Dear Edward
by
Ann Napolitano
Dial Books, 01/06/2020
What does it mean not just to survive, but to truly live? One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his ...
more
Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin
by
Jerome Charyn
Bellevue Literary Press, 01/07/2020
The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him "...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different
by
Chuck Palahniuk
Grand Central Publishing, 01/07/2020
In this spellbinding blend of memoir and insight, bestselling author Chuck Palahniuk shares stories and generous advice on what makes writing powerful...
more
Creatures
by
Crissy Van Meter
Algonquin Books, 01/07/2020
Evie grew up with her well-meaning but negligent father, surviving on the money he made dealing the island's world-famous strain of marijuana,&#...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America
by
Marcia Chatelain
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 01/07/2020
Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald's have long symbolized capitalism...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Hindsight (Kendra Michaels): Kendra Michaels #7
by
Iris Johansen
Grand Central Publishing, 01/07/2020
Dr. Kendra Michaels, blind for the first twenty years of her life before gaining her sight via a revolutionary surgical procedure, is a renowned ...
more
Jane Anonymous
by
Laurie Faria Stolarz
Wednesday Books, 01/07/2020
Seven months.
That's how long I was kept captive.
Locked in a room with a bed, refrigerator, and adjoining bathroom, I was instructed to eat, bathe, ...
more
Lady Hotspur
by
Tessa Gratton
Tor Books, 01/07/2020
STRIKE FAST, LOVE HARD, LIVE FOREVERThis is the motto of the Lady Knights--sworn to fealty under a struggling kingdom, promised to defend the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
One of Us Is Next: One of Us Is Lying #2
by
Karen M. McManus
Delacorte Press, 01/07/2020
Come on, Bayview, you know you've missed this.A ton of copycat gossip apps have popped up since Simon died, but in the year since the Bayview four ...
more
Qualityland
by
Marc-Uwe Kling
Grand Central Publishing, 01/07/2020
Welcome to QualityLand, the best country on Earth. Here, a universal ranking system determines the social advantages and career opportunities of every...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
SAM: One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize the Way We Build
by
Jonathan Waldman
Avid Reader Press, 01/07/2020
Humans have landed men on the moon, programmed cars to drive themselves, and put the knowledge of our entire civilization in your back pocket. But no ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
Spitfire: Livy Nash Mystery #1
by
M. L. Huie
Crooked Lane Books, 01/07/2020
How far would you go for vengeance?It's V-E Day 1946 in London. World War II is long over, and former spy Livy Nash is celebrating with her third ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Mysteries
Debut Author
The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact: A Novel (The American People Series)
by
Larry Kramer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 01/07/2020
Ranging from the brothels of 1950s Washington, D.C., to the activism of the 1980s and beyond, Kramer offers an elaborate phantasmagoria of bigoted ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Art of Dying: Dr. James Simpson Mystery #2
by
Ambrose Parry
Canongate Books, 01/07/2020
Simpson's protégé Will Raven and former housemaid Sarah Fisher are determined to clear their patron's name. But with Raven battling against ...
more
The Magical Language of Others
by
E. J. Koh
Tin House Books, 01/07/2020
The Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Welcome to the Pine Away Motel and Cabins
by
Katarina Bivald
Sourcebooks, 01/07/2020
The Pine Creek Motel has seen better days. Henny would call it charming, but she's always seen the best in things. Like now, when she's just met an ...
more
Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis
by
Ada Calhoun
Grove Press, 01/07/2020
When Ada Calhoun found herself in the throes of a midlife crisis, she thought that she had no right to complain. She was married with children and a ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
by
David Zucchino
Atlantic Monthly Press, 01/07/2020
By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
You Were There Too
by
Colleen Oakley
Berkley Books, 01/07/2020
Mia Graydon's life looks picket-fence perfect; she has the house, her loving husband, and dreams of starting a family. But she has other dreams too&#...
more
The Better Liar
by
Tanen Jones
Ballantine Books, 01/12/2020
"Like most of the dead, I want to be remembered."
Robin Voigt is dead. If Leslie had arrived at her sister's cramped Las Vegas apartment just hours...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
A Good Man
by
Ani Katz
Penguin Books, 01/14/2020
Thomas Martin was a devoted family man who had all the trappings of an enviable life: a beautiful wife and daughter, a well-appointed home on ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Abigail
by
Magda Szabo
New York Review Books, 01/14/2020
Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó's books in her native Hungary. ...
more
Black Girl Unlimited: The Remarkable Story of a Teenage Wizard
by
Echo Brown
Henry Holt and Company, 01/14/2020
Echo Brown is a wizard from the East Side, where apartments are small and parents suffer addictions to the white rocks. Yet there is magic......
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Cleanness
by
Garth Greenwell
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 01/14/2020
Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the ...
more
Imaginary Museums
by
Nicolette Polek
Soft Skull Press, 01/14/2020
They find themselves in bathhouses, sports bars, grocery stores, and forests in search of exits, pink tennis balls, licorice, and independence. Yet ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Short Stories
Debut Author
Lord of All the Dead: A nonfiction novel
by
Javier Cercas
Knopf, 01/14/2020
Javier Cercas grew up hearing the legend of his adored great-uncle Manuel Mena, who died at nineteen in the bloodiest battle of the Spanish Civil War-...
more
Oligarchy
by
Scarlett Thomas
Counterpoint Press, 01/14/2020
It's already the second week of term when Natasha, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives at a vast English country house for her first day of ...
more
The Impossible First: From Fire to Ice—Crossing Antarctica Alone
by
Colin O'Brady
Scribner, 01/14/2020
Prior to December 2018, no individual had ever crossed the landmass of Antarctica alone, without support and completely human powered. Yet, Colin O'...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
The Rabbit Hunter: Joona Linna #6
by
Lars Kepler
Knopf, 01/14/2020
It begins with a nursery rhyme. Nineteen minutes later you die. A masked stranger stands in the shadows. He watches his victim through the window. He ...
more
The Vanished Birds
by
Simon Jimenez
Del Rey, 01/14/2020
"This is when your life begins." Nia Imani is a woman out of place and outside of time. Decades of travel through the stars are condensed into mere ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
by
Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn
Knopf, 01/14/2020
With stark poignancy and political dispassion,
Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America." The authors tell this story, in part, through the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Uncanny Valley
by
Anna Wiener
MCD, 01/14/2020
In her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener―stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Zed
by
Joanna Kavenna
Doubleday, 01/14/2020
One corporation has made a perfect world based on a perfect algorithm ... now what to do with all these messy people?
Lionel Bigman is dead. ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
A Long Petal of the Sea
by
Isabel Allende
Bloomsbury USA, 01/21/2020
Victor Dalmau is a young doctor when he is caught up in the Spanish Civil War, a tragedy that leaves his life - and the fate of his country - forever ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
American Queenmaker: How Missy Meloney Brought Women Into Politics
by
Julie Des Jardins
Basic Books, 01/21/2020
Marie "Missy" Mattingly Meloney was born in 1878, in an America where women couldn't vote. Yet she recognized the power that women held as consumers ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Family Torn Apart by War
by
Elisabeth Asbrink
Other Press, 01/21/2020
Otto Ullman, a Jewish boy, was sent from Austria to Sweden right before the outbreak of World War II. There he became best friends with Ingvar Kamprad...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
My Red Heaven
by
Lance Olsen
Dzanc Books, 01/21/2020
The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Not So Pure and Simple
by
Lamar Giles
HarperTeen, 01/21/2020
Del has had a crush on Kiera Westing since kindergarten. And now, during their junior year, she's finally available. So when Kiera volunteers for an ...
more
Remembrance
by
Rita Woods
Forge Books, 01/21/2020
Remembrance…It's a rumor, a whisper passed in the fields and veiled behind sheets of laundry. A hidden stop on the underground road to freedom, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Small Days and Nights: A Novel
by
Tishani Doshi
W.W. Norton & Company, 01/21/2020
Escaping her failing marriage in the United States, Grace Marisola has returned to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she receives an ...
more
Stateway's Garden
by
Jasmon Drain
Random House, 01/21/2020
Before being torn down in 2007, the Stateway Gardens public housing projects on Chicago's South Side were ridden with deprivation and crime. But for ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Short Stories
Debut Author
The Blaze
by
Chad Dundas
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 01/21/2020
Having lost much of his memory from a traumatic brain injury sustained in Iraq, army veteran Matthew Rose is called back to Montana after his father's...
more
The Contact Paradox: Challenging our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
by
Keith Cooper
Bloomsbury Sigma, 01/21/2020
What will happen if humanity makes contact with another civilization on a different planet? In
The Contact Paradox, space journalist Keith Cooper ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
Debut Author
The Janes: Alice Vega #2
by
Louisa Luna
Doubleday, 01/21/2020
On the outskirts of San Diego, the bodies of two young women are discovered. They have no names, no IDs, and no family looking for them. Fearing the ...
more
The Wife and the Widow
by
Christian White
Minotaur Books, 01/21/2020
Set against the backdrop of an eerie island town in the dead of winter,
The Wife and the Widow is an unsettling thriller told from two perspectives: ...
more
The Words I Never Wrote
by
Jane Thynne
Ballantine Books, 01/21/2020
New York, present day: On a whim, Juno Lambert buys a 1931 Underwood typewriter that once belonged to celebrated journalist Cordelia Capel. Within its...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time
by
Gaia Vince
Basic Books, 01/21/2020
What enabled us to go from simple stone tools to smartphones? How did bands of hunter-gatherers evolve into multinational empires? Readers of
Sapiens ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
What I Carry
by
Jennifer Longo
Random House Books for Younger Readers, 01/21/2020
Growing up in foster care, Muir has lived in many houses. And if she's learned one thing, it is to
Pack. Light. Carry only what fits in a suitcase.
...
more
A Beautiful Crime
by
Christopher Bollen
Harper, 01/28/2020
When Nick Brink and his boyfriend Clay Guillory meet up on the Grand Canal in Venice, they have a plan in mind—and it doesn't involve a vacation...
more
Cartier's Hope: A Novel
by
M. J. Rose
Atria Books, 01/28/2020
New York, 1910: A city of extravagant balls in Fifth Avenue mansions and poor immigrants crammed into crumbling Lower East Side tenements. A city ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Hi Five: IQ #4
by
Joe Ide
Mulholland, 01/28/2020
Cristiana is the daughter of the biggest arms dealers on the West Coast, Angus Byrne. She's also the sole witness and number one suspect in the murder...
more
Highfire
by
Eoin Colfer
Harper Perennial, 01/28/2020
In the days of yore, he flew the skies and scorched angry mobs—now he hides from swamp tour boats and rises only with the greatest reluctance ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Interior Chinatown: A Novel
by
Charles Yu
Pantheon Books, 01/28/2020
Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental ...
more
Into the Fire: Orphan X #5
by
Gregg Hurwitz
Minotaur Books, 01/28/2020
Evan Smoak lives by his own code.
Once he was known as Orphan X. Trained as an off-the-books government assassin and spoken about only in whispers, ...
more
Murder at the Capitol: Lincoln's White House Mystery #3
by
C. M. Gleason
Kensington, 01/28/2020
On Independence Day, the citizens of Washington, DC, are celebrating as if there isn't a war. But the city is teeming with green Union recruits while ...
more
Show Them a Good Time
by
Nicole Flattery
Bloomsbury USA, 01/28/2020
A sense of otherworldly menace is at work in the fiction of Nicole Flattery, but the threats are all too familiar.
Show Them a Good Time tells the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Short Stories
Debut Author
Spring Rain: A Graphic Memoir of Love, Madness, and Revolutions
by
Andy Warner
St. Martin's Griffin, 01/28/2020
In 2005 Andy Warner traveled to Lebanon to study literature in Beirut, one of the world's most cosmopolitan and storied cities. Twenty-one years old ...
more
When You Trap a Tiger
by
Tae Keller
Random House Children's Books, 01/28/2020
Some stories refuse to stay bottled up...When Lily and her family move in with her sick grandmother, a magical tiger straight out of her halmoni's ...
more
18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics
by
Bruce Goldfarb
Sourcebooks, 02/04/2020
Frances Glessner Lee, born a socialite to a wealthy and influential Chicago family in the 1870s, was never meant to have a career, let alone one ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
by
Holly Jackson
Delacorte Press, 02/04/2020
Everyone in Fairview knows the story.
Pretty and popular high school senior Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then killed ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
A Perfect Explanation
by
Eleanor Anstruther
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 02/04/2020
Enid Campbell, granddaughter of a duke, grew up surrounded by servants, wanting for nothing except love. But when her brother died in the First World ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
Behind Every Lie
by
Christina McDonald
Gallery Books, 02/04/2020
If you can't remember it, how do you prove you didn't do it? Eva Hansen wakes in the hospital after being struck by lightning and discovers her mother...
more
Black Sunday
by
Tola Rotimi Abraham
Catapult, 02/04/2020
Twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike are enjoying a relatively comfortable life in Lagos in 1996. Then their mother loses her job due to political strife, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Brother & Sister
by
Diane Keaton
Knopf, 02/04/2020
When they were children in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1950s, Diane Keaton and her younger brother, Randy, were best friends and companions: ...
more
Everywhere You Don't Belong
by
Gabriel Bump
Algonquin Books, 02/04/2020
Claude isn't dangerous or brilliant—he's an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Half Broke
by
Ginger Gaffney
W.W. Norton & Company, 02/04/2020
At the start of this remarkable story of recovery, healing, and redemption, Ginger Gaffney answers a call to help retrain the troubled horses at an ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
King and the Dragonflies
by
Kacen Callender
Scholastic, 02/04/2020
Twelve-year-old Kingston James is sure his brother Khalid has turned into a dragonfly. When Khalid unexpectedly passed away, he shed what was his ...
more
Mazes of Power: The Broken Trust #1
by
Juliette Wade
DAW Books, 02/04/2020
The cavern city of Pelismara has stood for a thousand years. The Great Families of the nobility cling to the myths of their golden age while the city'...
more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes
by
Kathleen West
Berkley Books, 02/04/2020
When a devoted teacher comes under pressure for her progressive curriculum and a helicopter mom goes viral on social media, two women at odds with ...
more
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock
by
Christina Lane
University Of Chicago Press, 02/04/2020
In 1933, Joan Harrison was a twenty-six-year-old former salesgirl with a dream of escaping both her stodgy London suburb and the dreadful ...
more
Resistance Women
by
Jennifer Chiaverini
William Morrow, 02/04/2020
After Wisconsin graduate student Mildred Fish marries brilliant German economist Arvid Harnack, she accompanies him to his German homeland, where a ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Smacked: A Story of White-Collar Ambition, Addiction, and Tragedy
by
Eilene Zimmerman
Random House, 02/04/2020
Something was wrong with Peter. Eilene Zimmerman noticed that her ex-husband looked thin, seemed distracted, and was frequently absent from activities...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
The Girl with the Louding Voice
by
Abi Daré
Dutton, 02/04/2020
Adunni is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who knows what she wants: an education. This, her mother has told her, is the only way to get a "louding ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Paris Diversion: A Novel
by
Chris Pavone
Ballantine Books, 02/04/2020
American expat Kate Moore drops her kids at the international school, makes her rounds of chores, and meets her husband Dexter at their regular caf&#...
more
The Regrets
by
Amy Bonnaffons
Little Brown & Company, 02/04/2020
For weeks, Rachel has been noticing the same golden-haired young man sitting at her Brooklyn bus stop, staring off with a melancholy air. When, one ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Toni Morrison Book Club
by
Juda Bennett
University of Wisconsin Press, 02/04/2020
Tackling everything from first love and
Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read ...
