Ray Carney has spent two books trying to walk the line between respectable furniture salesman and quietly excellent fence, and “Cool Machine” finally makes him choose. Colson Whitehead closes out his Harlem Trilogy with the novel that has the most reason to feel like a victory lap and instead delivers
A decade after its release, “The Body Keeps the Score” still shows up on hospital reading lists, therapist waiting-room shelves, and TikTok book hauls alike, which is a strange kind of longevity for a book built on neuroscience footnotes. Bessel van der Kolk’s central claim is deceptively simple: trauma isn’t
Most political books arrive with a diagnosis and no prescription. Ben Wikler’s “This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy” flips that formula, and the result reads less like a lament and more like a field manual written by someone who has actually won a few
Some marriages end with a slammed door. Lucy’s ends with an overheard sentence — her husband, Fox, telling a friend he never loved her — and everything she thought she knew about her own life quietly rearranges itself. Maya Alden’s “Fox,” the latest short entry in her “Regretfully Yours” series,
Christina Lauren, the writing duo behind more than two decades of buoyant, big-hearted romantic comedy, take a hard left into speculative territory with The Romance Revival, and the gamble pays off in a book that is equal parts tearjerker and thought experiment. Three years into an impulsive Vegas marriage, scientist
Ryland Grace wakes up alone aboard a spacecraft with no memory of his name, his mission, or the two crewmates whose mummified bodies are strapped into the seats beside him. It is a premise Andy Weir has used before, an ordinary, resourceful problem-solver stranded far from home and forced to
Somewhere between a game show pitch meeting and an apocalypse briefing, an editor must have blinked twice at the premise: aliens demolish every building on Earth in an instant, fold the wreckage into an eighteen-level dungeon that wraps around the globe, and force the survivors to fight monsters for the
By the third installment of a series, most authors are coasting on established formula. Matt Dinniman instead throws his hero into a subway system. Not just any subway system — a impossibly tangled knot of trains spanning eras and technologies, all fused together into a single, mind-bending labyrinth. “The Dungeon
There is a moment in every good sequel where the writer has to decide whether to play it safe or double down, and Matt Dinniman does not hesitate. “Carl’s Doomsday Scenario” picks up right where the chaos of the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book left off, and then finds ways
Some novels announce their ambitions with a bang. “The Correspondent” opens with something quieter and, it turns out, far more disarming: a letter. Then another. Then dozens more, until an entire life has been assembled out of nothing but envelopes, stamps, and one woman’s unmistakable voice. By the time the
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