 Last month, the reviews editors gathered for my favorite annual tradition at PW: the best books lunch. At a quiet Italian spot two blocks from our offices, we fortified ourselves with pasta, wine, and a heroic amount of espresso, and kicked off the weeks-long process of picking the 150 best books of the year. This year’s discussion was especially animated, and not just because of the espresso. Our top 10, including cover author Ben Lerner’s jewel box of a novel, Transcription, might be the strongest in recent memory, and it easily could have been expanded to include a dozen titles from our category longlists and 50 selections for children and teens. No matter what you’re hungry for, you’ll find it here. Buon appetito! |
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The Abyss of Oblivion
Paco Roca and Rodrigo Terrasa, trans. from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg (Fantagraphics)
The horrors an oppressive regime keeps buried and the restorative power of reclaiming the past are explored in Eisner winner Roca’s latest masterwork, a collaboration with El Mundo reporter Terrasa. Comics journalism blends with magical realism when activist archivists dig up a mass grave of fathers, brothers, and sons assassinated by the Franco regime in one small town in Spain—and the men’s spirits emerge to narrate their desperate last days.
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The Abyss
Jeyamohan, trans. from the Tamil by Suchitra Ramachandran (Transit)
In this gritty novel about the dehumanizing horse-trading of modern-day slavery and arranged marriage, the protagonist puts deformed people to work as beggars on the steps of Hindu temples while scheming to marry off his oldest daughter. Jeyamohan’s depictions of grotesque behavior evoke the surreally ecstatic mood of such dark-hearted classics as José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night.
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The Case of the Pilfered Pearls
Margi Preus, illus. by Junyi Wu (Amulet)
Preus and Wu’s jubilant series opener stars a pygmy shrew sleuth who seeks to uncover the identity of the thief who stole a human’s string of pearls, clear her client’s name, and circumvent potential rodent murder. The adorable cast’s unique traits, including echolocation and cheek pouches, prove vital throughout the investigation, which is peppered with shaded graphite illustrations that recall Syd Hoff’s work.
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And Then We Saw the Bag...: Trash to Them, Treasure to Us
Emma AdBåge, trans. from the Swedish by Melissa Bowers (Arctis)
AdBåge captures a household’s dynamic in this hilarious account of parental tidying’s aftermath. After two youths return to discover their home freshly decluttered, their parents try to downplay the extent of the cleanup. Dumping out the contents of a garbage bag, the protagonists undertake an intensive recovery operation, putting everything back in its place. Child autonomy wins the day in this laugh-out-loud tale.
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As I Dream of You
Jennifer Lee, illus. by LeUyen Pham (First Second)
Lee debuts with this breathtaking graphic novel romance about loss and moving forward that expertly captures a teen’s feelings of isolation and emotional intensity as he processes his girlfriend’s death. Pham’s fluid illustrations amplify the storytelling, combining moody, grayish-blues and warm, uplifting buttery yellows to deliver a hopeful tale that will incite both heartache and joy.
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99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them
Ashely Alker (St. Martin’s)
Physician Alker, who calls herself a “board-certified death escapologist,” artfully blends humor with poignant reflections on death and practical health advice. An entertaining explanation of common illnesses and rare dangers, such as brain-eating amoebas, it’s less a manual for evading death than a guide to living.
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The Amateur
Chris Bohjalian (Doubleday)
Bestseller Bohjalian reaches new heights with his 25th novel, the stunning saga of an 18-year-old female golfer who accidentally kills a caddy in 1970s Westchester, N.Y. The ensuing investigation unearths the young woman’s entanglement with a much-older man, nudging the story in rich new directions as Bohjalian brilliantly considers questions of trauma, memory, and familial legacy.
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1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World
Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press)
Pulitzer winner Ahamed offers an eye-opening revisitation of the 1873 stock market crash and the economic slump that followed—the first to actually be called the Great Depression—and traces ways in which that crash, much like subsequent crashes, prompted reactionary politics all over the world, including the end of Reconstruction and a rise in antisemitism.
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Be Easy: New and Selected Poems
Adrian Matejka (Liveright)
From Midwestern amusement parks to Jack Johnson’s boxing ring, Matejka vibrantly delivers American life in all its music and contradictions. Gathering 21 new poems alongside selections from two decades of work, this insightful volume showcases his mastery of imagery and sound. It’s an exceptional introduction for new readers and a treasure for longtime fans.
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Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith
Rachel Held Evans (HarperOne)
The late Held’s sharp theological mind is on full display in these wide-ranging essays and blog posts tackling everything from religious doubt to sexuality in the church. Interspersed with brief tributes from friends and colleagues, this definitive volume showcases a religious thinker uniquely capable of celebrating Christianity while interrogating its flaws.
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Bad Words
Ríoghnach Robinson (St. Martin’s)
Sparks fly between author Parker Navarro and literary critic Selina Chan—despite her vicious pans of his two novels. Robinson uses their juicy intellectual sparring and slow-burning enemies-to-lovers arc to probe the intersections of artistry, taste, and commerce. Her robust portrait of New York City’s publishing scene could feel a bit inside baseball, but instead provides a vibrant backdrop to this un-put-downable bookish romance.
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As You Wake, Break the Shell
Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager)
While not quite as cozy as the works that Hugo Award winner Chambers is best known for, there’s a huge beating heart at the center of this immersive sci-fi series starter. It follows space pilot Cora; Colibri, the massive extraterrestrial with whom she’s telepathically bonded; and florist Signy, whom they turn to for help hiding their “mindbleed.” Chambers imbues this meticulously crafted alien world with an impressive amount of humanity.
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The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence
Kevin Roose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
This entertaining and essential account follows the high-stakes goings-on at leading AI companies as they attempt to build machines that think better and faster than humans. Rather than weighing the potential risks and benefits of a hypothetical technology, reporter Roose offers a front row seat to how humanity arrived at a pivotal inflection point.
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The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men
Jon Ronson (Riverhead)
A bemused investigation into a wealthy steel scion’s attempt to establish a harem in a castle in New England morphs into a rollicking inquiry into why some men, like sitcom writer Graham Linehan and actor Armie Hammer, have been driven into very public, career-ending spirals over issues of sex and gender identity. This gets at the heart of something both sinister and ridiculous about the present moment.
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Bury Me Already (It’s Nice Down Here): Comics on Pregnancy and Parenting
Julia Wertz (Black Dog & Leventhal)
The infamously caustic New Yorker cartoonist catches herself off guard with an urgent desire to have a child, but domesticity does not come easy. Recounting how she endured a traumatic birth and navigated her child’s medical needs in the midst of the Covid pandemic, Wertz throws her fans—hard and hilariously—into the chaos that is parenting, where tender moments come dripped in the profane.
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Acid Green Velvet
Grace Krilanovich (Two Dollar Radio)
Krilanovich tells a wonderfully strange and slyly contemporary tale of Gilded Age California. Its wayward teen heroine, Paulette, thinks she’s found a chance at a new life by shacking up with the boho scion of a robber baron, until her tramp father shows up with a band of anti-capitalist revolutionaries. There’s nothing quite like this incendiary novel.