more
The Tradition
by
Jericho Brown
Copper Canyon Press, 02/04/2020
Jericho Brown's daring new book
The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Things in Jars
by
Jess Kidd
Atria Books, 02/04/2020
Bridie Devine—female detective extraordinaire—is confronted with the most baffling puzzle yet: the kidnapping of Christabel Berwick, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Verge
by
Lidia Yuknavitch
Riverhead Books, 02/04/2020
I tell you, do not go near that place. Do not go near it. Graywolves guard the ground there. Girls are growing from guts, enough for a body and ...more
Bird Summons
by
Leila Aboulela
Black Cat, 02/06/2020
Salma, happily married, tries every day to fit into life in Britain. When her first love contacts her, she is tempted to risk it all and return to ...
more
1774: The Long Year of Revolution
by
Mary Beth Norton
Knopf, 02/11/2020
This masterly work of historical writing, Mary Beth Norton's first in almost a decade, looks at the sixteen months during which the traditional ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home
by
Nicole Chung, Mensah Demary
Catapult, 02/11/2020
Victoria Blanco relates how those with family in both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez experience life on the border. Nina Li Coomes recalls the ...
more
Abandoned: America's Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection
by
Anne Kim
The New Press, 02/11/2020
For the majority of young adults today, the transition to independence is a time of excitement and possibility. But nearly five million young people&#...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI
by
Kate Winkler Dawson
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 02/11/2020
Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities--beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books--sat an ...
more
And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges
by
Amber Sparks
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 02/11/2020
Exciting fans of such writers as Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Carmen Maria Machado with prose that shimmers and stings, Amber Sparks holds a ...
more
Eden Mine
by
S. M. Hulse
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 02/11/2020
Jo Faber is packing up the home she and her brother Samuel inherited. For generations, the Fabers have lived near Eden Mine, but Jo and Samuel will be...
more
I Know You Know Who I Am
by
Peter Kispert
Penguin Books, 02/11/2020
In the title story, the narrator, desperate to save a love affair on the rocks, hires an actor to play a friend he invented in order to seem less ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Short Stories
Debut Author
Ink in the Blood: Ink in the Blood #1
by
Kim Smejkal
Houghton Mifflin Books For Younger Readers, 02/11/2020
Celia Sand and her best friend, Anya Burtoni, are inklings for the esteemed religion of Profeta. Using magic, they tattoo followers with beautiful ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
My Part of Her
by
Javad Djavahery
Restless Books, 02/11/2020
For our unnamed confessor, the summer months spent on the Caspian Sea during the 1970s are a magically transformative experience. There, he is not the...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Our Fathers
by
Rebecca Wait
Europa Editions, 02/11/2020
Tommy, the only survivor of the terrible crime, has returned to Skellag many years later. Faced with this reminder of the horrors that took place ...
more
Shuggie Bain
by
Douglas Stuart
Grove Press, 02/11/2020
Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Something That May Shock and Discredit You
by
Daniel Mallory Ortberg
Atria Books, 02/11/2020
Sometimes you just have to yell.
New York Times bestselling author of
Texts from Jane Eyre Daniel Mallory Ortberg has mastered the art of "poetic ...
more
The Bear
by
Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Literary Press, 02/11/2020
They possess a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches the girl how to fish ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Boatman's Daughter
by
Andy Davidson
MCD, 02/11/2020
Ever since her father was killed when she was just a child, Miranda Crabtree has kept her head down and her eyes up, ferrying contraband for a mad ...
more
The Burn: Detective Betty #2
by
Kathleen Kent
Mulholland, 02/11/2020
She's back at work as a narcotics detective, but something isn't right--at work, where someone has been assassinating confidential informants, or at ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever
by
Kent Garrett, Jeanne Ellsworth
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 02/11/2020
In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited an unprecedented eighteen "Negro" boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later they would ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
The Unspoken Name: The Serpent Gates #1
by
A. K. Larkwood
Tor Books, 02/11/2020
What if you knew how and when you will die?Csorwe does―she will climb the mountain, enter the Shrine of the Unspoken, and gain the most honored ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
The Women in Black
by
Madeleine St John
Scribner, 02/11/2020
The women in black, so named for the black frocks they wear while working at an upscale department store called Goode's, are run off their feet ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
Turtle Under Ice
by
Juleah del Rosario
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 02/11/2020
Rowena feels like her family is a frayed string of lights that someone needs to fix with electrical tape. After her mother died a few years ago, she ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Tyll
by
Daniel Kehlmann
Pantheon Books, 02/11/2020
Daniel Kehlmann masterfully weaves the fates of many historical figures into this enchanting and picturesque book of magical realism and adventure. It...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize)
by
Joan Frank
University of New Mexico Press, 02/15/2020
Through the author's travels in Europe and the United States,
Try to Get Lost explores the quest for place that compels and defines us: the things we ...
more
Amnesty
by
Aravind Adiga
Scribner, 02/18/2020
Danny—formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam—is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. ...
more
Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
by
David Enrich
Custom House, 02/18/2020
On a rainy Sunday in 2014, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank was found hanging in his London apartment. Bill Broeksmit had helped build the 150-year...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Home Making
by
Lee Matalone
Harper Perennial, 02/18/2020
Cybil is a war child—the result of a brief affair between a young Japanese woman and a French soldier—who at a young age is transplanted ...
more
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Real Life
by
Brandon Taylor
Riverhead Books, 02/18/2020
A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend—and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Adventurer's Son
by
Roman Dial
William Morrow, 02/18/2020
In the predawn hours of July 10, 2014, the twenty-seven-year-old son of preeminent Alaskan scientist and National Geographic Explorer Roman Dial, ...
more
The Aosawa Murders
by
Riku Onda
Bitter Lemon Press, 02/18/2020
The only surviving links to what might have happened are a cryptic verse that could be the killer's, and the physician's bewitching blind daughter, ...
more
The Last Passenger: Charles Lenox Mysteries
by
Charles Finch
Minotaur Books, 02/18/2020
London, 1855. A young and eager Charles Lenox faces his toughest case yet: a murder without a single clue. Slumped in a third-class car at Paddington ...
more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Lucky One
by
Lori Rader-Day
William Morrow, 02/18/2020
Most people who go missing are never found. But Alice was the lucky one... As a child, Alice was stolen from her backyard in a tiny Indiana...
more
The Lucky Star
by
William T. Vollmann
Viking, 02/18/2020
In such earlier works of fiction as
The Rainbow Stories and
The Royal Family, William T. Vollmann wrote of pimps, prostitutes, addicts and homeless ...
more
The Second Chance Club: Hardship and Hope After Prison
by
Jason Hardy
Simon & Schuster, 02/18/2020
Prompted by a dead-end retail job and a vague desire to increase the amount of justice in his hometown, Jason Hardy became a parole officer in New ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
Firewatching
by
Russ Thomas
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 02/20/2020
WILL IGNITE
Soon the fires spread to offices, homes, people. The Firewatcher's followers are growing and they have one particular blaze in mind &#...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
142 Ostriches
by
April Davila
Kensington, 02/25/2020
When Tallulah Jones was thirteen, her grandmother plucked her from the dank Oakland apartment she shared with her unreliable mom and brought her to ...
more
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Apartment
by
Teddy Wayne
Bloomsbury USA, 02/25/2020
In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne's
Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his father's dime and living in an ...
more
Apeirogon
by
Colum McCann
Random House, 02/25/2020
Colum McCann's most ambitious work to date,
Apeirogon—named for a shape with a countably infinite number of sides—is a tour de force ...
more
Greenwood
by
Michael Christie
Hogarth Books, 02/25/2020
It's 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world...
more
Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier
by
Benjamin E. Park
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 02/25/2020
Compared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, often treated as fringe cultists or marginalized polygamists unworthy of serious ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
by
Cathy Park Hong
One World, 02/25/2020
Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of ...
more
Pretty as a Picture
by
Elizabeth Little
Viking, 02/25/2020
Marissa Dahl, a shy but successful film editor, travels to a small island off the coast of Delaware to work with the legendary--and legendarily ...
more
Red Hood
by
Elana K. Arnold
Balzer + Bray, 02/25/2020
You are alone in the woods, seen only by the unblinking yellow moon. Your hands are empty. You are nearly naked. And the wolf is angry.Since her ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Red Letter Days
by
Sarah-Jane Stratford
Berkley Books, 02/25/2020
Nineteen-fifties America is bright and full of promise, and Phoebe Adler, a New Yorker brimming with talent and ambition, is forging her way as the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America
by
Adam Cohen
Penguin Press, 02/25/2020
In the early 1960s, the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren was at the height of its power, expanding civil rights for the poor and ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Girl in White Gloves: A Novel of Grace Kelly
by
Kerri Maher
Berkley Books, 02/25/2020
A life in snapshots. Grace knows what people see. She's the Cinderella story. An icon of glamor and elegance frozen in dazzling Technicolor. The ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
The Last Smile in Sunder City: The Fetch Philips Archive #1
by
Luke Arnold
Orbit, 02/25/2020
Welcome to Sunder City. The magic is gone but the monsters remain.
I'm Fetch Phillips, just like it says on the window. There are a few things you ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
The Warsaw Protocol: Cotton Malone #15
by
Steve Berry
Minotaur Books, 02/25/2020
After former Justice Department agent Cotton Malone witnesses the theft of one of them, he learns from his old boss, Stephanie Nelle, that a private ...
more
These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson
by
Martha Ackmann
W.W. Norton & Company, 02/25/2020
On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, "All things are ready" and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending...
more
Anger Is My Middle Name
by
Lisbeth Zornig Andersen
Amazon, 03/01/2020
Born to a violently dysfunctional home in working-class Denmark, Lisbeth Zornig Andersen and her three older brothers were bounced between foster care...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Actress
by
Anne Enright
W.W. Norton & Company, 03/03/2020
Katherine O'Dell is an Irish theater legend. As her daughter Norah retraces her mother's celebrated career and bohemian life, she delves into long-...
more
Blackwood
by
Michael Farris Smith
Little Brown & Company, 03/03/2020
The town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, though those who've held on have little memory of when that was. Myer, the county's aged, ...
more
City of Margins
by
William Boyle
Pegasus Books, 03/03/2020
In
City of Margins, the lives of several lost souls intersect in Southern Brooklyn in the early 1990s. There's Donnie Parascandolo, a disgraced ex-cop...
more
I've Been Wrong Before
by
Evan James
Atria Books, 03/03/2020
From the award-winning essay "Lover's Theme," in which Evan James explores the life of a drag queen in San Francisco, to his poignant story of coming ...
more
Long Range: A Joe Pickett Novel #20
by
C. J. Box
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 03/03/2020
When Joe Pickett is asked to join the rescue efforts for the victim of a startling grizzly attack, he reluctantly leaves his district behind. One ...
more
Only Mostly Devastated
by
Sophie Gonzales
Wednesday Books, 03/03/2020
Will Tavares is the dream summer fling―he's fun, affectionate, kind―but just when Ollie thinks he's found his Happily Ever After, summer ...
more
Please See Us
by
Caitlin Mullen
Gallery Books, 03/03/2020
Summer has come to Atlantic City but the boardwalk is empty of tourists, the casino lights have dimmed, and two Jane Does are laid out in the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Postcolonial Love Poem
by
Natalie Diaz
Graywolf Press, 03/03/2020
Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit
by
Eliese Colette Goldbach
Flatiron Books, 03/03/2020
Steel is the only thing that shines in the belly of the mill...To ArcelorMittal Steel Eliese is known as #6691: Utility Worker, but this was never her...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Sharks in the Time of Saviors
by
Kawai Strong Washburn
MCD, 03/03/2020
In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Temporary
by
Hilary Leichter
Coffee House Press, 03/03/2020
Whether it's shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Exhibition of Persephone Q
by
Jessi Jezewska Stevens
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 03/03/2020
Now, instead of sleeping, Percy is spending her nights taking walks through her neighborhood, all the while fretting over her marriage, her impending ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories
by
Sam Pink
Soft Skull Press, 03/03/2020
Braving the neon mountains to return with blue raspberry concentrate.
Tearing out sundae cone fangs from the mouths of snow beasts.
And so on.
...
more
The Lady of the Lake: Brighton Mystery #7
by
Peter Guttridge
Severn House, 03/03/2020
When Major Richard Rabbitt, owner of a large estate in Sussex, is found floating in a lake belonging to Nimue Grace, a charismatic former Hollywood ...
more
The Last Taxi Driver
by
Lee Durkee
Tin House Books, 03/03/2020
Written by a former cabbie,
The Last Taxi Driver is a darkly comic novel about a middle-aged hackie's daylong descent into madness, ...
more
The Midnight Lie
by
Marie Rutkoski
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 03/03/2020
Where Nirrim lives, crime abounds, a harsh tribunal rules, and society's pleasures are reserved for the High Kith. Life in the Ward is grim and ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Night Watchman
by
Louise Erdrich
Harper, 03/03/2020
Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
The Two Lives of Lydia Bird
by
Josie Silver
Ballantine Books, 03/03/2020
Written with Josie Silver's trademark warmth and wit,
The Two Lives of Lydia Bird is a powerful and thrilling love story about the what-ifs ...
more
These Ghosts Are Family
by
Maisy Card
Simon & Schuster, 03/03/2020
Stanford Solomon has a shocking, thirty-year-old secret. And it's about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War, Volume I: July 1937-May 1942
by
Richard B. Frank
W.W. Norton & Company, 03/03/2020
In 1937, the swath of the globe east from India to the Pacific Ocean enclosed half the world's population, all save a fraction enduring under some ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Wicked As You Wish: A Hundred Names for Magic #1
by
Rin Chupeco
Sourcebooks, 03/03/2020
Many years ago, the magical Kingdom of Avalon was left desolate and encased in ice when the evil Snow Queen waged war on the powerful country. Its ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Fiebre Tropical
by
Juliana Delgado Lopera
Feminist Press, 03/04/2020
Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up in an evangelical church, replete with abstinent salsa dancers and baptisms for the dead. But there, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
A Phoenix First Must Burn: Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic, Resistance, and Hope
by
Patrice Caldwell
Penguin Young Readers Group, 03/10/2020
Evoking Beyoncé's
Lemonade for a teen audience, these authors who are truly Octavia Butler's heirs, have woven worlds to create a stunning ...
more
And They Called It Camelot: A Novel of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis
by
Stephanie Marie Thornton
Berkley Books, 03/10/2020
Few of us can claim to be the authors of our fate. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy knows no other choice. With the eyes of the world watching, Jackie uses ...
more
Historical Fiction
Before Familiar Woods
by
Ian Pisarcik
Crooked Lane Books, 03/10/2020
On the outskirts of a town too tired for its own happenings, the boys were found dead inside a tent. Three years later, their fathers have disappeared...more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Good Citizens Need Not Fear
by
Maria Reva
Doubleday, 03/10/2020
A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records. So begins Reva's ingeniously intertwined narratives,...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Short Stories
Debut Author
Hammer to Fall: Joe Wilderness #3
by
John Lawton
Atlantic Monthly Press, 03/10/2020
It's London, the swinging sixties, and by all rights MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, his postings are ...
more
In Five Years
by
Rebecca Serle
Atria Books, 03/10/2020
Where do you see yourself in five years? When Type-A Manhattan lawyer Dannie Cohan is asked this question at the most important interview of her ...
more
Into the Abyss: A neuropsychiatrist's notes on troubled minds
by
Prof. Anthony David
Oneworld Publications, 03/10/2020
As a cognitive neuropsychiatrist, Anthony David brings together many fields of enquiry, from social and cognitive psychology to neurology. The key for...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
Debut Author
Line of Sight
by
James Queally
Polis Books, 03/10/2020
He spends his days reluctantly keeping sideways cops out of the crosshairs of the Internal Affairs department. Until Keyonna Jackson, a social justice...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
New Waves
by
Kevin Nguyen
One World, 03/10/2020
Lucas and Margo are fed up. Margo is a brilliant programmer tired of being talked over as the company's sole black employee, and while Lucas is one of...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Revolver Road: Harper McClain #3
by
Christi Daugherty
Minotaur Books, 03/10/2020
Even in the chill of February, no place touches Harper McClain's heart like Savannah. She should be walking beneath the historic city's towering oaks,...
more
The Firsts: The Inside Story of the Women Reshaping Congress
by
Jennifer Steinhauer
Algonquin Books, 03/10/2020
In November 2018, the greatest number of women in American history entered Congress. From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and "the Squad" to "the Badasses" ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Mirror & the Light: Wolf Hall Trilogy
by
Hilary Mantel
Henry Holt and Company, 03/10/2020
"If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?"
