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.
Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible is part fantasy, part travel saga and part romance with one’s self, and that makes it well worth reading for anyone seeking a hopeful, warm journey that crackles with magic.
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.
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.
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.
The careful balance between Intermezzo’s brisk pace and its quite fearless exploration of sexual desire makes Sally Rooney’s fourth novel her most ambitious yet.
Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk looses her deft, dark satirical wit on the rigid patriarchal world of pre-World War I Europe. The result is an enchanting, unsettling bildungsroman like nothing you’ve read before.
Renowned director Pedro Almodovar turns his deeply textured, boundless talent to 12 short stories involving elements of autobiography and fantasy in The Last Dream.
Centered on a teen love triangle in a North Dakota community dominated by sugar beet farming, Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red might just be a new American classic.
Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase, former Slate advice columnist and cofounder of The Toast Daniel M. Lavery vividly imagines a 1960s women’s hotel in his debut novel.
Anna Montague explores friendship, aging, grief, regret and love with both creative and contemplative depth in her noteworthy debut, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?
Haruki Murakami’s latest masterwork, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, is a moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways.
Nuanced, hopeful and insightful, Ava Robinson’s Definitely Better Now is an endearing portrayal of a young woman redefining herself after one year of sobriety.
Though entertaining in the vein of Bridget Jones’s Diary, I Made It Out of Clay is darker and more complex, following a Jewish woman grieving the loss of her father who creates a golem when she can’t secure a date for her sister’s wedding.
Each of these fabulous novels, our 19 best historical fiction titles of the year, will transport you to another time and place.
In Bluebird Day, Megan Tady delivers a cozy tale with layers as numerous as midseason snowpack, delving into the psyches of mother and daughter competitive skiers Claudine and Wylie.
In Bluebird Day, Megan Tady delivers a cozy tale with layers as numerous as midseason snowpack, delving into the psyches of mother and daughter competitive skiers Claudine and Wylie.
Zahid Rafiq peers into the inner lives of 11 people living in Kashmir in his debut short story collection, The World With Its Mouth Open.
“Family vacation” takes on a new meaning for grown children without kids of their own—like the couple trying their best to keep both sets of in-laws happy in Weike Wang’s Rental House.