See the hottest books publishing this Summer

The Best New Books Publishing in 2025

2025

Use the drop-down menus to change the display. Yellow highlight = debut author.

We currently have previews of 1080 2025 books.
Select your view:
Order books by:
Give Her Credit: The Untold Account of a Women's Bank That Empowered a Generation
by Grace L. Williams
Little A, 01/01/2025
 
In the 1970s, a new wave of feminism was sweeping America. But in the boys' club of banking and finance, women were still infantilized―no credit...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Look Homeward, Angel
by Thomas Wolfe
Independently published, 01/01/2025
 
Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel is a monumental American coming-of-age tale that captures the restless spirit of youth, the weight of family ties,...more
Literary Fiction
The Invisible Man
by H.G. Wells
GENERAL PRESS, 01/01/2025
 
First published in 1897, The Invisible Man ranks as one of the most famous scientific fantasies ever written. Part of a series of pseudoscientific ...more
Literary Fiction
What the Light Touches: A Novel
by Xavier Bosch
AmazonCrossing, 01/01/2025
 
Seventeen-year-old Margaux doesn't realize one photo could change the course of her life. But in German-occupied Paris, nothing makes sense anymore. ...more
Historical Fiction
99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life
by Adam Chandler
Pantheon Books, 01/07/2025
 
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." This phrase, arguably Thomas Edison's most famous quote, has been drilled ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
A Traitorous Heart
by Erin Cotter
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 01/07/2025
 
Paris, 1572. Seventeen-year-old Jacqueline "Jac" d'Argenson-Aunis is lady-in-waiting to her best friend and former lover, the French Princess ...more
Historical Fiction
After Life
by Gayle Forman
Quill Tree Books, 01/07/2025
 
Because Amber died seven years ago, hit by a car while on the very same bicycle she's inexplicably riding now.

This return doesn't only impact ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
All the Water in the World: A Novel
by Eiren Caffall
St. Martin's Press, 01/07/2025
 
All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Among Serpents: Above the Black #2
by Marc J Gregson
Peachtree Teen, 01/07/2025
 
It takes guts to rise to the top of Meritocracy. It'll take sheer ruthlessness to stay there. As militants and monsters lay waste to the Skylands, ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Another Man in the Street: A Novel
by Caryl Phillips
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 01/07/2025
 
In London's swinging sixties, Victor Johnson, a young immigrant from the Caribbean, arrives in Britain with dreams of becoming a journalist in the "...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Baltic Souls: Fate in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania
by Jan Brokken
Scribe US, 01/07/2025
 
A remarkable number of talented people have come from this relatively small, sparsely populated area, many of them Jewish in origin. Brokken looks at ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King
by Preston Lauterbach
Hachette Books, 01/07/2025
 
After Baz Luhrmann's movie, Elvis, hit theaters, audiences and critics alike couldn't help but question the Black origins of Elvis Presley's ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Breath of the Dragon: Breathmarked #1
by Shannon Lee, Fonda Lee
Wednesday Books, 01/07/2025
 
Sixteen-year-old Jun dreams of proving his worth as a warrior in the elite Guardian's Tournament, held every six years to entrust the magical Scroll ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island
by David Campbell
New York University Press, 01/07/2025
 
While most people behind bars at Rikers Island are detainees awaiting the settlement of their cases, a smaller population have already been convicted ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Confidential: A Novel
by Miko?aj Grynberg
The New Press, 01/07/2025
 
Confidential follows on the success of acclaimed photographer, psychologist, and writer Mikołaj Grynberg's highly acclaimed short story ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Darkmotherland
by Samrat Upadhyay
Soho Press, 01/07/2025
 
In Darkmotherland, Nepali writer Samrat Upadhyay has created a novel of infinite embrace—filled with lovers and widows, dictators and dissidents...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Homeseeking
by Karissa Chen
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 01/07/2025
 
A single choice can define an entire life.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
How to Sleep at Night: A Novel
by Elizabeth Harris
William Morrow, 01/07/2025
 
Meet Ethan and Gabe. A devoted couple for years, they have successful careers, an adorable daughter, and a house in the New Jersey suburbs. Sure, they...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
I'll Come to You
by Rebecca Kauffman
Counterpoint Press, 01/07/2025
 
With empathy, insight, and humor, Rebecca Kauffman explores overlapping narratives involving a couple whose struggle to become pregnant has both ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space
by Irvin Weathersby Jr.
Viking, 01/07/2025
 
Amid the ongoing reckoning over America's history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Mother of Rome
by Lauren J. A. Bear
Ace Books, 01/07/2025
 
The names Romulus and Remus may be immortalized in map and stone and chronicle, but their mother exists only as a preface to her sons' journey, the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Mothers and Sons: A Novel
by Adam Haslett
Little Brown & Company, 01/07/2025
 
At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of immigrants only to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Mystery Royale
by Kaitlyn Cavalancia
Disney-Hyperion, 01/07/2025
 
The only thing sixteen-year-old Mullory Prudence has left of her mom is a warning: "Run if the strange finds you." But mysterious warnings don't pay ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Mysteries
 Debut Author
Playworld: A Novel
by Adam Ross
Knopf, 01/07/2025
 
"In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Rosarita
by Anita Desai
Scribner, 01/07/2025
 
Away from her home in India to study Spanish, Bonita sits on a bench in El Jardin de San Miguel, Mexico, basking in the park's lush beauty, when she ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Sweet Fury
by Sash Bischoff
Simon & Schuster, 01/07/2025
 
Lila Crayne is America's sweetheart: she's generous and kind, gorgeous and magnetic. She and her fiancé, visionary filmmaker Kurt Royall, have ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
The Assassin's Guide to Babysitting
by Natalie C. Parker
Candlewick Press, 01/07/2025
 
Tru has been hiding all her life. Her parents taught her to conceal her bastion Talent: indestructible skin, muscles, and bones. In a world where ...more
The Capital of Dreams: A Novel
by Heather O'Neill
Harper, 01/07/2025
 
Sofia Bottom lives in Elysia, a small country forgotten by Europe. But inside its borders, the old myths of trees that come alive and faeries who live...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe
by Marlene L. Daut
Knopf, 01/07/2025
 
Slave, revolutionary, king, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Granddaughter: A Novel
by Bernhard Schlink
HarperVia, 01/07/2025
 
It is only after the sudden death of his wife, Birgit, that Kaspar discovers the price she paid years earlier when she fled East Germany to join him: ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Heart of Winter: A Novel
by Jonathan Evison
Dutton, 01/07/2025
 
Abe Winter and Ruth Warneke were never meant to be together—at least if you ask Ruth. Yet their catastrophic blind date in college evolved into ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Lady of the Mine
by Sergei Lebedev
New Vessel Press, 01/07/2025
 
The bodies of dead Jews lying in its depths seem to attract still more present-day crimes. Acclaimed Russian author Sergei Lebedev portrays a ghostly ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Last Bookstore on Earth
by Lily Braun-Arnold
Delacorte Press, 01/07/2025
 
The world is about to end. Again.

Ever since the first Storm wreaked havoc on civilization as we know it, seventeen-year-old Liz Flannery has ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
The Lotus Shoes: A Novel
by Jane Yang
Park Row, 01/07/2025
 
1800s China. Tightly bound feet, or "golden lilies," are the mark of an honorable woman, eclipsing beauty, a rich dowry and even bloodline in the ...more
Historical Fiction
The Naming of the Birds
by Paraic O'Donnell
Tin House Books, 01/07/2025
 
Something is troubling Inspector Henry Cutter. Sergeant Gideon Bliss is accustomed to his ill-tempered outbursts, but lately the inspector has grown ...more
The Note: A Novel
by Alafair Burke
Knopf, 01/07/2025
 
It was meant to be a harmless prank.

Growing up, May Hanover was a good girl, always. Well-behaved, top of her class, a compulsive rule-follower....more
The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne
by Kate Winkler Dawson
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 01/07/2025
 
On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret ...more
Critics' Consensus:

True Crime
The Stolen Queen: A Novel
by Fiona Davis
Dutton, 01/07/2025
 
Egypt, 1936: When anthropology student Charlotte Cross is offered a coveted spot on an archaeological dig in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, she leaps at...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Things We Didn't Know
by Elba Iris Pérez
Gallery Books, 01/07/2025
 
Andrea Rodríguez is nine years old when her mother whisks her and her brother, Pablo, away from Woronoco, the tiny Massachusetts factory town ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
The Three Lives of Cate Kay: A Novel
by Kate Fagan
Atria Books, 01/07/2025
 
Cate Kay knows how to craft a story. As the creator of a bestselling book trilogy that struck box office gold as a film series, she's one of the most ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf
by Isa Arsén
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 01/07/2025
 
Up-and-coming stage actress Margaret Shoard has just taken a bow as Lady Macbeth, the role she has always believed was destined for her. At home, she ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
This Is the Year
by Gloria Muñoz
Holiday House, 01/07/2025
 
"In outer space, no one will know me as the girl with the dead sister."

Seventeen-year-old self-proclaimed Goth and aspiring writer Julieta ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Who Owns the Moon?: And Other Conundrums of Exploring and Using Space
by Cynthia Levinson
Margaret Quinlin Books, 01/07/2025
 
For teens who are space fans, this book is loaded with fascinating facts, great stories, and new ways of thinking about the challenges of space. It ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Y2K: A Witty and Poignant Reflection on Recent History Through a Contemporary Lens, Perfect for Winter 2025, See How Y2K Shaped Our Past, Present, and Future
by Colette Shade
Dey Street Books, 01/07/2025
 
THE EARLY 2000s conjures images of inflatable furniture, flip phones, and low-rise jeans. It was a new millennium and the future looked bright, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Essays
 Debut Author
You'll Never Believe Me: A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist
by Kari Ferrell
St. Martin's Press, 01/07/2025
 
Before Anna Delvey, before the Tinder Swindler, there was Kari Ferrell. Adopted at a young age by a Mormon family in Utah, Kari struggled with ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Magic Island
by William Seabrook
Independently published, 01/13/2025
 
In The Magic Island, William Seabrook transports readers to the heart of the Caribbean, unraveling the secrets of voodoo rituals, the concept of ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
A Calamity of Noble Houses
by Amira Ghenim
Europa Editions, 01/14/2025
 
Tunisia, 1930s. Against the backdrop of a country in turmoil, in search of its identity, the lives and destinies of the members of two important upper...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
A Serial Killer's Guide to Marriage: A Novel
by Asia Mackay
Bantam Books, 01/14/2025
 
I wasn't smashing the patriarchy; I was killing it. Literally.

Hazel and Fox are an ordinary married couple with a baby. Except for one small thing...more
Thrillers
Aflame: Learning from Silence
by Pico Iyer
Riverhead Books, 01/14/2025
 
Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest
by Kyle Paoletta
Pantheon Books, 01/14/2025
 
Albuquerque. Phoenix. Tucson. El Paso. Las Vegas. Iconic American cities surrounded by desert and rust. Teeming metropolises that seem to exist ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
 Debut Author
Andromeda: A Novel
by Therese Bohman
Other Press, 01/14/2025
 
The publishing house is anchored like a ship along Stockholm's main street, a large, bright building with an impressive rooftop terrace. The facade is...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Babylonia: A Novel
by Costanza Casati
Sourcebooks Landmark, 01/14/2025
 
Babylonia across the centuries has become the embodiment of lust, excess, and dissolute power that ruled Ancient Assyria. In this world you had to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Beautiful Ugly: A Novel
by Alice Feeney
Flatiron Books, 01/14/2025
 
Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.

Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby...more
Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman
by Brooke Shields
Flatiron Books, 01/14/2025
 
Brooke Shields has spent a lifetime in the public eye. Growing up as a child actor and model, her every feature was scrutinized, her every decision ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels
by Caroline Eden
Bloomsbury Publishing, 01/14/2025
 
"With its union of practicality and magic," Caroline Eden understands a kitchen as a portal, "offering opportunities to cook, imagine and create ways ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Travel & Adventure
Confessions: A Novel
by Catherine Airey
Mariner Books, 01/14/2025
 
New York City, late September 2001. The walls of the city are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady's father is there, the poster she ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Death of the Author: A Novel
by Nnedi Okorafor
William Morrow, 01/14/2025
 
The future of storytelling is here.

Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Dirtbag Queen
by Andy Corren
Grand Central Publishing, 01/14/2025
 
So began Andy Corren's unforgettable obituary for his mother, Renay Mandel Corren, a tribute that went on to touch the hearts of millions around the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Dreamover
by Dani Diaz
Top Shelf Productions, 01/14/2025
 
Amber's a headstrong goofball with a temper. Nico's a shy, self-conscious emo boy. But they've been best friends since third grade, and she can't hide...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
 Debut Author
Everything Is Poison
by Joy McCullough
Dutton for Young Readers, 01/14/2025
 
Early Seventeenth-Century Rome

For as long as she can remember, Carmela Tofana has desperately wanted one thing: to be a part of La Tofana's, her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Going Home: A Novel
by Tom Lamont
Knopf, 01/14/2025
 
Téo Erskine, now in his thirties, has moved on from childish things: He has a good job, a slick apartment in London, and when he heads back to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Good Girl: A Novel
by Aria Aber
Hogarth Books, 01/14/2025
 
In Berlin's artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies
by Manuel Betancourt
Catapult, 01/14/2025
 
"Hello stranger." As an opening line, you really can't ask for better.

Hello Stranger is a book about chance encounters—at a bar, through ...more
Honeysuckle and Bone
by Trisha Tobias
Zando, 01/14/2025
 
Carina Marshall is looking to reinvent herself, and what better place to do it than Jamaica, her mother's alluring homeland where she conveniently has...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
I Am Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free
by Lee Hawkins
Amistad, 01/14/2025
 
I Am Nobody's Slave tells the story of one Black family's pursuit of the American Dream through the impacts of systemic racism and racial violence. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Isaac's Song: A Novel
by Daniel Black
Hanover Square Press, 01/14/2025
 
Isaac is at a crossroads in his young life. Growing up in Missouri, the son of a caustic, hard-driving father, he was conditioned to suppress his ...more
Literary Fiction
Karma Doll: The Doll Series #3
by Jonathan Ames
Mulholland, 01/14/2025
 
After narrowly escaping with his life at the hands of a murderous Hollywood pimp, detective Happy Doll, bullet-ridden but healing, has landed on a ...more
Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies
by Michael Albertus
Basic Books, 01/14/2025
 
For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
My Darling Boy: A Novel
by John Dufresne
W.W. Norton & Company, 01/14/2025
 
Aided by his terminally ill girlfriend and the colorful inhabitants of a local motel―including a doomsday prepper, an ex-nun, a pair of blind ...more
Literary Fiction
Old As Stone, Hard As Rock: Of Humans and War
by Alessandro Sanna
Unruly, 01/14/2025
 
A stone falls to the Earth. It picks up speed, rolling down the steep side of a mountain until it comes to rest in an empty plain. But the plain won't...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Presumed Guilty: Presumed Innocent #3
by Scott Turow
Grand Central Publishing, 01/14/2025
 
Rusty is a retired judge attempting a third act in life with a loving soon-to-be wife, Bea, with whom he shares both a restful home on an idyllic lake...more
Save Our Souls: The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder
by Matthew Pearl
Harper, 01/14/2025
 
On December 10, 1887, a shark fishing boat disappeared. On board the doomed vessel were the Walkers—the ship's captain Frederick, his wife ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Strange Pictures: A Novel
by Uketsu
HarperVia, 01/14/2025
 
An exploration of the macabre, where the seemingly mundane takes on a terrifying significance... .

A pregnant woman's sketches on a seemingly ...more
The Big Empty: An Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Novel
by Robert Crais
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 01/14/2025
 
Traci Beller was thirteen when her father disappeared in the sleepy town of Rancha, not far from Los Angeles. The evidence says Tommy Beller abandoned...more
The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North
by Michelle Adams
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 01/14/2025
 
In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
The Forger's Requiem
by Bradford Morrow
Atlantic Monthly Press, 01/14/2025
 
Literary forger Henry Slader, assaulted and presumed dead by his longtime nemesis, Will, awakens in a shallow grave, suffocating in dirt. Concussed ...more
The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Kennedy - and Why It Failed
by Brad Meltzer, Josh Mensch
Flatiron Books, 01/14/2025
 
Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, is often ranked among Americans' most well-liked presidents. Yet what most Americans don't ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Kennedy Girl: A Novel
by Julia Bryan Thomas
Sourcebooks, 01/14/2025
 
1960. New York, Paris and Milan fashion culture is starting to make an impression on the average American woman. When a mysterious bakery customer ...more
Historical Fiction
The Last Room on the Left
by Leah Konen
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 01/14/2025
 
It's the perfect getaway to finish her book and start fresh.

But as she hunkers down in a blizzard, she spots something through the window: a pale ...more
The Last Word: A Novel
by Elly Griffiths
Mariner Books, 01/14/2025
 
Natalka and Edwin are perfect if improbable partners in a detective agency. At eighty-four, Edwin regularly claims that he's the oldest detective in ...more
Mysteries
The Queen's Spade
by Sarah Raughley
HarperCollins Publishers, 01/14/2025
 
A young lady can take only so many injuries before humiliation and insult forge a vow of revenge ...

The year is 1862 and murderous desires are ...more
The Really Dead Wives of New Jersey: A Novel
by Astrid Dahl
Simon & Schuster, 01/14/2025
 
Meet the Garden State Goddesses, the cast of Huzzah's third most popular show:

"I may play for both teams, but when it comes to being real, I ...more
The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story
by Pagan Kennedy
Vintage, 01/14/2025
 
In 1972, Martha "Marty" Goddard volunteered at a crisis hotline, counseling girls who had been molested by their fathers, their teachers, their uncles...more
Critics' Consensus:

True Crime
the space between men
by Mia S. Willis
Penguin Books, 01/14/2025
 
These piercing, surprising poems look to familial history, rituals of faith, and the natural world to explore how the intersecting cultures of ...more
Poetry & Novels in Verse
The Suicides
by Antonio Di Benedetto
New York Review Books, 01/14/2025
 
A reporter's boss assigns him to cover three unconnected suicides. The news agency wants to syndicate the story to color magazines, "For the blood, so...more
The Swans of Harlem (Adapted for Young Adults): Five Black Ballerinas, a Legacy of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History
by Karen Valby
Delacorte Press, 01/14/2025
 
At the peak of the civil rights movement, Lydia Abarca was the first ballerina in a Black ballet company to grace the cover of Dance magazine. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip
by Stephen Witt
Viking, 01/14/2025
 
In June of 2024, spurred by the frenzy of investment following the launch of ChatGPT, and thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny's restaurant,...more
Science, Health and the Environment
The Way Up is Death
by Dan Hanks
Angry Robot, 01/14/2025
 
As a grieving teacher, a reclusive artist, and a narcissistic celebrity children's author lead the others in trying to understand why they've been ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
This Love: A Novel
by Lotte Jeffs
Harper Perennial, 01/14/2025
 
When Mae and Ari meet outside a crowded gay bar during their final year of university, their connection is instant, sparking a lifetime friendship. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Truth, Lies, and the Questions in Between
by L.M. Elliott
Algonquin Young Readers, 01/14/2025
 
Patty Appleton is making history. As one of the Senate's first female Congressional Pages, she's not only paving the way for other politically minded ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century
by Bianca Mabute-Louie
Harper, 01/14/2025
 
In this hard-hitting and deeply personal book, a combination of manifesto and memoir, scholar, sociologist, and activist Bianca Mabute-Louie ...more
Biography/Memoir
Vantage Point: A Novel
by Sara Sligar
MCD, 01/14/2025
 
The old-money Wieland family has it all―wealth, status, power. They're also famously cursed.

Clara and her brother, Teddy, grew up on a ...more
We Lived on the Horizon: A Novel
by Erika Swyler
Atria Books, 01/14/2025
 
The city of Bulwark is aptly named: a walled city built to protect and preserve the people who managed to survive a series of great cataclysms, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Wiseguys and the White House: Gangsters, Presidents, and the Deals They Made
by Eric Dezenhall
Harper, 01/14/2025
 
Gangsters and presidents have long captured the American imagination, but how much does the underworld actually affect presidential power? How deep ...more
True Crime
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
by Grady Hendrix
Berkley Books, 01/14/2025
 
They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they're sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed ...more
Thrillers
The Screwtape Letters
by C. S. Lewis
Independently published, 01/15/2025
 
Screwtape teaches Wormwood the best ways to seduce and corrupt human souls, which are called "sick" and Take it away from God. The letters provide ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
A Gorgeous Excitement: A Novel
by Cynthia Weiner
Crown, 01/21/2025
 
It was the summer of 1986, when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir
by Vidyan Ravinthiran
W.W. Norton & Company, 01/21/2025
 
Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both ...more
Biography/Memoir
Ballerina
by Patrick Modiano
Yale University Press, 01/21/2025
 
Paris, 1960s. A young dancer and single mother, who might or might not be the narrator's love interest, is revisited by menacing figures from her past...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Boudicca: A Novel
by P. C. Cast
William Morrow, 01/21/2025
 
In Roman-occupied Britain, the Iceni tribe crowns an extraordinary new queen. Tall and flame-haired, Boudicca is devoted to Andraste, the Iceni's ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
by Tao Leigh Goffe
Doubleday, 01/21/2025
 
In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
 Debut Author
Finding Normal
by Jen Doktorski
Fitzroy Books, 01/21/2025
 
Right after she escapes Children' s Hospital in Harrisburg, where she' s being treated for anorexia. Enter Lucas Polizzi, a high school wrestler with ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty
by Bonny Reichert
Ballantine Books, 01/21/2025
 
When you're raised by someone who once survived on potato peels and coffee grounds, you develop a pretty healthy respect for food.

Bonny Reichert...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
by Julian Borger
Other Press, 01/21/2025
 
In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out advertisements offering their children into the safe keeping of ...more
Biography/Memoir
Let's Call Her Barbie
by Renée Rosen
Berkley Books, 01/21/2025
 
When Ruth Handler walks into the boardroom of the toy company she co-founded and pitches her idea for a doll unlike any other, she knows what she's ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Mask of the Deer Woman
by Laurie L. Dove
Berkley Books, 01/21/2025
 
At rock bottom following her daughter's death, ex–Chicago detective Carrie Starr has nowhere to go but back to her roots. Starr's father never ...more
Mona Acts Out: A Novel
by Mischa Berlinski
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 01/21/2025
 
Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
No Human Involved: The Serial Murder of Black Women and Girls and the Deadly Cost of Police Indifference
by Cheryl L. Neely
Beacon Press, 01/21/2025
 
When Black women and girls are targeted and murdered their cases are often categorized by police officers as "N.H.I." – "No Humans Involved." ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Only If You're Lucky: A Novel
by Stacy Willingham
Minotaur Books, 01/21/2025
 
Lucy Sharpe is larger than life. Magnetic, addictive. Bold and dangerous. Especially for Margot, who meets Lucy at the end of their freshman year at a...more
Power of Persuasion
by Stacey Abrams
Berkley Books, 01/21/2025
 
A.J. Grayson has come a long way from adopted orphan to fast-rising executive at a cutting-edge technology firm. Now an anti-terrorist agency wants to...more
Romance
Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union
by Richard Carwardine
Knopf, 01/21/2025
 
How did slavery figure in God's plan? Was it the providential role of government to abolish this sin and build a righteous nation? Or did such a ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Save Me, Stranger: Stories
by Erika Krouse
Flatiron Books, 01/21/2025
 
Erika Krouse's debut memoir, Tell Me Everything, was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "lyrical, jarring, propulsive," and the Washington ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Slavery After Slavery: Revealing the Legacy of Forced Child Apprenticeships on Black Families, from Emancipation to the Present
by Mary Frances Berry
Beacon Press, 01/21/2025
 
While the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, white southerners established a system of apprenticeship after the Civil War that entrapped Black ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Something Rotten: A Novel
by Andrew Lipstein
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 01/21/2025
 
Cecilie is a fed-up New York Times reporter. Her husband, Reuben, is a disgraced former NPR host and grudging stay-at-home dad. Neither can wait to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Song of a Blackbird
by Maria van Lieshout
First Second, 01/21/2025
 
In the present day, teenage Annick is desperate to find a bone marrow donor that could save the life of her grandmother, Johanna. She turns to her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
 Debut Author
Take My Name But Say It Slow: Essays
by Thomas Dai
W.W. Norton & Company, 01/21/2025
 
Thomas Dai has never gone by his Chinese name, Nuocheng, fashioned from the Knoxville (Chinese: Nuokeshiweier) of his childhood and the Chengdu his ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Essays
 Debut Author
The New Internationals
by David Wright Falade
Atlantic Monthly Press, 01/21/2025
 
Paris, 1947. The city, recovering from the Nazi occupation, suffers from an economy in shambles and an unraveled social fabric. Alongside the wary and...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The White Peril: A Family Memoir
by Omo Moses
Beacon Press, 01/21/2025
 
In The White Peril, Omo Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather's sermons and the writings of his ...more
Biography/Memoir
Those Fatal Flowers: A Novel
by Shannon Ives
Dell, 01/21/2025
 
Before, Scopuli. It has been centuries since Thelia made the mistake that cost her the woman she loved—Proserpina, the goddess of spring. As the...more
Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
To Save the Man
by John Sayles
Melville House, 01/21/2025
 
In September of 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle School, a military-style boarding school for Indians in Pennsylvania, founded and run ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
We Do Not Part: A Novel
by Han Kang
Hogarth Books, 01/21/2025
 
One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Where the Heart Should Be
by Sarah Crossan
Greenwillow Books, 01/21/2025
 
Ireland is starving, and a poor Irish scullery maid falls in love with the British heir to the land. Can their romance stay hidden during the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Poetry & Novels in Verse
Another Zionism, Another Judaism: The Unrequited Love of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis
by Göran Rosenberg
Other Press, 01/28/2025
 
Born in what is now Lviv, Ukraine, in 1869, Marcus Ehrenpreis was the secretary of Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, a ...more
Biography/Memoir
Beast of the North Woods: Monster Hunter Mysteries #3
by Annelise Ryan
Berkley Books, 01/28/2025
 
An ice fisherman is savagely mauled to death in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and an eyewitness claims the man was attacked by a hodag. There's just one ...more
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People
by Imani Perry
Ecco, 01/28/2025
 
Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Blob: A Love Story
by Maggie Su
Harper, 01/28/2025
 
The daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, Vi Liu has never quite fit into her Midwestern college town. Aimless after getting dumped by her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Carving Shadows into Gold: Forging Silver into Stars #2
by Brigid Kemmerer
Bloomsbury YA, 01/28/2025
 
The King's Courier Tycho has made a treacherous bargain. Now beholden to the magical scraver who saved King Gray's life, one false move could end ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Dead Money: A Novel
by Jakob Kerr
Bantam Books, 01/28/2025
 
Don't call me a fixer. This isn't HBO.