With
The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida
by
Clarissa Goenawan
Soho Press, 03/10/2020
University sophomore Miwako Sumida has hanged herself, leaving those closest to her reeling. In the months before her suicide, she was hiding away in ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Three Brothers: Memories of My Family
by
Yan Lianke
Grove Press, 03/10/2020
In this heartfelt, intimate memoir, Yan Lianke brings the reader into his childhood home in Song County in Henan Province, painting a vivid portrait ...
more
When You Were Everything
by
Ashley Woodfolk
Delacorte Press, 03/10/2020
You can't rewrite the past, but you can always choose to start again.It's been twenty-seven days since Cleo and Layla's friendship imploded.
Nearly a ...
more
A Conspiracy of Bones: Temperance Brennan #19
by
Kathy Reichs
Scribner, 03/17/2020
It's sweltering in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Temperance Brennan, still recovering from neurosurgery following an aneurysm, is battling nightmares...
more
After Me Comes the Flood
by
Sarah Perry
Custom House, 03/17/2020
One hot summer's day, John Cole decides to shut his bookshop early, and possibly forever, and drives out of London to see his brother. When his car ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Darling Rose Gold
by
Stephanie Wrobel
Berkley Books, 03/17/2020
Mothers never forget. Daughters never forgive.
For the first eighteen years of her life, Rose Gold Watts believed she was seriously ill. She was ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Hearts of Oak
by
Eddie Robson
Tor Books, 03/17/2020
The buildings grow.
And the city expands.
And the people of the land are starting to behave abnormally.
Or perhaps they've always behaved that way, and ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing: Zofia Turbotynska Mystery #1
by
Maryla Szymiczkowa
Mariner Books, 03/17/2020
Cracow, 1893. Zofia Turbotyńska—professor's wife and socialite—is bored at home, with little to do but plan a charity auction ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Mysteries
Debut Author
Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis
by
Greta Thunberg, Svante Thunberg, Malena Ernman, Beata Ernman
Penguin Books, 03/17/2020
When climate activist Greta Thunberg was eleven, her parents Malena and Svante, and her little sister Beata, were facing a crisis in their own home. ...
more
The Red Lotus
by
Chris Bohjalian
Doubleday, 03/17/2020
The first time Alexis saw Austin, it was a Saturday night. Not in a bar, but in the emergency room where Alexis sutured a bullet wound in Austin's arm...
more
When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
by
Meena Kandasamy
Europa Editions, 03/17/2020
Based on the author's own experience of marriage, soon the newly-wed experiences extreme violence at her husband's hands and finds herself socially ...
more
House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family
by
Hadley Freeman
Simon & Schuster, 03/24/2020
Hadley Freeman knew her grandmother Sara lived in France just as Hitler started to gain power, but rarely did anyone in her family talk about it. Long...
more
Lakewood
by
Megan Giddings
Amistad, 03/24/2020
One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Reads (The Great First Half 2020 Books)
When Lena Johnson's beloved grandmother dies, and the full extent of ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Like Flies from Afar
by
K. Ferrari
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 03/24/2020
A hardboiled noir thriller, a whodunit, a black comedy, and a filthy catalog of the excesses of wealth, this is a Jim Thompson novel for the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Marguerite
by
Marina Kemp
Viking, 03/24/2020
Marguerite Demers is twenty-five when she leaves Paris for the sleepy southern village of Saint Sulpice to take up a job as a live-in nurse. Her ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Marrow and Bone
by
Walter Kempowski
New York Review Books, 03/24/2020
West Germany, 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall: Jonathan Fabrizius, a middle-aged erstwhile journalist, has a comfortable existence in ...
more
Running Out of Road: Buck Schatz #3
by
Daniel Friedman
Minotaur Books, 03/24/2020
Once, Detective Buck Schatz patrolled the city of Memphis, chasing down robbers and killers with a blackjack truncheon and a .357. But he's been ...
more
The City We Became
by
N. K. Jemisin
Orbit, 03/24/2020
Every great city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got six.
But every ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Empress of Salt and Fortune: The Singing Hills Cycle #1
by
Nghi Vo
Tor Books, 03/24/2020
A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies...
more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
The Last Tourist: Milo Weaver #4
by
Olen Steinhauer
Minotaur Books, 03/24/2020
In Olen Steinhauer's bestseller
An American Spy, reluctant CIA agent Milo Weaver thought he had finally put "Tourists"―CIA-trained assassins&#...
more
The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President's Black Family
by
Bettye Kearse
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 03/24/2020
For thousands of years, West African
griots (men) and
griottes (women) have recited the stories of their people. Without this tradition Bettye ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
Tigers, Not Daughters
by
Samantha Mabry
Algonquin Young Readers, 03/24/2020
In the summer after her senior year of high school, Ana, the oldest sister, falls to her death from her bedroom window. A year later, her three ...
more
Wine Girl: The Obstacles, Humiliations, and Triumphs of America's Youngest Sommelier
by
Victoria James
Ecco, 03/24/2020
At just twenty-one, the age when most people are starting to drink (well, legally at least), Victoria James became the country's youngest sommelier at...
more
Code Name Hélène
by
Ariel Lawhon
Doubleday, 03/31/2020
Told in interweaving timelines organized around the four code names Nancy used during the war,
Code Name Hélène is a spellbinding and moving...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Days of Distraction
by
Alexandra Chang
Ecco, 03/31/2020
The plan is to leave. As for how, when, to where, and even why—she doesn't know yet. So begins a journey for the twenty-four-year-old narrator ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Flèche
by
Mary Jean Chan
Faber and Faber, 03/31/2020
Flèche (the French word for 'arrow') is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan's young adult years, when she ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife
by
Bart D. Ehrman
Simon & Schuster, 03/31/2020
What happens when we die? A recent Pew Research poll showed that 72% of Americans believe in a literal heaven, 58% in a literal hell. Most people who ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Hurricane Season
by
Fernanda Melchor
New Directions Publishing, 03/31/2020
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse―by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals―propels the whole village ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
I Want You to Know We're Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir
by
Esther Safran Foer
Tim Duggan Books, 03/31/2020
Esther Safran Foer grew up in a home where the past was too terrible to speak of. The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Valentine
by
Elizabeth Wetmore
Harper, 03/31/2020
Mercy is hard in a place like this... It's February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town's men ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
White Shadow: Ingrid Barrøy #2
by
Roy Jacobsen
MacLehose Press, 04/02/2020
No one can be alone on an island...
But Ingrid is alone on Barry, the island that bears her name, while the war of her childhood has been replaced ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
A Bad Day for Sunshine: Sunshine Vicram Series #1
by
Darynda Jones
St. Martin's Press, 04/07/2020
Del Sol, New Mexico is known for three things: its fry-an-egg-on-the-cement summers, strong cups of coffee―and, now, a nationwide manhunt? Del ...
more
A Tender Thing
by
Emily Neuberger
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 04/07/2020
Growing up in rural Wisconsin, Eleanor O'Hanlon always felt different. In love with musical theater from a young age, she memorized every show album ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
Above Us the Milky Way
by
Fowzia Karimi
Deep Vellum Publishing, 04/07/2020
As a young family attempts to reconstruct their lives in a new and peaceful country, they are daily drawn back to the first land through remembrance ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
And Their Children After Them
by
Nicolas Mathieu
Other Press, 04/07/2020
August 1992. One afternoon during a heatwave in a desolate valley somewhere in eastern France, with its dormant blast furnaces and its lake, fourteen-...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Broken
by
Don Winslow
William Morrow, 04/07/2020
In six intense short novels connected by the themes of crime, corruption, vengeance, justice, loss, betrayal, guilt and redemption,
Broken is #1 ...
more
Chosen Ones
by
Veronica Roth
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 04/07/2020
Fifteen years ago, five ordinary teenagers were singled out by a prophecy to take down an impossibly powerful entity wreaking havoc across North ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
by
Augustine Sedgewick
Penguin Press, 04/07/2020
Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world--one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
DMZ Colony
by
Don Mee Choi
Wave Books, 04/07/2020
Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Godshot
by
Chelsea Bieker
Catapult, 04/07/2020
In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret "assignments," to bring the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Strike Me Down
by
Mindy Mejia
Emily Bestler Books (Atria), 04/07/2020
Nora Trier catches thieves. As a forensic accountant and partner in her downtown Minneapolis firm, she's unearthed millions in every corner of the ...
more
The Ancestor
by
Danielle Trussoni
William Morrow, 04/07/2020
It feels like a fairy tale when Alberta "Bert" Monte receives a letter addressed to "Countess Alberta Montebianco" at her Hudson Valley, New York...
more
The Lost Orphan: A Novel
by
Stacey Halls
Mira, 04/07/2020
London, 1754. Six years after leaving her illegitimate newborn at the Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright returns to reclaim the daughter she has never ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
The Love Story of Missy Carmichael
by
Beth Morrey
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 04/07/2020
The world has changed around seventy-nine-year-old librarian Millicent Carmichael, aka Missy. Though quick to admit that she often found her roles as ...
more
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Other Name: Septology I-II
by
Jon Fosse
Transit Books, 04/07/2020
The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his ...
more
The Pelton Papers
by
Mari Coates
She Writes Press, 04/07/2020
Born into a family ruined by scandal, Agnes becomes part of the lively New York art scene, finding early success in the famous Armory Show of 1913. ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
The Silent Treatment
by
Abbie Greaves
William Morrow, 04/07/2020
A lifetime together.
Six months of silence.
One last chance. By all appearances, Frank and Maggie share a happy, loving marriage. But for the past six...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
We Didn't Ask for This
by
Adi Alsaid
Inkyard Press, 04/07/2020
Central International School's annual lock-in is legendary — and for six students, this year's lock-in is the answer to their dreams. The chance...
more
Braised Pork
by
An Yu
Grove Press, 04/14/2020
One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead. One minute she was breakfasting with him...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940-1976 (A Life of Calder)
by
Jed Perl
Knopf, 04/14/2020
The second and final volume of this magnificent biography begins during World War II, when Calder--known to all as Sandy--and his wife, Louisa, opened...
more
Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and on Us
by
George Zaidan
Dutton, 04/14/2020
Ingredients offers the perspective of a chemist on the stuff we eat, drink, inhale, and smear on ourselves. Apart from the burning question of whether...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
Debut Author
Miss Aluminum
by
Susanna Moore
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 04/14/2020
In 1963 after the death of her mother, seventeen-year-old Susanna Moore leaves her home in Hawai'i with no money, no belongings, and no prospects to ...
more
Simon the Fiddler
by
Paulette Jiles
William Morrow, 04/14/2020
In March 1865, the long and bitter War between the States is winding down. Till now, twenty-three-year-old Simon Boudlin has evaded military duty ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power
by
Deirdre Mask
St. Martin's Press, 04/14/2020
An exuberant and insightful work of popular history of how streets got their names, houses their numbers, and what it reveals about class, race, power...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
The Big Finish
by
Brooke Fossey
Berkley Books, 04/14/2020
Meet Duffy, an old curmudgeon who lives in an assisted living home.
Meet Josie, a desperate young woman who climbs through his window.
Together, they'...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Coyotes of Carthage
by
Steven Wright
Ecco, 04/14/2020
Dre Ross has one more shot. Despite being a successful political consultant, his aggressive tactics have put him on thin ice with his boss, Mrs. Fitz,...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
The Eighth Life
by
Nino Haratischvili
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd, 04/14/2020
At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Three Tigers, One Mountain: A Journey Through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea, and Japan
by
Michael Booth
St. Martin's Griffin, 04/14/2020
There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Creatures of Charm and Hunger: The Diabolist's Library
by
Molly Tanzer
Mariner Books, 04/21/2020
In the waning days of World War II, with Allied victory all but certain, desperate Nazi diabolists search for a demonic superweapon to turn the tide. ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Little Secrets: A Novel
by
Jennifer Hillier
Minotaur Books, 04/21/2020
All it takes to unravel a life is one little secret...
Marin had the perfect life. Married to her college sweetheart, she owns a chain of upscale ...
more
Outsmarting the Sociopath Next Door: How to Protect Yourself Against a Ruthless Manipulator
by
Martha StoutPh.D.
Harmony Books, 04/21/2020
While the best way to deal with a sociopath is to avoid him or her entirely, sometimes circumstance doesn't allow for that. What happens when the time...
more
Advice
Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In
by
Phuc Tran
Flatiron Books, 04/21/2020
In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
The King of Warsaw
by
Szczepan Twardoch
AmazonCrossing, 04/21/2020
It's 1937. Poland is about to catch fire.
In the boxing ring, Jakub Szapiro commands respect, revered as a hero by the Jewish community. Outside, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
The Moment of Tenderness
by
Madeleine L'Engle
Grand Central Publishing, 04/21/2020
This powerful collection of short stories traces an emotional arc inspired by Madeleine L'Engle's early life and career, from her lonely childhood in ...
more
Warhol
by
Blake Gopnik
Ecco, 04/21/2020
To this day, mention the name "Andy Warhol" to almost anyone and you'll hear about his famous images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. But though Pop ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
You Let Me In
by
Camilla Bruce
Tor Books, 04/21/2020
Cassandra Tipp is dead...or is she?