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Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters
Yevgenia Nayberg (Holiday House/Porter)
In this piercing graphic novel memoir, Nayberg campaigns to attend art school while navigating the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Frenetic, scribbled pencil strokes—evident amid muted watercolor and collage artwork produced on visibly creased paper—and subtle hints about the sociopolitical pressures of living in the U.S.S.R. suggest that unrest lies beneath the idyllic slice-of-life depictions of one young artist’s pursuit of uninhibited creative expression.
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Dad
Christian Robinson (Balzer + Bray)
Dedicated to “caregivers who give what they never got,” Robinson’s moving, animal-centric ode to fathers portrays parents with realistic faults. Narration unfolds through opposition; while a seahorse models a dad who “holds on tight,” a shark father “needs lots of space.” Amid the examples’ push and pull, which convey how a dad sometimes “lets you down,” a steadying message reassures.
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Beth Is Dead
Katie Bernet (S&S/Barley)
Bernet’s brilliantly snappy debut, a contemporary riff on Little Women, follows Jo as she investigates Beth’s murder. Chapters shift between the March sisters’ distinctive voices, injecting suspense and true crime podcast energy into the inquiry. The girls’ closely held desires and ambitions honor the cozy domesticity of the inspiration material and add fuel to the fire of this electrifying whodunit.
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Eat (Like) the Rich: A Cookbook
Olivia Tiedemann (Ten Speed)
Tiedemann divulges tips, tricks, and savory treats from her time working as a private chef in the Hamptons in this mouthwatering and gleefully irreverent compendium. The sassy, profanity-laden, and highly opinionated prose adds humor and a personal touch to an enticing range of recipes for any time of day. It’s irresistible.
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Backwater
James Sallis (Soho Crime)
This swan song for Drive author Sallis, who died in January, highlights everything that made him such a singular voice. The tale of a small-town cop who’s pulled back to the force when the local chief disappears, it’s more concerned with life in a village and the spiritual dimensions of work than with blood, guts, or the question of whodunit—and it’s all the better for it.
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Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America
Kim Phillips-Fein (Norton)
This fascinating counter-history of America unspools how, since the country’s founding, a strain of right-leaning American thinkers have been consistently arguing in favor of aristocracy and against the notion that all men are created equal. Historian Phillips-Fein makes the case that this line of thinking has been critical to the right’s ascendancy under Trump.
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Intifadas
Edward Salem (Sarabande)
Salem’s daring second book unforgettably captures Palestinian diasporic grief, survivor’s guilt, and fury. By turns bitterly funny and wrenching, these poems demonstrate their meticulous craft through inventive forms and surprising, powerful language.
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Enemies to Lovers
Alisha Rai (Avon)
This action-packed, hijinks-filled rom-com plays out as a madcap road trip from New York City to Las Vegas. Undertaking this rollicking journey are Krish Anand, who is impersonating an FBI agent, and con artist Sejal Chaudhary, whose ties to the Cobra crime syndicate are Krish’s best lead to locate his missing brother, an actual FBI agent. With plentiful twists, detours, and speed bumps along the way, it’s a cinematic romp.
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Defy the Dusk
Danielle L. Jensen (Del Rey)
A vividly drawn postapocalyptic desert serves as the striking backdrop for this electrifying romantasy series launch from bestseller Jensen. What’s left of humanity lives aboard giant rigs built to outrun man-eating monsters. As rig captain Kyran and magic wielder Lirien clash over survival strategies, Jensen continually ratchets up the stakes. Epic in scope and full of pulse-pounding action, this is a true page-turner.
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The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living
Dara Horn (Avid Reader)
In this razor-sharp survey of American antisemitism, novelist Horn critiques well-meaning educational initiatives that aim to reduce prejudice but wind up reinforcing stereotypes or assimilationist narratives, and suggests instead teaching the full sweep of Jewish history in ways that model lessons of resilience and freedom. It’s a clear-eyed yet surprisingly optimistic intervention in vital conversations about ending hate.
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Cool Machine
Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
It’s been a banner year for New York City—Mamdani, the Knicks—and Whitehead meets the moment with one of the best novels of the city in recent memory. In this conclusion to his Harlem Trilogy, which traces the porous line between crime and straight life, Whitehead examines the city’s pull on newcomers and natives alike and the lengths people go to make it there.
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The Case of David Zimmerman
Lucas and Arthur Harari, trans. from the French by David Homel (Arsenal Pulp)
Lost Highway glides into French neo-noir in this coolly stylized graphic novel, which follows a depressive who swaps bodies with the object of his desire. But as he becomes her, he loses track of his former self—and the reader becomes unmoored following a slippery series of shifting identities, which serve to critique contemporary class and gender divides. It’s heady sci-fi that looks super sharp on the shelf.
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Aside from My Heart, All Is Well
Héctor Abad, trans. from the Spanish by Anne McLean (Archipelago)
Inspired by a late 20th-century Medellín film critic and priest, Colombian writer Abad’s novel brims with humanity. Luis awaits a heart transplant at age 50. Meanwhile, the narrator, his decades-long friend, tells of Luis’s persuasive passion for cinema and both men’s spiritual devotion, in the process showing with heartrending clarity how their lives’ deepest meaning derives from friendship.
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Hometown
Shaun Tan (Levine Querido)
Earth-toned illustrations render organic, viscerally alive architecture and beings that toe the line between monstrous and fantastic in Tan’s visually stunning graphic novel about a lone youth who must choose between staying among their beloved otherworldly community and leaving to seek out others similar to themself. Humorous moments and spare narration result in an ethereal work about home and identity.
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Goodbye, Koi
Jack Wong (Orchard)
Wong traces a family’s relocation through a child’s musings in this affecting tale. After a father and child rehome their pet koi ahead of their move, the young narrator processes the shift via internally focused text. In this thoughtful work, redirecting feelings about an upcoming unknown softens a sense of loss without diminishing its significance.
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Call of the Dragon
Natasha Bowen (Random House)
This engrossing fantasy series opener sees a teenage priestess unexpectedly chosen as a vessel for her kingdom’s ancient dragon gods. When a transgression prompts the gods to abandon her people, the protagonist takes her kingdom’s protection into her own hands. Via African mythology-inspired worldbuilding and invigorating twists, Bowen crafts a gripping tale of first love, divided loyalties, and loss.
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My Jamaican Table: Vibrant Recipes from a Sun-Drenched Island
Andre Fowles (Artisan)
The Jamaican cuisine of three-time Chopped champion Fowles’s youth leaps off the page in this gorgeous recipe collection, which doubles as a culinary history. Serving up classic dishes alongside his own inventive twists on favorite flavors, Fowles delivers both heat (Scotch bonnets are a staple) and heart. Home cooks and armchair travelers alike will eat this up.
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Die Famous
Michael Koryta (Little, Brown)
Sweeping, epic, and psychologically complex, this historical thriller spins the real-life story of Maine outlaw Al Brady into the tragic tale of a family torn apart by crime during the Great Depression. It spans decades and hinges on an emotionally pummeling love story, and yet it’s difficult to imagine not racing through its 400-odd pages in a day or two.
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End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor (Norton)
Journalist Klein and activist Taylor pinpoint ways in which the modern American right has come to embrace the notion that the end of the world is imminent—whether because of AI, white replacement, or a good old-fashioned Second Coming—and persuasively argue that the left can gain political ground by offering people hope for the future instead of doom and gloom.
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Still House in the Desert: An Eco-Contemplation
Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan Univ.)
