Book Reviews

Some marriages end with warning signs nobody wanted to read. Belle Burden’s Strangers is about the other kind, the marriage that looked, from the outside and the inside, like it was working, until it wasn’t. The memoir debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, an unusual

There is a very specific kind of reader who hears the premise of Dungeon Crawler Carl and immediately knows whether they’re in or out, and Matt Dinniman has built an empire on the ones who are in. Originally self-published, the series has become one of the great word-of-mouth publishing stories

Some books ask you to keep up. Theo of Golden asks you to slow down, and right now a remarkable number of readers are doing exactly that. Three years after Allen Levi quietly self-published it, the novel has climbed to the top of the New York Times Combined Print &

Ten years of war between humans and vampires have left the world without daylight, and Carissa Broadbent’s “The Lion & the Deathless Dark” wastes no time reminding readers that darkness, in this series, has never just been weather. The novel opens the Bloodborn Duet, a new arc within Broadbent’s Crowns

A chance encounter at a museum, a face out of the past, and forty-five years of unspoken history — Ann Patchett’s “Whistler” opens with the kind of coincidence that only really works in fiction, and then spends the rest of its pages earning it. The setup: Daphne Fuller is at

There is a particular kind of horror in getting exactly what you asked for, and “Yesteryear” builds an entire novel out of that premise before it ever raises its voice. Caro Claire Burke’s latest opens on Natalie Heller Mills, a tradwife influencer with a curated feed of sourdough starters, hand-churned

Some houses are cheap because the roof needs work. The one Rachel and Theo Collins buy in a remote corner of New Hampshire is cheap because, three decades earlier, an entire family walked into a storm and never walked back out, leaving behind only a stray dog and a spray

Emily Giffin has built a career on the premise that the past never really stays past, and “Love You More” puts that theory to its toughest test yet: what happens when your old life calls you back just as your new one is finally clicking into place. Billie is a

Nearly three thousand years after it was first sung aloud, “The Odyssey” is back on the bestseller lists this week — proof that a story about a man who can’t find his way home still knows exactly how to find its way back into the culture. The poem needs no

Paris has hosted a thousand summer romances in fiction, but Kristin Harmel’s “Meet Me in Paris” makes a confident wager that one week and nine strangers are all the city needs to prove it hasn’t run out of ways to play matchmaker. The novel follows seven loosely braided love stories