In her job as unofficial "problem solver" for Silicon Valley's most ruthless venture capitalist, Mackenzie ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
elseship: an unrequited affair
by Tree Abraham
Soft Skull Press, 01/28/2025
 
This story begins where most end. elseship deftly and courageously recounts the starts and stops of a transitioning relationship. Having recorded the ...more
Biography/Memoir
Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
by Dorian Lynskey
Pantheon Books, 01/28/2025
 
As Dorian Lynskey writes, "People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia." In this immersive and compelling cultural history, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy
by Tamara Lanier
Crown, 01/28/2025
 
Tamara Lanier grew up listening to her mother's stories about her ancestors. As Black Americans descended from enslaved people brought to America, ...more
Biography/Memoir
Good Dirt: A Novel
by Charmaine Wilkerson
Ballantine Books, 01/28/2025
 
When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Head Cases: A Novel
by John McMahon
Minotaur Books, 01/28/2025
 
FBI Agent Gardner Camden is an analytical genius with an affinity for puzzles. He also has a blind spot on the human side of investigations, a ...more
Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope
by Catherine Coleman Flowers
Spiegel & Grau, 01/28/2025
 
Described by Bryan Stevenson as "the center of the quest for environmental justice in America," Catherine Coleman Flowers has dedicated her life to ...more
I Am Not Jessica Chen
by Ann Liang
HarperCollins Publishers, 01/28/2025
 
Jessica Chen is so beautiful people stop in the hallway to stare at her. Jessica Chen is so perfect she got into Harvard.

And Jenna Chen will only ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
I Think They Love You: A Novel
by Julian Winters
St. Martin's Griffin, 01/28/2025
 
When Denzel "Denz" Carter's workaholic father and CEO of 24 Carter Gold unexpectedly announces his retirement, the competition is on for who will ...more
Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts
by Helen King
Basic Books, 01/28/2025
 
Breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb. Across history, these body parts have told women who they are and what they should do. Although knowledge of each ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Johnny Careless: A Novel
by Kevin Wade
Celadon, 01/28/2025
 
Police Chief Jeep Mullane has been bounced back home to Long Island's North Shore by a heartbreaking case that both earned him his NYPD detective's ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
Old Soul
by Susan Barker
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 01/28/2025
 
In Osaka, two strangers, Jake and Mariko, miss a flight, and over dinner, discover they've both brutally lost loved ones whose paths crossed with the ...more
On the Wings of la Noche
by Vanessa L. Torres
Knopf, 01/28/2025
 
Death waits for Estrella (Noche) Villanueva. In her human form, she is a lonely science girl grieving the tragic accidental drowning of her girlfriend...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Our Winter Monster
by Dennis Mahoney
Hell's Hundred, 01/28/2025
 
For the last year, Holly and Brian have been out of sync. Neither can forget what happened that one winter evening; neither can forgive what's ...more
Out of Your Mind: The Biggest Mysteries of the Human Brain
by Jorge Cham, Dwayne Godwin
Pantheon Books, 01/28/2025
 
Why do you love? Why do you lie? What makes you happy? Every single thought you have comes from one place: your brain. But what makes it tick? How ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Pretend We're Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the '90s
by Tanya Pearson
Hachette Books, 01/28/2025
 
In 2018, during an interview with journalist Tanya Pearson, Shirley Manson lamented: "It's a blanket fact that after September 11th, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids: Stories
by Leyna Krow
Viking, 01/28/2025
 
That's the question the women of Leyna Krow's beguiling, darkly fabulist story collection grapple with as they strive to be good mothers, daughters, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South
by Kathryn Schumaker
Basic Books, 01/28/2025
 
Interracial marriage was already illegal in some American colonies as early as the 1690s. But long before the Supreme Court declared that interracial ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The English Problem: A Novel
by Beena Kamlani
Crown, 01/28/2025
 
Shiv Advani is an eighteen-year-old growing up in India. But he is no ordinary young man. Shiv has been personally chosen by Mahatma Gandhi to come to...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Girls of the Glimmer Factory: A Novel
by Jennifer Coburn
Sourcebooks Landmark, 01/28/2025
 
Hannah longs for the days when she used to be free, but now, she is a Jewish prisoner at Theresienstadt, a model ghetto where the Nazis plan to make a...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir
by Neko Case
Grand Central Publishing, 01/28/2025
 
Neko Case has long been revered as one of music's most influential artists, whose authenticity, lyrical storytelling, and sly wit have endeared her to...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood
by Stacy Horn
Zando, 01/28/2025
 
On a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an ...more
Critics' Consensus:

True Crime
The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir
by Edmund White
Bloomsbury Publishing, 01/28/2025
 
I'm at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them-for me it would be thousands of sex partners.

The 85-year-old "...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Oligarch's Daughter: A Novel
by Joseph Finder
Harper, 01/28/2025
 
Paul Brightman is a man on the run, living under an assumed name in a small New England town with a million-dollar bounty on his head. When his ...more
The Outcast Mage: The Shattered Lands #1
by Annabel Campbell
Orbit, 01/28/2025
 
In the glass city of Amoria, magic is everything. And Naila, student at the city's legendary academy, is running out of time to prove she can control ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920
by Manisha Sinha
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 01/28/2025
 
In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha expands our view beyond the accepted temporal and spatial ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Romantic Tragedies of a Drama King
by Harry Trevaldwyn
Wednesday Books, 01/28/2025
 
Patch Simmons has decided that this is the year he will get a boyfriend, so it's goodbye to his French pen-pal Jean-Pierre and hello to the world!

...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Scorpion Queen: Limited Sprayed Edge Edition
by Mina Fears
Flatiron Books, 01/28/2025
 
Deep within the imperial palace at Timbuktu, Amie has suffered a devastating loss. Once the daughter of a prosperous salt merchant Amie's life was ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
by Chris Hayes
Penguin Press, 01/28/2025
 
We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Vanishing Point: Stories
by Paul Theroux
Mariner Books, 01/28/2025
 
The stories in Paul Theroux's fascinating new collection are both exotic and domestic, their settings ranging from Hawaii to Africa and New England. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Too Soon: A Novel
by Betty Shamieh
Simon & Schuster, 01/28/2025
 
Arabella gets an unexpected chance at love when she's thrust into a conflict and history she's tried to avoid all her life.

Zoya is playing ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Trust Issues: A Novel
by Elizabeth McCullough Keenan, Greg Wands
Dutton, 01/28/2025
 
Hazel and Kagan have never really gotten along, but the siblings have certain things in common: they've both been cut off from the family fund, they'...more
We Rip the World Apart: A Novel
by Charlene Carr
Sourcebooks Landmark, 01/28/2025
 
When 24-year-old Kareela discovers she's pregnant with a child she isn't sure she wants, her struggle to understand her place in the world as a person...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging
by Tara Roberts
National Geographic, 01/28/2025
 
When Tara Roberts first caught sight of a photograph at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History depicting the underwater ...more
Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
The Dark Fable
by Katherine Harbour
Bloomsbury YA, 01/30/2025
 
The Dark Fable is an urban legend come to life. The notorious crew of thieves with magical abilities are known for secreting away obscure and occult ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Little Sanctuary
by Randy Boyagoda
Tradewind Books, 02/01/2025
 
Teenaged Sabel and her younger siblings are sent for safekeeping to a boarding school on a distant island. After discovering their guardians mean to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Voice Like a Hyacinth: A Novel
by Mallory Pearson
47North, 02/01/2025
 
Art student Jo Kozak and her fellow classmates and best friends, Caroline, Finch, Amrita, and Saz, are one another's muses―so close they have ...more
Thrillers
A Burning in the Bones: Waxways #3
by Scott Reintgen
Margaret K. McElderry Books, 02/04/2025
 
After taking control of House Brood, Ren and Theo dreamed of using their newfound influence to change the rest of Kathor, but now they find their ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
A Forty Year Kiss: A Novel
by Nickolas Butler
Sourcebooks Landmark, 02/04/2025
 
Charlie and Vivian parted ways after just four years of marriage. Too many problems, too many struggles, even though the love didn't quite die. When ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt
by Tess Chakkalakal
St. Martin's Press, 02/04/2025
 
In A Matter of Complexion, Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, ...more
Biography/Memoir
A Season of Light
by Julie Iromuanya
Algonquin Books, 02/04/2025
 
When 276 schoolgirls are abducted from their school in Nigeria, Fidelis Ewerike, a Florida-based barrister, poet, and former POW of the Nigerian Civil...more
Literary Fiction
Adam and Eve in Paradise
by Eça de Queirós
New Directions Publishing, 02/04/2025
 
Gloriously translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Adam and Eve in Paradise by Eça de Queirósis not the rosy prelapsarian tale of your childhood ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe
by Natasha Hakimi Zapata
The New Press, 02/04/2025
 
A new generation of Americans has declared that another world is possible. And yet, the stubborn problems of inequality, climate change, and declining...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
Anoxia: A Novel
by Miguel Ángel Hernández
Other Press, 02/04/2025
 
What is our relationship with the dead? How do we remember them? What dark secrets do our images of them hold? How do we emerge from grief to face the...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Bibliophobia: A Memoir
by Sarah Chihaya
Random House, 02/04/2025
 
Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us
by Jennifer Finney Boylan
Celadon, 02/04/2025
 
Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There was the first bestselling work written by a transgender American. Since its publication twenty years ago, she...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Code Noir: Fictions
by Canisia Lubrin
Soft Skull Press, 02/04/2025
 
Its structure, deceptively simple, is based on the infamous Code Noir, a set of real historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
 Debut Author
Dengue Boy: A Novel
by Michel Nieva
Astra House, 02/04/2025
 
The protagonist of this story has no understanding of the words "winter," "cold," or "snow" because he has never experienced the phenomena they ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future
by Neil Shubin
Dutton, 02/04/2025
 
Renowned scientist Neil Shubin has made extraordinary discoveries by leading scientific expeditions to the sweeping ice landscapes of the Arctic and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Fearless and Free: A Memoir
by Josephine Baker
Tiny Reparations, 02/04/2025
 
After stealing the spotlight as a teenaged Broadway performer during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Josephine then took Paris by storm, ...more
Biography/Memoir
Gettysburg: The Tide Turns: An Oral History
by Bruce Chadwick
Pegasus Books, 02/04/2025
 
In late June of 1863, one month after his victory over Union forces at Chancellorsville, Virginia, General Robert E. Lee, head of the Army of Northern...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Gliff: A Novel
by Ali Smith
Pantheon Books, 02/04/2025
 
An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.

Add two children. And a horse.

...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Grave Empire: The Great Silence #1
by Richard Swan
Orbit, 02/04/2025
 
A new age of exploration and innovation has dawned, and the Empire of the Wolf stands to take its place as the foremost power in the known world. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Harlem Rhapsody
by Victoria Christopher Murray
Berkley Books, 02/04/2025
 
In 1919, as civil unrest grips the county, in a flourishing part of New York City called Harlem, something special is stirring. Here, the New Negro is...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Heaven and Hell: The Trilogy About the Boy #1
by Jón Kalman Stefánsson
Biblioasis, 02/04/2025
 
When the friend, absorbed in a borrowed copy of Paradise Lost, forgets his oilskin one morning and the crew is unexpectedly caught at sea in a savage ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko's Fight for Ukraine
by Lara Marlowe
Melville House, 02/04/2025
 
Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko, a commander in the Ukrainian army serving on the front line of battle, embodies her country's resistance to the Russian ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy
by Julian Baggini
Pegasus Books, 02/04/2025
 
How we live is shaped by how we eat. You can see this in the vastly different approaches to growing, preparing and eating food around the world, such ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Travel & Adventure
Immemorial
by Lauren Markham
Transit Books, 02/04/2025
 
"I am in need of a word," writes Lauren Markham in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Isola: A Novel
by Allegra Goodman
The Dial Press, 02/04/2025
 
Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Junie: A Novel
by Erin Crosby Eckstine
Ballantine Books, 02/04/2025
 
Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
Last Twilight in Paris: A Novel
by Pam Jenoff
Park Row, 02/04/2025
 
London, 1953. Louise is still adjusting to her postwar role as a housewife when she discovers a necklace in a box at a secondhand shop. The box is ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Memorial Days: A Memoir
by Geraldine Brooks
Viking, 02/04/2025
 
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
by John Warner
Basic Books, 02/04/2025
 
In the age of artificial intelligence, drafting an essay is as simple as typing a prompt and pressing enter. What does this mean for the art of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Mutual Interest
by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
Bloomsbury Publishing, 02/04/2025
 
At the turn of the 20th century, Vivian Lesperance is determined to flee her origins in Utica, New York, and avoid repeating her parents' dull, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
No One Knows
by Osamu Dazai
New Directions Publishing, 02/04/2025
 
No one really understands how we suffer. One day, when we're adults, we may come to recall this suffering, this misery, as silly and laughable, but ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Open Season: An Alex Delaware Novel
by Jonathan Kellerman
Ballantine Books, 02/04/2025
 
People come to Los Angeles to chase their dreams. Sometimes they find themselves cast into a nightmare. And sometimes, the most ardent dreamers turn ...more
Oromay
by Baalu Girma
Soho Press, 02/04/2025
 
December 1981, Ethiopia. Tsegaye Hailemaryam, a well-known journalist for the state-run media, has just landed in Asmara. He is on assignment as the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Paris Undercover: A Wartime Story of Courage, Friendship, and Betrayal
by Matthew Goodman
Ballantine Books, 02/04/2025
 
Etta Shiber and Kitty Bonnefous are the unlikeliest of heroines: two seemingly ordinary women, an American widow and an English divorcée, living ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Punished: A Novel
by Ann-Helén Laestadius
Scribner, 02/04/2025
 
In the 1950s near the Arctic Circle, seven-year-olds Jon-Ante, Else-Maj, Nilsa, Marge, and Anne-Risten are taken from their families. As children of S...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Reading the Waves: A Memoir
by Lidia Yuknavitch
Riverhead Books, 02/04/2025
 
"I believe our bodies are carriers of experience," Lidia Yuknavitch writes in her provocative memoir Reading the Waves. "I mean to ask if there is a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America
by Jeff Hobbs
Scribner, 02/04/2025
 
In the tradition of Evicted and Invisible Child, Jeff Hobbs masterfully explores America's housing crisis through the real-life story of Evelyn. This ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Shattered: A Memoir
by Hanif Kureishi
Ecco, 02/04/2025
 
In late 2022, in Rome, Hanif Kureishi had a fall. When he came to, he realized he could no longer walk. He could do nothing without the help of others...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Shoot the Moon: Rainey Hall Mysteries
by Ava Barry
Pegasus Books, 02/04/2025
 
While in high school, Rainey spent a summer taking advantage of the wildfires near Los Angeles to break into the empty houses of the rich and famous ...more
Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling
by Henry Lien
W.W. Norton & Company, 02/04/2025
 
Discussions in the West around diversity in the arts often focus on the identities of characters and creators. Speculative fiction author and writing ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Black Orb: A Novel
by Ewhan Kim
MIRA, 02/04/2025
 
The object was a black orb, roughly two meters in diameter. Despite its large size, it made no sound as it moved. Although it wasn't chasing Jeong-su ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
The Bones Beneath My Skin
by TJ Klune
Tor Books, 02/04/2025
 
There's nothing more human than a broken heart.

In the spring of 1995, Nate Cartwright has lost everything: his parents are dead, his only ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Dissenters: A Novel
by Youssef Rakha
Graywolf Press, 02/04/2025
 
Certain as I've never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth ...more
Literary Fiction
The Edge of Water
by Olufunke Grace Bankole
Tin House Books, 02/04/2025
 
In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Lamb: A Novel
by Lucy Rose
Harper, 02/04/2025
 
Margot and Mama have lived by the forest ever since Margot can remember.

When Margot is not at school, they spend quiet days together in their ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Rose Bargain
by Sasha Peyton Smith
HarperCollins Publishers, 02/04/2025
 
London, 1848—For four hundred years, England has been under the control of an immortal fae queen who tricked her way onto the throne. To ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Sable Cloak
by Gail Milissa Grant
Grand Central Publishing, 02/04/2025
 
In the South, justice is swift and absolute. 

Jordan Sable, a prosperous undertaker turned political boss, has controlled the Black vote in ...more
Historical Fiction
The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream
by Jon Savage
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 02/04/2025
 
Jon Savage, the author of the canonical England's Dreaming, explodes new ground in this electrifying history of pop music from 1955 through 1979. In ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships
by Nathan H. Lents
Mariner Books, 02/04/2025
 
Evolutionary biologist Nathan H. Lents knows what makes humans unique—and it's most definitely not our sexual diversity. A professor ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
The Traitor of Arnhem
by Robert Verkaik
Pegasus Books, 02/04/2025
 
The end of World War II is in sight.

Following the overwhelming victory on D-Day, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin all seek to shape the future ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
The Underwood Tapes
by Amanda DeWitt
Peachtree Teen, 02/04/2025
 
Thirty years ago, Grace's mom left her hometown of Hermitage, Florida and never looked back—which is exactly why Grace thinks it's the safest ...more
This Ends in Embers: The Divine Traitors #2
by Kamilah Cole
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 02/04/2025
 
Faron Vincent was once the saint of San Irie. Now, she's done the unthinkable: betrayed her country. Alone, disgraced, and kidnapped, Faron is forced ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
This Is a Love Story: A Novel
by Jessica Soffer
Dutton, 02/04/2025
 
For fifty years, Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Under the Same Stars
by Libba Bray
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 02/04/2025
 
It was said that if you write to the Bridegroom's Oak, the love of your life will answer back. Now, the tree is giving up its secrets at last.

In...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Victorian Psycho: A Novel
by Virginia Feito
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 02/04/2025
 
Virginia Feito's Mrs. March was hailed as "a brilliant debut ... [by] a writer who keeps pace with the grandees she invokes" (Sarah Ditum, Guardian)&#...more
Who I Always Was: A Memoir
by Theresa Okokon
Atria Books, 02/04/2025
 
When Theresa Okokon was nine, her father traveled to his hometown in Nigeria to attend his mother's funeral…and never returned. His mysterious ...more
Essays
 Debut Author
Howards End
by E. M. Forster
Independently published, 02/06/2025
 
We read Howard's End for the merciless skill which E. M. Forster shows in laying bare the soul of Leonard Bast, the clerk in the insurance office, who...more
Literary Fiction
(S)Kin
by Ibi Zoboi
Versify, 02/11/2025
 
"Our new home with its

thick walls and locked doors

wants me to stay trapped in my skin—

but I am fury and flame."

Fifteen-year-...more
Critics' Consensus:

Poetry & Novels in Verse
After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart
by Megan Marshall
Mariner Books, 02/11/2025
 
Megan Marshall's innovative books, including The Peabody Sisters and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Margaret Fuller, are treasured ...more
Essays
After the North Pole: A Story of Survival, Mythmaking, and Melting Ice
by Erling Kagge
HarperOne, 02/11/2025
 
The North Pole looms large in our collective psyche—the ultimate Otherland in a world mapped and traversed. It is the center of our planet's ...more
Biography/Memoir
Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays
by Edgar Gomez
Crown, 02/11/2025
 
In Florida, one of the first things you're taught as a child is that if you're ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to ...more
Beartooth: A Novel
by Callan Wink
Spiegel & Grau, 02/11/2025
 
In an aging, timber house hand-built into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains, two brothers are struggling to keep up with their debts. They live off the...more
Beauty in the Blood: A Novel
by Charlotte Carter
Vintage, 02/11/2025
 
Sarah Toomey is a successful young black lawyer, lovely but straitlaced– and afraid that she is losing her mind. Since the death of her mother, ...more
Thrillers
Beta Vulgaris: A Novel
by Margie Sarsfield
W.W. Norton & Company, 02/11/2025
 
Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, hoping the paycheck from the sugar beet harvest will cover the rent on their Brooklyn apartment. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Black Woods, Blue Sky: A Novel
by Eowyn Ivey
Random House, 02/11/2025
 
Birdie's keeping it together; of course she is. So she's a little hungover, sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Blood Ties: A Novel
by Jo Nesbo
Knopf, 02/11/2025
 
By all accounts, Carl and Roy Opgard are doing quite well for themselves. Or at least they're doing as well as can be expected in a small town like Os...more
Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health
by Adam Ratner MD MPH
Avery, 02/11/2025
 
Every single child diagnosed with measles represents a system failure—an inexcusable unforced error. The technology to prevent essentially 100 ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
 Debut Author
Brother Brontë: A Novel
by Fernando A. Flores
MCD, 02/11/2025
 
The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Casualties of Truth
by Lauren Francis-Sharma
Atlantic Monthly Press, 02/11/2025
 
Prudence Wright seems to have it all: a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, D.C.; and the former glories of a successful career at ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Ibis: A Novel
by Justin Haynes
The Overlook Press, 02/11/2025
 
There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Idle Grounds: A Novel
by Krystelle Bamford
Scribner, 02/11/2025
 
Lingering at the edge of a family party, a troop of cousins loses track of the youngest child among them. With their parents preoccupied with ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church
by Philip Shenon
Knopf, 02/11/2025
 
When the jolly Italian peasant-turned-cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli of Venice was elected Pope John XXIII in 1958, change was in the air. The ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Life Hacks for a Little Alien
by Alice Franklin
Little Brown & Company, 02/11/2025
 
"Climb up here, Little Alien. Sit next to me. I will tell you about life on this planet. I will tell you how it goes."

Before she thinks of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Loca
by Alejandro Heredia
Simon & Schuster, 02/11/2025
 
It's 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Mainline Mama: A Memoir
by Keeonna Harris
Amistad, 02/11/2025
 
Keeonna and Jason met as young teens. Only fourteen, Keeonna had never had a boyfriend before, dreamed of attending Spelman to become an obstetrician,...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Mazeltov: A Novel
by Eli Zuzovsky
Henry Holt and Company, 02/11/2025
 
At a banquet hall, at the onset of war, Adam Weizmann's bar mitzvah party turns into a glorious catastrophe. On the cusp of manhood―and the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
On My Honor: The Secret History of the Boy Scouts of America
by Kim Christensen
Grand Central Publishing, 02/11/2025
 
Since its founding in 1910, the Boy Scouts of America has been the nation's premier youth organization, espousing self-reliance and honor. More than ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
by Eve L. Ewing
Junie B Jones, 02/11/2025
 
If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Out of the Blank
by Elaine Equi
Coffee House Press, 02/11/2025
 
From acclaimed poet Elaine Equi comes her latest provocatively playful collection. "Thoughtful, witty, curious" (The New York Times), Equi's ...more
Poetry & Novels in Verse
People of Means: A Novel
by Nancy Johnson
William Morrow, 02/11/2025
 
Two women. Two pivotal moments. One dream for justice and equality.

In the fall of 1959, Freda Gilroy arrives on the campus of Fisk University ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History
by Rich Benjamin
Pantheon Books, 02/11/2025
 
Rich Benjamin's mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Last Hamilton: A Novel
by Jenn Bregman
Crooked Lane Books, 02/11/2025
 
The more they know, the more danger they're in.

When Elizabeth Walker, the last heir of the Alexander Hamilton line, is tragically killed by a ...more
The Lost and the Found: A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family, and Second Chances
by Kevin Fagan
One Signal, 02/11/2025
 
Kevin Fagan's The Lost and the Found, set in San Francisco—one of the wealthiest cities in America—takes an empathic, character-driven ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
The Queens of Crime: A Novel
by Marie Benedict
St. Martin's Press, 02/11/2025
 
London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer ...more
The Riveter: A Novel
by Jack Wang
HarperVia, 02/11/2025
 
Vancouver, 1942. Josiah Chang arrives in the bustling city ready to make a new life for himself. The Second World War is in full swing, and Josiah, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
by David Levering Lewis
Penguin Press, 02/11/2025
 
Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Watermark
by Sam Mills
Melville House, 02/11/2025
 
Rachel and Jaime: their story isn't simple. It might not even be their story.

Augustus Fate, a once-lauded novelist and now renowned recluse, is ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The World After Gaza: A History
by Pankaj Mishra
Penguin Press, 02/11/2025
 
The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
There's No Turning Back: A Novel
by Alba De Céspedes
Washington Square Press, 02/11/2025
 
A coming-of-age novel that is as relevant today as it was nearly ninety years ago, There's No Turning Back centers on eight women with radically ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Three Days in June: A Novel
by Anne Tyler
Knopf, 02/11/2025
 
Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Waiting for the Long Night Moon: Stories
by Amanda Peters
Catapult, 02/11/2025
 
In this intimate collection, Amanda Peters melds traditional storytelling with beautiful, spare prose to describe the dignity of the traditional way ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
We All Live Here: A Novel
by Jojo Moyes
Pamela Dorman Books, 02/11/2025
 
Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
We Would Never: A Novel
by Tova Mirvis
Avid Reader Press, 02/11/2025
 
No one appears more surprised than Hailey Gelman when she comes under suspicion for the murder of her soon-to-be ex-husband Jonah. Hailey—...more
What's Real about Race?: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society
by Rina Bliss
W.W. Norton & Company, 02/11/2025
 
Biologically, race does not exist. But in our social world, it remains decidedly important. Mainstream scientists embrace these truths, yet ...more
Science, Health and the Environment
Where Shadows Bloom
by Catherine Bakewell
HarperCollins Publishers, 02/11/2025
 
Ofelia has lived her life dreaming of entering Le Château Enchanté—the mysterious court of the gods-blessed King Léo, where the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip
by Kelsey McKinney
Grand Central Publishing, 02/11/2025
 
Can you keep a secret?  It's harder than it seems – after all, it's only human to thirst after the juicy updates, jaw-dropping stories, and...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
A Curse for the Homesick: A Novel
by Laura Brooke Robson
MIRA, 02/18/2025
 
Skeld season comes around without warning, and while each window of time lasts only three months, anyone a skeld turns to stone is very much dead.