Hillman brings astonishing formal invention and emotional range to this meditation on ecological devastation and memory, balancing evocative objects from her personal history with planetary loss. Funny, tender, and ruminative, these poems and photographs show Hillman at the height of her power.
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Pretend You Believe: How to Enter Religion
Noa Kushner (Schocken)
Rabbi Kushner argues in her luminous debut that belief isn’t a prerequisite for faith but the product of attempting, however imperfectly, to practice religion in ways that shape a moral life. She fleshes out this counterintuitive premise with personal anecdotes and biblical stories, making for both a deeply existential commentary on modern religion and a practical guide to living ethically.
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How to Kill a Guy in 10 Dates
Shailee Thompson (Gallery)
It’s rare for a genre mash-up to get the tone just right, but debut author Thompson pulls it off, masterfully balancing rom-com and slasher tropes. As a speed dating event turns into a blood bath, readers will cheer for heroine Jamie to make it out alive—and with a new love at her side. The result is edge-of-the-seat suspenseful, laugh-out-loud funny, and dreamily romantic all at once.
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Honeysuckle
Bar Fridman-Tell (Bloomsbury)
Drawing from Welsh mythology, this haunting, claustrophobic fairy tale follows the thorny relationship between lonely boy Rory and Daye, a girl made out of flowers to be his friend, from childhood to adulthood. Fridman-Tell’s lovely, lyrical prose eases readers into the increasingly dark dynamic between these leads as Daye struggles to assert agency and understand her place in the world. It’s utterly transfixing.
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The Danger to Be Sane: Creativity and the Eccentric Mind
Rosa Montero, trans. from the Spanish by Lindsey Ford (Europa)
What begins as a penetrating examination of the psychology of literary greats transforms into a gripping account of Montero’s pursuit of an imposter who posed as her for years when she was a journalist in Madrid. A unique exploration of the relationship between the impulse to write and insanity, this is nothing short of brilliant.
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Charity and Sylvia
Tillie Walden (Drawn & Quarterly)
Eisner winner Walden crafts a transcendent and transformational comics history of two ordinary women in early-19th-century Vermont who openly cohabited as a lesbian couple. Defying expectations of period norms, yet full of meticulously detailed period references, Walden’s storytelling unfolds through poignant, luminously drawn vignettes that capture the radical nature of this remarkable couple’s quotidian struggles, hopes, prayers, and longings.
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Country People
Daniel Mason (Random House)
It’s a familiar story—coastal elites move to the country—but Mason turns it on its head in this seriously funny tale of a California family arriving in Vermont by showing more interest in the locals. Each are fascinating human beings, not objects of curiosity, even those who turn out to be part of an occult group of hollow-Earthers.
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La Bandera: Poems of Resistance and Pride
Anika Aldamuy Denise, illus. by Ericka Lugo (HarperCollins)
Across 14 dynamic poems, Denise unspools “a complex narrative that is missing from [the] mainstream,” matter-of-factly recounting Puerto Rico’s ongoing struggle for autonomy, as well as the language suppression, unfair governmental representation, and unwarranted violence endured by the island and its people. Accompanied by Lugo’s lush, brightly colored artwork, lyrical verse fluidly portrays moments of joy and oppression in this resplendent collection.
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The Celestial Seas
T.A. Chan (Viking)
A spacefaring teenage ship captain travels the cosmos seeking vengeance against the sentient, self-sustaining spacecraft that killed her crew in Chan’s exhilarating Moby-Dick-inspired debut. Contending with romantic feelings en route, the captain must choose between her future and pursuing the creature that destroyed her life. Steadfast first-person narration relays a sweeping interstellar adventure that boasts wholly unique worldbuilding.
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Padma’s All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste the Nation and Beyond
Padma Lakshmi (Knopf)
Inspired by Taste the Nation host Lakshmi’s U.S. travels, this expansive cookbook brings together more than 100 recipes representing a truly impressive range of flavor profiles and influences, alongside moving profiles of immigrant and Indigenous chefs. With Lakshmi as an impassioned guide, this is a loving tribute to the vast variety of cultures that make America great.
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The Fervent Whites
De’Shawn Charles Winslow (One World)
A majority-Black community in the Hudson Valley is rattled when a white couple falsely accused of murder returns home from prison in this deliciously subversive novel inspired by Winslow’s experiences as a minority in Upstate New York. With a climax that’s nigh impossible to forget, it flips the script on familiar stories of injustice in endlessly clever—and ultimately devastating—ways.
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The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory
Emily Eakin (Penguin Press)
New York Times Book Review editor Eakin’s debut traces her intellectual love affair with French theorists from Althusser to Foucault, blending biography, autobiography, and cultural criticism into a single, dazzling whole. She manages to shake the dust of history off these thinkers while inviting readers to revel in the pleasures of encountering big ideas for the first time.
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Swirl & Vortex
Larry Levis, edited by David St. John (Graywolf)
This monumental collection of past and previously unseen work invites readers to appreciate the full sweep of Levis’s melancholy and spellbinding imagination. Rich in narrative, his poems deliver resonant glimpses into ordinary lives and failures while quietly confirming the consolations of language.
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The Jezebel List
Alisa Dean (Alcove)
Pastor’s daughter Christina sets out to heal from the religious trauma that shaped her sheltered childhood in Dean’s heartfelt new adult debut. As Christina works through a list of activities her father would never approve of—with sexy filmmaker Danny documenting her attempts—Dean brings fun, joy, and humor to the recovery process, making Christina’s newfound freedom feel as revelatory and refreshing to the reader as to the character.
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Mazywood
Tananarive Due (Saga)
NAACP Image Award winner Due toggles between the 1920s—when Black aspiring actor Mazelle Washington makes a dangerous wish to become a Hollywood starlet—and the present day, when her filmmaker grandson and his family face the consequences of her actions. The result is a staggering work of horror that combines hair-raising action with sharp-toothed reflections on the politics of Black performance.
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The House with Nobody in It
Jon Klassen (Candlewick)
Incorporating a jump scare and an unreliable narrator, this gently eerie board book ghost story invites readers to tour the ostensibly empty residence that inspires the volume’s shape. As readers progress, deadpan prose acknowledges the abode’s contents—except for the spectral figure that appears in one room. Klassen again displays a remarkable knack for creating lingering, fully realized works through the sparsest storytelling.
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We Mend with Gold: An Immigrant Daughter’s Reckoning with American Christianity
Kristin T. Lee (Broadleaf)
The Japanese practice of kintsugi—repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer—grounds this unforgettable exploration of how growing up in an immigrant Chinese church in America fractured but ultimately fortified the author’s faith. Drawing from rich theology, physician Lee asks searching questions about what it means to belong and how the Western church undermines Christianity’s most vital tenets.
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The Nightingales
Emil Wilson (Avid Reader)
Replete with ephemera taped to the pages and loose colored-pencil portraits, this elegiac graphic novel has the tactile quality of a lost diary. A teen girl in the 1980s Pacific Northwest forms an unlikely friendship with a man dying of AIDs, who helps her see a future outside her fractured family life as he reckons with his own abbreviated timeline. Wilson’s dexterous debut is the literary comics discovery of the year.
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Desperate Bodies
Lydia Mathis (Grove/Gay)
Mathis aces a range of tones in this remarkably accomplished debut collection. “Girlhood Lessons,” an athem of resilience, begins with the narrator’s matter-of-fact descriptions of her abusive family’s double standards for girls. “Empty Apartment” is a sly ghost story about an English teacher preparing to lecture on Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” All the stories are worthy of attention.
