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Anyone else feeling nervous? We’re a week away from another election that’s too close to call and too momentous to tune out. Luckily, PW has just the thing to help get you through white-knuckle season and beyond: our 150 best books of the year. On the cover is Percival Everett, whose novel James brilliantly skewers and salvages an American classic. It’s joined on the top 10 by nine other outstanding works, and in the pages that follow, our editors spotlight more of the year’s best in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as 50 exceptional titles for children and teens. No matter where things are headed, you’ll be glad you brought these books along for the ride. —David Adams, adult reviews director

  • Bluff

    Danez Smith (Graywolf)

    This insightful and powerful collection captures the ongoing racial violence, mass protest, and political division in the United States, and the artist’s tenuous place at the center. A critical self-awareness pervades the volume as Smith urgently draws attention to the calamities of the moment, expressing growing skepticism toward poetry that performs its politics or fails to engage with reality.

  • Here We Go Again

    Alison Cochrun (Atria)

    It’s not often that a romance can be described as both a laugh-out-loud romp and a heartrending tearjerker, but Cochrun manages to blend the two tones seamlessly as estranged childhood friends reunite to fulfill their mentor’s dying wish for a cross-country road trip. Hijinks ensue alongside sapphic love and a moving meditation on what makes life worth living.

  • The City in Glass

    Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)

    At the heart of Hugo winner Vo’s masterful latest is the turbulent relationship between a hedonistic demon and one of the angels responsible for smiting the sinful human city she once called home. The result is part sweeping romance between eldrich immortal beings, and part evocative tone poem meditating on destruction, devotion, and what it takes to rebuild.

  • Final Cut

    Charles Burns (Pantheon)

    A teen in 1990s Seattle chases surreal visions and an elusive redheaded muse into the woods to make a movie, in this sexy and unsettling meditation on the limits of creative ambition. Burns delivers his trademark gorgeously goth, pulpy art and a mesmerizing tale of adolescent lust, longing, and madness. Readers won’t be able to look away—even as the plot turns unexpectedly more existential than horrific.

  • Amrikan: 125 Recipes from the Indian American Diaspora

    Khushbu Shah (Norton)

    In this delightful debut, Shah delineates a specifically Indian American cuisine, a fusion fare that, she writes, arose out of a scarcity of authentic ingredients and through cultural exchanges with other immigrant groups. She strikes a playfully irreverent tone as she guides home cooks through unexpected twists on classic dishes. These recipes are as fascinating as they are mouthwatering.

  • The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World

    Sharon Brous (Avery)

    At the heart of this eminently wise call for human connection in an increasingly fractured world is the “holy practice” of simply “showing up” for one’s community in moments of celebration or crisis. It’s a deceptively simple concept that Brous makes theologically rich by breathing new life into familiar Jewish midrashes, rituals, and scriptural stories.

  • The Anthropologists

    Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury)

    At the beginning of Savaş’s lean and heavy-hitting novel, the narrator faces a “moment of panic” with her partner: they’ve decided to put down roots, having spent the past several years living far from their respective homelands. The story, framed as an apartment search, blossoms into an indelible meditation on the meaning of home.

  • Ash Dark as Night

    Gary Phillips (Soho Crime)

    Set amid rising racial tensions in 1960s L.A., this top-shelf noir follows Black photographer Harry Ingram as he finds unexpected fame for an image he captures during a tragic police shooting. When he’s subsequently pulled into a missing persons case, he learns he has an aptitude for sleuthing. Folding real historical figures into the action, Phillips perfectly evokes the urgency and volatility of the period.

  • All Fours

    Miranda July (Riverhead)

    Funny, sexy, weird, but most of all deeply serious, July’s novel is better than anything she’s ever done, whether on the page, in film, or any of the other mediums she’s worked in. With this story about aging, desire, and mortality, July dramatizes how for an artist, the only way to face questions about life and death is by making art.

  • Ariel Crashes a Train

    Olivia A. Cole (Labyrinth Road)

    A teen begins to fear her own mind when intrusive thoughts about harming others intensify in this arresting novel about agency, self-acceptance, and living with obsessive compulsive disorder. In emotionally charged verse, Cole presents discussions of gender, race, religion, and sex that sharply expose the legal shortcomings and binary fallacies that sometimes complicate healing.

  • The Bard and the Book: How the First Folio Saved the Plays of William Shakespeare from Oblivion

    Ann Bausum, illus. by Marta Sevilla (Peachtree)

    Via humorous text brimming with infectious passion, Bausum breaks down the lucky confluence of events that led to the preservation of William Shakespeare’s plays. Sevilla’s vivid blue and orange folk art–inspired illustrations accompany intriguing scholarly facts surrounding the challenges of authenticating the bard's writings, the printing and binding process, and the maintenance and current whereabouts of the original folio.

  • Animal Albums from A to Z

    Cece Bell (Walker US)

    This clever, irresistibly prodigious abecedarian features album art and one song’s worth of liner-note lyrics apiece from 26 invented animal recording artists—creaturely crooners whose works represent myriad musical genres and decades’ worth of design aesthetics. For new listeners and seasoned audiophiles alike, this rigorously imaginative tour de force displays Bell’s no-detail-left-behind creativity, which turns each rockin’ concept “up to 11.”

  • The Big Freeze: 
A Reporter’s Personal Journey into the World of Egg Freezing and the Quest to Control Our Fertility

    Natalie Lampert (Ballantine)

    Journalist Lampert provides an enlightening exploration of the pros and cons of freezing one’s eggs, told through her efforts to decide whether to undergo the procedure herself. Combining sharp reporting on visiting clinics and conferences with smart commentary on how the procedure intersects with societal expectations of women, this is essential reading.

  • The Coin

    Yasmin Zaher (Catapult)

    The year’s best novel of a woman on the edge centers on a New York City high school English teacher in exile from Palestine, where her parents died years earlier in a car crash. As she subjects her body and her apartment to compulsive cleaning rituals, obsesses over the city’s filth, and deviates wildly from her school’s curriculum, the narrative builds to a wickedly funny joke about the currency of trauma stories.

  • Bright Objects

    Ruby Todd (Simon & Schuster)

    Cults, comets, and crippling grief collide in this wonderfully offbeat debut, which follows young widow Sylvia Knight as she falls for a charismatic American astronomer while searching for the hit-and-run driver who killed her husband. Todd stirs up a heady mix of mystery and mysticism that culminates in a shocking, emotionally devastating climax.

  • Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holliday’s Last Year

    Paul Alexander (Knopf)

    Alexander uses the final year of Billie Holliday’s life as a narrative prism through which to deliver sharp insights into her struggles with addiction, her tortured relationships, and the uncanny performance style that transformed her suffering into art. Giving due to the tragedies that marked Holliday’s life without letting them subsume her legacy, it’s an evocative portrait of a singular artist.

  • The Book of Love

    Kelly Link (Random House)

    Short story writer Link tries her hand at a novel and magnificently pulls it off with this fantasy-fueled ghost story. It’s about three dead teens who get a chance to come back to life, and as Link chronicles their interlocking lives, the narrative sheds fascinating light on the nature of love.

  • Bright Red Fruit

    Safia Elhillo (Make Me a World)

    After salacious rumors spread throughout her tight-knit community, a Sudanese teen is grounded indefinitely. In this perceptive novel, Elhillo navigates hard-hitting topics such as grooming, predation, and sex shaming, and captures a journey of self-discovery in sensitively wrought verse, resulting in a mesmerizing and a gripping exploration of the hyperpolicing of Black girls’ bodies and sexuality.