...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Daughter of Daring: The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood's First Stuntwoman
by Mallory O'Meara
Hanover Square Press, 02/18/2025
 
Helen Gibson was a woman willing to do anything to give audiences a thrill. Advertised as "The Most Daring Actress in Pictures," Helen emerged in the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Elegy, Southwest: A Novel
by Madeleine Watts
Simon & Schuster, 02/18/2025
 
In November 2018, Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American southwest. While wildfires rage, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art
by Morgan Falconer
W.W. Norton & Company, 02/18/2025
 
"Art has poisoned our life," proclaimed Dutch artist and De Stijl cofounder Theo van Doesburg. Reacting to the tumultuous crises of the twentieth ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary
by Victoria Amelina
St. Martin's Press, 02/18/2025
 
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country's literary scene, and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost's Poetry
by Adam Plunkett
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 02/18/2025
 
By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our nation's bard, simple and sincere, accompanying us...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Lucha of the Forgotten Spring
by Tehlor Kay Mejia
Make Me a World, 02/18/2025
 
A ruthless monster.
A daring heist.
A heart pulled in two directions.
A long-forgotten myth.

Killing a god was only the beginning ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Maya & Natasha: A Novel
by Elyse Durham
Mariner Books, 02/18/2025
 
Maya and Natasha are twin sisters born in the midst of the Siege of Leningrad in 1941 and immediately abandoned by their mother, a prima ballerina at ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
by Katherine Stewart
Bloomsbury Publishing, 02/18/2025
 
Why have so many Americans turned against democracy? In this deeply reported book, Katherine Stewart takes us to conferences of conspiracy-mongers, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
by Haley Mlotek
Viking, 02/18/2025
 
Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her "husbands." As a pre-teen, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Penitence: A Novel
by Kristin Koval
Celadon, 02/18/2025
 
When a shocking murder occurs in the home of Angie and David Sheehan, their lives are shattered. Desperate to defend their family, they turn to small-...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
Rebel Witch: The Crimson Moth #2
by Kristen Ciccarelli
Wednesday Books, 02/18/2025
 
A WITCH...
Rune Winters is on the run. Ever since the boy she loved, Gideon Sharpe, revealed who she was and delivered her into enemy hands, ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Snowy Day and Other Stories
by Lee Chang-dong
Penguin Press, 02/18/2025
 
Much like Lee Chang-dong's internationally renowned films (Burning, Secret Sunshine, and Poetry), these brilliant, unsettling tales, originally ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
 Debut Author
The Dressmakers of London
by Julia Kelly
Gallery Books, 02/18/2025
 
Isabelle Shelton has always found comfort in the predictable world of her mother's dressmaking shop, Mrs. Shelton's Fashions, while her sister Sylvia ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Echoes: A Novel
by Evie Wyld
Knopf, 02/18/2025
 
Max didn't believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he is still here, he watches his girlfriend, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Girl You Know
by Elle Gonzalez Rose
Bloomsbury YA, 02/18/2025
 
The week before Luna's twin sister Solina was supposed to head back for her final semester at Kingswood Academy, an elite boarding school in the ...more
The Revolutionary Self: Social Change and the Emergence of the Modern Individual, 1770-1800
by Lynn Hunt
W.W. Norton & Company, 02/18/2025
 
The eighteenth century was a time of cultural friction: individuals began to assert greater independence and there was a new emphasis on social ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Theory & Practice: A Novel
by Michelle de Kretser
Catapult, 02/18/2025
 
It's 1986, and "beautiful, radical ideas" are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Unhallowed Halls
by Lili Wilkinson
Delacorte Press, 02/18/2025
 
Page Whittaker has always been an outcast. And after the deadly incident that destroyed her single friendship at her old school, she needs a fresh ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Upon a Starlit Tide
by Kell Woods
Tor Books, 02/18/2025
 
Saint-Malo, Brittany, 1758. To Lucinde Leon, the youngest daughter of a wealthy French shipowner, the high walls of Saint-Malo are more hindrance than...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Yours, Eventually: A Novel
by Nura Maznavi
Dutton, 02/18/2025
 
The Ibrahim family is facing a crucial moment: Their patriarch just lost his fortune as the result of a Ponzi scheme, and the family is picking up the...more
Romance
 Debut Author
A Circle of Uncommon Witches: A Novel
by Paige Crutcher
St. Martin's Griffin, 02/25/2025
 
Doreen MacKinnon is doomed to die of a broken heart - if she can't break the centuries old curse placed on her family.

Three hundred years ago, ...more
A House for Miss Pauline: A Novel
by Diana McCaulay
Algonquin Books, 02/25/2025
 
When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
A Touch of Blood: A Venom Novel
by Sajni Patel
Rick Riodan Presents, 02/25/2025
 
Before Manisha, the youngest of three sisters, was sent to hide on the floating mountain, her eldest sister, Eshani, made a deal with the shades. In ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
All the Parts We Exile
by Roza Nozari
Knopf Canada, 02/25/2025
 
As the youngest of three daughters, and the only one born in Canada soon after her parents' emigration from Iran, Roza Nozari began her life hungry ...more
Biography/Memoir
Boy
by Nicole Galland
William Morrow, 02/25/2025
 
Alexander "Sander" Cooke is the most celebrated "boy player" in the Chamberlain's Men, William Shakespeare's theatre company. Indeed, Sander's ...more
Historical Fiction
Close Your Eyes and Count to 10: A Novel
by Lisa Unger
Park Row, 02/25/2025
 
When the real game begins, who will make it to the count of 10?

Charismatic daredevil and extreme adventurer Maverick Dillan invites you to the ...more
Death Takes Me: A Novel
by Cristina Rivera Garza
Hogarth Books, 02/25/2025
 
A city is always a cemetery.

A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Deep Cuts: A Novel
by Holly Brickley
Crown, 02/25/2025
 
It's a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction
by Andrea Barrett
W.W. Norton & Company, 02/25/2025
 
In this thoughtful collection of essays, Andrea Barrett draws from her experiences writing some of the most acclaimed historical fiction of our time ...more
Fagin the Thief: A Novel
by Allison Epstein
Doubleday, 02/25/2025
 
Long before Oliver Twist stumbled onto the scene, Jacob Fagin was scratching out a life for himself in the dark alleys of nineteenth-century London. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Famous Last Words: A Novel
by Gillian McAllister
William Morrow, 02/25/2025
 
It is June 21st, the longest day of the year, and new mother Camilla's life is about to change forever. After months of maternity leave, she will drop...more
Fundamentally: A Novel
by Nussaibah Younis
Tiny Reparations, 02/25/2025
 
When Dr. Nadia Amin, a long-suffering academic, publishes an article on the possibility of rehabilitating ISIS brides, the United Nations comes ...more
Literary Fiction
Knucklehead: Poems
by Tony Keith Jr.
Quill Tree Books, 02/25/2025
 
There are poems about the power of language to transcend the racist and homophobic constructs of a society prejudging Black boys. There are poems that...more
Critics' Consensus:

Poetry & Novels in Verse
Living in Your Light
by Abdellah Taïa
Seven Stories Press, 02/25/2025
 
Three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman. From 1954 to 1999. From French colonization to the death of King Hassan II.

It is her...more
Literary Fiction
Mornings Without Mii
by Mayumi Inaba
FSG Originals, 02/25/2025
 
On a cool summer evening in 1977, Mayumi Inaba hears a forlorn cry carried by the breeze off Tokyo's Tamagawa River. She follows the sound to the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Notes on Surviving the Fire: A Novel
by Christine Murphy
Knopf, 02/25/2025
 
At a Ph.D. program in Southern California, Sarah and her best friend, Nathan, spend their time working on their theses, getting high, and keeping ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
by Omar El Akkad
Knopf, 02/25/2025
 
On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments
by Kenneth Roth
Knopf, 02/25/2025
 
In three decades under the leadership of Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch grew to a staff of more than 500, conducting investigations in 100 countries...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Show Don't Tell: Stories
by Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House, 02/25/2025
 
In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she's as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
The Boyhood of Cain
by Michael Amherst
Riverhead Books, 02/25/2025
 
In the shadow of an ancient abbey nestled between rivers, Daniel is growing up. He is highly intelligent but little understood by his parents, and a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Café with No Name
by Robert Seethaler
Europa Editions, 02/25/2025
 
Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Fourth Consort: A Novel
by Edward Ashton
St. Martin's Griffin, 02/25/2025
 
Dalton Greaves is a hero. He's one of humankind's first representatives to Unity, a pan-species confederation working to bring all sentient life into ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Last American Heiresses
by Stephen Greco
A John Scognamiglio Book, 02/25/2025
 
The press dubs them "the Gold Dust twins." Born within a week of one another in Manhattan in 1912, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton both inherit ...more
Historical Fiction
The Other March Sisters
by Linda Epstein, Ally Malinenko, Liz Parker
Kensington Publishing, 02/25/2025
 
I'm sure you believe you know their story from reading that other book, which told you an inspiring tale about four sisters. It told you a story, but ...more
Historical Fiction
The Otherwhere Post
by Emily J. Taylor
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 02/25/2025
 
Seven years ago, Maeve Abenthy lost everything: her world, her father, even her name. Desperate to escape the stain of her father's crimes, she lives ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Rebel Empresses: Elisabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France, Power and Glamour in the Struggle for Europe
by Nancy Goldstone
Little Brown & Company, 02/25/2025
 
When they married Emperors Franz Joseph and Napoleon III, respectively, Elisabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France became two of the most famous ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Talent
by Daniel D'Addario
Gallery/Scout Press, 02/25/2025
 
As Hollywood prepares for its most glamorous evening, five actresses compete to see who will claim the top prize.

Adria, a dignified and highly ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Tilda Is Visible: A Novel
by Jane Tara
Crown, 02/25/2025
 
Tilda Finch is a successful businesswoman, a mother to two wonderful adult daughters, and besides an unexpected divorce, she's living a relatively ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
What You Make of Me: A Novel
by Sophie Madeline Dess
Penguin Press, 02/25/2025
 
On the eve of her first solo show, Ava is feeling defiant. The art gallery acolytes have insisted on writing 'explanations' of her paintings for an ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance
by Riley Black
St. Martin's Press, 02/25/2025
 
Fossils plants allow us to touch the lost worlds from billions of years of evolutionary backstory. Each petrified leaf and root show us that dinosaurs...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
When We Grow Up: A Novel
by Angelica Baker
Flatiron Books, 02/25/2025
 
Clare is supposed to be the grown-up one. Married to the love of her life, with a major deal for her first novel, she has everything she thought she ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Banned Together: Our Fight for Readers' Rights
by Ashley Hope Pérez
Holiday House, 03/04/2025
 
Books are disappearing from shelves across the country.

What does this mean for authors, illustrators, and—most crucially—for young ...more
Blood Moon
by Sandra Brown
Grand Central Publishing, 03/04/2025
 
Detective John Bowie is one misstep away from being fired from the Auclair Police Department in coastal Louisiana. Recently divorced and slightly ...more
Broken Country (Reese's Book Club)
by Clare Leslie Hall
Simon & Schuster, 03/04/2025
 
"The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him."

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Connecting Dots: A Blind Life
by Joshua A. Miele
Hachette Books, 03/04/2025
 
At the age of four, Joshua Miele was blinded and badly burned when a delusional neighbor poured sulfuric acid over his head in a crime that shocked ...more
Biography/Memoir
Days of Shattered Faith: The Tyrant Philosophers #3
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Head of Zeus, 03/04/2025
 
Loret is fresh off the boat, and just in time.

As Cohort-Invigilator of Correct Appreciation, Outreach department, she's here as aide to the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Divining the Leaves
by Shveta Thakrar
HarperCollins Publishers, 03/04/2025
 
Plant-loving Ridhi Kapadia and popular Nilesh Batra were friends once.

Now, seventeen and alone, Ridhi blends natural perfumes, wears flower crowns...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Dream Count: A Novel
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf, 03/04/2025
 
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women
by Vanda Krefft
Algonquin Books, 03/04/2025
 
It's a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Firstborn Girls: A Memoir
by Bernice L. McFadden
Dutton, 03/04/2025
 
On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Guatemalan Rhapsody: Stories
by Jared Lemus
Ecco, 03/04/2025
 
Ranging from a custodian at an underfunded college to a medicine man living in a temple dedicated to San Simon, the patron saint of alcohol and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
 Debut Author
How to Feed the World: The History and Future of Food
by Vaclav Smil
Viking, 03/04/2025
 
We have never had to feed as many people as we do today. And yet, we misunderstand the essentials of where our food really comes from, how our dietary...more
Science, Health and the Environment
I Leave It Up to You: A Novel
by Jinwoo Chong
Ballantine Books, 03/04/2025
 
A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Kills Well with Others
by Deanna Raybourn
Berkley Books, 03/04/2025
 
After more than a year of laying low, Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are called back into action. They have enjoyed their time off, but the ...more
Kirby's Lessons for Falling (in Love)
by Laura Gao
HarperAlley, 03/04/2025
 
Now she's forced to join the newspaper club for some desperately needed extra credit. Worse, she's recruited by crystal-wearing, tarot-reading Bex ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star
by Mayukh Sen
W.W. Norton & Company, 03/04/2025
 
Merle Oberon attained Hollywood immortality with a nomination for a Best Leading Actress Oscar for her role in the 1935 film The Dark Angel. It was ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Making Sense of Slavery: America's Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today
by Scott Spillman
Basic Books, 03/04/2025
 
In recent years, from school board meetings to the halls of Congress, Americans have engaged in fierce debates about how slavery and its legacies ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
Mellon vs. Churchill: The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War
by Jill Eicher
Pegasus Books, 03/04/2025
 
Andrew Mellon, one of the most accomplished businessmen of his era, is almost unknown today. To this shy, diffident (but brilliant) man fell the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Nightweaver: Nightweaver #1
by R.M. Gray
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 03/04/2025
 
Six hundred years ago, Nightweavers, cursed beings with untamed power, claimed the continents for their own. The ocean was meant to be a safe haven ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays
by A. Kendra Greene
Tin House Books, 03/04/2025
 
Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene's No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation―on the complex wonder of ...more
Oathbound: The Legendborn Cycle #3
by Tracy Deonn
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 03/04/2025
 
Severed from the Legendborn. Oathbound to a monster.

Bree Matthews is alone. She exiled herself from the Legendborn Order, cut her ancestral ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
On the Clock
by Claire Baglin
New Directions Publishing, 03/04/2025
 
Claire Baglin's On the Clock packs a family saga, a penetrating picture of social inequality, and a coming-of-age story into a compact tale told in ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Once Was Willem
by M. R. Carey
Orbit, 03/04/2025
 
Eleven hundred and some years after the death of Christ, in the kingdom that had but recently begun to call itself England, I, Once Was Willem, rose ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
One Step Forward
by Marcie Flinchum Atkins
HarperCollins Publishers, 03/04/2025
 
Raised in a politically divided family, Matilda wondered if she could be as courageous as her older sister who fought for suffrage. Joining the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Poetry & Novels in Verse
Optional Practical Training: A Novel
by Shubha Sunder
Graywolf Press, 03/04/2025
 
Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Pieces You'll Never Get Back: A Memoir of Unlikely Survival
by Samina Ali
Catapult, 03/04/2025
 
At 29, as a young writer working on her first novel, Samina Ali nearly died giving birth to her son. Miraculously, she survived the unchecked ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Raising Hare: A Memoir
by Chloe Dalton
Pantheon Books, 03/04/2025
 
Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Red Dog Farm: A Novel
by Nathaniel Ian Miller
Little Brown & Company, 03/04/2025
 
Growing up on his family's cattle farm in western Iceland, young Orri has gained an appreciation for the beauty found in everyday things: the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Remember This: A Novel
by Anthony Giardina
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 03/04/2025
 
Even though Miranda Rando, a forty-year-old writer living in Brooklyn, is making breakthroughs in her biography of a powerful woman artist, she can't ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope
by Amanda Nguyen
AUWA, 03/04/2025
 
In 2013, the trajectory of Amanda Nguyen's life was changed forever when she was raped at Harvard.

Determined to not let her assault derail her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
See Friendship: A Novel
by Jeremy Gordon
Harper Perennial, 03/04/2025
 
Ahead of looming layoffs within the ongoing decimation of media, Jacob Goldberg, a culture writer in New York, knows what will save him: a podcast.&#...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Seven Social Movements That Changed America
by Linda Gordon
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 03/04/2025
 
How do social movements arise, wield power, and bring about meaningful change? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these and other salient ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Stone Angels
by Helena Rho
Grand Central Publishing, 03/04/2025
 
Angelina Lee feels like she doesn't belong. Newly divorced, and completely unmoored by the sudden and tragic death of her mother, she hopes studying ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Strange Bedfellows
by Ariel Slamet Ries
HarperAlley, 03/04/2025
 
In the not-too-distant future, most of humanity resides on its last-ditch effort at utopia: Meridian, a remote alien planet where you're more likely ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America
by Russell Shorto
W.W. Norton & Company, 03/04/2025
 
In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Boxcar Librarian: A Novel
by Brianna Labuskes
William Morrow, 03/04/2025
 
When Works Progress Administration (WPA) editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she's shipped off to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Dream Hotel: A Novel
by Laila Lalami
Pantheon Books, 03/04/2025
 
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The King's Messenger
by Susanna Kearsley
Sourcebooks Landmark, 03/04/2025
 
It is the year 1613, and King James is sending his messenger Andrew Logan into Scotland with secret orders to arrest Sir David Moray, close friend and...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball
by John W. Miller
Avid Reader Press, 03/04/2025
 
Long before the Moneyball-era, the Earl of Baltimore reigned over baseball. History's feistiest and most colorful manager, Earl Weaver transformed the...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Persians: A Novel
by Sanam Mahloudji
Scribner, 03/04/2025
 
Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they're nobodies.

First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The River Has Roots
by Amal El-Mohtar
Tordotcom, 03/04/2025
 
"Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath."

In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
The Scorpion and the Night Blossom: The Three Realms #1
by Amélie Wen Zhao
Delacorte Press, 03/04/2025
 
Nine years ago, the war between the Kingdom of Night and the Kingdom of Rivers tore Àn'yīng's family apart, leaving her mother barely alive ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir
by Martha S. Jones
Basic Books, 03/04/2025
 
Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: "Who do ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Unworthy: A Novel
by Agustina Bazterrica
Scribner, 03/04/2025
 
From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Vanishing Kind: Alex Carter Series #4
by Alice Henderson
William Morrow, 03/04/2025
 
When wildlife biologist Alex Carter is tasked with locating jaguars on a vast desert preserve in New Mexico, she is ecstatic. While jaguars once ...more
Thrillers
They Bloom at Night
by Trang Thanh Tran
Bloomsbury YA, 03/04/2025
 
Since the hurricane, the town of Mercy, Louisiana has been overtaken by a strange red algae bloom. Noon and her mother have carved out a life in the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women's Ascent of Denali
by Cassidy Randall
Abrams Press, 03/04/2025
 
Cassidy Randall draws on extensive archival research and original interviews to tell an engrossing, edge-of-the-seat adventure story about a forgotten...more
Biography/Memoir
Ultramarine
by Mariette Navarro
Deep Vellum Publishing, 03/04/2025
 
A female captain in a male-dominated field, the unnamed narrator of Ultramarine has secured her success through strict adherence to protocol; she...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
Universality: A Novel
by Natasha Brown
Random House, 03/04/2025
 
Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.

An ambitious...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh: A Novel
by Colwill Brown
Henry Holt and Company, 03/04/2025
 
"Ask anyone non-Northern, they'll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London." But Doncaster's also ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
When the Bones Sing
by Ginny Myers Sain
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 03/04/2025
 
The past three years have been tough for Lucifer's Creek, Arkansas, a small town quietly tucked away in the Ozark mountains. More than two dozen ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Wild Dark Shore: A Novel
by Charlotte McConaghy
Flatiron Books, 03/04/2025
 
A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Woodworking
by Emily St. James
Zando, 03/04/2025
 
Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced―and trans. Not that she's told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn't exactly ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
33 Place Brugmann
by Alice Austen
Grove Press, 03/11/2025
 
On the eve of the Nazi occupation, in the heart of Brussels, life for the residents of eight apartments at 33 Place Brugmann is about to change ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe
by Mahogany L. Browne
Crown Books for Young Readers, 03/11/2025
 
In New York City, teens, their families, and their communities feel the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst the fear and loss, these teens and the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
All the Other Mothers Hate Me
by Sarah Harman
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 03/11/2025
 
Florence Grimes is a thirty-one-year-old party girl who always takes the easy way out. Single, broke and unfulfilled after the humiliating end to her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
America, Let Me In: A Choose Your Immigration Story
by Felipe Torres Medina
Abrams Image, 03/11/2025
 
Born in Colombia, Felipe Torres Medina moved to the US at the age of 21 and has spent over ten years of his life both navigating the chaos and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Care and Feeding: A Memoir
by Laurie Woolever
Ecco, 03/11/2025
 
In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Flatiron Books, 03/11/2025
 
From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door
by Thor Hanson
Basic Books, 03/11/2025
 
We all live on nature's doorstep, but we often overlook it. From backyards to local parks, the natural places we see the most may well be the ones we ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin
by Andre Dubus III
W.W. Norton & Company, 03/11/2025
 
During childhood summers in Louisiana, Andre Dubus III's grandfather taught him that men's work is hard. As an adult, whether tracking down a drug ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Girl Falling: A Novel
by Hayley Scrivenor
Flatiron Books, 03/11/2025
 
Torn between her girlfriend, Magdu, and her best friend, Daphne, Finn is looking forward to a day of rock climbing and bonding for the three women on ...more
Goddess Complex: A Novel
by Sanjena Sathian
Penguin Press, 03/11/2025
 
Sanjana Satyanandais trying to recover her life. It's been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Jane and Dan at the End of the World
by Colleen Oakley
Berkley Books, 03/11/2025
 
Jane and Dan have been married for nineteen years, but Jane isn't sure they're going to make it to twenty. The mother of two feels unneeded by her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Just Want You Here: A Novel
by Meredith Turits
Little A, 03/11/2025
 
The only love Ari has known is Morgan. Engaged and planning a life with him in New York, Ari is shocked when Morgan sits her down one rainy afternoon ...more
Literary Fiction
Liquid: A Love Story
by Mariam Rahmani
Algonquin Books, 03/11/2025
 
The unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator of Liquid has always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. And from an early age, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy
by Bridgett M. Davis
Harper, 03/11/2025
 
In Love, Rita, Bridgett M. Davis tells the story of her beloved older sister, a vivacious woman who in leaving home to attend Fisk ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Luminous
by Silvia Park
Simon & Schuster, 03/11/2025
 
In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful
by David Enrich
Mariner Books, 03/11/2025
 
It was a quiet way to announce a revolution: In an obscure 2019 case that the Supreme Court refused to even hear, Justice Clarence Thomas raised the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR
by Steve Oney
Avid Reader Press, 03/11/2025
 
Founded in 1970, NPR is America's most powerful broadcast news network. Despite being overshadowed by the larger and more glamorous PBS, public radio ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Rebel Queen: The Cold War, Misogyny, and the Making of a Grandmaster
by Susan Polgar
Grand Central Publishing, 03/11/2025
 
Born to a poor Jewish family in Cold War Budapest, Susan Polgar would emerge as the one of the greatest female chess players the world had ever seen. ...more
Biography/Memoir
Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories
by Torrey Peters
Random House, 03/11/2025
 
In this collection of one novel and three novellas, Torrey Peters's keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Sucker Punch
by Scaachi Koul
St. Martin's Press, 03/11/2025
 
Scaachi Koul's first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, ...more
The Anatomy of Magic: A Novel
by J.C. Cervantes
Park Row, 03/11/2025
 
Lilian Estrada seemingly has it all: an ob-gyn star on the rise, a master at balancing work with whirlwind romances and part of a family of fiercely ...more
The Antidote: A Novel
by Karen Russell
Knopf, 03/11/2025
 
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Broken King
by Michael Thomas
Grove Press, 03/11/2025
 
In 2007, Michael Thomas launched into the literary world with his award-winning first novel Man Gone Down, a beautiful and devastating story of a ...more
Biography/Memoir
The Californians: A Novel
by Brian Castleberry
Mariner Books, 03/11/2025
 
It's 2024, and Tobey Harlan—college dropout, temporary waiter, recently dumped—steals from the wall of his father's house three ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Four Queens of Crime
by Rosanne Limoncelli
Crooked Lane Books, 03/11/2025
 
1938, London. The four queens of British crime fiction, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham, are hosting a gala to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Mysteries
 Debut Author
The Jackal's Mistress: A Novel
by Chris Bohjalian
Doubleday, 03/11/2025
 
Virginia, 1864—Libby Steadman's husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York
by Elon Green
Celadon, 03/11/2025
 
At twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a young Black aspiring artist, deejay, and model, looking to make a name for himself in the vibrant ...more
Critics' Consensus:

True Crime
The Trouble Up North
by Travis Mulhauser
Grand Central Publishing, 03/11/2025
 
The Sawbrooks have lived on prime real estate on the lakes of Michigan since before there was prime real estate. A family of smugglers and bootleggers...more
Thrillers
The Wild Dark
by Katherine Harbour
Bloomsbury YA, 03/11/2025
 
Once an outcast and an orphan, Evie Wilder now finds herself as the new leader of the Dark Fable. But the secret group of globetrotting thieves is not...more
Thrillers
The Women on Platform Two
by Laura Anthony
Gallery Books, 03/11/2025
 
Dublin, 1969: Maura has just married Dr. Christy Davenport and they look forward to growing their family. But as her husband's vicious temper emerges,...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means
by Christopher Summerfield
Viking, 03/11/2025
 
In this accessible, up-to-date, and authoritative examination of the world's most radical technology, neuroscientist and AI researcher Christopher ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
 Debut Author
Tongues, Volume 1
by Anders Nilsen
Pantheon Books, 03/11/2025
 
Set in a version of modern Central Asia, Tongues is a retelling of the Greek myth of Prometheus. It follows the captive god's friendship with the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories
by Inagaki Taruho
Two Lines Press, 03/11/2025
 
A young storm-chaser welcomes a jaded woman into the eye of a storm. The last man of a peculiar family, implausibly tiny in stature, attends a Mozart ...more
Short Stories
Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses
by Peter Wolf
Little Brown & Company, 03/11/2025
 
Peter Wolf grew up in the Bronx, a child of "fellow travelers" whose artistic inclinations influenced both his love of music and his initial desire to...more
Biography/Memoir
Warbody: A Marine Sniper and the Hidden Violence of Modern Warfare
by Joshua Howe, Alexander Lemons
W.W. Norton & Company, 03/11/2025
 
Alexander Lemons is a Marine Corps scout sniper who, after serving multiple tours during the Iraq War, returned home seriously and mysteriously ill. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
You Deserve to Know
by Aggie Blum Thompson
Forge Books, 03/11/2025
 
Neighbors Gwen, Aimee, and Lisa share more than playdates and coffee mornings on their tranquil street in East Bethesda. They confide their deepest ...more
A Catalog of Burnt Objects
by Shana Youngdahl
Dial Books, 03/18/2025
 
Seventeen-year-old Caprice wants to piece her family back together now that her older brother has returned home, even as she resents that he ever ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
A Map to Paradise
by Susan Meissner
Berkley Books, 03/18/2025
 
With her name on the Hollywood blacklist and her life on hold, starlet Melanie Cole has little choice in company. There is her next-door neighbor, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Abundance
by Ezra Klein
Avid Reader Press, 03/18/2025
 
To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Alive: Our Bodies and the Richness and Brevity of Existence
by Gabriel Weston
David R. Godine, 03/18/2025
 
What does it mean to live in a body? For Gabriel Weston, there was always something missing from the anatomy she was taught at medical school. She'd ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Animal Instinct
by Amy Shearn
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 03/18/2025
 
It's spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein—mother of three, recent divorcée, and Brooklynite—is stuck inside. But her newly awakened ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Chloe: A Novel of Secrets and Lies
by Connie Briscoe
Amistad, 03/18/2025
 
A mansion haunted by the ghost of a cool, charismatic first wife. A second bride from a small Southern town who may be in over her head. A brooding ...more
Thrillers
Edgar Allan Poe: A Life
by Richard Kopley
University of Virginia Press, 03/18/2025
 
Edgar Allan Poe: A Life is the most comprehensive critical biography of Poe yet produced, exploring his fascinating life, his extraordinary work, and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Everybody Says It's Everything: A Novel
by Xhenet Aliu
Random House, 03/18/2025
 
Raised in Connecticut, adopted twins Drita and Petrit (aka Pete) had no connection to their Albanian heritage. Their lives were all about Barbie dolls...more
Literary Fiction
Firstborn: A Memoir
by Lauren Christensen
Penguin Press, 03/18/2025
 
"Some days I still think this is all just a sad story I'll tell Simone one day."

