best reviewed books 2022

The Best Books of 2022

Each week, our editors and critics recommend the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Find our essential reads of 2022 below, or  check out our latest reviews .

The Essentials

Fiction & poetry.

Book cover for Afterlives

The Nobel Prize winner’s most recent novel is a sweeping origin story of modern Tanzania, and a love story between two young runaways. Their search for a place in the world unfolds against the monumental absurdities of empire, focussing on the East African campaign of 1914-18 and the societies it violently remade. Afiya is an orphan, whose brother leaves her with abusive caregivers to fight for Germany’s Schutztruppe. Hamza, an escaped servant, also joins troops serving the German Empire, entering a brutal brawl for the continent at a time when “every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at least on a map: British East Africa, Deutsch-Ostafrika, África Oriental Portuguesa, Congo Belge.” The book interrogates the costs and rewards of the war’s circumstantial solidarities. For everyone, a longing for closeness is bedevilled by old shames and secrets.

Portrait of Abdulrazak Gurnah holding a book in front of an ornate door

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best reviewed books 2022

An Immense World

This book is filled with strange creatures and strange experiments; Yong is interested in what animals perceive, what they might communicate to us if they could. Humans see the world one way. Other species see it through very different eyes, and many don’t see it at all. Attempting to exchange one world view—or, to use the term Yong favors, Umwelt —for another may be frustrating, but, he argues, that’s what makes the effort worthwhile. It reminds us that, “for all our vaunted intelligence,” our Umwelt is just one among millions. Some species of scallop, for instance, have dozens of eyes; others have hundreds. We can learn a lot from the methods that animals use to sense their surroundings. And doing so can be, for us, mind-expanding.

A grid of four animals with different sensory systems highlighted in red.

Bad Mexicans

The nickname malos Mexicanos , translated in the title of this captivating history, is what the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz called the followers of the radical Ricardo Flores Magón, who, in 1911, helped depose him. The author, a U.C.L.A. historian and a MacArthur Fellow, writes that Magón and his band of magonistas “changed the course of history both north and south of the border.” She shows how their revolution fundamentally transformed the United States, as more than a million Mexicans migrated north. Although few Americans know about the event or the people behind it, Lytle Hernández argues powerfully that “you cannot understand U.S. history without Mexico and Mexicans.”

Book cover for The Book of Goose

The Book of Goose

This novel dissects the intense friendship between two thirteen-year-olds, Agnès and Fabienne, in postwar rural France. Believing themselves “old enough for everything,” they stave off boredom with increasingly elaborate schemes. Fabienne begins dictating morbid tales to Agnès, and then engineers their publication under Agnès’s name. Agnès is celebrated as a child prodigy and her life assumes a new trajectory. The story unfolds in retrospect, after Agnès, now twenty-seven and living in Pennsylvania, learns of Fabienne’s death. Her recollections of their friendship and her brush with unearned fame have an ethereal tone, punctuated with sharp descriptions of adolescent convictions.

Book cover for The Books of Jacob

The Books of Jacob

The Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk’s epic novel follows the exploits of an eighteenth-century messianic religious leader as he travels through the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, continually reinventing himself. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

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Checkout 19

A coming-of-age story in which no one comes of age, this novel is deliberate in its construction and yet aggressively resistant to definition. Dissected, it yields a conventional enough story: that of an intelligent working-class girl, in southwest England, who is encouraged to write by one of her teachers. For good and for ill, she both clings to and disowns her life. But Bennett is interested not in the shape of a life but in its substance: the prized darkness at the center of the human mind, the place where whatever is really real about us resides.

A series of drawn moments highlighting different parts of Claire-Louise Bennett's new book.

Chilean Poet

This charming novel follows Gonzalo, an aspiring poet, from his teen-age sonnets and sexual escapades to his relationship with a girlfriend, Carla, and her son, whom Gonzalo adopts as his stepson. (Gonzalo notes the unfortunate resonance between the Spanish for stepfather, padrastro , and poetastro , bad poet.) The stepson, Vicente, also wants to be a poet, and the second half of the novel sends up the Chilean literary scene as he guides a gringa journalist through a country where poetry is a national passion. As one character says, “Being a Chilean poet is like being a Peruvian chef or a Brazilian soccer player or a Venezuelan model.”

Book cover for Constructing A Nervous System

Constructing a Nervous System

In this follow-up to “Negroland,” Jefferson merges memoir and criticism. Drawing on material as disparate as Henry James, “The Wire,” “Othello,” and Black spirituals, she narrates moments of her life as they unfold in relation to “avatars,” models against which she conducts an “identity experiment.” “I must break myself into pieces,” she explains, “then rebuild.” Thus Ella Fitzgerald’s stage presence gestures toward a “black female destiny” of “scrutiny and our pity,” which a young Jefferson works to avoid; that of Josephine Baker demonstrates a way of embodying the influences of her predecessors. “Great soloists never perform entirely alone,” Jefferson writes, and the same is true of her.

Books & Fiction

best reviewed books 2022

Book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature, twice a week.

Book cover for Continuous Creation by Les Murray

Continuous Creation

This final collection by the great Australian poet, who died in 2019, encompasses archness, reserve, lament, and tenderness. Murray’s reflections on political and social subjects, including Brexit, bushfires, and his country’s neglect of literature, swing from the charmingly reserved to the jarringly detached. His nature poetry is more charged: there are poems about pippies, green catbirds, Australian pelicans, and a weebill caught in the grille of Murray’s car. The earth’s physical landscape—especially that of rural Australia, one of Murray’s lifelong preoccupations—is rendered with extraordinary, often strange, beauty. Swallows in flight are “whipping over glass”; a willow tree is “jammed / with soft white pearl-shell // a cascade of faces / down tiers and staircases / becoming a shatter.”

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Sharif was born in Turkey to Iranian parents, and the title of this collection evokes the extended “if” of someone enmeshed in the sadistic bureaucracy of American immigration. Facing a customs officer, the writer finds redress in knowing that her enemy “will be in a poem / where the argument will be // anti-American”—an insurrection that occurs only in the mind. Sharif’s collection imagines how a poet’s well-chosen lines might reject the arbitrary lines set by someone else’s customs. In these poems, the ostensible clarity of borders and checkpoints gives way to a terrain of fundamental uncertainty, a geography of elusive thresholds.

Solmaz Sharif poses outdoors.

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

In this crisply written, prodigiously researched, and frequently astonishing new biography, Gage explains how Hoover maintained his image as an old-school embodiment of law and order for most of his long tenure as director of the F.B.I. Hoover was born on January 1, 1895, in Washington, D.C., the city in which he would always live. Hired at the Department of Justice in 1917, he hunkered down and never left. For a very long time, most Americans admired Hoover. But from the Palmer Raids to COINTELPRO , he was never able to understand movements aimed at expanding social or racial or gender equality as anything other than criminal conspiracies. “Hoover did as much as any individual in government to contain and cripple movements seeking social justice,” Gage writes, “and thus to limit the forms of democracy and governance that might have been possible.”

A photograph of J. Edgar Hoover.

Getting Lost

Ernaux’s 1991 best-seller “Simple Passion,” a short narrative of her affair with A., as she calls her lover, conveyed the force with which desire can render the rest of life—the rest of the self—instantly void. A decade later, Ernaux did something surprising and published excerpts of the diary she had kept during the affair, which was released in the U.S. in September. Here is the sex and the torture of the waiting, unspooled in all its real-time wretchedness. Now called by his true initial, S., her lover turns out to be a thirty-five-year-old Soviet apparatchik whom the forty-eight-year-old Ernaux met on a writer’s junket to the U.S.S.R. The diary depicts the friction between her finely developed mind and the tyrannical demands of her body, and the gulf between her devotion to her lover and her awareness of his obvious mediocrity.

Annie Ernaux, photographed by Bettina Pittaluga.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

Short-listed for the National Book Award, Kochai’s inventive début story collection details the toll that decades of war and the struggles of immigration have taken on Afghans and the Afghan diaspora in the United States. Several entries, including the title story , first appeared in the magazine.

Book cover for Invisible Kingdom

The Invisible Kingdom

Delicately weaving her research on chronic illness with her personal experience of navigating an autoimmune disease, O’Rourke probes our understanding of what it means to be sick, asking us to reëxamine our tidy narratives of disease and reimagine our approaches to treatment. The book grew out of O’Rourke’s piece “ What’s Wrong with Me? ,” which ran in the magazine in 2013.

Book cover for The Last White Man

The Last White Man

In Hamid’s fifth novel, a white man wakes one morning to find that his skin has turned dark overnight, forcing him to question his sense of identity and his place in his family and city. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

Book cover for Lessons

McEwan’s latest novel tracks one man’s search for meaning in his relationships and in art, as his path intersects with historical events from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the COVID -19 pandemic. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

Book cover for Magnificent Rebels. Woman holding up feathere

Magnificent Rebels

A buoyant work of intellectual history, Wulf’s chronicle of the early Romantics—which includes figures like the Schlegel brothers (August Wilhelm and Friedrich), and their partners, Caroline and Dorothea—is written as what was once termed the “higher gossip.” It concerns a period, in the late seventeen-nineties and early eighteen hundreds, when Jena, a small university town in Saxony, became home to a literary cenacle of men and women who “placed the self at the centre stage of their thinking.” They believed in free love and self-expression—although the women’s contributions were typically credited to the men in their lives. A steady and ominous undertone to all the cogitation and copulation is the rise of Napoleon from the ashes of the 1789 revolution in France to a conclusive military blow against the Germans that was also centered in the town: the Battle of Jena.

A group of writers during the 1800's gathered in a room.

The Rabbit Hutch

Although there are actual rabbits in this ambitious novel, the “Hutch” of the title is the name given to an affordable-housing complex by its residents, in a post-industrial Indiana town. Gunty zooms in and out of the apartments, pushing the lives inside toward a forceful and violent climax; her central character is a gifted though troubled teen who grew up with foster families, has dropped out of high school, and calls herself Blandine. (Obsessed with female medieval mystics, she takes the name of a French martyr.) Despite offering a dissection of contemporary urban blight, the novel doesn’t let social concerns crowd out the individuality of its characters, and Blandine’s off-kilter brilliance is central to the achievement.

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The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

Born in 1722, the son of a Boston businessman, Samuel Adams studied at Harvard, worked for a while in the family malt business, and came into his own when, in the late seventeen-forties, he began to stand for local office. In detailing how Adams went on to shape every significant event in New England’s run-up to war, this biography weaves a pleasing tapestry of incident and inference. Schiff notes Adams’s uncanny ability to use the media for catalyzing public opinion and depicts him as a virtuoso of the eighteenth-century version of viral memes and fake news. The result is a wildly entertaining exploration of the roots of American political theatre.

Portrait of Samuel Adams writing on a chair.

The Song of the Cell

In an account that’s both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human understanding: from the seventeenth-century discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes. The book draws from “The Promise and Price of Cellular Therapies,” which originally appeared in the magazine in 2019.

Book cover for Stay True

In this intricate and heart-rending memoir, Hsu, a staff writer, tells the story of his college friendship with Ken. Both Asian American but from different backgrounds, they formed a bond that was cut short when Ken was murdered. Hsu describes his struggle to accept Ken’s death and also his friend’s lasting influence on his thinking. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

Book cover for Strangers to Ourselves

Strangers to Ourselves

Aviv, a staff writer, offers a groundbreaking exploration of mental illness and the mind, through a series of portraits that illuminate the connections between identity and diagnosis. Aviv’s original reporting , about the challenges of taking psychiatric drugs, first appeared in the magazine, in 2019.

Book cover for Trust by Hernan Diaz

This novel in four parts opens with a narrative about a mysterious Wall Street tycoon and his wife: “Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise.” Ending abruptly, this tale is followed by a fragmentary memoir of the same narrative events, but it contains important, disorienting factual differences. In the third section, the pieces start to connect, thanks to a new narrator—a plucky Brooklyn woman hired as a ghostwriter by the memoir’s author. Diaz cleverly weaves the disparate strands together while showing how our shifting perception of the story relates to wealth’s ability to “bend and align reality” to its own motives.

best reviewed books 2022

We Don’t Know Ourselves

This personal history of modern Ireland shows that history is a critical process in which eras helplessly recruit the agents of their own undoing. O’Toole’s book beautifully recounts the private story of his childhood and youth, while analyzing Ireland’s shameful, sometimes surreal postwar history. It pulses with righteous anticlericalism, and at its heart lies an eloquent outrage at what amounted to a vast religious penal colony. (In the mother-and-baby homes run by Catholic nuns, for instance, the newborn children of unmarried women were put up for adoption or neglected unto death.) O’Toole’s great gift is his extremely intelligent, mortally relentless critical examination, and here he details the past and the present of his own nation with episodes so pungent that reading the book is like reading a great tragicomic Irish novel.

A cross over a silhouette of Ireland

Also Recommended

best reviewed books 2022

The Individualists

Zwolinski, a philosopher at the University of San Diego, and Tomasi, a political theorist at Brown, are committed libertarians who are appalled at the movement’s turn toward a harder-edged conservatism. Their book is a deep plunge into the ideology’s archives, in search of a “primordial libertarianism” that preceded the Cold War. They contend that the profound skepticism toward government and the political absolutism that characterize libertarians have animated movements across the political spectrum, and have, in the past, sometimes led adherents in progressive directions rather than conservative ones. As they see it, libertarianism once had a left-of-center valence—one that could still be reclaimed.

A photographic illustration of the yellow Libertarian Gadsden flag gradually shredding and disintegrating.

Western Lane

When three adolescent sisters in an Indian immigrant family in England lose their mother unexpectedly, in this début novel, their father, unable to process his grief, hopes that playing squash will provide his daughters with structure. “What he saw was the days stretching ahead of him without Ma, with us,” Gopi, the youngest, and the most talented player, observes. “All I could do was serve and volley or disappoint him.” The family is isolated, but a tournament provides a means for Gopi to connect with her father and transcend limitations. “A clean hit can stop time,” Gopi says. “Sometimes it can feel like the only peace there is.”

best reviewed books 2022

Young Bloomsbury

This lively group biography offers an intimate glimpse of the Bright Young Things, the artistic coterie that emerged in the nineteen-twenties as successors to the prewar Bloomsburyites. Members included Eddy Sackville-West, a novelist and cousin of Virginia Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West, and John Strachey, a journalist and cousin of Lytton Strachey. The author, herself a member of the Strachey clan, sees “transgressive sociability” as a hallmark of this generation, whose members were proto-“social influencers” and moved “seamlessly between gallery, studio, and nightclub.” She applauds the group’s embrace of sexual freedom, which gave queer members a sense of “life-affirming normality in a generally hostile adult world” and fostered “an inclusive way of living not seen again for another century.”

best reviewed books 2022

Opening in 1866 in New York with the arrival from Germany of Lazarus Morgenthau, a Bavarian Jew who’d lost a cigar empire to American tariffs, this book traces the ups and downs (but mostly ups) of the family’s fortunes over four generations, providing a window on a century and a half of the city’s history. Lazarus’s son Henry was a lawyer, a real-estate baron, and a diplomat, whose son Henry, Jr., served Franklin Roosevelt as Treasury Secretary;  his  son, Robert, was the city’s longest-serving District Attorney, who oversaw some three million cases. There’s enough here for four separate biographies, but Meier ably synthesizes the various strands, finding family likenesses among his disparate subjects.

best reviewed books 2022

My Phantoms

This short, savage novel depicts the sins of inadequate mothers and fathers with vengeful clarity. Bridget, the narrator, is a young, bookish woman who’s living in London and struggling to gain independence from her long-separated parents. Her father is a cruel boor, her mother is a damaged fool. Riley’s prose is confidently exact; with a few words, she can paint a dreary English January, a cramped Glasgow flat, or some breathtaking desolation. “I didn’t, as a rule, talk to her about anything that mattered to me,” Bridget says of her mother. “Why upset her by talking about things she couldn’t understand or enjoy?” With a quick eye for details, Riley renders a middle England full of petit-bourgeois anxieties and wounded people desperate to be normal, laying bare the dynamics of damage and survival.

Gwendoline Riley, photographed by Daragh Soden.

City of Newsmen

McGarr, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, weighs the performance of the Washington press corps during the first decades of the Cold War, employing a close examination of archived correspondence to show that reporters in the nation’s capital knew perfectly well that officials were misleading them about national-security matters. McGarr believes that the press kept mum because they believed in what they saw as the central mission of Cold War policy: the defense of the North Atlantic community of nations. Even though newspapers were nominally in competition with one another, she writes, reporters and editors were subject to what she calls “horizontal pressure”—pressure to remain on good terms with their sources and their fellow-newsmen. The work of a thoughtful historian, “City of Newsmen” contemplates the relationship between government officials and the media by considering their societal role against the backdrop of a historical moment.

A black-and-white photo of two men looking out over an auditorium.

Cursed Bunny

The ten disquieting, bloody tales in this collection conjure a pitiless, almost folkloric world. A bunny-shaped lamp acts as a “cursed fetish” that extinguishes generations of a family and their misbegotten liquor empire; a woman who cannot find a father for her suddenly growing fetus is condemned to birth a “slightly iron-smelling, enormous blood clot.” In Chung’s universe of inventive horrors, brutality is endemic, and yet lyricism finds its place—in, for instance, a woman who is “transformed into thousands of water droplets and scattered into thin air,” or in the eye of a slain monster which is “shockingly deep and clear, and cruel.”

best reviewed books 2022

How Far the Light Reaches

Marine biology, cultural criticism, and memoir blend in this agile collection of essays, which brims with illuminating connections: between a potentially immortal jellyfish that is “always reinventing itself” and Imbler’s own sense of metamorphosis as a queer, biracial person; between the sand striker, an “ambush predator,” and a man who took advantage of Imbler during adolescence; between Imbler’s mother and an octopus species that starves to death while brooding eggs. Like the cuttlefish, which can change appearance “in a fraction of a second,” the book has a protean quality, and the way Imbler pays attention to animals living “an alternative way of life” without excessively anthropomorphizing them starts to seem like an ethical act.

best reviewed books 2022

Of Boys and Men

A British American scholar of inequality and social mobility, Reeves argues that the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn have left men bereft of what one sociologist has called "“ontological security.”" In Reeves’' view, men’s struggles are not reducible to a masculinity that is too toxic or too enfeebled but, rather, reflect the workings of the same structural forces that apply to every other group. A self-described “conscientious objector in the culture wars,” he aims to skip past moralizing and analyze men in the state that he finds them: beset by bewildering changes that they cannot adapt to. “Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls,” he contends.

