Book Reviews

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

There is a particular kind of quiet that falls over a fandom when it knows the end is coming, and that quiet has hung over readers of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper for months. With Volume 6, the beloved graphic novel series that turned a shy sketch of two British schoolboys into

A sentient cat with a flamethrower. A washed-up Coast Guard vet who talks like he’s perpetually one bad day from a bar fight. A dungeon that is also a reality show broadcast to billions of alien viewers who bet real money on whether you live or die. If that combination

Wake up with no memory, two dead crewmates floating beside you, and the fate of every living thing on Earth resting on your ability to remember middle-school chemistry. That is where Andy Weir drops us at the start of Project Hail Mary, and it is a testament to how well

Picture the worst possible way to lose your apartment, your girlfriend, and your species’ claim to being the dominant life form on Earth, all in the same afternoon — and then picture that catastrophe getting turned into a game show. That is the pitch of Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl,

Some novels announce themselves with a whisper; this one kicks the door in. Fourteen years after The Help made her a household name, Kathryn Stockett returns to the sweltering, unequal, gloriously alive American South with a book that trades the segregated kitchens of 1960s Jackson for the dust-choked, penniless summer

There’s a particular kind of ache that comes from running into someone decades after they mattered to you, and Ann Patchett builds an entire novel out of that ache in “Whistler,” a quiet, deceptively simple book about what survives a family’s unraveling. Daphne Fuller is an English teacher in her

Imagine waking up tomorrow to find the internet gone, your smartphone gone, and your carefully curated feed of soft linen dresses and homemade sourdough replaced by an actual, unglamorous 1855. That’s the premise driving “Yesteryear,” Caro Claire Burke’s sharp and unsettling debut, and it’s a premise that turns out to