced accusations of plagiarism, and she has been subjected to savage online abuse for arguing that aspects of trans ideology lead to the “erasure of the word ‘woman’”.

Sphere 1,024pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is set in early 7th century Ireland, and centres on a trio of monks who build a monastic community on a tiny island, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . The men set out in their “precarious boat” after their leader Artt – a “legendary holy man” – has a “vision of an island in the western sea”. When they reach a “large rock” covered in “birds, guano and little else”, Artt is convinced it’s the place from his dream – and resolves that he and his companions will never leave. Haven may sound like a work that “few readers have been praying for”, but it proves “transporting, sometimes unsettling and eventually shocking”.

There are some “striking formal similarities” between this novel and Donoghue’s 2010 bestseller Room , inspired by the Josef Fritzl case, said Paraic O’Donnell in The Guardian . Both are works of “radical minimalism”, about people who “struggle to preserve their humanity in utter isolation”. Although Haven is “created in a muted palette”, this is a work of impressive “narrative sustenance” – and is “crowded with quietly beautiful details”.

Picador 272pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated first novel, In the Distance, centred on a “penniless young Swedish immigrant” in California, said Jonathan Lee in The Guardian . His second concerns a “character at the other end of the economic scale” – a “Gatsby-like tycoon in 1920s New York” named Andrew Bevel. Rather than tell Bevel’s story straight, Diaz embeds it in four “interconnected narratives”: a fictionalised novel based on Bevel’s life; Bevel’s unfinished autobiography; a memoir by his ghostwriter; and fragments from his wife’s “long-withheld diary”. It sounds tricksy, but it’s surprisingly readable – like a “brilliantly twisted mix” of Borges and J.M. Coetzee, with “a dash” of Italo Calvino.

The “knotty ingenuity” of this novel makes it deserving of its place on this year’s Booker longlist, said Lucy Scholes in The Daily Telegraph . It is “destined to be known as one of the great puzzle-box novels”. I doubt that, said John Self in The Times . Parts are “original and surprising”, but overall it’s “well behaved and dull”, and consumed by its own cleverness. Like the tycoon at its centre, it’s “all smart, no heart”.

Picador 416pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel begins with a transformation, said Alex Preston in The Observer : Anders wakes up one morning to find his skin has changed from white to black. This metamorphosis is not explained; instead, the focus is on its impact on the people around Anders. When he goes out, he feels “vaguely menaced”; his boss tells him he’d have killed himself had it happened to him. But then Anders finds that similar transfor­mations are taking place across the US, until eventually there is “just one white man left”. Written in “incantatory” sentences, The Last White Man is a “strange, beautiful allegorical tale”.

Mysterious transformations can be “fertile terrain” for fiction, said Houman Barekat in The Times : one thinks, most obviously, of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. But while that work resists easy interpretation, Hamid’s aims are all too obvious: this is “yet another liberal parable” about the “psychic underpinnings of racial prejudice”. Ultimately, it’s a book that says more about the “publishing industry’s anxious scrabble for topicality” than about “the human condition”.

Hamish Hamilton 192pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

Most books billed as telling us “what it means to be human” really do no such thing, said John Self in The Observer . Ross Raisin’s A Hunger is an exception. The tale of a London “sous chef in her mid-50s”, this is the fourth novel by this talented writer – and it is his most “ambitious” yet, encompassing “work and family, desires and appetites, responsibility and identity”.

Raisin has always excelled at portraying working lives, said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian : Waterline , his second novel, centred on a Clyde shipbuilder; A Natural , his third, was about a lower league footballer. Here, he captures the rhythms of kitchen life so skilfully that it “makes one realise the degree to which work is still under-charted territory in literary fiction”. Yet the novel is about much more than cooking: Patrick, Anita’s husband of 30 years, has recently developed early-onset dementia, forcing her to combine the stresses of her job with a new role as a carer “changing incontinence pads”. The result is a “deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy” novel about the “conflicting demands of work and care”.

I wasn’t impressed, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . Although Raisin’s gifts for “startling descriptive prose” are evident – notably in a bravura opening set in a walk-in fridge – the novel overall is let down by “wooden dialogue”, characters who don’t seem real, and a clumsy structure in which Anita’s present-day travails are juxtaposed with “rushed and skimpy” scenes from her early life. It may not be perfect, but this is a deft exploration of “the guilt that accompanies female ambition”, said Amber Medland in the FT . Daring in what it sets out to achieve, A Hunger is equally “impressive in its execution”.

Jonathan Cape 464pp £18.99; The Week bookshop £14.99

Lillian Fishman’s debut is one of the most “searching and enthralling” novels about sex I’ve read in years, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The New Statesman . “Eve is a 28-year-old barista from Brooklyn in a long-term relationship with Romi, a paediatrician.” Although Eve considers herself a lesbian, she has fantasies about sleeping with a “wild number of people”. When she posts nude pictures of herself online, they catch the attention of an artist called Olivia – who proves to be acting on behalf of a “tall, wealthy man in his 30s” named Nathan, who makes Eve his sexual “toy”. “Part erotic Bildungsroman, part melancholy comedy of manners”, Acts of Service is “startlingly accomplished”.

Well, I found it thoroughly tedious, said Jessa Crispin in The Times – less a novel than a crude allegory. Nathan is “basically Christian Grey from Fifty Shades rendered in marginally better prose”. Fishman’s reflections on the corrupting effects of “patriarchy” and “capitalism” have been far better expressed elsewhere. Overhyped and unoriginal, this is a disappointing addition to the “library of endless want”.

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For 29 years after the end of the Second World War, a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda held out on a small island in the Philippines, believing his comrades were still fighting, said Anthony Gardner in The Mail on Sunday . Now the great film director Werner Herzog, who befriended Onoda in 1997, has written an imaginative reconstruction of his experiences. Steeped in the atmosphere of the jungle, it’s an “enthralling” novel that explores the nature of time and warfare with great mastery.

Onoda’s single-minded intransigence makes him an archetypal Herzog hero, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , and this “Hemingwayesque” novella is highly cinematic, with short chapters and vivid scene-setting. But its refined prose gives it a sculptural quality too: its descriptions of the natural world are radiant. Herzog manages to inhabit the soldier’s mind, and to create a “visionary” narrative, said Peter Carty in The i Paper. Moral issues – Onoda killed a number of islanders – are somewhat sidelined, but this beautifully crafted book is a “literary jewel” nevertheless.

Bodley Head 144pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Charlotte Mendelson’s “riotous, prize-winning novels” tend to be about messy, dysfunctional families, said Leyla Sanai in The Spectator . Her fifth centres on a “monstrous” artist named Ray Hanrahan and his downtrodden wife, Lucia. Narcissistic, abusive and controlling, Ray has “quashed” Lucia’s own artistic ambitions for decades, forcing her to minister to his needs and look after their (now grown-up) children.

With an “ostentatious private view” of his work about to open, he has summoned friends and family to their north London house. The result is a “glorious ride” of a novel – one in which “Mendelson observes the minutiae of human behaviour like a comic anthropologist”.

There is a lot going on in this novel – “at times, too much” – but the overall “effect is exhilarating”, said Susie Mesure in The Times . Moving between perspectives, Mendelson cranks the drama up to a “fiery climax”. There’s a “hint of HBO’s Succession ” in this tale of a “family in thrall to a despotic patriarch”, said Madeleine Feeny in The Daily Telegraph . Mingling “eroticism, absurdity and pathos”, it’s “electric”.

Mantle 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

At first glance, this debut novel seems to be yet another post-#MeToo book “dissecting sexual trauma and queasy power dynamics”, said Laura Hackett in The Sunday Times . At a US liberal arts college, John, a senior English professor, finds himself accused of sexual impropriety by “seven students with whom he has had affairs”. But rather than adopt their perspective, the novel is narrated by John’s wife – who is anything but sympathetic towards them. She laments the fact that young women today seem to have “lost all agency”, and admits to having “enjoyed the space” that her husband’s infidelities provided. With its bracing take on sexual politics, Vladimir is an “astonishing debut”.

In its second half, the novel becomes primarily about “female appetite”, as the narrator develops an obsessive crush on a “gorgeous new junior professor”, said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian . May Jones’s “quietly captivating” voice dazzles until the end, when the novel is let down by a “heavy-handed denouement”. Still, in its willingness to tackle “complex”, provocative themes, this is “an engrossing and clever debut”.

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Hanya Yanagihara’s latest novel is the “keenly awaited” follow up to A Little Life , her “devastating story of irreparable human damage”, said David Sexton in The Sunday Times . It consists of three sections all set in the same New York building and taking place, respectively, in 1893, 1993 and 2093.

Part one re-imagines 19th century New York as a “liberal breakaway nation in which gay marriage is normal”. Part two, set in the “time of Aids”, focuses on a wealthy white lawyer and his young Hawaiian lover. Part three envisages an America that has been ravaged by “successive waves of viruses, every few years from 2020”. While a “less bludgeoningly powerful” work than A Little Life , it’s still “highly affecting”.

This is in many ways a “wantonly strange” work, said Claire Allfree in The Times : the convoluted narrative can be “frustratingly opaque”, and there’s a complete absence of humour. Yet there’s no denying Yanagihara’s skill at immersing us in the “emotional world of her characters”. For all its flaws, To Paradise is “frequently magnificent”.

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The story of Joan of Arc – a 15th-century peasant girl from northeast France who became a national heroine – has been told many times before, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph . But in her second novel, the American writer Katherine J. Chen offers a “fresh and utterly enthralling take”. Her Joan is not a religious icon – “gone are the visions” – but primarily a “woman of action”: she’s a child of remarkable physical gifts who, through a series of “serendipitous events”, becomes a key ally of the dauphin (later King Charles VII), helping to lead his armies against the English. “Vivid, visceral and boldly immediate”, the novel has already earned comparisons with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.

At once a “mystic, martyr and war hero”, Joan is a largely “incomprehensible” figure today, said Jess Walter in The New York Times . Chen, however, has a “lively stab” at making her seem relevant – in part by imagining her as an “abused child” who uses her anger to become an “avenging warrior”. “Rich” and “visceral” in its descriptions, Joan is “stirring stuff”.