A girl leap-frogging over a boy in a superhero costume.

Quilter’s memoir of conceiving a child through I.V.F. provides a history of the treatment and a sharp interrogation of her experiences. Recalling that she came to I.V.F. “driven by grief and fear and desire to take a course of action that is hard enough to endure, let alone question at the same time,” she asks how much of the yearning for a child is personal and how much is historically and culturally conditioned. How do we rethink reproductive technologies so that they don’t reproduce conservative ideas of motherhood, class, and race? Quilter notes that I.V.F. “anticipates the general tone of motherhood before you are even pregnant because it anticipates, even mimics, the notion of justified pain.”

best reviewed books 2022

The Lion House

Centering on the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent, which sparked the Ottoman Empire’s vast expansion in the sixteenth century, this tightly woven history depicts a Machiavellian world in which Ottoman and European leaders bargained ruthlessly over land, ships, and people. With cinematic sweep and a dash of humor, de Bellaigue tracks fast-flowing shifts of power among the ambitious: illegitimate sons become diplomats, foreign consorts are crowned queens, pirates turn pashas, and slaves are promoted to grand viziers. De Bellaigue is alert to a fragility inherent in empires, where even the most influential ministers have “power to enact the will of God or violate it” only while royal favor lasts.

best reviewed books 2022

This Afterlife

In this volume of selected and uncollected poems, Stallings’s formal ingenuity lends a music to her philosophically and narratively compelling verse. She draws inspiration from daily domestic life and from the mythology and history of Greece, where she resides, crafting clever yet profound meditations on love, motherhood, language, and time. A particular pleasure is seeing certain personae—Persephone, Daphne, and Alice (of Wonderland)—recur throughout, accompanied by ever-deepening resonances. “Song for the Women Poets” ends, “And part of you leaves Tartarus, / But part stays there to dwell— / You who are both Orpheus / And She he left in Hell.”

best reviewed books 2022

A Private Spy

In a new volume of his letters gathered by his son Tim Cornwell, the novelist John le Carré writes to an eclectic array of recipients: John Cheever, Ralph Fiennes, the president of an English book club in Siberia, the host of Desert Island Discs, and the former London station chief of the K.G.B. The correspondence that makes up “A Private Spy” is capacious in theme, but a steady through line is work. These are, for all intents and purposes, business letters. Even the personal ones are mostly to do with his career. That le Carré held the concept of vocation—of a job that could become a container for the self—with a certain degree of sacredness is suggested in the considered and empathetic way he doles out job advice. A career in fiction writing enabled him to avoid many of the moral compromises that plagued his characters, but he did not flaunt his good fortune. His letters reveal that he knew what he had achieved was unlikely and that such lifeboats are in short supply.

Photograph of John le Carré in London.

Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion

Set in Corona, Queens, in the nineteen-eighties, this novel is an ode to adolescence in the vein of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”—a book that young Razia, a first-generation Pakistani American, reads early in the story. As Razia strains against the restrictions imposed by her Muslim family, Rehman ably evokes the period—the  AIDS  epidemic, the deficiencies of the 7 train—and the texture of life in a jumble of immigrant communities. Once Razia’s peers start being married off, she comes to question her faith: “We were groomed like Christmas trees, thinking we were in the beautiful woods, thinking we were growing, but we were just being readied to be cut down.”

best reviewed books 2022

This quartet of novels, three of them previously untranslated, are a classic of Spanish postwar literature often compared to the works of Proust and Joyce. The first three parts form a Künstelerroman whose protagonist, Raúl, emerges as the ostensible author of the fourth part. As he urges himself to go “from literal transposition to the displacement and transmutation of narrative material,” we see him fictionalize events from the preceding volumes. In pages-long sentences, Goytisolo’s characters expound on the book’s true subjects: Barcelona and the tumult of the Franco years. The city’s streets, Goytisolo writes, “had not found and perhaps would never find a faithful chronicler for their grandeur and their misery.”

best reviewed books 2022

Dinner with Joseph Johnson

From the seventeen-seventies until 1809, Johnson, a London publisher and bookseller, held a weekly dinner above his shop. Guests, many of whom he published, included such luminaries as Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, William Cowper, and Joseph Priestley. As this history shows, Johnson supported his writers in myriad invaluable ways: he gave houseroom to Wollstonecraft when she had nowhere else to go, and he may have secured Paine’s release when he was jailed following the publication of “Rights of Man.” But Johnson’s greatest service to literature may have been the community he forged—“connected by a web that spun outwards from Johnson’s house through the medium of paper.”

best reviewed books 2022

The Mountain in the Sea

In the near future, at a touristy dive spot off the coast of Con Dao, in Vietnam, a species of extra-intelligent octopuses captures a young diver. The event piques the interest of an ambitious researcher, and soon it becomes clear that the cephalopods, who have a culture and a language of their own, are a violent spawn of the Anthropocene. Nayler moves through his packed plot briskly and often lyrically, pausing on images of animals sparring like children and drones with thoraxes resembling those of dragonflies. He punctuates scenes with the researcher’s philosophical insights about interspecies meaning-making and the risks and rewards of cross-cultural communication.

best reviewed books 2022

Sybil & Cyril

This joint biography of the modernist linocut artists Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power is a riveting tale of art and love between the wars. The two first met in Suffolk, England, around 1919, when he was a married father of four and she was an aspiring watercolorist. Their relationship endured for decades, taking them to London, where their experiments with linocutting—a technique Uglow praises for its “radical simplicity”—commenced. What began as a sideline would prove to be the medium through which they realized their shared goal of creating an “art of to-day” that communicated the ethos of modernity. Power’s stark, surreal images of London life, Uglow writes, captured the era’s “unease,” while Andrews’s visceral prints of the human form in motion marked a “rebellion” against Victorian prettiness.

best reviewed books 2022

American Caliph

In March, 1977, a Black Muslim organization, the Hanafis, seized three buildings in Washington, D.C., taking more than a hundred hostages. Their leader, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, had two demands: that he be allowed to “carry out Allah’s justice” on Nation of Islam members who killed his family, and that a bio-pic of the Prophet Muhammad be banned. This history adeptly weaves together narratives of the hostage negotiations, of feuding American Islamic groups, and of Khaalis’s life, which was shaped by race, theology, and the faulty “machinery of American justice.” Mufti observes, “Khaalis may have been acting under the Islamic title ‘khalifa,’ but he, and his actions, were, above all, American.”

best reviewed books 2022

Slouching Towards Utopia

This economic history takes up the period from 1870 to 2010—what its author calls the “long twentieth century”—and examines why, despite the vast wealth generated during that time, problems such as climate change and inequality persist. DeLong, an economics professor, searches for explanations in the work of the period’s major political and economic theorists, such as Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, tracing their ideas’ intellectual and practical legacies. If our ancestors could see this era, he imagines, they might marvel at humanity’s “technological and organizational powers,” but they’d also wonder why we have “done so little to build a truly human world, to approach within sight of any of our utopias.”

best reviewed books 2022

Visual Thinking

For decades, Grandin has built a career describing her experience as a thinker on the autism spectrum and advocating for the importance of putting unique perceptual gifts to good use. “Visual Thinking” makes a further case for the value of neurodiversity, contending that word-centric people have taken over the world, dominating boardrooms, newsrooms, legislatures and schools, resulting in a crisis in American ingenuity. “Imagine a world with no artists, industrial designers, or inventors,” Grandin writes. “No electricians, mechanics, architects, plumbers, or builders. These are our visual thinkers, many hiding in plain sight.” She builds upon her previous work, proposing the existence of a continuum of thought styles, each with its own advantages. “Most people don’t fully comprehend the way their mind works,” Grandin writes. But with striking concreteness, the author describes what appears to be going on in her head, and, quite possibly, yours.

best reviewed books 2022

Confidence Man

The Times reporter Maggie Haberman has been one of the most shrewd and consistent chroniclers of Donald Trump’s political career. In her journalism, she has honed a stable interpretation of Trump, evoking not a strongman but a showman, an egomaniac with shrewd instincts and bad opinions. In “ Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America ,” she mounts a similar argument. The book presents Trump as a bullshit artist whose grand theme is his own greatness. “Confidence Man,” which synthesizes years of reporting on Trump and his milieu, is among the first accounts of Trump’s Presidency to seriously consider its subject’s backstory, how he sprang from the overlapping scenes of New York real estate, city government, and media celebrity. The book’s thesis— Trump’s gonna Trump —is pointedly unglamorous, in keeping with Haberman’s deflationary assessments of Trump’s character.

A portrait of the journalist Maggie Haberman.

The Easy Life

“La Vie Tranquille” (1944), Duras’s second novel—translated into English as “ The Easy Life ”—is a coming-of-age story that dwells on what a young woman must relinquish to the activity of tidying up life. Here, Duras’s sentences assume a voluptuousness that Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan do a remarkable job of translating. In a style differing from the bald obliquity that characterizes Duras’s more famous books and films, feelings and adjectives stick together like plums that have fallen from a tree and formed a putrid mass. The book sold out on its first printing, but its critical reception was lukewarm. “Despite the obvious talents of its author,” one reviewer wrote, the over-all effect was “a bit thin.” And yet “The Easy Life” is constructed with the same torqued intensity as all her fiction, seeding the problems that will eventually become Durassian preoccupations: the anguish of poverty, the vertigo of young love, the pull of biological conformity, and the struggle of women to reconcile the requirements of feminine competence with the disorganizing effects of sexual desire.

A black-and-white photo of the author Marguerite Duras in a bookstore with her books in front of her.

No One Left to Come Looking for You

In this novel, set in 1993, a bassist in his early twenties sporting the stage name Jack Shit investigates the disappearance of his drug-addled bandmate and his stolen Fender. As he pursues the mystery, Lipsyte takes the reader on a journey through the East Village at the height of the post-punk era, filled, in the bassist’s words, with “all of us kids who moved to New York years too late.” Though his cohort primarily frequents establishments in Alphabet City, they occasionally venture farther afield. “By the time you find what you’ve been seeking,” Jack observes, “you’re a different seeker.”

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Professor Wala Kitu (Tagalog and Swahili for “Nothing Nothing”) is a specialist in nothing. At the outset of this waggish novel, he has been hired by a billionaire with the “idiotic” goal of becoming a Bond villain, who needs help breaking into Fort Knox—not for the gold, but to steal an empty box. Everett’s riffs on the maximalism of Ian Fleming’s franchise include inexplicable location changes, double crosses—one courtesy of the priest from “The Exorcist”—a shark pool as a murder weapon, and the casual extermination of large civilian populations. Throughout, he mines the concept of nothing not just for comedy but also for the rich conundrums it presents in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and life.

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If Walls Could Speak

This richly detailed autobiography by the renowned architect weaves together memoir, a tour of select projects, and philosophical meditations. Born in Haifa in 1938, Safdie moved to Canada with his family when he was a teen-ager, and attained success at a young age: his master’s thesis, a system of modular housing units, was realized as Montreal’s Habitat 67 residential complex. It brought together many of his lasting preoccupations, including access to nature and high urban density. Safdie’s reflections on his other projects, which range from Jerusalem’s Holocaust History Museum—a structure built into a mountain, “cutting through like a spike”—to Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands, combine intellectual convictions with intuitions about the effects of space, light, sound, earth, and water, illuminating the impulses that have shaped his revolutionary works.

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The Latecomer

In this saga of a fractured family, Phoebe Oppenheimer, the titular “latecomer,” narrates the inception, dissolution, and reconstitution of her clan. Cryopreserved as an embryo and born seventeen years after her in-vitro-fertilized siblings—triplets who “had been in full flight from one another as far back as their ancestral petri dish”—Phoebe corrals a stupendous array of subjects into her chronicle, among them art collecting, real-estate buying, chicken husbandry, intractable rivalries, hoarders, a secret child, and Mormon pageants. Turning on a disastrous clambake in Martha’s Vineyard on September 10, 2001, which transforms the family utterly, the novel unfolds at a thriller’s pace, with Korelitz leaving no loose threads in her complex tapestry of generational wealth and woes across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

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The Island of Extraordinary Captives

Between 1940 and 1945, as Great Britain warded off a Nazi invasion, it imposed a cruel irony at home: fearing domestic German sympathizers, authorities imprisoned thousands of “enemy aliens”—many of them Jewish refugees who had fled Hitler’s persecution. Parkin, a  New Yorker  contributing writer, focusses on a camp on the Isle of Man, where the internees included scholars, engineers, and artists who forged a miniature society, with lectures, soccer matches, theatre performances, and even a debate society. Parkin’s account, with its well-chosen central figures and attention to the trauma that some of the imprisoned carried for decades, is testimony to human fortitude despite callous, hypocritical injustice.

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A Poison Like No Other

“Without plastic we’d have no modern medicine or gadgets or wire insulation to keep our homes from burning down,” Simon, a science journalist at Wired , writes. “But with plastic we’ve contaminated every corner of Earth.” He is particularly concerned about plastic’s tendency to devolve into microplastics. Plastic bags drift into the ocean, where they fall apart. As tires roll along, they abrade, sending clouds of plastic particles spinning into the air. Clothes made with plastics, which now comprise most items for sale, are constantly shedding fibres. Researchers have even found microplastics in human placentas. The hazards of ingesting large pieces of plastic include choking and perforation of the intestinal tract; the risks posed by microplastics are subtler, but not, Simon argues, any less serious. Many of the chemicals involved in the manufacture of plastics are carcinogens; these chemicals can leak as plastics fall apart. Microfibres can get pulled deep into the lungs. What effect does all this have on our systems? No one knows, but, as a researcher at England’s University of Portsmouth tells Simon, “We desperately need to find out.”

An outline of a woman made out of plastic beads and trash

Seduced by Story

Brooks, a literary scholar, spent most of his career trying to impress upon readers the particular power of narrative, examining novels such as “ Great Expectations ” and “ Heart of Darkness ,” and revealing how they work. In “ Seduced by Story ,” he describes the horrifying feeling of having succeeded all too well, witnessing a “narrative takeover of reality” that has unfolded across decades. To illustrate this phenomenon, Brooks describes watching George W. Bush introduce his Cabinet, shortly before his Inauguration in 2001, and speaking warmly about the “stories that really explain what America can and should be about.” Brooks writes, “It was as if a fledgling I had nourished had become a predator.” His book thoughtfully scrutinizes a purely narrative understanding of the world, one that fails to recognize that living and telling might be different things.

An illustration of a person dancing, framed by a window.

The Passenger

McCarthy’s first novel since “The Road” tells the story of Bobby Western, the son of a Jewish physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Bobby is a Caltech dropout who went to Europe to race cars until a crash in 1972 landed him in a coma. The novel takes place in 1980. Bobby is working as a salvage diver, wakened to a world of grief; his brilliant and tortured sister, Alicia, has killed herself. He searches for a passenger missing from the wreckage of a private jet and is followed by strange men who may or may not work for the F.B.I. Officially, Bobby is pursued by the government, but really he’s pursued by the grief he feels at the loss of his sister, by the dubious legacy of his father’s work, and by the theological wounds shared by so many McCarthy heroes.

Portrait of writer Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris

“Stella Maris,” named for a psychiatric institution in Wisconsin that the twenty-year-old mathematician Alicia Western has checked herself into, is an addendum to “The Passenger” consisting of transcribed therapeutic conversations between Western and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen. These exchanges take place in 1972, with Western’s brother Bobby still unconscious in Italy, and Alicia contemplating her eventual suicide. Just as Alicia has left mathematics, she believes that the world has been abandoned by God, or that at best humankind is caught in a terrible struggle with some cruel deity. Together and apart, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” explore the diabolical potential of mathematics and the possibility that history is but a “rehearsal for its own extinction.”

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We Are Not One

In this fearless account, Alterman, a journalist and a historian, sets out to describe the complex relationship between Israel and the U.S., at a moment when the former, having just elected the most conservative government in its history, is a distinctly red state, while, in the latter, Jews make up one of the bluest constituencies. He provides a scrupulous history of the crucial debates over Zionism, anti-Zionism, Palestine, the role of memory and the Holocaust, and America’s interactions with Israel. Alterman’s aim is not to flatter readers, no matter their ideological camp, but, rather, to scrutinize mythologies and fairy tales in order to make greater sense of why Israeli and American Jews, particularly in non-Orthodox communities, appear to be drifting farther apart.

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The Grand Affair

As one of the premier portraitists of the Belle Époque, John Singer Sargent lived a life befitting his status: garnering praise at the Paris Salon, painting such figures as Isabella Stewart Gardner and Teddy Roosevelt, and socializing with luminaries like Henry James and Oscar Wilde. But, as this sensitive biography makes clear, Sargent also pursued less socially acceptable interests; he had an abiding fascination with the male nude and was involved in intimate, somewhat ambiguous relationships with same-sex friends and models. Fisher wisely avoids making sweeping claims about Sargent’s sexuality, choosing instead to examine how “the protected and sanctioned camaraderie of the studio” enabled the painter’s art and social life to take on quietly unconventional forms.

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In this compact, minutely observed novel, the fate of a house in Florida—in which the three adult children of a recently deceased woman were raised—becomes the subject of delicate debate. Taking place in the lead-up to the first Christmas after the mother’s death, the story centers on her gathered offspring, their spouses, and their own children, employing a roving perspective to tease out each character’s response to loss and kinship. One of the sons considers his tribe “a small good gift,” whereas his wife is bewildered by the use of the word “family” in a way that “didn’t necessarily portend some sort of altercation.”