After all, the notorious recluse and eccentric bestselling novelist has always been prone to flights of fancy&#...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto
by
George M. Johnson
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 04/28/2020
From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America
by
Laila Lalami
Pantheon Books, 04/28/2020
Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once ...
more
Inge's War: A German Woman's Story of Family, Secrets, and Survival Under Hitler
by
Svenja O'Donnell
Viking, 04/28/2020
Growing up in Paris as the daughter of a German mother and an Irish father, Svenja O'Donnell knew little of her family's German past. All she knew was...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
by
Nicole R. Fleetwood
Harvard University Press, 04/28/2020
More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and ...
more
Our Riches
by
Kaouther Adimi (author), Chris Andrews (translator)
New Directions Publishing, 04/28/2020
Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (...
more
Sea Wife
by
Amity Gaige
Knopf, 04/28/2020
Juliet is failing to juggle motherhood and her anemic dissertation when her husband, Michael, informs her that he wants to leave his job and buy a ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Swimming in the Dark
by
Tomasz Jedrowski
William Morrow, 04/28/2020
When university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp, he is fascinated yet wary of this handsome, carefree stranger. But a chance...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Take Me Apart
by
Sara Sligar
MCD, 04/28/2020
When the famed photographer Miranda Brand died mysteriously at the height of her career, it sent shock waves through Callinas, California. Decades ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
The Knockout Queen
by
Rufi Thorpe
Knopf, 04/28/2020
Bunny Lampert is the princess of North Shore—beautiful, tall, blond, with a rich real-estate-developer father and a swimming pool in her ...
more
The Sweeney Sisters
by
Lian Dolan
William Morrow, 04/28/2020
Maggie, Eliza, and Tricia Sweeney grew up as a happy threesome in the idyllic seaside town of Southport, Connecticut. But their mother's death from ...
more
This Is All I Got: A New Mother's Search for Home
by
Lauren Sandler
Random House, 04/28/2020
Camila is twenty-two years old and a new mother. She has no family to rely on, no partner, and no home. Despite her intelligence and determination, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
A Good Marriage
by
Kimberly McCreight
Harper, 05/05/2020
Lizzie Kitsakis is working late when she gets the call. Grueling hours are standard at elite law firms like Young & Crane, but they'd be easier to ...
more
Big Summer
by
Jennifer Weiner
Atria Books, 05/05/2020
Six years after the fight that ended their friendship, Daphne Berg is shocked when Drue Cavanaugh walks back into her life, looking as lovely and ...
more
Clap When You Land
by
Elizabeth Acevedo
Quill Tree Books, 05/05/2020
Camino Rios lives for the summers when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this time, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Death in the East: Wyndham & Banerjee Mysteries #4
by
Abir Mukherjee
Pegasus Crime, 05/05/2020
1905, London. As a young constable, Sam Wyndham is on his usual East London beat when he comes across an old flame, Bessie Drummond, attacked in the ...
more
Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking
by
Bill Buford
Knopf, 05/05/2020
Bill Buford turns his inimitable attention from Italian cuisine to the food of France. Baffled by the language, but convinced that he can master the ...
more
Exile Music
by
Jennifer Steil
Viking, 05/05/2020
As a young girl growing up in Vienna in the 1930s, Orly has an idyllic childhood filled with music. Her father plays the viola in the Philharmonic, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Felix Ever After
by
Kacen Callender
Balzer + Bray, 05/05/2020
Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he's painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it's like and why it seems so ...
more
Fracture
by
Andrés Neuman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 05/05/2020
An earthquake unnerves Tokyo on March 11, 2011, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster―and a tectonic stirring of the collective past. Mr. ...
more
Friend: A Novel from North Korea
by
Paek Nam-nyong
Columbia University Press, 05/05/2020
A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Goldilocks
by
Laura Lam
Orbit, 05/05/2020
Despite increasing restrictions on the freedoms of women on Earth, Valerie Black is spearheading the first all-female mission to a planet in the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Hard Cash Valley
by
Brian Panowich
Minotaur Books, 05/05/2020
Dane Kirby is a broken man and no stranger to tragedy. As a life-long resident and ex-arson investigator for McFalls County, Dane has lived his life ...
more
If It Bleeds
by
Stephen King
Scribner, 05/05/2020
The novella is a form King has returned to over and over again in the course of his amazing career, and many have been made into iconic films, ...
more
Like Crazy: Life with My Mother and Her Invisible Friends
by
Dan Mathews
Atria Books, 05/05/2020
Dan Mathews knew that his witty, bawdy, unhinged mother, Perry, was unable to maintain her fierce independence at seventy-eight—so he flew her ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Network Effect: The Murderbot Diaries #5
by
Martha Wells
Tor Books, 05/05/2020
Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I. you'll read this century.
I'm usually alone in my head, and that's where 90 ...more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Sansei and Sensibility
by
Karen Tei Yamashita
Coffee House Press, 05/05/2020
In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room ...
more
Shiner
by
Amy Jo Burns
Riverhead Books, 05/05/2020
An hour from the closest West Virginia mining town, fifteen-year-old Wren Bird lives in a cloistered mountain cabin with her parents. They have no car...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Telephone: A Novel
by
Percival Everett
Graywolf Press, 05/05/2020
Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area―the geological history of a cave forty-...
more
The Lincoln Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill America's 16th President--and Why It Failed
by
Brad Meltzer, John Mensch
Flatiron Books, 05/05/2020
Everyone knows the story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, but few are aware of the original conspiracy to kill him four years earlier in ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Catherine House: A Novel
by
Elisabeth Thomas
Custom House, 05/12/2020
Trust us, you belong here.A gothic-infused debut of literary suspense, set within a secluded, elite university and following a dangerously curious, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Daughter of the Reich: A Novel
by
Louise Fein
William Morrow, 05/12/2020
She must choose between loyalty to her country or a love that could be her destruction…
As the dutiful daughter of a high-ranking Nazi ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire
by
Tom Zoellner
Harvard University Press, 05/12/2020
For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Goodbye Man: A Colter Shaw Novel
by
Jeffery Deaver
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 05/12/2020
In the wilderness of Washington State, expert tracker Colter Shaw has located two young men accused of a terrible hate crime. But when his pursuit ...
more
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums
by
A.Kendra Greene
Penguin Books, 05/12/2020
Iceland is home to only 330,000 people but more than 265 museums and public collections, ranging from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping
by
Samantha Harvey
Grove Press, 05/12/2020
In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to ...
more
Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity
by
Porochista Khakpour
Vintage, 05/19/2020
Novelist Porochista Khakpour's family moved to Los Angeles after fleeing the Iranian Revolution, giving up their successes only to be greeted by an ...
more
Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State
by
Barton Gellman
Penguin Press, 05/19/2020
Edward Snowden touched off a global debate in 2013 when he gave Barton Gellman, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald each a vast and explosive archive of...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Drifts: A Novel
by
Kate Zambreno
Riverhead Books, 05/19/2020
Haunting and compulsively readable,
Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, ...
more
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965
by
Jia Lynn Yang
W.W. Norton & Company, 05/19/2020
The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
Rodham: A Novel
by
Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House, 05/19/2020
In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Life magazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she's attending Yale Law School...
more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Sunday Girl: A Novel
by
Pip Drysdale
Sourcebooks Landmark, 05/19/2020
Taylor Bishop is hurt, angry, and wants to destroy Angus Hollingsworth in the way he destroyed her: 'Insidiously. Irreparably. Like a puzzle he'd ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
These Women: A Novel
by
Ivy Pochoda
Ecco, 05/19/2020
In West Adams, a rapidly changing part of South Los Angeles, they're referred to as "these women." These women on the corner … These women in ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Tropic of Violence
by
Nathacha Appanah
Graywolf Press, 05/19/2020
Marie, a nurse in Mayotte, a far-flung, tropical department of France in the Indian Ocean, adopts a baby abandoned at birth by his mother, a refugee ...
more
All My Mother's Lovers
by
Ilana Masad
Dutton, 05/26/2020
But when Maggie's mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris's will,...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Everything's Not Fine
by
Sarah Carlson
Turner, 05/26/2020
Rose's love of Frida Kahlo fuels her paint brush and her dreams to attend a prestigious art school. Painting is Rose's escape from her annoying ...
more
Fairest: A Memoir
by
Meredith Talusan
Viking, 05/26/2020
Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a "sun child" from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Home Home
by
Lisa Allen-Agostini
Delacorte Press, 05/26/2020
Moving from Trinidad to Canada wasn't her idea. But after being hospitalized for depression, her mother sees it as the only option. Now, living with ...
more
The Black Flamingo
by
Dean Atta
Balzer + Bray, 05/26/2020
Michael is a mixed-race gay teen growing up in London. All his life, he's navigated what it means to be Greek-Cypriot and Jamaican—but never ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times
by
Anthony DePalma
Viking, 05/26/2020
Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, Anthony ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Death of Jesus
by
J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 05/26/2020
In Estrella, David has grown to be a tall ten-year-old who is a natural at soccer, and loves kicking a ball around with his friends. His father Sim&#...
more
The Prisoner's Wife
by
Maggie Brookes
Berkley Books, 05/26/2020
In the dead of night, a Czech farm girl and a British soldier travel through the countryside. Izabela and prisoner of war Bill have secretly married ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
A Burning: A novel
by
Megha Majumdar
Knopf, 06/02/2020
Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
by
Roseanne A. Brown
Balzer + Bray, 06/02/2020
For Malik, the Solstasia festival is a chance to escape his war-stricken home and start a new life with his sisters in the prosperous desert city of ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Asha and the Spirit Bird
by
Jasbinder Bilan
The Chicken House, 06/02/2020
Asha lives on a family farm with her mother in rural India in the foothills of the Himalayas. Life would be perfect if her father were with them ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Between Everything and Nothing: The Journey of Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal and the Quest for Asylum
by
Joe Meno
Counterpoint Press, 06/02/2020
Long before their chance meeting at a Minneapolis bus station, Ghanaian asylum seekers Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal had already crossed half the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Exciting Times
by
Naoise Dolan
Ecco, 06/02/2020
Ava, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children.
Julian is a banker. A banker who likes to spend ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
How to Die in Space: A Journey Through Dangerous Astrophysical Phenomena
by
Paul M. Sutter
Pegasus Books, 06/02/2020
So you've fallen in love with space and now you want to see it for yourself, huh? You want to witness the birth of a star, or visit the black hole at ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
More Miracle Than Bird
by
Alice Miller
Tin House Books, 06/02/2020
On the eve of World War I, twenty-one-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees―on her own for the first time―is introduced to the acclaimed poet W. B. ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Parakeet
by
Marie-Helene Bertino
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 06/02/2020
The week of her wedding, The Bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, ...
more
Places I've Taken My Body
by
Molly McCully Brown
Persea Books, 06/02/2020
In seventeen intimate essays, poet Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body―in her case, one shaped since ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Essays
Debut Author
Running from the Dead
by
Mike Knowles
ECW Press, 06/02/2020
Jones had never promised Ruth Verne that he would find her son alive, but he knew deep down that she believed he would ― worse, he had believed ...
more
The Fallen
by
Carlos Manuel Álvarez
Graywolf Press, 06/02/2020
A powerful, unsettling portrait of family life in Cuba, Carlos Manuel Álvarez's first novel is a masterful portrayal of a society in free fall. ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The House on Fripp Island
by
Rebecca Kauffman
Mariner Books, 06/02/2020
Fripp Island, South Carolina is the perfect destination for the wealthy Daly family: Lisa, Scott, and their two girls. For Lisa's childhood friend, ...
more
The Lehman Trilogy
by
Stefano Massini
HarperVia, 06/02/2020
After leaving his native Bavaria, Henry Lehman arrives in America determined to make a better life. Sensing opportunity in the Deep South, he opens a ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
The Madwoman and the Roomba: My Year of Domestic Mayhem
by
SandraTsing Loh
W.W. Norton & Company, 06/02/2020
Ah, 55. Gateway to the golden years! Professional summiting. Emotional maturity. Easy surfing toward the glassy blue waters of retirement…Or ...
more
The Summer of Kim Novak
by
Hakan Nesser
One World, 06/02/2020
Sweden in the '60s. Erik and his friend Edmund spend their vacation by a forest lake daydreaming about Ewa, a young substitute teacher with an uncanny...
more
The Voyage of the Morning Light: A Novel
by
Marina Endicott
W.W. Norton & Company, 06/02/2020
Kay and Thea are half-sisters, separated in age by almost twenty years, but deeply attached. When their stern father dies, Thea travels to Nova Scotia...
more
Literary Fiction
Voyage of the Sparrowhawk
by
Natasha Farrant
Faber and Faber, 06/04/2020
In the aftermath of World War One, everyone is trying to rebuild their lives. If Ben is to avoid being sent back to the orphanage, he needs to find ...
more
Agnes at the End of the World
by
Kelly McWilliams
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 06/09/2020
Agnes loves her home of Red Creek -- its quiet, sunny mornings, its dusty roads, and its God. There, she cares tirelessly for her younger siblings and...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Always the Last to Know
by
Kristan Higgins
Berkley Books, 06/09/2020
The Frosts are a typical American family. Barb and John, married almost fifty years, are testy and bored with each other...who could blame them after ...
more
Last Tang Standing
by
Lauren Ho
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 06/09/2020
At thirty-three, Andrea Tang is living the dream: She has a successful career as a lawyer, a posh condo, and a clutch of fun-loving friends who are ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Romance
Debut Author
Pizza Girl
by
Jean Kyoung Frazier
Doubleday, 06/09/2020
Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Safe
by
S.K. Barnett
Dutton, 06/09/2020
Jenny Kristal was six years old when she was snatched off the sidewalk from her quiet suburban neighborhood. Twelve years later, she's miraculously ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
The Daughters of Erietown: A Novel
by
Connie Schultz
Random House, 06/09/2020
1957, Clayton Valley, Ohio. Ellie has the best grades in her class. Her dream is to go to nursing school and marry Brick McGinty. A basketball star, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Sight of You
by
Holly Miller
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 06/09/2020
Joel has sworn off falling in love. But when he meets Callie, he can't help being drawn to her. In Callie, he sees a second chance at life. And in ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
You Exist Too Much: A Novel
by
Zaina Arafat
Catapult, 06/09/2020
On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12–year–old Palestinian–American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
28 Summers
by
Elin Hilderbrand
Little Brown & Company, 06/16/2020
When Mallory Blessing's son, Link, receives deathbed instructions from his mother to call a number on a slip of paper in her desk drawer, he's not ...
more
Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre
by
Max Brooks
Del Rey, 06/16/2020
But the journals of resident Kate Holland, recovered from the town's bloody wreckage, capture a tale too harrowing—and too earth-shattering in ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Miss Iceland
by
Audur Ava Olafsdottir
Grove Press, 06/16/2020
Iceland in the 1960s. Hekla always knew she wanted to be a writer. In a nation of poets, where each household proudly displays leatherbound volumes of...
more
Seven Lies: A Novel
by
Elizabeth Kay
Pamela Dorman Books, 06/16/2020
Growing up, Jane and Marnie shared everything. They knew the other's deepest secrets. They wouldn't have had it any other way. But when Marnie falls ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Sleepovers
by
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
Hub City Press, 06/16/2020
This collection takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. We ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Short Stories
Debut Author
The Last Train to Key West
by
Chanel Cleeton
Berkley Books, 06/16/2020
For the tourists traveling on Henry Flagler's legendary Overseas Railroad, Labor Day weekend is an opportunity to forget the economic depression ...
more
Historical Fiction
The Lightness
by
Emily Temple
William Morrow, 06/16/2020
One year ago, the person Olivia adores most in the world, her father, left home for a meditation retreat in the mountains and never returned. Yearning...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Margot Affair
by
Sanaë Lemoine
Hogarth Books, 06/16/2020
"There were so many of us, children of these double families who dreamed of the other side."
Margot Louve is a secret: the child of a longstanding ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad
by
Mike Birbiglia (Author), J. Hope Stein (Contributor)
Grand Central Publishing, 06/16/2020
In 2016 comedian Mike Birbiglia and poet Jennifer Hope Stein took their fourteen-month-old daughter Oona to the Nantucket Film Festival. When the ...
more
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You
by
Kyle McCarthy
Ballantine Books, 06/23/2020
At age thirty, Rose is fierce and smart, both self-aware and singularly blind to her power over others. After moving to New York, she is unexpectedly ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Lost Companions: Reflections on the Death of Pets
by
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
St. Martin's Press, 06/23/2020
Over 84 million Americans―almost 3/4 of the US population―own a pet, and our society is still learning how to recognize and dignify that ...
more
The Falling Woman
by
Richard Farrell
Algonquin Books, 06/23/2020
Tragedy strikes during a cross-country flight when sudden turbulence causes the jet to come apart in midair. The odds of anyone surviving are nearly ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
The Mist: Hulda Hermannsdóttir #3
by
Ragnar Jonasson
Minotaur Books, 06/23/2020
1987. An isolated farm house in the east of Iceland.
The snowstorm should have shut everybody out. But it didn't.
