109 books
Haruki Murakami
You know Murakami’s going to be weird, you just don’t know if you’re going to like that flavor of weird. Well, I loved 1Q84. What’s more romantic than one moon hanging in the sky? Two moons! The book—and it’s a…
Megha Majumdar
It’s set in Kolkata, India, a few decades out, under flood and heat and a food shortage that has markets selling seaweed and synthetic fish. Ma runs a shelter, cares for her elderly father and her two-year-old daughter, and has…
Cormac McCarthy
John Grady Cole is sixteen when his grandfather dies and the ranch he expected to inherit gets sold out from under him. It’s 1949, and the cowboy life he wants has already ended in Texas, so he and a friend…
Callan Wink
In this second novel from author and fly-fishing guide Callan Wink, twenty-something brothers Thad and Hazen are hanging on, barely, in their rustic log house on the banks of the Yellowstone River, just outside the national park. They’re saddled with…
Jack Kerouac
Kerouac wrote On the Road, and it made him famous, and the fame ate him alive. By 1960, he was 38, drinking himself apart, with strangers showing up at his mother’s house wanting the King of the Beats. Ferlinghetti offered…
Jen Beagin
Greta is 46, broke, and living in a half-ruined Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York, with a beekeeper and a bunch of bees in the walls. She has a job transcribing the sessions of a local sex-and-relationship coach, which means…
Maggie Su
Vi Liu is 24, half-Taiwanese, dumped by her boyfriend, dropped out of school without telling her parents, and working the front desk at a motel in the Indiana college town she grew up in. She doesn’t even have the energy…
Cormac McCarthy
A runaway kid out of Tennessee, fourteen years old, drifts down into Texas in 1849 and falls in with the Glanton gang — real men, scalp hunters the Mexican states paid by the head to kill Apaches, who figured out…
Peter Heller
Celine is 68, blue-blooded, Sarah Lawrence grad, an apartment under the Brooklyn Bridge, a cigarette habit that gave her emphysema, and a better record finding missing people than the FBI. She takes cases about lost families because of a hole…
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Near-future America, where the prison system got turned into a televised blood sport. Sign up for the program and you fight other prisoners to the death on live TV; survive three years and you walk free. Almost nobody makes it.…
David Mitchell
Six stories nested inside each other like a set of dolls. A lawyer crossing the Pacific in 1850. A broke young composer in Belgium in 1931 conning his way into an old master’s house. A reporter in 1970s California chasing…
Daniel Mason
Miles Krzelewski is 45 and fourteen years into a dissertation on Russian folktales that keeps changing topic every time it gets hard. His wife Kate lands a one-year visiting professorship at a college in Vermont, so the whole family —…
Rachel Kushner
Sadie Smith is a hired spy — ex-federal, now freelance, working for clients she never meets. Her job is to get inside a commune of radical farmers in southwest France and push them into doing something illegal enough to jail…
Gabriel Tallent
Gabriel Tallent’s second novel, Crux, feels as if it’s trying to squeeze every possible metaphor out of every possible climbing term, and, like his hyper-loquacious protagonist Tamma, it’s a lot to take—at first. But you settle in, or maybe buckle…
Melissa Broder
A woman drives out of Los Angeles to a Best Western in the high desert, supposedly to work on her novel, actually to get away from her father, who’s been in the ICU for months and died and been brought…
Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver took David Copperfield, moved it to Lee County in the far southwest corner of Virginia, and let Dickens do the work he was built for. Damon Fields, called Demon, gets born on the floor of a single-wide to a…
Jack Kerouac
Kerouac wrote this right after On the Road, and it’s the calmer and better book. Ray Smith is Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder is Gary Snyder, who was then a young poet in Berkeley translating Han Shan and heading for a…
Beatriz Serrano
From the very first page of Discontent, the funny and sardonic debut novel by Spanish writer Beatriz Serrano, lyrics from Portugal. The Man’s “Purple Yellow Red & Blue” lodged in my head and stayed for the duration of the book:…