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Licorice
Kara LaReau, illus. by Kelly Murphy (Scholastic Press)
Drawing inspiration from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, LaReau and Murphy spin a heartening tale of a newly adopted cat who finds herself living in the shadow of her predecessor. Shaded pencil artwork amplifies feelings of unease, longing, and tension throughout this grounded, wistfully narrated story whose hopeful resolution ensures an enchanting experience for animal lovers and mystery aficionados alike.
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I Am Here
Kim Hyo-eun, trans. from the Korean by Aerin Park (Scribble US)
Using simple prepositions, Kim cleverly presents the world from a growing baby’s point of view in this bright-eyed board book. Unfolded vertically, accordion pages reference common sights an infant notices from below (“under/ the sun”); unfurled horizontally, the book’s reverse side foregrounds the vantage point of an older, toddling child (“beside/ a cat”). This uniquely engineered title articulates the ever-shifting process of becoming.
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Children of Owl
Darcie Little Badger, illus. by Abigail Rajunov (Levine Querido)
Informed by the son of a legendary Lipan Apache being that “a terrible fate looms,” a teen attempts to save her home from forces both supernatural and benign in Little Badger and Rajunov’s stunning contemporary fantasy. Mystery and speculative elements converge across this sinuous, elaborately constructed story that balances suspenseful plotting with emotional resonance and cultural depth.
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The Perfect Birth Myth: Pushing Back Against a Broken Industry
Avital Norman Nathman, with Deborah Wage (Bloomsbury Academic)
Journalist Nathman and nurse practitioner Wage deliver a vital examination of childbirth in the U.S., outlining how profit-driven policies, racism, and abortion bans have made it difficult for women to access quality care while society simultaneously convinces them a “perfect birth” is possible. It’s a supportive companion and a potent call for change.
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Fruit Fly
Josh Silver (Crooked Lane)
In a rare turn of events, this year’s buzziest (forgive the pun) thriller also turned out to be one of its best. Silver’s bruising satire of a publishing industry hungry for trauma porn is boosted by the former YA author’s deep empathy for his two antiheroes: a struggling author and a smart gay junkie. Crucially, however, the novel maintains its bite through to the final sentence.
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Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund
Molly Crabapple (One World)
Drawing partly on her own family history, journalist and artist Crabapple takes a stirring deep dive into the history of the Bund, a Jewish socialist party in Eastern Europe that opposed Zionism, fought the Nazis, and was dismantled by the Soviets. It’s an invigorating, heartfelt immersion into an oft-overlooked part of Jewish history.
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We
Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf)
Long Soldier’s dazzling assemblage of poems, essays, and visual art reveals how colonial history persists in classrooms, institutions, and family life. Her formally inventive work dismantles oppressive language while honoring Native resistance and collective action. The result is an unforgettable book of witness and possibility.
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Score
Kennedy Ryan (Forever)
Bestseller and PW Best Books frequent flier Ryan manages to outdo herself in this achingly tender tale of Hollywood, heartache, and history. After a stormy relationship that ended in disaster, a pair of exes are reunited on the set of a biopic about a fictional Harlem Renaissance artist. In Ryan’s hands, their emotional second-chance romance is as raw as it is riveting.
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Palaces of the Crow
Ray Nayler (MCD)
This intricately constructed and deeply empathetic speculative survival tale from Hugo Award winner Nayler follows a group of refugees weathering WWII with help from a murder of hyperintelligent corvids. There’s much that’s harrowing here as the war rages on around this unlikely gang of human and animal misfits, but Nayler tempers the darkness with hope, resilience, and a powerful message of togetherness.
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The Disappearers
Marlon James (Riverhead)
There are more than a few ways to recommend this audacious novel: one could call out its devotion to late-20th-century queer literature; its sobering portrait of homophobia in Jamaica, where sodomy is illegal; or its deeply sensuous writing on sex, violence, and death. Most admirable, though, is James’s ability to sustain and develop a thought across 600 pages.
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The Palm House
Gwendoline Riley (New York Review Books)
Those who toil in the culture industry will find special resonance in Riley’s gimlet-eyed view into a storied London literary magazine under clueless new ownership. The novel’s workplace drama and tight-knit tribe of writers are spot-on, and there’s equal depth to Riley’s sharp depictions of British class differences in barely affordable London and her portrayal of the narrator’s dysfunctional family.
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Dèy
Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
This understated and remarkably compressed novel opens with Magnolia, a 30-something daughter of Haitian immigrants, sheltering in place during a mass shooting. The ordeal floods her with grief, and the novel swells into a moving reflection on everyday violence and the tenuous nature of home, not only in America but in Haiti, where Magnolia’s parents have repatriated.
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Listen to the Girls
Chrystal D. Giles (Random House)
Giles’s potent, socially attuned novel follows a middle schooler reckoning with the knowledge that her favorite teacher has a history of sexual harassment complaints. Compassionate language approaches a difficult subject with care, as the protagonist grapples with instances of manipulation by trusted adults and recognizes the importance of speaking up for survivors. It’s a thoughtful, prescient exploration of the power of collective voices.
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An Expanse of Blue
Kauakanilehua Māhoe Adams (Heartdrum)
In this distinct and emotionally vulnerable verse novel, a Native Hawaiian teen rebels against her intimidating father’s rigid expectations. Following the revelation of her dad’s extramarital affair, she wrestles with feelings of invisibility and conflicting emotions about her role within her church-going community. With assuredness, Adams’s measured debut emerges as an aching story about one teen’s internal growth and cultural awakening.
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Furious Violet
Sarai Walker (Harper)
Mind-melting in the best way, this Möbius strip of a thriller follows a true crime writer who’s writing a book about a mom-obsessed serial killer while living in the shadow of her own mother, a famous poet. When the writer receives anonymous threats from someone claiming to be her child, her—and the reader’s—grip on reality starts to slip, plunging the narrative into pleasurable chaos.
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Holding Lightning: The Life, Loves, and Art of Whitney Houston
Emily Lordi (Mariner)
With this stellar biography, Vanderbilt English professor Lordi rescues Whitney Houston from the tortured female artist stereotype, reframing her as a canny musical interpreter who made familiar songs her own and helped Black artists break into the mainstream. Deep research and sharp musical analysis make this tribute as fascinating as its subject.
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You & Me and You & Me and You & Me
Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees (Putnam)
Listening to old casette tapes allows a long-married couple to travel back in time and make adjustments to their early courtship in this poignant, nostalgia-laced speculative romance. The authors beautifully capture the regrets, frustrations, and what-ifs that plague the leads while mining humor and heart from the butterfly effects caused by their meddling. It’s a pleasure to watch these two rediscover their passion.
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Persona
Aoife Josie Clements (Littlepuss)
An agoraphobic trans woman discovering explicit videos of herself online that she has no memory of making spirals into a meditation on isolation, autonomy, and the dark side of the internet that goes to some pitch-black places. In crisp, fearless prose, debut author Clements blends body horror and cosmic horror to truly gut-churning effect.