  • Beti and the Little Round House

    Atinuke, illus. by Emily Hughes (Candlewick)

    Drawing on her own childhood experiences, Atinuke introduces young Beti, who lives with her family in their “little round house” and whose penchant for turning ordinary outings into epic adventures reads like a cozy hug. Lush and luminous storytelling brings to life the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of Beti’s world, while Hughes’s muted pastel illustrations mirror the cheerful warmth of this gentle work.

  • Being Home

    Traci Sorell, illus. by Michaela Goade (Kokila)

    Across a joyful arc that shows a family embracing change, an Indigenous child looks gladly forward to moving from an ill-fitting city to “our ancestors’ land/ and to our people.” Sorell’s spare, rhythmic language and Goade’s soft-edged, organic landscapes twine to explore a family’s connection to a place and community—thoughtfully characterizing “the rhythm of being home.”

  • The Invention of the Darling

    Li-Young Lee (Norton)

    Lee’s mystical, exhilarating book evokes the sacred through the wonder of human bonds and the roles each person plays across a lifetime. In beautiful reflections, Lee pays tribute to his own roles as father and son, parental devotion, and poetry itself as he reveals where the spiritual and the material intersect.

  • A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

    Tia Williams (Grand Central)

    In this swoonworthy romance, Ricki Wilde, the black sheep of her large Southern family, moves to Harlem to pursue her artistic ambitions, where she meets and falls for Ezra, an oddly old-fashioned jazz musician. Toggling between the modern day and the 1920s, Williams crafts a lyrical love story that defies time itself. Ricki and Ezra are made for each other.

  • The Full Moon Coffee Shop

    Mai Mochizuki, trans. from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood (Ballantine)

    It’s impossible to come away from Mochizuki’s subtle gem of a debut without one’s faith in humanity restored. The gentle but dexterous plot follows five strangers who stumble upon a café run by fortune-telling cats and slowly reveals the unexpected intersections between the disparate cast. This is cozy fantasy done right.

  • Bayou: Feasting Through the Seasons of a Cajun Life

    Melissa M. Martin (Artisan)

    James Beard Award winner Martin brings together recipes, history, family stories, and gorgeous photography to capture the essence of a place and a way of life. With abundant seafood feasts, vibrant king cake, and homespun biscuits, this equally nostalgic and exultant paean to life on the Mississippi River Delta celebrates the way food ties a culture together. It’s an unfettered joy.

  • The Bible: A Global History

    Bruce Gordon (Basic)

    In Gordon’s hands, the Bible becomes a “migrant” that wanders across borders, continually reinventing itself through cultural blending, reinterpretation, and rebellion. Rigorous research and fine-grained textual analysis make this an ambitious and necessary reassessment of the world’s most-read book.

  • The Heart That Fed: A Father, a Son, and the Long Shadow of War

    Carl Sciacchitano (Gallery 13)

    Comics artist Schiacchitano accomplishes a rare feat in this superb graphic nonfiction narrative. As he documents his father’s Vietnam War–era military service and PTSD, he employs comics’ cinematic tricks to grab readers while also grounding the narrative in dialogue and historical detail. The result is a moving and meticulously constructed examination of the legacy of violence.

  • Fury

    Clyo Mendoza, trans. from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Seven Stories)

    Stunning in its beauty and brutality, Mexican poet Mendoza’s saga follows two soldiers from opposing sides of a war who become lovers after meeting on a battlefield. The imagistic prose calls to mind the films of Alejandro Jodorowski, while interludes of oral storytelling evoke the author’s Indigenous heritage. The result is an unforgettable new twist on Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo.

  • City in Ruins

    Don Winslow (Morrow)

    Winslow’s Homer-inspired Danny Ryan trilogy concludes with a rough-and-tumble finale that pits Ryan against his longtime rival, Vernon Winegard, on a trash-strewn Las Vegas Strip. With careful attention to several series-long arcs and heaps of elegantly written action, it’s a superbly satisfying end to a landmark series.

  • Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis

    Ryann Liebenthal (Dey Street)

    Decades of intractable political battles are brought to life in Liebenthal’s illuminating and outraging chronicle of the student debt crisis. Stretching from the 1944 GI Bill to President Biden’s thwarted attempts to cancel student debt, the piercing narrative reveals how higher education became out of reach for many Americans.

  • By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land

    Rebecca Nagle (Harper)

    Nagle draws on archival sources to paint an astonishing picture of 19th-century Native dispossession and its aftershocks. Bringing together stories of Native Americans struggling against settler violence across time—from high-stakes treaty negotiations to modern-day courtroom dramas—this is a kaleidoscopic overview of the dense legal webs that have ensnared and nullified Indigenous rights for generations.

  • The Brightwood Code

    Monica Hesse (Little, Brown)

    Haunted by a past mistake, a teenage phone operator recently returned from France must unravel an ominous secret code before it’s too late. Hesse confidently balances narrative flashbacks to harrowing WWI battle sequences with elegantly drawn scenes set in 1918 D.C. and Baltimore to tease out mystery alongside psychological thrills in this rewarding historical novel.

  • Bye Forever, I Guess

    Jodi Meadows (Holiday House)

    Delightfully snarky narration chronicles the trials and tribulations of an eighth grader’s vibrant online persona becoming entangled with the IRL perils of middle school. Meadows’s earnest and good-humored middle grade debut is a winning exploration of tween friendship as well as a pitch-perfect paean to fan culture and the thrill of finding one’s community.

  • Dog vs. Strawberry

    Nelly Buchet, illus. by Andrea Zuill (Random House Studio)

    When Dog is given a plump red strawberry, this work’s narrator breathlessly announces “the greatest race of all time!” Buchet’s heightened language and Zuill’s cinematic sense of silliness follow Dog’s frantic battle of wills with the fruit. Featuring a protagonist who’s both cunning competitor and genial goofball, it’s an enthusiastic love letter to canine behavior wrapped in a laugh-out-loud sportscast spoof.

  • God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

    Joseph Earl Thomas (Grand Central)

    Thomas follows up his acclaimed memoir, Sink, with a brilliant stream-of-consciousness narrative about a paramedic working in the emergency room of a Philadelphia hospital. As the narrator, Joseph, receives a series of battered and bloodied patients, he takes in the city’s violence, reflects on his time in the Army, and reckons with the demands of his needy family, all while going broke. It’s a tour de force.

  • Lost Man’s Lane

    Scott Carson (Atria/Bestler)

    A young man investigating the disappearance of a teenage girl confronts a sinister, otherworldly force haunting his hometown in this exceptional supernatural thriller. Carson channels the best of Stephen King, interweaving a hair-raising mystery and a poignant coming-of-age story populated with three-dimensional characters.

  • Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

    Madhumita Murgia (Holt)

    In this eye-opening tour of the profound effects AI is already having on the global workforce—all of it uniformly miserable—Murgia paints an unsettling portrait of a dystopian new world order wherein workers must acclimate to being aimlessly directed by distant and inscrutable forces. (To picture the future, imagine an UberEats driver being dispatched to an out-of-business restaurant—forever.)

  • The Heart That Fed: A Father, a Son, and the Long Shadow of War

    Carl Sciacchitano (Gallery 13)

    Comics artist Schiacchitano accomplishes a rare feat in this superb graphic nonfiction narrative. As he documents his father’s Vietnam War–era military service and PTSD, he employs comics’ cinematic tricks to grab readers while also grounding the narrative in dialogue and historical detail. The result is a moving and meticulously constructed examination of the legacy of violence.