Franziska Gänsler
Iris runs a hotel in Bad Heim, a German spa town six hours from Berlin that used to be a place people came to. Now the fires burn across the river every summer, the smoke never clears, people wear masks…
Paul Yoon
The narrator is a dog. Etna is a working military dog in an unnamed country, and after years at war he walks away from the men he fought beside one night and heads for the place he was taken from…
Rivka Galchen
Katharina Kepler was a widow in her seventies in a small German town, illiterate, sharp-tongued, in the business of mixing herbal remedies, and the mother of Johannes Kepler, who by then had worked out how the planets move. In 1615…
David Szalay
István is fifteen, new in town, living with his mother in a flat on a Hungarian housing estate, and he doesn’t know how to talk to anybody. The married woman across the hall, closer to his mother’s age than his,…
Amitav Ghosh
Calcutta, 1969. A three-year-old girl in a strict vegetarian household announces she wants fish for lunch. She’s never had it, never seen it in the house. She says she remembers another life, a mud house by a river, a different…
Claire Vaye Watkins
The Southwest has dried out and been evacuated, and a dune sea called the Amargosa is moving east across California, burying towns. Luz, a former poster child for the drought-relief effort, and Ray, an ex-soldier, are squatting in an abandoned…
Michael Christie
I liked this book. The New York Times also liked it a lot. The Washington Post was a bit more cynical, but also on point. “Michael Christie’s second novel, Greenwood, makes it clear that we really want 500-page novels about…
Delaney Nolan
Beatrice is twenty-nine and works at Twin Bridge, a broke residential treatment center in a dust-blown East Texas town called Askewn, minding a floor of furious teenage girls who are on too many drugs or not enough. It’s the near…
Amity Gaige
How easy is it to get lost when you wander off the Appalachian Trail? Very. This extremely page-turning novel by Amity Gaige veers between the disappearance in Maine’s North Woods of thru-hiker Valerie Gillis, who is just two hundred miles…
Jardine Libaire
Lee manages a Tribeca restaurant and runs on cocaine and pink champagne, financed by older men who buy her clothes and cover her rent. She was going to be a painter. She can’t remember the last time she touched a…
M. L. Rio
Summer 1989: Ten-year-old Suzanne talks her way onto tour with her father Gil, a metal guitarist one break away from being somebody, and his band the Kills. She’s a music obsessive with a camera and no ability to play, and…
Mark Z. Danielewski
A family moves into a house in the Virginia countryside and finds a closet where there wasn’t one, then a hallway, and then measure the place and discover the inside is a quarter inch bigger than the outside. The hallway…
Imbolo Mbue
How Beautiful We Were is more acutely felt than most of the real-life environmental tragedies that populate today’s headlines. A fictional eco-disaster set in the also fictional African village of Kosawa, Mbue’s second novel eviscerates the hypocrisies and externalized hungers…
Fernanda Melchor
The body of the Witch is found in an irrigation canal outside a Mexican village called La Matosa, and the novel works outward from there through five people connected to the killing — a teenage girl, a boy, a mother,…
Ling Ling Huang
Enka grows up on the poor side of a walled city in Florida, gets a scholarship to an elite art school, and immediately fixes on Mathilde, the prodigy everyone else is afraid to approach. Mathilde is genuinely great and genuinely…
Allegra Goodman
There’s little in the opening pages to suggest this 2025 novel will turn into a great adventure yarn replete with the hand-knife beheading of an attacking polar bear. It’s the early 1500s and orphaned French noblewoman Marguerite de la Rocque…
Percival Everett
Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s side, and the first thing Everett does is give him back his mind. The slave dialect is a performance the enslaved put on for white people and drop the second they’re alone — Jim teaches the…
Naina Kumar
Neelu Pillai flies to Scotland for her estranged father’s wedding intending to keep her head down. Instead she hooks up with a local the night before, then delivers a tipsy tirade at the rehearsal dinner that sends the bride running.…
