Critic Jason Sheehan says the new novel from Matt Haig — about a mystical library that lets people sample all the ways their lives might have gone — is a little too gentle and straightforward.
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Robinson's latest Gilead novel centers on prodigal son Jack, newly released from prison and in love with a Black woman — a crime in 1950s Missouri. But it's not a pat tale of love overcoming racism.
(Image credit: Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Jonathan Alter tells Carter's life story beautifully and with admirable fairness — while it's evident that he admires Carter, he treats the former president as a real person, as flawed as anyone else.
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A family on vacation opens the door of their remote Airbnb rental one night to an older couple who claims to be the home's owners. Rumaan Alam's thrilling novel is about race, class and self-delusion.
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Former Washington Post leader Len Downie is well-placed to offer a look at 50 years in news — but he also writes of times he had to weigh the public's right to know against national security.
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Renowned ballerina Misty Copeland's new kids' book Bunheads draws on her own childhood experiences — if your kids love dance, it's just the thing to keep them going until classes come back.
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From romance to nonfiction, here are some of NPR's best audiobook recommendations.
The former congressman's memoir is an urgent call to action, imploring us to defend our democracy as it is assailed by threats — and a poignant reminder of how much the nation lost with his death.
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In her first non-fiction work, Laila Lalami says these Americans want the country to succeed, but can't avoid the gulf between purported values of equality and the realities of systematic oppression.
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Burnout, Anne Helen Petersen argues, will end only with sweeping labor-policy changes — meaning it will only end when we "vote en masse to elect politicians who will agitate for [reform] tirelessly."
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This book may be the master in-depth briefing H.R. McMaster always wanted to give the president. For better or worse, it seems listening to lengthy historical explanations has not been Trump's style.
(Image credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Clarke fans waited 16 years for this follow-up to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Here, Clarke limns a magic that is part of the very fabric of the universe.
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The latest installment in the Hercule Poirot franchise — now being written by Sophie Hannah — is a masterful, multilayered puzzle in which Poirot's assistant Inspector Catchpool plays a key role.
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Lilliam Rivera's new young adult novel reimagines Orpheus and Eurydice as Afro-Latinx teens in New York, bringing something new to the old tale by giving Eurydice her own baggage and her own story.
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Graham Smith's new novel seems at first to be a light little story about a seaside love triangle in Brighton, England in the 1950s — but it turns out to be about something far deeper.
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Historian David Nasaw writes with deep, broad knowledge of the hundreds of thousands of refugees filling Europe's roads after WWII, hoping to return to homes that, in many cases, no longer existed.
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As the central character struggles with grief and shock at her late husband's infidelity, author Sue Miller keeps deftly shifting what readers might anticipate to be the ending of this novel.
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In If Then, author and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore unearths Simulmatics' story and makes the argument that the company paved the way for our 21st-century obsession with data and prediction.
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Sophie Yanow's new graphic novel chronicles her time studying abroad in Paris; it's not suspenseful or eventful, but Yanow's combination of perception and humility makes for an engaging read.
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Sumita Chakraborty's new poetry collection grapples with the death of the poet's sister; like the arrow of the title, which can be a weapon of Cupid or of war, these poems contain both love and death.
(Image credit: Alice James Books)
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