The couple should never have ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
All the Broken People
by
Leah Konen
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 06/30/2020
Fleeing Brooklyn with little more than a suitcase and her trusty dog, Lucy King heads to rustic Woodstock , New York, eager to lose herself in a quiet...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Friends and Strangers
by
J. Courtney Sullivan
Knopf, 06/30/2020
Elisabeth, an accomplished journalist and new mother, is struggling to adjust to life in a small town after nearly twenty years in New York City. ...
more
Love & Other Crimes
by
Sara Paretsky
William Morrow, 06/30/2020
New York Times bestselling author Sara Paretsky is the master of twisting suspense and compelling plots. She has been hailed by the crime community as...
more
Sex and Vanity
by
Kevin Kwan
Doubleday, 06/30/2020
On her very first morning on the jewel-like island of Capri, Lucie Churchill sets eyes on George Zao and she instantly can't stand him. She can't ...
more
The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming
by
Eric Holthaus
HarperOne, 06/30/2020
The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In
The Future ...more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Thin Girls
by
Diana Clarke
Harper, 06/30/2020
Rose and Lily Winters are twins, as close as the bond implies; they feel each other's emotions, taste what the other is feeling. Like most young women...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope
by
Shayla Lawson
Harper Perennial, 06/30/2020
Shayla Lawson is major. You don't know who she is. Yet. But that's okay. She is on a mission to move black girls like herself from best supporting ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Essays
Debut Author
14 Miles: Building the Border Wall
by
DW Gibson
Simon & Schuster, 07/07/2020
In August of 2019, Donald Trump finished building his border wall—at least a portion of it. In San Diego, the Army Corps of engineers completed ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Antkind
by
Charlie Kaufman
Random House, 07/07/2020
B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer),...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Becoming Duchess Goldblatt
by
Anonymous
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 07/07/2020
Becoming Duchess Goldblatt is two stories: that of the reclusive real-life writer who created a fictional character out of loneliness and thin air, ...
more
Biography/Memoir
Bright Precious Thing
by
Gail Caldwell
Random House, 07/07/2020
In a voice as candid as it is evocative, Gail Caldwell traces a path from her west Texas girlhood through her emergence as a young daredevil, then as ...
more
Death of a Prominent Citizen: A Reverend Mother Mystery #7
by
Cora Harrison
Severn House, 07/07/2020
Wealthy widow Charlotte Hendrick had always promised that her riches would be divided equally between her seven closest relatives when she died. Now ...
more
Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
by
Ben Ehrenreich
Counterpoint Press, 07/07/2020
As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
Fraternity
by
Benjamin Nugent
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 07/07/2020
In a Massachusetts college town stands a dilapidated colonial: Delta Zeta Chi. Here, we meet Newton, the beloved chapter president; Oprah, the ...
more
House Privilege: Joe Demarco #14
by
Mike Lawson
Atlantic Monthly Press, 07/07/2020
Fifteen-year-old Cassie Russell, the only daughter of a mega-rich Boston couple, is the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her parents. She's ...
more
Lake Life
by
David James Poissant
Simon & Schuster, 07/07/2020
The Starling family is scattered across the country. Parents Richard and Lisa live in Ithaca, New York, and work at Cornell University. Their son ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Molten City: Tom Harper #8
by
Chris Nickson
Severn House, 07/07/2020
Leeds, September 1908. There's going to be a riot. Detective Superintendent Tom Harper can feel it. Herbert Asquith, the prime minster, is due to ...
more
Mother Daughter Widow Wife
by
Robin Wasserman
Scribner, 07/07/2020
Who is Wendy Doe? The woman, found on a Peter Pan Bus to Philadelphia, has no money, no ID, and no memory of who she is, where she was going, or what ...
more
Paying the Land
by
Joe Sacco
Metropolitan Books, 07/07/2020
The Dene have lived in the vast Mackenzie River Valley since time immemorial, by their account. To the Dene, the land owns them, not the other way ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Survivor Song
by
Paul Tremblay
William Morrow, 07/07/2020
In a matter of weeks, Massachusetts has been overrun by an insidious rabies-like virus that is spread by saliva. But unlike rabies, the disease has a ...
more
The Beauty in Breaking
by
Michele Harper
Riverhead Books, 07/07/2020
Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington,...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's Wildlands
by
Jon Billman
Grand Central Publishing, 07/07/2020
These are the stories that defy conventional logic. The proverbial vanished without a trace incidences, which happen a lot more (and a lot closer to ...
more
The Golden Cage
by
Camilla Läckberg
Knopf, 07/07/2020
Faye has loved Jack since they were students at business school. Jack, the perpetual golden boy, grew up wealthy, unlike Faye, who has worked hard to ...
more
The Lost and Found Bookshop
by
Susan Wiggs
William Morrow, 07/07/2020
There is a book for everything...
Somewhere in the vast Library of the Universe, as Natalie thought of it, there was a book that embodied exactly ...
more
The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom
by
L.S. Dugdale
HarperOne, 07/07/2020
As a specialist in both medical ethics and the treatment of older patients, Dr. Lydia Dugdale knows a great deal about the end of life. Far too many ...
more
The Party Upstairs
by
Lee Conell
Penguin Press, 07/07/2020
Ruby has a strange relationship to privilege. She grew up the super's daughter in the basement of an Upper West Side co-op that gets more gentrified ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Rise of the G.I. Army, 1940-1941: The Forgotten Story of How America Forged a Powerful Army Before Pearl Harbor
by
Paul Dickson
Atlantic Monthly Press, 07/07/2020
The U.S. Army stood at fewer than 200,000 men―unprepared to defend the country, much less carry the fight to Europe and the Far East. And yet, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World
by
Sarah Stewart Johnson
Crown, 07/07/2020
Coated in red dust, the terrain is bewilderingly empty. And yet multiple spacecraft are circling Mars, sweeping over Terra Sabaea, Syrtis Major, the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
Debut Author
The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America's Forgotten Capital of Vice
by
David Hill
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 07/07/2020
Back in the days before Vegas was big, when the Mob was at its peak and neon lights were but a glimmer on the horizon, a little Southern town styled ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
The Voting Booth
by
Brandy Colbert
Disney-Hyperion, 07/07/2020
Marva Sheridan was born ready for this day. She's always been driven to make a difference in the world, and what better way than to vote in her first ...
more
The Wedding Thief
by
Mary Simses
Back Bay Books, 07/07/2020
The Harrington sisters have never gotten along. Sara is a Type-A, career-focused event planner, and her younger sister Mariel is the opposite: ...
more
Literary Fiction
Unconquerable Sun
by
Kate Elliott
Tor Books, 07/07/2020
GENDER-SPUN ALEXANDER THE GREAT ON AN INTERSTELLAR SCALE
Princess Sun has finally come of age.
Growing up in the shadow of her mother, Eirene, has...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Vernon Subutex 2
by
Virginie Despentes
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 07/07/2020
Rock star Alex Bleach might be dead, but he has a secret. It's a secret that concerns several people, but the only person who can unlock it is Vernon ...
more
Watching You Without Me
by
Lynn Coady
Knopf, 07/07/2020
After her mother's sudden death, Karen finds herself back in her childhood home in Nova Scotia for the first time in a decade, acting as full-time ...
more
Being Toffee
by
Sarah Crossan
Bloomsbury YA, 07/14/2020
Allison has run away from home and with nowhere to live finds herself hiding out in the shed of what she thinks is an abandoned house. But the house ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Blacktop Wasteland
by
S.A. Cosby
Flatiron Books, 07/14/2020
He thought he'd left all that behind him, but as his carefully built new life begins to crumble, he finds himself drawn inexorably back into a world ...
more
F*ckface: And Other Stories
by
Leah Hampton
Henry Holt and Company, 07/14/2020
The twelve stories in this knockout collection―some comedic, some tragic, many both at once―examine the interdependence between rural ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Short Stories
Debut Author
Filthy Beasts
by
Kirkland Hamill
Avid Reader Press, 07/14/2020
"Wake up, you filthy beasts!" Wendy Hamill would shout to her children in the mornings before school. Startled from their dreams, Kirk and his two ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Inheritors
by
Asako Serizawa
Doubleday, 07/14/2020
Spanning more than 150 years, and set in multiple locations in colonial and postcolonial Asia and the United States,
Inheritors paints a kaleidoscopic...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Short Stories
Debut Author
Miracle Country
by
Kendra Atleework
Algonquin Books, 07/14/2020
Kendra's parents taught their children to thrive in this beautiful, if harsh, landscape, prone to wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Above ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Mother Land
by
Leah Franqui
William Morrow, 07/14/2020
When Rachel Meyer, a thirtysomething foodie from New York, agrees to move to Mumbai with her Indian-born husband, Dhruv, she knows some culture shock ...
more
Natural History
by
Carlos Fonseca
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 07/14/2020
Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated ...
more
Niche: A Memoir in Pastiche
by
Momus
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 07/14/2020
Momus―named for the ancient Greek god of mockery, and described by
The Guardian as "the David Bowie of the art-pop underground"―has ...
more
Other People's Pets
by
R.L. Maizes
Celadon, 07/14/2020
La La's world stops being whole when her mother, who never wanted a child, abandons her twice. First, when La La falls through thin ice on a skating ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
by
Amy Stanley
Scribner, 07/14/2020
The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a traditional life much like her mother's. ...
more
The Extraordinaries: The Extraordinaries #1
by
TJ Klune
Tor Teen, 07/14/2020
Nick Bell? Not extraordinary. But being the most popular fanfiction writer in the Extraordinaries fandom is a superpower, right?
After a chance ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Only Good Indians
by
Stephen Graham Jones
Gallery Books, 07/14/2020
Seamlessly blending classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social commentary,
The Only Good Indians follows four American Indian men after...
more
Today Tonight Tomorrow
by
Rachel Lynn Solomon
Simon Pulse, 07/14/2020
Today, she hates him.
It's the last day of senior year. Rowan Roth and Neil McNair have been bitter rivals for all of high school, clashing on test...
more
What You Wish For
by
Katherine Center
St. Martin's Press, 07/14/2020
Samantha Casey is a school librarian who loves her job, the kids, and her school family with passion and joy for living.
But she wasn't always that ...
more
Grove: A Field Novel
by
Esther Kinsky
Transit Books, 07/21/2020
It is winter, and from her temporary residence on a hill between village and cemetery, she embarks on walks and outings, exploring the banal and the ...
more
He Started It
by
Samantha Downing
Berkley Books, 07/21/2020
Beth, Portia, and Eddie Morgan haven't all been together in years. And for very good reasons—we'll get to those later. But when their wealthy ...
more
Heaven and Earth
by
Paolo Giordano
Pamela Dorman Books, 07/21/2020
Every summer Teresa follows her father to his childhood home in Puglia, down in the heel of Italy, a land of relentless, shimmering heat, centuries-...
more
Riding with the Ghost: A Memoir
by
Justin Taylor
Random House, 07/21/2020
When Justin Taylor was thirty, his father, Larry, drove to the top of the Nashville airport parking garage to take his own life. Thanks to the ...
more
The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code
by
Michael E. McCullough
Basic Books, 07/21/2020
How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care about others? Since Darwin, scientists have tried to answer this question using ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Lives of Edie Pritchard: A Novel
by
Larry Watson
Algonquin Books, 07/21/2020
Edie—smart, self‑assured, beautiful—always worked hard. She worked as a teller at a bank, she worked to save her first marriage, and...
more
The Vanishing Sky
by
L. Annette Binder
Bloomsbury USA, 07/21/2020
"There was no shelter without her sons."
In 1945, as the war in Germany nears its violent end, the Huber family is not yet free of its dangers or ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
The Woman Before Wallis: A Novel of Windsors, Vanderbilts, and Royal Scandal
by
Bryn Turnbull
Mira, 07/21/2020
In the summer of 1926, when Thelma Morgan marries Viscount Duke Furness after a whirlwind romance, she's immersed in a gilded world of extraordinary ...
more
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
The Year of the Witching
by
Alexis Henderson
Ace Books, 07/21/2020
In the lands of Bethel, where the Prophet's word is law, Immanuelle Moore's very existence is blasphemy. Her mother's union with an outsider of a ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Trouble the Saints
by
Alaya Dawn Johnson
Tor Books, 07/21/2020
Amid the whir of city life, a young woman from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she's hired to use her knives to ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
A Star Is Bored
by
Byron Lane
Henry Holt and Company, 07/28/2020
Charlie Besson is about to have an insane job interview. His car is idling, like his life, outside the Hollywood mansion of Kathi Kannon. THE Kathi ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Afterland
by
Lauren Beukes
Mulholland, 07/28/2020
Most of the men are dead. Three years after the pandemic known as The Manfall, governments still hold and life continues -- but a world run by women ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Deep Delta Justice: A Black Teen, His Lawyer, and Their Groundbreaking Battle for Civil Rights in the South
by
Matthew Van Meter
Little Brown & Company, 07/28/2020
In 1966 in a small town in Louisiana, a 19-year-old black man named Gary Duncan pulled his car off the road to stop a fight between a group of four ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town
by
Barbara Demick
Random House, 07/28/2020
Just as she did with North Korea, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world. She tells the story of...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Empire of Wild
by
Cherie Dimaline
William Morrow, 07/28/2020
Joan has been searching for her missing husband, Victor, for nearly a year—ever since that terrible night they'd had their first serious ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Florida Man
by
Tom Cooper
Random House, 07/28/2020
Florida, circa 1980. Reed Crowe, the eponymous Florida Man, is a middle-aged beach bum, beleaguered and disenfranchised, living on ill-gotten gains ...
more
Flyaway
by
Kathleen Jennings
Tor Books, 07/28/2020
In a small Western Queensland town, a reserved young woman receives a note from one of her vanished brothers―a note that makes her question ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Hieroglyphics
by
Jill McCorkle
Algonquin Books, 07/28/2020
Lil and Frank married young, launched into courtship when they bonded over how they both - suddenly, tragically - lost a parent when they were ...
more
His & Hers
by
Alice Feeney
Flatiron Books, 07/28/2020
When a woman is murdered in Blackdown, a quintessentially British village, newsreader Anna Andrews is reluctant to cover the case. Detective Jack ...
more
Indigo: Valentino Mysteries #6
by
Loren D. Estleman
Forge Books, 07/28/2020
Film detective Valentino is summoned to the estate of Ignacio Bozel to collect a prized donation to the university's movie library:
Bleak Street, a ...
more
Is Rape a Crime?: A Memoir, an Investigation, and a Manifesto
by
Michelle Bowdler
Flatiron Books, 07/28/2020
The crime of rape sizzles like a lightning strike. It pounces, flattens, destroys. A person stands whole, and in a moment of unexpected violence, that...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
It Is Wood, It Is Stone
by
Gabriella Burnham
One World, 07/28/2020
Linda, an anxious and restless American, has moved to São Paulo, with her husband, Dennis, who has accepted a yearlong professorship. As Dennis ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Life Events
by
Karolina Waclawiak
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 07/28/2020
Karolina Waclawiak's breakout novel,
Life Events, follows Evelyn, who, at thirty-seven, is on the verge of divorce and anxiously dreading the death of...
more
Mr. Malcolm's List
by
Suzanne Allain
Berkley Books, 07/28/2020
The Honourable Mr. Jeremy Malcolm is searching for a wife, but not just any wife. As the target of matchmaking mothers and desperate debutantes, he's ...