Lauren Christensen is a thirtysomething editor in New York City ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Four Red Sweaters: Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust
by Lucy Adlington
Harper, 03/18/2025
 
Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker, Chana Zumerkorn, and Regina Feldman all faced the Holocaust in different ways. While they did not know each other&#...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Hangry Hearts
by Jennifer Chen
Wednesday Books, 03/18/2025
 
Julie Wu and Randall Hur used to be best friends. Now they only see each other on Saturdays at the Pasadena Farmers Market where their once close ...more
His Mortal Demise: The Last Bloodcarver #2
by Vanessa Le
Roaring Brook Press, 03/18/2025
 
Kochin is a heartsooth — a rare being with the ability to heal any wound. Any wound, that is, except death.

Intent on defying nature and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Hot Air: A Novel
by Marcy Dermansky
Knopf, 03/18/2025
 
Joannie hadn't been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Hunchback: A Novel
by Saou Ichikawa
Hogarth Books, 03/18/2025
 
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
If You Were My Daughter: A Memoir of Healing an Unmothered Heart
by Marianne Richmond
Sourcebooks, 03/18/2025
 
At nine years old, Marianne Richmond's life is upended when she collapses on her kitchen floor with full-body convulsions. "Pinched nerve," says the ...more
Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
In My Remaining Years
by Jean Grae
Flatiron Books, 03/18/2025
 
In My Remaining Years, by creative juggernaut Jean Grae, debunks the myth that coming-of-age narratives should be reserved for the kids, providing a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children
by Noliwe Rooks
Pantheon Books, 03/18/2025
 
On May 17, 1954 the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education determined that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Heralded as a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Killer Potential: A Novel
by Hannah Deitch
William Morrow, 03/18/2025
 
A scholarship kid with straight As and big dreams, Evie Gordon always thought she was special, that she'd be someone. But after graduating from an ...more
Thrillers
 Debut Author
Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War
by Michael Vorenberg
Knopf, 03/18/2025
 
We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant's ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted: A Novel
by Ben Okri
Other Press, 03/18/2025
 
There are organizations for people who grieve, for alcoholics and other kinds of addicts. But if you've been devastated by the love of your life ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
O Sinners!: A Novel
by Nicole Cuffy
One World, 03/18/2025
 
Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist processing the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed himself in a cult called "...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Our Beautiful Boys: A Novel
by Sameer Pandya
Ballantine Books, 03/18/2025
 
Vikram Shastri has always been a good kid. He's got a 4.6 GPA, listens to his parents, barely hits the parties, and is on track for a fancy college. ...more
Literary Fiction
Rooms for Vanishing: A Novel
by Stuart Nadler
Dutton, 03/18/2025
 
Everyone had been survived into different futures and I would never see any of them again. I could sense this. I would hear them in their separate ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Stop Me If You've Heard This One: A Novel
by Kristen Arnett
Riverhead Books, 03/18/2025
 
Cherry Hendricks might be down on her luck, but she can write the book on what makes something funny: she's a professional clown who creates raucous, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Sunrise on the Reaping: A Hunger Games Novel
by Suzanne Collins
Scholastic Press, 03/18/2025
 
As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Girl Who Flew Away
by Lee Dean
Iron Circus Comics, 03/18/2025
 
Bunking with total strangers to await and hide the birth of her boss's child, she finds herself unmoored and friendless in the sun-and-fun-obsessed ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
The House No One Sees
by Adina King
Feiwel & Friends, 03/18/2025
 
After a text from her estranged mother rips her away from a night with friends, Penny is forced into a kaleidoscope of memories locked inside the dark...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Hymn to Dionysus
by Natasha Pulley
Bloomsbury Publishing, 03/18/2025
 
Raised in a Greek legion, Phaidros has been taught to follow his commander's orders at all costs. But when Phaidros rescues a baby from a fire at ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Love We Found
by Jill Santopolo
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 03/18/2025
 
It's been ten years. In case you're out there somewhere. In case you're listening, I'm here. And I have so much to tell you.

It's been nearly ten...more
Romance
The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing
by Joshua Hammer
Simon & Schuster, 03/18/2025
 
It was one of history's great vanishing acts.

Around 3,400 BCE—as humans were gathering in complex urban settlements—a scribe in the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Paris Express: A Novel
by Emma Donoghue
Summit Books, 03/18/2025
 
Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Theft: A Novel
by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Riverhead Books, 03/18/2025
 
At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
True Life in Uncanny Valley
by Deb Caletti
Labyrinth Road, 03/18/2025
 
Eleanor, like so many others, is used to watching her famous father from afar. To the world, Hugo Harrison is the brilliant and charismatic tech ...more
All Our Beautiful Goodbyes: A Novel
by Julianne MacLean
Lake Union Publishing, 03/25/2025
 
1946: World War II is over, and Emma Clarkson is poised to take flight. With dreams of attending university, she's ready to leave behind the wild ...more
Literary Fiction
Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age
by Leah Sottile
Grand Central Publishing, 03/25/2025
 
Known for deep dives into true crime, extremist ideologies and fringe subcultures, journalist Leah Sottile turns her investigative eye toward American...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Blood on Her Tongue
by Johanna van Veen
Poisoned Pen Press, 03/25/2025
 
The Netherlands, 1887. Lucy's twin sister Sarah is unwell. She refuses to eat, mumbles nonsensically, and is increasingly obsessed with a centuries-...more
Counting Backwards
by Binnie Kirshenbaum
Soho Press, 03/25/2025
 
It begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a pair of swans paddling on the street. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Free: My Search for Meaning
by Amanda Knox
Grand Central Publishing, 03/25/2025
 
Though she was exonerated, it's taken more than a decade for her to reclaim her identity and truly feel free.

Free recounts how Knox survived ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert: A Novel
by Bob the Drag Queen
Gallery Books, 03/25/2025
 
In an age of miracles where our greatest heroes from history have magically, unexplainably returned to shake us out of our confusion and hate, Harriet...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
I Am the Swarm
by Hayley Chewins
Viking, 03/25/2025
 
As far back as anyone can remember, the women of the Strand family have been magical.

Their gifts manifest when they each turn fifteen, always in ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Poetry & Novels in Verse
King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South
by Jeanne Theoharis
The New Press, 03/25/2025
 
The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Lucky Night: A Novel
by Eliza Kennedy
Crown, 03/25/2025
 
Nick Holloway is forty-six. A successful partner at a law firm, he has a gorgeous wife, a precious daughter, and a big house. If he also has gnawing ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Retreat: A Novel
by Krysten Ritter
Harper, 03/25/2025
 
Liz Dawson weaves through a crowd with the ease of a tropical breeze, moving seamlessly through elite circles, sparking instant connections and making...more
Saltwater: A Novel
by Katy Hays
Ballantine Books, 03/25/2025
 
In 1992, Sarah Lingate is found dead below the cliffs of Capri, leaving behind her three-year-old daughter, Helen. Despite suspicions that the old-...more
Sister Europe: A Novel
by Nell Zink
Knopf, 03/25/2025
 
Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a bind: struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she's unable to host an ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Sons and Daughters: A Novel
by Chaim Grade
Knopf, 03/25/2025
 
"It is me the prophet laments when he cries out, 'My enemies are the people in my own home.'" The Rabbi ignored his borscht and instead chewed on a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Agonies
by Ben Faulkner
Arcade Publishing, 03/25/2025
 
Armand Bernal is breaking apart. The trials of youth become a torrential odyssey of dislocation and disorientation. In this bildungsroman for our ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The BookBrowse Anthology
by BookBrowse
BookBrowse, 03/25/2025
 
Where can you find Pulitzer, Nobel, Booker, and National Book Award Winners alongside bestsellers and hidden gems? For over 20 years, BookBrowse has ...more
Other
The Evening Shades
by Lee Martin
Melville House, 03/25/2025
 
One afternoon in the autumn of 1972, a lonely widow in Mt. Gilead, Illinois, makes the impromptu decision to rent out a room in her house to a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street
by Mike Tidwell
St. Martin's Press, 03/25/2025
 
In 2023, author and activist Mike Tidwell decided to keep a record for a full year of the growing impacts of climate change on his one urban block ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
The Reluctant Sheriff: The Mick Hardin Novels #4
by Chris Offutt
Grove Press, 03/25/2025
 
Lauded as a "masterclass in the craft of crime fiction" (CrimeReads), Chris Offutt's beloved and critically acclaimed Mick Hardin series is an ...more
The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree
by India Hayford
A John Scognamiglio Book, 03/25/2025
 
Genevieve Charbonneau talks to ghosts and has a special relationship with rattlesnakes. In her travels, she's wandered throughout the South, escaping ...more
Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
The Unwanted: A Novel
by Boris Fishman
Harper, 03/25/2025
 
Susanna, George, and their eight-year-old daughter, Dina, have been lucky, so far, in these four years since war broke out in their country. Even as ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Thrilled to Death: Selected Stories
by Lynne Tillman
Soft Skull Press, 03/25/2025
 
Among the vanguard of American literary writers, Lynne Tillman's work has defied categorization throughout her legendary career—a singular body ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Tilt: A Novel
by Emma Pattee
Simon & Schuster, 03/25/2025
 
Last night, you and I were safe. Last night, in another universe, your father and I stood fighting in the kitchen.

Annie is nine months pregnant ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
To Steal from Thieves
by M.K. Lobb
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 03/25/2025
 
Within the dazzling halls of London's Crystal Palace, the event of the season has arrived: The Great Exhibition. An opportunity for the greatest minds...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Trauma Plot: A Life
by Jamie Hood
Pantheon Books, 03/25/2025
 
In the thick of lockdown, 2020, poet, critic, and memoirist Jamie Hood published her debut, How to Be a Good Girl, an interrogation of modern ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Twist: A Novel
by Colum McCann
Random House, 03/25/2025
 
"Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken."

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
When the Moon Hits Your Eye
by John Scalzi
Tor Books, 03/25/2025
 
The moon has turned into cheese.

Now humanity has to deal with it.

For some it's an opportunity. For others it's a moment to question their ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
When We Ride: A Novel
by Rex Ogle
W.W. Norton & Company, 03/25/2025
 
Diego Benevides works hard. His single mother encourages him to stay focused on school, on getting into college, on getting out of their crumbling ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Poetry & Novels in Verse
A Drop of Corruption: An Ana and Din Mystery (Shadow of the Leviathan #2)
by Robert Jackson Bennett
Del Rey, 04/01/2025
 
In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire's reach, a Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—vanishing from a room ...more
A Hole in the Story: A Novel
by Ken Kalfus
Milkweed Editions, 04/01/2025
 
At his desk one day, prominent Washington commentator Adam Zweig receives a text message. "Btw want to give you a heads-up abt some breaking news," it...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
A/S/L
by Jeanne Thornton
Soho Press, 04/01/2025
 
1998: Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa are teenagers, scattered across the country but joined by the Internet. They are making Saga of the Sorceress, a video ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum
by Elaine Sciolino
W.W. Norton & Company, 04/01/2025
 
The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
All That Life Can Afford
by Emily Everett
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 04/01/2025
 
I would arrive, blank like a sheet of notebook paper, and write myself new.

Anna first fell in love with London at her hometown library—its...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Attila
by Aliocha Coll
Open Letter, 04/01/2025
 
In this groundbreaking "untranslatable" work, he channels Joycean experimentalism to explore the fragility of empires, the future of the city, and the...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Bad Nature: A Novel
by Ariel Courage
Henry Holt and Company, 04/01/2025
 
When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Cat's People: A Novel
by Tanya Guerrero
Delacorte Press, 04/01/2025
 
Núria, a single-by-choice barista with a resentment for the "crazy cat lady" label, is a member of The Meow-Yorkers, a group in Brooklyn who ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio: A Novel
by Amara Lakhous
Europa Editions, 04/01/2025
 
Piazza Vittorio is home to a polyglot community of immigrants who have come to Rome from all over the world. But when a tenant is murdered in the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Flesh: A Novel
by David Szalay
Scribner, 04/01/2025
 
Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Gifted & Talented
by Olivie Blake
Tor Books, 04/01/2025
 
Where there's a will, there's a war.

Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Holy Terrors: Little Thieves #3
by Margaret Owen
Henry Holt and Company, 04/01/2025
 
As the Pfennigeist, she bucks the law in order to help the desperate and haunt the corrupt all across the empire―and no matter what, she works ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie
by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot
Mariner Books, 04/01/2025
 
On January 16, 1983, Aubrey LaHaye's body was found floating in the Bayou Nezpique. His kidnapping ten days before sparked "the biggest manhunt in the...more
Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Huda F Wants to Know?: A Graphic Novel
by Huda Fahmy
Dial Books, 04/01/2025
 
Huda Fahmy is ready for junior year. She's got a plan to join all the clubs, volunteer everywhere, ace the ACTs, write the most awe-inspiring essay ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
I See You've Called in Dead: A Novel
by John Kenney
Zibby Books, 04/01/2025
 
Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who is afraid to live. Yes, his wife recently left him for a "far more interesting" man. Yes, he goes on a ...more
Literary Fiction
Insignificant Others: A Novel
by Sarah Jio
William Morrow, 04/01/2025
 
What if you could have a second chance to say "yes" to the one who got away?

Lena Westbrook, a perfectionist and workaholic, has carefully planned...more
Romance
Messy Perfect
by Tanya Boteju
Quill Tree Books, 04/01/2025
 
Cassie Perera is a star student in St. Luke's junior class. But the new school year brings an unwelcome surprise—the return to St. Luke's of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum
by Daniel Tammet
The Experiment, 04/01/2025
 
Exploding the tired stereotypes of autism, Daniel Tammet―acclaimed author and an autistic savant himself―draws out the inner worlds of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Our City That Year: A Novel
by Geetanjali Shree
HarperVia, 04/01/2025
 
"That year, in our city, Hindus abandoned their pacifism. We've run out of other cheeks to turn, they proclaimed. We're helpless! they screamed. They ...more
Literary Fiction
Rabbit Moon: A Novel
by Jennifer Haigh
Little Brown & Company, 04/01/2025
 
Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Renegade Girls: A Queer Tale of Romance and Rabble-Rousing
by Nora Neus
Little, Brown Ink, 04/01/2025
 
Seventeen-year-old Helena "Nell" Cusack came to New York this summer looking for a story—a real story. She dreams of one day writing hard-...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
Run Away With Me
by Brian Selznick
Scholastic Press, 04/01/2025
 
"I'm going to call you Danny. What are you going to name me?"

"Angelo."

Danny is spending his sixteenth summer in Rome. As his mother spends the...more
Romance
Shots Heard Round the World: America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War
by John Ferling
Bloomsbury Publishing, 04/01/2025
 
In April 1775, British troops marched to Lexington, where an armed group of Yankees awaited them. Despite an order to disperse, shots rang out. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Small Ceremonies: A Novel
by Kyle Edwards
Pantheon Books, 04/01/2025
 
Word on the street is that this is the Tigers' last season. For Tomahawk "Tommy" Shields, an Indigenous, image-obsessed high school student from ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Sour Cherry
by Natalia Theodoridou
Tin House Books, 04/01/2025
 
The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord's baby boy. But something is wrong...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dali
by Michele Gerber Klein
Harper, 04/01/2025
 
Using previously undiscovered material, Surreal tells the riveting story of Gala Dalí, (1894-1982) who broke away from her cultured but penurious...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Beauty of the End: A Novel
by Lauren Stienstra
Little A, 04/01/2025
 
Charlie Tannehill and her twin sister, Maggie, are just eight years old when an unfortunate scientific discovery upends their world―and the ...more
Literary Fiction
The Ephemera Collector: A Novel
by Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 04/01/2025
 
In near-future Los Angeles, Xandria Brown works diligently as an archivist at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Descended ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
The Gatsby Gambit: A Novel
by Claire Anderson Wheeler
Viking, 04/01/2025
 
Freshly twenty-one and sporting a daring new bob, Greta Gatsby--younger sister to the infamous Jay—is finally free of her dull finishing school,...more
Critics' Consensus:

Mysteries
 Debut Author
The Last American Road Trip
by Sarah Kendzior
Flatiron Books, 04/01/2025
 
It is one thing to study the fall of democracy, another to have it hit your homeland — and yet another to raise children as it happens. The Last...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Railway Conspiracy: A Dee and Lao Mystery
by SJ Rozan
Soho Press, 04/01/2025
 
London, 1924. Following several months abroad, Judge Dee Ren Jie has returned to the city to foil a transaction between a Russian diplomat and a ...more
The River Knows Your Name: A Novel
by Kelly Mustian
Sourcebooks Landmark, 04/01/2025
 
For nearly thirty years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother's...more
Literary Fiction
The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys
by Lise Olsen
Random House, 04/01/2025
 
Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s was an exciting place—the home of NASA, the city of the future. But a string of missing teenage boys, many ...more
True Crime
The Snares: A Novel
by Rav Grewal-Kök
Random House, 04/01/2025
 
"Are you happy where you are? Toiling in the trenches of the Justice Department?"

In the waning months of George W. Bush's presidency, Neel Chima...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
The Stars and Their Light: A Novel
by Olivia Hawker
Lake Union Publishing, 04/01/2025
 
It's 1947 when Sister Mary Agnes arrives in New Mexico. Her mission is to establish a monastery in the town of Roswell, where weeks before rumors of ...more
Historical Fiction
The Usual Desire to Kill: A Novel
by Camilla Barnes
Scribner, 04/01/2025
 
Miranda's parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure
by Jennie Erin Smith
Riverhead Books, 04/01/2025
 
In the 1980s, a neurologist named Francisco Lopera traveled on horseback into the mountains seeking families with symptoms of dementia. For centuries,...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine
by Chris Hedges
Seven Stories Press, 04/08/2025
 
A Genocide Foretold confronts the stark realities of life under siege in Gaza and the heroic effort ordinary Palestinians are waging to resist and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Audition: A Novel
by Katie Kitamura
Riverhead Books, 04/08/2025
 
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling,...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Authority: Essays
by Andrea Long Chu
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 04/08/2025
 
Since her canonical 2017 essay "On Liking Women," the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public ...more
Big Chief
by Jon Hickey
Simon & Schuster, 04/08/2025
 
Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Don't Sleep with the Dead
by Nghi Vo
Tordotcom, 04/08/2025
 
Nick Carraway―paper soldier and novelist―has found a life and a living watching the mad magical spectacle of New York high society in the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Fearless: The Powerless Trilogy
by Lauren Roberts
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 04/08/2025
 
Paedyn Gray and Kai Azer return to the Kingdom of Ilya…

And Paedyn has a life-altering choice to make. Whatever she decides will determine ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Forget the Camel: The Madcap World of Animal Festivals and What They Say about Being Human
by Elizabeth MeLampy
Apollo Publishers, 04/08/2025
 
As the gates open at the racetrack in Virginia City, Nevada, three camels stumble out, ridden by amateur jockeys. A crowd of roaring spectators looks ...more
Science, Health and the Environment
Hail Mary: Stories
by Funmi Fetto
Harper, 04/08/2025
 
From a Nigerian migrant worker conned out of her earnings in London to a recently widowed housewife rediscovering her suppressed African heritage, a ...more
Short Stories
Happy Land
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Berkley Books, 04/08/2025
 
Nikki Berry hasn't seen her grandmother in years, due to a mysterious estrangement inherited from her mother. So when the elder calls out of the blue ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories
by Banu Mushtaq
And Other Stories, 04/08/2025
 
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Make Sure You Die Screaming: A Novel
by Zee Carlstrom
Flatiron Books, 04/08/2025
 
The newly nameless narrator of Make Sure You Die Screaming has rejected the gender binary, has flamed out with a vengeance at their corporate gig, is ...more
Thrillers
My Documents: A Novel
by Kevin Nguyen
One World, 04/08/2025
 
Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family, but the truth about their family is much more complicated. As young ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson
by Gardiner Harris
Random House, 04/08/2025
 
One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, a pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times, was early for a flight and sat down at an airport bar. He struck ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Passion Project: A Novel
by London Sperry
Penguin Books, 04/08/2025
 
Where's that zest she keeps hearing about? She's a temp worker in New York City with no direction, no future, and no social life. And at the painful ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room
by Paul Auster
Pantheon Books, 04/08/2025
 
In 1994, Paul Auster's City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel and became an immediate cult classic, published in over 30 editions worldwide, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
Plum
by Andy Anderegg
Hub City Press, 04/08/2025
 
Told entirely in the second person, Plum follows J as she grows from kid to teen in a house ruled by her alcoholic dad and complicit mother. Her older...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Precious Rubbish
by Kayla E.
Fantagraphics Books, 04/08/2025
 
"If an exorcism can ever be slow and quiet, then every panel I've finished has felt something like an exorcism. The gutters give me space to make ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
by Vauhini Vara
Pantheon Books, 04/08/2025
 
When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its ...more
Sky Daddy: A Novel
by Kate Folk
Random House, 04/08/2025
 
Linda is doing her best to lead a life that would appear normal to the casual observer. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Terrestrial History: A Novel
by Joe Mungo Reed
W.W. Norton & Company, 04/08/2025
 
Hannah is a fusion scientist working in a cottage off the coast of Scotland when she's approached by a visitor from the future, a young man from a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road
by E.A. Hanks
Gallery Books, 04/08/2025
 
In her trusted loaded-up minivan "Minnie," E.A. Hanks follows the same route as a long-ago road trip with her mother in an attempt to better ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
The Baker of Lost Memories: A Novel
by Shirley Russak Wachtel
Little A, 04/08/2025
 
Growing up in 1960s Brooklyn, Lena wants to be a baker just like her mother was back in Poland prior to World War II. But questions about those days, ...more
Historical Fiction
The Creation of Half-Broken People: A Novel
by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
House of Anansi Press, 04/08/2025
 
Showcasing African Gothic at its finest, The Creation of Half-Broken People is the extraordinary tale of a nameless woman plagued by visions. She ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Float Test: A Novel
by Lynn Steger Strong
Mariner Books, 04/08/2025
 
The Kenner siblings are at odds. Jenn is a harried mom struggling under the weight of family obligations. Fred is a novelist who can't write, maybe ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits: A Novel
by Jennifer Weiner
William Morrow, 04/08/2025
 
Sisters Cassie and Zoe Grossberg were born just a year apart but could not have been more different. Zoe, blessed with charm and beauty, yearned for ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Impossible Thing
by Belinda Bauer
Atlantic Monthly Press, 04/08/2025
 
How do you find something that doesn't exist?

1926. On the cliffs of Yorkshire, men are lowered on ropes to steal the eggs of the sea birds who ...more
The Mademoiselle Alliance: A Novel
by Natasha Lester
Dell, 04/08/2025
 
Marie-Madeleine is not the kind of woman who goes through life sitting down, and it's a trait that not everyone is a fan of—including her ...more
Historical Fiction
The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris
by Evie Woods
HarperCollins Publishers, 04/08/2025
 
Nestled among the cobblestone streets of Compiègne, there existed a bakery unlike any other.