  • Carnival Chaos

    Tracey Baptiste (Freedom Fire)

    When flames begin shooting from their mouths after they eat mango anchar, three Brooklyn cousins must harness their newfound powers to save carnival festivities from disaster in Baptiste’s exuberant series launch. Lively text centers Afro-Caribbean experiences with heartfelt humor, culminating in an adventure that emphasizes the high spirits of the festival season and its importance to the tweens’ culture.

  • Emergency Quarters

    Carlos Matias, illus. by Gracey Zhang (HarperCollins/Tegen)

    After Ernesto begins walking to school without his parents, he holds onto the single “for emergencies” quarter his mother presses into his hand each morning—until a surprising “emergency” at the barber shop offers a winning opportunity for independent decision-making. Matias and Zhang supply lively sensate details, artfully portraying Ernesto’s community and his own canny balancing of prudence and pleasure.

  • Brownstone

    Samuel Teer, illus. by Mar Julia (Versify)

    A reluctant teen must stay with the father she’s never met while he renovates an N.Y.C. brownstone in this affecting and emotionally grounded graphic novel set in 1995. Julia’s fluid illustrations, saturated in rich earth tones, breathe life into Teer’s vibrant metropolitan neighborhood, as seen by a resourceful and unfettered protagonist, in this satisfyingly transformative story about family and identity.

  • Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space

    Catherine Barnett (Graywolf)

    These stunning poems sketch out a witty and philosophical approach to life’s probing, existential questions. Barnett’s elegiac musings offer both witness and remembrance, while a series of “Studies on Loneliness” proves to be a remarkably perceptive exploration of the subject, mining solitude’s overlooked value.

  • A Novel Love Story

    Ashley Poston (Berkley)

    Romance novel fan Elsy Merriweather magically stumbles into the fictional small-town setting of her favorite book series in this playfully meta rom-com. As Elsy meddles in her favorite characters’ lives and discovers a connection with a handsome local bookseller (whom she doesn’t remember from the series), Poston uses the clever premise to compose a heartfelt love letter to the genre.

  • Memorials

    Richard Chizmar (Gallery)

    Bestseller Chizmar pays gleeful homage to found footage and cosmic horror tropes in this bone-chilling epic about a trio of college students attempting to make a documentary on Appalachian roadside memorials. As the group becomes convinced that someone—or something—is following them, characters and prose alike descend into itchy paranoia. It’s sleep-with-the-lights-on scary.

  • I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together: A Memoir

    Maurice Vellekoop (Pantheon)

    Vellekoop’s sumptuous graphic memoir is truly a life’s work. In it, the groundbreaking queer cartoonist joyfully showcases his guiding obsessions (classic Disney animation, opera, 1970s television, and fashion) in splendid drawings that trace his path from growing up in a volatile ultrareligious family to finding artistic success in 1980s and ’90s N.Y.C. and fully embracing his sexuality.

  • Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food

    Fadi Kattan (Hardie Grant)

    The immense love and pride that restaurateur Kattan feels for his native city shines through on every page of this elegant collection. Appealing and approachable traditional recipes are studded with moving portraits of Bethlehem locals, including a vendor Kattan dubs the Queen of Herbs and members of his own extended family.

  • Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

    Eliza Griswold (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

    Drawing on years of immersive research, Pulitzer winner Griswold paints an indelible portrait of the interpersonal tensions, internal biases, and gaps between utopian ideals and messy reality that unraveled a progressive Philadelphia church in 2023. In its particularity, this speaks powerfully to the broader trend of partisanship playing out across the country.

  • Great Expectations

    Vinson Cunningham (Hogarth)

    In this blistering bildungsroman, a young man works on an Obama-like candidate’s presidential campaign in New York City. Cunningham, now a writer for the New Yorker, worked for the real Obama back in 2008, so it’s a treat to get these glimpses behind the curtain. But what thrills the most is seeing the way Cunningham so perfectly applies his chops as a critic to his descriptions of politics as performance.

  • May the Wolf Die

    Elizabeth Heider (Penguin Books)

    Former Navy analyst Heider parlays her experience in the service into an expert thriller that follows U.S. military police investigator Nikki Serafino as she probes the murders of two American sailors in Italy. Though the whodunit is tense and complicated in all the right ways, it’s Heider’s portrait of Nikki—in particular, her home life and her ambivalent feelings about U.S. imperialism—that sets this apart.

  • Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry

    Ryan Ruby (Seven Stories)

    Reviving the archaic verse essay, Ruby proves a skilled tour guide of poetry’s history from ancient Greece through the rise of AI, exploring how form has adjusted to historical and technological developments. Though the unusual format might come across as a gimmick in lesser hands, Ruby’s assured execution makes it feel fresh and original, a perfect marriage of form and subject.

  • Compound Fracture

    Andrew Joseph White (Peachtree)

    Utilizing evocative language, White depicts autistic transgender 16-year-old Miles’s mission to upend a corrupt authority and seek justice for a past transgression. It’s a stunning testament to community-focused ideologies and Appalachia’s history of worker-centered advocacy that confronts the consequences of one’s failure to engage in their surroundings and the intertwining realities of politics and queerness.

  • Felix Powell, Boy Dog

    Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow)

    After curious eight-year-old Felix magically becomes a dog, beguiling descriptions recount his pooch Mary Puppins’s efforts to guide him in the ways of canine cavorting. Short, well-paced, suspenseful chapters convey the joy of running on four legs and the subtleties of tail wagging, while Kelly’s b&w drawings enhance the congenial ambiance, making for an engaging and just-right romp.

  • Go Forth and Tell: The Life of Augusta Baker, Librarian and Master Storyteller

    Breanna J. McDaniel, illus. by April Harrison (Dial)

    Before becoming an expert storyteller, Augusta Braxton Baker (1911–1998) “was an amazing story listener,” begins McDaniel and Harrison’s vital history of a vital figure. Intricate mixed-media collage meticulously highlights Baker’s route to helping “people become better listeners” and her creation of a library collection that ensured Black children would “have heroes that rose up and looked, talked, and shined bright.”

  • Herscht 07769

    László Krasznahorkai, trans. from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (New Directions)

    The form is demanding (it’s a single 400-page sentence), but Krasznahorkai’s latest is worth every moment of concentration. At the center of the narrative is Florian Herscht, a gentle giant with an intellectual disability who’s being exploited by a neo-Nazi gang leader. What makes this so exciting and satisfying is the author’s clear-eyed and open-hearted exploration of conspiracy thinking and nationalism, and the divisiveness they fuel.

  • Intermezzo

    Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

    Marxist purveyor of literary smut? Overrated romance author? With success comes detractors, but no matter what labels people throw at Rooney, her work stands as some of the most arresting contemporary fiction. Her latest, a compulsive tale of two brothers saddled with grief over their father’s recent death and struggling to make sense of their relationships with women, more than holds up to scrutiny.

  • Once More from the Top

    Emily Layden (Mariner)

    Layden’s smart and layered sophomore novel tracks Taylor Swift stand-in Dylan Read as she grapples with the discovery of her long-missing best friend’s body. By focusing on parasocial fandom and the anxieties of artistic collaboration, Layden finds a fresh angle on the price of fame and spins a stay-up-all-night mystery to boot.