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I Am the Mountain
Steven Weinberg (Holiday House/Porter)
Twining seasonal and sensate perceptions across a sumptuously painted four-part narrative, Weinberg’s arresting picture book offers a full-bodied education in encountering the natural world—via the perspective of a mountain. The result urges readers to slow down, attend with every sense, and appreciate the myriad ways a terrain’s riches reveal themselves.
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Public Access Afterworld
Jane Schoenbrun (Hogarth)
To most, David Sawyer, the mysterious character at the center of filmmaker Schoenbrun’s ambitious, funny, and scary debut, is a mass-murdering cult leader. To some, he’s guiding the way to the truth about a portal to an alternate universe. What’s so good about this book, beyond the effortless mix of horror and trans coming-of-age story, is its irresistible voice.
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Dooneen
Keith Ridgway (New Directions)
Mew, a London-based writer, returns to his native Dublin, where he’s swept up in a mysterious revolt. Ridgway sets the stage with wondrous fantastical and dreamlike details—Mew’s means of travel was a magical urban turnstile, which transports pedestrians between the two cities—and packs the narrative with sharp ideas about Dublin’s literary legacy and history of revolutionary politics.
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Lost in Peach Blossom Paradise
Xiong Liang, trans. from the Chinese by Chloe Garcia Roberts (Elsewhere)
Elements of Lewis Carroll and Hayao Miyazaki reverberate throughout Liang’s whimsical illustrated series starter about a forbidden trek, a secret village, and a young wanderer on the adventure of a lifetime. Propulsive fantasy presents Chinese culture and mythology in a gorgeous package that features ink-wash drawings emphasizing vivid, imagery-rich prose, a vast forest setting, and impish, memorable characters.
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I Will Eat You in the End
David Duff, illus. by Marianna Coppo (Holiday House/Porter)
Duff and Coppo’s Beckettian two-parter lays out the realities of the life cycle with unstinting matter-of-factness and disarming wit. After an enormous sauropod inadvertently takes out a pink worm, a humorously paced back-and-forth reveals the democracy of mortality—and results in a beautiful friendship. Funny and emotionally generous, this delivers hard truths in a way young readers can hold onto.
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Few Blue Skies
Carolina Ixta (Quill Tree)
Former friends team up to expose a company’s complicity in their community’s increasing death toll in Ixta’s riveting and intelligent novel. As the protagonists grapple with their desire to make a difference and find their place in the world, clever and empathetic narration poses challenging questions about the things one is willing to compromise for love and justice.
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The Midnight Taxi
Yosha Gunasekera (Berkley)
It’s not easy to pull off a memorable cozy, but Innocence Project attorney Gunasekera nails it on her first try. Set in a recognizably gritty New York City, the book follows a cab driver who seeks assistance from a public defender after she’s accused of killing a passenger. The result is sweet, surprising, and endlessly entertaining.
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I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World
Sarah Wilson (Penguin Life)
Journalist Wilson’s ambitious account of how modern civilization might unravel doubles somewhat improbably as a moving ode to the beauty of the world made stark by the nearness of such a disaster. Uncompromisingly honest and filled with razor-sharp insights, this is difficult to forget.
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The Poet Empress
Shen Tao (Bramble)
Brilliantly subverting romantasy convention, Tao’s unrelenting dark fantasy debut introduces a world where poetry is power, but women aren’t permitted to learn how to read. That stricture can’t hold back ambitious, revenge-minded heroine Wei, however, as she rises through the court of cruel prince Terren. Tao never shies away from showing her deliciously thorny characters in all their startling complexity. This pulls no punches.
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The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
Jill Lepore (Liveright)
Pulitzer winner Lepore warns in this urgent, sweeping treatise that AI governance is the final form of Hannah Arendt’s “totalitarian state.” But she notes that AI may also be sounding its own death knell, as the last gasp of a type of automated decision-making that has been on the rise for decades. The book’s title notes a “rise and fall” because, Lepore argues, the fall is nigh.
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The Frenzy
Joyce Carol Oates (Hogarth)
Oates continues her spectacular winning streak after Butcher and Fox with a collection of stories that stand with her greatest work. Take the title entry, about a ridiculous middle-aged suburbanite hoping to make a “teenaged mistress” out of a family friend. Like many of the entries, it’s taut with tension and veers in a surprising but inevitable direction.
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The Moon Without Stars
Chanel Miller (Philomel)
Zine-making provides a seventh grader, who views “language as a balm for emotional wounds,” an avenue through which she helps classmates alleviate personal issues—and that offers her a chance at popularity. Miller’s subtle, lightly suspenseful prose relays an original story about the perils of sacrificing one’s values for the sake of fitting in, culminating in a complex and emotionally resonant novel that celebrates empathy.
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Loops
Jashar Awan (Simon & Schuster)
Via a horizontal format that turns “learning to be a big kid!” into a full stage show starring a child in motion, Awan spotlights a common milestone on the wobbly path to maturation: wearing “big-kid shoes.” Though the laces come undone and the kicks slip off, the young narrator refuses to dwell on frustration. It’s a confidence-boosting work about the monumental nature of early accomplishments.
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My Name Was Gerry Sas
Tiffany Hanssen (Atlantic Crime)
WNYC host Hanssen makes a seamless transition to the page with this story of a radio host and hit man whose murder sparks a crisis of faith in his best friend and sets his daughter on a bloody quest for revenge. Indelible characters and Hanssen’s well-honed message about the futility of escaping the past would be enough to make this one of the year’s best—that it’s funny is just a bonus.
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In Trees: An Exploration
Robert Moor (Simon & Schuster)
Blending philosophy, memoir, and science, this is a beautiful tribute to the wisdom of trees and an urgent call for their protection. Whether climbing sequoias or tracing the branches of his family tree, journalist Moor demonstrates the transformative effects of viewing the world with an “arborescent mind.”
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To Bewitch a Hunter
Luciano Lamberti, trans. from the Spanish by Frank Wynne (HarperVia)
When the heroine of this wildly ambitious, polyphonic horror novel discovers that she was kidnapped as a baby during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship in Argentina, her investigation into her origins leads to a shocking supernatural revelation. Her family history unfolds via a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes from myriad narrators, creating a tantalizing puzzle with a dark secret at its center.
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The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America
Gabriel Duckels and David Levithan (Knopf)
In this comprehensive nonfiction work, debut author Duckels teams up with Levithan to recount the history of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and its physical and emotional impact on those affected. Highlighting the intensity of the virus’s influence on society and culture as well as important aspects of its past and its present-day status, it’s an essential portrait of the epidemic.
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This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark
Craig Fehrman (Avid Reader)
This kaleidoscopic retelling of the Lewis and Clark expedition surfaces the saga’s darker undercurrents—reframing the pregnant Sacajawea as a victim of rape, highlighting Clark’s refusal to free an enslaved man who made the journey, and spotlighting Lewis’s descent into addiction and Clark’s subsequent reign as superintendent of Indian Affairs, where he betrayed many who aided the expedition.
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It Will Come Back to You
Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead)
Not only is Nunez a sharply funny and fiercely intelligent writer, she’s a remarkable storyteller. Her wide-ranging tales hold the reader in her grip, even as she flits from one digression to another, because she’s always deepening a theme or honing an idea, whether about people’s instinct to philosophize or the gravitational pull of deviant behavior.
