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If 2023 was a lot of fun—frothy delights like Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street, a cool and compelling new novel from Emma Cline, heartfelt family sagas like Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful, and effervescent debuts like Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident—it was also a year that was perhaps a bit fractured in the book world. Where was the big fall novel that everyone seemed to be reading? If you can think of a book that checks this box, it was probably Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, her first foray into historical fiction—a book that took two real-life characters and imagined an epic and emotional landscape for them. But many year-end lists have immediately sent us to the bookstore, searching for titles we seem to have missed. All this has led us to believe that the book world is a bit weirdly, and maybe wonderfully, decentralized at the moment. You may not be reading the same book as five other commuters in your subway car, but you’re likely to be able to find a book that absolutely captures you. Here’s what we loved.
The Shards by Brett Easton Ellis (January)
Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero, published in 1985, is hard to shake—a drifting, menacing story about Los Angeles private school kids with monosyllabic names (Clay, Blair, Trent, Rip) who go to parties, do drugs, have sex and try to feel something about any of it. The Shards, Ellis’s hypnotic, prodigious, and unsettling new novel—his first in 13 years—is a time machine back to that early 80s milieu. It stars none other than Ellis himself, a prep school senior writing a novel called Less Than Zero and surrounded by a pack of rich, beautiful friends who are themselves shadowed by a serial killer nicknamed the Trawler. Ellis holds nothing back through these 600 pages: baroque violence, startling eroticism, relentless cataloging of mood-specific song and movie titles. His gothic predilections are not for everyone (the Trawler’s kills are grotesque), but the evocation of a certain kind of vacant privilege—a buried longing overlaid with studied dissociation—is masterful.—Taylor Antrim
Sam by Allegra Goodman (January)
There are books that assail you with their importance, and then there are those, like Allegra Goodman’s Sam (The Dial Press), whose modest-seeming ambitions blossom into sweeping works of emotional resonance. Goodman’s novel tells the deceptively simple story of a girl, Sam, growing into a young woman. Her life has many deprivations and few points of brightness—but from these bare contours, a powerful portrait emerges. Goodman’s writing mimics the voice of her subject, with earlier chapters echoing the staccato thought patterns of elementary years and later chapters channeling the tender vulnerabilities of young adulthood. Sam may investigate the most acute of emotional growing pains, but there is nothing awkward here.—Chloe Schama
The Survivalists: A Novel by Kashana Cauley (January)
Community gardeners meet doomsday preppers stockpiling weapons above a trendy coffee shop in The Survivalists (Soft Skull Press), a darkly funny look at how people form communities to care for one another amid institutional failures and scarcity. Set in a mostly Black Central Brooklyn, this debut novel from Kashana Cauley— a former lawyer, Daily Show With Trevor Noah writer, and New York Times contributor—finds humor in our hostile, uncertain present while outlining starkly different visions of the future—and how we might prepare for them.—Lisa Wong Macabasco
Spare by Prince Harry (January)
It’s almost unheard of for a book to dominate public conversation well before even being published. Yet Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, has done just that after several explosive and intimate claims about his life within the royal family came to light. Of course, we haven’t read it yet, but the talent of his ghost-writer, J.R. Moehringer, who also wrote the biographies of Nike’s Phil Knight and Andre Agassi, has us excited. The Pulitzer Prize winner has an astonishing ability to plumb the depths of his subjects—crafting a raw, nuanced portrait of a person in the process. “He’s half psychiatrist,” Knight said of Moehringer. “He gets you to say things you really didn’t think you would.”—Elise Taylor
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (February)
Jen Beagin writes with a zany, overflowing energy, her enthusiasm in stark contrast to the halting, static nature of her protagonist in Big Swiss. Set in a very recognizable Hudson, New York, brimming with metropolitan expats and locals who have settled into their roles as the native color, the novel tells the story of a woman running from her past while excavating the emotional travails of others. She is doing this quite literally, as the transcriber for a local sex therapist, ignoring all professional ethics as she does so by falling for one of the clients. She may be privy to the innermost desires of the client—whom she nicknames Big Swiss—but that doesn’t make her more sure-footed when it comes to affairs of the heart. Big Swiss is a comic novel, but it is one with a very tender core. Already in development as a series set to star Jodie Comer, you are sure to hear more about this one.—C.S.
Pat in the City by Patricia Field (February)
Patricia Field’s memoir covers the territory you’d expect it to cover: how she got her gig as the costume designer for Sex In the City (including a charming anecdote about how she convinced showrunner Darren Star that a tutu was far superior to a shift dress for Carrie’s ensemble in the opening credits), her more recent exploits as the force behind the eyeball-scorching outfits on Emily In Paris. But it also covers her more tender years growing up in New York City and Long Island, how her early store, Pants Pub, ignited a small revolution in downtown fashion, and how subsequent boutiques became a refuge for fantastic misfits of all stripes. You didn’t need to have a lot of retail experience to work for Patricia Field, it seems, but you did need to have a whole lot of the right kind of attitude. This is a book for the SATC superfans, but it is also for anyone curious about the lived experience of Downtown culture in the ’70s, ’80s, and beyond.—C.S.