  • The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power

    Dana Mattioli (Little, Brown)

    Crackerjack reporting drives this exceptional deep dive into Jeff Bezos’s corporate leviathan, drawing on internal documents and hundreds of interviews with Amazon personnel to illuminate the company’s merciless tactics for conquering an ever-growing range of industries. It’s the most comprehensive account yet of Amazon’s quest for retail dominance.

  • James

    Percival Everett (Doubleday)

    Everett has ascended to blockbuster status without leaving behind what makes him special. Here, he rewrites Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a novel that’s more kinetic and intellectually stimulating than the original. Language is a central subject, as the literate and well-read Jim slyly coarsens his speech when talking to whites. So is revenge, which figures into the book’s explosive and satisfying climax.

  • The Deep Dark

    Molly Knox Ostertag (Graphix)

    Upon reconnecting with a childhood friend, a high school senior must confront her past if she hopes to build a future. Grayscale present-day scenes alternate with flashbacks in unbridled color to render an expansive triumph—Ostertag’s best graphic novel yet—that examines issues of grief, identity, intergenerational trauma, and reinvention via measured pacing, dynamic paneling, and robust dialogue.

  • Impossible Creatures

    Katherine Rundell, illus. by Ashley Mackenzie (Knopf)

    A boy with an affinity for animals, a girl who can fly when the wind blows, and a secreted-away world in need of saving propel this dazzling, realms-roving trilogy opener. Rundell deploys epic stakes, bonds both tender and devastating, and fierce kid characters for a fresh, lore-informed narrative about the kinship of living things and the marvels of being alive.

  • In Praise of Mystery

    Ada Limón, illus. by Peter Sís (Norton)

    In the cadenced text of this deliberately paced poem by Limón—which is etched on Europa Clipper, a NASA spacecraft heading toward Jupiter and its moons—the work’s speaker draws everyday existence on planet Earth into relationship with watery Europa. Primal blue spreads from Sís evoke depth and distance, resulting in an expansively wrought work that describes two realms connected across unimaginable distance.

  • Wrong Norma

    Anne Carson (New Directions)

    The master of genre-bending presents a brilliant, time-splicing mythology comprised largely of prose poems. Blending ancient and modern sources, Carson revisits classical myth while alluding to Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, and other unexpected sources of inspiration. The result is an alert, surprising, and innovative book.

  • The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love

    India Holton (Berkley)

    This utterly enchanting series launch sends rival Victorian bird-watchers on a madcap race across Europe to find a mythical bird. Holton has a great deal of fun creating a tongue-in-cheek Victorian pastiche replete with gaslight, cobblestones, and mechanized parasols that enable ladies to fly. The irreverent worldbuilding and sparkling banter between the combative leads make this a winner.

  • The Mercy of Gods

    James S.A. Corey (Orbit)

    Transporting readers to a dazzlingly inventive galaxy, this thrilling, series-launching space opera introduces research scientist Tonner Freis just before he’s abducted by an extraterrestrial hive mind intent on conquering the universe. The stakes are sky-high, the scale is vast, and pseudonymous writing duo Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck remain unparalleled at crafting deeply human characters even in wildly alien worlds.

  • Mothballs

    Sole Otero, trans. from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg (Fantagraphics)

    Unrest—of the personal, familial, and political variety—is the unifying theme of Otero’s electric English-language debut. The parallel narratives follow an unhappy Italian woman whose family flees fascism in Europe for Argentina, and her similarly distempered granddaughter, who reckons with her grandmother’s ghost and her own thwarted desires. Bursting with color and linework that playfully dances across the page, this marks Otero as a rising star of international comics.

  • Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

    Catherine Nixey (Mariner)

    Nixey peers beyond today’s familiar “Jesus of Sunday school and sunbeams” to reveal an array of far weirder—and more intriguing—textual Christs, from the two-bit magician of ancient Greco-Roman writings to the arrogant miracle worker of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Written with wit and verve, this fascinating history asks trenchant questions about which historical narratives get preserved and why.

  • Lazarus Man

    Richard Price (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

    Price, one of the best writers ever to take on New York City, calls back to his masterpiece Lush Life, once again taking inspiration from a deadly event and casting the story against a broad canvas of urban life. Every detail in this one, about the victims of a tenement collapse in Harlem and those drawn to the disaster, is written with laser-like precision.

  • The Puzzle Box

    Danielle Trussoni (Random House)

    Puzzlist Mike Brink returns after the events of The Puzzle Master to open a booby-trapped box for the descendants of a Japanese emperor in this rip-roaring adventure, the rare sequel that bests its predecessor. From familiar parts—a criminal savant, a Robert Langdon–esque trek in search of precious artifacts—Trussoni constructs a wholly original page-turner.

  • My Friends

    Hisham Matar (Random House)

    Matar channels Roberto Bolaño’s theme of literary obsession in this sublime novel of a Libyan exile in London whose two friends return to Libya in 2011 to take part in the overthrow of Gadhafi. As the narrator describes his quest to understand life through literature, the novel’s sense of truthfulness and urgency restores the reader’s belief in what fiction can do.

  • Island of Whispers

    Frances Hardinge, illus. by Emily Gravett (Amulet)

    The son of the Ferryman must embark on a perilous quest following his father’s murder in this elegiac fantasy about grief, compassion, and the importance of living life fully. Hardinge’s spare, evocative prose and otherworldly tone are heightened by black, white, and light blue illustrations from Gravett that are by turns bold and ethereal.

  • The Dividing Sky

    Jill Tew (Joy Revolution)

    Employment defines social status and addictive, legalized drugs are used to increase productivity in debut author Tew’s heart-racing dual-perspective future dystopian romance set in a cyberpunk, ultracapitalistic vision of America. Messy human emotions strain against technology and morality in a high-stakes story that’s packed with slow-burn pining and plentiful tension, enriched by skillful worldbuilding and nods to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.

  • Joyful Song: A Naming Story

    Lesléa Newman, illus. by Susan Gal (Levine Querido)

    Everyone wants to know the name of Zachary’s newborn sibling. But before the synagogue baby-naming ceremony, Mama and Mommy sub in playful endearments, gently reminding that the official name will be revealed at the event. Newman and Gal lavishly capture the coziness of Zachary’s neighborhood and the sacred space where a warm community gathers to welcome their newest member.

  • The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without

    John Oakes (Avid Reader)

    This searching study weaves together science on what happens when the body goes without food, an exploration of fasting’s role in religion and protest, and Oakes’s personal account of forgoing food for a week. Taking an evenhanded tack that recognizes fasting’s benefits without minimizing its dangers, this will change how readers think about what it means to go without.

  • Old King

    Maxim Loskutoff (Norton)

    As tensions mount between a local conservationist and a logger in 1970s Montana, Ted Kaczynski’s new neighbor gets caught in the middle. Meanwhile, Ted, an eccentric hermit motivated by his hatred of modern life, carries on the terror campaign that will eventually see him brought to justice as the Unabomber. Loskutoff’s deeply considered novel of ideas has the pacing of a thriller, and its heartbreaking ending is impossible to shake.

  • Rough Trade

    Katrina Carrasco (MCD)

    Carrasco revisits the gritty world of 19th-century opium smuggling in this unabashedly queer swashbuckler centered on Alma Rosales, who largely lives as her male alter ego, Jack Camp. Espionage and murder among Alma/Jack’s operation animate the plot, which Carrasco buttresses with a brilliantly vivid depiction of men’s cruising bars and the period’s sexual paranoia.

  • Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See

    Bianca Bosker (Viking)

    Delving into the elite and sometimes opaque world of fine art, Bosker delivers both a riveting account of its eccentricities (collectors who treat artworks “like vital organs”; paintings of Martians with kale for skin) and a moving, perceptive commentary on what it means to observe and appreciate beauty.

  • Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

    Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

    Written in coruscating prose, Gumbs’s innovative account of Audre Lorde’s life, focused loosely on how the natural world informed the feminist poet’s thinking, toys with chronology and form as it unpacks the mentorships, romances, and traumas that shaped her. It’s the rare literary biography that stands up next to its subject’s achievements.

  • Max in the House of Spies

    Adam Gidwitz (Dutton)

    Following Kristallnacht, irrepressible German Jewish 11-year-old Max is sent to England via the Kindertransport, where he endeavors to become a British spy to rescue his parents. Imbuing the narrative with plentiful charm, Gidwitz conjures a compelling duology starter that boasts triumphs, perils, mystical intrigue, and a cliffhanger ending that expertly builds momentum for the sequel.

  • Everything We Never Had

    Randy Ribay (Kokila)

    Compact storytelling layered with Filipino American culture and history provides the backdrop for four generations of father-son relationships to unfurl. Past and present narratives from 1929 to 2020 perceptively depict personal and sociopolitical struggles such as the Covid-19 pandemic and farm workers’ rights advocacy to further flesh out Ribay’s emotionally resonant tale that reflects on masculinity, identity, and cycles of trauma.

  • Just Like Millie

    Lauren Castillo (Candlewick)

    After a child who’s recently moved house declines to make new friends, their mother takes them to an animal shelter, where they meet a “just right dog.” The pleasure that the animal takes in companionship and the family’s daily walks make all the difference. Castillo’s tender work highlights both a close, transformative bond and the way that new connections can ease upheaval.

  • A Year of Last Things

    Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)

    Ondaatje’s literary gifts and expansive imagination are on display in these dazzling poems that reflect on memory, history, and art. Photographs spark a playful retrospective, allowing Ondaatje to craft lyric narratives that leap from a Sri Lankan boarding school to tender memories of landscapes and friends.

  • The Prospects

    KT Hoffman (Dial)

    Hoffman’s rousing debut follows the first openly trans, openly gay recruit to a minor league baseball team, reuniting him with his ex-friend from college. Hoffman makes the game scenes thrilling even for readers with no knowledge of baseball and builds a gradual, deeply emotional connection between the leads. These are underdogs worth rooting for.

  • Metal from Heaven

    August Clarke (Erewhon)

    Clarke deeply engages with themes of labor rights, exploitation, and power within the pulpy, page-turning framework of a gripping revenge story. It’s an impressive juggling act, and Clarke makes it look easy, rounding things out with wonderfully complex science-fantasy worldbuilding and a steamy lesbian love plot for good measure.

  • Victory Parade

    Leela Corman (Schocken)

    In a WWII story that toggles between the Brooklyn home front and the liberation of Buchenwald, Corman paints indelible characters who grapple with grief on battlefields and in the wrestling ring. Her lithe, purple-toned watercolors bleed on the page—a tactile evocation of how trauma breaks through and crosses generations. It’s a transcendent, visionary accomplishment by an artist at the height of her powers.

  • Somehow: Thoughts on Love

    Anne Lamott (Riverhead)

    Lamott proves herself a master storyteller in these meditations on the most elusive of emotions, using her trademark humor and compassion to enliven life’s ordinary moments and find wisdom in its tragedies. In one of the book’s most remarkable passages, she writes of the love that once found her holding a sharpened pencil to her “addict son’s throat” and warning him that he couldn’t come home again until he stopped using.

  • Our Evenings

    Alan Hollinghurst (Random House)

    Hollinghurst trains his famously exquisite and exacting prose onto the life of aging gay actor Dave Winn. Half Burmese, half British, Dave was bullied at boarding school and typecast throughout his career, and now faces a new form of ugliness in Brexit-era xenophobia. Hollinghurst’s achievement is in crafting Dave with a deep sense of dignity, showing how his hero has lived a good life despite adversity.

  • Ghosts of Crook County: An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land

    Russell Cobb (Beacon)

    Cobb dives down the rabbit hole of a turn-of-the-20th-century scam, bringing to light startling revelations about a scheme to steal oil-rich land from Native Americans that reached all the way to the White House—with Woodrow Wilson implicated—and has surprising legal implications for the control of a modern-day fortune in Oklahoma.

  • Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell

    Ann Powers (Dey Street)

    Reaching beyond the public image of Joni Mitchell as either a “misunderstood musical genius” or a megawatt pop star, Powers takes a freewheeling and fascinating trip through her subject’s influences and obsessions, capturing her shifting “musical selves” and the gaps and inconsistencies between them. Interweaving meditations on feminism, gender, and success, Powers paints a dazzling portrait of an inimitable artist while challenging traditional notions of what a biography can be.

  • Mishka

    Anoush Elman and Edward van de Vendel, trans. from the Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier, illus. by Annet Schaap (Levine Querido)

    Elman and van de Vendel’s sensitively written story, informed by personal history, gently illuminates the disorienting effects of one refugee child’s experience leaving Afghanistan for the Netherlands. Simple, affecting narration features distinctive and sympathetically rendered characters whose individual arcs organically converge into a moving novel that’s complemented by Schaap’s warmly childlike full-color artwork.

  • Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I’d Known

    George M. Johnson, illus. by Charly Palmer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

    Johnson combines incisive prose commentary, skewering verse, and revealing memoir to highlight Harlem Renaissance–era Black queer luminaries, the racism and homophobia they experienced outside the Black diaspora, and oppression within the community. The inviting, conversational voice is elevated by Palmer’s hyperrealistic imagery, which features subway maps and skyscrapers overlaying canvas portraiture that harkens to the titular period.

  • The Last Stand

    Antwan Eady, illus. by Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey (Knopf)

    When Papa becomes too tired to run his farmer’s market stand—the last in a close-knit community—the young narrator, and those Papa has long nurtured, find a way to move forward in care. The Pumphreys’ crisp illustrations, created with handmade stamps, convey a palpable feeling of abundance as Eady unfurls a subtle intergenerational story that hints at broader sociopolitical issues.

  • Pink Slime

    Fernanda Trías, trans. from the Spanish by Heather Cleary (Scribner)

    Many novelists have drawn from Covid-19’s world-changing effects, but it’s Uruguayan writer Trías who best captures the pandemic’s strain on interpersonal relationships and the melancholia-inducing loss of a way of life. She does so with the story of a deadly epidemic spawned by toxic algae, combining sobering ecofiction with nightmarish dystopian elements for an unforgettable speculative novel.

  • The Sequel

    Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon)

    In Korelitz’s follow-up to The Plot, scheming widow Anna Williams-Bonner fights to protect her novelist husband’s legacy by publishing a metafictional novel of her own. Saying much more about this Tom Ripley–riffing thriller, which is at once a satire of the literary world and a spellbinding work of crime fiction, would spoil the wicked fun. Suffice it to say that Patricia Highsmith herself would have savored Korelitz’s nastiness.

  • Grief Is for People

    Sloane Crosley (MCD)

    In this potent, unforgettable memoir, Crosley illuminates unlikely links between the suicide of her best friend and the burglarizing of her West Village apartment. She paints her late friend, Vintage Books’ Russell Perreault, in unvarnished detail, delivering a searching meditation on loss and friendship that’s also laugh-out-loud funny.