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Scatterlings

Set in South Africa in 1927, this powerful novel chronicles the unravelling of a biracial family in the wake of the Immorality Act, which outlawed sexual relations between white and Black people. A winemaker of Dutch and English heritage; his wife, who was born to formerly enslaved parents in Jamaica; and their two daughters are “tumbled into chaos” by the new law. In despair, the mother makes a decision that costs two family members their lives; the surviving pair flee the country. Manenzhe situates this tragic tale within the broader context of the displacement and abuse of Africans caused by colonialism and the slave trade, but her achievement is to humanize the victims of that legacy, in a story that feels like an act of restoration.

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They’re Going to Love You

“What I did was  forgivable ,” the narrator of this ruminative novel insists. Her offense, which brought about a rupture with her father years ago, is not immediately revealed. Now a former dancer trying to make it as a choreographer, she grapples with her father’s impending death by recalling wide-eyed adolescent visits to the Greenwich Village brownstone where he and his boyfriend nurtured gay artists at the height of the  AIDS  crisis. A lifelong sense that she is “no one’s best” has resulted in a string of arm’s-length adult relationships, she realizes, but her careful arrangement of the final farewell produces a late drive toward love and reconciliation.

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The Grimkes

This multilayered history follows branches of a family of Southern slaveholders. On one side, there are the abolitionist sisters Angelina Grimke Weld and Sarah Grimke; on the other, stemming from their brother’s relationship with an enslaved woman named Nancy Weston, are Archibald Grimke, a co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., and his daughter, the writer Angelina Weld Grimke. The story opens in the eighteen-twenties, with the sisters quitting South Carolina for Philadelphia, where they encountered a vibrant Black-led abolitionist movement; only much later did they acknowledge their Black relatives. Greenidge faithfully documents the sisters’ activism, but her real concern is exploring the limits of white sympathy, a story vividly animated by her nuanced biographical portraits.

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The White Mosque

Born to an American Mennonite mother and a Somali-born father, the author of this “palimpsestic quest” through Central Asia follows a group of nineteenth-century Mennonites who travelled from Ukraine to Uzbekistan to await the return of Jesus. Samatar blends travelogue with a larger meditation on faith, community, and colonization. She details the sense of alienation felt by many non-white Mennonites, including her own experiences dealing with racist gibes at school, and the patronizing attitudes that can underpin charitable efforts in the developing world. But she also acknowledges the sense of “tradition, community, mutual aid” that the faith offers. As a fellow-traveller reminds her, “You can’ t be a Mennonite alone.”

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Ostensibly a collection of found documents assembled by a would-be biographer, this novel revolves around the nineteen-sixties fame and subsequent eclipse of an English therapist, Arthur Collins Braithwaite, who hoped to “bring down the ‘jerry-built edifice’ of psychiatry.” The novel switches between a documentary examination of Braithwaite’s life (including a retinue of historical figures, such as R. D. Laing) and the extravagant suspicions of a woman who, blaming him for her sister’s suicide, enrolls as his patient, under the alias Rebecca Smyth, to investigate. With its layers of imposture and unreliability, the novel suggests that our personhood is far more malleable than we believe.

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A Heart That Works

Shortly after Delaney’s son Henry turned one, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He spent much of his life in hospitals, and died before he turned three. “A Heart That Works” tells the story of Henry’s life and Delaney’s grief. Alongside the recounting of panicked hospital visits, scary infections, and breathing-tube struggles, there are comic riffs and asides that wouldn’t be out of place in a Delaney standup set, or on his Twitter feed. Then Delaney yanks you back to grief. The pain comes less from horrifying details than from the way he lures us into contact with the very aspects of our lives that are easiest to ignore: our fragilities, our constant proximity to calamity, our powerlessness to control what life brings, or when. All the while, the jokes keep coming. It’s not hard to imagine some readers being repelled by the marriage of Delaney’s comic style with talk of grief. But cancer knows nothing of propriety, and neither does grief, and so Delaney—never terribly interested in propriety to begin with—doesn’t want to know, either.

Actor Rob Delaney near his home in North London.

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“It took Brian less than a week to decide that the ‘long goodbye’ of Alzheimer’s was not for him and less than a week for me to find Dignitas, at the end of several long Google paths,” recounts Amy Bloom in her lyrical, recursive memoir about her husband’s decision to end his life, at the Swiss nonprofit that offers assisted—or what it calls “accompanied”—suicide. The signs of Brian’s memory loss accrete gradually, then suddenly: he slowly loses interest in his many hobbies; a boss reprimands him for being “too slow” at work; he misplaces his car keys at a Stop & Shop. As clouds of disagreement linger longer between Bloom and her husband, she writes with unswerving honesty about the feeling of becoming newly estranged from him. Looping back and forth in the progression of Brian’s illness, the book is a work of remembering that is an intimate account both of a life shared with a man who was, for Bloom, “the sunrise and the sunset and all of the light in between,” and of putting back together the jagged pieces of one’s self in the wake of shattering loss.

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Life Is Everywhere

Lucy Ives, in her dizzying novel, attempts the impossible task of building a set in which every emotional and physical detail is noted and accounted for. “Life Is Everywhere” holds out the hope that the novel might be a home to which everything belongs. At the same time, it illuminates the ways in which such novels operate like families unto themselves, absorbing so much apparent dysfunction while maintaining the illusion that all of their parts constitute a happy—or at least a believable—whole. Its books-within-books conceit is twisty and treacherous, and taken together its many stories read like an encyclopedia whose every entry is at its heart a story of intimate betrayal. The true pièce de résistance is the protagonist novel-within-a-novel by the protagonist, Erin, which contains “Life Is Everywhere”’s most fully realized, compelling, and suffocating adultery plot. Long after Erin writes her novel, she becomes aware of her own husband’s infidelity. We cannot protect ourselves from our fictions, Ives seems to say, not even those devised by our own hand, since we so utterly belong to them, too.

Illustration of people and objects peeking out from the pages of a book.

Hollywood: The Oral History

The special virtue of Basinger and Wasson’s work is its seamlessly sequential organization, so that talk about cinematographers flows neatly into talk about writers, which flows then into talk about actors, almost all of it magically mucilaged part to part. The net is cast wide; many glimmering fish are drawn up. Nobody who loves old movies won’t be tickled to discover that Clark Gable’s jackets in “Gone with the Wind” had padded shoulders, in an anachronistic, nineteen-thirties style, which differentiated him from all those other nineteenth-century Southern gents. The book also makes clear that cinema is a craft art, with an artisan foundation. That’s why it makes sense to have a many-voiced chorus tell this many-handed story: everyone’s voice counted.

A photograph of Judy Garland, in preparation for "Oz."

Everything the Light Touches

Four characters embark on journeys that bring them into close communion with nature, in this philosophical novel. A young Indian woman finds a sense of purpose in her country’s rural east. In the Edwardian era, an English botanist journeys to the same remote area, searching for a mythical tree. Carl Linnaeus, the father of biological classification, travels through Lapland, and Goethe develops his framework for perceiving the unity of a natural world in which “all is leaf.” Goethe’s rejection of the scientific wish to define nature and the mercantile one to extract value from it provides the book’s intellectual core. As one character muses, “How much harder to see things, in continuity, in extension, in expansion, as uninterruptedness.”

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Beyond Measure

This book uses a seemingly simple question—How did our units of measurement originate?—to deliver a profound reflection on how we experience and describe the world. The author’s inquiry takes him from Cairo, where he visits a thousand-year-old device for measuring the Nile’s floodwaters, to an iron cabinet in Paris that houses the standard metre and kilogram produced after the French Revolution. If measurement constitutes, as Vincent believes, “a mirror to society itself,” then it is perhaps no surprise that its history is one of both ingenuity and oppression. Ultimately, Vincent writes, our “frameworks of order that seem inviolable because of their deep roots in tradition and authority are as changeable as anything else in life.”

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How to Speak Whale

In this book, Mustill delves into the latest research on animal communication. “Is it too much of a leap to think we might someday decode the sperm whale click for ‘mother’?” Mustill writes. “For ‘pain’? For ‘hello’? The answer is, of course, that we cannot know until we try.” The book is borne along by his faith that whales have something intelligible to tell us and his hope that one day soon we’ll figure out what that is. It spurs one to imagine how transformative it would be if we could chat with whales about their love lives or their sorrows or their thoughts on the philosophy of language.** **“The more we learn about other animals and discover evidence of their manifold capacities, the more we care, and this alters how we treat them,” Mustill writes.

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James Purdy

This biography of a cult writer and pioneer of queer fiction tries to reconcile mainstream neglect of his work with the acclaim he received from authors including Tennessee Williams and Susan Sontag. Purdy, who once insisted that “all of my work is a criticism of the United States,” specialized in a kind of “outlaw fiction.” His treatment of “passing” and his use of Black vernacular made Langston Hughes assume that he was Black. Snyder takes us from Purdy’s childhood on an Ohio farm to his final years in New York, in a tantalizing portrait of a man with a talent for alienating colleagues, but also for conveying “a tragic sense of life couched in dark laughter.”

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In this multilayered novel about the sins and traumas of China’s past, two childhood friends reunite in their provincial home town after years apart. In the course of a winter night, their alternating monologues sift through their family histories, circling a fateful moment during the Cultural Revolution which left one man’s grandfather comatose and set the other’s up for an eminent medical career. As the two friends’ fortunes become increasingly intertwined, they also trade stories of their childhoods in the eighties, and the historical weight shouldered by their generation. “Blood ties are a form of violence, the way they yoke together people who feel nothing for each other,” Zhang writes.

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A Left-Handed Woman

In a collection of profiles and essays originally written for The New Yorker , Thurman explores the mysterious intersection of the sensual life and the life of the mind. As she considers the triumphs and failures of our culture—literature, politics, fashion, art, sex—Thurman is both fiercely intelligent and disarmingly human.

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Ted Kennedy: A Life

A sense of promise lost and regained imbues this biography of a figure whose long career encompassed the ascendancy of liberalism, its decline under Reagan, and the country’s descent into today’s partisanship. Kennedy continually reached across the aisle even as he saw the era of coalition-building come to an end. Hobbled by his struggle to measure up to his brothers, and by the grim shadow of the Chappaquiddick incident, he was nonetheless a standard-bearer of the left who, in his last years, helped seed a newly resilient and forward-looking strain of liberalism. By tracing this life of tragedy, tenacity, and service, Farrell draws a complex portrait of a man who, like his family—and perhaps his nation—was “always running to keep ahead of the darkness.”

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Cheap Land Colorado

The book opens as Conover sets off to meet—and ultimately live with—the off-gridders of the San Luis Valley, in the south-central part of the state. The largest alpine valley in the world, it has an average elevation of more than seven and a half thousand feet. The cheap land can be found in a region known as “the flats,” where there is almost no infrastructure: no electricity, no sewer system, no pavement. Conover has a good eye for the particularity of life on the flats, in this valley that has become a magnet for the dispossessed, and the book is bursting with dreamers and druggies, drifters and grifters, the deluded, the dangerous, the salt of the earth.

People standing outside a trailer in the mountains.

Well of Souls

Tracing the development of the banjo, “a uniquely American instrument, crafted by people of African descent,” this meticulous history also illuminates the difficulties of unearthing a story rooted in the experiences of the enslaved. Gaddy close-reads every early depiction of the banjo she can find—a priest observing a calinda dance in Martinique in 1694, a 1785 watercolor from a plantation in South Carolina—while remaining critically alert to the overwhelmingly white (and usually pro-slavery) perspectives that document the instrument’s existence prior to the Civil War. Decoupling the banjo from the crude secular associations of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, she emphasizes in particular its significance in religious music.

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The Backstreets

The narrator of this dark, existential novel—a startling literary document of urban alienation—is an Uyghur man roaming Ürümqi in search of a room to rent. As he wanders, he encounters menacing strangers, disembodied screams, trash. At work, he is revolted by the falsity of his colleagues and fixates on a sheet of random numbers, searching for combinations that might make sense of his predicament. “I don’t know anyone in this strange city, so it’s impossible for me to be friends or enemies with anyone,” he says, but enemies clearly exist. The author disappeared in 2018, presumably into one of China’s Xinjiang detention centers.

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The Magic Kingdom

Harley Mann, the son of “educated White Northerners with an affection for abstract thought,” and the narrator of this slow-build tragic novel, recounts his youth and lovestruck early adulthood at New Bethany, the South Florida Shaker settlement where he moved with his siblings and widowed mother in 1902. (The book takes its inspiration from audio recordings made by the real Mann in 1971.) Like the plaster-of-Paris model of New Bethany that the adult Mann, having left Shaker life, painstakingly constructed, the novel presents “a specific moment plucked from the stream of time and memory and fixed like a butterfly pinned in a glass-fronted case.”

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The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution

Who are we? What is our place in nature? In this history of evolution, Bashford moves across the generations of the Huxley family, tracing how a gifted brood of illustrious scholars and writers struggled to answer these questions, in the process shaping the outlooks we hold on the past and future of our species. Bashford focusses her chronicle on the two most evolutionarily minded Huxleys: Thomas Henry and his grandson Julian. Thomas Henry died in 1895, days after Julian turned eight. But, as an adult, Julian took after his grandfather. They were so alike that Bashford says they can even be thought of as “one very long-lived man, 1825–1975.” Yet the book is more than an account of how two writer-scientists fashioned and sold evolution. It is also about the implications that the men discerned in activities ranging from religion to conservation.

Silhouettes of animals coming out of a person's head split in two.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

In this magic-realist satire, the title character—a self-described “photographer, gambler, slut”—wakes up in the afterworld and has a week to discover who killed him. Set during the civil war in Sri Lanka in 1989, the novel follows Almeida as he attempts to find his murderer and help two friends obtain a cache of photographs incriminating those on all sides of the conflict, before they are purloined by others searching for them. The group includes government officials, separatist Tamil Tigers, communist rebels, Indian peacekeepers, and arms dealers, all of whom are willing to kill to accomplish their mission. When Almeida tracks down his murderer, he realizes that “every death is significant, even when every life appears not to be.”

Book cover for Finale

Several years ago, Steven Sondheim accepted D. T. Max’s invitation to be profiled in this magazine—then decided against it. Then he reconsidered, and reconsidered again. But the bard of ambivalence kept talking through it all, and Max’s book places those autumnal conversations—some of which appeared, in edited form, on our Web site—center stage.

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The Escape Artist

In 1944, the Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba, intent on piercing the “veil of ignorance” surrounding the Nazis’ crimes, related his and others’ experiences of the camp in the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Disseminated in the midst of the war, the report catalyzed an international response that would ultimately spare two hundred thousand Hungarian Jews. With the propulsion of a historical thriller, Freedland, a journalist, tracks Vrba’s work collecting the “data of the dead” even while imprisoned, driven by his conviction that facts could perhaps derail the Nazi extermination plan. As Freedland depicts world leaders’ failure to act expeditiously, he observes, “A horror is especially hard to comprehend if no one has ever witnessed anything like it before.”

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Shirley Hazzard

This biography of an acclaimed novelist follows Hazzard from her early years in Australia and postwar Hong Kong through her adulthood among storied literary circles in New York City and Italy. Olubas traces the development of Hazzard’s longtime preoccupations with “mobile protagonists and their shifting worlds,” and with questions of truth, goodness, knowledge, and perspective. Carefully crafted—a page could be revised as many as thirty times—and signalling a “deep investment in destiny,” Hazzard’s richly layered novel “The Transit of Venus” led her husband, the biographer and Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller, to remark, “No one should have to read it for the first time.”

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Botticelli’s Secret

In 1882, an Austro-Hungarian art collector purchased a set of drawings by Sandro Botticelli that had been languishing in private collections in France and England for centuries. In this wide-ranging history, Luzzi considers why the drawings, which illustrated eighty-eight cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy, had fallen into oblivion, and charts both Dante’s and Botticelli’s reputations across the ages. Many early critics found Botticelli’s drawings out of step with Dante’s text, arguing that the Renaissance artist’s sensual, full-bodied humans undermined the medieval poet’s “visceral yearning for God.” Luzzi, by contrast, reads Botticelli’s drawings as “a ‘poem’ in their own regard,” and as a crucial link in the “mapping of the human spirit’s transition” from one era to the next.

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In 2012, after a wildly successful and hectic period during which he worked almost exclusively as a playwright, the Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse converted to Catholicism, quit drinking, and remarried. He then started composing “Septology,” a seven-volume novel written in a single sentence and exemplifying what he has described as his turn to “slow prose.” (The book was translated, by Damion Searls, for Fitzcarraldo Editions, in the U.K.; a U.S. edition is out this month, from Transit Books.) The novel’s narrator is a painter named Asle, a convert to Catholicism who’s grieving the death of his wife. The night before Christmas Eve, he finds his friend, also a painter named Asle, unconscious in an alley in Bergen, dying of alcohol poisoning. Their memories double, repeat, and gradually blur into a single voice, a diffuse consciousness capable of existing in many times and places at once. Though lacking a particularly doctrinal or dogmatic sense of religion, the novel raises the possibility of belief in the reality of the divine, as the fourteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart, whom Fosse has read intently, describes it: “It is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.”

The Norwegian author John Fosse sits and leans on a makeup table.

A Shiver in the Leaves

Brutality and tenderness intertwine in this collection, which illuminates the inner life of a young gay Black man navigating desire, depression, family, and faith. Although the poems are haunted by historical and contemporary violence, they are also often rapturous, revelling in the pleasures of nature and of the body. Hughes’s primary mode is almost Romantic, aware of death’s ubiquitous presence, yet alive with feeling; allusions to Dickinson, Emerson, and Poe abound. For all there is to mourn, kinship provides a kind of compass. “I have wanted / nothing / to do with blackness / or laughter / or my life,” Hughes writes. “But, about love, / who owns the right, / really?”