more
The Butterfly Lampshade
by
Aimee Bender
Doubleday, 07/28/2020
On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting...
more
The Faithless Hawk: The Merciful Crow #2
by
Margaret Owen
Henry Holt and Company, 07/28/2020
As the new chieftain of the Crows, Fie knows better than to expect a royal to keep his word. Still she's hopeful that Prince Jasimir will fulfill his ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Silence of the White City: The White City Trilogy #1
by
Eva Garcia Sáenz
Vintage, 07/28/2020
Young Inspector Unai López de Ayala, known as "Kraken," is charged with investigating a series of ritualistic murders. The murders are eerily ...
more
This Is My America
by
Kim Johnson
Random House Books for Younger Readers, 07/28/2020
Every week, seventeen-year-old Tracy Beaumont writes letters to Innocence X, asking the organization to help her father, an innocent Black man on ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession
by
Sarah Weinman
Ecco, 07/28/2020
The appeal of true-crime stories has never been higher. With podcasts like
My Favorite Murder and
In the Dark, bestsellers like
I'll Be Gone in the ...more
When She Was Good: Cyrus Haven #2
by
Michael Robotham
Scribner, 07/28/2020
Criminal psychologist Cyrus Haven and Evie Cormac return in this mesmerizing new thriller from internationally bestselling author Michael Robotham, a ...
more
A Lab of One's Own: One Woman's Personal Journey Through Sexism in Science
by
Rita Colwell PhD
Simon & Schuster, 08/04/2020
If you think sexism thrives only on Wall Street or in Hollywood, you haven't visited a lab, a science department, a research foundation, or a biotech ...
more
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
by
Alicia Elliott
Melville House, 08/04/2020
The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to "a mind spread out on the ground." In this urgent and visceral work, Alicia Elliott ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Essays
Debut Author
A Saint from Texas
by
Edmund White
Bloomsbury USA, 08/04/2020
Yvette and Yvonne Crawford are twin sisters, born on a humble patch of East Texas prairie but bound for far more dramatic and tragic fates. Just as an...
more
Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine
by
Bob Blaisdell
Pegasus Books, 08/04/2020
Anna Karenina is one of the most nuanced characters in world literature and we return to her, and the novel she propels, again and again. Remarkably, ...
more
Dance on Saturday
by
Elwin Cotman
Small Beer Press, 08/04/2020
Church-going immortals tend life-extending fruit. Swarms of deadly wasps engineered by a polymath sorcerer battle killer snails. Geese take human form...
more
Every Bone a Prayer
by
Ashley Blooms
Sourcebooks, 08/04/2020
All that Misty's sister Penny wants to talk about are the strange objects that start appearing outside their trailer. The grown-ups mutter about sins ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Here is the Sweet Hand: Poems
by
francine j. harris
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 08/04/2020
The speakers in these poems are often protagonists. Against the backdrop of numerous American cities and towns, and in a time of political uncertainty...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
I Give It to You
by
Valerie Martin
Nan A. Talese, 08/04/2020
When Jan, an American academic, rents an apartment in a Tuscan villa for the summer, she plans to spend her break writing a biography of Mussolini. ...
more
Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness
by
Catherine Cho
Henry Holt and Company, 08/04/2020
When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy
by
Edward Ball
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 08/04/2020
Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the ...
more
Love After Love
by
Ingrid Persaud
One World, 08/04/2020
Solo flees Trinidad for New York to carve out a lonely existence as an undocumented immigrant, and Mr. Chetan remains the singular thread holding ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Luster
by
Raven Leilani
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 08/04/2020
Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties―sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Midnight Sun: Twilight Series #5
by
Stephenie Meyer
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 08/04/2020
When Edward Cullen and Bella Swan met in
Twilight, an iconic love story was born. But until now, fans have heard only Bella's side of the story. At ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Mr Campion's Seance: An Albert Campion Mystery #7
by
Mike Ripley
Severn House, 08/04/2020
1946, London. The eagerly anticipated new detective novel from Albert Campion's godsibling, bestselling author Evadne Childe, is proving to be another...
more
Nightshade
by
Annalena McAfee
Knopf, 08/04/2020
Eve Laing, celebrated artist, once the muse of legendary painter and "monstre sacré" Florian Kiš, is a photorealist painter of flowers at ...
more
Six Days in August: The Story of Stockholm Syndrome
by
David King
W.W. Norton & Company, 08/04/2020
On the morning of August 23, 1973, a man wearing a wig, makeup, and a pair of sunglasses walked into the main branch of Sveriges Kreditbank, a ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Sweet Sorrow
by
David Nicholls
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 08/04/2020
Now: On the verge of marriage and a fresh start, thirty-eight-year-old Charlie Lewis finds that he can't stop thinking about the past, and the events ...
more
Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World
by
John Freeman
Penguin Books, 08/04/2020
In the past five years, John Freeman, previously editor of
Granta, has launched a celebrated international literary magazine,
Freeman's, and compiled ...
more
The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Sister Gone Missing
by
Betsy Bonner
Tin House Books, 08/04/2020
A young woman is found dead on the floor of a Tijuana hotel room. An ID in a nearby purse reads "Atlantis Black." The police report states that the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals
by
Becky Mandelbaum
Simon & Schuster, 08/04/2020
The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals is in trouble.
It's late 2016 when Ariel discovers that her mother Mona's animal sanctuary in Western Kansas ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne
by
Elsa Hart
Minotaur Books, 08/04/2020
London, 1703. In a time when the old approaches to science coexist with the new, one elite community attempts to understand the world by collecting ...
more
The Death of Vivek Oji
by
Akwaeke Emezi
Riverhead Books, 08/04/2020
One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son's body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. ...
more
The Hollow Ones
by
Guillermo del Toro, Chuck Hogan
Grand Central Publishing, 08/04/2020
Odessa Hardwicke's life is derailed when she's forced to turn her gun on her partner, Walt Leppo, a decorated FBI agent who turns suddenly, ...
more
The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers
by
Emily Levesque
Sourcebooks, 08/04/2020
Humans from the earliest civilizations were spellbound by the night sky-craning their necks each night, they used the stars to orient themselves in ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
Debut Author
The Night Swim
by
Megan Goldin
St. Martin's Press, 08/04/2020
Ever since her true-crime podcast became an overnight sensation and set an innocent man free, Rachel Krall has become a household name―and the ...
more
To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace
by
Kapka Kassabova
Graywolf Press, 08/04/2020
Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two ancient lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that seem to hold both the turbulent memories of the region's ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Travel & Adventure
Under Pressure: Lucas Page #2
by
Robert Pobi
Minotaur Books, 08/04/2020
On a beautiful October evening, New York City's iconic Guggenheim Museum is closed for a tech company's private gala. Until an explosion rocks the ...
more
Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots
by
Morgan Jerkins
Harper, 08/04/2020
Between 1916 and 1970, six million black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
What Happens at Night
by
Peter Cameron
Catapult, 08/04/2020
In this atmospheric, suspenseful novel, an American couple travels to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby, who they hope will resurrect ...
more
With or Without You: A Novel
by
Caroline Leavitt
Algonquin Books, 08/04/2020
After almost twenty years together, Stella and Simon are starting to run into problems. An up-and-coming rock musician when they first met, Simon has ...
more
My Midnight Sun
by
John Shors
John Shors Publishers, 08/05/2020
After time with his family and friends in America does little to ease his pain, Owen returns to Asia to try to make peace with his past. A chance ...
more
Literary Fiction
A House Is a Body
by
Shruti Swamy
Algonquin Books, 08/11/2020
In "Earthly Pleasures," a young painter living alone in San Francisco begins a secret romance with one of India's biggest celebrities, and desire and ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Short Stories
Debut Author
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Death in Her Hands
by
Ottessa Moshfegh
Penguin Press, 08/11/2020
While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones. "Her ...
more
Olive the Lionheart: Lost Love, Imperial Spies, and One Woman's Journey into the Heart of Africa
by
Brad Ricca
St. Martin's Press, 08/11/2020
In 1910, Olive MacLeod, a thirty-year-old, redheaded Scottish aristocrat, received word that her fiancé, the famous naturalist Boyd Alexander, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire
by
Chloe Hooper
Seven Stories Press, 08/11/2020
What kind of person would deliberately start a firestorm? What kind of mind?
On the scorching February day in 2009 that became known as Black ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Boy in the Field
by
Margot Livesey
Harper, 08/11/2020
One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, ...
more
The New Wilderness
by
Diane Cook
Harper, 08/11/2020
Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the City—an over-populated, over-built metropolis where ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
The Quiet Girl
by
S.F. Kosa
Sourcebooks Landmark, 08/11/2020
Good girls keep quiet. Quiet girls won't stay silent forever.
When Alex arrives in Provincetown to patch things up with his new wife, he finds an ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays
by
Elisa Gabbert
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 08/11/2020
We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase "Did you see?" The feeling that we're living in...
more
Then She Vanished: Roland Ford #4
by
T. Jefferson Parker
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 08/11/2020
Private Investigator Roland Ford has taken a job for a fellow Marine and a rising politician, Dalton Strait. Strait is contending with unexplained ...
more
Driftwood
by
Marie Brennan
Tachyon Publications, 08/14/2020
Who is Last?
Fame is rare in Driftwood―it's hard to get famous if you don't stick around long enough for people to know you. But many know ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Impersonation
by
Heidi Pitlor
Algonquin Books, 08/18/2020
Together, they make the perfect feminist mother.
Allie Lang is a professional ghostwriter and a perpetually broke single mother to a young boy. ...
more
Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich
by
Thomas Levenson
Random House, 08/18/2020
Money for Nothing chronicles the moment when the needs of war, discoveries of natural philosophy, and ambitions of investors collided. It's about how ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Ordinary Hazards
by
Anna Bruno
Atria Books, 08/18/2020
It's 5pm on a Wednesday when Emma settles into her hometown bar with a motley crew of locals, all unaware that a series of decisions over the course ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Dazzling Truth
by
Helen Cullen
Graydon House, 08/18/2020
In the courtyards of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1978, aspiring actress Maeve meets pottery student Murtagh Moone. As their relationship progresses, ...
more
The Discomfort of Evening: A Novel
by
Lucas Rijneveld
Graywolf Press, 08/18/2020
Ten-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and her siblings on a dairy farm where waste and frivolity are akin to sin. Despite the ...
more
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Glass Kingdom
by
Lawrence Osborne
Hogarth Books, 08/18/2020
Escaping New York for the anonymity of Bangkok, Sarah Mullins arrives in Thailand on the lam with nothing more than a suitcase of purloined money. Her...
more
The New American
by
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Simon & Schuster, 08/18/2020
One day, Emilio learns a shocking secret: he is undocumented. His parents, who emigrated from Guatemala to California, had never told him.
...
more
The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls: A Novel
by
Ursula Hegi
Flatiron Books, 08/18/2020
In the summer of 1878, the Ludwig Zirkus arrives on Nordstrand in Germany, to the delight of the island's people. But after the show, a Hundred-Year ...
more
Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings
by
Neil Price
Basic Books, 08/25/2020
The Viking Age -- from 750 to 1050 -- saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Elatsoe
by
Darcie Little Badger
Levine Querido, 08/25/2020
There are some differences. This America been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Everything Sad Is Untrue: (a true story)
by
Daniel Nayeri
Levine Querido, 08/25/2020
"A patchwork story is the shame of the refugee," Nayeri writes early in the novel. In an Oklahoman middle school, Khosrou (whom everyone calls Daniel)...
more
Final Cut
by
S.J. Watson
Harper, 08/25/2020
They tried to hide the truth. But the camera never lies…
Blackwood Bay. An ordinary place, home to ordinary people.
It used to be a ...
more
Freedom: An Unruly History
by
Annelien DeDijn
Harvard University Press, 08/25/2020
We tend to think of freedom as something that is best protected by carefully circumscribing the boundaries of legitimate state activity. But who came ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism
by
Laura E. Gómez
The New Press, 08/25/2020
Latinos have long influenced everything from electoral politics to popular culture‚ yet many people instinctively regard them as recent ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Shadows of the Dead: Special Tracking Unit #3
by
Spencer Kope
Minotaur Books, 08/25/2020
A woman―abducted and found in the trunk of a car after a high-speed chase―regains consciousness in the ICU to reveal two crucial pieces of...
more
Sisters
by
Daisy Johnson
Riverhead Books, 08/25/2020
"One of her generation's most intriguing authors" (
Entertainment Weekly), Daisy Johnson is the youngest writer to have been short-listed for the Man ...
more
Summer: Seasonal Quartet #4
by
Ali Smith
Pantheon Books, 08/25/2020
Meanwhile, the world's in meltdown—and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and ...
more
Tales from the Ant World
by
Edward O. Wilson
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 08/25/2020
"Ants are the most warlike of all animals, with colony pitted against colony...Their clashes dwarf Waterloo and Gettysburg," writes Edward O. Wilson ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
The Companion
by
Katie Alender
G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 08/25/2020
The other orphans say Margot is lucky.
Lucky to survive the horrible accident that killed her family.
Lucky to have her own room because she ...
more
The Great Offshore Grounds
by
Vanessa Veselka
Knopf, 08/25/2020
On the day of their estranged father's wedding, half sisters Cheyenne and Livy set off to claim their inheritance. It's been years since the two have ...
more
The Last Great Road Bum
by
Héctor Tobar
MCD, 08/25/2020
Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a "road bum," an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no ...
more
Vesper Flights
by
Helen Macdonald
Grove Press, 08/25/2020
In
Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a ...
more
Blood Moon
by
Lucy Cuthew
Walker & Company, 09/01/2020
After school one day, Frankie, a lover of physics and astronomy, has her first sexual experience with quiet and gorgeous Benjamin—and gets her ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Cemetery Boys
by
Aiden Thomas
Swoon Reads, 09/01/2020
Yadriel has summoned a ghost, and now he can't get rid of him.
When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel...
more
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Dear Life: A Doctor's Story of Love and Loss
by
Rachel Clarke
Thomas Dunne Books, 09/01/2020
Death was conspicuously absent during Rachel's medical training. Instead, her education focused entirely on learning to save lives, and was left ...
more
Fifty Words for Rain
by
Asha Lemmie
Dutton, 09/01/2020
Kyoto, Japan, 1948.
"Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist."