Cold People by Tom Rob Smith (February)
What is the author of a trilogy of elegant historical espionage novels (the bestselling Child 44 books) doing writing a sci-fi monster novel set in Antarctica? I read the summary of Tom Rob Smith’s Cold People (Scribner)—an alien invasion wipes out Earth’s population, driving the lone survivors to Antarctica to set up a new society—with bemusement. Had Smith, who pivoted into TV writing with The Assassination of Gianni Versace and other shows, lost his way? Nope. Cold People is a zany, wildly gripping, dark futuristic fantasy that never remotely achieves plausibility but achieves escapist lift-off nonetheless. The alien invasion that begins the book and prompts a desperate evacuation to Antarctica—the only place the aliens will let humans live—is bizarrely cursory, but Smith is getting it out of the way. The bulk of the book, set in the resulting society of human survivalists on the icy continent, tells a story of genetic experimentation that recalls H.P. Lovecraft and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I loved this wild, imaginative, fast-moving book and can’t wait to see the inevitable screen adaptation.—T.A.
The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A–Z by Tamar Adler (March)
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Vogue contributing editor Tamar Adler’s new cookbook is a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated, and gracefully written resource for what to do with basically anything in your fridge, larder, or on your chopping board. A kind of spiritual sequel to her 2011 volume, An Everlasting Meal, this hefty, companionable resource suggests new life for, say, overcooked beans, or undercooked ones, discarded crab shells, leftover ramen soup, uneaten waffles (or flat beer, or broken aioli, or pickle brine—seriously, nothing is left unconsidered). There are recipes and strategies for everything you can imagine, and a no-waste ethos permeates these many pages with goodwill, humor, and hope. As with all things Adler, the writing is fantastic: expert and unfailingly elegant.—T.A.
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (March)
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Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful is a tribute to Little Women, telling the story of four sisters and the man who enters their orbit when he marries the oldest daughter. So far, so similar. But William Waters’s tragic past is rendered, on the first page of this novel, with such heartbreaking specificity—his three-year-old sister died in her crib the week he was born, plunging his parents into a state of mourning they never escape—that readers will be forewarned that they have a distinct experience ahead of them. In college William becomes involved with Julia Padavano, a relentlessly ambitious young woman from a boisterous Chicago family, and is quickly subsumed by her desires and trajectory. Napolitano has an uncanny ability to pack her paragraphs with rich detail, painting entire landscapes—interior and exterior—with startling emotional economy. This is a warm blanket of a book, one that reminds you of the enveloping power of literature and leaves you very grateful to have encountered it.—C.S.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (March)
Set in modern-day New Zealand, Birnam Wood (Macmillan) is a multi-layered book that reads, at times like a far-left anti-capitalist manifesto, at times like a techno-futurist manual, at times like suburban ennui-driven domestic fiction—in short, it’s a book of contemporary ideas, somehow woven together into a thriller that is subtly poking fun at the absolutism all those perspectives entail. No matter how assured the characters are that they possess the most righteous framework through which to understand the world, their blindspots lead them into sometimes criminal entanglements that they can’t philosophize their way out of. Catton is not just a master at spinning a web of competing philosophies, though; her characters are deeply flawed, but you can’t help but root for them. I was one of the few who missed this young New Zealand novelist’s best-selling and critically acclaimed 2013 novel, The Luminaries, but this new book has convinced me that I won’t let that happen again.—C.S.
Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson (March)
Jenny Jackson’s new novel Pineapple Street (Pamela Dornan) is a delicious new Gilded Age family drama—almost a satire—set in the leafy enclaves of Brooklyn Heights. The book follows three women in the Stockton family, a clan that made their money in real estate and left subsequent generations to alternately indulge in and wring their hands over it, their angst inflected with a very New York 1% class consciousness. Family members make their way from their non-profit jobs and school fundraisers to tennis clubs and private planes. It’s a lighthearted book that captures a slice of New York society, a guilty pleasure that also feels like a sociological text, punctuated with very particular references to restaurants, preschools, nightclubs, and other pillars of urban life in 2023.—C.S.
The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J.Crew by Maggie Bullock (March)
Maggie Bullock’s cultural history is nominally the story of the rise and fall of one of America’s most iconic retailers, but it’s also a sociological text and a personal one, charting the brand’s influence in popular, commercial, and deeply individual terms. Bullock, who has spent a large part of her career working in fashion magazines, is intimately acquainted with this terrain, not just as an editor but as a former boarding school novice, transplanted to the Northeast from a decidedly unpreppy family in the South, forced to navigate the choppy social dynamics among her rollneck-sweater-wearing peers. Most everyone is familiar with the Jenna Lyons–era J.Crew aesthetic, which extended its influence to no less prominent spheres than the White House, but fewer people are familiar with the ups and downs of the brand before its hot pink, sequined phase. Bullock unravels it all in this lively, entertaining book.—C.S.