Bonnie Garmus
Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist in early sixties Southern California who is very good and gets nothing for it — no doctorate, no credit on her own work, and a lab full of men who treat her as furniture.…
Martin Amis
Nicola Six knows she’s going to be murdered and sets about arranging it. She picks two candidates in a west London pub — a small-time con man and darts obsessive named Keith Talent, and a rich, gentle sad sack named…
Ryan Effgen
Three generations of the Pickford family land on Mackinac Island for one more week together: A snail scientist studying an invasive species, his sister on the way out of a marriage, her teenage daughter, the wayward brother, and the father…
Charlotte McConaghy
Franny Stone talks her way onto a fishing boat in Greenland by promising the crew that the Arctic terns she has tagged will lead them to the last fish in a mostly emptied ocean. The birds are making what may…
Steve Hawk
A small nuclear device goes off beside a highway in West Virginia — low yield, few dead, and the first act of nuclear terrorism in history. Months later, on a rough stretch of Northern California coast, a surfer and lifeguard…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
Saint-Exupéry flew the mail in South America, and this is the night operation: Three planes converging on Buenos Aires from Patagonia, Chile, and Paraguay, and Rivière, the man on the ground who sends them out. One pilot flies into a…
Daniel Mason
One house in the western Massachusetts woods, told across four centuries by everyone who passed through it. Two lovers fleeing a Puritan colony. An apple-obsessed English soldier. Twin spinster sisters. A landscape painter, a schizophrenic son, a true crime writer,…
Haruki Murakami
Toru Watanabe hears a Beatles song on a plane and is thrown back to 1969, to a Tokyo university, and to two women. Naoko was his dead best friend’s girlfriend, fragile and receding into a sanatorium in the hills. Midori…
Alvaro Enrigue
A Mexican woman flees into the desert after an Apache raid on her dead husband’s ranch. A lieutenant colonel chasing cattle rustlers realizes he’s tracking an abduction instead. Decades on, the American and Mexican armies maneuver Geronimo toward a surrender…
Nathaniel Rich
Mitchell Zukor is a young math genius hired by a Manhattan firm called FutureWorld that sells corporations worst-case scenarios — for a fee, they calculate your catastrophic exposure and indemnify you against being sued for not foreseeing it. Mitchell is…
Solvej Balle
Tara Selter, an antiquarian book dealer, wakes up and it is the eighteenth of November. It is the eighteenth of November again the next day, and the next, and it doesn’t stop. She isn’t looking for a way out and…
Jack Kerouac
Sal Paradise meets Dean Moriarty and spends the next few years crossing and recrossing the country — New York to Denver to San Francisco, down to Mexico City, back again, in borrowed cars and on buses, with no money, chasing…
Richard Powers
Four lives converging on Makatea, a French Polynesian island strip-mined for phosphate decades ago and now down to eighty residents who are being asked to vote on whether a consortium can build the first floating city offshore. There’s a tech…
Daryl Gregory
The Birch family has kept a covenant with something living in a cave on their mountain in the Smokies since the 1930s. Each generation supplies a girl who goes into the dark to receive from it, and Stella was the…
Amy Taylor
Amy Taylor is a Melbourne novelist whose first book, Search History, made The Guardian’s best-of-the-year list. Ruins, her second, drops a couple into an Athens summer. Emma and Julian are house-sitting for a friend and quietly falling apart — she…
Ling Ma
Candace Chen works a dead-end job in New York coordinating the production of specialty Bibles in Chinese factories. Shen Fever arrives — a fungal infection that doesn’t kill people so much as lock them into repeating one familiar routine forever,…
Yasunari Kawabata
A wealthy Tokyo dilettante named Shimamura takes the train through a long tunnel into the mountains of Niigata, where the snow piles up higher than the houses, and stays at a hot spring inn. There he takes up with Komako,…
Jess Walter