Such is eight-year-old Noriko "Nori" Kamiza's first lesson. She will not ...
more
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Flamer
by
Mike Curato
Henry Holt and Company, 09/01/2020
I know I'm not gay. Gay boys like other boys. I hate boys. They're mean, and scary, and they're always destroying something or saying something dumb ...more
Having and Being Had
by
Eula Biss
Riverhead Books, 09/01/2020
"My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts," Eula Biss writes, "the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after." Having just ...
more
Likes
by
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 09/01/2020
In nine stories that range from the real to the unreal, strange to familiar, funny to frightening, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum reminds us why her wildly ...
more
Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains
by
Kerri Arsenault
St. Martin's Press, 09/01/2020
Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
Red Pill
by
Hari Kunzru
Knopf, 09/01/2020
After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of
Red Pill arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Ruthie Fear: A Novel
by
Maxim Loskutoff
W.W. Norton & Company, 09/01/2020
As a child in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, Ruthie Fear sees an apparition: a strange, headless creature near a canyon creek. Its presence haunts her ...
more
The Bass Rock
by
Evie Wyld
Pantheon Books, 09/01/2020
Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has always borne witness to the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
The Bridge
by
Bill Konigsberg
Scholastic, 09/01/2020
Aaron and Tillie don't know each other, but they are both feeling suicidal, and arrive at the George Washington Bridge at the same time, intending to ...
more
Literary Fiction
The Four Profound Weaves
by
R.B. Lemberg
Tachyon Publications, 09/01/2020
The Surun' nomads do not speak of the master weaver, Benesret, who creates the cloth of bone for assassins in the Great Burri Desert. But aged Uiziya ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
The Lying Life of Adults
by
Elena Ferrante
Europa Editions, 09/01/2020
Giovanna's pretty face has changed: it's turning into the face of an ugly, spiteful adolescent. But is she seeing things as they really are? Into ...
more
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
by
Deesha Philyaw
West Virginia University Press, 09/01/2020
The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between...
more
Short Stories
Debut Author
Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (Pacific War Trilogy #3)
by
Ian W. Toll
W.W. Norton & Company, 09/01/2020
In June 1944, the United States launched a crushing assault on the Japanese navy in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The capture of the Mariana ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
When No One Is Watching: A Thriller
by
Alyssa Cole
William Morrow, 09/01/2020
Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR ...
more
A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom
by
Brittany K. Barnett
Crown, 09/08/2020
Brittany K. Barnett was only a law student when she came across the case that would change her life forever—that of Sharanda Jones, single ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
Anxious People
by
Fredrik Backman
Atria Books, 09/08/2020
Looking at real estate isn't usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and ...
more
Bestiary
by
K-Ming Chang
One World, 09/08/2020
One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman's body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Eat a Peach
by
David Chang
Clarkson Potter, 09/08/2020
In 2004, Momofuku Noodle Bar opened in a tiny, stark space in Manhattan's East Village. Its young chef-owner, David Chang, worked the line, serving ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Good Blood: A Doctor, a Donor, and the Incredible Breakthrough that Saved Millions of Babies
by
Julian Guthrie
Abrams Books, 09/08/2020
In 1951 in Sydney, Australia, a fourteen-year-old boy named James Harrison was near death when he received a transfusion of blood that saved his life....
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
Just Us: An American Conversation
by
Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press, 09/08/2020
As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Monogamy
by
Sue Miller
Harper, 09/08/2020
Graham and Annie have been married for nearly thirty years. A golden couple, their seemingly effortless devotion has long been the envy of their ...
more
The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival
by
Amra Sabic-El-Rayess
Bloomsbury USA, 09/08/2020
The Serbs control the army, and now they have peaceful Bihac surrounded. Soon Amra and her family are dealing with starvation and the threat of brutal...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
The Darkest Evening: Vera Stanhope #9
by
Ann Cleeves
Minotaur Books, 09/08/2020
On the first snowy night of winter, Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope sets off for her home in the hills. Though the road is familiar, she misses a ...
more
The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most
by
Lee Vinsel
Currency, 09/08/2020
It's hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it's genuinely a new invention or just a new...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Sleeping Nymph: Teresa Battaglia #2
by
Ilaria Tuti
Soho Crime, 09/08/2020
A decades-old murder investigation has landed on Superintendent Teresa Battaglia's desk. DNA analysis has revealed that a painting from the final days...
more
Young Rembrandt: A Biography
by
Onno Blom
W.W. Norton & Company, 09/08/2020
Rembrandt van Rijn's early years are as famously shrouded in mystery as Shakespeare's, and his life has always been an enigma. How did a miller's son ...
more
Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West
by
Lauren Redniss
Random House, 09/14/2020
Oak Flat is a serene high-elevation mesa that sits above the southeastern Arizona desert, fifteen miles to the west of the San Carlos Apache Indian ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son
by
Michael Ian Black
Algonquin Books, 09/15/2020
In this thoughtful, inspiring, and deeply personal book, comedian, actor, and father Michael Ian Black gets (mostly) serious about the trouble with ...
more
Each of Us a Desert
by
Mark Oshiro
Tor Teen, 09/15/2020
Xochitl is destined to wander the desert alone, speaking her troubled village's stories into its arid winds. Her only companions are the blessed stars...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Great Adaptations: Star-Nosed Moles, Electric Eels, and Other Tales of Evolution's Mysteries Solved
by
Kenneth Catania
Princeton University Press, 09/15/2020
From star-nosed moles that have super-sensing snouts to electric eels that paralyze their prey, animals possess unique and extraordinary abilities. In...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
Debut Author
Grown
by
Tiffany D. Jackson
Katherine Tegan Books, 09/15/2020
When legendary R&B artist Korey Fields spots Enchanted Jones at an audition, her dreams of being a famous singer take flight. Until Enchanted wakes up...
more
High as the Waters Rise
by
Anja Kampmann
Catapult, 09/15/2020
One night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic, Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion, Mátyás, has ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
by
Jill Lepore
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 09/15/2020
The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Polar Vortex
by
Shani Mootoo
Akashic Books, 09/15/2020
It seemed like a good idea to both Priya and Alex to cement their newish, later-in-life relationship by leaving the past behind to create a new life ...
more
The Art of Saving the World
by
Corinne Duyvis
Amulet Books, 09/15/2020
When Hazel Stanczak was born, an interdimensional rift tore open near her family's home, which prompted immediate government attention. They soon ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Evening and the Morning: The Prequel to The Pillars Of THe Earth
by
Ken Follett
Viking, 09/15/2020
It is 997 CE, the end of the Dark Ages. England is facing attacks from the Welsh in the west and the Vikings in the east. Those in power bend justice ...
more
The Glass House
by
Beatrice Colin
Flatiron Books, 09/15/2020
Scotland, 1912. Antonia McCulloch's life hasn't gone the way she planned. She and her husband, Malcolm, have drifted apart; her burgeoning art career ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War
by
David Nasaw
Penguin Press, 09/15/2020
In May 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Scapegracers: The Scapegracers #1
by
Hannah Abigail Clarke
Erewhon Books, 09/15/2020
Skulking near the bottom of West High's social pyramid, Sideways Pike lurks under the bleachers doing magic tricks for Coke bottles. As a witch, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
The Way Back
by
Gavriel Savit
Knopf Books for Young Readers, 09/15/2020
For the Jews of Eastern Europe, demons are everywhere: dancing on the rooftops in the darkness of midnight, congregating in the trees, harrowing the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix
by
Philip Norman
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 09/15/2020
Over fifty years after his death, Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) is celebrated as the greatest rock guitarist of all time. But before he was setting ...
more
You Want More: Selected Stories of George Singleton
by
George Singleton
Hub City Press, 09/15/2020
With his signature darkly acerbic and sharp-witted humor, George Singleton has built a reputation as one of the most astute and wise observers of the ...
more
The Louder I Will Sing: A story of racism, riots and redemption
by
Lee Lawrence
Sphere Books, 09/17/2020
On 28 September 1985, Lee Lawrence's mother Cherry Groce was wrongly shot by police during a raid on her Brixton home. The bullet shattered her spine ...
more
Biography/Memoir
Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction
by
David Hajdu
W.W. Norton & Company, 09/22/2020
Adrianne Geffel was a genius. Praised as the "Geyser of Grand Street" and the "Queen of Bleak Chic," she was a one-of-a-kind artist, a pianist and ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
And Now She's Gone
by
Rachel Howzell Hall
Forge Books, 09/22/2020
It's up to Grayson Sykes to find her. Although she is reluctant to track down a woman who may not want to be found, Gray's search for Isabel Lincoln ...
more
Thrillers
Dancing with the Octopus: A Memoir of a Crime
by
Debora Harding
Bloomsbury USA, 09/22/2020
One Omaha winter day in November 1978, when Debora Harding was just fourteen, she was abducted at knifepoint from a church parking lot. She was thrown...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Every Body Looking
by
Candice Iloh
Dutton for Young Readers, 09/22/2020
As she stumbles deeper into the world of dance and explores her sexuality, she also begins to wrestle with her past—her mother's struggle with ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Debut Author
Hench
by
Natalie Zina Walschots
William Morrow, 09/22/2020
Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. Working for a monster lurking beneath the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Smash It!
by
Francina Simone
Inkyard Press, 09/22/2020
Olivia "Liv" James is
done with letting her insecurities get the best of her. So she does what any self-respecting hot mess of a girl who wants to ...
more
The Book of Two Ways
by
Jodi Picoult
Ballantine Books, 09/22/2020
Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She's on a plane when the flight attendant makes an announcement: Prepare for a crash ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Silvered Serpents: The Gilded Wolves #2
by
Roshani Chokshi
Wednesday Books, 09/22/2020
They are each other's fiercest love, greatest danger, and only hope. Séverin and his team members might have successfully thwarted the Fallen ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
A Deadly Education: The Scholomance #1
by
Naomi Novik
Del Rey, 09/29/2020
I decided that Orion Lake needed to die after the second time he saved my life.
Everyone loves Orion Lake. Everyone else, that is. Far as I'm ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times
by
David S. Reynolds
Penguin Press, 09/29/2020
David S. Reynolds, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning cultural biography of Walt Whitman and many other iconic works of nineteenth century American ...
more
Dear Justyce: Dear Martin #2
by
Nic Stone
Crown Children's Books, 09/29/2020
In the highly anticipated sequel to her
New York Times bestseller, Nic Stone delivers an unflinching look into the flawed practices and silenced ...
more
Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy
by
Connor Towne O'Neill
Algonquin Books, 09/29/2020
Through the lens of these conflicts, O'Neill examines the legacy of white supremacy in America, in a sobering and fascinating work sure to resonate ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life
by
Jonathan Alter
Simon & Schuster, 09/29/2020
Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate...
more
Just Like You
by
Nick Hornby
Riverhead Books, 09/29/2020
Lucy used to handle her adult romantic life according to the script she'd been handed. She met a guy just like herself: same age, same background, ...
more
The Book of Lamps and Banners: Cass Neary #4
by
Elizabeth Hand
Mulholland, 09/29/2020
Photographer Cass Neary is desperate to get home, and she's already lost her camera -- like losing a limb. Now her only chance is to cash in on a deal...
more
The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War
by
Catherine Grace Katz
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 09/29/2020
Tensions during the Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
The End of the Day
by
Bill Clegg
Gallery/Scout Press, 09/29/2020
A retired widow in rural Connecticut wakes to an unexpected visit from her childhood best friend whom she hasn't seen in forty-nine years.
A man ...
more
The Midnight Library: A Novel
by
Matt Haig
Viking, 09/29/2020
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One...
more
Whale Day: And Other Poems
by
Billy Collins
Random House, 09/29/2020
Billy Collins's new collection brings together more than fifty poems and showcases his deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made him ...
more
Poetry & Novels in Verse
A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future
by
David Attenborough
Grand Central Publishing, 10/06/2020
See the world. Then make it better.
I am 93. I've had an extraordinary life. It's only now that I appreciate how extraordinary.
As a young man, ...
more
Bright and Dangerous Objects
by
Anneliese Mackintosh
Tin House Books, 10/06/2020
But to fulfill her ambition, she'll have to leave behind everything she's ever known―for the rest of her life.
As the prospect of heading to ...
more
Cardiff, by the Sea: Four Novellas of Suspense
by
Joyce Carol Oates
Mysterious Press, 10/06/2020
In the titular novella, an academic in Pennsylvania discovers a terrifying trauma from her past after inheriting a house in Cardiff, Maine from ...
more
Confessions on the 7:45
by
Lisa Unger
Park Row Books, 10/06/2020
Be careful to whom you tell your darkest secrets…
Selena Murphy is commuting home from her job in the city when the train stalls out on the ...
more
Cuyahoga
by
Pete Beatty
Scribner, 10/06/2020
Big Son is a spirit of the times—the times being 1837. Behind his broad shoulders, shiny hair, and church-organ laugh, Big Son practically made ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
Dear Child
by
Romy Hausmann
Flatiron Books, 10/06/2020
A windowless shack in the woods. A dash to safety. But when a woman finally escapes her captor, the end of the story is only the beginning of her ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Eleanor
by
David Michaelis
Simon & Schuster, 10/06/2020
In the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor ...
more
Humans
by
Brandon Stanton
St. Martin's Press, 10/06/2020
Brandon Stanton created
Humans of New York in 2010. What began as a photographic census of life in New York City, soon evolved into a storytelling ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Travel & Adventure
Magic Lessons: The Prequel to Practical Magic
by
Alice Hoffman
Simon & Schuster, 10/06/2020
Where does the story of the Owens bloodline begin? With Maria Owens, in the 1600s, when she's abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Missionaries
by
Phil Klay
Penguin Press, 10/06/2020
A group of Colombian soldiers prepares to raid a drug lord's safe house on the Venezuelan border. They're watching him with an American-made drone, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard
by
John Birdsall
W.W. Norton & Company, 10/06/2020
In the first portrait of James Beard in twenty-five years, John Birdsall accomplishes what no prior telling of Beard's life and work has done: He ...
more
The Nightworkers
by
Brian Selfon
MCD, 10/06/2020
Shecky Keenan's family is under fire―or at least it feels that way. Bank accounts have closed unexpectedly, a strange car has been parked near ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
The Searcher
by
Tana French
Viking, 10/06/2020
Cal Hooper thought a fixer-upper in a bucolic Irish village would be the perfect escape. After twenty-five years in the Chicago police force and a ...
more
The Sicilian Method: Inspector Montalbano #26
by
Andrea Camilleri
Penguin Books, 10/06/2020
Mimi Augello is visiting his lover when the woman's husband unexpectedly returns to the apartment; he climbs out the window and into the downstairs ...
more
White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color
by
Ruby Hamad
Catapult, 10/06/2020
Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep "ownership" of their slaves, through the centuries of colonialism, when they ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
by
Xiaowei Wang
FSG Originals, 10/13/2020
In
Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
Come On In: 15 Stories about Immigration and Finding Home
by
Adi Alsaid
Inkyard Press, 10/13/2020
WELCOME
From some of the most exciting bestselling and up-and-coming YA authors writing today…journey from Ecuador to New York City and ...
more
Daughters of Jubilation
by
Kara Lee Corthron
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 10/13/2020
In the Jim Crow South, white supremacy reigns and tensions are high. But Evalene Deschamps has other things to worry about. She has two little sisters...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945-1962
by
Martin J. Sherwin
Knopf, 10/13/2020
In this groundbreaking look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Sherwin not only gives us a riveting sometimes hour-by-hour explanation of the crisis ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Goodnight Beautiful
by
Aimee Molloy
Harper, 10/13/2020
A handsome psychotherapist. His lonely wife. And in his home office ceiling, a vent …
You'd listen too, wouldn't you? (You know you would.)
...
more
Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck
by
William Souder
W.W. Norton & Company, 10/13/2020
The first full-length biography of the Nobel laureate to appear in a quarter century,
Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John ...
more
Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors
by
Adrian Goldsworthy
Basic Books, 10/13/2020
Alexander the Great's conquests staggered the world. He led his army across thousands of miles, overthrowing the greatest empires of his time and ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Ring Shout
by
P. Djèlí Clark
Tor Books, 10/13/2020
IN AMERICA, DEMONS WEAR WHITE HOODS.
In 1915,
The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Shelter in Place
by
David Leavitt
Bloomsbury USA, 10/13/2020
It is the Saturday after the 2016 presidential election, and in a plush weekend house in Connecticut, an intimate group of friends, New Yorkers all, ...
more
The Blind Light: A Novel
by
Stuart Evers
W.W. Norton & Company, 10/13/2020
England, 1959: two young soldiers―Drummond and Carter―form an intense and unlikely friendship at "Doom Town," a training center that ...
more
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: A Day in the Life
by
Ricardo Piglia
Restless Books, 10/13/2020
How could we define a perfect day? Maybe it would be better to say: how could I narrate a perfect day?
