Book Reviews

Claudia Rankine has spent a career asking what language can hold, and her latest book, Triage, pushes that question into the most difficult territory yet: a decades-long friendship strained nearly to the breaking point by how two people respond to the same atrocities. The book centers on two women —

Some friendships start as inheritance rather than choice, formed in the gap left by absence — and Tayari Jones has built an entire novel out of that gap. Kin follows Vernice and Annie, two motherless girls raised as neighbors in the fictional town of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, whose bond forms in

Some novels ask you to see war differently. Etna asks you to smell it, track it, survive it on four legs — and the gamble pays off in ways few war novels manage. Paul Yoon’s slender new novel unfolds entirely through the perception of its title character, a sixty-seven-pound mixed-breed

What does it take to make a book about America itself feel like a page-turner? Peter Santenello, the YouTuber-turned-author whose channel has quietly built an audience of over four million people watching him talk to strangers in Amish country and coal towns, seems to have found the formula. “Your Fellow

Three books into the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Matt Dinniman finally lets his readers in on the joke that’s been running the whole time: the dungeon isn’t just trying to kill Carl and his cat, Princess Donut — it’s trying to entertain the entire galaxy while it does it. The

Sybil Van Antwerp has spent decades saying everything she means on paper, and almost nothing out loud. Virginia Evans’s debut novel The Correspondent is built entirely from Sybil’s outgoing mail — letters and emails fired off each morning from her desk to her brother, her oldest friend, a university president

Some islands keep their secrets quietly. The one at the center of Riley Sager’s The Unknown keeps its by making sure nobody who learns them ever leaves to tell. In 1926, five women vanished without a trace from a remote island off the Vermont coast, their disappearance folding into local

Few nonfiction books of the past several years have generated as much heat, and as little critical consensus, as The Real Anthony Fauci. First published in 2021 and still moving copies on the strength of its author’s rising political profile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s sprawling indictment of the former NIAID

Theo Baker was still an undergraduate at Stanford when he broke the story that would eventually end a university president’s tenure. How to Rule the World is his account of that investigation, and it reads less like a triumphant campus memoir than a sober dispatch on how institutions protect their

One swing. That is all it takes to turn a Massachusetts golf course into the scene of an accident that will not stop echoing. Chris Bohjalian, the prolific author of psychological page-turners like The Flight Attendant and The Lioness, opens The Amateur with a premise so simple it feels almost