Book Reviews

Some books arrive with fanfare and thick spines; this one arrives at just eighty pages and asks you to slow down for a single sentence you have read a hundred times without ever really reading it. Walter Isaacson’s The Greatest Sentence Ever Written takes the second sentence of the Declaration

Somewhere beneath the surface of a world remade by a sadistic alien game show, a man and his cat have become famous enough to have a price on their heads. That is, remarkably, only the third-strangest sentence a reader could write about Matt Dinniman’s “The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook,” the third

Matt Haig built a career-defining hit out of a library full of unlived lives. In “The Midnight Train,” his follow-up to the phenomenon that was “The Midnight Library,” he swaps the endless branching possibilities of that book for something narrower and, in some ways, harder to sit with: a single

Danny McBride has spent two decades building a rogues’ gallery of delusional men — televangelist heirs, disgraced principals, minor-league wrestlers convinced they’re one break from stardom — and somehow, until now, he’d never put one on the page. “Thrilling Tales of Modern Men,” his first short-story collection, fixes that with

Somewhere around book eight of a series built on chainsaws, cannibal elves, and a foul-mouthed cat with a body count, you’d expect the well of surprises to run dry. Matt Dinniman’s “A Parade of Horribles” proves otherwise by doing something almost perverse: it slows down. Sort of. The eighth installment

James Patterson has built an entire second career pairing his relentless plotting instincts with co-authors who bring genuine expertise to the page, and in Matt Eversmann he’s found one of his most authentic collaborators yet. Eversmann is a former U.S. Army Ranger whose own combat experience anchored the harrowing “Black

Few authors have made a career out of the glamorous complications of love quite like Danielle Steel, and her latest, “Weddings,” goes straight to the source: a woman who builds other people’s happiest days for a living, and two daughters who aren’t at all sure they want one of their

Maggie O’Farrell has never been a writer content to tell a story straight through when a stranger, more elemental path is available, and “Land” pushes that instinct further than anything in her catalog since “Hamnet.” This is a novel about a family, yes, but it’s just as much a novel

Some novels open with a bang; Ann Patchett’s latest opens with a stranger’s face across a museum gallery, and readers won’t want to look away until the last page turns. Whistler follows Daphne Fuller, a fifty-something English teacher at a Manhattan private school, whose quiet visit to the Metropolitan Museum

Most survival stories are about surviving nature. The genuinely unsettling thing about A Marriage at Sea is that the ocean might not have been the hardest part. Sophie Elmhirst’s account follows Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a British couple who, in 1972, sold their belongings and set out to sail around