Rumours were whispered through the town that ...more
Historical Fiction
The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West
by Amitav Acharya
Basic Books, 04/08/2025
 
Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers&#...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
All the Noise at Once
by DeAndra Davis
Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 04/15/2025
 
All Aiden has ever wanted to do was play football just like his star quarterback brother, Brandon. An overstimulation meltdown gets in the way of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
American Spirits: The Famous Fox Sisters and the Mysterious Fad that Haunted a Nation
by Barb Rosenstock
Calkins Creek, 04/15/2025
 
Rap. Rap. Rap. The eerie sound was first heard in March of 1848 at the home of the Fox family in Hydesville, New York. The family's two daughters, ...more
Biography/Memoir
Bitter Texas Honey: A Novel
by Ashley Whitaker
Dutton, 04/15/2025
 
It's 2011, and twenty-three-year-old Joan West is not like the rest of her liberal peers in Austin, nor is she quite like her Tea Party Republican, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It
by Andre M. Perry
Metropolitan Books, 04/15/2025
 
Historically, Black Americans' quest for power has been understood as an attempt to gain equal protections under the law. But power in America ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Coram House: A Novel
by Bailey Seybolt
Atria Books, 04/15/2025
 
On a blistering summer day in 1968, nine-year-old Tommy vanishes without a trace from Coram House, an orphanage on the shores of Lake Champlain. Some ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life
by Dan Nadel
Scribner, 04/15/2025
 
Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Hellions: Stories
by Julia Elliott
Tin House Books, 04/15/2025
 
From the acclaimed author of The Wilds comes an electric story collection that blends folklore, fairy tales, Southern Gothic, and horror, reveling in ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Hyo the Hellmaker
by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh
Scholastic Press, 04/15/2025
 
Hyo Hakai is a hellmaker, hired to create customized hells and unlucky days for your worst enemies.

When a demon destroys her village, Hyo and her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir With Appearances by Virginia Woolf
by Heather Christle
Algonquin Books, 04/15/2025
 
When Heather Christle realizes that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery
by Mark Synnott
Dutton, 04/15/2025
 
Only a few hundred vessels have ever transited the Northwest Passage, stretching through Canada's north from Maine to Alaska—and substantially ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Travel & Adventure
Lost at Sea: Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America
by Joe Kloc
Dey Street Books, 04/15/2025
 
In the wake of the financial crisis, the number of anchor-outs living in Richardson Bay more than doubles as their long-simmering feud with the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Midnight in Soap Lake: A Novel
by Matthew Sullivan
Hanover Square Press, 04/15/2025
 
When Abigail agreed to move to Soap Lake, Washington, for her husband's research, she expected old-growth forests and craft beer, folksy neighbors and...more
Thrillers
Nahia
by Emily Jones
Holiday House, 04/15/2025
 
Spain, 8,000 years ago. As Headwoman's daughter, eighteen-year-old Nahia was born to lead. But when she speaks aloud a forbidden truth—that her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Notes from a Regicide
by Isaac Fellman
Tor Books, 04/15/2025
 
When your parents die, you find out who they really were.

Griffon Keming's second parents saved him from his abusive family. They taught him how to...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
One Death at a Time
by Abbi Waxman
Berkley Books, 04/15/2025
 
When Julia Mann, a bad-tempered ex-actress and professional thorn in the side of authority, runs into Natasha Mason at an AA meeting, it's anything ...more
Open, Heaven: A Novel
by Seán Hewitt
Knopf, 04/15/2025
 
Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Somadina
by Akwaeke Emezi
Knopf Books for Young Readers, 04/15/2025
 
Somadina and her twin brother, Jayaike, are practically the same person: they finish each other's sentences and make each other whole. When the twins ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
stay with me
by Hanne Orstavik
Archipelago Books, 04/15/2025
 
Fear is a second skin for the unnamed narrator of Hanne Ørstavik's Stay With Me. A successful writer at 53, her father may be a frail twig, but ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Strangers in Time: A World War 2 Novel
by David Baldacci
Grand Central Publishing, 04/15/2025
 
Fourteen-year-old Charlie Matters is up to no good, but for a very good reason. Without parents, peerage, or merit, ducking school but barred from ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Eights
by Joanna Miller
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 04/15/2025
 
Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its one-thousand-year history, Oxford University officially admits female students. Burning with dreams of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice, and the Birth of a Movement
by Brian Patrick O’Donoghue
Sourcebooks, 04/15/2025
 
October, 1997. Late one night in Fairbanks, Alaska, a passerby finds a teenager unconscious, collapsed on the edge of the road, beaten nearly beyond ...more
True Crime
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, 2)
by C. S. Lewis
HarperCollins Publishers, 04/15/2025
 
Four siblings step through a mysterious wardrobe and into the magical Narnia, a once-peaceful land now frozen in snow and stone by the cruelty of the ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Proof of My Innocence
by Jonathan Coe
Europa Editions, 04/15/2025
 
Post-university life doesn't suit Phyl. Time passes slowly living back home with her parents, working a zero-hour contract serving Japanese food to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Raven Scholar: Eternal Path Trilogy #1
by Antonia Hodgson
Orbit, 04/15/2025
 
Let us fly now to the empire of Orrun, where after twenty-four years of peace, the reign of Bersun the Brusque has come to an end. In the dizzying ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Seven O'Clock Club
by Amelia Ireland
Berkley Books, 04/15/2025
 
In a perfectly ordinary building, four strangers who couldn't be more different meet for the first time. Their skepticism of this new kind of grief ...more
Literary Fiction
Things Left Unsaid: A Novel
by Sara Jafari
St. Martin's Press, 04/15/2025
 
When twenty-six year old Shirin Bayat bumps into Kian at a house party in London, she is taken aback by the immediate feelings that resurface. It's ...more
Literary Fiction
Vanishing World
by Sayaka Murata
Grove Press, 04/15/2025
 
Sayaka Murata has proven herself to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of the strangeness of society, x-raying our contemporary world to bizarre ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
When the Harvest Comes: A Novel
by Denne Michele Norris
Random House, 04/15/2025
 
"I got tired of running away from what I should've been running toward."

The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis,...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
A Training School for Elephants
by Sophy Roberts
Atlantic Monthly Press, 04/22/2025
 
In 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa's resources. The key to cracking open the continent, or so he thought...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
America, América: A New History of the New World
by Greg Grandin
Penguin Press, 04/22/2025
 
The story of how the United States' identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates,...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Atavists: Stories
by Lydia Millet
W.W. Norton & Company, 04/22/2025
 
From Lydia Millet―"the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves" (Chicago Tribune)―comes an inventive new ...more
Short Stories
Calm
by S. J. Baker
Neem Tree Press, 04/22/2025
 
In a near-future Britain, societyʼs calm facade conceals a sinister truth: the state maintains its control by meddling with the nationʼs ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Cope Field
by T. L. Simpson
Flux, 04/22/2025
 
When Craw is sentenced to community service for hitting his father in the head with a baseball bat, he accepts his punishment without objection, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Down in the Sea of Angels
by Khan Wong
Angry Robot, 04/22/2025
 
In the year 2106, climate change has altered the world, transforming borders, cities, and socioeconomic structures. Additionally, a cosmic event known...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Eat the Ones You Love
by Sarah Maria Griffin
Tor Books, 04/22/2025
 
After losing her job and her fiancé and moving back from the city to live with her parents, Shell Pine needs some help. And according to the sign...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Fair Play: A Novel
by Louise Hegarty
Harper, 04/22/2025
 
A group of friends gather at an Airbnb on New Year's Eve. It is Benjamin's birthday, and his sister Abigail is throwing him a jazz-age Murder Mystery ...more
Great Big Beautiful Life
by Emily Henry
Berkley Books, 04/22/2025
 
Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they'...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future
by Alan Weisman
Dutton, 04/22/2025
 
In this profoundly human and moving narrative, the bestselling author of The World Without Us returns with a book ten years in the making: a study of ...more
Science, Health and the Environment
If We Were a Movie
by Zakiya N. Jamal
HarperCollins Publishers, 04/22/2025
 
Lights. Camera. Love?

Rochelle "the Shell" Coleman is laser focused on only three things: becoming valedictorian, getting into Wharton, and, of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Romance
 Debut Author
Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools
by Mary Annette Pember
Pantheon Books, 04/22/2025
 
From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their families to attend boarding schools that ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
by Adam Becker
Basic Books, 04/22/2025
 
Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Rakesfall
by Vajra Chandrasekera
Tor Books, 04/22/2025
 
Some stories take more than one lifetime to tell. There are wrongs that echo through the ages, friendships that outpace the claws of death, loves that...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson
by Claire Hoffman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 04/22/2025
 
On a spring day in 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson wandered into the Pacific Ocean and vanished. Weeks later she reappeared in the desert, claiming to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World
by Stephen S. Hall
Grand Central Publishing, 04/22/2025
 
For millennia, depictions of snakes as alternatively beautiful and menacing creatures have appeared in religious texts, mythology, poetry, and beyond....more
The Bright Years
by Sarah Damoff
Simon & Schuster, 04/22/2025
 
Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now parents to a baby girl, Georgette. But Lillian has a son she hasn't told Ryan ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Corruption of Hollis Brown
by K. Ancrum
HarperCollins Publishers, 04/22/2025
 
Hollis Brown is stuck. Born to a blue-collar American Dream, Hollis lives in a rotting small town where no one can afford to leave. Hollis's only ...more
The Dissident Club: Chronicle of a Pakistani Journalist in Exile
by Taha Siddiqui
Arsenal Pulp Press, 04/22/2025
 
In Islamabad in 2018, Pakistani investigative journalist Taha Siddiqui is kidnapped at gunpoint and barely escapes being killed. He flees the country ...more
Biography/Memoir
The Fantasies of Future Things: A Novel
by Doug Jones
Simon & Schuster, 04/22/2025
 
Daily interactions between Jacob and Daniel are a powder keg of sexual tension and uncertainty. A recent Morehouse graduate and Brooklyn transplant, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood
by Matthew Specktor
Ecco, 04/22/2025
 
Matthew Specktor grew up in the film industry: the son of legendary CAA superagent Fred Specktor, his childhood was one where Beau Bridges came over ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
by Sarah Aziza
Catapult, 04/22/2025
 
"You were dead, Sarah, you were dead." In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Pretender: A Novel
by Jo Harkin
Knopf, 04/22/2025
 
In 1480 John Collan's greatest anxiety is how to circumvent the village's devil goat on his way to collect water. But the arrival of a well-dressed ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The World of Nancy Kwan: A Memoir by Hollywood's Asian Superstar
by Nancy Kwan
Hachette Books, 04/22/2025
 
When Nancy Kwan burst onto the scene in the early 1960s, Asian characters in film were portrayed by white actors in makeup playing "yellowface," and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Zeal: A Novel
by Morgan Jerkins
Harper, 04/22/2025
 
Harlem, 2019. Ardelia and Oliver are hosting their engagement party. As the guests get ready to leave, he hands her a love letter on a yellowing, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
A Mind of Her Own: A Novel
by Danielle Steel
Delacorte Press, 04/29/2025
 
Alexandra Bouvier is born in Paris in 1900, at the dawn of a new century. From an early age, she is encouraged to think for herself by her enlightened...more
Romance
Ancestors: Identity and DNA in the Levant
by Pierre Zalloua
Random House, 04/29/2025
 
In recent years, as companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com have made genetic testing available across the globe, it has become relatively simple to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Awakened
by A.E. Osworth
Grand Central Publishing, 04/29/2025
 
On a morning much like any other, 30-something queer Brooklynite Wilder makes the miraculous discovery: suddenly, as if by magic, they can understand ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown
by Candace Fleming
Anne Schwartz Books, 04/29/2025
 
Using riveting first-person accounts, award-winning author Candace Fleming reveals the makings of a monster: from Jones's humble origins as a child of...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Dianaworld: An Obsession
by Edward White
W.W. Norton & Company, 04/29/2025
 
Over the last forty years, the mythology of Princess Diana has turned the woman who was born Diana Spencer into a symbol for almost anything. From a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Favorite Daughter: A Novel
by Morgan Dick
Viking, 04/29/2025
 
Mickey and Arlo are half sisters. But they've never spoken and never met. Arlo adored her father—but always lived in the shadow of his magnetic ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Ginseng Roots: A Memoir
by Craig Thompson
Pantheon Books, 04/29/2025
 
When Blankets first published in 2003, Craig Thompson's seminal memoir about first love and faith lost in rural Wisconsin debuted to rapturous acclaim...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
by Sophie Gilbert
Penguin Press, 04/29/2025
 
What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent after a period of cultural and legislative backlash, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
Julie Chan Is Dead: A Novel
by Liann Zhang
Atria Books, 04/29/2025
 
Julie Chan has nothing. Her twin sister has everything. Except a pulse.

Julie Chan, a supermarket cashier with nothing to lose, finds herself ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
Love at Second Sight
by F.T. Lukens
Margaret K. McElderry Books, 04/29/2025
 
Fifteen-year-old Cam Reynolds wants to spend his sophomore year flying under the radar. That shouldn't be too hard, considering he's a human going to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats
by Courtney Gustafson
Crown, 04/29/2025
 
When Courtney Gustafson moved into a rental house in the Poets Square neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, she didn't know that the property came with ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Polybius
by Collin Armstrong
Gallery Books, 04/29/2025
 
October, 1982. Forced to move to the quiet seaside town of Tasker Bay by her mother, the only thing on high schooler Andi's mind is saving up enough ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Serial Killer Games
by Kate Posey
Berkley Books, 04/29/2025
 
Dolores dela Cruz has been dying to spot one in the wild, and he fits the mold perfectly: strangler gloves, calculated charm, dashing good looks that ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Romance
 Debut Author
Sleeping Children: A Novel
by Anthony Passeron
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 04/29/2025
 
It's 1981. As a wave of mysterious infections sweeps across the United States, a doctor in Paris encounters something unexpected: a case of a disease ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease
by Thomas Levenson
Random House, 04/29/2025
 
Two out of three soldiers who perished in the Civil War died of infected wounds, typhoid, and other infectious diseases. But no doctor truly ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
by Michael Luo
Doubleday, 04/29/2025
 
Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
The Accidentals: Stories
by Guadalupe Nettel
Bloomsbury Publishing, 04/29/2025
 
Acclaimed for her piercing insights and razor-sharp prose, award winning author Guadalupe Nettel introduces us to eight characters who are each in ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
The Determined
by Rachel Rueckert
Kensington Publishing, 04/29/2025
 
1721, Spanish Town, Jamaica. Captured, convicted, and pregnant, twenty-three-year-old Anne Bonny faces the gallows. When writer Captain Charles ...more
Historical Fiction
The Edge of Yesterday
by Rita Woods
Forge Books, 04/29/2025
 
Greer Coffey is a principal dancer with a renowned Harlem company. Sebastian Coffey is an architect with a prestigious Midtown firm. The Coffeys are ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780
by Rick Atkinson
Crown, 04/29/2025
 
The first twenty-one months of the American Revolution—which began at Lexington and ended at Princeton—was the story of a ragged group of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
by William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury Publishing, 04/29/2025
 
For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Lilac People
by Milo Todd
Counterpoint Press, 04/29/2025
 
In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin's thriving queer community. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Road to Tender Hearts: A Novel
by Annie Hartnett
Ballantine Books, 04/29/2025
 
At sixty-three years old, million-dollar lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Massachusetts, if it weren't for the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions
by Ersilia Vaudo
W.W. Norton & Company, 04/29/2025
 
When Neil Armstrong first set foot in the lunar dust, his action forever changed our view of what was possible. Once something new alters our ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
 Debut Author
The Summer I Remembered Everything
by Catherine Con Morse
Crown Books for Young Readers, 04/29/2025
 
Emily Chen-Sanchez can't do anything right. She's been grounded for a bad grade; she can't stop fighting with her perfect older sister; everyone's ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing
by Lili Taylor
Crown, 04/29/2025
 
Most people don't really know birds—or rather, they aren't aware of them. Lili Taylor used to be one of those people. She knew birds existed. ...more
Essays
We Were Never Here: Reese's Book Club: A Novel
by Andrea Bartz
Ballantine Books, 04/29/2025
 
Emily is having the time of her life—she's in the mountains of Chile with her best friend, Kristen, on their annual reunion trip, and the women ...more
Thrillers
When the Tides Held the Moon
by Venessa Vida Kelley
Erewhon Books, 04/29/2025
 
Benigno "Benny" Caldera knows an orphaned Boricua blacksmith in 1910s New York City can't call himself an artist. But the ironwork tank he creates for...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Where Was Goodbye?
by Janice Lynn Mather
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 04/29/2025
 
Karmen is about to start her last year of high school, but it's only been six weeks since her brother, Julian, died by suicide. How is she supposed to...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis
by Suzanne Cope
Dutton, 04/29/2025
 
From underground soldiers to intrepid spies, Women of War unearths the hidden history of the brave women who risked their lives to overthrow the Nazi ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
You Can Never Die: A Graphic Memoir
by Harry Bliss
Celadon, 04/29/2025
 
New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss loved his sweet dog Penny, a joyful part of his life for seventeen years. Every day that he cared for his beloved ...more
Biography/Memoir
The Best We Could Hope For: A Novel
by Nicola Kraus
Little A, 05/01/2025
 
When Bunny Linden abandons her three children with her older sister, Jayne, in 1972, she knows Jayne will be the perfect mother. The mother Bunny, a ...more
Literary Fiction
A Thousand Natural Shocks
by Omar Hussain
Blackstone Publishing, 05/06/2025
 
Dash, a reporter in Monterey, California, is desperate to outrun his past. During the day, he investigates the reemergence of a long-dormant serial ...more
Thrillers
 Debut Author
All the Mothers: A Novel
by Domenica Ruta
Random House, 05/06/2025
 
Sandy thought she was making her greatest mistake yet when she got unexpectedly pregnant in her mid-thirties by a dating-app flop. Now, her baby Rosie...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures
by Lizzie Wade
Harper, 05/06/2025
 
A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips through a city, a civilization collapses. When we finally uncover the ruins, we ask: what happened? The ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Are You Happy?: Stories
by Lori Ostlund
Astra House, 05/06/2025
 
An aspiring veterinarian survives a plane crash and starts life over in California. A woman mourns the loss of her childhood friend's innocence and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Austen at Sea: A Novel
by Natalie Jenner
St. Martin's Press, 05/06/2025
 
In Boston, 1865, Charlotte and Henrietta Stevenson, daughters of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, have accomplished as much as women are allowed...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back
by Miranda S. Spivack
The New Press, 05/06/2025
 
Most Americans are likely to encounter the effects of government malfeasance or neglect close to home—from their governors, mayors, town ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
Daughters: A Novel
by Kirsty Capes
The Overlook Press, 05/06/2025
 
When Mattie and Nora's mother, the brilliant, troubled, and world-renowned Norwegian painter Ingrid Olssen, was on her deathbed, there was one promise...more
Literary Fiction
Dear Teacher: A Novel
by Maddalena Vaglio Tanet
HarperVia, 05/06/2025
 
One morning, a teacher disappears into the woods. As whispers fill her classroom and relatives scour the streets, she melts into a wild landscape, a ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Disco Witches of Fire Island: A Novel
by Blair Fell
Alcove Press, 05/06/2025
 
It's 1989, and Joe Agabian and his best friend Ronnie set out to spend their first summer working in the hedonistic gay paradise of Fire Island Pines....more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Ellmann's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker
by Zachary Leader
Belknap Press, 05/06/2025
 
Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, published in 1959, was hailed by Anthony Burgess as "the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century." Frank ...more
Biography/Memoir
Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
by Katie Goh
Tin House Books, 05/06/2025
 
What begins as a curiosity into the origins of the orange soon becomes a far-reaching odyssey of citrus for Katie Goh. Katie follows the complicated ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Forged: A Novel
by Danielle Teller
Pegasus Books, 05/06/2025
 
In the Gilded Age, a time of abject poverty and obscene wealth, a desperate and ambitious young woman strikes out for a new life in the rising ...more
Historical Fiction
Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries
by Abigail Leonard
Algonquin Books, 05/06/2025
 
Utterly moving and addictively readable from page one, the book begins with the pregnancies and labor experiences of Anna in Finland, Tsukasa in Japan...more
Science, Health and the Environment
Girls with Long Shadows: A Novel
by Tennessee Hill
Harper, 05/06/2025
 
Identical triplets Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C Binderup were welcomed into the world as their mother was ushered out of it, leaving them nameless and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
His Face Is the Sun: Throne of Khetara #1
by Michelle Jabès Corpora
Sourcebooks Fire, 05/06/2025
 
Desire, War, Magic, Monsters...a forgotten oracle will unite them against an ancient enemy. But who will be on the throne when the red dust of Khetara...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Home of the American Circus: A Novel
by Allison Larkin
Gallery Books, 05/06/2025
 
After an emergency leaves her short on rent, thirty-year-old Freya Arnalds bails on her lackluster life as bartender in Maine and returns to her ...more
Literary Fiction
Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk
by Faiz Siddiqui
St. Martin's Press, 05/06/2025
 
What happened to Elon Musk? In six years, he turned Tesla into the world's most valuable automaker and cast himself as a savior of humanity, an ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
I Can't Even Think Straight
by Dean Atta
Quill Tree Books, 05/06/2025
 
Kai knows who he is to others: The good grandson, the reliable best friend, the romantic backup. But he doesn't quite know who he is to himself.

...more
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Lessons from My Teachers: From Preschool to the Present
by Sarah Ruhl
Simon & Schuster, 05/06/2025
 
Based on her popular class at Yale, this masterful, intimate essay collection from one of our greatest living playwrights and teachers, Sarah Ruhl, is...more
Michael Without Apology: A Novel
by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Lake Union Publishing, 05/06/2025
 
Michael Woodbine was seven years old when a near-fatal fireworks accident scarred him and led to his placement in foster care. Now a college freshman,...more
Literary Fiction
Misophonia: A Novel
by Dana Vowinckel
HarperVia, 05/06/2025
 
It's the hottest of summers in Chicago, and fifteen-year-old Margarita is spending her vacation as usual, under the not-so-watchful eyes of her aging ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
My Friends: A Novel
by Fredrik Backman
Atria Books, 05/06/2025
 
Most people don't even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the...more
Literary Fiction
My Name Is Emilia del Valle: A Novel
by Isabel Allende
Ballantine Books, 05/06/2025
 
In San Francisco in 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Ocean: Earth's Last Wilderness
by Sir David Attenborough
Grand Central Publishing, 05/06/2025
 
Through personal stories, history and cutting-edge science, Ocean uncovers the mystery, the wonder and the frailty of the most unexplored habitat on ...more
Science, Health and the Environment
Old School Indian: A Novel
by Aaron John Curtis
Zando, 05/06/2025
 
Abe Jacobs is Kanien'kehá:ka from Ahkwesáhsne―or, as white people say, a Mohawk Indian from the Saint Regis Tribe. At eighteen, Abe ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Other Worlds: Stories
by André Alexis
FSG Originals, 05/06/2025
 
A Trinidadian obeah man finds himself reborn, a hundred years after his death, in the body of a Canadian child; a writer takes up a seasonal job as a ...more
Short Stories
Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II
by Paul Thomas Chamberlin
Basic Books, 05/06/2025
 
In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age
by Amanda Hess
Doubleday, 05/06/2025
 
In the summer of 2020, a routine ultrasound detected a mysterious abnormality in Hess's baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Shopgirls: A Novel
by Jessica Anya Blau
Mariner Books, 05/06/2025
 
Nineteen-year-old Zippy can hardly believe it: she's the newest and youngest salesgirl at I. Magnin, "San Francisco's Finest Department Store." Every ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Snowglobe 2: The Snowglobe Duology #2
by Soyoung Park
Delacorte Press, 05/06/2025
 
Chobahm's perfect life in Snowglobe came crashing down when she discovered the truth about Haeri; the girl she watched faithfully on television was ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger during World War II
by Becky Aikman
Bloomsbury Publishing, 05/06/2025
 
They were crop dusters and debutantes, college girls and performers in flying circuses-all of them trained as pilots. Because they were women, they ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Adventures of Mary Darling
by Pat Murphy
Tachyon Publications, 05/06/2025
 
Mary Darling is a pretty wife whose boring husband is befuddled by her independent ways. But one fateful night, Mary becomes the distraught mother ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Director: A Novel
by Daniel Kehlmann
Summit Books, 05/06/2025
 
An artist's life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest directors of the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother
by Jill Bialosky
Washington Square Press, 05/06/2025
 
When Iris Yvonne Bialosky died in an assisted care facility on March 29, 2020, it unleashed a torrent of emotions in her daughter, Jill Bialosky. ...more
Biography/Memoir
The Invisible Wild
by Nikki Van De Car
Running Press Publishers, 05/06/2025
 
According to legend, when the kanaka 'ōiwi sailed over two thousand miles across untraveled seas to the most remote island chain in the world, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
The Manor of Dreams
by Christina Li
Avid Reader Press, 05/06/2025
 
Vivian Yin is dead. The first Chinese actress to win an Oscar, the trailblazing ingénue rose to fame in the eighties, only to disappear from the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
The Mother Code: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Myths That Shape Us
by Ruthie Ackerman
Random House, 05/06/2025
 
Ruthie Ackerman had long believed that the decision to not have children was a radical act. She'd grown up being told that she came from a long line ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Names: A Novel
by Florence Knapp
Pamela Dorman Books, 05/06/2025
 
In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History
by Laurence Rees
Public Affairs, 05/06/2025
 
How could the SS have committed the crimes they did? How were the killers who shot Jews at close quarters able to perpetrate this horror? Why ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Night Birds: A Novel
by Christopher Golden
St. Martin's Press, 05/06/2025
 
Charlie Book and Ruby Cahill have history. After their love ended in heartbreak years ago, they never expected to see each other again.

Now, as ...more
The Ones We Loved: A Novel
by Tarisai Ngangura
Park Row, 05/06/2025
 
On a bus moving across rural landscapes from town to town, two young people are escaping with nothing to hold except hope. She has committed a ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Original Daughter: A Novel
by Jemimah Wei
Doubleday, 05/06/2025
 
Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in working-class Bedok, Genevieve is ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Retirement Plan
by Sue Hincenbergs
William Morrow, 05/06/2025
 
After thirty years of friendship, Pam dreams of her perfect retirement with Nancy, Shalisa, Marlene, and their husbands—until their husbands ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
The River Is Waiting: A Novel
by Wally Lamb
Simon & Schuster, 05/06/2025
 
Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Sun Blessed Prince: A Tale of Two Crowns #1
by Lindsey Byrd
Random House Canada, 05/06/2025
 
Separated by war, united by fate...