Hodder & Stoughton 368pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

In 2014, Jessie Burton’s debut novel The Miniaturist – about 18-year-old Nella Oortman’s coming of age in 17th century Amsterdam – became a global bestseller, said Gwendolyn Smith in The i Paper . Now Burton is back, with a “beguiling, tender sequel”, set 18 years later. Nella, now 37, is a widow (The Miniaturist climaxed with her husband’s execution for sodomy), who still lives in the “same grand address on Amsterdam’s Herengracht canal”. A “cold, austere place” in the previous book, the house is now suffused with “warmth and familiarity” – though it still “thrums with secrets”. “Wise and fabulously immersive”, this book, if anything, surpasses its predecessor.

I disagree, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph . Burton remains a “lovely writer”, who can craft “startlingly sculptural” sentences. But “where The Miniaturist was alive with spooky mystery”, this book lacks an “animating spirit”: characters, events and even the language seem contrived. “In seeking to bring more life to the characters in The Miniaturist, The House of Fortune somehow diminishes them instead.”

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Set in the Alaskan wilderness, Rebecca Rukeyser’s “wistful and sardonic” first novel is part adventure story, part coming-of-age tale, said The Irish Times . Seventeen-year-old Mira is working for the summer at a guest house run by a married couple, Stu and Maureen, alongside two other girls and a troubled chef. Much of her time is spent fantasising sexually about a boy she met the year before. Rukeyser’s descriptive prose is assured and elegant, and the story becomes increasingly tense, as Stu’s predatory behaviour towards the girls becomes apparent.

Mira’s adolescent yearning is well captured in this quirky, wry debut, said Siobhan Murphy in The Times . Rukeyser provides a “deftly juggled” mixture of merciless judgement and gentle compassion for her characters’ failings. There’s also plenty of comedy, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Sunday Telegraph, though the story becomes more “mature and melancholy” as it progresses. The Seaplane on Final Approach is about how “desire ruins everything”. And when the finale arrives, it is “catastrophic” – but it also provides “lengthy, gruesome fun”.

Granta 288pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

“Few people outside the literary world” have heard of 41-year-old novelist Benjamin Wood, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . That’s a shame, because he’s “wonderful”. Already the author of “three richly layered novels”, he has now written a fourth, The Young Accomplice , which is “his most original yet”. Set in the 1950s, it centres on Arthur and Florence Mayhood, “childless architects in their 30s” who, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, dream of creating a communal-living project on their Surrey farm. To help them realise this ambition, they invite a pair of borstal leavers – brother and sister Charlie and Joyce Savigear – to live with them; unsurprisingly, things go wrong.

Compared with Wood’s previous novels, which blended “storytelling punch with literary sensibility”, this book at times feels muted, said John Self in The Times . Wood spends a lot of time in his characters’ heads; you wish for a bit more action. Still, there are compensations: the characters feel like “real people”, who you miss when they’re gone. This is a book that “digs its claws into you and sticks there”.

Viking 368pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Benjamin Markovits’s latest novel is a “compelling account of relative failure”, said Joseph Owen in Literary Review . Brian, the narrator, is a “big fat slow” Jewish kid from Austin, Texas, who becomes childhood friends with Marcus Hayes, his high school’s basketball star. Marcus is black, and from a broken home – for a while he lives with Brian’s family – but in adulthood, when Marcus becomes an “NBA superstar”, Brian is merely a “semi-successful” sportswriter. The novel convincingly portrays Brian’s “inhibited world-view”, which is “tainted by jealousy” of his friend. The result is a “bleak, amusing, ultimately absorbing read”.

This is a novel with the “topography of a classic American story”, said Stuart Evers in The Spectator : “sport as a metaphor for the fracture of the US; friendship as a microcosm of race relations”. It feels a little dated – a bit “male and white” – and the “detailed descriptions of basketball” could put some people off. In the final act, though, when Markovits unveils “his A-game”, the novel “ignites into something compelling and emotionally resonant”.

Faber 361pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

In 2009, the novelist Julie Myerson found herself at the centre of a media storm after publishing a non-fiction account of her eldest son’s addiction to marijuana, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . The episode, she has said, drove her to a “kind of breakdown”, and she has never directly addressed it in her writing. Except that now, in a way, she has. This, her 11th novel – entitled Nonfiction – is all about “teenage drug addiction”. The narrator is a once “happily married” writer, who is looking back on her attempts to save her heroin-addicted daughter “from self-destruction”. Given her own backstory, Myerson is risking a lot with such a novel – but “the results are nothing less than incandescent”.

The title is confusing, and deliberately so, said Alex Peake-Tomkinson in The Spectator . This is Myerson’s “squarest attempt so far at autobiographical fiction”. Yet in other ways, it seems a typical work: she has always explored “her worst fears in her novels”. Although I hope she will “look beyond her own life” in future, I found this a “satisfyingly propulsive” read.

Corsair 288pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Maggie Shipstead’s “thrilling” historical epic, Great Circle , not only earned her a place on last year’s Booker shortlist, but also “proved a huge hit with readers”, said Lucy Scholes in the Financial Times . So it’s “savvy” of her publisher to bring out this collection of her short stories, written over the past 13 years. The tales vary widely in tone and setting – they transport us “from the catacombs of Paris, via an Olympic Village, to a guano island in the middle of the Pacific” – but taken together, they forcefully illustrate the “remarkable scope of Shipstead’s imagination and talent”.

While one or two of these stories seem a bit “too self-conscious”, most are superb, said Lizzy Harding in The New York Times . In the “sure standout”, “La Moretta”, a young couple’s honeymoon in Romania “transforms into folk horror à la The Wicker Man ”. Shipstead has an “unnerving ability to capture a character’s inner life in a few choice phrases”, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer . “It’s a rare writer who can create a world as convincingly over a few pages as in a 600-page novel.”

Doubleday 288pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “creepy coming-of-age tale” unfolds like a “darker version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda ”, except with “no Miss Honey coming to the rescue”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Observer . Set in an “icy” Massachusetts town in the 1980s, it is narrated by Ruthie, an only child whose family is “on the edge of poverty”. Ruthie is an assiduous cataloguer of “everything she sees” – her mother’s lumpy body, her awkward dinners with richer school friends – but she doesn’t always understand the significance of what she sees. Marked by its “pitiless, minutely observed prose”, Very Cold People is a work that “will stay with me for a very long time”.

Manguso is especially good at evoking the “constraints and cruelties” of Ruthie’s home life, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times . So successfully does she portray “boring old daily pain” that it almost seems redundant when “more dramatic plot-turns arrive” towards the end of the book. Very Cold People is at its best simply as a “compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived”.

Picador 208pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

The Irish writer Louise Kennedy only began writing aged 47, but her rise has been meteoric, said Madeleine Feeny in The Spectator . The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, her debut short story collection, was “fought over” by nine publishers. And now, with this first novel, she has written what promises to be another hit. Plot-wise, Trespasses doesn’t break new ground, said Kevin Power in The Guardian: set near Belfast in 1975, it’s about a young Catholic primary school teacher who falls in love with a posh Protestant barrister. What distinguishes it is its “sense of utter conviction”. This is a story “told with such compulsive attention to the textures of its world that every page feels like a moral and intellectual event”.

Kennedy is a superbly visual writer, and her “idiomatic dialogue gives her prose real verve”, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer : the protagonist’s mother, catching sight of Helen Mirren on a chat show, describes her as a “dirty article”. Combining “unflinching authenticity” with a “flair for detail”, this is a “deftly calibrated” and ultimately “devastating” novel.

Bloomsbury 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Julian Barnes’s latest is that “old-fashioned thing, a novel of ideas”, said John Self in The Times . It is narrated by Neil, a former actor, but is really all about Elizabeth Finch, the “lecturer on a course on culture and civilisation that Neil took decades earlier”. Finch, who is “probably inspired” by Barnes’s friend, the late novelist Anita Brookner, is remembered as an inspirational teacher, someone “who obliged us – simply by example – to seek and find within ourselves a centre of seriousness”. Neil recalls their sort-of friendship – they occasionally met for lunch – and describes his quest, in the present day, to find out more about Finch in the wake of her death. Very much a “thinky” novel, Elizabeth Finch may be “rather less fun” than most of Barnes’s books, but it “offers plenty to chew on”.

“Part of the challenge of rendering a brilliantly inspirational teacher is making them sufficiently brilliant and inspirational,” said Sameer Rahim in The Daily Telegraph . Despite Neil’s insistence on Finch’s originality, “what she actually says tends to fall flat”. “She told me that love is all there is. It’s the only thing that matters,” a classmate of Neil recalls. The novel is further let down by its baffling middle section, which consists of Neil’s “stolid student essay” on the fourth century Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, whom Finch regarded as a kindred spirit, said Sam Byers in The Guardian .

It all adds up to a “work stubbornly determined to deny us its pleasures”. I disagree, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . As a teacher, Finch “blazes with vividness”, and Neil’s essay is a “bravura exercise in nimbly handled erudition”. Elizabeth Finch “celebrates the cast of mind” – subtle, sceptical and ironic – that “Barnes most prizes”.

Jonathan Cape 192pp £16.99; The Week bookshop £13.99

Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a “sibling novel” to A Visit From the Goon Squad, her bestselling 2010 novel about rock music, “Gen-X nostalgia” and the “digitalisation of everything”, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times . Consisting of interrelated short stories which zigzag about in time, it resembles its predecessor in structure – and features many of the same characters. But at its centre is a new figure: the “Mark Zuckerberg-like” Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, has created an “implausible” device known as Own Your Unconscious, which lets users upload their own and other people’s memories, and “watch them all like movies”.

The sci-fi aspects of the book are neither new nor “particularly fully realised”, said Andrew Billen in The Times : memory uploads have been tackled better elsewhere. But this is essentially a book of short stories, and most of them are excellent and “brain-stretching”. What “really astounds is the visual brilliance of Egan’s writing across these disparate tales”. She won a Pulitzer for A Visit From the Goon Squad; I hope this book “wins another”.

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Ali Smith’s first novel since her “extraordinary Seasonal Quartet ” has a fitting title, said Alex Preston in The Observer , as it “springs from the same source as its predecessors”. Like them, it was “written and published swiftly”, to cram in recent events. It’s 2021, and Sandy, an artist, is “struggling through lockdown”. Her father is in hospital following a heart attack – and she “only has his dog for company”. Smith skilfully evokes the grim monotony of pandemic life, said Catherine Taylor in the FT – from the “regularity of testing” to “the exhaustion of medical staff”.

