Book Reviews

Some fairy tales get retold with a wink and a modern one-liner. Cindy Pham’s debut novel does something riskier: it cracks open “Sleeping Beauty” and pours something much heavier inside. The result is currently a #1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller, and it earns that spot by refusing

Some books earn a permanent place on the bestseller lists not through marketing muscle but because readers keep pressing them into other people’s hands. Nearly a decade after its original publication, “When Breath Becomes Air” is still doing exactly that, reappearing on this week’s nonfiction charts as a reminder of

Courage, as Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer argue in their new book On Courage, is not a personality trait. It’s a skill — one that can be studied, broken down into component parts, and practiced. That reframing is the engine behind one of the more useful additions to the current

Lisa See has spent decades excavating the buried histories of Chinese women, and her latest, Daughters of the Sun and Moon, may be her most ambitious excavation yet. Set in the raw, rapidly growing Los Angeles of the late 1800s, it’s a novel that insists on being read as both

Some novels ask you to root for a plot. Villa Coco asks you to fall in love with a house, a handful of eccentrics rattling around inside it, and the particular flavor of chaos that only late-summer Tuscany can produce. Andrew Sean Greer, the Pulitzer Prize winner behind Less, returns

Lisa Jewell has built a career on quiet houses that turn out to be hiding something monstrous, and “It Could Have Been Her” gives her one of the quietest, prettiest covers of her career wrapped around one of her darkest stories yet. Jane Trevally is walking her dogs on her

Some novels build their whole architecture out of a single, almost old-fashioned habit, and Virginia Evans’s debut, “The Correspondent,” does exactly that: it is told entirely through letters, and it is one of the more quietly devastating character studies to hit best-seller lists this year. Sybil Van Antwerp is a

There’s a particular kind of chaos that only an outsider can cause in a friend group that’s been sealed shut since middle school, and Jenny Jackson spends all of “The Shampoo Effect” gleefully cracking that seal open. Caroline Lash, a Manhattan editor burned out on her career and her mother’s

There is a particular strain of American story about the family that moves to the country chasing some quieter, truer version of life, and Daniel Mason’s Country People knows exactly how that story usually goes before gleefully declining to go there. This is the July pick for Good Morning America’s

Picture the least heroic person you know, an overworked, slightly cynical middle manager at a big-box office supply store, and then imagine dropping him naked into a blood cult’s hedge maze on another planet. That is the opening indignity visited on Jason Asano, the reluctant hero of Travis Deverell’s He