The Lost Wife by Susana More (April)
It’s fitting that The Lost Wife (Knopf), Susanna Moore’s first work of fiction in over a decade, should directly follow Miss Aluminum, her lustrous 2020 memoir; this book, like that one, tells the story of a woman continuously transformed by difficult relationships and sweeping changes of circumstance. In the new novel, Moore’s protagonist is Sarah, a 25-year-old wife and mother who leaves an unhappy home in Rhode Island for a fresh start in Minnesota, where white settlers have forged an uneasy peace with the Sioux people. Sarah’s new marriage to a respected (if repressed and opium-addicted) local doctor grants her money and status for the first time in her life—but when she’s abducted during the US-Dakota War of 1862, her loyalty to him, and to so-called civilized society in general, is tested. Even transposed onto the 19th-century American prairie, Moore’s voice is cool and sure, rich with detail.—Marley Marius
Independence Square by Martin Cruz Smith (May)
Martin Cruz Smith has been writing highly diverting detective novels starring the Moscow-based investigator Arkady Renko since his 1981 breakthrough Gorky Park. Each is fast-paced enough to read on a beach towel but so full of detail about Russian life and politics that you leave equally edified and entertained. His tenth Renko mystery, the highly enjoyable Independence Square, is set in the tumultuous months leading up to the invasion of Ukraine. Renko takes on the case of a missing dissident girl, leading him from Moscow to Kyiv to the Crimean peninsula, where menacing revanchist biker gangs dream of a return to Soviet times. Smith keeps his plot ticking along but makes room for affecting character work too. In Independence Square the intrepid Renko must face a Parkinson’s diagnosis (Smith has lived with the disease since the ‘90s) along with a rising body count.—T.A.
The Half Moon by Mary Beth Keane (May)
Keane’s 2019 novel Ask Again, Yes was a breakthrough: a best-selling portrait of a pair of hard-working Irish American families in suburban New York whose lives intersect and fall apart. Her deft, satisfying fourth novel The Half Moon returns to a similar milieu and tells a more concentrated story: of Malcolm Gephardt, bar owner, 40-something, as personable as he is emotionally hapless, struggling to save his business and marriage—to an attorney wife who justifiably wants more. Keane writes in a sturdily realist vein—the vivid, domesticated world of Anne Tyler, of William Trevor, of Elizabeth Strout—but her insights into matters of the heart, longing, and restlessness especially, have astonishing delicacy.—T.A.
The Postcard by Anne Berest (May)
Anne Berest’s novel, The Postcard (Europa), falls loosely into the category of what we might call, in this country, autofiction. (The French probably have another term!) The protagonist, a Paris-based writer named Anne, receives a postcard from an anonymous sender inscribed only with the names of four relatives who died in Auschwitz. All this happened to the author as well. But what transpires after is a testament to the power of imagination and an investigation of empathy—because far from haunting her, Berest’s murdered relatives were largely absent from her life, in part because she had never fully considered her Jewish heritage. The Postcard goes on to spin a full and textured rendering of these relatives’ lives before they were cruelly killed, rendering the horrors of the Holocaust horrifically fresh. Once the novel has covered this ground, however, it becomes almost a modern-day thriller, circling in on the mysterious mail at its center. The Postcard is a somewhat strange book, not without the occasional infelicity of translation, almost experimental in its form. But even with all its layered complication, it is undeniably compelling.—C.S.
Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith (May)
I devoured this gimlet-eyed account of painfully recent history–the dizzy rise of digital media rivals such as Buzzfeed and Gawker, companies fueled on human attention, rapacious for virality and traffic, a word that has totemic power in this well-paced narrative. Smith, former Politico star, former Buzzfeed News Editor, former New York Times media columnist, and now the editor-in-chief of Semafor, is well placed to tell the stories of ambitious, restless characters such as Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti and Gawker’s Nick Denton and the Faustian bargains they made on the way to enormous valuations, and equally precipitous turnabouts in fortune. Smith, of course, is a protagonist here too, having controversially decided to publish the notorious Steele dossier about President Trump at Buzzfeed when other outlets would not (an episode he recounts and reflects on here). I am not sure I wholly bought Smith’s conclusion—that the harnessing of virality by the likes of Buzzfeed led to the ubiquity of an increasingly remorseless right-wing populism. And yet the argument is made with force and gives this book the shape of a (irresistibly readable) tragedy.—T.A.