Much of the plot concerns Sandy’s “renewed acquaintance” with an old university friend Martina, who gets in touch to tell her about her recent interrogation by UK border police, said Philip Hensher in The Daily Telegraph . This leads to Sandy meeting Martina’s twin daughters, Eden and Lea, who are full of “millennial” rage and entitlement. Covering a “lot of contemporary ground”, Companion Piece offers an entertaining portrait of the “world we live in, by the most beguiling and likeable of novelistic intelligences”.

Hamish Hamilton 400pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Douglas Stuart’s debut, Shuggie Bain – the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize – was a “bleak autobiographical novel about a young boy caring for his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . His follow-up is “cut from the same cloth”.

Fifteen-year-old Mungo lives with his mother and two older siblings in Glasgow’s East End. “His brother, Hamish, is a Faginesque Protestant gang leader; his sister, Jodie, is a do-gooding fallen angel; and their mother, Mo-Maw, is a woman ruined by alcohol.” As the novel opens, Mungo is shooed off by his mother on a fishing trip with two menacing strangers from her Alcoholics Anonymous group, who promise to teach him “masculine pursuits”.

Interspersed with this “gruesome excursion” are chapters set a few months earlier, detailing Mungo’s first love affair, with a Catholic neighbour called James. Although this “alternating timeline” feels forced at times, this is still a “richly abundant” work packed with fine writing and “colourful characters”.

It may be felt – with some justification – that Stuart has written the same book twice, said Nikhil Krishnan in The Daily Telegraph . Yet he “makes small differences count”. Because Mungo is older than Shuggie, he is able to see in his sexuality “not just a source of difference and alienation, but a possible route to escape and emancipation”. And Stuart widens his focus beyond family life, taking in the “Jets and Sharks world” of Glasgow’s sectarian politics.

Like its predecessor, this “bear hug of a new novel” has a “yeasty whiff of the autobiographical” about it, said Hillary Kelly in the Los Angeles Times . If you adored Shuggie Bain , this book “will please you on every page”.

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Joseph Stalin “never spoke or wrote” about the two months he spent in London in the spring of 1907, attending the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, said Alasdair Lees in The Daily Telegraph . Into this “psychological aperture” steps Stephan May, whose sixth novel is an “openly confected” retelling of those “few overlooked weeks”.

It begins with a 29-year-old Stalin – then known by his nickname, Koba – landing at Harwich, fresh from “a campaign of terror and banditry” in his native Georgia. In London, he stays in a dosshouse in Stepney, while better-off attendees – including Lenin – lodge in Bloomsbury. May’s Stalin is a “figure of fascinating contradictions” – an “idealist and a thug” – and the novel a “captivating thought experiment”.

Sadly, it often falls “disappointingly flat”, said Simon Baker in Literary Review . There are “samey descriptions” of London’s “awful” pubs, and May makes too much use of summary. Despite having the makings of an “exciting political thriller”, the novel isn’t convincing enough for May’s story to really grow.

Sandstone 288pp £8.99; The Week Bookshop £6.99

Anne Tyler virtually created the “family novel” genre, but has “strayed into more diverse territory recently”, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times . Fans will be delighted by the 80-year-old’s 24th novel, which marks a return to type. Set, almost inevitably, in Baltimore, it’s a multi-generational saga spanning six decades, about a “comfortingly average” family. Mercy and Robin Garrett “enjoy a smoothly conventional life” running a hardware store and raising their three children. But theirs is a family in which “certain things must never be said”, and as the decades pass, this creates division. French Braid is “Tyler at her most Tyler-ish: pleasant and inoffensive, yet surprisingly deep and moving”.

Near its end, the novel does take an unexpected turn, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . Its final chapters are set during Covid – a topic Tyler suggested she’d never write about. Typically, however, she emphasises not the pandemic’s harrowing side, but its “potential to occasion reunion and reconnection”. This book may fall short of her best work – but “at this point any Tyler book is a gift”.

Chatto & Windus 256pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “eagerly awaited” debut is being hailed as “part of a wave of novels by young men of colour exploring race, romance and mental health problems”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . Nur, a 25-year-old online journalist from Birmingham who regularly suffers panic attacks, has been with Yasmina for four years. But he has yet to tell his Pakistani parents about the relationship: Yasmina’s family is Sudanese, and Nur has never got over his “mother’s disgust when she saw him hanging out with a black girl at school”.

On the surface a “poignant romance” about the barriers standing in the way of two young lovers, Good Intentions gradually reveals itself to be a deeper novel – about how an obsession with vulnerability can “make you forget your responsibility to others”.

Ali’s characters are “well-drawn”, and “what a tonic” to have a book about race in Britain set outside the capital, said Siobhan Murphy in The Times . Unfortunately, though, the unnecessarily complex structure necessitates a lot of darting “between points on the timeline” – and this, alas makes the novel rather “confusing”.

4th Estate 352pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Jessamine Chan’s “crafty and spellbinding” debut is set in a terrifyingly plausible dystopian America, said Molly Young in The New York Times . Frida Liu is a 39-year-old single mother with an 18-month-old daughter and a stressful job. One day, in a “spell of insomnia-induced irrationality”, she leaves her daughter unattended at home while running a work errand.

Neighbours hear the toddler crying, and alert the police. Frida is sentenced to a year in an “experimental rehab facility”, where women are moulded into better mothers by practising their parenting skills on AI dolls. The school continually berates Frida for her actions: her kisses, instructors tell her, “lack a fiery core of maternal love”.

It’s no surprise that this book has been “making waves” in the US, said Madeleine Feeny in The Daily Telegraph : “questions of how we define and evaluate motherhood pervade contemporary culture”. Beautifully lucid and elegantly written, this is a “must-read” novel, said India Knight in The Sunday Times – “a Handmaid’s Tale for the 21st century”.

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The Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s latest is “an original”, said Anne Enright in The Guardian . It’s a short novel about grief in which plot often gives way to “mystical” digressions that are “earnest, funny and sweet” – “a bit mad”, but in a good way.

Mira, a solitary woman in midlife, falls in love with Annie, a fellow student at their school for art criticism. Then Mira’s father dies, and his spirit joins her own inside a leaf, where they converse about “art, God, love and the transmigration of souls”, before Mira returns to “the pursuit of love”, her faith in “family and tradition” strengthened.

Billed as “a philosopher of modern experience”, Heti is known for her auto-fictional novels such as How Should a Person Be? (2010). Pure Colour is more like a fable, said Mia Levitin in the FT , in which God is an artist, and this world is his “first draft”, now “heating up in advance of its destruction”. Sadly, the book’s “meditations on grief” left me cold, and I found the prose “clunky” and “perilously close to kitsch”, with a naive, fairy-tale quality ill-suited to a story about middle age.

Harvill Secker 224pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Edmund White’s novels “forever enlarged what gay writing might do”, said Neil Bartlett in The Guardian . His latest book – “his 30th, by my count” – is an “elegant, filthy” work that “crackles with a heartfelt insistence that the old and hungry” still have much to tell us about “the dynamics of sex”.

In the year 2050, a married couple in a remote Swiss chalet decide to entertain each other by recounting their “previous sexual careers”. Constance, in her early 30s, is an “African-American orphan”, while Ruggero, her husband, is an elderly bisexual Sicilian aristocrat who is “legendarily well-connected (not to mention well hung)”.

As you’d expect, this novel is “elegantly written”, and contains many “arresting images”, said Peter Parker in The Spectator – but it’s fairly “preposterous”. The leap forward in time is merely a device allowing Ruggero to reminisce about his affair 30 years earlier with the now-forgotten writer Edmund White, then old and infirm: a “fat, famous slug”, he calls him. It is, however, all very entertaining.

Bloomsbury 288pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Unsure what to do after graduating, Matt Knott alighted on tutoring as an “easy way to make money”, said Georgia Beaufort in The Daily Telegraph . He duly joined an agency that specialised in finding “study buddies” for the children of the super-rich. With his “Cambridge degree and his floppy hair”, Knott proved a big success – and in this “very funny memoir”, he recounts his three years in the job.

His first assignment was in a house in Mayfair, where each day he sat in a “holding pool” of tutors waiting to see if he’d be picked to help a five-year-old with his homework. Other families were considerably friendlier: half servant, half family member, Knott accompanied his charges on various exotic holidays.

This amusing book sheds light on a ridiculous world of “butlers in very tight trousers” and “helicopter trips from Tuscan villas to smart restaurants in Rome”, said Roland White in the Daily Mail . In this milieu, five-year-olds eat lobster tempura for supper, and “PJs” stands for private jets instead of pyjamas. With his pleasing turn of phrase (these days he works as a screenwriter), Knott is a witty, observant guide.

Trapeze 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Gary Shteyngart’s fifth novel is set during the far-off-seeming “early days” of the Covid pandemic, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . Sasha Senderovsky, a successful Russian-born US novelist (like his creator), has retreated to his large house in upstate New York, accompanied by a group of friends. Their plan is to ride out lockdown together but, predictably, things go wrong.

Various housemates fall out with one another; “plenty of partner-swapping” occurs. If the basic conceit owes a lot to Chekhov, the novel’s boisterous, madcap comedy owes at least as much to A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Shteyngart has brilliantly captured the “almost maniacal aliveness” of the early pandemic. If anyone writes a funnier lockdown novel, “I will eat my face mask”.

There’s so much going on in this somewhat “messy” novel that at times it’s exhausting to read, said John Self in The Times . A “little more stillness” would have been welcome. Still, it exhibits Shteyngart’s trademark “feverish energy” – and the result is “often funny” and “sometimes moving”.

Allen & Unwin 336pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Michelle de Kretser’s slyly intelligent sixth novel pairs two first-person narratives,” said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . One is set in “dystopian near-future Melbourne” and follows Lyle, an immigrant who works for a sinister government agency created to deport immigrants. The other is set in 1981, and follows Lili, a 22-year-old Australian, during a carefree sojourn in the south of France. The link between the two narratives is mysterious – and even the order you read them in is “up to you”, on account of the book’s “reversible, Kindle-defying two-way design”.

