Not since Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend has a novel so deftly probed the magical and sometimes destructive friendships that can occur between two girls.
Nick Drnaso builds a world we think we understand. Then, methodically and slowly, he breaks it all down—and with it, our understanding of the human condition.
Less Is Lost, the companionable sequel to Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winning novel, Less, traces a hapless writer’s further misadventures.
Kamila Shamsie’s eighth novel speculates about whether even the most cherished friendships could have an expiration date.
In Mr. Wilder and Me, bitterness isn’t part of Billy Wilder’s makeup, as Jonathan Coe emphasizes the director’s kindness and humility.
In bringing Jacqueline Bouvier’s transformative Paris interlude to the page, Ann Mah offers readers a lovely, immersive visit to a vanished city.
Full of small mysteries that deserve lengthy discussions with well-read friends, The Complexities is a superb book club selection.
Dinosaurs is a bracing if subtle reminder that, in the absence of changes to old-fashioned ways, some people are just one good volcanic eruption from going the way of the dinosaur.
Celeste Ng is undoubtedly at the top of her game. The American society in Our Missing Hearts is overcome by fear, serving as a poignant critique of our own increasingly fraught and oppressive political landscape.
A Minor Chorus is a feat of technical brilliance, a novel that questions the worth of writing even as it asserts its own value.
Andrea Barrett has devoted vast amounts of her creative energy to vividly imagining generations of a family and their friends living in central New York, but you need not have read her earlier stories to be informed and dazzled by Natural History.
Although some readers may disagree, Ian McEwan’s scathing, unsettling novel posits that knaves and heroes come in all guises, and that everyone is capable of lies, predation and selfishness.
Jonathan Escoffery brings an imaginative, fresh voice to his deep exploration of what it means to be a man, son, brother, father and nonwhite immigrant in America. As his protagonist notes, “If I don’t create characters who look like me, who will? Visibility is important. Otherwise, it’s as if we don’t exist.”
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