  • When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

    John Ganz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

    The politics of the right-wingers at the margins of the 1992 U.S. presidential election—and the center of Ganz’s brilliant and witty narrative—will be eerily familiar to anyone who’s been listening to Trump. In his startlingly accomplished first book, Ganz makes a revelatory case for the origins of today’s authoritarian posturing and its appeal to voters.

  • Quagmire Tiarello Couldn’t Be Better

    Mylisa Larsen (Clarion)

    Compassionate characterizations personify Larsen’s intimately written story that centers a 14-year-old yearning for stability and support after his mother’s mental health takes a turn. Numerous plotlines teeming with absurd and unsettling twists are seamlessly connected by the protagonist’s bird observations and transcriptions of his diary-esque audio files, which add further texture to this emotionally wrenching read.

  • Icarus

    K. Ancrum (HarperTeen)

    In Ancrum’s intimate reimagining of the Icarus myth, a teenage art thief yearns to escape his challenging circumstances—and falls in love. Lyrical language winningly captures the magic and dreamlike aura of young romance, and brief, propulsive plotting brimming with riveting action and deeply felt emotion culminate in a subversive and triumphant ode to the importance of connection and empathy.

  • Life After Whale: The Amazing Ecosystem of a Whale Fall

    Lynn Brunelle, illus. by Jason Chin (Holiday House/Porter)

    Magnificent watercolor and gouache spreads by Chin and meticulous text from Brunelle capture the grace of a blue whale in life alongside the bustling ecosystem that surrounds it in death, as its body provides nourishment for countless creatures over more than a century. It’s a brilliant breakdown of how death supports life and how populations grow and are sustained.

  • This Could Be Us

    Kennedy Ryan (Forever)

    When devoted housewife Soledad’s husband is arrested for embezzlement and confesses to infidelity, she must rebuild her life from the ashes. Ryan makes her efforts to do so poignant and empowering, emphasizing the value that exists in the domestic sphere. Add in a steamy affair with the hot single father who investigated Soledad’s husband and this mature contemporary proves un-put-downable.

  • Midnight Rooms

    Donyae Coles (Amistad)

    Combining acute psychological detail with eerie fairy tale elements, Coles’s debut sets itself apart from the recent renaissance of gothic literature even as it revels in the genre’s tropes. What starts as the story of a mixed-race woman in Victorian England traveling to the home of her new husband, a virtual stranger, becomes a surreal fever dream as the elegant plot unfolds.

  • Praiseworthy

    Alexis Wright (New Directions)

    Aboriginal Australian author Wright fires on all cylinders in her latest epic, which stands alongside Carpentaria as one of her masterworks. Among the many threads of this polyphonic saga of climate change and generational oppression is the story of Cause Man Steel, who sets out to save Australia by gathering millions of feral donkeys for use as transport.

  • The Silver Bone

    Andrey Kurkov, trans. from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk (HarperVia)

    A devastated Kyiv provides the backdrop for this idiosyncratic WWI-era mystery about a teenager who comes to the attention of an investigator after filing an eloquent police report. Patient, funny, and remarkably attuned to the casual tragedy of life during wartime, it’s a late-career treat from a Ukrainian luminary.

  • Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

    Richard Beck (Crown)

    To account for the rise of Donald Trump, Beck examines the War on Terror and its coarsening effect on American culture, arguing that, after 9/11, Americans became primed for fear, hate, and violence. The result is an urgent and inspired reexamination of the roots of America’s rightward turn.

  • Shark Teeth

    Sherri Winston (Bloomsbury)

    At last reunited following a period spent in separate foster homes, 12-year-old Sharkita and her two siblings seek normalcy while living with their mother in Winston’s stirring telling. Driven, complex, and emotionally intelligent Sharkita ferries this potent and powerful story about strength in the face of neglect and the bravery to demand what is best for one’s family and oneself.

  • Libertad

    Bessie Flores Zaldívar (Dial)

    Through the eyes of 18-year-old Libi, a strong, sympathetic protagonist, Zaldívar crafts a hefty novel that explores the lead up to a controversial presidential election in 2017 Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Detailed depictions of the characters’ everyday dealings with widespread corruption are inextricably woven with Libi’s exploration of her expanding identity as a gay poet, adding authenticity to this potent and empowering debut.

  • Little Shrew

    Akiko Miyakoshi (Kids Can)

    Via understated storytelling and simultaneously winsome and melancholy artwork, Miyakoshi examines the everyday life of a small shrew existing modestly among humans. From a breakfast of honey biscuits to preparations for an annual visit from dear friends, renderings of quiet, precisely completed routines and the occasional celebration bring security and contentment to this intimate early reader told in three parts.

  • Rejection

    Tony Tulathimutte (Morrow)

    Satire is alive and well, as evidenced by Tulathimutte’s flamboyant collection. One protagonist takes to an incel message board after failing to convince women he’s a feminist. Another sabotages his first potentially serious relationship with a man out of fear he’ll be rejected for his kink. A throbbing heart beats at the center of the hilarity and ribaldry, making this irresistible.

  • Smoke Kings

    Jahmal Mayfield (Melville House)

    In this jolting debut, Mayfield follows a group of Black vigilantes seeking revenge for the murder of their young leader’s cousin. Their plan—to kidnap the descendants of past perpetrators of hate crimes and force them to pay reparations—goes awry in ways even seasoned thriller readers won’t see coming. Intense, unsparing, and searingly topical, it’s an unforgettable achievement.

  • In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

    Sebastian Junger (Simon & Schuster)

    Junger’s near-death experience in 2020—triggered by the rupture of a long-dormant pancreatic aneurysm—serves as a jumping-off point for this stimulating meditation on the afterlife. Interweaving quantum physics with philosophical musings, Junger delivers insights that unsettle and enlighten. It’s an exhilarating exploration of what lies beyond.

  • Stealing Little Moon: The Legacy of American Indian Boarding Schools

    Dan SaSuWeh Jones (Scholastic Focus)

    Jones uses urgent prose to chronicle the history of Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in Oklahoma, starting with his grandmother’s kidnapping from the Ponca reservation in 1885. Extensive research, interviews with key figures, quotes and stories from survivors, and relevant experiences from the author’s childhood inform this visceral and empathetic unraveling of Indigenous history in the U.S.

  • Looking for Smoke

    K.A. Cobell (Heartdrum)

    After a Blackfeet Reservation teen is murdered, her peer group aims to find her killer—even if it means condemning one of their own. Interweaving intricacies of reservation life and striving to highlight the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis, debut author Cobell delivers a gut-punch thriller via a timely mystery plot that is by turns spine-tingling and emotionally raw.

  • Mabel Wants a Friend

    Ariel Bernstein, illus. by Marc Rosenthal (S&S/Wiseman)

    Fox Mabel “always got what she wanted,” even when doing so requires subterfuge, but a friendship with generous rabbit Chester teaches her to value others for more than how they meet her needs. Bernstein and Rosenthal once again dazzle at demonstrating social-emotional nuance in this savvy, playground-set work about how wants can go beyond a desire for self-gratification.

  • Moon of the Turning Leaves

    Waubgeshig Rice (Morrow)

    In Rice’s harrowing sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow, set 12 years after a global power outage, the Anishinaabe people who settled in New Village are forced to relocate, trekking through a dystopian landscape in hope of finding a new home. Rice chronicles their journey in gorgeous prose, placing plenty of postapocalyptic horrors in their path but never losing sight of hope.

