Reality television has always thrived on manufactured danger, but what happens when the danger stops being manufactured? That’s the unsettling premise anchoring “The Escape Game,” the young adult thriller from bestselling author Marissa Meyer and co-writer Tamara Moss that fuses puzzle-box ingenuity with a genuinely creeping sense of dread. The
Chuck Tingle has built a reputation on horror novels that pair genuine emotional stakes with gleefully over-the-top gore, and his newest release, already climbing this week’s bestseller charts, doubles down on the second half of that equation. Fabulous Bodies is pitched as Drive meets Beetlejuice, and it delivers exactly the
Winter fantasy romance lives or dies on atmosphere, and Rachel Griffin has built a career on nailing it. Her latest, currently riding high on regional bestseller lists, drops readers into a village so far north the sun barely clears the mountains, and asks what happens to a girl who suddenly
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
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