Prince Elician is a Giver. He can heal any wound and bring the dead back to life. He also can't be killed, so ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Wanderer's Curse: A Memoir
by Jennifer Hope Choi
W.W. Norton & Company, 05/06/2025
 
When Jennifer Hope Choi first stumbled upon the "curse" known as yeokmasal―an allegedly inheritable affliction causing one to roam farther and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
The Words of Dr. L: & Other Stories
by Karen E. Bender
Counterpoint Press, 05/06/2025
 
Grounded in both the contemporary United States and a variety of dystopias, the new stories in Karen E. Bender's third collection examine the evolving...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir
by Craig Mod
Random House, 05/06/2025
 
Photographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of long solo walks. But in 2021, during the pandemic shutdown of Japan's borders, one particular walk...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
This Is Your Mother: A Memoir
by Erika J. Simpson
Scribner, 05/06/2025
 
Growing up, Erika Simpson's mother loomed large, almost biblical in her life. A daughter of sharecroppers, middle child of ten, her origin story ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
This Thing of Ours
by Frederick Joseph
Candlewick Press, 05/06/2025
 
In an instant, Ossie Brown's entire future is in jeopardy when a torn ACL ends his promising basketball career. Now that basketball is no longer a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Twelve Post-War Tales
by Graham Swift
Knopf, 05/06/2025
 
Here are the soldiers and doctors and veterans, wives and lovers and children, who have been affected in ways both subtle and profound by the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Up in Smoke
by Nick Brooks
Henry Holt and Company, 05/06/2025
 
Unmask a murderer or take the fall.

After Cooper King is pressured by big brother figure Jason to go on a looting spree during a local march, the ...more
Wake the Wild Creatures
by Nova Ren Suma
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 05/06/2025
 
Three years ago, Talia lived happily in the ruins of the Neves, a once-grand hotel in the wilds of the Catskill Mountains, with her mother Pola and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Warhol's Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine
by Laurence Leamer
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 05/06/2025
 
"Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil," Andy Warhol confessed, "of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
What My Father and I Don't Talk About: Sixteen Writers Break the Silence
by Michele Filgate
Simon & Schuster, 05/06/2025
 
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About has become a rare gem in the literary world. Both a viral sensation online and chosen by Oprah Daily as one of ...more
32 Days in May
by Betty Corrello
Avon Books, 05/13/2025
 
Nadia Fabiola wants to lose herself in Evergreen—the Jersey Shore town where she grew up vacationing with her family—and never look back ...more
Romance
Anima Rising: A Novel
by Christopher Moore
William Morrow, 05/13/2025
 
Vienna, 1911. Gustav Klimt, the most famous painter in the Austrian Empire, the darling of Viennese society, spots a woman's nude body in the Danube ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Awake in the Floating City: A Novel
by Susanna Kwan
Pantheon Books, 05/13/2025
 
Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Bear Witness: A Crusade for Justice in a Violent Land
by Ross Halperin
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 05/13/2025
 
As young men, Kurt Ver Beek, an American sociologist, and Carlos Hernández, a Honduran schoolteacher, devoted their lives to helping the poor. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI
by John Cassidy
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 05/13/2025
 
At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, and inequality are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Captain Kidd: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal
by Samuel Marquis
Diversion Books, 05/13/2025
 
Captain William Kidd stands as one of the most notorious "pirate" outlaws ever, but his notorious legend is tainted by a bed of lies. Captain Kidd has...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Eliza, from Scratch
by Sophia Lee
Quill & Quire, 05/13/2025
 
Eliza Park's senior year will be perfect: She's going to be salutatorian, give a tear-jerking graduation speech in front of her parents, and enjoy her...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Family & Other Calamities: A Novel
by Leslie Gray Streeter
Lake Union Publishing, 05/13/2025
 
Entertainment journalist Dawn Roberts has a lot to work through: a widow's grief, betrayals of family and friends, and scandals that almost tanked her...more
Literary Fiction
Fitting Indian
by Jyoti Chand
HarperAlley, 05/13/2025
 
All Nitasha's parents want is for her to be the perfect Indian daughter—something she is decidedly not. Everything she does seems to disappoint ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution
by Peniel E. Joseph
Basic Books, 05/13/2025
 
In Freedom Season, acclaimed historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a stirring narrative history of 1963, marking it as the defining year of the Black ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea
by Marcus Rediker
Viking, 05/13/2025
 
As many as 100,000 enslaved people fled successfully from the horrors of bondage in the antebellum South, finding safe harbor along a network of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Happiness Forever: A Novel
by Adelaide Faith
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 05/13/2025
 
"It's maybe six hundred times a day," Sylvie says, and then she stops and the therapist tilts her head. "That I think about you," Sylvie goes on, the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Home Has No Borders
by Samira Ahmed
HarperCollins Publishers, 05/13/2025
 
From first crushes to first heartbreaks, complicated family dynamics to community relationships, this powerful collection of stories explores race, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Hunger Like a Thirst: From Food Stamps to Fine Dining, a Restaurant Critic Finds Her Place at the Table
by Besha Rodell
Celadon, 05/13/2025
 
When Besha Rodell moved from Australia to the United States with her mother at fourteen, she was a foreigner in a new land, missing her friends, her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Insectopolis: A Natural History
by Peter Kuper
W.W. Norton & Company, 05/13/2025
 
This visually immersive work of graphic nonfiction dives into a world where ants, cicadas, bees, and butterflies visit a library exhibition that ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth
by Karen G. Lloyd
Princeton University Press, 05/13/2025
 
Life thrives in the deepest, darkest recesses of Earth's crust—from methane seeps in the ocean floor to the highest reaches of Arctic permafrost...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil: A Novel
by Oliver Darkshire
W.W. Norton & Company, 05/13/2025
 
This debut novel by beloved rare bookseller and memoirist Oliver Darkshire reimagines the Decameron heroine Isabella (with her creepy pot of basil) in...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Make Me Famous: A Novel
by Maud Ventura
HarperVia, 05/13/2025
 
Ever since she was a child, Cléo, the French-American daughter of two academics, has had only one obsession: becoming a famous singer. Over the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Marble Hall Murders: A Novel
by Anthony Horowitz
Harper, 05/13/2025
 
Editor Susan Ryeland has left her Greek island, her hotel, and her Greek boyfriend Andreas in search of a new life back in England.

Freelancing ...more
Mark Twain
by Ron Chernow
Penguin Press, 05/13/2025
 
Ron Chernow, the highly lauded biographer of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant, brings his considerable powers to bear on ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Metallic Realms: A Novel
by Lincoln Michel
Atria Books, 05/13/2025
 
Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln's life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic pulp heroes of his ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
My Father's House: An Ode to America's Longest-Serving Black Congressman
by John Conyers III
Amistad, 05/13/2025
 
A respectful, thoughtful, yet clear-eyed reframing of a national hero's personal and political odyssey, My Father's House is John Conyers III's love ...more
Biography/Memoir
Of Earthly Delights
by Goldy Moldavsky
Henry Holt and Company, 05/13/2025
 
Aspiring artist Rose Pauly is not happy moving from her home in New York City right before her senior year of high school. But on her first miserable ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Romantic Thrillers
One of the Boys
by Victoria Zeller
Levine Querido, 05/13/2025
 
As senior year begins, Grace is struggling to find her place in early transition, new social circles, and a life without football. But when her skills...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Parallel Lines: A Novel
by Edward St. Aubyn
Knopf, 05/13/2025
 
It's the summer, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him grappling with his fragile grip on reality and his persistent ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece
by James Romm
W.W. Norton & Company, 05/13/2025
 
Plato is one of history's most influential thinkers, the "sublime philosopher" whose writings remain foundational to Western culture. He is known for ...more
Biography/Memoir
Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos
by Candace Rondeaux
Public Affairs, 05/13/2025
 
In June 2023, the Wagner Group assembled an armed convoy that included tanks and rocket launchers and set out on what seemed like a journey to take ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Queen of All Mayhem: The Blood-Soaked Life and Mysterious Death of Belle Starr, the Most Dangerous Woman in the West
by Dane Huckelbridge
William Morrow, 05/13/2025
 
On February 3, 1889, just two days shy of her forty-first birthday, Myra Maybelle Shirley—better known at that point by her outlaw sobriquet "...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Run for the Hills: A Novel
by Kevin Wilson
Ecco, 05/13/2025
 
Ever since her dad left them twenty years ago, it's just been Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While she sometimes ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Shampoo Unicorn
by Sawyer Lovett
Hyperion, 05/13/2025
 
In the small town of Canon, West Virginia, most people care about three things: God, country, and football.

Brian is more into Drag Race, Dolly ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Sleep: A Novel
by Honor Jones
Riverhead Books, 05/13/2025
 
Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made.

Ten-year-old Margaret hides ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color
by Caro De Robertis
Algonquin Books, 05/13/2025
 
So Many Stars knits together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer and two-spirit elders of color as they share authentic, intimate ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
State Champ
by Hilary Plum
Bloomsbury Publishing, 05/13/2025
 
A high-school state champion runner turned college dropout, Angela is working as a receptionist at an abortion clinic when a "heartbeat law" ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Take to the Trees: A Story of Hope, Science, and Self-Discovery in America's Imperiled Forests
by Marguerite Holloway
W.W. Norton & Company, 05/13/2025
 
Journalist Marguerite Holloway arrives at the Women's Tree Climbing Workshop as a climbing novice, but with a passion for trees and a deep concern ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon's Enduring Impact on America
by Mark Whitaker
Simon & Schuster, 05/13/2025
 
Malcolm X has become as much of an American icon as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. But when he was murdered in 1965, he was ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want
by Emily M. Bender
Harper, 05/13/2025
 
Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland
by Michelle Young
HarperOne, 05/13/2025
 
On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a woman of quiet daring, found herself in a desperate position. From the windows of her beloved Jeu de Paume museum,...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Boy from the Sea: A Novel
by Garrett Carr
Knopf, 05/13/2025
 
In Donegal, Ireland, 1973, a baby boy is found on the beach of a close-knit fishing village. After the baby has been carried through the crowd of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Dark Maestro: A Novel
by Brendan Slocumb
Doubleday, 05/13/2025
 
Curtis Wilson is a cello prodigy, growing up in the Southeast D.C. projects with a drug dealer for a father. But through determination and talent, and...more
The Devil Three Times: A Novel
by Rickey Fayne
Little Brown & Company, 05/13/2025
 
Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
The Duke Steals Hearts & Other Body Parts
by Elias Cold
Page Street YA, 05/13/2025
 
Wielding a magic that allows him to pop off limbs, con artist Phyllis steals body parts and his partner Lucent ransoms them. Everyone who knows about ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
The Education of Kia Greer
by Alanna Bennett
Knopf Books for Young Readers, 05/13/2025
 
Growing up in the public eye, Kia would gladly give up her privileged life as the daughter of a reality star for the freedom to find her own way—...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin
by Daniel Brook
W.W. Norton & Company, 05/13/2025
 
More than a century ago, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld first argued that gender and sexuality were fluid. Dubbed "the Einstein of Sex," Hirschfeld grew famous...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel
by Ocean Vuong
Penguin Press, 05/13/2025
 
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Incandescent
by Emily Tesh
Tor Books, 05/13/2025
 
"Look at you, eating magic like you're one of us."

Doctor Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story
by Brandy Schillace
W.W. Norton & Company, 05/13/2025
 
Set in interwar Germany, The Intermediaries tells the forgotten story of the Institute for Sexual Science, the world's first center for homosexual and...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties
by Dennis McNally
Da Capo, 05/13/2025
 
Few cities represent the countercultural movement of the 1960s more than San Francisco. By that decade, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was home to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Last Secret Agent: My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines
by Pippa Latour
St. Martin's Press, 05/13/2025
 
From a unique and singular voice comes the incredible true story of the last surviving undercover British female operative in WW2. Pippa Latour ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Red House: A Novel
by Mary Morris
Doubleday, 05/13/2025
 
Thirty years ago, Laura's mother, Viola, went missing. She left behind her purse, her keys and her mysterious paintings of a red house. Viola was ...more
The Remembered Soldier
by Anjet Daanje
New Vessel Press, 05/13/2025
 
After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Romance Rivalry
by Susan Lee
HarperCollins Publishers, 05/13/2025
 
Irene Park loves romance novels—so much so she's made a career of them as an online book reviewer with a massive following. But Irene's real ...more
Trans History: A Graphic Novel: From Ancient Times to the Present Day
by Alex L. Combs
Candlewick Press, 05/13/2025
 
What does "trans" mean, and what does it mean to be trans? Diversity in human sex and gender is not a modern phenomenon, as readers will discover ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
You and Me on Repeat
by Mary Shyne
Henry Holt and Company, 05/13/2025
 
Chris O'Brien has a genius plan: If he can share the perfect first kiss with his crush, Andy, then of course he'll break free from the time loop that ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner: The Troubled History of the Learning Style Idea
by Thomas Fallace
University Of Chicago Press, 05/14/2025
 
The widely embraced notion that we all process information in one of three distinct modes—visual, auditory, or kinesthetic—has informed ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine
by Danielle Leavitt
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 05/20/2025
 
Even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukrainian cause and adopt Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, the lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
Don't Let Me Go
by Kevin Christopher Snipes
HarperCollins Publishers, 05/20/2025
 
Out and proud, Riley Iverson knows there's nothing more cringe than crushing on a straight boy. But from the moment that the handsome, sporty, and ...more
Romance
Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us
by Anna Malaika Tubbs
Flatiron Books, 05/20/2025
 
Patriarchy has oppressed women and denied their contributions worldwide, but the United States of America has its own unique gendered hierarchy. Dr. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Everyone Sux But You
by K. Wroten
Henry Holt and Company, 05/20/2025
 
High school senior Carson Flynn doesn't give a damn―about you, about school, or about her future. The only thing she cares about is jumping into...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
First Rain in Paradise
by Gwyneth Lewis
Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 05/20/2025
 
These accounts of living in and emerging from the dark wrestle with the angel of language. Suffering does not preclude humour and may, in fact, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Poetry & Novels in Verse
Gingko Season: A Novel
by Naomi Xu Elegant
W.W. Norton & Company, 05/20/2025
 
After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Hardly Creatures: Poems
by Rob Macaisa Colgate
Tin House Books, 05/20/2025
 
Brilliant and innovative, Rob Macaisa Colgate's debut poetry collection, Hardly Creatures, takes the form―visually and metaphorically―of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Poetry & Novels in Verse
 Debut Author
In Case You Read This
by Edward Underhill
Quill & Quire, 05/20/2025
 
Arden isn't excited about moving. Los Angeles was an easy place to fit in and find a supportive queer community. But Winifred, Michigan? That sounds ...more
Is a River Alive?
by Robert Macfarlane
W.W. Norton & Company, 05/20/2025
 
Hailed as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler" (Holly Morris, New York Times), Robert Macfarlane ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Our Last Wild Days: A Novel
by Anna Bailey
Atria Books, 05/20/2025
 
The Labasques aren't like other families.

Living in a shack out in the swamps, they made do by hunting down alligators and other animals. To the ...more
Thrillers
Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA
by John Lisle
St. Martin's Press, 05/20/2025
 
Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's most cunning chemist. As head of the infamous MKULTRA project, he oversaw an assortment of dangerous―even deadly&#...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Run Like a Girl
by Amaka Egbe
HarperCollins Publishers, 05/20/2025
 
To make matters worse, Dera learns that her new school doesn't have a girls' track team, shattering her dreams of getting a track scholarship and, one...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Salvación
by Sandra Proudman
Wednesday Books, 05/20/2025
 
Lola de La Peña yearns to be free from the societal expectations of a young Mexican lady of her station. She spends her days pretending to be ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Shamanism: The Timeless Religion
by Manvir Singh
Knopf, 05/20/2025
 
What are the origins of shamanism, and what is its future? Do shamans believe in their powers? What exactly is trance? What can we learn from ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Sike: A Novel
by Fred Lunzer
Celadon, 05/20/2025
 
Adrian earns his living writing lyrics for rappers he never meets, and finds success with a hit song about his own fruitless search for love. After ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Sing to Me: A Novel
by Jesse Browner
Little Brown & Company, 05/20/2025
 
His family farm and the surrounding community now emptied by war, young Hani embarks on an epic quest – assisted by a brooding yet brilliant ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Sins of Survivors: A Carter Brothers Novel
by Blair Underwood, Joe McClean
Amistad, 05/20/2025
 
In 1908 Alabama, precocious young Benjamin Carter brings deadly consequences down upon his father's head when he dares to use a white drinking ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
Songs of Summer
by Jane L. Rosen
Berkley Books, 05/20/2025
 
Maggie Mae Wheeler is content with her life. At 30, she has grand plans for her vintage record shop in the charming Midwestern town where she grew up,...more
Literary Fiction
Spent: A Comic Novel
by Alison Bechdel
Mariner Books, 05/20/2025
 
In Alison Bechdel's hilariously skewering and gloriously cast new comic novel confection, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
The American Game: History and Hope in the Country of Lacrosse
by S. L. Price
Atlantic Monthly Press, 05/20/2025
 
Nearly a millennium ago, Native Americans created lacrosse as a means of training warriors and settling disputes. Co-opted by whites in the late 1800s...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Book of Records: A Novel
by Madeleine Thien
W.W. Norton & Company, 05/20/2025
 
Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Doorman: A Novel
by Chris Pavone
MCD, 05/20/2025
 
Chicky Diaz is everyone's favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York...more
The Fate of Others: Stories
by Richard Bausch
Knopf, 05/20/2025
 
In ten piercing new stories, Richard Bausch fleshes out the rich inner worlds of his characters and plumbs the nuances of infidelity, loss, and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
The Girls of Good Fortune: A Novel
by Kristina McMorris
Sourcebooks Landmark, 05/20/2025
 
She came from a lineage known for good fortune…by those who don't know the whole story.

Oregon, 1888. Amid the subterranean labyrinth of ...more
Historical Fiction
The Gone Book
by Helena Close
Little Island Books, 05/20/2025
 
Matt's mom left home when he was 10. He writes letters to her but doesn't send them. He keeps them in his Gone Book, which he hides in his room. Five ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The True Happiness Company: A Memoir
by Veena Dinavahi
Random House, 05/20/2025
 
It is hard for Veena Dinavahi to live while her classmates keep dying. The high-achieving daughter of loving Indian immigrants, Veena lives in a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Things in Nature Merely Grow
by Yiyun Li
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 05/20/2025
 
"There is no good way to say this," Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.

"There is no good way to state these facts, which must be ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
This Could Be Forever
by Ebony LaDelle
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 05/20/2025
 
Deja's got a plan. The first in her large family to go to college, she wants to study chemistry and sell natural skin care products, like the ones she...more
We Live Here Now: A Novel
by Sarah Pinborough
Flatiron Books, 05/20/2025
 
After an accident that nearly kills her, Emily and her husband, Freddie, move from London to a beautiful Dartmoor country house called Larkin Lodge. ...more
What Will People Think?: A Novel
by Sara Hamdan
Henry Holt and Company, 05/20/2025
 
Mia Almas has a secret. By day, she works at a respectable job as a media fact checker―a position her conservative, Arab grandparents approve of...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Audrey: Timeless Edition Featuring Authentic Illustrations
by Mary Johnston
Independently published, 05/23/2025
 
Raised far from society, she loved nature and lived simply, with a strong belief in goodness and truth.

One day, Audrey's peaceful life changed ...more
Historical Fiction
Autocorrect: Stories
by Etgar Keret
Riverhead Books, 05/27/2025
 
Etgar Keret is the world's most famous living Israeli writer, known for writing short stories that are lean and accessible in style, and whimsical, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950
by Eli Erlick
Beacon Press, 05/27/2025
 
Highlighting influential individuals from 1850-1950 who are all but unknown today, Eli Erlick shares 30 remarkable stories from romance to rebellion ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Come As You Are: A Novel
by Dahlia Adler
Wednesday Books, 05/27/2025
 
Hot on the heels of a broken heart, Everett "Evie" Riley arrives at Camden Academy ready for a new beginning - one far away from her cheating ex-...more
Consider Yourself Kissed: A Novel
by Jessica Stanley
Riverhead Books, 05/27/2025
 
When she first meets Adam, Coralie is new to London and feeling adrift. But Adam is clever, witty, and (he insists) a quarter inch taller than the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Costumes for Time Travelers
by A. R. Capetta
Candlewick Press, 05/27/2025
 
Anyone who has hiked through time knows the town of Pocket. It's the place travelers first reach after they stumble away from their hometime, passing ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Deep Breath
by Rita Halász
Catapult, 05/27/2025
 
When we meet Vera, her body and mind are on a precipice. She's just left her marital home to live with her father after her husband's violent ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Disappoint Me: A Novel
by Nicola Dinan
Dial Books, 05/27/2025
 
I don't know why I feel like I've been caught doing something dirty. Cheating on queerness. Fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife.

Thirty ...more
Literary Fiction
Dreaming of Home: A Young Latina's Journey to Pride, Power, and Belonging
by Cristina Jiménez
St. Martin's Press, 05/27/2025
 
Dreaming of Home is a coming-of-age story both for a young woman finding her true self and for a social movement of immigrant youth trailblazers who ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power
by Augustine Sedgewick
Scribner, 05/27/2025
 
Fatherhood is one of the most meaningful aspects of human culture, but we know little about when or where fatherhood first emerged, or even how or why...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Harmattan Season: A Novel
by Tochi Onyebuchi
Tor Books, 05/27/2025
 
Veteran and private eye Boubacar doesn't need much―least of all trouble―but trouble always seems to find him. Work has dried up, and he'd ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Lay Your Armor Down: A Novel
by Michael Farris Smith
Little Brown & Company, 05/27/2025
 
An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night. A light in the wood draws her to a campfire with two ...more
Literary Fiction
Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes
by Harrison Browne
Beacon Press, 05/27/2025
 
The recent anti-trans commentary around the 2024 Summer Olympics and the wave of anti-trans sports law around the world often includes disturbing ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Maybe This Will Save Me: A Memoir of Art, Addiction and Transformation
by Tommy Dorfman
Hanover Square Press, 05/27/2025
 
On a hot summer day, twenty-eight-year-old Tommy Dorfman was enjoying a beautiful outing on a boat. But inside she felt unmoored. After a lifetime of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Never Flinch: A Novel
by Stephen King
Scribner, 05/27/2025
 
When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to "kill thirteen innocents and one guilty" in "an act ...more
Not They Who Soar: Katharine Wright Mysteries #2
by Amanda Flower
Kensington Publishing, 05/27/2025
 
Summer 1904. Katharine and her best friend from Oberlin College, Margaret Goodwin Meacham, are thrilled to attend the St. Louis Exposition in St. ...more
Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie
by Dave Hage, Josephine Marcotty
Random House, 05/27/2025
 
The North American prairie is an ecological marvel, a lush carpet of grass that stretches to the horizon, and home to some of the nation's most iconic...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Solo
by Gráinne O'Brien
Little Island Books, 05/27/2025
 
Daisy can feel like a solo act at home. On the outside of her twin brothers' intense relationship, she leans towards her parents, particularly her ...more
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Storybook Ending: A Novel
by Moira Macdonald
Dutton, 05/27/2025
 
April, a smart and lonely tech worker, worries work from home has gotten out of hand: She's left an anonymous note in a book for Westley, the clerk at...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Busybody Book Club
by Freya Sampson
Berkley Books, 05/27/2025
 
Having recently moved from London to a small Cornish seaside village, Nova Davies started a book club at the local community center, but so far it's a...more
The Gravedigger's Almanac: A Leopold von Herzfeldt Case #1
by Oliver Pötzsch
HarperVia, 05/27/2025
 
Vienna, 1893. A gravedigger at the city's famous Central Cemetery, Augustin Rothmayer is an unorthodox yet highly educated oddball who finds solace ...more
Thrillers
The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s
by Paul Elie
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 05/27/2025
 
The 1980s are usually seen as a slick, shrill decade. The Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers urged "Death to America"; Ronald Reagan was in the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Martha's Vineyard Beach and Book Club: A Novel
by Martha Hall Kelly
Ballantine Books, 05/27/2025
 
2016: Thirty-four-year-old Mari Starwood is still grieving as she travels to the storied island of Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Palace at the End of the Sea: A Novel
by Simon Tolkien
Lake Union Publishing, 05/27/2025
 
New York City, 1929. Young Theo Sterling's world begins to unravel as the Great Depression exerts its icy grip. He finds it hard to relate to his ...more
Historical Fiction
The South: A Novel
by Tash Aw
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 05/27/2025
 
When his grandfather dies, Jay travels south with his family to the property they've inherited, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Stalker
by Paula Bomer
Soho Press, 05/27/2025
 
Robert Doughten Savile, aka "Doughty," is the son of a once-wealthy, now hard-up family from Darien, Connecticut. Doughty lives in a perpetual cloud ...more
These Vengeful Gods
by Gabe Cole Novoa
Random House Books for Younger Readers, 05/27/2025
 
Years ago, the descendants of the god of Death were murdered. The few that remain are in hiding, including Crow, a teen who survived the genocide and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
This Moth Saw Brightness
by A. A. Vacharat
Dutton for Young Readers, 05/27/2025
 
"The invisible D in my name is my mother's second most lasting contribution to my life."

'Wayne Le—known as "Invisible-D 'Wayne" at school&...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Titan of the Stars
by E.K. Johnston
Tundra Books, 05/27/2025
 
Celeste knows every inch of this ship. She's proud of her work as apprentice engineer. And as the maiden voyage of the Titan launches, she's ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
by Jordan Thomas
Riverhead Books, 05/27/2025
 
Eighteen of California's largest wildfires on record have burned in the past two decades. Scientists recently invented the term "megafire" to describe...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
A Family Matter: A Novel
by Claire Lynch
Scribner, 06/03/2025
 
1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
A First Time for Everything
by K. L. Walther
Sourcebooks Fire, 06/03/2025
 
Madeline has always been extremely close to her family, so she is shocked when her older brother gets engaged without including them (or even giving ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
A Forgery of Fate
by Elizabeth Lim
Knopf Books for Young Readers, 06/03/2025
 
Truyan Saigas didn't choose to become a con artist, but after her father is lost at sea, it's up to her to support her mother and two younger sisters....more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
A Language of Limbs: A Novel
by Dylin Hardcastle
Dutton, 06/03/2025
 
Newcastle, Australia, 1972. On a sticky summer night, a choice must be made: To give in to queer desire or suppress it? To venture into the unknown or...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
A Song of Legends Lost: Invoker Trilogy #1
by M. H. Ayinde
Saga Press, 06/03/2025
 
A SONG OF REBELLION. A SONG OF WAR. A SONG OF LEGENDS LOST.