Rhys Kinnick blew up his life seven years ago and has been living off the grid in the woods of eastern Washington, no phone, no news, growing his own food and stewing. Then his granddaughter and grandson turn up at…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
His first book, and the roughest. Jacques Bernis flies the Toulouse–Dakar mail run down the coast of Africa, over the Spanish Sahara where a forced landing means capture, and the narrator is a friend at one of the desert waystations…
Emily St. John Mandel
An actor dies onstage during King Lear in Toronto on the night a flu arrives that will kill almost everybody. Twenty years later the Traveling Symphony walks a circuit around the Great Lakes performing Shakespeare for the settlements that are…
Gary Shteyngart
A near-future America where everyone wears an äppärät around their neck broadcasting their credit rating and screwability to everyone in the room, the dollar is pegged to the yuan, and the country is being run into default by a party…
Michael Chabon
Josef Kavalier gets smuggled out of Prague in 1939 in a coffin with the Golem, a kind of Jewish Frankenstein’s monster, lands on his cousin Sammy Clay’s bedroom floor in Brooklyn, and the two of them invent a comic book…
Rae Giana Rashad
Set in an America where a second civil war broke out in 1954 and the wrong side won. By 2030 a white-run government called the Order classifies Black people as Descendants of Slavery, and an algorithm hands out your job,…
Junot Diaz
Díaz’s 2007 first novel, which won the Pulitzer. Oscar de León is an overweight, lovelorn Dominican-American kid in New Jersey — a science fiction and fantasy obsessive who wants, more than anything, to fall in love. The book follows him…
Lev Grossman
I don’t know how I stumbled upon this book, because I mostly left my interest in fantasy behind in my teens (talkin’ to you, Tolkien). But, wow. I couldn’t put The Bright Sword down and even raved about it to…
Stephen Graham Jones
In 1912, a Lutheran pastor in Montana takes the confession of a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, who has been coming to the church weekly and telling a story in pieces. Good Stab is a vampire, made by a white…
Cormac McCarthy
The second McCarthy border novel — a young man crosses into Mexico to return a wolf to the wild. The wolf doesn’t survive. Neither does the old world McCarthy is eulogizing. If McCarthy’s your jam, the prose is as good…
Leonardo Sciascia
A man is shot dead boarding a bus in a Sicilian town square in front of forty people, and by the time the carabinieri arrive nobody saw anything. Captain Bellodi, a northerner and a former partisan, actually investigates — which…
Peter Heller
We’ve all imagined what it would be like to survive an apocalypse, but Peter Heller imagined it better. It’s nine years after a pandemic, our location a small airport at the base of the Colorado Rockies. Hig (Big Hig to…
Zadie Smith
Eliza Touchet is a Scottish widow running the household of her cousin, a once-famous novelist now writing books nobody reads, in Victorian England. She becomes obsessed with the Tichborne trial — a butcher from Australia claiming to be a missing…
Naomi Alderman
Three tech billionaires have bunkers, and their prediction models are telling them when to run. Around them, a handful of people who know the systems from the inside — a survivalist forum obsessive, a daughter, a lover, an ex-employee —…
Donna Tartt
Theo Decker is thirteen when a bomb goes off in the Metropolitan Museum, killing his mother, and in the smoke a dying old man tells him to take a small Dutch painting off the wall. He does, and he keeps…
Emma Cline
Alex is twenty-two, broke, running from people in the city she owes money to, and spending August on Long Island with a much older man who is done with her by the second chapter. He puts her on a train.…
James McBride
A skeleton turns up in a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in 1972, and the story goes back to Chicken Hill in the 1920s and 30s — the neighborhood where Jewish immigrants and Black families lived alongside each other on the…
Chi Zijian
One day holding a hundred years, told by a ninety-year-old Evenki woman as the last of her people board trucks out of the forest. Bruce Humes’s translation trusts you with the specificity and never buries you in glossary. Elegy, and a beautiful one.