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Hotta, a Tokyo-born historian, takes on the life story and legacy of Shinichi Suzuki, the creator of the Suzuki method. Born in 1898 in the Japanese city of Nagoya, he was the son of a violin-maker, and, when young Suzuki became captivated by the singing tone of the violinist Mischa Elman, he persuaded his father to send him to Berlin, where he spent several formative years. The book explores the evolution of Suzuki’s conviction that the ability to play an instrument was not an inborn gift but a specific, learnable skill. He came to believe children could learn music the way that children learn language: naturally, through early and abundant exposure. But reducing his method to a system of music instruction, the biography argues, misses its larger point about education as a means of awakening human potential.

Shinichi Suzuki with a group of young violin students, in 1967.

Indigenous Continent

In the opening pages of this book, Hämäläinen, a historian at Oxford, maintains that the America we know was—in its borders, shape, and culture—far from inevitable. Throughout the work, which details the rise and fall of early empires and Native responses to European colonial forays, Hämäläinen stresses the kinetic nature of Indigenous power. Even after the so-called colonial era, tribal nations often played a determining role in American history. Instead of a foreordained story of decline and victimization, Hämäläinen wants us to see a parade of contingencies, with tribal nations regularly giving as good as they got, or even better.

A portrait of Thayendanegea, painted in London, in 1785, by Gilbert Stuart.

Metamorphoses

Ovid’s masterpiece contains nearly two hundred and fifty mythic tales of corporeal transformation, many of which have become central in art and culture. But Stephanie McCarter’s revisionist translation shows how often translators have obscured the sexual violence of these stories with euphemism. In an introduction, she argues that the prevalance of rape in the poem suggests that “Ovid felt such violence was worthy of critical interrogation,” and that we should read him “with an eye toward his full complexity—his beauty and his brutality.” Ultimately, she writes, “to wrestle with the unsavory aspects of ancient literature is to do the hard work of self-examination.”

An illustration of the writer Ovid, who is wearing a robe and a laurel wreath on his head. He is writing with a quill in a book, and the book's white pages gradually transform into white birds, which fly away above him.

Silicon chips undergird all of modern digital technology, yet only a handful of companies are capable of producing them or the nanometre-scale precision instruments required for their manufacture—making the industry “a triumph of efficiency,” Miller writes, but also creating “a staggering vulnerability.” This history traces the chips’ development, from their invention, in America, in the nineteen-fifties, to the establishment of a global supply chain concentrated in East Asia. Today, nearly all advanced processor chips are produced in Taiwan, and Miller mounts a convincing argument that shifting control of the industry could dramatically reshape the world’s economic and political orders.

best reviewed books 2022

Number One Is Walking

In the second book by the comedian Steve Martin and the cartoonist Harry Bliss, the actor wittily details his film career alongside his frequent collaborator’s humorous illustrations. This book was excerpted on newyorker.com

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Power Failure

This absorbing seven-hundred-page opus on the rise and fall of General Electric contains a particularly compelling portrayal of the tenure of its fabled C.E.O., Jack Welch, who turned G.E. into a lean and disciplined profit machine. During the nineteen-seventies, the company was run by a modest, austere man named Reginald Jones, who believed that G.E. culture was best exemplified through mutual concern for one another. Welch, a homespun dynamo with blue-collar origins, did not view G.E. as one big, warm family. When he took over from Jones as C.E.O., he imposed his own sense of excellence on the company, through a series of principles that captivated his peers: your duty is always to enrich your shareholders. Shed any business that isn’t first or second in its market category. Fire nonperformers without regret. Cohan gives us a lot of alpha-male straight talk, and the book enables one to see how Welch emerged as a ruthless businessman who saw every interaction as a potential shakedown.

The retired CEO of General Electric sitting in an office with a jet engine behind him.

When We Were Sisters

A young Muslim American woman named Kausar narrates this hard-bitten but glimmering début novel, which chronicles her negotiation of the thorny path from childhood to adulthood. The story begins in Philadelphia, with the murder of Kausar’s widowed father, after which she and her sisters are relocated to New Jersey to live with an uncle who meets their practical needs, and nothing more. Asghar parses the confusion and hysteria surrounding female sexuality—especially calamitous for Kausar, whose body is “pretending to be a girl, even though I’m not.” The narrative is most affecting when Kausar turns to her faith, as when she prays, “Allah, forgive me for being janky.”

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For Amanda Parrish Morgan, strollers aren’t just tools we use, or products we buy; they’re dense symbols, with no single or settled meaning, of our relationships to parenting . They tell us things: about what we want, what we can’t have, what we fear. The central strength of “Stroller,” a slim work of memoiristic cultural criticism, is not comprehensiveness but the way the stroller, and Morgan’s experience of her own strollering years, become an omnidirectional magnet, pulling disparate material into friendly proximity. Her own stroller years are almost over, and the closing pages of “Stroller” evoke the experience of looking at newly obsolete pieces of parenting gear in the garage or basement, feeling time and memory leak out as they transmogrify back into mere plastic and rubber.

Strollers in a line outside of a building

Diaghilev’s Empire

In the early twentieth century, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes revitalized ballet, and the company remained at the forefront of the international avant-garde for decades. In this rich account, Christiansen, a critic and a self-described “incurable balletomane,” narrates its rise and fall under Diaghilev, a charismatic impresario whose creative orbit encompassed not only dancers, choreographers, and composers—among them Nijinsky, Balanchine, and Stravinsky—but also painters and writers, including Picasso and Cocteau. The professional achievements of these artists are evoked vividly, as are the personalities, romances, and rivalries whose tempestuous ebbs and flows shaped their work. Though little of the Ballets Russes repertoire survives today, Christiansen makes a convincing case for its indelible influence.

best reviewed books 2022

This book, by one of Romania’s leading avant-garde writers, presents itself as the diary of an unnamed failed poet who has become a schoolteacher. He relates memories of his sickly childhood and of his walks around Bucharest (“a museum of melancholy and the ruin of all things”), where, in front of a morgue, he encounters so-called anti-death protesters holding signs that read “NO to Being Buried Alive!” The novel’s title refers to a mysterious object on top of which his home is built, which causes levitation and rearranges rooms. As in the work of Kafka, whose diaries the narrator adores, the book’s horror and humor are born from examining “the tragic anomaly of the spirit dressed in flesh.”

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The Hero of This Book

McCracken’s latest novel straddles the line between fiction and memoir, though she rejects the term “autofiction” as sounding “like it might be written by a robot, or a kiosk, or a European.” It is August, 2019, and the unnamed narrator, sightseeing in London, is haunted by the presence of her late mother, who grew up “disabled and Jewish in small-town Iowa,” was stubborn and bad with money, and was also brilliant and effervescent and a great appreciator of life. “Once somebody is dead, the world reveals all the things they might have enjoyed if they weren’t,” the narrator laments. McCracken delivers a searing meditation on loss and the impossibility of depicting, in art, the entirety of a person.

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Properties of Thirst

Set around the time of Pearl Harbor, this poignant saga centers on the town of Lone Pine, in California’s Owens Valley, where Rocky Rhodes has built a beautiful home for his wife, a doctor and a cook of some renown. After she dies, of polio, he struggles to raise their son and daughter while trying to protect the area from the Los Angeles water authorities. The son, joyful and reckless, moves out at thirteen and joins the Navy at nineteen. When the government establishes a Japanese American internment camp on the land across from Rocky’s, the newcomers become enmeshed in the locals’ lives. The novel’s resounding theme, “You can’t save what you don’t love,” applies to people and landscapes alike.

An earlier version of this review misidentified the location of Lone Pine.

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The Philosophy of Modern Song

From 2006 to 2009, Dylan hosted “Theme Time Radio Hour,” a weekly program on satellite radio. The programs were hilarious, campy nostalgia. Most important, you got to hear the often forgotten music that helped form him in some way. Dylan has published a kind of extension of the radio show, this rich, riffy, funny, and completely engaging book of essays. It’s immediately clear what you’re in for: Dylan wandering through the enormous record bin of his mind. In order to stave off creative exhaustion and intimations of mortality, he has, over and over again, returned to what fed him in the first place—the vast tradition of American song. What he tries to get across in this book is the feel of these songs, their atmosphere and internal life.

Bob Dylan sits at a grand piano in the Royal Albert Hall, in London

Arthur Miller

The longtime New Yorker theatre critic John Lahr explores the life and work of Arthur Miller, connecting the dots between the playwright’s personal and psychological development and the evolution of his plays. The book draws on Lahr’s piece in the magazine about the making of Willy Loman , the protagonist of Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”

Book cover for Mr. B

The first major biography of Balanchine draws on a decade of research in Russian and American archives and interviews with his dancers. Homans, the dance critic at The New Yorker , charts the choreographer’s journey from Tsarist Russia to interwar Europe and, finally, New York, where he remade classical ballet. The book’s account of Balanchine’s return to his homeland, in 1962, first ran in the magazine.

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The Other Side of Prospect

The result of eight years of reporting, this deft chronicle delves into the story of Bobby Johnson, a sixteen-year-old from New Haven, who, in 2006, was coerced into confessing to a brutal murder he didn’t commit. Dawidoff presents portraits of the individuals involved, juxtaposed with research on segregation, the Great Migration, and mass incarceration. Bobby, though widely considered innocent, was convicted because he “fit a false stereotype about how things worked in poor neighborhoods.” The book details his childhood, his time in prison, and—after a single-minded lawyer secures his release, in 2015—the challenges and the disorientation Bobby experiences upon reëntering society.

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The Beloved Vision

This musical study charts the rise of Romanticism, in the nineteenth century, as composers came to see individual voice as the key to emotional expression, and began to assert their “existential being through a recognizable, even idiosyncratic musical language.” Walsh provides biographical sketches of composers and assessments of their work, and weaves in subplots across decades and geography—the impact of nationalism, the development of program music, the ubiquitous spectre of Beethoven. Observing that “obsolescence is always the lurking fate of music not quite of the front rank,” Walsh explores the influence of relatively obscure composers, such as Louise Farrenc and Heinrich Marschner, with generous, contagious curiosity.

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Nights of Plague

The Nobel laureate’s latest novel opens like a starry romantic chronicle: a steamer is making its way at night to a gemlike island, the fictional Mingheria, in the Mediterranean. It is 1901. On board are three medical scientists, one accompanied by his wife, a princess, who spends much of the novel writing letters to her sister; the tale is supposedly constructed, by her great-granddaughter, from these letters. The group comes to Mingheria because of an outbreak of bubonic plague, and they have to deal with a shifting political landscape—one all too familiar to us in 2022. Yet what is most vital in this book is Pamuk’s lovingly obsessive creation of the island itself, a world so detailed that it shimmers like a memory palace. He places his humans in this “three-dimensional fairy tale” and observes what happens to the state when an epidemic tests its tolerances.

Strips of red flowing through a city landscape.

Can I Pet Your Dog?

The cartoonist Jeremy Nguyen illustrates this waggish guide to petting dogs (that don’t belong to you). This book was excerpted on newyorker.com

Book cover for American Midnight

American Midnight

The four years of American history from 1917 to 1921 are underexamined, but, in this account, they emerge as pivotal. “Just as the war in Europe was being fought on several fronts, so was the war at home,” Hochschild writes. Vigilante groups and the government itself targeted labor unionists, socialists, immigrants, Blacks, Jews, and others perceived to be insufficiently patriotic. While narrating raids, arrests, lynchings, deportations, and instances of censorship, spying, and torture, Hochschild periodically checks in on an achingly conflicted Woodrow Wilson. When a member of his Administration suggested pardoning those who had been punished for opposing conscription, the President replied that, while the idea “appeals to me not a little, . . . I don’t feel that I can follow my heart just now.”

Book cover for Kiki Man Ray

Kiki Man Ray

Kiki de Montparnasse was born Alice Prin, in a village far from the cosmopolitan Parisian enclave whose name she later adopted. One of the most popular artists’ models of the nineteen-twenties—as well as a cabaret star, painter, memoirist, and bon vivant—Kiki posed for artists including Soutine, Foujita, and, perhaps most fruitfully, the surrealist Man Ray. Braude’s biography argues that the pair’s long love affair was mutually galvanizing, and that Kiki was not just a muse but an artist in her own right. If she has largely faded from view, he writes, it is because “you can’t sell a dance at auction. You can’t sell a pose.”

Book cover for Haven

In this novel of religious discovery, set in the seventh century, three Irish monks make a fraught journey from their monastery to Great Skellig, a craggy rock formation in the Atlantic that resembles “the most gigantic of cathedrals.” Switching perspectives among the monks, the narrative tracks their escalating discord as they endeavor to construct a new monastic settlement there. Donoghue evokes their devotional seriousness with a descriptive texture that is equally alert to a flock of cormorants taking flight “by some collusion,” or to the whittling of a makeshift pipe. As the men maintain routines of worship in the face of futility, the novel asks whether they should be answerable to God or to one another.

Book cover for Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

This striking novel takes a formally inventive approach to a woman’s terminal-cancer diagnosis. Lia is a successful illustrator with a loving husband and preteen daughter, but their contentment is disrupted by the resurgence of her breast cancer. In Mortimer’s rendering, the cancer has its own voice and graphic style, and it guides readers through Lia’s most visceral life experiences: a strict religious upbringing; a destructive love affair; her treatments and her sense of the changes they wreak upon her body. Although Lia’s fate is telegraphed from the start, sadness is not allowed to crowd out wit and joy, and Mortimer asks readers to think about death as something that “does not happen in the first or third person, but in the second.”

Book cover for The Joy of Quitting

The Joy of Quitting

Roberts’s autobiographical comics illustrate day-to-day life, incorporating humorous details from the author’s experiences raising her daughter and being in the workplace. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Book cover for I Love(ish) NYC

I Love(ish) New York City

This collection of cartoons and essays explores the broad range of experiences, and the many ups and downs, one encounters while living in N.Y.C. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

best reviewed books 2022

Where Did My Roommate Put My Charger?

In this activity book for adults, the cartoonist Sarah Kempa invites readers to solve the humorous complexities of adulthood—like finding lost items in an apartment, figuring out how to split a check, and creating the perfect dating profile. This book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Book cover for The Birdcatcher

The Birdcatcher

With the plush scenery of a travelogue, the misshapen soul of a noir, and the anarchic spirit of a trickster tale, this novel revolves around three Black American expatriates. The narrator, Amanda, is a divorced travel writer invited to the island of Ibiza by her friend Catherine, a prize-winning sculptor, who “sometimes tries to kill her husband.” (“He puts her into an asylum, thinks she’s well, takes her out again, and she tries to kill him.”) Catherine is suspicious of Amanda’s intentions toward her husband, but, in Jones’s fearsome, fractured narrative, her potential for violence seems no more alarming than anything else that might befall these social outsiders.

Book cover for The Black Period

The Black Period

In this lyrical memoir, Geter, a poet, sets down a powerful vision of Black life in the United States by intertwining dual origin stories: her own (she is the daughter of an African American man and a Muslim Nigerian woman) and the nation’s, with its history of Native genocide and African enslavement. Recounting the lives of her forebears (enslaved people, sharecroppers, artists), she expresses grief and rage, but she also sees the potential for liberation, which she terms “the Black Period,” a time both prospective and realized, “where, if not our bodies, then our minds could be free.” Again and again, she asks, “What would it look like to emerge from erasure?” Her father’s oil paintings and charcoal drawings, scattered throughout the book, provide one response.

Book cover for Master of the Two Left Feet

Master of the Two Left Feet

This biography of the self-taught painter Morris Hirshfield (1872-1946) is also a study of the vagaries of artistic reputation. Hirshfield, a Russian Polish immigrant, worked as a tailor and a slipper-maker in Brooklyn before turning to art, in his mid-sixties. Championed by avant-garde luminaries including André Breton and Alfred Barr for his “primitive” approach to pattern and figuration, he enjoyed brief renown—with a solo show at moma, in 1943, and much press coverage—before being largely forgotten. Meyer situates Hirshfield’s idiosyncratic output in the popular imagery and fine art of the period, suggesting that he was savvier than his early admirers knew.

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Listening for Ghosts

A man gets a phone call from a dead uncle, another finds his life transformed into a mutating, inexplicable dreamscape: in this collection of short fiction, Rabe explores the people and the memories that haunt us. Three of the stories, including “ Uncle Jim Called ,” first appeared in the magazine.

Book cover for Liberation Day

Liberation Day

A new collection from the wildly imaginative Saunders examines American life as we know it—and as we don’t—in a series of stories about characters grappling with sometimes nefarious political, social, and cultural forces. Several stories, including “ Ghoul ,” first appeared in the magazine.

Book cover for Marigold and Rose

Marigold and Rose

This slip of a book, the Nobel-winning poet’s first work of narrative prose, consists of the thoughts of twin baby girls, each named after a flower. Marigold is small, quiet, inward; Rose, born first, is loud, forgiving, and protective. Alongside an exploration of the dichotomies that bind the girls together are meditations on many of Glück’s familiar preoccupations: halves and wholes, familial inheritance, time’s passage, the psychic power of words. The innocence of the girls’ observations, bearing an infant clarity, pare many of the book’s subjects down to a revealing frankness. “Infinite possibility,” they think as they learn to walk. “Then an absence or loss. Safety, which had disappeared.”

Book cover for The Slowworm's Song

The Slowworm’s Song

The narrator of this novel is a British former soldier and recovering alcoholic, who becomes unhinged after a letter summons him to Belfast to give evidence to a commission investigating a tragic incident that occurred in 1982, during the Troubles. Taking the form of a confession to his estranged daughter, the book works its way toward the life-altering event, which took place when he was a twenty-one-year-old recruit. Along the way, he recalls military training in Germany, his journey through rehab, and his current employment, at a rural garden center. His apologia represents a sincere redemptive attempt at “having a go at living.”

Book cover for Bridge to the Sun

Bridge to the Sun

The long-overlooked role of Japanese Americans who fought against their ancestral land during the Second World War receives its due in this authoritative history. Many were recruited from internment camps, and worked variously as interpreters, translators, and interrogators. America’s ability to understand Japanese communications was “among the best kept secrets of the war,” Henderson writes. He skillfully refracts the conflict through the experiences of several veterans, including Kazuo Komoto, who received the Purple Heart after fighting in Guadalcanal and New Georgia, and Tom Sakamoto, who was part of a select cadre of Japanese Americans entrusted with top-secret information, and who witnessed Japan’s formal surrender. The book ends with a roster of the more than three thousand Japanese Americans who served.