The publisher has been “fastidious” in cooperating with de Kretser’s conceit, said Sam Leith in The Daily Telegraph : there are two front covers, two copyright pages, two sets of acknowledgements, and so on. “It’s sort of magnificent, and it’s also sort of gimmicky” – and it left me unsure if I was actually reading a novel, or simply two novellas yoked together. Perhaps, though, it doesn’t really matter. Filled with “apt quick literary brushstrokes and the gleam of humour”, both halves are equally “terrific”.

Allen & Unwin 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Tessa Hadley is justly lauded for “elevating the domestic novel to literary fiction” in her stories about the “shifting geometries” of middle-class families, said Mia Levitin in the FT . Free Love , her eighth novel, “adds a Sixties twist to Anna Karenina ”. Set in 1967, it centres on 40-year-old Phyllis Fischer, a well-off suburban housewife married to Roger, a senior civil servant. One summer night, twenty-something Nicky – the son of a family friend – comes to supper. He and Phyllis steal an “illicit kiss” – and embark on an affair. Leaving home without a forwarding address, Phyllis swaps her cosy life with Roger for “then-bohemian Ladbroke Grove” (where Nicky occupies a squalid bedsit). Hadley’s style is as “sumptuous” as ever, and her characterisations are superb. While this isn’t perhaps her best novel, its publication is a “cause for celebration”.

Hadley has been criticised for the “narrowness of her social concerns – her incorrigible preoccupation with Cecilias, Harriets and Rolands”, said James Marriott in The Times . So it’s gratifying that in this “beautiful and exciting” novel, she contrasts the bourgeois world with the “supremely undomesticated” 1960s counterculture.

Yet there’s a problem, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times : Hadley is far more at home among herbaceous borders than in the “pot-smoking” milieu of Nicky and his friends. Her depictions of the Swinging Sixties rarely rise above cliché – and “when she tries to capture the life of a black nurse whom Phyllis befriends, the writing becomes laboured”. You sense Hadley “itching to get back to the bourgeois suburbs” – and as this disappointing novel progressed, I wished I was back there with her.

Jonathan Cape 320pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Sarah Moss’s 2009 debut novel, Cold Earth , imagined an out-of-control virus, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . She returns to similar terrain with her latest novel – only this time with less need for invention. Set in November 2020, The Fell centres on Kate, a forty-something single mum, who “finally snaps” during a two-week quarantine period, and goes for a solitary walk in the Peak District. It’s “destined to be an ill-fated expedition”: the night draws in, Kate doesn’t return – and her absence is noticed by her teenage son Matt. With its vivid sense of “accumulating dread”, this is an “intense time capsule of a tale”.

Moss moves “gracefully” between various perspectives, said Sarah Ditum in The Times : that of Alice, an elderly neighbour; and Rob, a member of the mountain rescue team. Elegantly written and concise, The Fell is a “close-to-perfect” novel. Even though Moss has said it was written fast, the prose here feels “precision-tooled”, said Roger Cox in The Scotsman . Remarkably, in only 180 pages, she has captured “all of lockdown life”.

Picador 180pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

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The 50 Best New Books of 2022 That You Won't Be Able to Put Down

Wondering what you should be reading this year? Our list includes romance novels, non-fiction best-sellers, thrillers and so much more.

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And this year's crop of new releases will do all of that, and more. Some of your favorite authors have new books out that rival their previous releases (peep that new Jennifer Egan!) and a whole host of debut authors also came out with stellar reads that will leave you hungry for their next one before you reach the last page. These are the best and most-anticipated books we've found so far, with something for fans of every genre and style. Of course, we have to acknowledge that "best" might mean something different to everyone. There are as many reading appetites as there are readers, so if your favorite book of 2022 doesn't make our list, don't despair. Let us know in the comments, and you might just inspire someone else to pick it up, too.

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

Fiona and Jane are best friends, navigating their tumultuous teenage years together, as well as their family histories and all that comes with them. But when Fiona moves across the country, their bond weakens and threatens to break. This novel about the power of female friendship will give you a gorgeous peek into both women's perspectives on a shared story that has as many facets as they do.

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamin Chan

Frida's daughter Harriet is everything to her. But when she makes a terrible one-time mistake, the state decides that she has to prove her ability to be a good mother in order to remain one at all. This scarily prescient novel that's reminiscent of Orwell and Vonnegut explores the depths of parents' love, how strictly we judge mothers and each other and the terrifying potential of government overreach.

30 Things I Love About Myself by Radhika Sanghani

Newly single freelance writer Nina isn’t exactly flourishing, especially after she has to move back in with her depressed brother and her overbearing mother. But when she finds herself reading a self-help book in jail on her 30th birthday (long story), she embarks on a journey toward self-love, learning lessons most of us could stand to hear, too.

Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories by Gwen E. Kirby

Just because Cassandra can see the future doesn't mean she's sharing what she finds there. In this wildly inventive collection of stories, Kirby explores the power of feminity in its many forms – including as brazen witches, virgins who can't be sacrificed and even cockroaches who catcallers fear. It's laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes brightly painful, thought-provoking and completely original.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

When an archaeologist witnesses the unleashing of a long-buried plague, it changes the course of history. This hauntingly beautiful story focuses on how the human spirit perseveres through it all. With everything from a cosmic search for home to a theme park for terminally ill kids and a talking pig, it’s a lyrical adventure that feels fantastical yet familiar.

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

Serial killer Ansel Packer is going to die for his crimes in 12 hours. But as the clock ticks down, we get to know the women who passed through his life, including his desperate mother and the homicide detective who became obsessed with his case. It’s a chilling, surprisingly tender tale of how each tragedy ripples through many lives.

RELATED: 25 Best True Crime Books of All Time to Unleash Your Inner Sherlock

Good Rich People by Eliza Jane Brazier

The rich live differently than the rest of us, and that's never more evident than this chilling account of one family that plays a sick and twisted game with their tenants. When one (an interloper herself) decides that she's not just a pawn, nobody wins – or do they?

Devil House by John Darnielle

Fans of true crime, police procedurals and books that stick with you for weeks after you reach the last page, don't sleep on the latest from the multitalented Mountain Goats singer. It follows a true crime writer who's trying to figure out what really happened at a dilapidated former porn store where locals (and lore) say the Satanic panic resulted in death, but the truth goes so much deeper than that.

Don't Say We Didn't Warn You by Ariel Delgado Dixon

Two sisters' paths repeatedly diverge and intersect through this story about trauma and reckoning with it. Through life in an abandoned warehouse just outside NYC, stints at a wilderness rehabilitation center and a scrabble to find their footing as young adults, this is a sharp and unsettling story of two girls' ongoing search for their own place in the world and how their history shapes who they become.

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

Midwesterners, New Englanders and anyone from small town America will recognize the contours in this quietly beautiful novel about what it feels like to grow up an outsider. It's a starkly lyrical exploration of the darkness that lies underneath a lily white community with an emotional resonance that sneaks up on you and won't let go.

Where I Can't Follow by Ashley Blooms

In a little mountain town hit hard by poverty and the opioid epidemic, there's a chance at escape. Magical doors appear to some people as a way out, but once they step through, there's no turning back. This fantastically real, absorbing novel explores what it would feel like to have an escape hatch from the hardships of life, and the agonizing decision whether to leave everyone you love behind.

The Last Suspicious Holdout by Ladee Hubbard

From the author of The Rib King comes a collection of stories about the Black residents of a southern suburb in the years between the beginning of the Clinton administration and Obama's election. It's about racism, the war on drugs, class and struggle, but at its heart, it's a portrait of a community. While it doesn't flinch away from the hard truth, it's also filled with love and a steely kind of hope.

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

This eerily magical, richly atmospheric novel follows Darwin, a devout Rastafarian whose poverty forces him to cast off his religion to become a gravedigger, and Yejide, one of a line of women who have the power to usher the dead into the afterlife. Darwin gets mixed up in some funny business and Yejide is looking for a way out of the life she's been handed. When they're drawn together, they discover whether their love can rival the forces working against them.

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Ingrid has hit a wall in her PhD research on poet Xiao-Wen Chou when she comes across something that suggests he may not have been who he seems. Before she knows it, Ingrid has blown open a scandal that threatens her relationship with her fiancé and her best friend, her academic department and even her own self-knowledge. This is a fresh, hilarious and thoughtful satire that'll make you think about cultural identity in a whole new way.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

If you loved Station Eleven , you'll adore this dystopian novel that's about time travel as much as it is about love and family, and what happens when we lose sight of what's truly important. It takes the reader from a plague-ravaged earth to moon colonies, from 1912 to the near future in a triumph of science fiction for those who think they hate science fiction.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

You don't have to read A Visit From the Goon Squad to love this sibling novel to Egan's stellar hit. The revolutionary technology Own Your Unconscious allows users to store and access their memories – and other people's. Through complex and intimate intertwining narratives, it follows a cast of characters' experiences with Bouton's creation, and how its consequences echo through the decades.

End of the World House: A Novel by Adrienne Celt

What do you get when you take Groundhog Day, add a dash of the apocalypse, a little French obsession and mix in female friendship and romantic entanglement? This firecracker of a book that gets weirder and more bizarrely funny the more pages you turn.

Nobody Gets Out Alive: Stories by Leigh Newman

The Alaskan wilderness is unforgiving, and so is life for the people who live there. In this arresting collection of stories, we meet people who are fighting not only the snowy tundra, but addiction, heartbreak, complicated families and the demons so many of us carry with us, regardless of when or where we live.

When We Fell Apart by Soon Wiley

Min can’t believe his Korean girlfriend Yu-jin died by suicide, right before graduation. As he embarks on a quest to uncover the truth, he learns more about Yu-jin’s life as the daughter of a high-ranking government official, the true nature of her bond with her roommate So-ra, and his own bi-racial identity. This compelling, propulsive novel is as complex as the characters it follows.

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

A sharply original novel about love, friendship and the journey grief takes, this one will ring true for so many of us these days. Five years after losing the love of her life, Feyi's BFF, Joy, wants her to get back out there, but when she does, Feyi finds herself thrown into her future without a net. For anyone who's been feeling a little lost, let this book give you some inspiration.

