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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

It says something about a twenty-six-year-old novel that it can still resurface on a weekly best-seller chart. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire keeps doing exactly that, and rereading it now makes it obvious why: this is the book where J.K. Rowling stopped writing children’s adventures and started writing

Fashion books about political figures usually settle for one of two moods: reverent retrospective or glossy filler. The Look manages to avoid both, mostly because Michelle Obama refuses to treat her own wardrobe as trivia. Co-written with Meredith Koop, the stylist who dressed her for nearly a decade, and featuring

Some fantasy novels ease you into their world. Fourth Wing shoves you off a cliff and dares you to grow wings on the way down — which, fittingly, is more or less what happens to its heroine in the opening chapters. Rebecca Yarros’s runaway hit follows Violet Sorrengail, a twenty-year-old

Some novelists disappear for a decade and come back tentative. Kathryn Stockett comes back with a 640-page fastball. “The Calamity Club” is the sound of a writer who spent years being talked about for a book she didn’t fully control anymore, deciding to remind everyone why she got the attention

James Patterson has never needed to slow down to hit hard, and “The Country Road Murders,” his latest collaboration with Mike Lupica, proves the formula still works when you swap a big-city detective for a broken-down former football star and a stretch of backwoods North Carolina asphalt. The premise centers

Ann Patchett has built a career on the quiet ambush — novels that seem to be about one thing and turn out to be about grief, or forgiveness, or the strange durability of love that never got the chance to finish what it started. “Whistler,” her tenth novel, is her

Some franchises run out of gas by book twenty. Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series, twenty-six installments deep, does the opposite — it tightens the screws. “Ransom” finds the art restorer and reluctant spymaster pulled from his gallery and back into the shadows he keeps swearing he’s left behind, and the

In 1898, Wilmington, North Carolina was one of the most successful Black communities in the American South: a city with Black-owned newspapers, a thriving middle class of lawyers and educators, and elected Black officials serving alongside white ones. Then, on November 10 of that year, a coordinated group of white