The Guest by Emma Cline (May)
Emma Cline’s new novel—her first since her breakthrough debut in 2016, The Girls—is a grifter tale for the post-Anna Delvey era, a spellbinding literary rendering told from the perspective of the deceiver herself. Exiled from her quasi-boyfriend’s Hampton’s home, she convinces herself that all will be forgiven if she can simply hang on for the week and make an unbidden appearance at his weekend party. Like The Girls, and several of the stories in Cline’s short story collection, Daddy, Cline is here investigating the power and peril of being female and young, telling a story in which who is being used, and for what, is slippery and ill-defined. Cline is a master of depicting the nefarious and atmospheric menace that often lurks adjacent to our most glittery environments, and she does so here with subdued but no less cutting aplomb.—C.S.
Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (May)
I’m many years off from having kids (I...hope?), but if and when I do, I’ll be ushering them into adolescence with a copy of this brilliant, incisive, and funny meditation on sex, consent, and desire from Food & Wine editor Yagoda. In the book, Yagoda gets at an essential truth (too many of us are having bad, or at least meh, sex) without being remotely prescriptive; her journalistic perspective is fresh enough to make an age-old complaint feel new and deeply relevant.—Emma Specter
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donohue (June)
Caroline O’Donohue’s delightful novel, The Rachel Incident, is set in the Irish city of Cork in the early-ish 2010s and is narrated by a woman looking back at her university years a decade later. But The Rachel Incident is as much an investigation of how the events of early adulthood shape us as it is about the events themselves; this is a sneakily philosophical book about growing up that offers its insights with charming, effervescent ease. And about those events—one can’t help but feel a bit bad for O’Donohue, whose characters and plot will inevitably be compared to Sally Rooney. (One setup involving two college-age students and an older, glamorously intellectual couple bears uncanny resemblance to the setup of Rooney’s Conversations With Friends.) But O’Donohue is a unique and exciting talent, allowing her characters to puncture their solipsistic preoccupations with humor and self-awareness, even if it arrives after their glittering self-involved young adulthood has faded into the past. I galloped through this book, enchanted by its characters and its full-hearted vision of friendship. This is a book full of love, and it is extremely easy to love reading it.—C.S.
The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon (June)
Clémence Michalon’s dark and juicy thriller is set in upstate New York. More precisely, it’s set mainly within the confines of a rural house where a serial killer is keeping a victim he has mysteriously decided to keep instead of kill—fun stuff! And yet, like Emma Donohue’s Room, the novel takes this creepy and claustrophobic premise and spins a paradoxically expansive plot from it, told from the perspective of his victim, his daughter, and a local restaurant owner. The killer is presented not just as a monster but as a member of polite society—something of a stretch, but in Michalon’s assured telling, a compelling one.—C.S.
Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur (June)
Adrienne Brodeur knows her way around a family drama; in her first book, 2019’s Wild Game, she recalled abetting her own mother’s long affair with the married man who later became her stepfather. Now, with the novel Little Monsters (Avid Reader Press), Brodeur weaves a story dense with stinging secrets and simmering resentments, rooted in another context that she knows well: the manicured towns and wild fringes of Cape Cod. (Brodeur divides her time between the Cape and Cambridge, Massachusetts.) Unfolding between April and October of 2016—with that year’s looming election offering its own grim disquiet—the book centers on the Gardner clan, anchored by patriarch Adam, a formerly esteemed, now dangerously flailing marine biologist staring down the barrel of 70; son Ken, a tightly wound aspiring politician concealing great depths of childhood trauma; and daughter Abby, an oddball artist slowly emerging from her father and brother’s towering shadows. (Rounding out the central cast are Jenny—Abby’s best friend from RISD and Ken’s wife—and Steph, a police officer from Boston lingering on the periphery.) Set against the island’s rippling dune grasses and scrub pines, their narrative is as elegantly rendered as it is compulsively readable.—M.M.
The Imposters by Tom Rachman (June)
Tom Rachman’s bustling, globe-trotting new novel manages to be about a writer’s life ending, quietly, lonesomely—even as it bursts with characters, plots, humor, and drama. The writer is Dora Frenhofer, a prickly Dutch novelist in her seventies, living alone in London, who is determined to write another novel, a final act of creation in the face of the literary world’s indifference. The Imposters is that manuscript, a novel-in-stories interrupted by diary entries from Frenhofer herself, who can’t quite find her subject so she tries many—like a young man adrift in India (inspired by Dora’s lost brother), a linguist who lost her children in a horrific crime (a double of a London friend), a comedy writer in L.A. who longing for affection and company (Dora’s estranged daughter). Rachman, a former A.P. foreign-news editor, has a far-and-wide imagination, and his novel is ingenious: investing a protagonist at the twilight of her life with grand, restless vision.—T.A.
Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions by Mattie Kahn (June)
Mattie Kahn’s Young and Restless feels born of the current moment: a book about the Gretas and the Xiyes of the world, and the outsized role they seem to play in fixing our broken world. But it is also an interrogation into why we pay these captivating young women such attention—are young women seemingly over-represented in the climate fight because that cause is generally associated with the need to make altruistic sacrifice and women have traditionally been more associated with those tendencies? The book is also a look at why and how girls have been sidelined by history in the past—turned into objects of cultural fascination while simultaneously being denied agency and power, especially in the historical record.—C.S.
Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie (June)
In Jenny Xie’s Holding Pattern, Kathleen Cheng has moved back home to Oakland, reeling from a devastating breakup and having dropped out of a graduate program. There she finds her Chinese immigrant mother somehow newly engaged to a tech entrepreneur. Signing up to be a cuddle therapist at a curious start-up moves Cheng to reconsider the relationships in her life. Driven by Xie’s irresistible voice, this is a warm and funny debut about longing and belonging, the mother-
daughter bond, and finding intimacy in an increasingly alienated world.—L.W.M.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore (June)
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Lorrie Moore’s darkly funny and occasionally unhinged new novel is a bit of a collage, a jittering, syncopated series of narrative sequences that add up to something sneakily profound–a suggestion of an afterlife that could be more joyous than our own. It starts with a letter written by the owner of a 19th-century boarding house named Libby to her sister. For fans of Moore, whose slim short story collections of contemporary life—Self-Help, Like Life, Bark—are masterclasses of compression, Libby’s antique register (“A good scalawag sticks to the late-night cipher of her diary”) is startling, musical if knotty. (One senses Moore had fun writing these pages, which are about a handsome, flirtatious boarder who has come to stay.) Soon enough, though, the mood darkens as we leap forward to 2016: A high school teacher named Finn is visiting his dying brother Max in hospice in New York, preparing himself to say goodbye. As soon as you’ve settled into that mordant, bleakly funny sequence, it is interrupted again as Finn is called back to his midwestern home, where his ex-girlfriend has committed suicide. This is Lily, who dominates the second half of this book as a decaying zombie. Are you still with me? If you’re new to Moore, this is perhaps not the book of hers to start with, but over nearly a 40-year career, she has more than earned the loyalty of her fervent fans. This lunar, screwball novel is brief and unexpectedly powerful in its meditations and riffs on love and purgatory as it swerves and skids toward an offbeat finish.—T.A.
After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley (July)
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Ghosts of the short story masters—Alice Munro, William Trevor, Katherine Mansfield among them—haunt the wonderful new collection from Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral and Other Stories. Hadley published her first novel just 20 years ago. Since then we’ve been treated to a steadily growing body of work—eight novels and four collections in total—all of it astonishing in its consistency. Hadley writes graceful domestic narratives, generally set in England—stories of daughters and wives and widows and sisters and lovers, whose lives are upended by emotional reversals. What’s not captured in any summary is how gripping her work is. In the title story, a mother and two daughters find their way after the death of their husband and father, while a love affair with a prosperous local doctor upends their domestic equilibrium. In “Dido’s Lament” an unsteady encounter between two former lovers ends in an especially unsparing way. “Funny Little Snake” conjures extraordinary tension from the rivalry between a young wife named Valerie—who is all middle-class propriety—and the shambolic bohemian Robyn, with a nine-year-old girl caught between them. The quality of suspense and satisfaction in Hadley’s stories—quiet, patient, exquisitely wrought—is miraculous.—T.A.
The Last Ranger by Peter Heller (July)
What could be more companionable than a suspenseful novel set in Yellowstone and starring a sturdily capable park ranger (Ren) who drives a truck, loves a flat white, and is determined to protect the wolves, elk, foxes, and bears from tourists and poachers alike? Peter Heller’s sixth novel, The Last Ranger (Knopf), is a lovingly written mystery populated by wildlife and militiamen and starring a mid-30s loner who can’t help but fall for an expert wolf researcher named Hilly. Heller draws a spirit of romance from the Montana landscape even as he keeps his plot ticking along. When Hilly is nearly killed by a deliberately laid poacher’s trap, Ren must untangle the motives of a group of locals, driven by revenge or rebelliousness or simply a common desire to escape into the wild.—T.A.
The Spider by Lars Kepler (July)
Some readers fill their summers with narratives of love and romance; others need a serial killer to pass the time. Fresh from Sweden, The Spider (Knopf) is the latest thriller from Lars Kepler (the pseudonym for a best-selling husband-wife team), and like Kepler’s other breathless procedurals, it stars the preternaturally brilliant detectives Joona Linna and Saga Bauer. In The Spider, they’re on the trail of an elusive killer who sends eerie figurines and cryptic riddles before striking. Everything is turned up to 11 in Kepler’s novels, which are wry, fast-moving, and ever so slightly perverse. A beach read for the dark-hearted, The Spider is vivid, wicked fun.—T.A.
The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth Rush (August)
Elizabeth Rush’s The Quickening is one part memoir, one part reporting from the edge—think Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction—a book that feels as though it was written from the brink. In this case, the extreme scenario is literal: Rush, a journalist, joins a crew of scientists aboard a ship headed for a glacier in Antarctica that is, like much of the poles, rapidly disappearing. The book brings the environmental crisis into a personal sphere, asking what it means to have a child in the face of such catastrophic change. Threaded throughout this intimate investigation are the stories of the scientists and crew, each with their own take on the challenges they are facing. Rush writes with clarity and precision, giving a visceral sense of everything from the gear required to traverse an arctic landscape to the interior landscape of a woman facing change both global and immediate.—C.S.
