Book Reviews

Enemies-to-lovers romance usually gets to keep its central tension simple: two people who shouldn’t want each other, wanting each other anyway. Brigitte Knightley’s The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy complicates that formula in the best way, by making the “enemy” part load-bearing — literally, a matter of which order

Some phone calls arrive at the exact wrong moment — or, depending on how you look at it, the exact right one. In Emily Giffin’s latest novel, that call comes for Billie just hours after she’s said yes to the marriage proposal she’d been quietly hoping for. On the other

Somewhere between satire and nightmare sits “Yesteryear,” a debut novel with a premise so precisely tuned to this cultural moment that it barely needs the fantastical twist to feel unsettling. Natalie Heller Mills has built an enormous following selling a curated version of the past: raw milk, hand-churned butter, farm-fresh

Few political reporting duos have earned the kind of access Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan bring to “Regime Change,” and the result reads less like conventional journalism than a room you weren’t supposed to be allowed into. The book chronicles the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, built on

Every so often a book arrives that seems almost allergic to hurry, and “Theo of Golden” is exactly that kind of anomaly: a quiet, unhurried novel that has somehow out-sold flashier thrillers on national bestseller lists for months on end. The novel follows Theo, an 86-year-old man living in the

Gad Saad has built a career on the provocative title, and Suicidal Empathy doesn’t break the streak. An evolutionary psychologist and Concordia University marketing professor turned online culture-war fixture, Saad arrives with a coinage he clearly hopes will stick: “suicidal empathy,” his term for a kind of moral reflex he

Some books ask you to think harder about your country. All American Patriotism asks you to feel something about it, and it makes no apology for that choice. Rachel Campos-Duffy — Fox & Friends Weekend co-host, mother of nine, and now first-time author — has built a keepsake volume timed

Some books arrive as arguments. Andrew Weissmann’s Liar’s Kingdom arrives more like a legal brief — tight, procedural, and impatient to get to the remedy. That makes sense: Weissmann spent decades as a federal prosecutor, including a stint leading a team on Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and he writes now

There’s a specific kind of heartbreak that only a lifelong best friend can properly witness, and Carley Fortune builds her fifth novel, Our Perfect Storm, entirely around that idea. It’s a book that understands friendship can be its own kind of romance, complicated by decades of history, inside jokes, and

Some houses hold onto the past the way a wound holds onto infection, and Thornwood, the crumbling Hampstead property at the center of Lisa Jewell’s It Could Have Been Her, is exactly that kind of house. It is the kind of setting Jewell has built a career on: unremarkable from