Book cover for The Chaos Machine

The Chaos Machine

“The very structure of social media encourages polarization,” the author contends in this sobering investigation into the effects of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Tracking political movements that spread over social media, both in America and worldwide, Fisher describes how algorithms designed to “maximize our time on site” systematically promote extreme content that sparks moral outrage and forges group identities united by a sense of threat. “The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself,” he writes. Fisher speaks to researchers and industry insiders, who all seem to arrive at the same proposal: turn off the algorithms that reward engagement above all else.

Book cover for Some of Them Will Carry Me

Some of Them Will Carry Me

The female protagonists who appear in Scodellaro’s kinetic début collection of stories find themselves in absurdist and fantastical scenarios that interrogate the nature of subjectivity. “ A Triangle ” appeared in The New Yorker .

Book cover for Love And Vermin

Love & Vermin

This collection brings together some of the many cartoons published by McPhail in The New Yorker , as well as a number of new cartoons and comics. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Book cover for Dinosaurs

For the writer Millet, novels, like people, tend to suffer from a blinkered, human-centric perspective. Instead of focussing on the “arc of the private individual,” as she puts it, Millet writes books that churn up atmosphere: something happens, and then something else happens; the cloudy design melts and shifts. More often than not, they also mourn our collapsing environment, the cost of our ill-gotten gains. In her latest novel, “Dinosaurs,” a man named Gil has just moved to Phoenix after breaking up with his girlfriend of fifteen years. He is handsome, embarrassingly wealthy, and desperate to be of use. He befriends a neighbor’s kid, who’s being bullied at school; takes up the cause of hawks and quail against a mystery poacher; and volunteers at a local women’s shelter. The story has a muted quality—Millet writes in the simple, enigmatic prose of books for children. But it’s also sharp and implacably funny, and, after one of Gil’s friends dies, it becomes a study in the nature of loss. For Millet, at least, there’s solace in the idea that we are infinitely bigger than ourselves.

Lydia Millet

The Betrothed

In Italy, Manzoni’s grand historical novel is considered a literary treasure almost on a par with Dante, but its reputation elsewhere has faded. In this new translation, the first in fifty years, it emerges as a work that anyone who cares about nineteenth-century fiction should want to read. Manzoni, the child of a genteel Lombard family, lived from 1785 to 1873, through the political turmoil stretching from the French Revolution to the great political cause of the Risorgimento—by which the peninsula became a united, independent nation. “The Betrothed” was written in service of that ideal, but it is set in the seventeenth century—the period of the Thirty Years’ War and of resurgent bubonic plague. It follows a young couple, Renzo and Lucia, whose engagement is thwarted by the fact that Lucia has caught the eye of a local Spanish lord, who is protected by a corrupt legal system. Separated, the couple are basically on the lam for most of the novel, sometimes helped and sometimes hurt by people they meet along the way. The book is a great pleasure to read, thanks to its romanticism, its sweep and danger and excitement, and the fullness of its ever-ramifying plot.

A painting of a woman.

Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions

This début novel, formed of interlocking short stories, follows the lives of four Nigerian women who meet at boarding school in the nineteen-eighties and whose futures are drastically altered by a protest that they organize. The stories move backward and forward in time: we excavate nineteenth-century family roots and leap to 2050, when one character sacrifices herself for her son. Through the years, the four friends face various challenges. One encounters racism in Kraków; another, unhappy as a banker in New York, contemplates the “scalp-searing sun” and the bean pudding of home. Ogunyemi shows how early friendships can shape entangled alliances that define women’s lives.

Book cover for Barefoot Doctor

Barefoot Doctor

During the Cultural Revolution, minimally trained “barefoot doctors” were sent to the Chinese countryside, providing basic medical services and folk remedies. The author of this novel was one of them, and she draws on her experiences in the story of Mrs. Yi, a village herbalist who gathers her remedies on a nearby mountain. She struggles to find a successor—either the flighty but kindhearted Gray, who loves herbs but fears patients, or Mia, from nearby Deserted Village—and events become increasingly surreal. As the mountain changes shape and ghosts visit the living, mysterious connections between the body and nature emerge.

Book cover for The Portraitist

The Portraitist

Little is known about the Dutch painter Frans Hals: no letters or diaries survive, and the only contemporary documents are unrevealing. But Nadler manages to construct a satisfying quasi-biography by using the milieu of seventeenth-century Haarlem. The city, Protestant and republican, had neither church nor monarchy to commission art, so artists relied on the patronage of private citizens—an advantage for Hals, who excelled at capturing the spirit of locals. His rough brushwork lent an air of improvisation to his boisterous depictions of soldiers, musicians, and tavern-goers. Though Hals has long been overshadowed by his contemporary Rembrandt, Nadler demonstrates why his peers held him to be “the modern painter par excellence.”

Book cover for By Hands Known

By Hands Now Known

This history of Jim Crow explores “slavery’s afterlife in law” from the nineteen-twenties to the sixties through the fates of Black Americans whose stories “were not meant to leave the South.” Some were “abducted from their homes, churches, fields, and other workplaces,” others murdered after flouting bus segregation. Burnham illuminates a continuum of white supremacy, dating back to slavery, that depended on the blurring of “formal and mob law” and on an often complicit federal government. “Law needed terror, and terror needed law,” she writes. She also examines Black Americans’ long-standing “practices of dissent and resistance” and describes reparations as an ethical imperative.

best reviewed books 2022

Burning Down the House

Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern, constructs a history of libertarianism, making a case that it has degraded from a pro-market economism to a blinkered worship of individual rights. The economist Friedrich Hayek, whom the author admires, wrote in favor of a “social minimum,” which, though bare, made room for a welfare state. But, as an economist, Hayek had “no clear account of rights,” Koppleman says. As a result, Hayek’s approach was displaced by an uncompromising rights-based liberalism. Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Nozick, figureheads of the characteristic late-twentieth-century form of libertarianism, had a different goal than their predecessors, Koppelman maintains, shrinking government not to advance economic efficiency but to protect the rights of property owners. This critical distinction—seeing each economic question as a matter of fundamental rights—obliterated the possibility of compromise, Koppelman writes; his book seeks a “middle way” in earnest.

Book cover for Life is Hard

Life Is Hard

In this book of stories and ideas, the philosopher Kieran Setiya argues that certain fundamental challenges—loneliness, injustice, failure, ill health, grief, and so on—are essentially unavoidable; even though a redemptive impulse “urges us to focus on the best in life,” it’s actually a mistake to turn away from the experiences that wound us. Drawing on a variety of thinkers and on his own experiences, Setiya shows that, instead of glossing over our own disappointments, it’s best to think about them in detail, discovering how they can help us grow tougher, kinder, wiser, more compassionate, and more realistic. The book, he writes, aims to offer “guidance in adversity,” showing us how we can remain hopeful without deluding ourselves or downplaying life’s difficulties.

4 panels of a child hanging from a tree.

Need to Know

How did we end up with the C.I.A., which marks its seventy-fifth anniversary this year? This account of the rise of American intelligence shows that the agency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, was only one element in a dramatic expansion of operations at the start of the Second World War. As Reynolds recounts, it was Army and Navy cryptography and reconnaissance units that handled most of the actual code-breaking and spying. The problem became the volume of raw intelligence, which gave rise to a need for an entity that could make sense of it and turn it into something that policymakers could use. Various intelligence agencies took up this responsibility during and after the war, and Reynolds, by engaging fully with the various contenders, manages to avoid retrofitting the history of U.S. intelligence around the assumption that the C.I.A. would inevitably emerge as the lead postwar organization.

A shadow of two people in CIA headquarters.

Super-Infinite

Rundell, an Oxford scholar whose previous books have mostly been novels for children, titles her new biography of John Donne “Super-Infinite”—a word that would be equally at home in a mathematical theorem and a comic book. In fact, it was one of the poet’s many neologisms, used to describe the world that waits for us after death: “an infinite, a super-infinite, an unimaginable space.” For Rundell, it is a perfect example of Donne’s “absurd, grandiloquent, courageous, hungry” style, the way he dislocated language in pursuit of extremes. Born in 1572, Donne was most widely known in his lifetime as a priest. He served as the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1621 until his death, where his celebrated sermons—many of them pondering sickness and death—drew thousands. As a poet, Donne made a very different impression, seducing and mocking. In her attempt to fit these two faces together, Rundell writes with both the knowledge of an expert and the friendly passion of a proselytizer. Donne, she promises, “is protection against those who would tell you to narrow yourself, to follow fashion in your mode of thought.” His writing expresses “what he knew with such precision and flair that we can seize hold of it, and carry it with us.”

Portrait of John Donne writing.

Sacred Nature

An urgent plea opens this nuanced exploration, by a veteran writer on religion, of our relationship to nature: if ecological disaster is to be avoided, Armstrong writes, “we need to recover the veneration of nature that human beings carefully cultivated for millennia.” What follows is a tour of how various spiritual traditions conceive of nature, with a focus on a common thread: an understanding of the natural world as a unified whole shot through by “an immanent sacred force.” This concept, prominent in Eastern thought, was also a feature of Western monotheist traditions before we began treating nature as “a mere resource.” “While it is essential to cut carbon emissions,” Armstrong writes, we also need to overhaul “our whole belief system.”

Book cover for Poūkahangatus

Poūkahangatus

This collection’s title poem, which describes itself as “An Essay About Indigenous Hair Dos and Don’ts,” mixes mythological and pop-cultural references with ruminations on female beauty, power, and inheritance: Medusa makes an appearance, as does Disney’s “Pocahontas.” Elsewhere, the poet, a Māori New Zealander, uses the film “Twilight” as a lens through which to examine racialized and gendered tensions of adolescence. Tibble’s smart, sexy, slang-studded verse is fanciful and dramatic, revelling in the pains and the pleasures of contemporary young womanhood yet undergirded by an acute sense of history. Her voice remains sure-footed across many registers, and the book, at its best, functions as an atlas for learning to explore the world on one’s own terms.

Book cover for Lady Justice

Lady Justice

In a richly layered set of profiles, a noted legal correspondent chronicles efforts by female lawyers to bolster democracy during the Trump Presidency. Some figures are familiar (the voting-rights champion Stacey Abrams), others less so (a co-founder of an organization that helps refugees seeking asylum). For all these women—and for Lithwick, who writes about her own sexual harassment by a former federal judge—law isn’t an “unassailable cathedral” but a “fragile arrangement of norms, suggestions, and rules.” Constitutional progress often takes a slow, zigzagging path rather than a linear one, and it is this, Lithwick muses, that “allows it to preserve histories that might otherwise be erased.”

Book cover for Fen, Bog & Swamp

Fen, Bog & Swamp

Proulx’s masterly exploration of the ecology and history of wetlands—and of humankind’s seemingly unstoppable desire to drain them—makes a powerful case for their protection. Her account of her love of swamps was excerpted in the magazine.

Book cover for The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound

The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound

In 1968, three years after T. S. Eliot’s death, his drafts of “The Waste Land,” long thought lost, were unearthed in the New York Public Library. First published in 1971, edited by Eliot’s widow, they revolutionized the understanding of the poem’s creation, by making apparent Ezra Pound’s outsized editorial role, including many ruthless cuts, and also the input of Eliot’s troubled first wife, Vivienne. These pages—some handwritten, some typewritten, with wordless loops and slashes scrawled across the text and brusque observations at the side—have become famous in their own right, and, for the hundredth anniversary of the poem’s publication, the edition has been reissued, with extra material. If you badly wish to know how much Eliot spent on breakfast at the Albemarle Hotel, Margate, on the north coast of Kent, in October, 1921, your craving can now be satisfied, because his hotel bills are shown in all their glory. Few Eliot fans will be able to resist.

T. S. Eliot sitting on a boat in Gloucester in 1907

Piet Mondrian: A Life

The first thorough Mondrian biography since the nineteen-fifties to be published in English, this book is audacious in structure. Janssen drew on his profound knowledge to dispense with strict chronology and to write not only about his subject’s prodigious mind and eye but also from within them. Mondrian was born in the province of Utrecht in 1872 and came into his own during his first sojourn in Paris, beginning in 1911. Style, for Mondrian, served a quest to manifest soul-deep spirituality as a demonstrable fact of life. His aim, he said, was “to find things out.” He hit by accident on the potency of diamond formats—square or squarish canvases rotated forty-five degrees—to hint at the extension, invisibly, of rectilinear layouts beyond their material bounds, perhaps to infinity. He needn’t portray the complete universe. He could imply it.

Piet Mondrian circa 1905-1908.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

The work camps in the Albertan oil sands are cut off from the outside world; their inhabitants are a shadow population, at home neither in the barracks where they sleep nor among the families they have left behind. The Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton spent two years in the oil sands, working at three different mines, in order to pay off her student loans. Beaton’s remarkable account of this time, her first stand-alone book for adults, is both a graphic memoir and a work of reportage. “Ducks” is anchored by Beaton’s own story, but it seeks to show her as typical of a much larger swath of workers who are lured to the oil sands at the cost of their health, their dignity, and sometimes their lives. As a comic artist, Beaton is distinguished by the attention that she brings to the spaces between the panels of her drawings. In “Ducks,” she calls attention to a different kind of invisible space, and to the people who perform the punishing and lonely labor of the petroleum industry.

A panel from Kate Beaton's graphic memoir  Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.

The Divider

In this history of the Trump Presidency, Glasser, a staff writer, and Baker, a Times journalist, take us inside the White House to describe the fantastical degree of instability during Trump’s time in office, and the growing gulf between his values and those of the officials that surrounded him. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

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It’s natural when trying to understand a reversal in reputation as spectacular as Rudy Giuliani’s to wonder whether he was all that great to begin with, and Kirtzman’s lively biography reviews Giuliani’s entire career in that revisionist spirit. He details how Giuliani became regarded as a paragon of leadership because of his exemplary comportment in the aftermath of September 11th; and then how he quickly realized that his “reputation for integrity could be squeezed like a washcloth for all types of moneymaking ventures.” By 2007, Giuliani’s worth was estimated to be thirty million dollars. Yet his work for Donald Trump has reportedly brought him to the brink of bankruptcy. What happened? Giuliani was seduced by Mammon, Kirtzman suggests, and righteousness morphed into self-righteousness.

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First published in German in 1963, and now reissued in a lucid translation, Haushofer’s cult classic details the eerie experience of a woman who, on vacation in the Alps, wakes one morning to find she is entirely alone in the world, confined to a parcel of land by an invisible barrier. The narrator, alone with a few animals, establishes a kind of separatist commune deep in the woods. She spends much of the book shedding her old self. The novel is a dystopian one that gradually becomes a utopian one: our narrator makes a new community, creating a new life so fulfilling and engrossing that it is not clear she would wish to rejoin the old, ordinary, damaged society, even if she could. Haushofer’s inhabitation of animality is remarkably tender.

A blue illustration of a woman blocked by an invisible wall in the forest.

The Serpent Coiled in Naples

In a travelogue exploring the cultural and historical richness of Naples, Kociejowski emerges as a great questioner. He professes to be shy, but something about his enthusiasm (“the engine that drives the universe,” he notes) evidently elicits answers. Perhaps it’s because he asks the right people, the kind of people you would glimpse in a foreign city and wish to get to know. His new book takes on some of the largest questions that come with searching for the soul of this stupendous city: Has paganism survived Christianity in subtle or not so subtle ways? Do people think differently about death when living in immediate reach of a large volcano? For all the book’s exalted aims, though, the tone remains light, the content varied, the sense of mission wholly personal. The experience is more of an intellectual joyride than a standard history.

An alleyway full of hanging sheets pointing to a volcano in the distance.

Alive at the End of the World

The apocalypse is a many-faced phenomenon in this collection, several poems from which were published in The New Yorker . Jones creates a kaleidoscope of shared and private grief—mass shootings, American racism, a mother’s death—which also celebrates the ingenuity that it takes to survive.

Book cover for I Walk Between the Raindrops

I Walk Between the Raindrops

Boyle, in his twelfth short-story collection, finds so much humor in the casual twists and turns of fate that you may forget that the stories address such serious subjects as alcoholism, COVID -19, and animal research. Several entries, including the title story , first appeared in the magazine.

Book cover for Bliss Montage

Bliss Montage

The follow-up to Ma’s début novel, “Severance,” is a surreal and unnerving collection of stories that explores the nature of connection and autonomy. The story “ Peking Duck ” first appeared in the magazine’s annual Fiction Issue.

Book cover for Two Nurses, Smoking

Two Nurses, Smoking

In his virtuoso sixth collection, Means explores the ways in which we attempt to make sense of the past in order to achieve some kind of equilibrium in the present. The title story , among others, first appeared in the magazine.

Book cover for The Storm is Here

The Storm Is Here

In 2020, Mogelson, a staff writer known for his dispatches from war zones overseas, returned home to document a year of tumult in America. The pieces he filed from across the country climaxed in a remarkable first-person account of the invasion of the U.S. Capitol . Drawing on this work, his book searingly captures a country being torn apart both by phantom grievances and by genuine social injustice.

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Lucy by the Sea

Like all of Strout’s novels, this one has an anecdotal surface that belies a firm underlying structure. It begins with William, Lucy’s first husband, from whom she is long divorced, plucking her from her mournfully comfortable existence in New York City when the pandemic begins. They relocate to a house perched on a cliff over a rocky shore in Maine. Holed up together, they start getting on each other’s nerves, and revisit the tensions of their marriage. He tires of hearing her talk about the depressing plight of her brother; Lucy finds herself hating William every evening after dinner, because he doesn’t really listen to her. Strout skillfully builds her fiction out of the little slights and kindnesses that make up the architecture of human relationships.

The back of a person looking at a house on a cliff by the sea.