@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-o9j0dn:before{margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-right:0.625rem;color:#ffffff;width:1.25rem;bottom:-0.2rem;height:1.25rem;content:'_';display:inline-block;position:relative;line-height:1;background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-o9j0dn:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/goodhousekeeping/static/images/Clover.5c7a1a0.svg);}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.loaded .css-o9j0dn:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/goodhousekeeping/static/images/Clover.5c7a1a0.svg);}} All the Best Books to Read Next

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The Best Books of 2022

If you want to read about spaceships, talking pigs, or supervillains, you’ve come to the right place.

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Check back with us in the new year, when we'll start rounding up our favorite books of 2023. In the meantime, happy reading!

Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, by James Hannaham

Hannaham’s buoyant sophomore novel introduces us to the unforgettable Carlotta Mercedes, an Afro-Latinx trans woman released from a men’s prison after serving two decades. Returning home to Brooklyn, she encounters a gentrified city she doesn’t recognize, as well as a host of new stressors; life on the outside soon involves an unforgiving parole process and a family that struggles to recognize her transition. Over the course of one zany Fourth of July weekend, Carlotta descends into Brooklyn’s roiling underbelly on a quest to stand in her truth. Angry, saucy, and joyful, Carlotta is a true survivor—one whose story shines a disinfecting light on the injustices of our world.

Harry Sylvester Bird, by Chinelo Okparanta

The title character of Okparanta’s gutsy new novel is a white teenager born to xenophobic parents, but everything changes for young Harry Sylvester Bird on a safari in Tanzania, when he develops an enduring fascination with Blackness. Harry soon escapes to college in Manhattan and begins to identify as Black, joining a “Transracial-Anon” support group and longing for “racial reassignment.” When he falls in love with Maryam, a student from Nigeria, a study-abroad trip to Ghana’s Gold Coast puts both their romance and his identity to the test. Outlandish and arresting, Harry’s miseducation is a deft satire of prejudice and allyship.

Young Mungo, by Douglas Stuart

When his Shuggie Bain took home the Booker Prize in 2020, readers were desperate to see what this astounding debut novelist would do next. It will come as no surprise that Stuart’s second effort soars—and socks you right in the belly. Set in the tenements of Glasgow during the 1990s, Young Mungo is the wrenching story of the doomed and forbidden love between two teenage boys, one Catholic and the other Protestant. Insecure, self-loathing Mungo is forever changed by the calming influence of tender-hearted James, but in a stratified society such as this one, their bond can’t be allowed to stand. When the adults in their lives intervene, James and Mungo learn heartbreaking lessons about how boys become men. In a world where hope and despair coexist, Young Mungo is both brutal and breathtaking.

Time Is a Mother, by Ocean Vuong

Vuong’s second collection of poetry is a bruising journey through the devastating aftershocks of his mother’s death. Like Orpheus descending into the underworld, Vuong takes us to the white-hot limits of his grief, writing with visionary fervor about love, agony, and time. Without his mother, Vuong must remake his understanding of the world: what is identity when its source is gone? What is language without the cultural memory of our elders? Aesthetically ambitious and ferociously original, Time Is A Mother interrogates these impossibilities. “Nobody’s free without breaking open,” Vuong writes in one searing poem. Here, he breaks open and rebuilds.

Trust, by Hernan Diaz

In 2018, Diaz came close to the Pulitzer Prize with In the Distance , a probing western honored as a finalist; now, with Trust , he may finally take home the gold. Trust is the story of a Wall Street tycoon and his brilliant wife, who become outlandishly wealthy in Prohibition-era New York. In this puzzle box of stories-within-a-story, the mystery of their affluence becomes the subject of a novel, a memoir, an unfinished manuscript, and finally, a diary. Each layer builds and recontextualizes Diaz's riveting story of class, capitalism, and greed. The result is a mesmerizing metafictional alchemy of grand scope and even grander accomplishment.

Liarmouth, by John Waters

Waters takes his first bow as a novelist with this "perfectly perverted feel-bad romance” about Marsha “Liarmouth” Sprinkle, a con woman caught up in a bad romance with Darryl, the degenerate loser with whom she steals suitcases from airport luggage carousels. Marsha has promised Darryl sex for his services after one year of employment, but when she skips out without paying up, Darryl is out for revenge. In the acknowledgments, Waters aptly describes this novel as “fictitious anarchy.” That’s as good a description as any for this campy, raunchy, surreal story, rife with ribald pleasures. Read an interview with Waters here at Esquire.

Butts: A Backstory, by Heather Radke

This crackling cultural history melds scholarship and pop culture to arrive at a comprehensive taxonomy of the female bottom. From 19th-century burlesque to the eighties aerobics craze to Kim Kardashian’s internet-breaking backside, Radke leaves no stone unturned. Her sources range from anthropological scholarship to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” making for a vivacious blend, but Butts isn’t all fun and games. Radke explores how women’s butts have been used “as a means to create and reinforce racial hierarchies,” acting as locuses of racism, control, and desire. Lively and thorough, Butts is the best kind of nonfiction—the kind that forces you to see something ordinary through completely new eyes. Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, by Kim Kelly

With a galvanizing groundswell of unionization efforts rocking mega-corporations like Amazon and Starbucks, there’s never been a better time to learn about the history of the American labor movement. Fight Like Hell will be your indispensable guide to the past, present, and future of organized labor. Rather than structure this comprehensive history chronologically, Kelly organizes it into chapter-sized profiles of different labor sectors, from sex workers to incarcerated laborers to domestic workers. Each chapter contains capsule biographies of working-class heroes, along with a painstaking focus on those who were hidden or dismissed from the movement. So too do these chapters illuminate how many civil rights struggles, like women’s liberation and fair wages for disabled workers, are also, at their core, labor struggles. After reading Fight Like Hell , you’ll never look at American history the same way again—and you may just be inspired to organize your own workplace. Read an interview with Kelly here at Esquire.

Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library, by Amanda Oliver

Library-goers have long labored under a romanticized portrait of libraries as sacred spaces. In Overdue , a former librarian explores the importance of demanding better from what we love. Through the lens of her time as a librarian in one of Washington D.C.’s most impoverished neighborhoods, Oliver illuminates how libraries have long been vectors for some of our biggest social ills, from segregation to racism to inequality. Now, as unhoused patrons take refuge in libraries and librarians are trained to administer Narcan, our overlapping mental healthcare and opioid crises come to a head in these spaces. At once a love letter and a call to action, Overdue dispels mythology and demands a better future. You’ll never see libraries the same way again.

Woman, Eating, by Claire Kohda

My Year of Rest and Relaxation meets Milk Fed in this slacker comedy about Lydia, a multiracial Gen Z vampire suffering an identity crisis. Fresh out of art school and eager to make a new life for herself in London, Lydia soon gets a harsh reality check: her gallery internship is unfulfilling, her crush is dating someone else, and her supply of pig's blood is running dangerously low. Ravenous and lonesome, she becomes addicted to watching #WhatIEatInADay videos, desperate for the embodied connection to food and life that humans experience. But for this yearning young vampire, self-acceptance won’t come until she finds something (or someone) to eat. Thoughtful and thrilling, Woman, Eating makes a meal of themes like cultural alienation, disordered eating, and the growing pains of adulthood.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy

After sixteen years of characteristic seclusion, McCarthy returns with a one-two punch: The Passenger , out in October, and Stella Maris , a companion volume set to follow in November. In The Passenger , the stronger of the two works, we meet Bobby Western, a salvage diver and mathematical genius reckoning with his troubled personal history. Western is tormented by the legacy of his father, who worked on the atomic bomb, and the suicide of his sister, who suffered from schizophrenia. Told in meandering form, The Passenger is an elegiac meditation on guilt, grief, and spirituality. Packed with textbook McCarthy hallmarks, like transgressive behaviors and cascades of ecstatic language, it’s a welcome return from a legend who’s been gone too long.

Fen, Bog and Swamp, by Annie Proulx

The legendary author of “Brokeback Mountain” and The Shipping News delivers an enchanting history of our wetlands, a vitally important but criminally misunderstood landscape now imperiled by climate change. As Proulx explains, fens, bogs, swamps, and estuaries preserve our environment by storing carbon emissions. Roving through peatlands around the world, Proulx weaves a riveting history of their role in brewing diseases and fueling industrialization. Imbued with the same reverence for nature as Proulx’s fiction, Fen, Bog, and Swamp is both an enchanting work of nature writing and a rousing call to action. Read an exclusive interview with the author here at Esquire.

Because Our Fathers Lied, by Craig McNamara

How do we reckon with the sins of our parents? That’s the thorny question at the center of this moving and courageous memoir authored by the son of Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy’s architect of the Vietnam War. In this conflicted son’s telling, a complicated man comes into intimate view, as does the “mixture of love and rage” at the heart of their relationship. At once a loving and neglectful parent, the elder McNamara’s controversial lies about the war ultimately estranged him from his son, who hung Viet Cong flags in his childhood bedroom as a protest. The pursuit of a life unlike his father’s saw the younger McNamara drop out of Stanford and travel through South America on a motorcycle, leading him to ultimately become a sustainable walnut farmer. Through his own personal story of disappointment and disillusionment, McNamara captures an intergenerational conflict and a journey of moral identity.

A Ballet of Lepers, by Leonard Cohen

A Ballet of Lepers collects never-before-seen early works from beloved singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, including short stories, a novel, and a radio play. The titular novel, Cohen believed, was “probably a better novel” than his celebrated book The Favorite Game . These recovered gems traffic in the themes that would always obsess their author, like shame, desire, and longing. Cohen’s life and art have been dissected for years, but as this revealing volume proves, there are still new shades of him to discover.

Lost & Found, by Kathryn Schultz

Eighteen months before Schultz’s father died after a long battle with cancer, she met the love of her life. It’s this painful dichotomy that sets the foundation for Lost & Found , a poignant memoir about how love and loss often coexist. Braiding her personal experiences together with psychological, philosophical and scientific insight, Schultz weaves a taxonomy of our losses, which can “encompass both the trivial as well as the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone.” But so too does she celebrate the act of discovery, from finding what we’ve mislaid to lucking into lasting love. Penetrating and profound, Lost & Found captures the extraordinary joys and sorrows of ordinary life.