Denis Johnson
Roland Nair, a Danish-American with a NATO intelligence job and a private agenda, flies into Freetown to meet his old friend Michael Adriko, a Ugandan special forces soldier who is charming, unreliable, and possibly running a scam involving enriched uranium.…
Maggie Stiefvater
June Hudson runs the Avallon, a grand hotel built over mineral springs in the West Virginia mountains, and she came up from the hollers to do it. In 1942 the State Department requisitions the place to intern Axis diplomats and…
James Galvin
A hundred years of one meadow on the Wyoming-Colorado line, at ten thousand feet, told out of order. Galvin owned part of it and knew the people who worked it, chiefly Lyle Van Waning, a man who built his own…
Nathaniel Ian Miller
As a young boy in Sweden at the beginning of the twentieth century, bookworm Sven Ormson was obsessed with polar adventure, but decades of lethargy and dead-end jobs have led to a man who is, at best, stuck. Spurred by…
Kaliane Bradley
A near-future British government has time travel and no idea what to do with it, so it pulls a handful of people out of history moments before they would have died and assigns each one a “bridge” — a civil…
Edward Abbey
Four people meet on a river trip and decide to start wrecking things. A Vietnam surgeon with three ex-wives, a Mormon river guide with three current ones, a Bronx kid turned desert fanatic, and a woman from the Bronx who…
Diane Cook
Many dream of the camping trip that never ends. Surely our best selves are found in nature, right? In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a mother saves her daughter from pollution-induced asthma by moving to the Wilderness State, an…
Richard Powers
I was skeptical about this book, with its nine human characters, sprawling timeline from 19th century New York to Occupy Wall Street, and magical realism meets science fiction meets eco-terrorism fable. What? But Richard Powers, who’s won a National Book…
Peter Heller
Jim Stegner is a painter with a real market, two dead marriages, a daughter who was murdered, and a prison term for shooting a man in a bar. He’s living in Colorado trying to fish and paint and stay level.…
Vijay Khurana
Two teenagers, Adam and Teddy, in a small town at the end of a summer. Adam is the one with the ideas, deep in video games and internet grievance; Teddy is the one who goes along to see what happens.…
Naomi Alderman
Teenage girls start producing an electrical charge from a strand of muscle across the collarbone, enough to hurt, enough to kill. They can wake it in older women. Inside a decade the whole arrangement of the world has flipped. Alderman…
Graham Greene
Saigon, early fifties, the French war going badly. Fowler is a British reporter, middle-aged, opium in the afternoons, living with a young Vietnamese woman named Phuong and determined to have no opinions about anything. Pyle is a young American just…
W.G. Sebald
A man walks the Suffolk coast and the walk keeps opening into other things. A skull, a herring fishery, Thomas Browne’s missing remains, the silk trade, Joseph Conrad in the Congo, the Taiping rebellion, a collapsing country house, the hurricane…
Peter Heller
Award-winning writer Peter Heller has traveled the world as an expedition kayaker from the High Pamirs of Tajikistan to Central America to Peru. Which is to say, few can write about rivers—their shifting colors, sounds, and moods—like Heller. Now the…
Lionel Davidson
The time is the early 1950s. The place is Central Asia. The backdrop is geopolitics, with the great powers of Britain, China, and others wrestling in the shadows for influence over India, Tibet, and Nepal. Into this cauldron stumbles fictional…
Chana Porter
An alien species arrives, and instead of invading it just seeps into everything — the water, the food, the bodies — and makes the world gentle. No scarcity, no illness, no death you don’t choose. Trina Goldberg-Oneka, a trans woman…
Eowyn Ivey
This Pulitzer Prize finalist feels like winter—wet snowflakes on eyelashes, the smell of a woodstove, fear of long, dark nights. Inspired by an old Russian folk tale, it’s a fictional story about a novice homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska who…
Mary Doria Russell
A radio telescope picks up singing from Alpha Centauri, and the Jesuits — who have been doing astronomy and first contact for four centuries — quietly fund and crew the first mission. Eight people go. One comes back, mutilated and…
Graham Greene
A German prison in occupied France. Thirty hostages, three to be shot, lots drawn. Chavel, a wealthy lawyer, draws one of the marked slips and offers everything he owns — house, money, all of it — to any man who…