Less Is Lost

Picking up the plot nine months after his Pulitzer-winning “Less” left off, Greer’s sequel sends Less, a gay middle-aged novelist, on another roving adventure, this one across the continental United States; the novel advances by way of a series of road-trip encounters with characters who are mostly also “characters.” Less spends a great deal of time in R.V. parks, where he nervously tries to camouflage his sexuality by purchasing “a red bandanna, wraparound sunglasses, a hoot ’n’ holler T-shirt, flip-flops, a baseball cap, a cowboy hat, a bolo tie, and six miniature American flags.” His countrymen often mistake him for a foreigner, a fair confusion when it comes to a member of that dreaded coastal caste, the publishing world. To a globe-trotting “Minor American Novelist,” nowhere could be more exotic than America itself.

A man standing a desert with his car and cacti.

The Furrows

Serpell’s second novel batters against the fixities of language like a moth at a windowpane. The main narrator recounts the story of how, when she was twelve, her seven-year-old brother Wayne disappeared beneath the ocean’s waves, “the great grooves in the water” like furrows in a field. That story is, it turns out, a story, one account of how Wayne went away; whether or not the going away was a death cleaves the family. But, though the novel’s story lines turn and twist, the precision of Serpell’s language remains under exquisite control—while reminding us on every page that every story is necessarily an act of falsification.

Namwall Serpell.

[To] The Last [Be] Human

Compiling four of Graham’s recent poetry collections—“Sea Change,” “Place,” “Fast,” and “Runaway”—this volume is a monumental exploration of consciousness in an age of ecological, political, and existential crisis. Several poems, including “ I Won’t Live Long ,” were originally published in The New Yorker .

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Kick the Latch

Perched ambiguously between novel and oral history, this work of fiction is based on interviews that Scanlan conducted with an Iowa-born horse trainer named Sonia. She narrates Sonia’s life in a series of vignettes that play out across the gritty, intoxicating fever dream of the horse-racing world, as Sonia travels from race to race, living in trailers and motels. Her life is bound by the constant, gruelling rhythm of her work—“Four o’clock feed, seven days a week”—but whenever she is talking about horses, tenderness cuts through her stoicism like vinegar through oil. The work is structured by recurring themes: the violence and pleasures of intimacy, the balm and exhaustion of hard work, our bonds with animals and with our own animal natures—those surges of desire and aggression that unseat and rearrange us.

Illustration of a birds eye view of a trainer helping someone ride a horse

Fathers and Children

The good news is that your son, Arkady, is home from university; the not-so-good news is that he’s brought his dear friend Bazarov, a revolutionary who despises everything you wishy-washy liberals represent and has persuaded your son to join him in his “nihilist” creed. First published in 1862, in Russian, the book caused a furor upon its release. Young radicals felt targeted by the portrayal of the radical Bazarov (brilliant, intemperate, unaccountably rude); liberals felt that the book gave the radicals too much credit. Through the tensions between the ideological orientation of Arkady and Bazarov and that of their fathers, Turgenev probes the point at which belief tips over into fanaticism, and captures the inevitable rupture among parents and their children. This new English translation can be workmanlike and literal (starting with its title) but has inspired moments, and provides a worthy occasion to return to Turgenev’s masterpiece.

A father reaching out to his two sons in front of their mansion.

If I Survive You

The eight linked stories in this ravishing début largely concern three men living in Miami: an older man who fled Jamaica in the nineteen-seventies with his wife, Sanya; their elder son, a budding guitarist who’s prone to wise-stoner tautologies (“We all have to be what we have to be”); and the younger son, bookish and ironic, and the most frequent narrator. Escoffery’s fiction is marked by ingenuity. One tale unfolds in Jamaican patois; another dips in and out of Black American idioms. The book, about an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet, delights in mocking the trope of an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet. It feels thrillingly free.

Two boys playing with crabs.

One Beautiful Spring Day

Each panel in Jim Woodring’s huge new graphic novel is drawn in a style that looks like an eccentric woodcut. The effect is something like Doré meets Dalí: stories of pure dream logic rendered as reverently as an etching of the infant Christ. Woodring has published four book-length comics and an enormous collection of short stories that follow the distressing adventures of his hero, a woodland creature called Frank, who lives in a dreamlike world filled with deserts, forests, minareted castles, hot-air balloons, a devil, and the occasional cylindrical chicken. The Frank stories are both foreign and lucid, a set of gnomic parables that always end in a puff of irony or ambiguity. They leave behind not broad moral lessons but the harsh laws and uncrossable boundaries that apply only in a fictional world unlike any other.

Artwork by Jim Woodring

Diary of a Void

The gambit of Emi Yagi’s début novel is seductive enough to prop up a more ordinary book: a woman in her mid-thirties, sick of being treated like dirt at her office job, pretends to be pregnant, causing her colleagues to shower her with accommodations. “Diary of a Void,” translated into a rinsed, clear English by David Boyd and Lucy North, begins as a standard-issue workplace novel and turns into something deeper and weirder. Yagi wants to press on broad assumptions about life, vitality, and spirit, and where these qualities can be found. Blurring the lines between fertility and barrenness, the animate and the inanimate, “Diary of a Void” advances a passionate case for female interiority, for women’s creative pulse and rich inner life. Why, the novel seems to ask, is it necessary to sequester life within certain borders, and to guard those borders so obsessively?

Illustration of a woman hiding behind a curtain that shows the silhouette of a pregnant woman.

One Person, One Vote

This timely book is an excellent, if gloomy, guide to the abuse (or maybe just the use) of an apparently mundane feature of our system of elections: districting. “The only traditional districting principle that has been ubiquitous in America since before the founding,” Seabrook writes, “is the gerrymander itself.” That’s the way the system was set up: there was partisan gerrymandering even in the colonies. Seabrook goes on to detail, among other things, the way that New York’s districting was solidified under a handshake agreement that gave each party control of the process for one legislative chamber; and how the gridlock, backroom dealing, and inequitable distribution of resources of what Seabrook calls New York’s “criminal oligarchy” are a result of parties trying to create as many safe districts for their candidates as possible.

A saw cutting a hole around the voting box.

Laboratories Against Democracy

Grumbach is a quantitative political scientist, and his data suggest that, although some state governments have moved to the extremes, public opinion in those states has remained fairly stable. He therefore describes the country as “under entrenched minority rule.” What explains the political shift, he thinks, is that all politics has become national. National groups, he maintains, have exploited low-information environments to increasingly dominate the state level of politics and freeze out the opposition. “Antidemocratic interests need only to take control of a state government for a short period of time,” Grumbach points out, “to implement changes that make it harder for their opponents to participate in politics at all levels. ”

Book cover for No Land In Sight

No Land in Sight

This latest offering from Simic, a longtime New Yorker contributor , features his signature impish, uncanny take on metaphysics. As he contemplates memory, death, and the detritus of daily life, Simic makes the world itself his interlocutor, projecting his imagination onto the inanimate and in-between.

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Agent Josephine

A dancer, a singer, and the most celebrated night-club entertainer of her era, Josephine Baker might have been the smoothest operator of the twentieth century. She first captivated Parisians in 1925, when she appeared on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, nude save for her feathers. Had Baker’s career been restricted to her role as an entertainer, it would have had the allure of a thriller. But, during the war years, she was also—as this book by a British journalist chronicles with much fresh detail—a spy in the most literal sense, using a touring performer’s freedom of movement to transport intelligence documents. Later, the French government accorded her the Légion d’Honneur for military service.

Josephine Baker poses in a gown.

Last Letter to a Reader

This book gives us the writing lifetime of the reclusive, gnarly master of contemporary Australian literature: it reflects on his previous work, fourteen strange and brilliant books, most of them concerned with the twinned acts of reading and of writing about the act of reading. Murnane’s supreme conviction as a writer is that the images in our mind may be more real than the objects that surround us, and his writing often gives the act of thinking a shape and a sound. These essays are an extraordinary effort made to retrieve an irretrievable entity: the time of thinking, the time of living, “the book being written continually on one’s heart.”

Gerald Murnane sits outside with a light beam illuminating his face.

The Last Resort

Delving into the histories of more than twenty beachfront locales, from the Jersey shore to Indonesia, this chronicle of corrosive tourism describes a pattern of overdevelopment that, in our current ecological moment, “implies an end to the beach vacation as we know it.” The “nautical playgrounds” that Stodola surveys face coastal erosion, rising sea levels, wastewater leakage, and even Atlantis-like submersion. They also tend to segregate tourists from locals. Correctives such as taxing long-haul flights and transplanting man-made coral onto vanishing reefs can help, but Stodola believes that the resorts of the future will be “prohibitively expensive” and pushed back from the shore: the “paradise fantasy” must be reimagined, with the beach in a less central role.

Book cover for An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy

An Honest Living

Set amid New York’s rare-book trade, this slow-burning début crime novel is also an atmospheric homage to the film “Chinatown.” The narrator, a former corporate lawyer who now undertakes quasi-legal freelance work, is hired by a woman to investigate her husband’s plans to sell a collection of old books owned by her family. The case leads him to A. M. Byrne, “the best American novelist under the age of fifty,” and to Byrne’s father, a wealthy businessman who has a scheme to redevelop the Brooklyn waterfront. The book is driven less by its plot than by a conflict between yearning and resignation. “Sometimes a conspiracy is just another word for life carrying on without you noticing it,” the narrator says.

Book cover for Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez

In these essays by a poet, arts writer, and self-identified “queer brown butch,” encounters in Los Angeles and the Southwest with aging punks, border activists, lesbian legends, and others give rise to explorations of Latinx identity, cultural resistance, and the role of art. In one essay, Gutiérrez recounts a foray into the desert with a group of aid workers supplying water to migrants, and reflects on the “deep and complex matrices” that connect her to immigrants, including her Mexican father and Salvadoran mother. “I have been spared the experience of crossing the desert,” she writes. Still, the landscape cannot be separated from its history of violence, and there is no desert vista “that doesn’t have the uncanny attached to it.”

Book cover for Girls They Write Songs About by Carlene Bauer

Girls They Write Songs About

This prickly-coy novel centers on two women who move to New York in the nineteen-nineties to become writers—or, as one of them, the narrator, puts it, “to be seen as an overpoweringly singular instance of late-twentieth-century womanhood.” The women meet and become friends while working at a music magazine, but the narrator opens her account by telling us that she and the other woman no longer speak. What shattered the friendship? Bauer is a crackerjack chronicler of the slide into humility which follows ravenous early adulthood, when “we felt that we owed the books we’d read proof that we were as open and free as they had commanded us to be.”

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All That Moves Us

The chief of pediatric neurosurgery at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Wellons writes unsparingly of his chosen specialty, and “the nearly unbearable pain that we must at times unleash upon our patients.” We see Wellons operate on patients with tumors, blood-vessel malformations, brain swelling, developmental problems, and damage from trauma. The severity of the situations he confronts becomes an opportunity to prevent the direst outcomes, “not always, but most of the time.” He tells a number of stories in which he takes responsibility for irreparable mistakes. But he avoids growing isolated by perfectionism and imperiousness, turning to colleagues and mentors who reconcile him to human imperfection.

A person walking into the wrinkles of a brain.

There have always been two views of Putin: in one, he is a pragmatic statesman, doing what he can for Russia under difficult circumstances; in the other, he is an ideologue, bent on restoring something like the Soviet empire to its 1945 borders. Short’s book, the most comprehensive English-language biography to date of the Russian leader, depicts Putin as a fairly impressive but also typical product of a patriotic working-class Soviet family of the nineteen-fifties.Young Putin was an indifferent student and an enthusiastic street brawler. In college, he was recruited by the K.G.B., becoming a middling officer with a short fuse. In 1985, he was dispatched to East Germany, by spy standards a backwater. His rise to the presidency was in many ways accidental; Putin found himself in the right place at the right time over and over, and he impressed the right people with his diligence and his loyalty. If some of his supporters were disappointed by their man, Short writes, others got exactly what they wanted, and much more.

George H. W. Bush shakes hands with Mikhail Gorbachev with a large silhouette of Putin in the background.

Bitter Orange Tree

In this novel of remembrance and regret, Zuhour, an Omani student at a British university, obsessed with the possibility of “regaining or restoring just one moment from the past,” reflects on her grandmother, who has recently died. Described by Zuhour as a “mountain” of fortitude, she was born the daughter of a renowned horseman who left the family after the death of her mother. Much of the grandmother’s life story takes place in the context of devastating waves of drought, inflation, and famine, and Alharthi marshals these elements to construct a mosaic of history with women’s crushing vulnerability at its center.

Book cover for Resistance by Halik Kochanski

This ambitious history offers the first unified picture of resistance against Nazi Germany in the many countries it invaded, including Poland, where the Reich’s brutality sparked immediate rebellion; the Balkans, where partisan activity devolved into civil war; and France, where collaborationist policies delayed the population’s sense of urgency. Kochanski examines clandestine presses, intelligence efforts, sabotage, armed uprisings, and civilian protests, noting that resisters’ motives and methods varied widely, and that some stories have been distorted by nationalist narratives. Dispensing with heroics and highlighting the imperfect, human nature of the underground, she nevertheless depicts a vital defense of dignity, spirit, and the future, mounted against all odds.

Book cover for Chinatown by Thuận

During the investigation of a bomb scare on the Paris Métro, the nameless passenger who narrates this novel recounts her journey from postwar Hanoi to twenty-first-century Belleville and reflects on her past marriage to an architect belonging to Vietnam’s Han Chinese minority. When border disputes with China sparked Sinophobia in Hanoi, he abandoned her and their son and headed for Saigon’s populous Chinatown. Aside from glimpses of a book that the narrator is writing, the novel unfolds in one unbroken paragraph, a virtuosic stream-of-consciousness mapping of the afterlives of diaspora.

Book cover for Paul Laurence Dunbar by Gene Andrew Jarrett

Paul Laurence Dunbar

One of America’s first Black writers to achieve international acclaim, Dunbar was born to former slaves, in 1872. After submitting his writing to newspapers in his mid-teens, he went on to become a literary celebrity, reciting his poems on regional tours. However, his most popular work, dialect poetry, made him feel like “a caged bird,” forced to pander to white audiences. In this biography, Jarrett aims to cut through “the myths of his celebrity to the facts of his life.” Drawing on Dunbar’s sizable correspondence with friends, family, and benefactors, Jarrett illustrates his struggle to reconcile his professional success with a sense of himself as a failure—an errant husband, an alcoholic, and, above all, a Black artist who couldn’t liberate his community from racial stereotypes.

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Salka Valka

Nowhere in the novels of Laxness (1902-1998) is the conflict between the shining ideal of socialism and the dignity of individual people on plainer display than in this one from 1931, and the new translation captures the Icelandic writer’s singular dour-droll tone with uncanny grace. Roiling with “unruly vitality,” young Salka arrives with her mother one night in a coastal village. Tall and strong, she’s determined to buy herself a pair of trousers soon “and stop being a girl.” Surviving the predations of a local drunk, Salka falls for a Communist revolutionary—but she’s too alive as a character to conform to any ideology.

Portrait of Halldór Laxness.

In this evocative memoir of working as a seasonal farmhand in upstate New York and Vermont, Gaydos offers what, at first, reads like a straightforward catalogue of farm life: how pigs are raised and slaughtered; how radishes are harvested; where farmhands sleep. But the tranquil simplicity belies a deeper purpose. The farms where Gaydos works are independent, their output extremely vulnerable to the whims of nature; she has seen crops fail and “worms rot a flock of sheep from the hooves up.” And people are scarcely less vulnerable than livestock: a farmhand contracts Lyme disease; Gaydos has a miscarriage. Our dominion over nature, it becomes clear, is incomplete. The reason Gaydos likes farming, she writes, is that “one simply must accept the outcome.”

Book cover for One’s Company by Ashley Hutson

One’s Company

A random moment of luck sets this novel in motion: Bonnie, a thirtysomething grocery-store worker plagued by a persistent sense of “wrongness” and by memories of a traumatic robbery, wins the lottery and gets the chance to leave her old life behind. She decides to exist in her favorite TV show, “Three’s Company”—by moving alone to a rural locale, re-creating all the show’s sets, and the characters’ lives, one after another. “So many people wanted to solve their problem of self,” she thinks. “I wanted to trash it entirely.” When external forces intrude—in the form of storms, urban explorers, an old friend who’s determined to save her from herself—Bonnie is forced to reckon with the controlled world she has created.

Book cover for Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

Nightcrawling

Kiara, the narrator of this searing novel, is a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout in East Oakland, California, who has to take care of the boys in her life—an immature older brother, an addict-neighbor’s young son—despite not having anyone to take care of her. After a man forces himself on her, she reasons that her body will be used with or without her consent and turns to sex work. Her johns range from men as destitute as she is to the local police. Careful not to portray Kiara as a victim, Mottley shows us the pleasures of family, friendship, and love. The result is an intimate portrait of a young Black woman searching for autonomy and fulfillment in a society designed to deny her both.

Book cover for I Used to Live Here Once

I Used to Live Here Once

The Dominica-born British novelist Jean Rhys (1890-1979), whose “Wide Sargasso Sea” (1966) became a key text in feminist and post-colonial literature, lived a tempestuous bohemian life—rich in marriages, affairs, drink-fuelled rows—much of which she mined to create the heroines of her first four novels. This enthralling new biography powerfully evokes the Caribbean world of Rhys’s girlhood, whose dynamics of prejudice, abuse, and complicity she never really escaped, and her later life, through which the constant theme of poverty runs like a watermark through a pound note. But, where other biographers have read Rhys’s works in a reductive spirit of quasi-psychiatric diagnosis, Seymour shows that Rhys’s heroines are not mere alter egos, and, refreshingly, treats the novels as fully autonomous works of art.

Jean Rhys looks out of a window.

Hollywood Ending

Auletta, a contributor since 1977, writes about the life, career, and downfall of the former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, whom he first profiled in 2002. His account of Weinstein’s criminal trial in New York was excerpted in the magazine.

