Book Reviews

Imagine waking up in your own bed and finding that the last hundred and seventy years simply didn’t happen. That’s the jolt at the center of Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, “Yesteryear.” Natalie Heller Mills has built a life, and a following, around performing the past: she’s a “tradwife” influencer

Seventeen years is a long time to make readers wait, but Kathryn Stockett has finally returned with a novel big enough to fill the gap. “The Calamity Club,” her first book since the phenomenon of “The Help,” lands with the same instinct for finding humor and heartbreak crammed into the

A book about the entire sweep of human history has no business still climbing bestseller charts more than a decade after publication, yet here is Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” comfortably back among Amazon’s most-read nonfiction titles this week. Few works of popular history have proven

Long before “Stoic” became a lifestyle-brand hashtag stamped on water bottles and productivity apps, Ryan Holiday and translator Stephen Hanselman set out to give the philosophy a durable, page-a-day home. Nearly a decade after its release, “The Daily Stoic” is still climbing Amazon’s nonfiction charts, a rare feat for a

Forget the linen-draped bannetons and moody flour-dust photography that turned sourdough into a pandemic-era religion. Angela Sincore, the baker known online as the Sourdough Hoe, wants you to know that a lopsided loaf with a torn crumb is still bread, and it’s still going to taste incredible. Her debut cookbook,

Kristin Harmel has built a career on historical fiction set against the backdrop of World War II, so “Meet Me in Paris” registers as something of a departure — a present-day, multi-strand love story that trades occupied France for the City of Light as it exists today, sunlit cafés and

The Spellshop series built its following on cozy magic and slow-burn romance, and “Sea of Charms,” the third installment, mostly delivers more of what made the first two books such comfort reads — just with sea legs instead of a garden. Marin, the novel’s narrator, works as a supply runner,

Few books arrive with as much baggage as “Daggermouth,” and by baggage we mean both a seven-figure publishing deal and a swirling debate about whether a human wrote it at all. H.M. Wolfe’s dystopian romance climbed from a self-published Kindle upload in December 2025 to the top of the New

Bennett Brinkman has spent years perfecting the art of not wanting the one person he’s not allowed to want. “Just for the Plot” spends its length watching that discipline fall apart in the most entertaining way possible. Meghan Quinn’s second Bay Area Players novel centers on Bennett, San Francisco baseball’s

Violet Sorengail survived her first year at Basgiath War College. “Iron Flame” makes clear that surviving was the easy part. Rebecca Yarros’s second Empyrean novel picks up where “Fourth Wing” left off, and immediately raises the stakes on every front. Violet now knows what the leadership of Navarre has spent