Less Is Lost, by Andrew Sean Greer

In 2018, Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Less , an unforgettable comic novel about aging writer Arthur Less and his international misadventures. Less is back for more in this beguiling sequel, bursting with just as much absurdity, heartache, and laugh-out-loud joy as its predecessor. Dogged by financial crisis and the death of his former lover, Less sets out across the American landscape with nothing but a rusty camper van, a somber pug, and a zigzagging itinerary of literary gigs. Our reluctant hero blunders his way into a cascade of disasters, but the more lost Less gets, the closer he is to being found. Rambunctious and life-affirming, Less is Lost is a winsome reminder of all that fiction can do and be. As Greer writes of novelists, “Are we not that fraction of old magic that remains?” Read an exclusive interview with the author here at Esquire.

Fairy Tale, by Stephen King

The master of horror turns his talents to coming-of-age fantasy in this spellbinding tale about seventeen-year-old Charlie Reade, a resourceful teenager who inherits the keys to a parallel world. It all starts when Charlie meets Mr. Bowditch, a local recluse living in a spooky house with his lovable hound. When Mr. Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie the house, a massive stockpile of gold, and the keys to a locked shed containing a portal to another world. But as Charlie soon discovers, that parallel world is full of danger, dungeons, and time travel—and it has the power to imperil our own universe. Packed with glorious flights of imagination and characteristic tenderness about childhood, Fairy Tale is vintage King at his finest. Read an exclusive excerpt here at Esquire.

The Furrows, by Namwali Serpell

Fresh off the stratospheric achievement of The Old Drift , Serpell’s sophomore novel is a wrenching examination of grief, memory, and reality. When Cassandra Williams was twelve years old, her seven-year-old brother Wayne drowned off the Delaware coast. Or did he? While the first half of The Furrows examines the long half-life of Cassandra’s grief, the second half gets slippery, exploring the possibility that Wayne survived. As the blurry boundaries between what’s true and what’s possible collapse, Serpell resets her novel again and again, like a scratched record skipping back to the beginning. Old wounds never heal, and Cassandra can’t stop revisiting them. Let this breathtaking novel roll over you in waves.

The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li

Time and time again, Li has proven herself a master storyteller obsessed with the nature of storytelling. In her latest novel, she takes that obsession to spectacular new heights. Set in the ruined countryside of post-WWII France, The Book of Goose centers on the friendship between shy Agnès and rebellious Fabienne. Fabienne devises a game: she will imagine a lurid story, and Agnès, with her perfect penmanship, will write it. When the book becomes a runaway bestseller credited to Agnès alone, it propels the girls on a trajectory of fame and fortune that threatens to sever their friendship. Fans of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels will love this gripping tale of art, power, and intimacy.

Liberation Day, by George Saunders

The godfather of the contemporary short story is back and better than ever in Liberation Day , his first collection of short fiction in nearly a decade. In one memorable story set in a near future police state, a grandfather explains how Americans lost their freedoms through small concessions to an authoritarian government. In another standout, vulnerable Americans are brainwashed and reprogrammed as political protestors, with their services available to the highest bidder. The rousing title novella sees the poor enslaved to entertain the rich, forced to recreate scenes from American history. In these powerful and perceptive stories, Saunders conjures a nation in moral and spiritual decline, where acts of kindness wink through like lights in the darkness.

@media(max-width: 73.75rem){.css-1ktbcds:before{margin-right:0.4375rem;color:#FF3A30;content:'_';display:inline-block;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1ktbcds:before{margin-right:0.5625rem;color:#FF3A30;content:'_';display:inline-block;}} Best of 2022

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40 Most Anticipated Books of 2022

JAN. 11, 2022

by Xochitl Gonzalez

Atmospheric, intelligent, and well informed: an impressive debut. Full review >

by Chantal James

A mesmerizing story told by an impressive and captivating voice. Full review >

by Hanya Yanagihara

Gigantic, strange, exquisite, terrifying, and replete with mystery. Full review >

JAN. 25, 2022

by John Darnielle

An impressively meta work that delivers the pleasures of true-crime while skewering it. Full review >

FEB. 1, 2022

A powerful collection that demonstrates Fu’s range and skill. Full review >

FEB. 15, 2022

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

by Marlon James

The second part of this trilogy is darker and, in many ways, more moving than its predecessor. Full review >

MARCH 8, 2022

by Karen Joy Fowler

The similarities to today are riveting and chilling. Full review >

APRIL 5, 2022

by Douglas Stuart

Romantic, terrifying, brutal, tender, and, in the end, sneakily hopeful. What a writer. Full review >

by Jennifer Egan

A thrilling, endlessly stimulating work that demands to be read and reread. Full review >

APRIL 26, 2022

by Michelle Huneven

Like the lamb shank at the cafeteria: tender, salty, and worthy of note. Full review >

by Mark Epstein

Empathetic and persuasive—one of the better books on psychotherapy and meditation in recent years. Full review >

JAN. 18, 2022

by Bernardine Evaristo

A beautiful ode to determination and daring and an intimate look at one of our finest writers. Full review >

by Kimberly Jones

Demanding better, Jones provides a wise, measured look at the economic and social landscape of America. Full review >

FEB. 8, 2022

by Chuck Klosterman

A fascinating examination of a period still remembered by most, refreshingly free of unnecessary mythmaking. Full review >

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

by Jessie Singer

An eye-opening, urgent book that demands an end to inequality as a matter of life and death. Full review >

by Garrett M. Graff

Now the best and fullest account of the Watergate crisis, one unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon. Full review >

FEB. 22, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

by Ian O'Connor

A sharpshooting account worthy of a champion. Full review >

MARCH 1, 2022

by Michael Kazin

This should be today’s go-to book on its subject. Full review >

by Meghan O'Rourke

Emotionally compelling and intellectually rich, particularly for those with a personal connection to the issue. Full review >

MARCH 22, 2022

by John Markoff

A sturdy, readable study of a fellow who’s had considerable press devoted to him—but who can still surprise. Full review >

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT

by Jason Reynolds ; illustrated by Jason Griffin

Artful, cathartic, and most needed. Full review >

by Leanne Hall

Hauntingly riveting. Full review >

by Akwaeke Emezi

A compact, urgent, and divine novel. Full review >

by Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem ; translated by Kristen Gehrman

Vivid and brutal—but not without a sliver of hope. Full review >

by Neal Bascomb

An impressive addition to the sports history catalog. Full review >

GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

by Laura Gao ; illustrated by Laura Gao with Weiwei Xu

A nuanced representation of being Asian and transnational in the contemporary U.S. Full review >

by Anna-Marie McLemore

A beauty both bright and deep. Full review >

by Adib Khorram

An absolute bop; Khorram’s best yet. Full review >

MARCH 29, 2022

by Candace Fleming

Erudite, readable, and appalling. Full review >

by Chesil ; translated by Takami Nieda

Enigmatic and powerful. Full review >

CHILDREN'S

JAN. 4, 2022

by Virginia Zimmerman ; illustrated by Mary Newell DePalma

A timely nod to female empowerment that knits together generations of girls and women and raises a hat to activists... Full review >

by Joanna Ho ; illustrated by Dung Ho

A beautifully validating book that builds on the necessary work of its predecessor. Full review >

by Ruth Behar ; illustrated by Devon Holzwarth

A nostalgic glimpse at a little-known but rich culture within the broader Jewish American community. Full review >

by Aisha Saeed

A powerful tale about a preteen pushing back against systemic injustice. Full review >

by Julie Dunlap ; illustrated by Megan Elizabeth Baratta

A marvelous life survey of a perennially relevant historical figure. Full review >

by Traci Sorell ; illustrated by Madelyn Goodnight

A heartwarming picture book about the roles of courage, culture, and community in the journey of personal healing. Full review >

by NoNieqa Ramos ; illustrated by Paola Escobar

This bold manifesto of cultural awareness reaches out to awaken the sleepwalkers among us. Full review >

by Julia Kuo ; illustrated by Julia Kuo

A quiet book with a loud message about the everyday things that create constancy in a world of ephemeral pleasures. Full review >

by Kelly Barnhill

Combines realistic empathy with fantastical elements; as exquisite as it is moving. Full review >

APRIL 19, 2022

by Dorien Brouwers ; illustrated by Dorien Brouwers

An invitation to cultivate our wild selves and our inextricable bond with the natural world. Full review >

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/12-books-to-read-from-2022

12 books to read from 2022

Which books of 2022 will you remember and recommend?

Thursday on the PBS NewsHour, Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, and New York Times books editor Gilbert Cruz join Jeffrey Brown to share some of their favorite books of the year. Here, they describe a few of their suggestions.

“Trust” by Hernan Diaz

This is a novel that tells the rise of a financier in New York City in the early 20th century, but it tells it from four different perspectives. … This is one of my favorite books of the year.

– Gilbert Cruz

“The Candy House” by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From The Goon Squad. … And The Candy House is a sequel. … You find some of the same characters, but it sort of takes them in a completely different direction. …It is grappling with what it means to be hooked into technology and social media.

WATCH: New novel imagines how memories can be accessed and reviewed by ourselves and others

“Foster” by Clare Keegan

This is a novella… telling the story of a young girl who’s shipped off to relatives she doesn’t know to live for a summer on a farm. … Keegan raises the question of whether this is a kindness or not to introduce a child who has been deprived to a different way of living and different relationships when she’s going to be shipped back to her parents at the end of the summer.

– Maureen Corrigan

“If I Survive You” by Jonathan Escoffery

It’s about a Jamaican American family. The parents come to Florida to … try to give their two young sons another kind of life. They keep getting knocked down. The 2008 recession. Hurricane Andrew. Racism. Escoffery is a terrific writer … and the “You” his characters are trying to survive is America.

“Stay True” by Hua Hsu

It’s a memoir of growing up as a child of Taiwanese immigrants in California. But it’s also the memoir of going to Berkeley in the mid-1990s. … [The author] becomes friends with the son of Japanese American immigrants, a boy named Ken, who he first thinks is sort of this very simple frat boy, but then grows to learn is much more complicated. … It’s a book about grief. It’s a book about youth and nostalgia.

“An Immense World” by Ed Yong

This is a book about animals and specifically about the ways that animals perceive the world and how those perceptions are different from the way that humans see the world. … Whether you like animals or not, it was just endlessly fascinating.