  • Sister Deborah

    Scholastique Mukasonga (Archipelago)

    Mukasonga, long known for her portrayals of the Rwandan genocide, took up the intersection of tribal myths and Christianity with her previous novel, Kibogo. She masters the theme with this story of a feminist and anti-racist Pentacostal cult in early-20th-century Rwanda under Belgian rule. Her depictions of spiritual visions, injustice, and superstition are by turns beautiful, stirring, and wickedly funny.

  • We Solve Murders

    Richard Osman (Viking)

    Osman pivots from his beloved Thursday Murder Club series to launch a new, equally smooth blend of comedy and mystery about a father- and daughter-in-law who team up to take down a killer stalking a bestselling author. Their globe-trotting search is equal parts zany and heartwarming, with Osman flexing his gift for characterization as often as his talent for crafting a good red herring.

  • Into the Unknown: The Quest to Understand the Mysteries of the Cosmos

    Kelsey Johnson (Basic)

    Colliding universes, interdimensional particles, and the nature of time are among the mind-boggling mysteries contemplated in Johnson’s mesmerizing debut. Asking what caused the big bang and what determines the laws of nature, among other enigmas, Johnson introduces readers to heady cosmic questions they didn’t know to ask, proving the universe is far stranger than they imagined.

  • Sylvia Doe and the 100-Year Flood

    Robert Beatty (Disney Hyperion)

    As an amnesiac 13-year-old works to stop a once-in-a-lifetime flood, she learns it may cost her the only home she’s ever known. Through the protagonist’s passionate narration, Beatty combines sensorial descriptions and pulse-pounding action to pay tribute to the beauty and dangers of the natural world in a thoughtful and quietly magical adventure about finding where one belongs.

  • Rising from the Ashes: Los Angeles, 1992. Edward Jae Song Lee, Latasha Harlins, Rodney King, and a City on Fire

    Paula Yoo (Norton)

    Messages of empathy, progress, and resilience following tragedy resonate throughout this moving account of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Via vivid prose, Yoo contextualizes the history—and far-reaching consequences—of the LAPD’s racist policing, highlighting events that remain relevant to a contemporary society in which individuals continue to combat police brutality and systemic racism.

  • My Daddy Is a Cowboy

    Stephanie Seales, illus. by C.G. Esperanza (Abrams)

    When Daddy wakes this immersive work’s young narrator before dawn, the two grin at each other, then head out for a horseback ride. Seales’s affectionate text and Esperanza’s thick-stroked oil paintings depict the outing, capturing the open feel of early morning alongside the beauty of one-on-one time while following a child whose “Daddy is a cowboy.... And so am I.”

  • Small Rain

    Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

    The best autofiction has an argument to make. Greenwell’s, an intimate medical narrative about a poet’s sudden debilitating pain and invasive testing during a weeks-long hospital stay, doubles as a blistering treatise on the inadequacies and indignities of American healthcare. What makes it shine is Greenwell’s elegant prose, in which he sustains one sinuous thought after another throughout the narrator’s harrowing experiences.

  • The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

    Zoë Schlanger (Harper)

    This superlative debut will challenge what readers thought they knew about flora, drawing attention to shape-shifting vines, peas that can “hear,” and willow trees that warn their neighbors of nearby predators. The luminous prose finds revelation in the secret life of plants, and Schlanger’s winning combination of reporting and research announces her as a major new talent.

  • Uprooted: A Memoir About What Happens When Your Family Moves Back

    Ruth Chan (Roaring Brook)

    Chan recounts her youthful experience of replanting her roots when her family moves from Toronto to Hong Kong in this earnest 1993-set graphic novel memoir. Nuanced character interactions and expressive cartooning across simply plotted panels depict her struggle to connect with her peers and navigate intense loneliness alongside nightly talks with her father that encourage her to persevere.

  • Songlight

    Moira Buffini (HarperCollins)

    Powerful telepaths live in fear of extermination by an oppressive patriarchal theocracy in this searing debut. By playing off conflicting character motivations to explore weighty topics of reproductive freedom, internalized homophobia, and state oppression, Buffini spins an intricate adventure, while dropping tantalizing hints of further conflict and hidden history brewing under the surface of this dystopian trilogy opener.

  • The Pelican Can!

    Toni Yuly (Little, Brown)

    Rhyming questions are answered with the titular cry in a triumphant work that displays the pelican’s power and grace. “Who can see it’s time to eat?” Yuly begins, showing two adult pelicans and a nestling in silhouette. The motif continues as the pelican hunts and returns in this closely observed tale in which the natural world supplies a full scope of visual drama.

  • Someone Like Us

    Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf)

    In Mengestu’s wonderful novel, told in a hypnotic recursive structure, an Ethiopian American journalist explores his identity and lineage. The action takes place over three days, but the narrator ranges freely over decades of memories, guided at times by what might be the ghost of his biological father. It’s a fascinating and immersive blend of rumination and fabulism.

  • Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

    Carrie Courogen (St. Martin’s)

    Cult favorite director Elaine May leaps off the page in journalist Courogen’s spirited biography. Tracing May’s ascent from her improv comedy days through her turbulent film career, Courogen portrays her as a force of nature, too sui generis for the Hollywood machine she fought from within. It’s a vivid tribute to an overlooked talent.

  • Weirdo

    Tony Weaver Jr., illus. by Jes and Cin Wibowo (First Second)

    The Wibowos’ rich color palettes, embellished with superhero comic emanata, shift to convey the mood as a young Weaver contends with childhood bullying—until a move to a new school helps him find community with like-minded “weirdos.” It all culminates in an uplifting debut graphic novel memoir of belonging that realistically depicts the many small steps required in becoming one’s own hero.

  • Twenty-Four Seconds from Now...

    Jason Reynolds (Atheneum/Dlouhy)

    Reynolds astounds in this sweetly hilarious story of two Black teens preparing to take a huge first step in their relationship. Sex-positive messaging encourages vulnerability as well as open conversations about bodily autonomy and consent, making for a bold tribute to Black love as well as an exhilarating story of one boy’s growth and the richly wrought community that fosters it.

  • The Squish

    Breanna Carzoo (HarperCollins)

    The indignities keep piling up for this affirming picture book’s oft-toppled sandcastle protagonist. Its efforts at fashioning itself bigger and even giving up are to no avail, but a sea change occurs when two sandpiles unite into one dual-towered castle that’s ready to weather life’s storms. Carzoo’s story of solidarity and resilience offers plenty of good-hearted, goofy verve.

  • The Spoiled Heart

    Sunjeev Sahota (Viking)

    Sahota frames his perfectly layered working-class drama around an election. For factory employee Nayan, the union is his life, but he’s opposed in his run for general secretary by a woman of Indian descent who works in retail, and their clash fuels meaty intersectional disquisitions. As election day looms, readers won’t be able to put this down.

  • Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church

    Gareth Gore (Simon & Schuster)

    This investigation into the alleged misdeeds of Catholic lay organization Opus Dei will leave readers wide-eyed and chilled to the bone. Having stumbled onto a cache of banking records that he says connects the group to shadowy dealings around the world, Gore paints an expansive, gruesome picture of abuse and money laundering, one that he asserts stretches back to the organization’s early-20th-century origins.

  • The Table

    Winsome Bingham and Wiley Blevins, illus. by Jason Griffin (Holiday House/Porter)

    Bingham, Blevins, and Griffin present a powerfully layered work about two families—first one, then another—who live their lives around the same kitchen table. As the furniture passes from one home to the next, the transition makes for a mirrored telling that bears witness to the lives of two households “with parents that work hard and long hours and love each other.”

  • Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown

    Andreas Malm and Wim Carton (Verso)

    Malm and Carton warn that the world has been seduced by the false promise of “overshoot”—the notion that blowing past carbon emissions goals is no big deal because technology will come along in the future to fix it. They marshal extensive evidence to prove that this strain of tech utopianism is a dangerous, unfounded belief promoted by oil companies. It’s a galvanizing wake-up call for a world grown complacent.

  • A Sunny Place for Shady People

    Mariana Enriquez, trans. from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Hogarth)

    Among the many spine-chilling and crafty conceits in Enriquez’s collection is the “ghost pandemic” plaguing a Buenos Aires neighborhood in “My Sad Dead,” where innocent victims of violent crime haunt the narrator. Enriquez’s nimble style, handily rendered in English by McDowell, extends to incisive body horror and troubling generational trauma. It’s intriguing and disquieting in equal measure.

  • Planes Flying over a Monster: Essays

    Daniel Saldaña París, trans. from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman (Catapult)

    Saldaña París travels from Mexico City to Montreal and beyond in these striking meditations on place, identity, and the warped truths that underlie the construction of the self. Prose that’s sometimes subtle and sometimes lands like a gut punch distinguishes this as one of the year’s standout essay collections.

  • The Playbook: The Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War

    James Shapiro (Penguin Press)

    In this shrewd and witty account of the rise and fall of the Federal Theatre Project—the first New Deal program to be shut down for promoting “un-American activity”—Shapiro trains his eye on the overblown dramatics of the right-wing congressmen of the House Un-American Activities Committee as they go toe-to-toe with the program’s progressive dramatists.

  • Question 7

    Richard Flanagan (Knopf)

    Booker winner Flanagan shatters memoir conventions with a strange, intoxicating tapestry that weaves narrative strands about his parents, Australian history, and the atomic bomb. At once elliptical and deeply moving, this unique book achieves something rare: it authentically communicates the tumbling patterns of human thought without indulgence or pretension.

  • Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank

    Justene Hill Edwards (Norton)

    In this propulsive piece of financial sleuthing, Edwards sheds light on the collapse of the Freedman’s Bank, which stole millions of dollars from formerly enslaved people and transferred their wealth into the hands of crooked white trustees, most notably the family of industrialist Jay Cooke—and in its final act roped Frederick Douglass into serving as president, tarnishing his legacy. It makes for a revelatory new perspective on the forces behind Reconstruction’s failure.

  • Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto

    Kohei Saito, trans. from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom (Astra House)

    Saito offers the best defense yet of degrowth. To stop climate change, he argues, society needs to challenge increasing demands on workers’ time. It’s a scintillating treatise that draws on a wide swath of political philosophy to engage earnestly with the idea of what it would mean to slow down.

  • This Strange Eventful History

    Claire Messud (Norton)

    If no unhappy families are alike, there’s no end to the ways of portraying one on the page. Messud, drawing on her own family history, brilliantly succeeds in this multigenerational story of a pied-noir clan’s exodus from Algeria during the war of independence. As they scatter around the globe, Messud pores over their resentments and secrets without a hint of sentimentality.

  • Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories

    Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

    In this brilliant history of the opium trade, Ghosh portrays the present world as sunk into an amnesiac state. The massive wave of exports that flowed out of China in the 19th century as opium flowed in has been erased from the historical record, Ghosh argues, because descendants of the British aristocrats and Boston Brahmins who profited from the drug trade sought to keep their ancestors’ involvement secret.

  • Tamales for Christmas

    Stephen Briseño, illus. by Sonia Sánchez (Random House Studio)

    Briseño and Sánchez chronicle a matriarch’s pre-Christmas tamale production as, “with masa in one hand, corn husks in the other,” she makes enough to sell “to fill the space underneath the tree.” Brisk text tracks the woman’s incredible progress across energetic spreads that follow the making of a whopping 1,000 dozen tamales in a triumphant work jam-packed with activity and pure familial love.

  • Wild Houses

    Colin Barrett (Grove)

    This razor-sharp Irish noir begins with a loner unwittingly playing host to drug-dealing kidnappers and their innocent bounty, the teen brother of an associate who owes them money. It expands to so much more, though, as Barrett deploys deep psychological realism to plumb for the truth of how each of his characters ended up where they did.

  • A Termination

    Honor Moore (A Public Space)

    With lyrical prose that masks simmering rage, poet Moore revisits her 1969 abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The account examines her feelings of fear and liberation when she decided, at 23, to terminate her pregnancy, and culminates in an artful battle cry against backsliding into the secrecy of previous generations.

  • We Are Definitely Human

    X. Fang (Tundra)

    Following their flying saucer’s crash-landing near Mr. and Mrs. Li’s rural home at midnight, a trio of aliens tries their darndest to convince the couple that “we are DEFINITELY human.” After the humans welcome the aliens as guests, what starts out as a laugh-out-loud fish-out-of-water comedy from Fang becomes a freshly funny close encounter of straightforward acceptance.

  • Your Absence Is Darkness

    Jón Kalman Stefánsson, trans. from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton (Biblioasis)

    Stefánsson’s magnificent opus glows with the magic of the aurora borealis. It takes place in Iceland’s Westfjords, where a man who’s lost much of his long-term memory begins his search for answers in a church. From there, Stefánsson unspools a vivid set of stories of people on the precipice of change, which cohere into an endlessly pleasurable narrative of self-discovery.

  • There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

    Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

    After writing some of the finest music criticism of recent years, Abdurraqib proves his sports writing is just as incisive. With his trademark lyricism, he seamlessly weaves reflections on LeBron James, hometown high school basketball heroes, and his own relationship with the sport into a searching meditation on community and belonging.

  • We Who Produce Pearls: An Anthem for Asian America

    Joanna Ho, illus. by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya (Orchard)

    Bold, pop art–style graphics and lyrical phrasing distinguish this affecting picture book “inspired by specific figures, events, and movements in Asia and across the Asian diaspora.” “We” statements from Ho (“We who dream... seek... cultivate”) hint at a rich history that Phingbodhipakkiya reveals via dozens of crisp, bright-hued digital portraits accented with stylized landscapes, bursts of flora, and other natural elements.

  • We’re Alone: Essays

    Edwidge Danticat (Graywolf)

    The poignant latest collection from Danticat centers her native Haiti, exploring its thriving arts scene, vulnerability to climate change, and resilience in the face of earthquakes and political unrest. Her clarity of purpose and lucid prose distill complex emotions and ideas into unforgettable turns of phrase that readers will carry with them for a long time to come.

  • You Broke It!

    Liana Finck (Rise x Penguin Workshop)

    A range of adults respond with knee-jerk admonitions to classic kid behavior (“You broke it!” a full-grown bird rebukes a hatching chick) in Finck’s comic spin on grown-up demands. When a small octopus told to “Keep your hands to yourself” speaks up for kids everywhere (“I AM JUST BEING ME”), the response results in a multiarmed hug poised to inspire patience in any dynamic.

  • Whiskey Tender

    Deborah Taffa (Harper)

    Questions of assimilation and American mythology animate Taffa’s devastating memoir, which recounts her 1980s childhood as a “Native girl in a northwestern New Mexico town where cowboys still hated Indians.” Given little information about her heritage from her parents, Taffa was forced to piece together the story of her people on her own—a painful, edifying process that she recounts in visceral, haunting prose.

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