The people of Nine Lands know their history. The kingdom once belonged to the Scathed ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Albion: A Novel
by Anna Hope
Harper, 06/03/2025
 
The Brookes are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home—twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone—to bury their patriarch, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Atmosphere: A Love Story
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Ballantine Books, 06/03/2025
 
Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Beast: A Novel
by Richard Van Camp
Douglas & McIntyre, 06/03/2025
 
Lawson Sauren's life has always been entwined with the lives of the Cranes brothers. Cody Cranes became an unexpected friend when they shared a tent ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Best of All Worlds
by Kenneth Oppel
Scholastic, 06/03/2025
 
Xavier Oaks doesn't particularly want to go to the cabin with his dad and his dad's pregnant new wife, Nia. But family obligations are family ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care
by Shelley Sella
Beacon Press, 06/03/2025
 
Within both the anti-abortion and pro-choice movements, third-trimester abortion is often stigmatized and misunderstood. For 20 years, Dr. Shelley ...more
Science, Health and the Environment
Blonde Dust
by Tatiana de Rosnay
Grand Central Publishing, 06/03/2025
 
Pauline, a young chambermaid who works at the legendary Mapes Hotel in Reno, Nevada, is asked to step in for a colleague and clean Suite 614. Although...more
Historical Fiction
Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation
by Zaakir Tameez
Henry Holt and Company, 06/03/2025
 
Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Charlottesville: An American Story
by Deborah Baker
Graywolf Press, 06/03/2025
 
Within an hour of their arrival, the city's historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far right cadres battled activists in the streets. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Clam Down: A Metamorphosis
by Anelise Chen
One World, 06/03/2025
 
We've all heard the story about waking up as a cockroach—but what if a crisis turned you into a clam? After the dissolution of her marriage, a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse
by Alice Bolin
Mariner Books, 06/03/2025
 
In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the ...more
Dan in Green Gables: A Graphic Novel: A Modern Reimagining of Anne of Green Gables
by Rey Terciero
Penguin Books, 06/03/2025
 
Despite a life on the road with his free-spirited mother, fifteen-year-old Dan Stewart-Álvarez has always wanted to settle down. He just didn't ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told
by Jeremy Atherton Lin
Little Brown & Company, 06/03/2025
 
It's 1996, and Jeremy Atherton Lin has met the boy of his dreams — a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit — just as, amid a media frenzy, US ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Devils Like Us
by L.T. Thompson
Bloomsbury YA, 06/03/2025
 
Cas has a rule: Don't tell anyone. Not about the nagging gender discomfort, and certainly not about the prophetic visions of untimely deaths. Cas ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America's Gay Restaurants
by Erik Piepenburg
Grand Central Publishing, 06/03/2025
 
Dining Out explores how gay people came of age, came out, and fought for their rights not just in gay bars or the streets, but in restaurants, from ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Endling: A Novel
by Maria Reva
Doubleday, 06/03/2025
 
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Fight AIDS!: How Activism, Art, and Protest Changed the Course of a Deadly Epidemic and Reshaped a Nation
by Michael G. Long
W.W. Norton & Company, 06/03/2025
 
Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!

This was the slogan for ACT UP―or AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power―an activist organization that ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Flashlight: A Novel
by Susan Choi
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 06/03/2025
 
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He's carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Gaysians
by Michael Curato
Algonquin Books, 06/03/2025
 
When AJ moves to Seattle in the early aughts, he's ready to reinvent himself as a gay Asian man—but his dreams hit reality fast with no friends,...more
Critics' Consensus:

Graphic Novels
 Debut Author
Heir of Storms: Storm Weaver #1
by Lauryn Hamilton Murray
Roaring Brook Press, 06/03/2025
 
The very day Blaze came into the world, she almost drowned it. A Rain Singer born into one of the most powerful fire-wielding families in the empire, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir
by Hala Alyan
Simon & Schuster, 06/03/2025
 
After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. In this ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
In the Family Way: A Novel
by Laney Katz Becker
Harper, 06/03/2025
 
In 1965 America, women can't have their own bank accounts, credit cards, or sign their own leases; divorce is scandalous and difficult; and abortion ...more
Historical Fiction
It's Not the End of the World: A Novel
by Jonathan Parks-Ramage
Bloomsbury Publishing, 06/03/2025
 
It's 2044 and life is bleak for many Americans, but not for Mason Daunt. Safe in his Los Angeles mansion, Mason can remain blissfully unaware of the ...more
Lady's Knight
by Amie Kaufman
Storytide, 06/03/2025
 
Gwen is sick of hiding—hiding the fact that she's taken over her father's blacksmithing duties, hiding her attraction to girls, hiding her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Lincoln's Lady Spymaster: The Untold Story of the Abolitionist Southern Belle Who Helped Win the Civil War
by Gerri Willis
Harper, 06/03/2025
 
Wealthy Southern belle Elizabeth Van Lew had it all. Money, charm, wit—the biggest mansion in Richmond. So why risk everything to become the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness
by Adam Weymouth
Crown, 06/03/2025
 
In 2011, a wolf named Slavc left his home territory of Slovenia for a wide-ranging journey across the Alps. Tracked by a GPS collar, he traveled over ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
Madame Queen: The Life and Crimes of Harlem's Underground Racketeer, Stephanie St. Clair
by Mary Kay McBrayer
Park Row, 06/03/2025
 
In her heyday, Stephanie St. Clair went by many names, but one was best known by all: Madame Queen. The undeniable queen of the Harlem numbers game, ...more
Biography/Memoir
Meet Me at the Crossroads: A Novel
by Megan Giddings
Amistad, 06/03/2025
 
On an ordinary summer morning, the world is changed by the appearance of seven mysterious doors that seemingly lead to another world. People are, of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church
by Kevin Sack
Crown, 06/03/2025
 
Few people beyond South Carolina's Lowcountry knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston—Mother Emanuel—before the ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 Years of African Culture and Identity
by Luke Pepera
Pegasus Books, 06/03/2025
 
Historian, archaeologist, and anthropologist Luke Pepera takes us on a personal journey discovering 500,000 years of African history and cultures in ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy
by Edward Hirsch
Knopf, 06/03/2025
 
"My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water... . They didn't expect an entire book," Hirsch says in the "...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Never Thought I'd End Up Here
by Ann Liang
Scholastic, 06/03/2025
 
Leah Zhang has spent her whole life in LA ― it's all she's ever known. But after accidentally wishing her cousin ill health and a very ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Notes on Infinity: A Novel
by Austin Taylor
Celadon, 06/03/2025
 
Zoe, the daughter of an MIT professor who grew up in her brother's shadow, can envision her future anew at Harvard. Jack, a boy in Zoe's organic ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Park Avenue: A Novel
by Renée Ahdieh
Flatiron Books, 06/03/2025
 
Jia Song has always been destined for greatness. As the daughter of Korean bodega owners, she promised herself that she would have every Fifth Avenue ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Pioneer Summer: A Novel
by Kateryna Sylvanova
The Overlook Press, 06/03/2025
 
The year is 1986, and Yurka Konev, 16, has been sent off for another summer at Pioneer Camp. Impulsive, forthright, and unfairly branded as a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Sick and Dirty: Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness
by Michael Koresky
Bloomsbury USA, 06/03/2025
 
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Motion Picture Production Code severely restricted what Hollywood cinema could depict. This included "any inference" ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Skipshock
by Caroline O'Donoghue
Walker Books US, 06/03/2025
 
Margo is a troubled schoolgirl. After the death of her father, she's on her way to a new boarding school in a new city.

Moon is a salesman. He ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
So Happy Together: A Novel
by Olivia Worley
Minotaur Books, 06/03/2025
 
For twenty-four-year-old Jane, finding love in New York City is even harder than making it as a playwright. So when Jane meets Colin, she can't ...more
Thrillers
Songs of No Provenance: A Novel
by Lydi Conklin
Catapult, 06/03/2025
 
Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Strange Houses: A Novel
by Uketsu
HarperVia, 06/03/2025
 
A writer fascinated by the macabre is approached by an acquaintance who is considering purchasing a second-hand house in Tokyo. With its bright and ...more
Thrillers
Sycorax
by Nydia Hetherington
Pegasus Books, 06/03/2025
 
Outcast by society and all alone in the world, Sycorax must find a way to understand her true nature. But as her powers begin to grow, so too do the ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Ten Incarnations of Rebellion: A Novel
by Vaishnavi Patel
Ballantine Books, 06/03/2025
 
Kalki Divekar grows up a daughter of Kingston—a city the British built on the ashes of Bombay. The older generation, including her father, have ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
That Devil, Ambition
by Linsey Miller
Storytide, 06/03/2025
 
There is only one school worth graduating from, and it creates as many magicians as it does graves…

First in his class and last in his noble ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
That's How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor
by Damon Young
Pantheon Books, 06/03/2025
 
A critic explores the paradox of finding community in "the dozens" while grieving. A violent town ritual causes an all-too-familiar moral panic. An ...more
The Catch: A Novel
by Yrsa Daley-Ward
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 06/03/2025
 
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood,...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
by Melissa Febos
Knopf, 06/03/2025
 
In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break—for three months she would abstain from dating, from ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Ghostwriter: A Novel
by Julie Clark
Sourcebooks Landmark, 06/03/2025
 
June, 1975.

The Taylor family shatters in a single night when two teenage siblings are found dead in their own home. The only surviving sibling, ...more
The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History
by Maggie Gram
Basic Books, 06/03/2025
 
Design has penetrated every dimension of contemporary society, from classrooms to statehouses to corporate boardrooms. It's seen as a kind of mega-...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
The Listeners: A Novel
by Maggie Stiefvater
Viking, 06/03/2025
 
January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweetwater washing away all of ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick: Sex and the Supreme Court in the Age of AIDS
by Martin Padgett
W.W. Norton & Company, 06/03/2025
 
When a police officer stood at his bedroom door on August 3, 1982, Michael Hardwick had no idea that he would become an avatar of the gay rights ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Slip: A Novel
by Lucas Schaefer
Simon & Schuster, 06/03/2025
 
Austin, Texas: It's the summer of 1998, and there's a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994
by Thomas Mallon
Knopf, 06/03/2025
 
In 1983, Thomas Mallon was still unknown. A literature professor at Vassar College, he spent his days traveling from Manhattan to campus, reviewing ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System
by Brando Simeo Starkey
Doubleday, 06/03/2025
 
Their Accomplices Wore Robes takes readers from the Civil War era to the present and describes how the Supreme Court—even more than the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
There Are Reasons For This
by Nini Berndt
Tin House Books, 06/03/2025
 
But Lucy has only just arrived, and too late. She arrives in search of Helen, a woman Mikey loved. But when Lucy moves in across the hall, she finds ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Waterline: A Novel
by Aram Mrjoian
HarperVia, 06/03/2025
 
Outside Detroit on the island of Gross Ile, the Kurkjians receive news that Mari, the eldest of their youngest generation, has swum into the depths of...more
Literary Fiction
We Are Green and Trembling
by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
New Directions Publishing, 06/03/2025
 
Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
What Is Queer Food?: How We Served a Revolution
by John Birdsall
W.W. Norton & Company, 06/03/2025
 
The food on our plates has long been designed, twisted, and elevated by queer hands. Piecing together a dazzling mosaic of queer lives, spaces, and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
When Devils Sing
by Xan Kaur
Henry Holt and Company, 06/03/2025
 
When Dawson Sumter goes missing, all he leaves behind is a smattering of blood in room 4 of the debt-ridden motel owned by Neera Singh's family. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Thrillers
 Debut Author
When We Ruled: The Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors
by Paula Akpan
Pegasus Books, 06/03/2025
 
Njinga Mbande. Nana Yaa Asantewaa. Makobo Modjadji VI. Ranavalona the First.

These queens and warriors ruled vast swathes of the African continent,...more
Biography/Memoir
Your Final Moments
by Jay Coles
Scholastic, 06/03/2025
 
Hakeem goes to Narcotics Anonymous meetings to keep his addictions in check. But when his best friend Miles kills himself, Hakeem finds the days ...more
A Girl Walks into the Forest
by Madeleine Roux
Quill & Quire, 06/10/2025
 
For as long as she can remember, Valla's been told her beauty would give her a life most people only dreamed of. So when the mysterious Count Leonid ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Amelia, If Only
by Becky Albertalli
HarperCollins Publishers, 06/10/2025
 
Okay, maybe her friends are right: She's slightly parasocially infatuated. But Amelia just knows sparks would fly—if only she could connect with...more
Art Above Everything: One Woman's Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life
by Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Beacon Press, 06/10/2025
 
Is the all-encompassing quest to become a self-sustaining artist worth the sacrifices it often requires? Throughout her 20s and 30s, Stephanie ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Audition
by Pip Adam
Coffee House Press, 06/10/2025
 
A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley, and Drew. If they...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
by V. E. Schwab
Tor Books, 06/10/2025
 
This is a story about hunger.

1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada.

A young girl grows up wild and wily—her beauty is only outmatched by her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard
by C. M. Kushins
Mariner Books, 06/10/2025
 
Over the course of his sixty-year career, Elmore Leonard, "the Dickens of Detroit," published forty-five novels that have had enduring appeal to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Days of Light
by Megan Hunter
Grove Press, 06/10/2025
 
She marvels at the way a single day can unravel everything, like ribbon pulled from a present.

In 2017, Megan Hunter burst onto the literary scene...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Death at the White Hart: A Novel
by Chris Chibnall
Pamela Dorman Books, 06/10/2025
 
Nothing keeps a village together like secrets.

The villagers of Fleetcombe like to think of it as one of the most picturesque spots on England's ...more
Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age
by Frank Close
Basic Books, 06/10/2025
 
Although Henri Becquerel didn't know it at the time, he changed history in 1895 when he left photographic plates and some uranium rocks in a drawer. ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Expert Witness: The Weight of Our Testimony When Justice Hangs in the Balance
by Ann Wolbert Burgess
Hachette Books, 06/10/2025
 
For decades, when criminal cases of the most unprecedented nature went to trial, one woman took the stand to separate truth from fiction. Expert ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Florenzer: A Novel
by Phil Melanson
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 06/10/2025
 
Leonardo da Vinci, twelve years old and a bastard, leaves the Tuscan countryside to join his father in Florence with dreams of becoming a painter. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists
by Susan Gubar
W.W. Norton & Company, 06/10/2025
 
Despite the losses generally associated with aging, quite a few writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and dancers have managed to extend and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Great Black Hope: A Novel
by Rob Franklin
Summit Books, 06/10/2025
 
An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil....more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Homework: A Memoir
by Geoff Dyer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 06/10/2025
 
The only child of a sheet-metal worker and a dinner lady who worked at the canteen of the local school, Geoff Dyer grew up in a world shaped by ...more
Biography/Memoir
Joy Goddess: A'Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance
by A'Lelia Bundles
Scribner, 06/10/2025
 
Dubbed the "joy goddess of Harlem's 1920s" by poet Langston Hughes, A'Lelia Walker, daughter of millionaire entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker and the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Kakigori Summer: A Novel
by Emily Itami
Mariner Books, 06/10/2025
 
Rei, Kiki, and Ai are three sisters divided by distance and circumstance. Ambitious Rei works in finance in London; Kiki is the single mother of a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Kill Your Darlings: A Novel
by Peter Swanson
William Morrow, 06/10/2025
 
Thom and Wendy Graves have been married for over twenty-five years. They live in a beautiful Victorian on the north shore of Massachusetts. Wendy is a...more
King of Ashes: A Novel
by S. A. Cosby
Flatiron Books, 06/10/2025
 
When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father's car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals...more
Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai'i
by Sara Kehaulani Goo
Flatiron Books, 06/10/2025
 
From an early age, Sara Kehaulani Goo has always been enchanted by her family's land in Hawai'i. The vast area along the rugged shores of Maui's east ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Love, Misha
by Askel Aden
First Second, 06/10/2025
 
Can this road trip get any worse? Yes, Mom (Audrey) wanted to spend time with Misha. And yes, she's never around and they don't even live together, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Making Friends Can Be Murder
by Kathleen West
Berkley Books, 06/10/2025
 
It feels like kismet when Sarah Jones, newly relocated to Minneapolis after abruptly calling off her engagement, gets invited to join a group of women...more
Meet Me on Love Street
by Farah Heron
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 06/10/2025
 
Sana Merali is a certified hopeless romantic.

It's inevitable when she literally lives on Love Street, a cute side-street full of mom-and-pop shops...more
Romance
Midnight at the Cinema Palace: A Novel
by Christopher Tradowsky
Simon & Schuster, 06/10/2025
 
Walter Simmering is searching for love and purpose in a city he doesn't realize is fading away—San Francisco in 1993, at the height of the AIDS ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
by Caroline Fraser
Penguin Press, 06/10/2025
 
Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Ordinary Love: A Novel
by Marie Rutkoski
Knopf, 06/10/2025
 
Emily has, by all appearances, a perfect life: a townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, two healthy children, and a husband who showers her with ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
So Far Gone: A Novel
by Jess Walter
Harper, 06/10/2025
 
Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Great Mann: A Novel
by Kyra Davis Lurie
Crown, 06/10/2025
 
In 1945, Charlie Trammell steps off a cross-country train into the vibrant tapestry of Los Angeles. Lured by his cousin Marguerite's invitation to the...more
Literary Fiction
The Lamplighter's Bookshop
by Sophie Austin
HarperCollins Publishers, 06/10/2025
 
When Evelyn Seaton answers an advertisement for an assistant at a forgotten bookshop in York, she is not the only one with something to hide.

There...more
Historical Fiction
 Debut Author
This Is Not a Ghost Story: A Novel
by Amerie
William Morrow, 06/10/2025
 
John's House provides all he needs. Surrounded by a vast, beautiful ocean under a void of sky, the House is John's haven. He is alone, but never ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Vesuvius
by Cass Biehn
Peachtree Publishers, 06/10/2025
 
Clever thief Felix slips from city to city to survive the present and escape a past he can't remember. When Felix steals a divine artifact—...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
We Can Never Leave: A Novel
by H.E. Edgmon
Wednesday Books, 06/10/2025
 
You can never go home…

Every day, all across the world, inhuman creatures are waking up with no memory of who they are or where they came ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
What Kind of Paradise: A Novel
by Janelle Brown
Random House, 06/10/2025
 
The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
With a Vengeance: A Novel
by Riley Sager
Dutton, 06/10/2025
 
In 1942, six people destroyed Anna Matheson's family. Twelve years later, she's ready for retribution.

Under false pretenses, Anna has lured those ...more
A Far Better Thing
by H. G. Parry
Tor Books, 06/17/2025
 
I feared this was the best of times; I hoped it could not get any worse.

The faeries stole Sydney Carton as a child, and made him a mortal ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
A Novel Murder: A Mystery
by E. C. Nevin
Knopf, 06/17/2025
 
In the quaint English town of Hoslewit, the biggest names in crime writing have congregated to celebrate all things bookish and murderous. Author Jane...more
Mysteries
A Promise to Arlette: A Novel
by Serena Burdick
Atria Books, 06/17/2025
 
Sidney and Ida Whipple are living the suburban 1950s American dream, complete with two children and a white picket fence, which didn't seem possible ...more
Historical Fiction
American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives
by Robert W. Fieseler
Dutton, 06/17/2025
 
In January 1959, Art Copleston was escorted out of his college accounting class by three police officers. In a motel room, blinds drawn, he sat in ...more
Critics' Consensus:

History, Current Affairs and Religion
Before Dorothy
by Hazel Gaynor
Berkley Books, 06/17/2025
 
Chicago, 1924: Emily and her new husband, Henry, yearn to leave the bustle of Chicago for the promise of their own American dream among the harsh ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Bug Hollow: A Novel
by Michelle Huneven
Penguin Press, 06/17/2025
 
When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free
by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
Simon & Schuster, 06/17/2025
 
Claire McCardell forever changed American fashion. In fact, much of what we wear today can be traced back to her: ballet flats, mix-and-match ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
Crown
by Evanthia Bromiley
Grove Press, 06/17/2025
 
Jude Woods is on the brink of eviction. Pregnant, jobless, and mother to Evan and Virginia, she has three days to box up her family's life and find a ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Ecstasy
by Ivy Pochoda
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 06/17/2025
 
Lena wants her life back. Her wealthy, controlling, humorless husband has just died, and now she contends with her controlling, humorless son, Drew. ...more
Fox: A Novel
by Joyce Carol Oates
Hogarth Books, 06/17/2025
 
Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Fulfillment: A Novel
by Lee Cole
Knopf, 06/17/2025
 
Fulfillment tells the story of two half brothers—Joel, a successful academic and author, whose marriage is in deep trouble, and his younger ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Girls Girls Girls
by Shoshana von Blanckensee
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 06/17/2025
 
It's the summer of '96 and best friends (and secret girlfriends) Hannah and Sam are driving across the country from Long Beach, New York, to the ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Goodbye, My Princess
by Fei Wo Si Cun
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 06/17/2025
 
There is no room for love in an empire.

Qu Xiaofeng has been living in Shangjing for three years now. A naïve, happy-go-lucky treaty bride ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Hazel Says No: A Novel
by Jessica Berger Gross
Hanover Square Press, 06/17/2025
 
Hazel Blum, please report to the principal's office. Hazel Blum.

When Hazel Blum's father gets a tenured job at a prestigious college, she and ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
How to Dodge a Cannonball: A Novel
by Dennard Dayle
Henry Holt and Company, 06/17/2025
 
Razor-sharp and hilarious, How to Dodge a Cannonball tells the story of Anders, a white teenager who volunteers to be a Union Army flag-twirler to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
by Kate Marvel
Ecco, 06/17/2025
 
Dr. Kate Marvel is a renowned climate scientist and researcher whose work on climate change led her to grapple with strong, complicated emotions. ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
If We Survive This
by Racquel Marie
Feiwel & Friends, 06/17/2025
 
Flora Braddock Paz is not the girl who survives. A colorful creative who spends as much time fearing death as she does trying to hide that fear from ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
June in the Garden: A Novel
by Eleanor Wilde
Crown, 06/17/2025
 
After her mother's unexpected death, June must vacate her home. But when the social worker urges her to move into a flat with no garden—clearly,...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Liberation Summer: The Moment That Changed the Women's Movement and the Future of American Politics
by Micki McElya
Simon & Schuster, 06/17/2025
 
Of the many pivotal years in United States history studied and recreated by historians, journalists, and filmmakers, 1968, in particular, is widely ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia,from Revolution to Autocracy
by Julia Ioffe
Ecco, 06/17/2025
 
In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Shaw Connolly Lives to Tell: A Novel
by Gillian French
Minotaur Books, 06/17/2025
 
Shaw Connolly is no stranger to trauma. As a fingerprints analyst, she's one of the first on-site for crimes, including murder scenes and a mysterious...more
Mysteries
Sound Affects: How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing and Our Planet
by Julian Treasure
Grand Central Publishing, 06/17/2025
 
Hearing is the first sense we develop—a primary warning sense hardwired into our brains. And yet, in an increasingly noisy and distracted world,...more
Science, Health and the Environment
Summers in Squid Tickle: A Newfoundland Odyssey
by Robert Finch
W.W. Norton & Company, 06/17/2025
 
Robert Finch arrived in Newfoundland in the summer of 1995 heartsick, directionless, his old life on Cape Cod in tatters. Burnside―traditionally...more
Biography/Memoir
The Cost of Being Undocumented: One Woman's Reckoning with America's Inhumane Math
by Alix Dick
Beacon Press, 06/17/2025
 
An inhumane math pervades this country: even as our government extracts labor and often taxes from undocumented workers, it excludes these same ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Lost Masterpiece: A Novel
by B. A. Shapiro
Algonquin Books, 06/17/2025
 
Stretching from the late-nineteenth century to the present day, The Lost Masterpiece is wrapped around an enigmatic and powerful painting, Party on ...more
Historical Fiction
The Mercy Makers: The Moon Heresies #1
by Tessa Gratton
Orbit, 06/17/2025
 
Can an empire trip and fall on a mere strand of silk? 

Iriset is a prodigy and an outlaw. The daughter of a powerful criminal, she dons her ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Möbius Book
by Catherine Lacey
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 06/17/2025
 
Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
The Poppy Fields: A Novel
by Nikki Erlick
William Morrow, 06/17/2025
 
Welcome to the Poppy Fields, where there's hope for even the most battered hearts to heal.

Here, in a remote stretch of the California desert, lies...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog: And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science
by Carly Anne York
Basic Books, 06/17/2025
 
Why would anyone research how elephants pee? Or study worms who tie themselves into a communal knot? Or quantify the squishability of a cockroach? It ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Science, Health and the Environment
The Scrapbook: A Novel
by Heather Clark
Pantheon Books, 06/17/2025
 
The traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism echo and reverberate through the present in this story of a lifechanging seduction.

Harvard...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Second Chance Convenience Store: A Novel
by Ho-Yeon Kim
Harper Perennial, 06/17/2025
 
Dok-go lives in Seoul Station. He can't remember his past, and the only thing he knows for certain is that he could really use a drink. When he finds ...more
Literary Fiction
The Sisters: A Novel
by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 06/17/2025
 
Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau
by Kristin Harmel
Gallery Books, 06/17/2025
 
Colette Marceau has been stealing jewels for nearly as long as she can remember, following the centuries-old code of honor instilled in her by her ...more
Historical Fiction
The Teacher of Auschwitz: A Novel
by Wendy Holden
Harper, 06/17/2025
 
Fredy built a wall against suffering in their hearts ...

Amid the brutality of the Holocaust, one bright spot shone inside the Nazi death camp of ...more
Historical Fiction
The Tournament
by Rebecca Barrow
Margaret K. McElderry Books, 06/17/2025
 
Gardner isn't like other boarding schools. They take in those who've been rejected everywhere else, they offer a survival skills class that has ...more
The Unexpected Consequence of Bleeding on a Tuesday
by Kelsey B. Toney
Random House Books for Younger Readers, 06/17/2025
 
High school senior Delia Bridges has the most amazing mom and sister, a killer GPA—and periods that are so painful they make her scream, pass ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
The Uproar: A Novel
by Karim Dimechkie
Little Brown & Company, 06/17/2025
 
Sharif is a good person. He knows that he is good because he's aware of the privilege that he holds as a white man. He knows he is good because he ...more
Literary Fiction
These Heathens: A Novel
by Mia McKenzie
Random House, 06/17/2025
 
Where do you get an abortion in 1960 Georgia, especially if your small town's midwife goes to the same church as your parents? For seventeen-year-old ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship
by Dana A. Williams
Amistad, 06/17/2025
 
A multifaceted genius, Toni Morrison transcended her role as an author, helping to shape an important period in American publishing and literature as ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Biography/Memoir
UnWorld: A Novel
by Jayson Greene
Knopf, 06/17/2025
 
Anna is shattered by the violent death of her son, Alex, and tormented by the question of whether it was an accident or a suicide. Samantha is Alex's ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Weepers: A Novel
by Peter Mendelsund
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 06/17/2025
 
Ed is a weeper. A professional weeper.