WATCH: Grappling with grief as U.S. COVID deaths surpass 1 million

“Also a Poet” by Ada Calhoun

Ada Calhoun is writing about her father, Peter Schjeldahl, who was an art critic for The New York Times. … She comes upon these cassette tapes that her father made when he was trying to write a biography of the New York poet Frank O’Hara. And she decides she’s going to use these tapes to try to complete what he never completed. … “Also A Poet” is literary criticism. It’s biography of both her father and Frank O’Hara. And it’s also a daughter’s memoir and a love letter to New York City. So it’s fabulous.

“The Facemaker” by Lindsey Fitzharris

It’s about the pioneering plastic surgery work of Harold Gillies, a doctor during World War I, who’s faced with this catastrophe of all of these men who’ve had their faces shattered by the new technology of warfare during World War I. There are no textbooks, there are no guides. He’s trying to put these men’s faces back together again and to give them their lives.

“Lucy by the Sea” by Elizabeth Strout

A novel starring a character that she’s written about several times before, Lucy Barton. And in this novel, Lucy experiences the pandemic. She is an older woman who has to leave New York to go up to Maine to join her husband in a cabin so they can sort of get away from what they imagine is a very dangerous place to be. … I found it extremely readable.

WATCH: How fiction draws Pulitzer-winner Elizabeth Strout home to Maine

“The Year of the Puppy” by Alexandra Horowitz

Alexandra Horowitz is the head of the canine cognition lab at Barnard, and she’s written a lot of nonfiction about the way dogs think. … She and her family adopted a puppy during the pandemic. And so it’s partly that personal story … but also this attempt, yes, to get into the mind of a creature who we love but who is not us.

And two more personal favorites…

Corrigan suggested “Vladimir” by Julia May Jonas and Cruz suggested “Olga Dies Dreaming” by Xochitl Gonzalez .

In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with The New York Times.

Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.

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The Idaho Student Murders Shocked the Nation — Now a New Book Explores What Happened (Exclusive)

Read an exclusive excerpt from journalist Howard Blum's new book, 'When the Night Comes Falling,' out June 25

Anthony Lattari; Harper

A gruesome quadruple murder shocked the University of Idaho in fall 2022 and now the journalist whose reporting earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination has written a book about the case.

When the Night Comes Calling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders by Howard Blum comes out June 25, and offers an in-depth account of the police manhunt that eventually led to the arrest of the suspected killer.

On Nov. 13, 2022, Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20, were  all stabbed to death  in bedrooms on the second and third floor of a home in Moscow, Idaho. All four victims attended the University of Idaho, which was rocked by the news. Over a month after the murders took place, suspect Bryan Christopher Kohberger was  arrested in Pennsylvania  in connection with the murders —  the same day a memorial was scheduled  for Mogen and Goncalves.

A three-part Paramount+ docuseries about the killings,  #Cybersleuths: The Idaho Murders ,  premiered on Feb. 6. Below, read an exclusive excerpt from Blum's book that details what may have happened that night.

It is 3:30 in the cold, starlit Sunday morning, November 13, and the quiet on King Road is all enveloping. A whisper, it seems, would echo like a scream.

A white car appears, and it is in no hurry. It creeps along in front of 1122 as though on tiptoes. Continuing past the adjacent Queen Apartments, it climbs up the incline and is abruptly trapped in a dead end. But there’s no sense of any frustration. The driver carefully executes a three-point turn, and the car exits toward Greek Row.

Is that it?

The driver cannot seem to find the will to park. He needs to stop wavering and hold the idea, the possibility, firmly in his mind. Only the driver of the white car is unreconciled. He is not there yet. But he so wants to because, as if summoned, he returns. The white car retraces its earlier route. But apparently he still cannot vault to the place he wants, he feels he must, reach. He can still see other possibilities. Once again, the white car exits the neighborhood.

Yet minutes later, the car returns as if pulled by an invisible force. He needs to find the boldness to act. Except he cannot. Once again the car approaches, only finally to pull away. And this time he is determined to stay away. It’s as if he does not want to be that other person. He continues onto Taylor Avenue until King Road is a faint, distant blur in his rearview mirror. He is escaping.

But he cannot help himself. It is 4 in the morning, and the driver turns around and returns a third time.

The white car has stopped, engine idling, on the asphalt parking bluff above the King Road house. Turning off the ignition will require the strength of Hercules. It seems an impossible task. It’s still not too late to flee.

But he must know his hesitation is a hoax. He must understand that only the deed will silence the voices screaming like a chorus of banshees inside his head. With that realization, self-restraint crumbles. And in an incredible moment, he finds the will. The idea has become as natural as breathing. He is committed. He turns the ignition off. The door of the white car opens. No one notices. All remains still. A dark figure walks down the dirt incline, the ground hard with a thin coating of frost. He is heading toward the back of the house. In his gloved hand he is gripping a leather sheath that holds a Ka-Bar knife with a sharp, seven-inch steel blade. It is a killer’s weapon.

The sliding glass door to the kitchen is rarely locked, and tonight is no exception. The door glides open easily, making only a muffled sound, as slight as a sudden intake of breath, and he steps inside. Does he listen for a telltale noise? Does he need a moment to get accustomed to this new manner of darkness? Or is the faint glow of the neon good vibes sufficient to light the way?

Once in the kitchen, he proceeds up the narrow staircase to the third floor. And this is, arguably, telling. If he were aimless, driven only by furious emotions, he would burst forward into either of the second-floor bedrooms. But he has a plan. He knows where he is going. He is a hunter stalking his prey.

Another speculation: since Kaylee no longer lives full-time in the house, his target has always been, since the madness first crept into his thoughts, petite Maddie. The stairs up to the third floor creak with the tread of his feet. He advances toward the bedroom door. Does his heartbeat slow? Does he feel invulnerable? Does he restrain himself, knowing that attack blows are better for this moment of delay?

When he opens the door, he finds two girls in the bed asleep. He slashes away swiftly, savagely. The wounds are long and very deep. It is quick, vicious work. In the single bed, the two lie dying, their bodies splayed yet touching. Their blood seeps into the mattress in a spreading red stain. Yet despite her wounds, Kaylee manages to lift herself up and, as if trying to escape, wedges herself into the far corner of the small room. The determined killer closes in, and she fights back. But all is quickly over, and her bloody body crumples to the floor.

The commotion and smell of blood rouses the dog, Murphy. From the room across the hall, the dog is frantic, his sense of danger keen. He bellows with large, cathartic howls. Downstairs, Dylan wakes. Is Kaylee playing with Murphy at this time of night? She calls out with disapproval into the darkness from her bed.

No one answers, but Murphy has calmed in some measure. The sounds the dog makes are steady and low.

The killer walks down the stairwell. Xana is awake. “There’s someone here!” she cries out, the alarm loud enough so that from her bedroom across the hall Dylan hears every word. She opens her bedroom door and peers out. There is only darkness, and, closing the door behind her, she returns to her bed. This is not the time, she decides, to make sense of things.

But Ethan has emerged from Xana’s room to investigate. And suddenly he is standing face-to-face with an intruder dressed entirely in black, a black mask pulled up high on the ridge of his nose. Ethan is six-four, powerful, an athlete. Yet the killer does not hesitate. He lashes out without compunction, and an arcing blow slices through Ethan’s neck, catching the jugular. His body starts to topple, and then falls in the doorway with a flat thud. Does the killer crouch over his victim and continue his attack? If so, the assault is unnecessary. Ethan is already dead.

Xana is sobbing.

The plaintive sound rouses Dylan again. She opens her bedroom door a crack and once again peers. The darkness reveals nothing. The killer is now close enough to Xana to see that she is trembling. Despite everything that is raging in him, he selects his words with a deliberate care. “It’s okay, I’m going to help you,” he says.

It is a lie. He has only come to help himself.

He raises his knife and attacks.

From behind her partially opened door, Dylan hears the killer speak. Nothing is making sense. She closes the door and retreats back to her bed. Xana, 5'3" and 113 pounds, is fighting for her life. But she is no match for the killer. He plunges his knife in deep, again and again. She crumples to the floor. Then he steps over Ethan’s body and walks out of the room.

His gait is unhurried. There were four of them, and he never hesitated. He did what he had to, and he must feel exhilarated. He continues back toward the slider door in the kitchen. His self-absorption is total.

He never notices that Dylan is standing in the doorway, the bedroom door flung open. And she is staring directly at him as if in a trance. She sees a man dressed all in black, a black mask reaching up high on his face. As she processes the moment, she decides he is about five ten, maybe taller. Not muscular, but well put together like an athlete.

For some reason, her eyes fix on his bushy eyebrows. She stares at him. A visitor? An intruder? She doesn’t understand what has happened. And she is extremely tired. She closes the door of her room and goes to bed, the blanket pulled up high. Did the killer see Dylan? Does he spare her in a sudden act of kindness? Or at that wild moment is he incapable of seeing anything?

It remains a mystery.

He retraces his steps, making his way back up the hill. He is transformed. He has become what he had to become. In little more than 8 minutes, 10 at most, he killed four people. He gets back in the white car and drives off as the faint light of the new day begins to filter throughthe lead-gray sky, and the blood spreads in thin red rivulets through the house on King Road.

From the forthcoming book WHEN THE NIGHT COMES FALLING   by Howard Blum. Copyright © 2024 by Howard Blum. To be published on June 25 th , 2024 by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission.

When the Night Comes Falling comes out June 25 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

• Entertainment

Here Are the 12 New Books You Should Read in July

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

E ven if you can’t escape rising summer temperatures to more comfortable climes, you can at least get lost in a good book . The best new books coming in July include Kevin Barry’s Western romance, Lev Grossman ’s reimagining of King Arthur’s legend, and Laura van den Berg ’s unsettling new novel set in Florida’s underbelly.

Keep Shark Week going with shark scientist Jasmin Graham’s debut memoir focused on her work with the most misunderstood fish in the sea. Hit the road with Turkish author Ayşegül Savaş’ third novel, about a couple running into unexpected trouble finding a new apartment for their family. And gaze deeply into beauty writer Sable Yong’s thoughtful essay collection on the role of vanity in today’s culture.

Here, the 12 new books you should read in July.