Learned by Heart by Emma Donohue (August)
Inspired by the real correspondence and (extensive) diaries of Anne Lister—an English landowner often dubbed “the first modern lesbian”—and her erstwhile lover Eliza Raine, Learned By Heart (Little, Brown and Company) is Emma Donoghue’s richly imagined novelistic account of a 19th-century love affair. (Donoghue, the Booker Prize–winning author of Room, has also produced several significant works of historical fiction, including 2016’s The Wonder, recently adapted for Netflix.) Raine, the Madras-born daughter of an English surgeon, first meets the rule-flouting, Latin-spouting Lister at their small boarding school. With time, the intimacies of isolated schoolgirls yield to full-tilt desire. That first fire eventually sputters, but not without leaving behind some beautiful embers.—M.M.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith (September)
Zadie Smith’s searingly original sixth novel, The Fraud, is also her first foray into historical fiction. Set in 1873, some 40 years after Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act, it masterfully depicts post-emancipation Britain as it ruptures along fault lines of class and race. At its center are the real-life figures of William Ainsworth, a successful and prolific, if hopelessly bloviating author (and something of a rival to Charles Dickens), and Ainsworth’s cousin’s widow, Eliza Touchet, who serves as his housekeeper and sometime lover. Just as you think the novel might be a Victorian comedy of manners—and it is certainly very funny in parts—Smith introduces Andrew Bogle, a former slave who is now the key witness in a controversial trial of fraudulent identity that gripped England in 1873. As Bogle unfurls his past to Touchet in a chophouse over a hot meal, the whole rancid history of England’s involvement with the slave trade—its plantations steeped in human misery and blood—comes crashing to the fore like a rush of blood to the head.—Zing Tsjeng
Omega Farm: A Memoir by Martha McPhee (September)
Martha McPhee’s spirited and ruthlessly honest memoir, Omega Farm, begins with a familiar COVID scenario: a daughter sheltering in place with her aging mother (and her husband and kids) on a rural, densely forested family farm, thinking it’s just a temporary measure. But McPhee finds herself stuck, not just by the pandemic, but by the needs of her dementia-stricken mother and those of the hopelessly neglected property—and by her own whirlpool of memories. McPhee describes her 1970s childhood, which was presided over by her mother, her Gestalt therapist stepfather, and her nine siblings, as a kind of bohemian chaos, where boundaries were crossed in the name of freedom. There’s a darkness to these recollections, and McPhee’s willingness to reckon with them and with the needs of the shambolic property form the memoir’s hypnotic narrative. McPhee’s adventures in forestry are as involving as her unearthing of family secrets.—T.A.
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt (September)
Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed (New York Review Books) is a disarming and heartrending little book—little in the sense that the scale is small and the text less than 200 pages. It is the story, essentially, of a grandmother raising her granddaughter when her addict daughter relinquishes parental control. Ruth—the grandmother—is proud, exacting, strong, insecure, and damaged; she pours all this into raising the baby, Lily, who grows up under her watch. Ruth saves Lily, but her granddaughter returns the favor, giving her love and purpose. Like a painterly miniature, Loved and Missed contains a wide-ranging emotional landscape within its precise and intricate scenes. Boyt packs her writing with such intensity it is sometimes difficult to read; there’s no filler here, just the soaring and plunging sensations that come along with unrelenting love—and what could be a bigger topic than that?—C.S.
How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto (September)
Julius Taranto’s razor-sharp debut, How I Won a Nobel Prize (Little, Brown), comes with an intriguing premise: Helen, a prodigiously talented graduate student, decides to follow her professor and mentor after he is booted from their university following a sex scandal. Their destination is an institute for “canceled” academics on an island off the coast of Connecticut, where a protest movement aiming to bring the high-flying academic pariahs to their knees has taken root. That might sound like the start of a clunky cancel culture diatribe, but Taranto’s compelling dissections of moral gray areas and nail-bitingly tense passages on Helen’s superconductivity experiments make the novel bracingly clever. A viciously funny page-turner with plenty of surprises up its sleeve.—Liam Hess
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (September)
Lauren Groff has long been fascinated by stories of female survival, and in her new novel, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead), she places her protagonist in extreme circumstances: an early period of the Jamestown colony, when famine decimated almost the entirety of that settlement. Our heroine flees to the surrounding wilderness, where, by wits and tenacity, she manages to maintain a tenuous purchase on life. The Vaster Wilds is a page-turner with a built-in engine: What will she have to do to survive? Inspired by the language of Elizabethan English, the book takes a minute to metabolize. But once you slip into its rich rhythms, it’s an engrossing and rewarding journey.—C.S.