He's a card-carrying member of an eccentric union hired to cry at funerals, wakes, services and burials. It'...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
When the Music Hits: A Novel
by Amber Oliver
Ballantine Books, 06/17/2025
 
Growing up in the Bronx, Billie Grand sought solace in music, finding herself in the pulsing beats, striking lyrics, and mesmerizing voices that saved...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
You've Awoken Her
by Ann Davila Cardinal
HarperCollins Publishers, 06/17/2025
 
All Gabi wants is to spend the summer in his room, surrounded by his Funkos and books, but with his mom traveling, his bags are packed for the last ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
A Treachery of Swans
by A. B. Poranek
Margaret K. McElderry Books, 06/24/2025
 
Can two girls—one enchanted, one the enchantress—save their kingdom and each other?

Two hundred years ago, a slighted deity stole the ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Among Friends: A Novel
by Hal Ebbott
Riverhead Books, 06/24/2025
 
It's an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host's fifty-second ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Arcana: The Lost Heirs (Arcana #1)
by Sam Prentice-Jones
Feiwel & Friends, 06/24/2025
 
James, Daphne, Koko, and Sonny have all grown up surrounded by magic in the Arcana, an organization of witches that protects the magical world, run by...more
Graphic Novels
 Debut Author
Belle Starr: The Truth Behind the Wild West Legend
by Michael Wallis
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 06/24/2025
 
In the annals of legendary Wild West desperados, Belle Starr is remembered to this day as the Bandit Queen. Shortly after her murder in 1889, a highly...more
Biography/Memoir
El Dorado Drive
by Megan Abbott
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 06/24/2025
 
All I want is to be innocent again. But that's not how it works. Especially not after the Wheel.

The three Bishop sisters grew up in privilege in...more
Thrillers
Fresh, Green Life: A Novel
by Sebastian Castillo
Soft Skull Press, 06/24/2025
 
After experiencing a mysterious heart-related health scare, our narrator, Sebastian Castillo, who shares his name with this book's author, resolves to...more
Literary Fiction
I'll Be Right Here: A Novel
by Amy Bloom
Random House, 06/24/2025
 
Immigrating alone from Paris to New York after the crucible of World War II, young Gazala becomes friends with two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. ...more
Literary Fiction
Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings
by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
Harper, 06/24/2025
 
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.

Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous ...more
Essays
Room on the Sea: Three Novellas
by André Aciman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 06/24/2025
 
The short fictions in Room on the Sea deal with the heart-wrenching vicissitudes of amorous ambivalence, in André Aciman's inimitably nostalgic, ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Tempest
by K. Ibura
Quill & Quire, 06/24/2025
 
After Veronique's parents died, her grandmother raised her on a farm in rural Louisiana. For sixteen years, it's just been Veronique, MawMaw, and an ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Accidental Favorite: A Novel
by Fran Littlewood
Henry Holt and Company, 06/24/2025
 
Vivienne and Patrick Fisher have done an excellent job raising their three daughters, Alex, Nancy, and Eva. They're well-adjusted women with ...more
Literary Fiction
The Colony of Lost Souls
by Kelsey James
A John Scognamiglio Book, 06/24/2025
 
Born a year apart, May and June Anderson were once as close as twins. Time and a loveless marriage changed the once vibrant May into June's timid ...more
Historical Fiction
The Compound: A Novel
by Aisling Rawle
Random House, 06/24/2025
 
Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Girls Who Grew Big: A Novel
by Leila Mottley
Knopf, 06/24/2025
 
Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother's home in the ...more
Literary Fiction
The Great White Hoax: Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America
by Philip Kadish
The New Press, 06/24/2025
 
Fake news, outright political lies, a shamelessly partisan press, and the collapse of truth, civility, and shared facts, Philip Kadish argues, are ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
The House on Buzzards Bay: A Novel
by Dwyer Murphy
Viking, 06/24/2025
 
As they hurtle into midlife, Jim and his closest college friends get together to rekindle the bonds of their friendship in his family's beautiful, ...more
Thrillers
The Master Jeweler: A Novel
by Weina Dai Randel
Lake Union Publishing, 06/24/2025
 
Harbin, China, 1925. Fifteen-year-old Anyu Zhang discovers a priceless Fabergé egg in the snow and returns it to the owner, Isaac Mandelburg, a ...more
Historical Fiction
The Place of Tides
by James Rebanks
Mariner Books, 06/24/2025
 
We are all in need of lights to follow.

One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and ...more
Biography/Memoir
The Plunge: A Novel
by Lila Raicek
MIRA, 06/24/2025
 
Following the death of her disgraced fiancé, Liv returns to New York City where she finds shelter in the apartment of a former mentor. Lonely and...more
Thrillers
 Debut Author
The Tiny Things are Heavier
by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo
Bloomsbury Publishing, 06/24/2025
 
The Tiny Things are Heavier follows Sommy, a Nigerian woman who comes to the United States for graduate school two weeks after her brother, Mezie, ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Whyte Python World Tour: A Novel
by Travis Kennedy
Doubleday, 06/24/2025
 
It's Los Angeles, 1986, and metal rules the world. For aspiring drummer Rikki Thunder, life is good—even if he is sleeping in a condemned paint ...more
Thrillers
Thus with a Kiss I Die: Daughter of Montague
by Christina Dodd
A John Scognamiglio Book, 06/24/2025
 
"Woe, for I am the bug that meets the windshield's might,
No longer the speeding glass, smooth, clean and bright ..."

You're right. I, Rosie...more
Mysteries
Trailblazer: Perseverance in Life and Politics
by Carol Moseley Braun
Hanover Square Press, 06/24/2025
 
The first Black woman ever elected to the Senate. The first woman to represent the state of Illinois. The first Black woman to serve as a US ...more
Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
What We Leave Behind: A Novel
by Sue Halpern
Harper, 06/24/2025
 
It's the perennial question: are we a product of how we were raised, or is our identity hardwired by our genetic inheritance? When her adoptive mother...more
Literary Fiction
A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart: A Novel
by Nishant Batsha
Ecco, 07/01/2025
 
At a party near Stanford University's campus in 1917, Cora Trent, a graduate student raised in the rugged mining towns of the American West, meets ...more
Historical Fiction
After We Burned
by Marieke Nijkamp
Sourcebooks Fire, 07/01/2025
 
A terrible accident. A horrible loss. A regrettable tragedy. That's all anyone in Fenix can talk about when a fire consumes the local high school, ...more
Thrillers
Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution
by Molly Beer
W.W. Norton & Company, 07/01/2025
 
Few women of the American Revolution have come through 250 years of US history with such clarity and color as Angelica Schuyler Church. She was ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Archive of Unknown Universes: A Novel
by Ruben Reyes Jr.
Mariner Books, 07/01/2025
 
Cambridge, 2018. Ana and Luis's relationship is on the rocks, despite their many similarities, including their mothers who both fled El Salvador ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Hot Girls with Balls: A Novel
by Benedict Nguyen
Catapult, 07/01/2025
 
Six is 6'7", scheming to rejoin the starting lineup, and barely checks her phone. Green is 6'1", always building her brand, and secretly jealous of ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
I Want to Burn This Place Down: Essays
by Maris Kreizman
Ecco, 07/01/2025
 
At the heart of this funny, acerbic, and bravely honest book of essays is Maris Kreizman, a former rule follower and ambition monster who once ...more
Essays
The Art of Vanishing: A Novel
by Morgan Pager
Ballantine Books, 07/01/2025
 
Jean's life is the same day in and day out. Frozen in time by his painter father, the legendary Henri Matisse, Jean observes the ebb and flow of ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Original: A Novel
by Nell Stevens
W.W. Norton & Company, 07/01/2025
 
Brought to her uncle's decaying Oxfordshire estate when she was a child, Grace has grown up on the periphery of a once-great household, an outsider in...more
Historical Fiction
Typewriter Beach: A Novel
by Meg Waite Clayton
Harper, 07/01/2025
 
1957. Isabella Giori is ten months into a standard seven-year studio contract when she auditions with Hitchcock. Just weeks later, she is sequestered ...more
Historical Fiction
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
by Sophie Elmhirst
Riverhead Books, 07/08/2025
 
Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He's a loner, awkward and obsessive; she's charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their...more
Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
Bring the House Down: A Novel
by Charlotte Runcie
Doubleday, 07/08/2025
 
Alex Lyons always has his mind made up by the time the curtain comes down at a performance—the show either deserves a five-star rave or a one-...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Fools for Love: Stories
by Helen Schulman
Knopf, 07/08/2025
 
The wide-ranging and inventive stories that make up Helen Schulman's Fools for Love are funny, sexy, sometimes sad, and always surprising. A single ...more
Short Stories
Island Creatures
by Margarita Engle
Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 07/08/2025
 
Every day, Vida reads to the creatures at the wildlife rescue center and dreams of her childhood in Cuba, where she and her best friend Adán ...more
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Long Distance: Stories
by Aysegül Savas
Bloomsbury Publishing, 07/08/2025
 
A researcher abroad in Rome eagerly awaits a visit from her long distance lover, only to find he is not the same man she remembers. An expat meets a ...more
Short Stories
My Train Leaves at Three: A Novel
by Natalie Guerrero
One World, 07/08/2025
 
How much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice in order to chase your dreams?

After her sister Nena's sudden death, Xiomara, an Afro-Latina ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Last Empress of France: The Rebellious Life of Eugénie de Montijo
by Petie Kladstrup
Hanover Square Press, 07/08/2025
 
Although a nineteenth-century woman, her almost twenty-first century outlook was key to the creation of modern France. Viewed frequently as a mere "...more
Biography/Memoir
The Rabbit Club: A Novel
by Christopher J. Yates
Hanover Square Press, 07/08/2025
 
When Ali McCain, an eighteen-year-old from Los Angeles, is accepted at Oxford, it's a chance to fulfill his dreams. To study English literature in ...more
Literary Fiction
The Roma: A Traveling History
by Madeline Potter
Harper, 07/08/2025
 
The word Roma conjures images of free-spirited nomads, creative and easy-going people who choose to eschew social conformity for personal independence...more
Biography/Memoir
 Debut Author
The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them
by Ekow Eshun
Harper, 07/08/2025
 
In the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger, outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien; one who remains associated with their origins ...more
Biography/Memoir
These Summer Storms: A Novel
by Sarah MacLean
Ballantine Books, 07/08/2025
 
Alice Storm hasn't been welcome at her family's magnificent private island off the Rhode Island coast in five years—not since she was cast out ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Vera, or Faith: A Novel
by Gary Shteyngart
Random House, 07/08/2025
 
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but ...more
Literary Fiction
A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children
by Haley Cohen Gilliland
Simon & Schuster, 07/15/2025
 
In the early hours of March 24th, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumbled with tanks as soldiers seized the presidential palace, overthrowing ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
 Debut Author
Carved in Blood: Hana Westerman Thrillers #3
by Michael Bennett
Atlantic Monthly Press, 07/15/2025
 
When Detective Inspector Jaye Hamilton stops at an Auckland liquor store for a bottle of champagne, it is supposed to be celebratory: his daughter ...more
Thrillers
House of Beth
by Kerry Cullen
Simon & Schuster, 07/15/2025
 
After a heart-wrenching breakup with her girlfriend and a shocking incident at her job, Cassie flees her life as an overworked assistant in New York ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
I DON'T KNOW HOW TO TELL YOU THIS
by Marian Thurm
Delphinium Books, 07/15/2025
 
 I Don't Know How to Tell You This focuses on Judge Rachel Sugarman and her life both inside and outside the courtroom. Rachel is part of a close...more
Literary Fiction
If You Love It, Let It Kill You: A Novel
by Hannah Pittard
Henry Holt and Company, 07/15/2025
 
Divorced and childless by choice, Hana P. has built a cozy life in Lexington, Kentucky, teaching at the university, living with her boyfriend (a ...more
Literary Fiction
Jamaica Road: A Novel
by Lisa Smith
Knopf, 07/15/2025
 
South London, 1981: Daphne is the only Black girl in her class. All she wants is to keep her head down, preferably in a book. The easiest way to ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Make Your Way Home: Stories
by Carrie R. Moore
Tin House Books, 07/15/2025
 
In eleven stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern metropolitan cities, Make Your Way Home follows Black men and ...more
Short Stories
 Debut Author
Matchmaking for Psychopaths
by Tasha Coryell
Berkley Books, 07/15/2025
 
Lexie was expecting a nice evening with her fiancé for her birthday. Instead, her best friend is sitting next to her man, and what's worse: They'...more
Thrillers
Of Flame and Fury
by Mikayla Bridge
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 07/15/2025
 
On an island built from ash and shrouded in fire, phoenix racing is a sport just as profitable as it is deadly.

Kel Varra and her team of underdogs...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
Seesaw Monster: A Novel
by Kotaro Isaka
The Overlook Press, 07/15/2025
 
In Seesaw Monster, international bestselling author Kotaro Isaka employs his hallmarks of kinetic pacing, high-stakes action, and great characters to ...more
Thrillers
The Bewitching
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Del Rey, 07/15/2025
 
"Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches": That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris
by Jennifer Dasal
Bloomsbury Publishing, 07/15/2025
 
In Belle Époque Paris, the Eiffel Tower was newly built, France was experiencing remarkable political stability, and American women were painting...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Convenience Store by the Sea
by Sonoko Machida
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 07/15/2025
 
A quaint seaside town in Kitakyushu, Mojiko is full of hidden delights. And one unexpected treasure is the 24/7 convenience store, Tenderness.

Sure...more
Literary Fiction
The Felons' Ball: A Novel
by Polly Stewart
Harper, 07/15/2025
 
In their younger years, Trey Macready and his best friend Ben Marsh were distributors and enforcers for the local distillers who made their small ...more
Thrillers
Girl, 1983: A Novel
by Linn Ullmann
W.W. Norton & Company, 07/22/2025
 
Paris, a winter's night in 1983. The girl is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a ...more
Literary Fiction
Jules Verne and the Invention of the Future
by Laurence Bergreen
Mariner Books, 07/22/2025
 
His stories inspired the greatest literary minds—J.R.R. Tolkien, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. le Guin. He inspired real-world expeditions and ...more
Biography/Memoir
Necessary Fiction: A Novel
by Eloghosa Osunde
Riverhead Books, 07/22/2025
 
In Necessary Fiction, Eloghosa Osunde poses these provocative questions and many more while exploring the paths and dreams, hopes and fears of more ...more
Literary Fiction
Pan: A Novel
by Michael Clune
Penguin Press, 07/22/2025
 
Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He's been living with his dad in the bleak ...more
Literary Fiction
Salt Bones: A Novel
by Jennifer Givhan
Mulholland, 07/22/2025
 
At the edge of the Salton Sea, in the blistering borderlands, something is out hunting...

Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked ...more
Thrillers
The Midnight Estate
by Kelly Rimmer
Graydon House, 07/22/2025
 
When a misshelved book, The Midnight Estate, catches her attention in her late uncle's library, Fiona is plunged into a tale that mirrors her own&#...more
Historical Fiction
The Phoenix Pencil Company: A Novel
by Allison King
William Morrow, 07/22/2025
 
Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
The Tapestry of Time
by Kate Heartfield
Harper360, 07/22/2025
 
There's a tradition in the Sharp family that some possess the Second Sight. But is it superstition, or true psychic power?

Kit Sharp is in Paris, ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Tilting House
by Ivonne Lamazares
Counterpoint Press, 07/22/2025
 
In the summer of 1993, Yuri, a teenage orphan, lives with her strict, religious Aunt Ruth in a Havana suburb when Mariela, a thirty-four-year-old ...more
Literary Fiction
An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories
by Ed Park
Random House, 07/29/2025
 
In "Machine City," a college student's role in a friend's movie causes lines to blur between his character and his true self. In "Slide to Unlock," a ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Short Stories
Angel Down: A Novel
by Daniel Kraus
Atria Books, 07/29/2025
 
Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Historical Fiction
Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy
by Tre Johnson
Dutton, 07/29/2025
 
Black genius sits at the heart of the American story. In his probing essay collection, Black Genius, cultural critic Tre Johnson examines how Black ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Essays
 Debut Author
Lonely Crowds: A Novel
by Stephanie Wambugu
Little Brown & Company, 07/29/2025
 
Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl's school on a ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Simplicity: A Novel
by Mattie Lubchansky
Pantheon Books, 07/29/2025
 
In 1977, a group called The Spiritual Association of Peers decamps to the woods of the Catskills, taking over an abandoned summer camp. They name ...more
Graphic Novels
The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive
by Mathelinda Nabugodi
Knopf, 07/29/2025
 
A scrap of Coleridge's handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair. Percy Shelley's gilded ...more
Biography/Memoir
Automatic Noodle
by Annalee Newitz
Tordotcom, 08/05/2025
 
You don't have to eat food to know the way to a city's heart is through its stomach. So when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Every Summer After: Deluxe Edition
by Carley Fortune
Berkley Books, 08/05/2025
 
They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too ...more
Romance
 Debut Author
God and Sex
by Jon Raymond
Simon & Schuster, 08/05/2025
 
What if God spoke to you? Would you hear Him? Would you obey His command?

Arthur Zinn, an author of high-end spiritual texts, has fallen in love ...more
Romance
L.A. Women
by Ella Berman
Berkley Books, 08/05/2025
 
After a steady descent from literary stardom, Lane Warren is back. She's secured a new book deal based off the life of her sometimes friend and more ...more
Historical Fiction
Mistress of Bones: A Novel
by Maria Z. Medina
Wednesday Books, 08/05/2025
 
It's been thousands of years since the gods lifted the continents into the air so humanity could thrive, chaining the lands down with their bones and ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Moderation: A Novel
by Elaine Castillo
Viking, 08/05/2025
 
Girlie Delmundo is the greatest content moderator in the world, and despite the setbacks of financial crises, climate catastrophe, and a global ...more
Literary Fiction
Murder by the Book: A Novel
by Amie Schaumberg
MIRA, 08/05/2025
 
She's been posed to look like a painting of Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet, the scene taunting the police with messages that they don't understand....more
Thrillers
 Debut Author
Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses (Embers)
by M. G. Sheftall
Dutton, 08/05/2025
 
On August 6, 1945, the United States unleashed a weapon unlike anything the world had ever seen. Then, just three days later, when Japan showed no ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
People Like Us: A Novel
by Jason Mott
Dutton, 08/05/2025
 
People Like Us is Jason Mott's electric new novel. It is not memoir, yet it has deeply personal connections to Jason's life. And while rooted in ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Literary Fiction
Sunbirth
by An Yu
Grove Press, 08/05/2025
 
In Five Poems Lake, a small village surrounded by impenetrable deserts, the sun is slowly disappearing overhead. A young woman keeps one apprehensive ...more
Literary Fiction
Tantrum
by Rachel Eve Moulton
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 08/05/2025
 
Thea's third pregnancy was her easiest. She wasn't consumed with anxiety about the baby. She wasn't convinced it was going to be born green, or have a...more
Literary Fiction
The Hounding: A Novel
by Xenobe Purvis
Henry Holt and Company, 08/05/2025
 
Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny, from strange creatures that wash up on ...more
Historical Fiction
The Magician of Tiger Castle
by Louis Sachar
Ace Books, 08/05/2025
 
Long ago and far away (and somewhere south of France) lies the kingdom of Esquaveta. There, Princess Tullia is in nearly as much peril as her ...more
Critics' Consensus:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why
by Madeleine Beekman
Simon & Schuster, 08/05/2025
 
Journeying to the dawn of Homo sapiens, evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman reveals the "happy accidents" hidden in our molecular biology—...more
Science, Health and the Environment
We Should All Be Birds: A Memoir
by Brian Buckbee
Tin House Books, 08/05/2025
 
On a spring evening in Montana, Brian Buckbee encounters an injured baby pigeon. Heartbroken after the loss of the love of his life and increasingly ...more
Biography/Memoir
When the Cranes Fly South: A Novel
by Lisa Ridzén
Vintage, 08/05/2025
 
Bo is running out of time. Yet time is one of the few things he's got left. These days, his quiet existence is broken up only by daily visits from his...more
Literary Fiction
What Hunger
by Catherine Dang
Little Simon, 08/12/2025
 
It's the summer before high school, and Ronny Nguyen finds herself too young for work, too old for cartoons. Her days are spent in a small backyard, ...more
Literary Fiction
White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War, Then Rewrote the History
by Ann Bausum
Roaring Brook Press, 08/12/2025
 
Warning: This is not your average U.S. history book.

After the Civil War, the Confederates may have laid down their arms, but they were far from ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Lessons in Magic and Disaster
by Charlie Jane Anders
Tor Books, 08/19/2025
 
A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic—with very unexpected results—in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, ...more
Literary Fiction
Ruth: A Novel
by Kate Riley
Riverhead Books, 08/19/2025
 
Ruth is raised in a snow globe of Christian communism, a world without private property, television, or tolerance for idle questions. Every morning ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
The Possession of Alba Díaz
by Isabel Cañas
Berkley Books, 08/19/2025
 
In 1765, plague sweeps through Zacatecas. Alba flees with her wealthy merchant parents and fiancé, Carlos, to his family's isolated mine for ...more
Thrillers
Happiness and Love: A Novel
by Zoe Dubno
Scribner, 09/02/2025
 
Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic world—a group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Mercy
by Joan Silber
Counterpoint Press, 09/02/2025
 
In the gritty East Village of 1970s New York, Ivan and his best friend, Eddie, a popular local bartender, are dabbling in drugs following a short tour...more
Literary Fiction
A Land So Wide: A Novel
by Erin A. Craig
Pantheon Books, 09/09/2025
 
Like everyone else in the settlement of Mistaken, Greer Mackenzie is trapped. Founded by an ambitious lumber merchant, the village is blessed with ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Play Nice
by Rachel Harrison
Berkley Books, 09/09/2025
 
Clio Louise Barnes leads a picture-perfect life as a stylist and influencer, but beneath the glossy veneer she harbors a not-so glamorous secret: she ...more
The Last Time We Spoke: A Story of Loss
by Jesse Mechanic
Street Noise Books, 09/09/2025
 
Grief never goes away.

When he was a teenager, Jesse Mechanic's mother passed away after a long struggle with cancer. In this memoir, he looks ...more
Graphic Novels
For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran's Women-Led Uprising
by Fatemeh Jamalpour
Pantheon Books, 09/16/2025
 
In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, died after being beaten by police officers who arrested her for not adhering to the ...more
History, Current Affairs and Religion
A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories
by Jonathan Lethem
Ecco, 09/23/2025
 
This dazzling, genre-defying collection from Jonathan Lethem features seven major stories published since his last collection, along with his best ...more
Literary Fiction
Dinner at the Night Library: A Novel
by Hika Harada
Hanover Square Press, 09/30/2025
 
All Otaha Higuchi wants to do is work with books. However, the exhausting nature of her work at a chain bookstore, combined with her paltry salary and...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Great Disasters: A Novel
by Grady Chambers
Tin House Books, 09/30/2025
 
This is the story of how we became. I write those words but remain uncertain what they mean... . Drinking was a part of it. But as much as it was ...more
Literary Fiction
The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Future Food Crisis
by Sam Kass
Crown, 10/07/2025
 
As a chef in high-end restaurants, and later, in the home of then Senator Barack and Michelle Obama, Sam Kass read a lot about how eating organic and ...more
Science, Health and the Environment
Crawl: Stories
by Max Delsohn
Graywolf Press, 10/21/2025
 
What to do when starting testosterone unlocks a newfound desire for men? How to respond when your boss's boss asks if you've had "the surgery" and ...more
Thrillers
The Sister's Curse
by Nicola Solvinic
Berkley Books, 10/21/2025
 
Lieutenant Anna Koray thought she'd finally found solid ground and escaped her past as the daughter of a notorious serial killer. A loving boyfriend, ...more
Thrillers
The Ten Year Affair: A Novel
by Erin Somers
Simon & Schuster, 10/21/2025
 
When Cora meets Sam at a baby group in their small town, the chemistry between them is undeniable. Both are happily married young parents with two ...more
Literary Fiction
The Bone Thief
by Vanessa Lillie
Berkley Books, 10/28/2025
 
In the hours before dawn at a local summer camp, Bureau of Indian Affairs archaeologist Syd Walker receives an alarming call: newly discovered ...more
Thrillers
Every Moment Was You: Notes on Loving and Parting
by Taewoan Ha
Harper, 11/18/2025
 
Every Moment Was You is a deeply moving collection of poems and lyrical essays about the beauty of youth and the pain that comes with transitioning ...more
Romance
I, Medusa: A Novel
by Ayana Gray
Random House, 11/18/2025
 
Meddy has spent her whole life as a footnote in someone else's story. Out of place next to her beautiful, immortal sisters and her parents—both ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
 Debut Author
The Book of Women's Friendship
by Rachel Cooke
W.W. Norton & Company, 11/18/2025
 
As Marilynne Robinson writes in her 1980 novel Housekeeping, "having a sister or friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house." Bringing ...more
Other
The Botanist's Assistant
by Peggy Townsend
Berkley Books, 11/18/2025
 
Plenty of people consider Margaret Finch odd. Six-feet-tall and big-boned, she lives alone in a small cabin in the woods, drives a 20-year-old truck, ...more
Mysteries
Far from the A-List: A Novel
by Stephanie Burns
MIRA, 12/09/2025
 
Former child star Michaela Turner is ready for her next big role—she just doesn't know what it is yet. As someone whose days were once filled ...more
Literary Fiction
 Debut Author
Three Stories of Forgetting
by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida
FSG Originals, 12/09/2025
 
The discrete yet overlapping tales in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida's Three Stories of Forgetting explore the lives of three men―perhaps already ...more
Literary Fiction
Select your view:
Order books by:

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.