Margaret Atwood
Thirty-odd years after The Handmaid’s Tale, told by three women. Aunt Lydia, the most senior of the Aunts, who runs Ardua Hall and has spent years quietly compiling files on everybody who matters. Agnes, raised inside as a commander’s daughter,…
Colson Whitehead
Cora is a teenager on a Georgia cotton plantation, working a patch of dirt her grandmother claimed, abandoned by a mother who ran and never sent word. When Caesar asks her to go with him, she says no, then says…
Quan Barry
Striker is a Black film scout on a luxury Antarctic cruise, photographing locations for a big-budget movie about Shackleton, and she’s the only Black passenger aboard among tech money and blended families she watches with a very dry eye. Then…
Lauren Groff
A servant girl runs out of the Jamestown fort in the winter of the starving time, with a hatchet, a stolen pewter cup, and two pairs of stockings, into a continent she knows nothing about. That’s the whole book —…
John Lanchester
Sea level went, and Britain has ringed the entire island in concrete. Every citizen serves two years as a Defender on the wall, twelve-hour shifts staring at cold water, and the rule is simple: If Others get past you, you…
Haruki Murakami
Toru Okada is unemployed, boiling spaghetti, when the phone rings. Then the cat disappears. Then his wife does. What follows involves a psychic prostitute, a teenage neighbor, a politician brother-in-law with something badly wrong in him, and a man who…
Martin Amis
The book runs backward. It opens with a man dying in America and moves the wrong way down his life, narrated by a consciousness riding inside him that can’t control anything and doesn’t understand what it sees. So doctors take…
Eowyn Ivey
In 1885, shortly after the Alaska Purchase from Russia and before the gold rush, the U.S. Army’s Lieutenant Henry T. Allen was ordered on a 1,200-mile expedition to map the Copper and Tanana rivers of Alaska’s interior. Little was known…
Gabrielle Zevin
Sam and Sadie meet as kids in a hospital game room in Los Angeles, fall out, and meet again in a Cambridge subway station in the nineties. They make a video game together in a borrowed apartment over one summer…
Colum McCann
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and failing novelist, gets an assignment about the undersea cables that carry the internet, and joins a repair ship off the west coast of Africa. The chief of mission is John Conway, a freediver and…
Andrew Sean Greer
The writing in this book is anguished from the first page: It’s precious, far too self-aware, awkward, and twee. It set me on edge. I pushed through another or ten or so pages and gave up. I might return for…
Meg Little Reilly
Ash and Pia leave Brooklyn for rural Vermont wanting a simpler life, and then the forecasts start describing a superstorm months out — big enough that the government begins issuing guidance and the town begins picking sides. Pia throws herself…
Ian McEwan
The year is 2119, most of Britain is under water and reduced to an archipelago, and an academic named Thomas Metcalfe has built his career on a lost poem — read aloud once at a dinner party in 2014, never…
Benjamín Labatut
Five linked pieces that start as history and slide into fiction without telling you where the line is. Fritz Haber pulls nitrogen out of the air, feeds the world, and invents chemical weapons. Schwarzschild solves Einstein’s equations in the trenches…
Jardine Libaire
New Haven, 1986. Elise Perez is twenty, mixed race, out of the projects, squatting in the house next door to a Yale senior named Jamey Hyde, who has an heir’s trust fund and a family that will not tolerate her…
Charlotte McConaghy
Set on a fictional and very, very remote island at the bottom of the world, Charlotte McConaghy’s third novel brings new meaning to Southern gothic: There are dark and stormy nights, melodrama, and a ruddy lighthouse keeper, but whales and…
Taylor Brown
Trace Temple’s family lost their New Mexico ranch after somebody shot an endangered wolf, and he’s living out of his truck, broke and furious at the government. A secretive militia offers him money to kill One-Eleven, the she-wolf leading the…
Claire Vaye Watkins
Watkins’s fourth book. Rose of Sharon — named for the Grapes of Wrath character — is a Sierra Club fundraiser living in a cinder block cabin in the Mojave, her daughter with an ex on the East Coast for the…
Caro Claire Burke
Natalie Heller Mills sells the pioneer life to millions of followers — raw milk, farm eggs, five kids, a husband, a ranch in Idaho, all of it shot beautifully and none of it done by her, since there are nannies…