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Picasso’s War

The creation of a market for Picasso’s work in the United States took almost thirty years, from the first American Picasso show, in 1911, to the MOMA blockbuster (“Picasso: Forty Years of His Art”), in 1939, which, Eakin writes, “electrified the city.” His book isn’t really about Picasso; rather, it offers a gripping and thorough history of modern American taste-making. Its principals are the dealers, gallery owners, curators, and critics who make up the art world—figures like John Quinn, a collector, and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. Modern art’s journey to American success, we learn, was propelled by transatlantic cultural exchange and the mysterious and ever-shifting elements that combine to create cultural prestige.

Picasso's guitar collage placed in a shopping cart.

Everything I Need I Get from You

When the Internet-culture reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany first encountered One Direction , the summer after her freshman year at college, she was sad and sick of herself. Her first impressions of the British-Irish boy band—bland songs, “too much shiny brown hair”—were overtaken by a weird sense of enchantment. Tiffany’s wistful, winning, and unexpectedly funny book sets out to explain why she “and millions of others needed something like One Direction as badly as we did,” and “how the things we did in response to that need changed the online world for just about everybody.” One of Tiffany’s most provocative arguments is that fans have drafted the Internet’s operating manual. She also evokes the intimacy of the fan-artist relationship: how your chosen mania can become the lens through which you process the world. The book draws intriguing parallels between fandom and religious experience, teasing out the mystical quality of fans’ devotion, how oddly close we can feel to icons we’ve never met.

Illustration of pop stars inserted into a 15th-century Netherlandish painting.

Drawn Together

Based on chats with real-life couples, de Recat’s book ruminates on the nature of love and includes hilarious and poignant details from the relationships that the author surveyed. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Book cover for Horse by Geraldine Brooks

One of America’s first champion thoroughbreds, Lexington (1850-75), stands at the center of this deft novel, which moves between the present day and the Civil War era in a polyphonic examination of the fraught racial aspects of horse racing in U.S. history. Theo, a Nigerian American art historian, finds a portrait of a horse in his neighbor’s trash, and meets Jess, an Australian scientist who is involved in analyzing the recently discovered skeleton of a powerful stallion. Back in Lexington’s lifetime, we meet his young groom, Jarret, living in slavery and torn between his desire for freedom and his devotion to the animal. These narratives and others gradually fit together to create a picture of the artistic, athletic, and scientific passions that horses can inspire in humans.

Book cover for The Pope at War

The Pope at War

Afraid of jeopardizing the Vatican’s precarious neutrality during the Second World War, Pius XII was so reluctant to upset Mussolini and Hitler that he refused to publicly condemn the slaughter of Europe’s Jews. Yet he has retained many defenders, and his legacy has been much debated, in part because his papers were sealed until 2020. Drawing on these newly available documents, this history offers both a masterly character study of a flawed, tormented leader and a cautionary tale about the perils of both-sides-ism. Although the Pope managed to protect the papacy during a tumultuous period, Kertzer definitively concludes that “as a moral leader, Pius XII must be judged a failure.”

Book cover for Geography Is Destiny

Geography Is Destiny

Ten thousand years of British history are condensed in a book that seeks to explain what led to Brexit. A pattern emerges in which Continental innovations (in agriculture, technology, religion, and governance) have invariably pushed northwestward, with the Isles repeatedly facing encroachment and population replacement. The pattern was disrupted in the imperial age, but this, Morris contends, was a blip, whereas the anxieties that produced Brexit—immigration, identity, ownership—represent the norm. Looking to the future, Morris predicts that, as the globe continues to shrink, “Beijing, not Brussels,” will become the focus of Britain’s encroachment angst.

Book cover for Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

In this novel of medieval grotesquerie, Lapvona is a realm where cruelty reigns. Marek, a disfigured boy, and his father, Jude, a shepherd, live a life of squalor until an accident results in Marek’s being adopted by Lapvona’s slovenly lord, Villiam. While Marek grows fat on the castle’s delicacies, Jude and the other villagers go hungry during a drought. Alternating between scenes of idle decadence and of desperate struggle for survival, the novel abounds with violence, cannibalism, and magic, while human compassion flickers only occasionally. Moshfegh’s brutal vision can make for grim reading, but it has a coherence that is rare in contemporary fiction.

best reviewed books 2022

New and Selected Stories

The primary tension in Rivera Garza’s fiction is between the unruly intensities of sexual desire and the political disciplining of the body, and it’s at its most concentrated in this latest translation of the Mexican-born writer’s work. The book assembles pieces from three collections first published in Spanish, and adds a new collection of flash fiction. In her earliest fiction, we are introduced to a recurrent narrator named Xian, “a slacker and occasional thief and queer liar,” who slinks through the world with an attractive insouciance; in another collection, men seeking women from their pasts trip from one metaphysical plane to another—from dream world to waking life, from the harsh present to the glow of memory.

Body parts smushed together inside a silhouette of a man's profile.

A Trail of Crab Tracks

This concluding novel in an epic historical trilogy about Cameroon reimagines a nation by reimagining the novel: ranging back and forth across time, weaving real-world figures amid fictional characters, and shifting among languages to powerful effect. Tanou, a middle-aged professor at an American university, attempts to come to terms with his father’s history, one entwined with the birth of the Cameroonian state. Tanou’s immense thirst for his father’s recognition and approval is the emotional engine that powers the novel, even as his father’s far more dramatic history of colonial tragedy unspools around it; ultimately, the two narratives fuse into one, yielding a singularly complex interrogation of the relationship between thought and action, between writing and the world.

Portrait of Patrice Nganang.

In this reissue of a 2013 classic of trans fiction, twenty-nine-year-old Maria Griffiths addresses other trans women in popular blog posts on the early-two-thousands Internet, showing, through her own life, where trans women often go wrong. But Maria can’t get her offline life together. The novel brilliantly contrasts the useful things she says with the dumb things she does. A road trip to Nevada, in a car stolen from her ex-girlfriend, is her attempt to find out what she really wants. The book introduces its readers to a trans woman’s consciousness from the inside while strenuously resisting what Burt calls the “Trans 101” stance; it does not, as Binnie says in a new afterword, seek “validation from cis people.” The tone is defiant, terse, not quite cynical, and sometimes flip. Authenticity, not uplift, is the point.

A person waking up from bed, looking at the mountains outside.

In this collection of articles that originally appeared in The New Yorker , Keefe, a staff writer, finds artful dodgers lurking across the globe—from Wall Street boardrooms and Amsterdam apartments to West African mines .

Book cover for The Hangman and His Wife by Nancy Dougherty

The Hangman and His Wife

Assassinated in 1942 by Czechoslovak resistance fighters, the Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich left few traces of his life, but Dougherty, who died in 2013, spent decades researching this account of his rise, most notably through interviews with Heydrich’s widow, Lina. The son of an opera singer, Heydrich was dismissed from the Navy before becoming Heinrich Himmler’s deputy and then the head of the Gestapo. Dubbed “the man with the iron heart” by Hitler, he comes across as an opportunist rather than as a true believer. Lina, willfully refusing to accept her husband’s role in atrocities, claims that his importance is “always overrated.” In photographs, she says, “he’s shown where he really belongs, always in the second rank.”

Book cover for Keats by Lucasta Miller

Approaching the arch-Romantic poet through “Nine Poems and One Epitaph,” this brief biography blends close readings of Keats’s output with anecdotes gleaned from his letters and the accounts of contemporaries. Miller draws parallels between art and life—“To Autumn” is linked to political unrest, “The Eve of St. Agnes” to a woman with whom Keats had a relationship—without insisting on perfect correspondences. There are some personal asides, but the focus is on Keats’s complex life and style, and the book’s deftness and passion make it an excellent introduction to a poet who remains influential for his ambiguities and for language that “resists any final definition.”

Imaginary Languages by Marina Yaguello

Imaginary Languages

Expanding on a study published in France in 1984, a noted linguist surveys the history of language invention, an enterprise undertaken by centuries of “lunatic lovers of language,” for reasons philosophical, political, artistic, and arcane. Yaguello recounts the utopian impulses behind projects like Esperanto and Volapük; speculative fiction’s explorations of linguistic theory; and the search, rooted in Judeo-Christian mythology, for an original, universal tongue. The mind-bending nature of the book’s subject, which offers seemingly infinite paths of inquiry, could overwhelm, but Yaguello relates the material with gusto, offering an idiosyncratic, illuminating perspective on the development of Western thought.

Book cover for Fire Island by Jack Parlett

Fire Island

This richly textured history of a place “equal parts real and imagined,” which has served as a queer summertime mecca for more than a century, unfolds like a pageant, populated by notable figures who have sought sun, sex, and solace on its beaches. Against a backdrop of tea dances, costume parties, and anonymous sexual encounters, we meet W. H. Auden, smoking at daybreak; Patricia Highsmith, brawling in Duffy’s Bar; Frank O’Hara, killed by a dune buggy. Parlett captures the giddy excesses, but his real aim is to show how a community sought to define, protect, liberate, and celebrate themselves, realizing “the fantasy of a world away from shame and silence.”

best reviewed books 2022

In the artist Anne Truitt’s final journal, the prose is as unembellished and direct in impact as her sculptures. Truitt remained an evenhanded witness to her own life, the pleasure of visits from grandchildren running alongside her grief at a friend’s passing. As in her art, Truitt was constantly making monoliths of memory—including the moment a half century before when she understood what she wanted to do with her life: “And one day . . . it occurred to me that if I made a sculpture it would just stand there and time would roll over its head and the light would come and the light would go and it would be continuously revealed.” Her journals offer a model of discipline and open-ended inquiry and a welcome counterweight to the kind of anxieties that so often accompany a creative practice.

Anne Truitt at the André Emmerich gallery.

The Twilight World

The Japanese lieutenant Hiroo Onoda emerged from hiding, in 1974, after fighting the Second World War for twenty-nine years. He’d been deployed to the Philippine island of Lubang in 1944, when he was twenty-two, and had received secret orders to hold his position even as the Imperial Army withdrew from its airfield there. Trained in military intelligence, he dismissed all outside communication as propaganda. The director Werner Herzog has made Onoda the subject of his wondrous first novel. In Herzog’s lightly mythologized version of the story, Lubang exists outside of time, and Onoda’s war has the eerie gravity of a thought experiment come to life. Herzog, who has made a career studying the emptiness of meaning-making, celebrates his subject’s crusade even as he dismisses its abject triviality; it takes a kindred spirit to admire someone who held himself hostage to a lost cause.

Werner Herzog in New York City.

Tracy Flick Can’t Win

Tracy Flick, the teen-age star of “Election,” Perrotta’s 1998 novel, was ambitious, assertive, a little crazed in her quest to become student-body president. She seemed in the suburbs but not of them: destined for genuine greatness. She could not have known how the world—illness, economic hardship, grief—would crush her, conspiring with sexism to stamp out her hope, her spark. This sequel, set in New Jersey around the end of 2018 and imbued with the author’s sense of ironized grace, finds Tracy, now in her mid-forties, grappling with topics that were only nascent in “Election”: What does it mean to be special? What is the nature of success, of failure? The book pores over these questions like an honors student before midterms.

An illustration of a blond girl looking at another girl on the school bus

Streets of Gold

Abramitzky and Boustan, professors of economics at Stanford and Princeton, respectively, make a powerful case for the benefits of immigration, not only to migrants but to their hosts. Seeing the long-run benefits requires measurement “at the pace of generations, rather than years,” they contend. Many of their arguments come from their analysis of genealogical records collected by Ancestry.com, which, in combination with detailed census records, debunk the idea that earlier waves of European migrants were more industrious and more culturally assimilable than contemporary migrants from elsewhere. Even if migrants arrive poor, “one generation later their children more than pay for their parents’ debts,” Abramitzky and Boustan write.

A family looks towards an abstract gateway made of collaged money.

Although structured around a retracing of significant walks taken by Henry David Thoreau, this book quickly reveals itself to be less a historical reënactment than a series of meditations on the things that, now as then, fill our lives—breakups and new relationships, family history and its reverberations, nature and our rapidly changing place within it—all informed by Thoreau’s luminous, lyrical prose. From the shores of Cape Cod to the heights of Mt. Katahdin, Shattuck finds moments of sublimity (the call of a loon, the comfort of friendship) and disillusionment (health problems, tourists), but his main message is the primacy of love, for both the people around us and the world we inhabit.

Book cover for School Days by Jonathan Galassi

School Days

Having once been a pupil at the ultra-preppy boarding school where he teaches, Sam Brandt, the protagonist of this novel, is approached by the headmaster to investigate a recent allegation of a decades-old sexual assault by an unspecified faculty member. As Sam starts digging, we are transported back to 1964, where febrile schoolboy crushes abound and students are enraptured by one particularly charismatic teacher. Meanwhile, Sam is forming a sense of his own gay identity, after spending his adulthood closeted and married. The book neatly encompasses much of modern gay history—pre-Stonewall secrecy, AIDS , today’s climate of openness—but, as Sam mulls the paths his classmates have taken, it also becomes a sensitive evocation of late middle age.

Book cover for Metaphysical Animals

Metaphysical Animals

In postwar Oxford, the four philosophers at the heart of this absorbing history—Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch—came together to give new life to moral philosophy. As Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman write, prewar British philosophy had been dominated by logical positivists who dismissed inquiry into the nature of goodness as “nonsense.” But the war presented urgent moral questions, not to mention new opportunities for women in academia. In the following decades, each of this book’s subjects produced work that, in seeking to reconnect “human life, action and perception” with morality, remains vitally relevant.

Book cover for Adriatic by Robert D. Kaplan

Part travelogue, part geopolitical study, this freewheeling book examines the kaleidoscopic histories and cultures of the countries fringing the Adriatic Sea. Kaplan begins in Italy, contemplating the region’s ascendancy under the Venetian Republic, and then enters the “more politically fragile terrain” of Slovenia and Montenegro. His central thesis is that the Adriatic may soon, once again, take on global significance, as the Western maritime terminus of China’s Belt and Road Initiative; Trieste will be linked with Hong Kong. Today’s Adriatic, Kaplan writes, is a “geographical metaphor for an age that is passing: the modern age itself in Europe.”

Book cover for Avalon by Nell Zink

When Bran, the protagonist of this offbeat bildungsroman, is ten years old, her mother joins a Buddhist colony, abandoning her to the dubious care of her common-law stepfather. His family belongs to a motorcycle gang, evades taxes on principle, houses Bran in a mice-infested lean-to, and compels her to work unpaid in its plant nursery. Yet Bran emerges into her twenties with a cheerfully demented optimism. She sheep-sits for strangers, works as a barista, makes avant-garde student films, and falls in love with a magnetic, disturbed college student, who introduces her to literature. He praises the artless outlook that makes Bran and the novel captivating: “You’re still using your eyes to see the world, instead of adopting the proper skewed perspective of an egomaniac.”

Book cover for Love Marriage by Monica Ali

Love Marriage

Set in London, this quick-footed and absorbing novel begins with Yasmin, a young doctor, newly engaged, fretting about her Indian-born parents’ meeting with the mother of her fiancé, Joe. In front of this woman, a wealthy white feminist activist, Yasmin cringes at her mother’s clothes and her sincere father’s imperviousness to sarcasm, “a level of Englishness to which he could never aspire.” The playful clash of cultures evolves into a subtle exploration of the ways in which both immigrant and nonimmigrant families have shaped their children, transmitting unexplored trauma across generations. As Joe tries to maintain boundaries with his mother, his therapist tells him, “What we do not know controls us.”

Book cover for Fight Like Hell by Kim Kelly

Fight Like Hell

This history of American labor places today’s resurgence of union activity in the context of past struggles, ranging from the textile mills of New England in the eighteen-forties to the emergence of flight attendants, in the nineteen-thirties. Employers, seeking “docility” in marginalized people, have sometimes pitted groups against one another: in response to Chinese-exclusion policies, Hawaiian sugar-plantation owners brought in Japanese workers, who were in turn replaced by Filipinos. Kelly’s broad view makes it possible to see resonances across history and locale. Like the New York garment workers who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in 1911, many of the Bangladeshi workers killed in the Dhaka factory collapse of 2013 made clothes for American companies.

Book cover for Stepping Back from the Ledge by Laura Trujillo

Stepping Back from the Ledge

The author of this memoir reckons with her mother’s suicide, a decade ago in Grand Canyon National Park, and with the agonizing conviction that she was to blame for it. Not long before, Trujillo had told her mother that her stepfather had sexually abused her for years. In unvarnished prose, she conjures the despair that gripped her in the aftermath of the death: “My grandma blamed me, as did my mom’s sister and her brother.” Later, Trujillo, a journalist, uses park-service reports to reconstruct a time line of her mother’s final journey. Hoping thereby to understand her mother’s decision, she instead confronts how, in cases of suicide, “only one person ‘gets’ an ending; the rest of us are left with a story abandoned mid-sentence.”

Book cover for Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman

Acts of Service

Having a devoted, dependable girlfriend doesn’t stop Eve, the narrator of this début novel, from posting nude selfies online or from becoming involved with a couple, Olivia and Nathan, who respond to the pictures. Olivia is a painter with a day job at a family investment firm, where Nathan is her boss. Eve finds herself intoxicated by Nathan’s masculinity, which draws her into “a state of grotesque candor,” even as she frets over Olivia’s well-being and struggles to reconcile her ideas of gender politics with the discovery of pleasure and abandon. Her adventure, she realizes, presents all the issues that preoccupy her—“desire, sex, gender, attention, intimacy, vanity, and power”—in such a way that she can “study them like fruit in a bowl.”

Book cover for Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

Time Shelter

In this antic fantasy of European politics, narrated by a fictionalized version of the author, an enigmatic friend of his designs “a clinic of the past,” which soothes Alzheimer’s patients with environments from a time they can still remember. As the treatment gains prominence, feverish nostalgia grips the continent. People dress up in national costumes, and there is a Brexit-style referendum to return to the past (though the countries disagree on the era). In the East, there are socialist rallies and even a re-assassination of Franz Ferdinand. “History is still news,” Gospodinov writes, cunningly drawing attention to the violence that the past wreaks on the present.

