Book Reviews

There’s a particular kind of dread that only isolated islands can produce, and Riley Sager has built a career out of mining it. In “The Unknown,” the bestselling author of “The Only One Left” and “Final Girls” sends a film crew to a fog-bound speck of land off the Vermont

Seventeen years is a long time to keep readers waiting for a follow-up, but Kathryn Stockett’s return proves patience pays off. The Calamity Club arrives as one of the summer’s most-talked-about novels, currently sitting atop bestseller lists from coast to coast, and it’s easy to see why: this is a

Some books arrive as headlines. This one arrives as an archive. “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” is the product of roughly a thousand interviews conducted over two years by two of the most sourced political reporters in the country, and it reads less like a single

Somewhere between a field guide and a fever dream sits “Pokécology: An Illustrated Guide to Pokémon Ecology,” the rare bestseller list entry that made even seasoned publishing watchers do a double take this month. It showed up on Publishers Weekly’s chart in a week otherwise dominated by literary fiction and

A diary sealed inside a wall for over a century. A Lutheran pastor’s careful, increasingly horrified handwriting. And a confession, transcribed word for word, from a man who says he cannot die. “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” doesn’t announce itself as one of the most acclaimed horror novels of the decade

Pick up a handful of soil and most of us see dirt. Robin Wall Kimmerer sees a conversation thousands of years old, one she has spent a lifetime learning to translate. “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” opened in relative quiet back in 2013, then

Four books in, most cozy fantasy series are coasting on charm alone. Adversary to the Villain, the latest entry in Hannah Nicole Maehrer’s Assistant to the Villain series, is proof that this one still has teeth — it currently sits at No. 1 on the New York Times paperback trade

Every so often a series comes along that makes an entire subgenre look easy, and for LitRPG fiction, that book is Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl — a novel that opens with its protagonist standing outside in his underwear at the exact moment the apocalypse begins. Carl’s ex-girlfriend has just

Ann Patchett has spent a career writing about the families people build for themselves, and Whistler, her tenth novel, turns that gaze toward the family a woman loses — and then, forty-five years later, finds standing three galleries away. Daphne Fuller is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her

There’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes from watching someone build a beautiful lie and then live inside it. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear opens on a sun-bleached homestead that looks, at first glance, like the kind of pastoral fantasy sold to millions of scrolling thumbs every day — and