Matthew Specktor grew up the son of a famous Hollywood agent. In The Golden Hour he serves up family saga, cultural criticism, fictionalized biography, history and lament for a vanishing world.
The Secret Life of a Cemetery is a paean to the renowned Parisian cemetery, Père Lachaise. There, 10,000 visitors a day seek the graves of some 4,500 notable figures.
Nat Cassidy's wildly entertaining novel is a superb example of how to work with clichés. When the Wolf Comes Home might sound like a werewolf novel — but it's an entirely different animal.
Laila Lalami's dystopian novel centers on a woman who's been incarcerated because an algorithm flagged her as a crime risk. The Dream Hotel paints a grim picture about the ways our data can betray us.
Lydia Millet's characters in Atavists interact and have little dramas of their own — the author's talent is on full display here. Not every story is strong, but they work well together.
Didion's book is an intimate chronicle of the author's struggle to help her daughter, even if it meant digging into her own long-unexamined neuroses.
Dorothy Parker's posthumously published collection is Poems; Camilla Barnes' debut novel is The Usual Desire to Kill. Both affirm: sharp humor can be grounded in pain.
A famed graphic novelist returns! A Southern-gothic crime-thriller inspired by The Godfather! An extremely in depth biography of Mark Twain! And more!
Russell has published excellent short story collections since her 2011 debut novel Swamplandia!, but this is her first novel in nearly 15 years. It follows a "Prairie Witch" in Dust Bowl-era Nebraska.
Sunrise on the Reaping recounts the 50th annual Hunger Games, telling the story of Haymitch Abernathy. It's themes and events conjure images of today's U.S. political climate.
The prose is gorgeous and the plot is complex. The author of The Only Good Indians returns again with a spellbinding yarn about one of the bloodiest, most significant parts of the nation's history.
Willow Winsham's new book on witches, past and present, offers a fun, fast, well researched historical summary that is also a stunning work of art.
Formerly enslaved people would placed ads in newspapers hoping to find lost children, parents, spouses and siblings. Historian Judith Giesberg tells the stories of some of those families in a new book.
Live Fast won France's top literary prize in 2022. Brigitte Giraud's haunting book revisits the death of her husband in a motorcycle crash 20-odd years earlier.
Horwitz died suddenly in 2019 while on a book tour. In Memorial Days, Geraldine Brooks grieves her husband — and also reflects on the life she might have lived had they not met.
Kay Sohini's graphic memoir, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, tells a story of migration and redefinition. Gay Talese gathers many of his great pieces about the city in A Town Without Time.
Adam Haslett's compelling novel focuses on the strained relationship between an asylum lawyer and his mother. It's a beautiful appreciation of the all-too-human mess of life.
Kick off the Year of the Snake with two romances: Lunar Love by Lauren Kung Jessen, and Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham.
(Image credit: Louise Delmotte)
Sometimes you finish a book and just have to talk about it with someone else. If your book club is looking for its next conversation-sparking title we have a dozen for you!
There are so many great books to look forward to in 2025. But first, you'll want to catch up on these perspective-shifting titles from 2024, exploring art, the afterlife, nuns, nuclear war — and more.
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