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The Queen’s Granddaughter
Diane Zahler (Roaring Brook)
A precocious 12th-century princess navigates life-or-death situations that force her to contend with ethical and physical peril, reexamine her values, and choose the type of leader she wants to become in this perceptive adventure. Via smoothly flowing prose and empathetic characters, Zahler provides ample opportunity for readers to consider how differing perspectives come together and how the past informs the future.
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The Muéganos
Jaque Jours (Transit)
Just like the Mexican street candy with which they share their name, the Muégano family, five bunnies connected at the torso, is “never apart.” Young Julia “wouldn’t have it any other way” in Jours’s tender solo debut, but her longing to go in her own direction causes a physical rift, a painful inevitability that offers meaningful insight into a child’s first independent steps.
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Queen of Faces
Petra Lord (Holt)
One’s body and soul are separate entities in debut author Lord’s mind-bending series opener, which sensitively explores identity and self-actualization. Determined to obtain a vessel that matches her spirit, the protagonist—a female consciousness bound to a male figure—becomes embroiled in a dangerous war. Sophisticated worldbuilding and sumptuous set pieces are enriched by exquisitely rendered characters in this dazzling tale.
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Paper Cut
Rachel Taff (Morrow)
Taff’s incendiary debut knits together several topical themes—cults, female rage, the pitfalls of maintaining a public persona—without once feeling like it’s chasing trends. Nearly 20 years after the murder trial that made cult escapee Lucy Golden a feminist icon, she considers telling the truth about that long-ago disaster. Lucky for readers, the truth is a doozy.
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Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America
Howard Bryant (Mariner)
This impressive history demonstrates how, amid anti-communist anxieties in mid-century America, political institutions and sports officials framed baseball star Jackie Robinson as a heroic foil to actor Paul Robeson, a vocal critic of capitalism. Sports journalist Bryant keenly reveals how the situation typified Black Americans’ internal conflict between patriotism and protest. It’s a brilliant and eye-opening corrective of the past.
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The Left and the Lucky
Willy Vlautin (Harper)
At the center of this bighearted novel of working-class life in Portland, Ore., is the mutually healing bond between a relentlessly bullied eight-year-old boy and his next-door neighbor, a jilted housepainter. Never treacly or sensational, Vlautin’s authentic story has the reader caring about its characters as if they were the reader’s own found family.
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Raise the Bar
Fernanda Frick H. (Dial)
Frick H.’s exceptional graphic novel debut chronicles the triumphs and setbacks of a young amateur weight lifter on her journey toward competing professionally. Bold-lined, vibrantly saturated, emotive cartooning captures the precise motions and kinetic atmosphere of the protagonist’s sport, while appealing, distinctly wrought characters energize the story’s organic emotion, humor, and action. It’s a gold medal–worthy performance.
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Navigating Night
Julie Leung, illus. by Angie Kang (Random House/Schwartz)
In this touching picture book, a rainy evening sees a child considering two nighttime journeys: their father’s takeout delivery route and Baba’s story of his own experience getting turned around as a youth. Leung and Kang highlight a distinct bond and sacrifices made across generations, building with feeling to the idea that “we can all help each other find our way.”
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A Scar Like a River
Lisa Graff (Little, Brown/Ottaviano)
After the uncle who physically assaulted her suddenly dies, a teen reckons with past trauma as well as fraught family dynamics and her mother’s mysterious worsening illness. Graff infuses viscerally wrought realities with moments of lightheartedness via funny and compassionate narration, resulting in a meticulously calibrated story about familial abuse and the psychological effects of a lasting injury.
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A Past Without Pictures
Jonathan Ames (Mysterious Press)
Ames, a literary shape-shifter, does a lot with a little in this spare story of an LAPD detective who returns to Alabama after the murder of her unsavory father. There, she finds the type of surreal criminal underworld Ames explored in 2013’s You Were Never Really Here; this time, the tone is even stranger and more tragic.
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Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour
Mark Haddon (Doubleday)
Novelist Haddon collages photographs, illustrations, and colorful biographical snippets into a memoir of his rocky childhood and writing career. Along the way, he tangles with a constellation of fears, obsessions, and preoccupations—about writing, the fallibility of memory, flying, and familial obligation—and comes away with an uncommonly intimate map of a creative mind.
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Life of M
Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Cusk’s portrait of an eternally youthful and maddeningly ethereal movie star has become one of the most misunderstood novels in some time. Far from an attack on a real-life celebrity, the story, about an aging author writing about an unnamed actor, is a sly and boldly weird meditation on fiction, mortality, and personhood.
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The Second Life of Snap
Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow)
Succinct, sensorial prose conjures a futuristic tale about down-and-out tweens living under a dictatorial regime who find unexpected comfort from their robot chaperone. Race-against-the-clock plotting sees the youths desperately seeking a solution to the robot’s failing battery, while touching on timely themes of climate change and technological classism. The protagonists’ ingenuity and capacity for optimism are the cherry on top of Kelly’s affirming adventure.
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Night Ride
Christopher Myers (Kokila)
Myers delivers a visual love letter to Black childhood and New York City with a stunning wordless picture book that follows five kids bicycling across the boroughs. Lighted and photographed stained glass windows comprise each landscape, layering vibrant colors into scenes that reflect the children’s sense of belonging and camaraderie. It amounts to a freewheeling portrait of kids fully inhabiting a locale.
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Thornbird
E. Kennedy (Delacorte)
Kennedy makes her YA debut with a taut, emphatic thriller that follows the intelligent, resilient teenage daughter of a serial killer as she wrestles with her memories of her father and his monstrous actions. Anticipatory writing and nuanced, morally complex characterization relays an introspective examination of the ripple effects of violence and a grimly layered mystery about reconciliation.
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A Violent Masterpiece
Jordan Harper (Mulholland)
The latest from Harper, the reigning king of L.A. neo-noir, is a neon-soaked nightmare of serial killers, conspiracy theories, and livestreamers, with a few direct links to the author’s 2023 hit Everybody Knows. Employing a wider scope than in his previous books and prose that’s more stylish and dazzling than ever, Harper handily defends his crown.
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Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City
Anand Giridharadas (Knopf)
Journalist Giridharadas offers a kaleidoscopic examination of the 2023 subway slaying of Jordan Neely and the acquittal of his killer Daniel Penny that traces the dense web of connections that brought both men to the fateful encounter. It adds up to an elegant rumination on the growing divide between America’s haves and have-nots.
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Lovers XXX
Allie Rowbottom (Soho)
Two teen girls run away to 1980s Los Angeles in this thrilling novel. After one of them throws herself into becoming a porn star, they’re driven apart. With an insightful two-part narrative that revisits these events decades later, Rowbottom offers a nuanced view—from sobering to titillating and back—of her characters’ attempts to empower themselves.
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Sisters Alone
Shifa Saltagi Safadi (Putnam)
Sisters must put aside their differences to weather a deadly snowstorm in Safadi’s stirring verse novel. When a fallen tree branch makes their isolated house inhospitable, the siblings embark on a quest for safety that’s impeded by feelings of numbing grief and simmering anger brought about by their mother’s recent death. Equal parts thrilling survival story and tender homage to sisterhood, it’s a standout.
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The Ones Who Came Before
Kevin Maillard, illus. by Sibu T.P. (Roaring Brook)
Maillard and Sibu T.P. muse on themes of belonging in this reverent narrative about connection across time and place. When Aabanya travels to visit her grandfather, she contemplates the area and learns about its residents while hearing her elder's stories of their shared Indigenous culture. It’s a dynamic portrait of the natural world’s long history.
