Black Butterflies follows an artist’s life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, in a story of how art sustains and gives purpose in moments of desolation and terror.
Amanda Cox’s entrancing Between the Sound and Sea chronicles the restoration of a lighthouse and the journey of an event planner who is looking for a new start.
Daniel M. Lavery, author of Something That May Shock and Discredit You, makes his historical fiction debut with Women’s Hotel, a slice-of-life comedy following the residents of a hotel for young working women in 1960s New York City. Lavery was Slate’s Dear Prudence columnist from 2016–2021, and his humor, curiosity and empathy lend themselves perfectly to this charming subject matter.
In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, touching four lives linked by the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Renowned director Pedro Almodovar turns his deeply textured, boundless talent to 12 short stories involving elements of autobiography and fantasy in The Last Dream.
2024 has brought a number of beautiful novels exploring aging and the experiences of older protagonists, from Julia Alvarez’s The Cemetery of Untold Stories to Claire Lombardo’s Same as It Ever Was. Even in such company, Anna Montague’s debut, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?, stands out as the surest bet to bring on both laughter and tears. Magda is a psychiatrist just entering her 70s who sets off on a cross-country road trip accompanied by the ashes of her best friend, hoping to finally face what was left unresolved in their friendship.
Anyone suspicious of the luster of capitalism and its promises will find much to mull over in Entitlement, Rumaan Alam’s slyly provocative fourth novel.
Rachel Kushner has taken the bones of the traditional spy novel and spun it into something that is as thought-provoking as it is fun, an intellectual thriller that deviously suggests there could be another fate for our disaster-bound species.
Danzy Senna’s tale of a novelist’s venture into Hollywood is hilarious even as the reader senses the despair beneath the laughs. Colored Television is the perfect story for our times.
No one writes like Haruki Murakami, and his every release spurs massive excitement. For longtime fans, The City and Its Uncertain Walls incorporates familiar elements, like the Town you must give up your shadow to enter, while still delighting with a fresh plot and characters. In true Murakami fashion, this book doesn’t quite fit into one mold—fantasy? a romance? a parable?—but rather offers something for everyone.
A white-hot novel documenting the friendship that arises between two very different women, Veronica is a heady, hallucinatory narrative—another walk on the wild side from a writer who has never shied from tackling potentially contentious topics.
If you loved Downton Abbey or wish the works of Edith Wharton were a little less mannered, put Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Shuttle on your reading list.
Long before venturing southwest with Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy plumbed his native Appalachia for visceral cruelty and mythological beauty in Outer Dark.
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