The Secret Hours by Mick Herron (September)
Spy novelists are often hailed as successors to the late John le Carré. Mick Herron with The Secret Hours (Soho Crime), his teemingly complex story of the British Secret Service, rife with post-Brexit infighting and festering Cold War secrets, earns the comparison. The novel has exciting set pieces and plenty of cloak-and-dagger maneuvering, but what elevates it is Herron’s clear-eyed portrait of state power, in which lowly civil servants joust with formidable MI5 leaders who may, in turn, be toppled by spies who have long ago come in from the cold. Amid his careful plotting Herron manages to be acidly funny too, a quality that fans of his best-selling Slough House novels (adapted by Apple TV+ as the terrific series Slow Horses) know well.—T.A.
Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (September)
I’m a sucker for a sister story, and this novel (which follows three granddaughters of the titular matriarch Candelaria as they come of age in Guatemala and the US) is spooky, sweet, stunningly well-written, and the perfect thing to slip into your ultra-literary sibling’s stocking this Christmas.—E.S.
People Collide by Isle McElroy (September)
If you’re a fan of the body-swap genre (think Freaky Friday, the fun one with Lindsay Lohan) but wish it had more musings on gender, self, identity, and love, then this is indisputably the book for you. McElroy is a skilled novelist, and their gift for laying out a seemingly improbable story with realism and grace shines in this follow-up to their 2021 debut, The Atmospherians.—E.S.
The Children’s Bach: A Novel by Helen Garner (October)
This one is a bit of a cheat since it was originally published in 1984. It’s the story (loosely) of two families in Melbourne, Australia: Athena and Dexter, a married couple with two boys, and Elizabeth, a single adult woman whose teenage sister, Vicki, comes to live with her. Dexter had a relationship of sorts with Elizabeth when they were in college, and a chance encounter brings them all back together. But it is Vicki who ends up moving in and Elizabeth’s current boyfriend who most disrupts the seemingly set domestic arrangements of the nuclear family. But the plot is really beside the point (and actually sort of hard to follow); Garner is gesturing to entire lives with a few spare strokes, a master of incredibly fluid and intimate free indirect discourse. This is a modernist book set against an arid Australian landscape, and it’s like nothing else I’ve ever read.—C.S.
A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel (October)
Oh, the joys of the finely tuned 800-word essay! Against concerns over the fragmentation of media—alongside the fetishization of the long-form—it’s a tonic to recall just how potent a short (but not too short!) text can be. Mantel, the best-selling and beloved author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, was for decades, before her death last year, a journalist as well as a novelist—relying on the regular deadlines to clear out the cobwebs. The works collected in A Memoir of My Former Self (Holt) are simultaneously sharp and shapely, models of economy and density of thought. They also cover an expanse of emotional and geographic terrain. Here is the story of her time as the wife of an oil-company exec in Saudi Arabia and her struggles with that rich and claustrophobic culture; her lifelong compulsion to write; and her endometriosis—which becomes a moving meditation on women’s pain, the way it is diminished and ignored. Whether you are a Mantel completist or have never heard of her, this book is an utter delight.—C.S.
Absolution by Alice McDermott (October)
From the start, Alice McDermott’s Absolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) assumes the warm and winning tone of a letter from an old friend, full of glorious detail and teasing asides. And that is exactly what it is: Decades after a stint in Saigon, Vietnam, with her engineer husband, our primary narrator, Patricia, has reconnected with the younger Rainey, whose mother—the wily, benzo-popping Charlene—had been a friend (and a mild source of terror) to her in that faraway city. As they catch up and exchange memories of life in Vietnam (Patricia’s encounter with a young burn victim is especially piercing), McDermott compiles a heady study of war, marriage, patriotism, religion, and the compulsion to do good in the face of overwhelming suffering, her prose accomplished and assured. —M.M.
Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri (October)
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories (Knopf) is a delectable, sun-washed treat: a series of tales set in and around the Italian capital, told from the perspective of natives, expats, migrants, and other transplants. When a city invites you in—with all its alluring splendor—who ultimately gets to lay claim to it? Lahiri wears that geopolitical question lightly, enveloping the reader in birthday parties and summer heat waves; the adrenaline of teenage delinquents and the anxieties of nonnas keeping a watchful eye; flings that are mere flights of imagination and real, life-transforming affairs. Like Lahiri’s two most recent books, this collection was written in Italian and translated for an English audience, and the stories have the beating heart of the city itself, a place of magnificent decay and vibrant, varied life. —C.S.