The Cliffs , J. Courtney Sullivan (July 2)

A decade ago, best-selling author J. Courtney Sullivan became obsessed with a purple Victorian mansion she discovered while on vacation in Maine. Now, that unique home is at the center of her haunting new novel, The Cliffs. After losing her mother, getting laid off, and separating from her husband, archivist Jane Flanagan returns to her coastal Maine hometown to discover that the long-abandoned gothic house she was obsessed with as a teen has a new owner. Genevieve, a wealthy outsider, has given the once-dilapidated dwelling a misbegotten makeover that she believes has awakened something sinister. In this provocative ghost story that questions how we right our wrongs of the past, the two must team up to rid the mysterious 19th-century home of its spirits and overcome their own demons.

Buy Now: The Cliffs on Bookshop | Amazon

The Heart in Winter , Kevin Barry (July 9)

The Heart in Winter, Irish author Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, is a rollicking romance that is as wild as the Old West where it takes place. In 1891 Butte, Mont., a reckless young poet and doper named Tom Rourke falls in love with Polly Gillespie, the new wife of the extremely devout captain of the local copper mine. The twosome ride off on a stolen horse together toward San Francisco, only to be pursued by a posse of mad gunmen hired by Polly’s husband. In order to survive in this rip-roaring love story, the outlaws make choices they may live to regret.

Buy Now: The Heart in Winter on Bookshop | Amazon

State of Paradise , Laura van den Berg (July 9)

In Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise, a ghostwriter travels to Florida during an unspecified pandemic to look after her aging mother. But when she arrives, the unnamed narrator discovers that it’s her little sister who really needs help. Struggling to process the death of their father, her sibling has become obsessed with a virtual reality headset that allows her to reconnect with the dead. Then she suddenly goes missing, alongside countless other Floridians, leading the protagonist to launch an investigation into the mysterious tech company behind the headsets. What ensues is a page-turning story about the challenges of learning to let go.

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The Anthropologists , Ayşegül Savaş (July 9)

Inspired by her 2021 New Yorker short story, “ Future Selves ,” Ayşegül Savaş’ perceptive new novel, The Anthropologists , follows a nomadic couple as they struggle to find an apartment in an unnamed foreign city. Asya and Manu, a documentarian and nonprofit worker, are looking to finally put down roots together in a place that is all their own and nothing like where they came from. But as they tour each real-estate listing, envisioning what their future could look like, something always seems off, and they can’t quite place why. The idealistic lovers find themselves chafing against society’s idea of adulthood and look to kindred spirits—a reticent bon vivant, a lonely local, and their poetry-loving elderly neighbor—in hopes of figuring out how to live a good life.

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Die Hot With a Vengeance, Sable Yong (July 9)

With her debut essay collection, Die Hot With a Vengeance, Sable Yong looks to understand why vanity is still such a dirty word in a culture so obsessed with beauty. The former Allure editor offers thought-provoking analysis on social media’s impossible beauty standards , the rise of questionable wellness trends , and whether blondes really do have more fun. Going beyond just sharing her insights from working in the industry, she also weaves in stories of her own complicated relationship with self-image as she grew up feeling like an outsider in her mostly white neighborhood. With humor and candor, Die Hot With a Vengeance shows why beauty should be a tool of self-expression, not self-hate.

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The Lucky Ones , Zara Chowdhary (July 16)

Zara Chowdhary’s debut memoir, The Lucky Ones, is a moving tale of survival that spans more than two decades of anti-Muslim violence in India . As a teenager in the early 2000s, Chowdhary bore witness to India’s worst communal riots in over 50 years, which turned Hindu and Muslim neighbors against one another. Chowdhary offers a harrowing account of the violence that occurred—and continues to this day —between the two groups, tracing the political, economic, and social repercussions of 80 years of ongoing bloodshed.

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Sharks Don't Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist , Jasmin Graham (July 16)

Throughout shark scientist Jasmin Graham’s riveting debut memoir, Sharks Don’t Sink, she compares herself to the oft-misunderstood titular fish. Despite being denser than water, sharks manage to float because they just keep swimming. Graham had to do the same in order to move up in the white male-dominated profession of marine biology. She shares stories of growing up fishing with her dad and describes her struggle to find her place in academia as a Black woman and how that led her to start Minorities in Shark Sciences , an organization that provides support and opportunities for those underrepresented in the marine science field. Graham also makes the case for thinking about sharks differently, and urges us all to help protect these vulnerable, prehistoric creatures.

Buy Now: Sharks Don't Sink on Bookshop | Amazon

The Bright Sword , Lev Grossman (July 16)

Best-selling author Lev Grossman, a former TIME critic, is back with a new, sweeping medieval epic that offers a fresh take on the legend of King Arthur . In The Bright Sword, a gifted young knight named Collum arrives in Camelot in the hopes of competing for a spot at the Round Table. Sadly, though, he’s too late; King Arthur died in battle two weeks earlier, and the knights that survived him are more Bad News Bears than Game of Thrones . Still, Collum joins this lovable band of misfits realizing there’s too much at stake, and their fight has just begun. Together, the group becomes Camelot’s only hope of reclaiming Excalibur, reuniting the kingdom, and keeping Arthur’s foes—dastardly half-sister Morgan le Fay, his fallen bride Guinevere, and disgraced hero Lancelot—from reclaiming the crown.

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Liars , Sarah Manguso (July 23)

In essayist and poet Sarah Manguso’s unflinching second novel, a writer named Jane believes she’s found a supportive partner in John, a visual artist who becomes her husband. But after the birth of their first child, she begins to feel swallowed up by John’s ego. When her own career starts to take off, it’s John who pulls away, leaving Jane to take a closer look at their marriage, which, she realizes, may have never been on solid ground. As she examines the pieces of her life, Manguso’s plucky protagonist makes stirring observations about marriage and identity.

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Catalina , Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (July 23)

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut novel follows Catalina Ituralde, a brash undocumented immigrant from Ecuador on the verge of graduating from Harvard. She’s got a stacked resume and pretty good grades, but her immigration status has made her post-grad prospects rather bleak. This is a major problem for Catalina, who takes care of her grandparents on top of everything else. After years of working to infiltrate Harvard’s high society and as commencement looms over her head, she falls for a sanctimonious anthropology student and begins wondering if she’s found a solution to her woes or just another problem. This sardonic, semi-autobiographical novel is sure to delight fans of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot .

Buy Now: Catalina on Bookshop | Amazon

Someone Like Us , Dinaw Mengestu (July 30)

Dinaw Mengestu’s fourth novel, Someone Like Us , is a beguiling meditation on love, loss, and the need to belong. As his marriage unravels, war journalist Mamush returns to the tight-knit Ethiopian community in Washington, D.C. where he grew up to seek solace. But once there, he discovers that Samuel, his larger-than-life father figure, has unexpectedly died. In hopes of better understanding Samuel, Mamush embarks on a cross-country expedition to trace the older man’s immigration journey—only to unearth a shocking secret about his own lineage.

Buy Now: Someone Like Us on Bookshop | Amazon

They Dream in Gold , Mai Sennaar (July 30)

Playwright and filmmaker Mai Sennaar’s debut novel, They Dream in Gold, is a tender romance that spans decades, generations, and continents. It’s love at first sight when Bonnie and Mansour, African immigrants abandoned by their mothers, meet in New York in 1968. The two bond over Mansour’s music, a blend of Senegalese gospel and American jazz, which they each believe has the power to change the world. When Mansour goes missing while on tour in Spain, a pregnant Bonnie must team up with his mother, grandmother, and aunt to solve the mystery of his disappearance. In detailing their plight, Sennaar unveils a story about motherhood, the African diaspora, and the resilience of Black women.

Buy Now: They Dream in Gold on Bookshop | Amazon

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7 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Today is the first day of summer, and what better time to read a handful of books about adventures — or misadventures? Our recommended titles this week include Kevin Fedarko’s “A Walk in the Park,” his good-natured romp about encountering bad nature on a trek through the Grand Canyon, along with David Nicholls’s novel about a happier hiking trip, Nicholas Kristof’s memoir of life as a roving reporter and Kassia St. Clair’s look at an epic intercontinental car race in the early days of the automobile. (You can’t even call it a road race, because along much of the route roads were nonexistent.)

On a more sober note, we also recommend Kim A. Wagner’s meticulously researched history of a forgotten military atrocity and Steven Johnson’s reconstruction of an era when anarchists and police forces duked it out in a battle of wits (and dynamite). In fiction, don’t miss Morgan Talty’s rich debut novel, “Fire Exit,” about a man exiled from the only land and culture he has ever known. Happy solstice, and happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

A WALK IN THE PARK: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon Kevin Fedarko

Two friends — the adventure writer Fedarko and the photographer Pete McBride — decide to walk the length of the Grand Canyon. What could go wrong? As this wildly entertaining book demonstrates, everything you can imagine, and then some. Fedarko takes us for a ride that’s often harrowing, frequently hilarious and, always, full of wonderful nature writing.

“Fedarko doesn’t describe awe; he induces it, with page-turning action, startling insights and the kind of verbal grace that makes multipage descriptions of, say, a flock of pelicans feel riveting and new.”

From Blair Braverman’s review

Scribner | $32.50

THE INFERNAL MACHINE: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective Steven Johnson

From the 1880s to, roughly, 1920, anarchists were considered America’s greatest terror threat. And in telling the stories of Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Peter Kropotkin and the policemen who pursued them, Johnson makes it clear that his real protagonist is dynamite itself. While this functions as a lively history of an era in its own right, it’s also a timely meditation on the nature of violence, protest and American society.

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AP Biology Premium, 2022-2023: Comprehensive Review with 5 Practice Tests + an Online Timed Test Option (Barron's AP) Premium Edition

• ISBN-10 1506280366
• ISBN-13 978-1506280363
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• Publisher Barrons Educational Services
• Publication date February 1, 2022
• Language English
• Dimensions 8.38 x 1.3 x 10.88 inches
• Print length 456 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Barrons Educational Services; Premium edition (February 1, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 456 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1506280366
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1506280363
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 9 - 12
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.57 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.38 x 1.3 x 10.88 inches
• #168 in AP Test Guides
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• #3,046 in Education Workbooks (Books)

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Mary wuerth.

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