Books Critics and Readers Both Love

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.

The Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There (“Pure soaring beauty.” The New York Times Book Review) delivers a masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.

Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. 

A novel about the rich stories of small places, from the Nobel Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Books of Jacob and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Another brilliant constellation novel in the mode of Tokarczuk’s International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night reminds us that the story of any place, no matter how humble, is boundless. 

A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. In development as a feature film to be produced by Steven Spielberg.

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years — an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss.

Despite lukewarm first impressions, Hua and Ken became friends. It was a friendship built on late-night conversations, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first met. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends — his memories — Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of I’m Glad My Mom Died comes “a thorny examination of power, lust, shame, and rage” (Los Angeles Times) from “a writer able to capture some of the darkest parts of human nature with unflinching honesty and devastating humor” (NPR).

A big-hearted, wise, unceasingly buoyant love story about a woman who, after escaping a bruising marriage, theorizes that happiness is possible solely with the eradication of all romance — only to find someone that could change her life forever. Cleverly constructed, delightfully funny, and beautifully written, The End of Romance is an anti-romance romance novel that charts its fallible heroine’s tumultuous journey to love and happiness with erudition and deep feeling — a story for anyone who, despite their best efforts, has fallen in love, and wondered why.

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, Griffith’s closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day. In The Flower Bearers, Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love.

A radiant new memoir from artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids. Here we meet Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.

It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t … With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Belle Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.

In this masterful, groundbreaking work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson shines surprising new light on an infamous 1984 New York subway shooting that would unveil simmering racial resentments and would lead, in unexpected ways, to a fractured future and a new era of rage and violence. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.