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Traitors’ Nest
Frances Hardinge (Amulet)
In Hardinge’s rousing, medieval-inspired historical fantasy, a kingdom’s castles occasionally swap places thanks to a Great Game involving godlike Players. Tired of mercenaries plundering his village’s livestock and food stores, a teen attempts to turn the tides of the brutal sport. Witty and wildly inventive mythology and indomitable characters distinguish this triumphant tale of derring-do.
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The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Liveright)
Goldstein, a philosopher and novelist, elegantly moves between philosophy and reportage for this revelatory consideration of how the desire to matter shapes both inner life and social values. In the process, she makes a moving case for the importance of honoring innate human worth in a frequently impersonal and fractured world.
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The Windowman
Christopher Goffard (Crooked Lane)
This kaleidoscopic satirical thriller filters the story of Damon Midnight, who disappears after he’s acquitted of a string of grisly murders, through the perspectives of his self-righteous wife, the DA tasked with finding him, and the actor hired to play him. Goffard, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, brings a reporter’s eye for detail to the proceedings, resulting in an incisive and unpredictable ride.
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Nebraska
Monica Datta (Astra House)
Copious footnotes, a psychiatrist’s frame story, a ghastly crime—yes, this archly told novel is coded by the DNA of fiction by Vladimir Nabokov and David Foster Wallace. But it’s very much doing its own thing with the sprawling story of an Indian family broken apart by a mother’s filicide, incarceration, and subsequent new life in a Nebraska Christian commune.
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This Is a Door
Daniel Nayeri (Stonefruit)
Loyal, kindhearted characters gracefully navigate complicated emotions in Nayeri’s rousing mythic fantasy about an orphaned tween searching beyond his mountaintop city for his purpose. Luminous language illustrates the protagonists’ trek, while stylized text design arranges specific words, lines, and passages to evoke pertinent objects, emotions, or actions. Fizzes of gentle humor keep the tone light throughout this remarkably innovative tale.
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Open: Every Seed Has Its Moment
Robert Agis, illus. by Sarah Jacoby (Candlewick)
A sprouting seed receives loving support in Agis and Jacoby’s radiant meditation on the act of growing. Soft-focused artwork begins trained on the seed before splitting into a series of cutaways that reveal goings-on above and below the soil’s surface. When the plant bursts ecstatically into bloom, its contribution to the world makes for a joyful crescendo.
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Wake Now in the Fire
Jarrett Dapier, illus. by AJ Dungo (Ten Speed Graphic)
Dapier and Dungo’s profound graphic novel fictionalizes the story of the Chicago public school system’s 2013 removal of Persepolis from classroom libraries. As teens contest the ban, their protests garner national attention, forcing them to consider their actions’ impact. Organic dialogue adds verve to sophisticated conversations about censorship, while understated artwork complements the complex, multifaceted tale.
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Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team
A.M. Gittlitz (Astra House)
This innovative study combines an enthralling history of the New York Mets with a smart analysis of Marxism to demonstrate that baseball has long served as an arena for class conflict. Gittlitz makes unique and bold connections between politics and sports, resulting in a singular celebration of a beloved team.
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The Occidental Book of the Dead
T. Geronimo Johnson (Morrow)
With the irreverence of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and the narrative pyrotechnics of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, Johnson’s novel doesn’t make things easy. Its story, doled out in conflicting versions, follows a Black cop whose partner kills a white teen. Though the novel causes no shortage of discomfort, it’s completely worth the effort.
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Where the Wild Horses Are
Amy Alznauer (Holiday House/Porter)
Having long yearned to own a horse, a self-described cowboy takes advantage of a wild horse training program. Alznauer’s distinctive first-person narration captures both the intensity of the child’s aspirations and the vulnerabilities hidden beneath her stubborn demeanor. The result is a deeply felt and emotionally satisfying story about a girl, a horse, and the solace they find in each other.
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A Riddle of Eels
Nicholas Day, illus. by Corey R. Tabor (Random House Studio)
“The eel is hard to hold. It slips from our grasp,” and so does certainty itself, Day and Tabor hint in this awe-inspiring nonfiction title, which explains just how little is known about the commonplace creature. In a world that strives to assure that everything can be mapped, this astounding book celebrates one vast, wondrous mystery—and suggests that some riddles are worth savoring.
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Where You’ll Find Us
Jen St. Jude (Bloomsbury)
A transgender teen’s discovery of a magical liminal space empowers them to be their most authentic self in St. Jude’s cathartic story. Intimate prose traces the protagonist’s grappling with their gender identity as they—and five queer strangers—find refuge in an isolated farmhouse where time stands still. The result is a luminous and affirming novel about healing and moving forward.
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Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built
Gayle Feldman (Random House)
At over a thousand pages and decades in the making, this spellbinding biography is a rare achievement deserving of comparison to acclaimed tomes like The Power Broker. Chronicling the life and influence of the Random House founder, former PW contributing editor Feldman vividly recreates the heyday of book publishing and pulls back the curtain on how many classics came to be.
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One Leg on Earth
’Pemi Aguda (Norton)
The Nigerian short story writer’s lyrical debut novel takes a measured view of the desire for motherhood and its unspoken burdens. The themes are enhanced by a visionary and subtly dystopian conceit involving the links between a spate of suicides by pregnant women in Lagos and an exploitative urban development scheme for the city’s elite.
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You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This
Aaron Starmer, illus. by Jaime Zollars (Penguin Workshop)
A tween’s curiosity about his family and his place within it propels him on an unsettling journey in this bizarre yet alluring story that considers a child’s relationship with his grandfather. Starmer’s clever prose conjures a cohesive, genuinely touching narrative that features gruesome elements including a pickled pinkie toe, while Zollars’s moody gray Steven Kellogg–esque illustrations amplify the book’s unrepentantly weird vibe.
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Story Rug
Sophie Blackall, illus. by Phoebe Wahl (Little, Brown)
Solo play turns into communal collaboration in Blackall and Wahl’s expertly crafted picture book. After Class 203’s “braiding CRAZE” results in a length of plaited textiles that snakes down the hallway, the schoolmates coil their handiwork into a rug that embodies not just the peer group’s partnership but the incorporated items’ backgrounds, too. It’s a sparkling chronicle of individual strands twined.
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Words Spoken True
Anne Broyles (Scholastic Press)
Broyles delivers a searing historical novel about a Cherokee teen’s forced removal from her Tennessee home. Characters inspired by real people are vividly brought to life through raw prose, poems, and fictionalized diary and journal entries. It’s a triple threat: an illuminating historical telling, a tender portrait of adolescence, and a harrowing call to action against the U.S.’s inhumane treatment of Indigenous peoples.
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On Morrison
Namwali Serpell (Hogarth)
Much has been written about Toni Morrison since her death in 2019, but nothing has been quite as revelatory as this masterful work of literary criticism. Refusing to allow Morrison’s public image to overshadow the genius of her novels, Serpell illuminates the complexity within Morrison’s craft. It’s an enthralling tour of a legendary writer’s oeuvre.
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Paradiso 17
Hannah Lillith Assadi (Knopf)
This beautiful novel functions as a dialogue of the unsayable between a father and daughter. Sufien, a Palestinian cab driver in the U.S., escaped the 1948 Nakba as a young boy. Now, decades later, raising his daughter, Layla, with his Jewish wife, he still nurses a longtime dream of becoming a writer. In Assadi’s hands, his story comes to brilliant life.