Vengeance Is Mine by Marie NDiaye (October)
The unsettling Vengeance Is Mine (Knopf) from Marie NDiaye, winner of France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt, has the magnetism of a thriller and the mysteriousness of an existential riddle. Maître Susane, a lawyer of middling success in Bordeaux, is asked by the husband of an imprisoned woman to defend her. What has she done? Murdered her three children—an unimaginable crime that NDiaye allows to sit in the background of her storytelling like an ominous dream. What concerns NDiaye’s heroine is a flickering memory from her child- hood that involves the defendant’s husband, a passive-aggressive relationship with her Mauritian housekeeper, a sense of rejection by her parents, and her too-modest car. This is a novel of unraveling certainties and of a middle-class life encroached upon by nightmares. You may not fully unlock its mysteries—it’s slim, a good length for a reread—but you won’t be able to put it down.—T.A.
Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward (October)
Let Us Descend (Scribner), the latest novel from Jesmyn Ward—the virtuosic author of 2011’s Salvage the Bones and 2017’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, both winners of the National Book Award for Fiction—takes its title from a passage in Dante’s Inferno, verses of which Ward’s protagonist, an enslaved teenager named Annis, can hear through the door as her white half-sisters sit for their lessons. It resonates: Working in her sire’s house feels distinctly like hell—dark, endless, full of dangers—the only grace, Annis’s fierce bond with her mother, Sasha. Yet after Sasha is sold, and Annis herself is sent on a harrowing walk from the Carolinas to Louisiana, she descends to yet another circle, enduring the searing loneliness and fresh terrors of life on a sugar plantation. The novel is not for the faint of heart, but Annis’s story, told in Ward’s musical prose, is nothing short of epic, magical, and intensely moving.—M.M.
Sonic Life by Thurston Moore (October)
In 2015, Kim Gordon’s memoir, Girl in a Band, gave Sonic Youth fans a tantalizing glimpse into the group’s past—but a fractured one. Gordon’s book was written in the aftermath of her divorce from her bandmate Thurston Moore and the breakup of the group after decades of defining a beautifully angular, frequently dissonant art-house, post-punk sound. Girl in a Band, powerful and personal as it was, felt hurt and a little angry, even withdrawn. Now comes Moore’s exuberant and widescreen memoir, Sonic Life, a book that details Sonic Youth’s New York City origin story in a fascinatingly fine-grained way—and fans will devour every page. Moore is a music obsessive, a Connecticut kid who came to Manhattan in the 1970s to talk his way into Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s to gawk at punk bands, and his account of those years is meticulous, romantic, and transporting. Sonic Life packs in seemingly every gig, every night out, every record Moore saved up for and bought as he moved to the East Village and eeked out an existence in a downtown scene that was evolving by the day. It’s a vivid recollection of a lost world, a feral, scuzzy Manhattan where artists and musicians and fans were mixing and colliding and getting fucked up and trying new things. Moore would eventually meet Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley, and they would tour and make records as Sonic Youth that would change music forever. That road is well mapped here; the demise of his marriage and the breakup of his band is not. Sonic Life is withholding in its own way, a book that can’t seem to face the unhappy endgame of a band that meant so much to so many.—T.A.
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez (November)
Sigrid Nunez has achieved something wonderful at this later stage of her career: a talent for slim, companionable novels that have a kind of gossamer delicacy and tremendous emotional power. There was The Friend from 2018, a surprise bestseller and National Book Award winner, followed by 2020’s What Are You Going Through, a wry and moving story about mortality. And now we have The Vulnerables (Riverhead), which is set in Manhattan during the first months of COVID and has the spry pace of a diary and a kind of welcome gallows humor in its examination of our general communal distress. Our narrator is a writer of Nunez’s age, and she holes up in a friend’s apartment during the lockdown and passes the time in memory and musings—with a sociable house parrot for company and then a slouching 20-something (her friends’ son) who first annoys and then shakes her, somewhat hilariously, to life. —T.A.
My Name Is Barbra (November)
Fans of Barbra Streisand had been promised a memoir for years (also a DVD set called My Life in Words and Music that never materialized, but I digress), and My Name Is Barbra, released this fall, delivered on every front. Ruminative and dishy, funny and smart, it deftly captures the voice that first bewitched American audiences some 60 years ago—plus her weird dynamic with Marlon Brando, the nightmare of making Yentl with Mandy Patinkin, her lifelong fondness for baked potatoes, and other delicious bits. Oh, and speaking of Streisand’s voice: You’ve never heard an audiobook performance quite like the one she gives for this—full of wry asides and snatches of music—which clocks in at a magisterial 48 hours. As it should! —M.M.
Ilium by Lea Carpenter (December)
Lea Carpenter’s novel Ilium (Knopf), about a clandestine operation to take out a Russian asset on the French peninsula of Cap-Ferrat, has the surface tension of an espionage thriller, but it’s really a psychological study of a young British woman who is swept into a world of intelligence and finds herself undone by it. Reminiscent of the spare, strobe-lit storytelling of the late Joan Didion, Carpenter shows how wealth and sophistication paper over moral rot and how human attachment is a vulnerability when only posing and posturing keep you alive. —T.A.
Listen to Vogue editors share more must-reads on this episode of The Run-Through here.