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At The New York Times Book Review, we write about thousands of books every year. Many of them are good. Some are even great. But we get that sometimes you just want to know, “What should I read that is good or great for me?”
Well, here you go — a running list of some of the year’s best, most interesting, most talked-about books. Check back next month to see what we’ve added.
(For more recommendations, subscribe to our Read Like the Wind newsletter, check out our romance columnist’s favorite books of the year so far or visit our What to Read page.)
Fiction
I’d like a historical crime novel from an American master
Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead
Easy: Pick up this new novel, a follow-up to Whitehead’s novel “Harlem Shuffle.” He again uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point — here, Harlem in the 1970s. The novel makes sinuous the sounds of a city and its denizens pushing against the boundaries.
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Actually, I want a crime novel, but darker
All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby
In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime/suspense genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children — he’s written a crackling good police procedural.
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I wasn’t invited to the Hamptons this year
The Guest, by Emma Cline
Live vicariously through a call girl on the run, who’s desperately trying to find her footing in the rarefied spaces of Long Island — where she knows she will never be fully welcome. Alex, the main character, is kicked out of her rich boyfriend’s summer house, and drifts from house parties to beach clubs, gaining entry by posing as a party girl or a family friend or a sex kitten, a study in determined complacency as she figures out what people want and how to give it to them. It’s a subtle, nuanced study of power and performance.
I want to read one of the summer’s buzziest books
Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang
Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is breezy and propulsive: a thrilling, searing tale about a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing the manuscript of her recently deceased Asian friend’s unpublished novel and passing it off as her own.
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I’d like a cozy family story
Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett
Set on a cherry orchard during the recent pandemic, this novel has echoes of both Anton Chekhov and Thornton Wilder. It follows three sisters in their 20s quarantining with their mother — and draw out stories from her past as an actress.
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Give me an existential, deep-sea thriller
Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus
A teenage diver is gulped down by a 60-ton whale while trying to honor his father’s death, and must try to escape. However improbable its premise, this is a crazy, and crazily enjoyable, beat-the-clock adventure story about fathers, sons, guilt and the mysteries of the sea.
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I’d like a fizzy novel of manners
Pineapple Street, by Jenny Jackson
Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems (which threaten to weaken the clan’s stiffest upper lip). Does money buy happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does it buy honesty?
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I’d like to be scared — but not too scared
Lone Women, by Victor LaValle
It’s 1915 when Adelaide, a young Black woman, makes her way from California to the Montana wilds in the wake of a family tragedy. As she establishes herself as a homesteader, adjusting to the isolation and wide open spaces, the contents of a locked steamer trunk — and some dark secrets — weigh heavily on her conscience.
I want a sweeping saga with a hopeful bent
The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese
Verghese’s first novel since the enormously successful “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor, will make. At over 700 pages, this is a long saga — but the author’s gift for suspense, and his easy relationship to language, helps the story fly by.
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Give me a crackling, fast-moving literary thriller
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton
In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes. The billionaire decides to support the collective, citing common interests, but some of the activists suspect ulterior motives.
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Give me a rich, decades-spanning family saga
Hello Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano
In her radiant and brilliantly crafted fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on a classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago, add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly original story.
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Nonfiction
I want a dazzling biography of a civil rights icon
King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig
The first comprehensive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, Eig’s book draws on a landslide of recently released government documents as well as letters and interviews. This is a book worthy of its subject: both an intimate study of a complex and flawed human being and a journalistic account of a civil rights titan.
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I’d like a dramatic history that reads like a novel
The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, by Jeff Goodell
In his fast-paced new book about the extreme heat caused by climate change, Goodell shows how even the most privileged among us will struggle with the cascading catastrophes — rising seas, crop failures, social unrest — generated by the deadly heat. (If you’d like something more retrospective, another recent book, John Vaillant’s “Fire Weather,” argues that the catastrophic — and inevitable — 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in Canada was a sign of things to come.)
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Give me a swashbuckling tale of survival
I want a celebrity memoir that doesn’t hold back
Pageboy: A Memoir, by Elliot Page
Page, known for his roles in “Juno” and “Inception,” came out as trans in late 2020. In this “brutally honest” memoir, he recounts the fears and obstacles to gender transition — and the hard-won happiness that’s followed.
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How about some real-life ‘Succession’?
Take me on a head-spinning trip through the dark corridors of the national security apparatus
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, by Kerry Howley
The people in this darkly funny book include fabulists, truth tellers, combatants, whistle-blowers. Like many of us, they have left traces of themselves in the digital ether by making a phone call, texting a friend, looking up something online. Howley writes about the national security state and those who get entangled in it — Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner all figure into Howley’s riveting account.