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The Sweetest of Lemons
Daniel Nayeri, illus. by Rahele Jomepour Bell (Levine Querido)
In Nayeri and Jomepour Bell’s dazzlingly circuitous picture book, a refueling break unfurls into a layered story of longing. A nested narrative pairs the account of a family road trip with a meandering folk tale, depicted in alternating gouache images and collage illustrations. This smartly constructed work is fully invested in its own expansive telling.
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Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope
Zaina Arafat (Little, Brown)
Drawing on her own and her family’s experiences, novelist Arafat paints a nuanced, ruminative portrait of the Palestinian diaspora in America today, with a focus on the painful, maddening reality of living in a world that refuses to acknowledge the crimes being committed against one’s homeland.
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The School of Night
Karl Ove Knausgaård, trans. from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken (Penguin Press)
A mania-inducing new star, a Hamlet-like dream, and murderous metalheads drove the three previous entries in the Morning Star series. This one, a Faustian tale about a famous photographer threatened by possible revelations of a dastardly youthful deed, is the best yet. Packed with insights into Marlowe’s play, Knausgaård’s page-turner has loads to say about the cost of ambition.
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Troubled Waters: A River’s Journey Toward Justice
Carole Boston Weatherford, illus. by Bryan Collier (Bloomsbury)
Boston Weatherford and Collier relay an engrossing history of the Alabama River from the water body’s perspective in this distinctive picture book. Incorporating facts and lyrics, resonant text traces that which has flowed “past my banks,” including enslaved people fleeing bondage, the Trail of Tears, and Bloody Sunday. Depicting figures above and below the water’s surface, collaged acrylic and watercolor illustrations acknowledge a continuation of resistance.
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The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine Is Transforming Math and AI
Kevin Hartnett (Quanta)
It’s one thing to make complex mathematical concepts accessible to a lay audience, but to illustrate their importance through an engrossing, character-driven narrative is a feat only a journalist as adept as Hartnett can pull off. This cinematic account of the creation of Lean, a software tool that’s become vital for mathematicians and AI researchers, is necessary reading for understanding the rise of human-computer collaboration.
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Transcription
Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
With its brisk pacing and tidy page count, Lerner’s finest novel offers readers a concentrated hit of fiction’s core pleasure: the sense, while reading, that one is recovering lost time. Though the story is contemporary, involving the anxiety and folly caused by a broken smartphone, it’s fueled by ageless concerns about technology’s effects on art, consciousness, and human relationships.
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Sisters in Yellow
Mieko Kawakami, trans. from the Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio (Europa)
Kawakami preserves what was so arresting in her earlier work—alluring depictions of Tokyo nightlife, women’s complex friendships, and acute loneliness—and blows them out into a sweeping noir. Its story of two women who open a Tokyo bar is woven with dense and fascinating layers, after one of the women learns that the other has been charged with kidnapping.
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Q: The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers
Lani Watson (Viking)
Philosopher Watson traces in her ambitious debut how the instinct to question has shaped human development, from information-seeking behaviors animals developed millions of years ago to existential queries that help people understand the world and their place in it. Throughout, she makes a persuasive case that asking better questions can stoke curiosity and connection in a culture obsessed with certainty.
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A Very Good Parade
Eleanor Davis (Abrams)
Cartoonist Davis makes a triumphant solo picture book debut with the tale of a child who wills a parade into being—one that builds to a marvelous racket of a performance and a glorious tuba “BAROOMPA!” Uncorking the joy latent in an ordinary day, it’s an enthusiastic ode to come-as-you-are community and to a child who refuses to march alone.
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The Song of Stork and Dromedary
Anjet Daanje (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Added to the pantheon of fiction about literary obsessives—think 2666—is this fascinating metafictional novel about a Victorian novel by Englishwoman Eliza May Drayden, who invites comparisons to the Brontës. Blended with Daanje’s narrative of Drayden are long sections devoted to the critics and readers who build their lives around her work. It’s endlessly stimulating.
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While We’re Here
Anne Wynter, illus. by Micha Archer (Clarion)
Wynter and Archer capture a day’s contrasting rhythms in this compassionate, intentionally paced tale about an outing that doesn’t go according to plan. A child and caregiver rush out to catch a train and get to a city park—only to discover that they’ve missed their event. Dallying en route home, the two powerfully model the ease that can emerge from unstructured time.
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The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World
Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking)
In this propulsive study, historian Philbrick recasts the California gold rush as having had a massive impact on modern America’s cultural life, from its time-is-money ethos and exploitation of immigrants to its inculcation of Americans’ uniquely strong faith in technological innovation to solve problems.
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The Wise Pickle
Sarah Howden, illus. by Sabina Hahn (Tundra)
With a briny wit, Howden and Hahn offer up a sly parable suggesting that radical acceptance can be goofy, profound, and green. After a googly-eyed pickle drops from the sky, it begins offering existential observations to local wildlife. Minimalist vignettes and smart plotting land the ending somewhere between ridiculousness and enlightenment. Full of tangy absurdity, this is a tale fit to be relished.
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The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game
C. Thi Nguyen (Penguin Press)
University of Utah philosophy professor Nguyen provides a lively, erudite look at how scoring systems shape the world—occasioning creative forms of play at the hobby level but flattening value at the institutional scale (think college rankings). The result is an energetic exploration full of advice for resisting the gamification of society.
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A Tender Age
Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead)
Lee’s deceptively simple story of a 10-year-old Korean immigrant’s introduction to the ways of the world not only skewers the model minority myth, but it pokes fun at the conventions of a bildungsroman, leaving the reader to join with the middle-aged narrator in recognizing how little can be learned from one’s own experiences.
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Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir
Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)
Turning an eye toward her West Virginia childhood, the Pulitzer winner employs luscious, lyrical prose to consider how the midcentury mining town that birthed her also shaped her into the wordsmith she’s become. Both an elegy for a long-gone way of life and a finely detailed self-portrait, it’s one of the finest memoirs of the year.
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Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood
Joseph Osmundson (Bloomsbury)
This stirring hybrid of memoir and science writing parallels biophysicist Osmundson’s study of salmon spawning and climate collapse with his attempt to father a child with a pair of lesbian friends. In the process, he addresses a constellation of contemporary anxieties—about family, futurelessness, and economic struggle—with infectious curiosity.
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When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine
Francesca Albanese, trans. from the Italian by Gregory Conti (Other Press)
UN special rapporteur Albanese recounts the surreal experience of being sanctioned by the U.S. for working with the International Criminal Court to investigate Israeli crimes against Palestinians. This provides invaluable insight into how voices speaking out for Palestine are systemically silenced.
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The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers
Carlos Barragán (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Journalist Barragán tracks down and interviews the impoverished young Nigerian scammers who use seduction to wring money and gifts out of lonely older Westerners, finding breathtaking pathos and empathy on both sides of the con.
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A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer
Jenny Uglow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Uglow brings unmatched depth and intimacy to this biography of the pioneering 18th-century naturalist. Drawing on White’s detailed daily journals to reconstruct a year of his life, she elucidates the many wonders of nature while expanding the boundaries of what biography can be. It’s enchanting.