Is that why I write a diary? To capture&#...more
The Historians: Poems
by
Eavan Boland
W.W. Norton & Company, 10/13/2020
Throughout her nearly sixty-year career, acclaimed poet Eavan Boland came to be known for her exquisite ability to weave myth, history, and the life ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Poetry & Novels in Verse
The Lost Shtetl
by
Max Gross
HarperVia, 10/13/2020
What if there was a town that history missed?
For decades, the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol existed in happy isolation, virtually untouched and ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Magic Fish
by
Trung Le Nguyen
Random House Graphic, 10/13/2020
Real life isn't a fairytale.
But Tiến still enjoys reading his favorite stories with his parents from the books he borrows from the local ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Graphic Novels
Debut Author
The Midnight Bargain
by
C.L. Polk
Erewhon Books, 10/13/2020
Beatrice Clayborn is a sorceress who practices magic in secret, terrified of the day she will be locked into a marital collar that will cut off her ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The National Road: Dispatches From a Changing America
by
Tom Zoellner
Counterpoint Press, 10/13/2020
From the embattled newsrooms of small town newspapers to the pornography film sets of the Los Angeles basin, from the check-out lanes of Dollar ...
more
The Once and Future Witches
by
Alix E. Harrow
Redhook, 10/13/2020
In 1893, there's no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Puppetmaster's Apprentice
by
Lisa DeSelm
Page Street Kids, 10/13/2020
When the orders for more soldiers come in with increasingly urgent deadlines, the puppetmaster's health suffers and Pirouette, his daughter and prot&#...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
by
Robert D. Putnam
Simon & Schuster, 10/13/2020
Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley
by
Adrian Daub
FSG Originals, 10/13/2020
Adrian Daub's
What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life
by
Christie Tate
Avid Reader Press, 10/20/2020
Christie Tate had just been named the top student in her law school class and finally had her eating disorder under control. Why then was she driving ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Plain Bad Heroines
by
Emily M. Danforth
William Morrow, 10/20/2020
Our story begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a ...
more
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
by
Heather Clark
Knopf, 10/20/2020
With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new ...
more
Sorrow
by
Tiffanie DeBartolo
Woodhall Press, 10/20/2020
Joe Harper has backpedaled throughout his life. A once-promising guitar prodigy, he's been living without direction since abandoning his musical ...
more
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by
Les Payne
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 10/20/2020
Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone...
more
The War of the Poor
by
Eric Vuillard
Other Press, 10/20/2020
In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation launched an attack on privilege and the Catholic Church, but it rapidly became an established, ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Bad Island
by
Stanley Donwood
W.W. Norton & Company, 10/27/2020
A wild seascape, a distant island, a full moon. Gradually the island grows nearer until we land on a primeval wilderness, rich in vegetation and huge,...
more
Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975
by
Neal Gabler
Crown, 10/27/2020
In the tradition of the works of Robert Caro and Taylor Branch,
Catching the Wind is the first volume of Neal Gabler's magisterial two-volume ...
more
House of Correction
by
Nicci French
William Morrow, 10/27/2020
Tabitha is not a murderer.
When a body is discovered in Okeham, England, Tabitha is shocked to find herself being placed in handcuffs. It must be a...
more
Inside Story
by
Martin Amis
Knopf, 10/27/2020
This novel had its birth in the death of Martin Amis's closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and ...
more
The Tower of Fools: The Hussite Trilogy #1
by
Andrzej Sapkowski
Orbit, 10/27/2020
Reinmar of Bielawa, sometimes known as Reynevan, is a healer, a magician, and according to some, a charlatan. When a thoughtless indiscretion forces ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Witch Hunter
by
Max Seeck
Berkley Books, 10/27/2020
A bestselling author's wife has been found dead in a gorgeous black evening gown, sitting at the head of an empty dining table. Her most chilling ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
Trial by Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and a 15-Year Search for Truth
by
Scott James
Thomas Dunne Books, 10/27/2020
All it took for a hundred people to die during a show by the hair metal band Great White was a sudden burst from two giant sparklers that ignited the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Girls of Brackenhill
by
Kate Moretti
Thomas & Mercer, 11/01/2020
When Hannah Maloney's aunt dies in a car accident, she returns to her family's castle in the Catskills and the epicenter of a childhood trauma: her ...
more
How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
by
Jerald Walker
Mad Creek Press, 11/02/2020
It is on the knife's edge between fury and farce that the essays in this exquisite collection balance. Whether confronting the medical profession's ...
more
Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941
by
Alan Allport
Knopf, 11/03/2020
Here is the many-faceted, world-historically significant story of Britain at war. In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Butter Honey Pig Bread
by
Francesca Ekwuyasi
Arsenal Pulp Press, Limited, 11/03/2020
Kambirinachi believes that she is an Ogbanje, or an Abiku, a non-human spirit that plagues a family with misfortune by being born and then dying in ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Miss Benson's Beetle
by
Rachel Joyce
Dial Press, 11/03/2020
She's going too far to go it alone.
It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson, a schoolteacher and spinster, is ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Shadow Sands: Kate Marshall #2
by
Robert Bryndza
Thomas & Mercer, 11/03/2020
Criminology academic Kate Marshall is on a scuba jaunt with her son when they dive toward a shocking discovery: the body of a teenage boy entangled ...
more
Sicily '43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe
by
James Holland
Atlantic Monthly Press, 11/03/2020
Operation HUSKY, as it was known, was enormously complex, involving dramatic battles on land, in the air, and at sea. Yet, despite its paramount ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Dirty South: Charlie Parker #18
by
John Connolly
Emily Bestler Books (Atria), 11/03/2020
It is 1997, and someone is slaughtering young women in Burdon County, Arkansas.
But no one in the Dirty South wants to admit it.
In an Arkansas ...
more
The Russian Pink
by
Matthew Hart
Pegasus Books, 11/03/2020
When "The Russian Pink"—a stunningly large rose-hued diamond—makes a surprise appearance around the neck of Honey Li, the wife of surging ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow
by
Laura Taylor Namey
Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 11/10/2020
For Lila Reyes, a summer in England was never part of the plan. The plan was 1) take over her abuela's role as head baker at their panadería, 2) ...
more
After All I've Done
by
Mina Hardy
Crooked Lane Books, 11/10/2020
She's lost her best friend, her husband--and possibly, her mind.
Five months ago, an accident left Diana Sparrow badly injured and missing a few ...
more
Agatha Arch is Afraid of Everything
by
Kristin Bair
Alcove Press, 11/10/2020
Agatha Arch's life shatters when she discovers her husband in their backyard shed, in flagrante delicto, giving the local dog walker some heavy ...
more
At Night All Blood Is Black
by
David Diop
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 11/10/2020
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called "Chocolat" soldier with the French ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
Factory Witches of Lowell
by
C.S. Malerich
Tor.com, 11/10/2020
Faced with abominable working conditions, unsympathetic owners, and hard-hearted managers, the mill girls of Lowell have had enough. They're going on ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Debut Author
Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind
by
Kermit Pattison
William Morrow, 11/10/2020
In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—"the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology"—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Science, Health and the Environment
Debut Author
Murder in Old Bombay: A Mystery
by
Nev March
Minotaur Books, 11/10/2020
In 1892, Bombay is the center of British India. Nearby, Captain Jim Agnihotri lies in Poona military hospital recovering from a skirmish on the wild ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Mysteries
Debut Author
Odessa: Volume 1
by
Jonathan Hill
Oni Press, 11/10/2020
Eight years ago an earthquake—the Big One—hit along the Cascadia fault line, toppling cities and changing landscapes all up and down the ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Graphic Novels
Debut Author
Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis
by
Jeffrey H. Jackson
Algonquin Books, 11/10/2020
Devising their own PSYOPS campaign, they slipped their notes into soldier's pockets or tucked them inside newsstand magazines.
Hunted by the secret...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir
by
Kao Kalia Yang
Metropolitan Books, 11/10/2020
All over this country, there are refugees. But beyond the headlines, few know who they are, how they live, or what they have lost. Although Minnesota ...
more
South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War
by
Alice L. Baumgartner
Basic Books, 11/10/2020
The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
The Kingdom
by
Jo Nesbo
Knopf, 11/10/2020
Roy has never left the quiet mountain town he grew up in, unlike his little brother Carl who couldn't wait to get out and escape his troubled past. ...
more
They're Gone
by
E.A. Barres
Crooked Lane Books, 11/10/2020
Two men from vastly different backgrounds are murdered one after another on the same night, in the same fashion with two bullet wounds: one in the ...
more
We Gather Together: A Nation Divided, a President in Turmoil, and a Historic Campaign to Embrace Gratitude and Grace
by
Denise Kiernan
Dutton, 11/10/2020
From Ancient Rome through 21st-century America, bestselling author Denise Kiernan brings us a biography of an idea: gratitude, as a compelling human ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence
by
Becky Cooper
Grand Central Publishing, 11/10/2020
You have to remember, he reminded me, that Harvard is older than the U.S. government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget.
...
more
A Promised Land
by
Barack Obama
Crown, 11/17/2020
In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man ...
more
Biography/Memoir
Here Is the Beehive
by
Sarah Crossan
Little Brown & Company, 11/17/2020
But nothing could have prepared Ana for the call from Rebecca Taylor, explaining in a strangely calm tone that her husband Connor was killed in an ...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
One of Our Own: Gregor Demarkian #30
by
Jane Haddam
Minotaur Books, 11/17/2020
A mysterious black van is spotted by several people at various times in the area around Cavanaugh Street, Philadelphia's Armenian-American enclave. ...
more
Soulswift
by
Megan Bannen
Balzer + Bray, 11/17/2020
Gelya is a Vessel, a girl who channels the word of the One True God through song. Cloistered with the other Vessels of her faith, she believes—...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
The Lady Upstairs
by
Halley Sutton
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 11/17/2020
Jo's job is blackmailing the most lecherous men in Los Angeles--handsy Hollywood producers, adulterous actors, corrupt cops. Sure, she likes the money...
more
Critics' Consensus:
Thrillers
Debut Author
The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of Love, War, and Everest
by
Ed Caesar
Avid Reader Press, 11/17/2020
In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Mount Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson...
more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Night of the Fire: Ann Lindell Mysteries #8
by
Kjell Eriksson
Minotaur Books, 11/17/2020
Police inspector Ann Lindell has left the Uppsala police and is living a quiet life, producing local cheese in a small town in Uppland. But life in ...
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The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream
by
Michael Wood
St. Martin's Press, 11/17/2020
Michael Wood has travelled the length and breadth of China, the world's oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling story of ...
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Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
This Is Not My Memoir
by
André Gregory
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 11/17/2020
This is Not My Memoir tells the life story of André Gregory, iconic theatre director, writer, and actor. For the first time, Gregory shares ...
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A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War
by
William G. Thomas III
Yale University Press, 11/24/2020
For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom ...
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Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Debut Author
Carving Out a Humanity: Race, Rights, and Redemption
by
Vincent Southerland, Janet Dewart Bell
The New Press, 11/24/2020
Carving Out a Humanity gathers some of our country's brightest progressive legal stars in a volume that illuminates the facets of the law that have ...
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Ghostways: Two Journeys in Unquiet Places
by
Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, Dan Richards
W.W. Norton & Company, 11/24/2020
In
Holloway, "a perfect miniature prose-poem" (William Dalrymple), Macfarlane, artist Stanley Donwood, and writer Dan Richards travel to Dorset, near ...
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Critics' Consensus:
Travel & Adventure
The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams
by
David S. Brown
Scribner, 11/24/2020
Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic
The Education ...more
Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Last Days of Ellis Island
by
Gaëlle Josse
World Editions, 11/24/2020
John Mitchell, an officer of the Bureau of Immigration, is the guardian and last resident of the island. As Mitchell looks back over forty-five years ...
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Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
The Thirty Names of Night
by
Zeyn Joukhadar
Atria Books, 11/24/2020
Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new ...
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A Certain Hunger
by
Chelsea G. Summers
The Unnamed Press, 12/01/2020
Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of ...
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Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Big Girl, Small Town
by
Michelle Gallen
Algonquin Books, 12/01/2020
Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Irish Book Awards Newcomer of the Year
Majella is happiest out of the spotlight, away from her ...
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Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Book Clubs in Lockdown: An investigation into how book clubs are responding and adapting to the extraordinary events of 2020, and the implications for the future
by
Bookbrowse
BookBrowse, 12/01/2020
BookBrowse has surveyed readers and book clubbers for more than 15 years. Over this time we have seen many relatively slow shifts including the growth...
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Advice
Eddie's Boy: Butcher's Boy #4
by
Thomas Perry
Mysterious Press, 12/01/2020
He is immediately thrust into action, luring his lethal pursuers to Australia before venturing into the lion's den―the States―to figure ...
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Every Last Secret
by
A.R. Torre
Thomas & Mercer, 12/01/2020
Cat Winthorpe has worked hard to get what she has: a gorgeous home; social standing; and William, her successful, handsome husband. Then a friendly ...
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Lazarus: Joona Linna #7
by
Lars Kepler
Knopf, 12/01/2020
A mysterious killer is brutally murdering Europe's most loathsome criminals. When police discover that two of the victims have disturbing connections ...
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Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America
by
Ijeoma Oluo
Seal Press, 12/01/2020
What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of white men that they deserve power? What happens when success is defined by status ...
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Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Ordesa
by
Manuel Vilas
Riverhead Books, 12/01/2020
It seemed to me the state of my soul was a blurry memory of something that had occurred in a place in northern Spain called Ordesa, a place full of ...more
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Rest and Be Thankful
by
Emma Glass
Bloomsbury USA, 12/01/2020
Laura is a nurse in a pediatric unit. On long, quiet shifts, she and her colleagues, clad in their different shades of blue, care for sick babies, ...
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The Art of Violence: Lydia Chin/Bill Smith Mysteries #13
by
S.J. Rozan
Pegasus Crime, 12/01/2020
Former client Sam Tabor, just out of Greenhaven after a five-year homicide stint, comes to Bill Smith with a strange request. A colossally talented ...
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Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House
by
Rachel Maddow
Crown, 12/08/2020
Is it possible for a sitting vice president to direct a vast criminal enterprise within the halls of the White House? To have one of the most brazen ...
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Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Girl Gurl Grrrl: On Womanhood and Belonging in the Age of Black Girl Magic
by
Kenya Hunt
Amistad, 12/08/2020
Black women have never been more visible or more publicly celebrated than they are now. But for every new milestone, every magazine cover, every box ...
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Critics' Consensus:
Essays
Debut Author
Layla
by
Colleen Hoover
Amazon Publishing, 12/08/2020
When Leeds meets Layla, he's convinced he'll spend the rest of his life with her―until an unexpected attack leaves Layla fighting for her life. ...
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Romance
The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates
by
Robin Lane Fox
Basic Books, 12/08/2020
A preeminent classics scholar revises the history of medicine.
Medical thinking and observation were radically changed by the ancient Greeks, one ...
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Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Unsinkable: Five Men and the Indomitable Run of the USS Plunkett
by
James Sullivan
Scribner, 12/08/2020
More than the story of a single, savage engagement,
Unsinkable traces the individual journeys of five men on one ship from Casablanca in North Africa,...
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Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel
by
Rachel Holmes
Bloomsbury USA, 12/15/2020
Sylvia Pankhurst fought militantly for a woman's right to vote, inspiring movements around the globe. But the vote was just the beginning. A talented ...
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