Book cover for The Shores of Bohemia

The Shores of Bohemia

From roughly 1910 to 1960, Cape Cod was a yeasty outpost for lefty artists and intellectuals—“Greenwich Village sunburnt,” as the editor Floyd Dell said of Provincetown. Mary McCarthy lived and set her barbed novel “A Charmed Life” on the Cape. Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams felt able to do their best work there. Robert Motherwell wrote of “the radiant summer light of Provincetown that rivals the Greek islands.” In this admiring chronicle, the author shows how, across half a century of tippling, rabble-rousing, and bed-hopping on the Cape, “a movement that shaped American art, literature, design, and theater rose and fell like the tides on its shores.”

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Two Wheels Good

In the history of the bicycle, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. As Rosen relates, the Laufmaschine was invented in 1817: it had a wooden frame, a leather saddle, two in-line wheels, and no pedals; you scooted around on it. In England, they_ _were called “swiftwalkers.” Lately, posh toddlers, the newest preschool jet set, roll around on modern swiftwalkers, marketed as “wooden balance bikes.” If you bike all your life, there’s a fair chance you’ll bike the whole history of bicycles—a history that this book examines through a set of quirky and kaleidoscopic stories. To ride a bike is to come as close to flying by your own power as humans ever will, Rosen observes. No part of you touches the ground. You ride on air.

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What’s Good

Levin Becker disapproves of those who would insist on “instrumentalizing rap as a vector of sociopolitical insight without also revelling and rejoicing in its vital sense of play.” Rhyme is, of course, central to rap, and a key part of Levin Becker’s mission is to defend rap’s frequent use of imperfect rhymes as a superior form of “slanting” language, responsive to American speech in all its variety. What emerges is an argument that American hip-hop, wrongly characterized as an “authentic” form of expression, a “street” idiom, is both levelling and exalting; it has renewed the language of American song by broadening its resources and sharpening its ear.

A drawing of a pie and a tie.

Spin Dictators

Guriev and Treisman offer a social-scientific perspective on the mechanics of new autocrats and their common world view. They draw a yin-and-yang distinction between “fear dictators,” the classic kind, and “spin dictators,” the contemporary kind. What emerges as the central observation is that the new generation of authoritarians, whether fully fledged or still aspirant, as in the U.S., usually exploit the apparent levers of democratic politics but use more discreet forms of manipulation to extend their rule: rather than cancel elections, they rig them; rather than outlaw opposition media, they marginalize them; sooner than start a gulag, they put constraints on Google.

A person climbing a ladder up a statue of a dictator.

The Letters of Thom Gunn

Gunn’s letters are a primer both on literature and on the poet himself, a British expatriate who spent most of his life in San Francisco, and who had a tendency, in his work, to hide in plain sight. In these letters, he relays the aftermath of his mother’s suicide and the losses he experienced during the AIDS crisis in tones of measured anguish; the letters are also full of his love for leather and motorcycles, and his sometimes childlike reaching for the ecstatic. If death is the most vivid, indelible thing life offers us, Gunn’s writing asks again and again, how do we make the best of both life and death?

Thom Gunn stands in Hyde Park holding a cigarette to his lips.

The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

As the nation confronts a deepening struggle with inequality, political unrest, and a climate in crisis, McKibben, a longtime contributor, looks back at two events that occurred during his childhood in Lexington, Massachusetts—the birthplace of the revolution—to try to understand how we got here. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Book cover for The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer

The Last Days of Roger Federer

The twilight of careers underpins these kaleidoscopic musings on artistic and sporting endeavors. Dyer considers the late phase of Bob Dylan, the mythology surrounding Nietzsche’s decline and death, and the drive of talented people to keep going. Andy Murray, hobbled by injury, “persisted in coming back for more even if more meant less and less”; Willem de Kooning, blind and suffering from dementia, made paintings in which “the obstacle became the path.” An irony of endings, Dyer writes, is that “lastness is oddly self-perpetuating. For a while at least, one last thing generates and leads to another.”

Book cover for A Sister’s Story by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

A Sister’s Story

The sisters from the author’s previous novel, “A Girl Returned”—a stoic narrator and her fiery younger sister, Adriana—reappear in this unsettling companion tale. The narrator, now a professor in France, returns to her home town, on the coast of Abruzzo, after Adriana has a mysterious accident. Her renewed immersion in the town’s social rhythms, particularly in the gritty fishermen’s quarter, brings back powerful memories—of the end of her marriage to a gentle yet duplicitous husband, of Adriana’s harried arrival at her house with a baby. “I felt intensely the unease of being her sister,” the narrator says of Adriana, as she moves fluidly between the past and the present, sifting years of unarticulated emotions.

Book cover for Life on the Rocks by Juli Berwald

Life on the Rocks

This book on the plight of coral reefs spikes the normally glum discourse about ocean conservation with a measure of capitalist techno-optimism, arguing that a combination of marine science and smart business could yet bring salvation. The heroes here are various public-private partnerships: commercial coral farms in Bali; a reef-restoration project in Sulawesi; debt swaps and “blue bonds” for ocean protection in Seychelles; even a geo-engineered “cloud brightening” plan for the Great Barrier Reef. Berwald interweaves the insights of conservationists and entrepreneurs with a parallel narrative of her daughter’s struggles with O.C.D., suggesting that complex problems call for radical solutions.

best reviewed books 2022

Who Killed Jane Stanford?

In his engaging new book, the historian Richard White investigates the mysterious death of Jane Stanford, the widow of the railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, in 1905. When a violent spasm threw her from her bed, Stanford had told the doctor who rushed to her care, “I have been poisoned.” Authorities insisted that Stanford could not have been murdered, for the kindly widow had no enemies. But as White investigates her murder he finds that Stanford’s sanitized public persona masked a reality that was both more scandalous and more strange. The mystery of her death turns out to hinge on the mystery of her life: how a woman at the turn of the twentieth century could amass such power, and how she could disguise that power from the public.

A portrait of Jane Stanford.

The Revenge of Power

A foreign-policy maven’s account of how recent demagogues have come to power and used the tools of our time—social media, the society of spectacle—to promote one-man rule and the suppression of dissent, the book excels in the mordant detailing of its profiles. It contains portrayals of certain second-tier autocrats—less famous than Putin and Erdoğan, but exemplary of the rise of what Naím calls “3P” (populist, polarizing, and post-truth) politicians. He details how these autocrats often follow a similar, and, to Americans, depressingly familiar route: after improbable success as loudmouth entertainers, not taken seriously by the political establishment, they attract a passionate minority and then, suddenly, they’re in power.

Book cover for Everything Abridged

Everything Abridged

Dayle’s witty collection of stories provides social commentary with a satirical twist, breaking down American racism and politics. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

Book cover for Either/Or

This sequel to Batuman’s first novel, “The Idiot,” takes her protagonist, Selin, through sophomore year of college and a hilarious and poignant series of intellectual and sexual explorations. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

Book cover for Rouge Street by Shuang Xuetao

Rouge Street

These three intricate novellas converge on the author’s home city, Shenyang, recalling the gritty neighborhoods of his childhood, in the early nineties, which were populated by drunks, gamblers, and laid-off factory workers. In sparse, vernacular prose, Shuang uses fabulist noir to evoke the pace of social change: a hollow-boned inventor dreams of creating a flying machine; children fall into an icy lake and encounter a gigantic fish; a string of violent carjackings dredges up submerged memories. “The past has nothing to do with the present,” one character admonishes, and Shuang’s multi-voiced narratives both challenge and confirm that maxim, conveying the contested legacies of recent Chinese history.

Book cover for Dress Code by Véronique Hyland

“Controlling what you wear is a proxy for controlling what you do,” Hyland writes in this examination not only of fashion but also of sartorial life more generally. Hyland finds meaning in what we wear, whether in the nineteenth-century vogue for bloomers or in courtroom attire, which is chosen to convey its wearer’s respectability. Indeed, even an anti-fashion impulse can yield fashionable results. Hyland shows how normcore, which “annihilated the idea of personal style and its emphasis on individuality,” arose as a street look just as online forums for self-expression, such as blogs and Instagram, were becoming coöpted by corporate sponsors.

Book cover for Journeys to Heaven and Hell

Journeys to Heaven and Hell

Ehrman follows up his masterly history of concepts of the afterlife with one about narratives in which a living soul—like Dante led by Virgil—is given a tour of what awaits us after death. Focussing on pre-Christian and early-Christian literature, Ehrman shows how Homer’s egalitarian afterlife, where all meet the same fate, gave way to Virgil’s version, where an elect few enjoy eternal rewards while the rest suffer torments. Early Christians imagined Hell as a punishment for nonbelievers, but it was gradually cast as an elaborate realm that terrorized even the faithful. As Ehrman notes, in every era, such tales aimed to teach readers “how to live in the here and now.”

Book cover for Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej

Little Rabbit

Queer, young, and finishing her first novel at an artists’ residency, the narrator of this unusual erotic tale is the last person who would expect to find herself in bed with a rich and powerful older man. Even more challenging to her self-conception is that the man, a successful choreographer, is intent on dominating her, in the bedroom and beyond—and that she enjoys submitting to him. Her queer friends are horrified that she would, as her roommate puts it, be “some man’s little woman,” but the narrator finds this less constrictive than her old life. Songsiridej’s sex scenes are notably arresting, both in their urgency and in the way they reveal competing interpretations of the erotic domain.

Book cover for Essential Labor

Essential Labor

A mother of two, Angela Garbes spent most of the first year and a half of the pandemic both caring for her children and struggling to write. The experience led her to examine how caregiving “came to be seen as naturally female, which is to say invisible and undervalued,” and why it’s conceived as “low-wage labor, rather than highly skilled work that is essential, creative, and influential.” She began to see her frustrations mirrored all around her, as a larger reckoning with the broken American care structure began emerging in the news. “Essential Labor” is Garbes’s attempt to harness the parental desperation and civic potential of the past two years. It’s partly a history of caregiving in the United States. It’s also a call for a guaranteed decent income for domestic workers and caregivers, parents included. Above all, it is an argument that care should be public and universal—that the grace and affirmation that women are asked to bestow on their children should not be limited to mothers, or to parents, or to the private sphere. As a lived-in argument for radicalized parenting, “Essential Labor” is a landmark and a lightning storm, a gift that will be passed hand to hand for years.

Illustration of a toddler lying on his mother’s face, giving her kisses.

Private Notebooks

Wittgenstein’s surviving notebooks from the first half of the First World War, now available in the first facing-page English translation, contain remarks that are clearly an embryonic form of the “Tractatus,” along with personal remarks on religion, masturbation, and the quotidian business of being at war. Taken out of context, Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks can seem perilously close to kitsch, or mere displays of cleverness. But he possessed a virtue rarer than cleverness: that of depth. He rarely doubted his authority to tell people how to live, and, even now, seven decades after his death, his conduct and character continue to invite lively speculation.

Portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein broken up by shapes

With an uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, this novel navigates a reality riven by violence, race, class, and sex. It vividly depicts an ailing society inured to its own cruelty, and Melchor’s supple sentences are alive to the rhythms of speech. The book largely takes place in the gated community of Paradais, but it is firmly situated in the teen-age male psyche: that of Polo, who works in Paradais as a gardener. The milieu is largely one of luxury and wealth, insulated from what happens outside its perimeter. All borders are porous, however, and this porousness, in the shape of the unlikely friendship between Polo and the odious Franco, another teen-ager who lives in the community with his grandparents, will harrow the supposed sanctuary.

A illustration of a person holding a book who is mentally spiraling with emotion.

Ancestor Trouble

An interest in genealogy, for those not drawn to it, can seem “at best, embarrassing, if not a sign of narcissism and pitiable aspiration,” Newton acknowledges in this candid account about her own genealogical obsession. But, whatever you think about genealogy, it has profound ramifications for you. Family and citizenship law codifies privileges and exclusions based on lineage. Today’s addictive Web sites and sleekly packaged DNA kits rest on deep, if not always acknowledged, assumptions about the fixity of status, race, ethnicity, and nationality. Newton has a keen appreciation for the way ancestry inflects the social, material, legal, and medical conditions of nearly everybody’s life, and she illuminates how each way that humans have conceived of ancestry has been layered onto others.

An illustration of a person in middle of a DNA strain wrapping around them.

In the Early Times

After Friend’s erudite, emotionally remote father dies, he comes across a cache of his personal writings and begins to reassess his family history. The result is a memoir that traces generations of crosscurrents of love, ambition, and unresolved yearning. Friend is a staff writer, and an excerpt from the book ran in the magazine.

Book cover for Eleutheria by Allegra Hyde

In the heightened climate crisis imagined in this novel, birds drop en masse from the sky and heat waves cause baseball players to faint mid-game. Willa, the daughter of paranoid survivalists, leaves Boston for the Bahamas in search of a group of eco-warriors, led by a man who propounds a carbon-negative life style calculated to appeal to society’s élite, offering “the promise of more, not less.” Willa’s account of what happens when the leader goes missing is intercut with scenes from her earlier life, involving her influencer-wannabe cousins, dumpster diving, and her infatuation with a Harvard professor. Partly satirical, the book is also an urgent, absorbing story that asks how we are meant to live.

Book cover for Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde

The marginalized residents of Lagos in this début novel—queer lovers, restless spirits, and survivors of sexual violence—rely on increasingly fantastical forms of disguise in order to survive: lies, masks, bodysuits. But true salvation comes from self-revelation and the community that it forges. Village women sharing stories of abuse vanish into thin air, leaving their abusers abandoned. A dominatrix transmutes her clients’ shame until it is “submitted, regulated, rewritten into power.” Socialites relate their sorrows to a dressmaker, who then creates outfits to conceal pain. In a world that seeks to consign to the shadows those who don’t conform, Osunde’s vagabonds act as an illuminating force for one another. “If they say we don’t exist,” a woman asks her lover, “how come I can see you?”

Book cover for Serenade by Toni Bentley

Taking its title from that of George Balanchine’s first American ballet, which premièred in 1934, this personal history by a former New York City Ballet dancer blends various accounts of the work’s—and the company’s—creation and evolution. In addition to providing a wealth of ballet lore, trivia, and insightful interpretation, Bentley is not afraid to get technical; she describes steps, combinations, entrances, and exits from the perspective of the corps. In endeavoring to conjure the transcendent lyricism of Balanchine’s vision and Tchaikovsky’s score, the book goes further, touching on deeper, stranger ideas about the symbiosis between life and art.

best reviewed books 2022

Activities of Daily Living

Alice, the protagonist of Lisa Hsiao Chen’s engrossing début novel, has constructed her life around an amorphous “project” that involves learning all she can about Tehching Hsieh, the Taiwanese American artist who engaged in a series of yearlong performance pieces in the late seventies and early eighties. When Alice isn’t working on her project, she is tending to her stepfather, who suffers from dementia; his demise is meandering and cruelly slow. Her thoughts often drift back to Hsieh, who provides a model for living slowly, deliberately, and counterproductively. Time is all that Alice and her stepfather have left together, yet it cannot be maximized through the haze of his dementia. Embracing the artist’s perspective gives her the license to see life as we know it—the life of bottom lines and optimization—as strange and inhumane.

Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano stare into the camera during an art performance titled “Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984.” For the piece, the two remained tethered together with rope for an entire year.

Homesickness

With dark humor and lyrical expansiveness, Barrett’s second collection of stories captures the weirdness and beauty of seemingly ordinary lives in the West of Ireland and Canada. Several of these, including “ A Shooting in Rathreedane ,” first appeared in the magazine.

Book cover for I'm more than a Plate of Refried Beans

I’m More Dateable than a Plate of Refried Beans

With a collection of short stories and quizzes, Hogan, a comedian,  determines how dateable we really are. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Book cover for The Premonitions Bureau

The Premonitions Bureau

A remarkable true story of death foretold, Knight’s first book originated in the magazine. In it, he recounts how a British psychiatrist set up an office to collect dreams and forebodings from the public, in the hope of preventing disasters.

Book cover for La Nijinska by Lynn Garafola

La Nijinska

Long overshadowed by her older brother, the tragic virtuoso Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska (1891-1972) was also an important dancer and choreographer, and this scrupulous biography illuminates the formidable scope of her accomplishments. Nijinska made integral contributions to her brother’s legendary dances, staged groundbreaking creations of her own (including “Les Noces” and “Les Biches”), and trained future stars such as Frederick Ashton, Cyd Charisse, and Maria Tallchief. Garafola documents the ways in which a misogynistic establishment undermined Nijinska’s achievements and argues that, despite this, her ideas about the relationship between movement and music and her gender-bending experiments in abstraction helped shape the modern art of ballet.

Book cover for How Strange A Season

How Strange a Season

Women’s homeownership and its promise of security are at stake in this closely observed story collection. A rancher concocts a peculiar side business to save the property she inherited from her mother; a divorcing woman must decide whether to move to California to claim the glass house her grandmother left her; a matriarch’s fear of losing her family home compels her to send her barely adult daughter down a life-altering path. In several stories, climate change looms, but casting darker shadows are the book’s many absent or inadequate parents. One character is convinced that her forebears’ missteps are “inside of her, like the rings of a felled tree.”

Book cover for Glory

Populated entirely by animals, this novel slyly invokes “Animal Farm” while depicting more recent political struggles. The protagonist is a goat named Destiny, an exile returning to the fictional African nation of Jidada after the ouster of its longtime autocrat, Old Horse (explicitly modelled on Robert Mugabe), by a new authoritarian, called the Savior. Destiny delves into the taboo subject of political disappearances, and her fearlessness catalyzes a citizenry whose most potent act of defiance is to name the dead in public. Bulawayo’s chronicle of the new government’s corruption and the old one’s brutality dramatizes Zimbabwean history while also illuminating the challenges of many developing nations.

Book cover for Didn't We Almost Have It

Didn’t We Almost Have It All

Fusing biography and cultural criticism, this consideration of Whitney Houston is also a study of reputation. Houston, born in 1963 in Newark, cultivated her voice in church and under the tutelage of her mother, a gospel singer; she also suffered sexual abuse and began using cocaine at a young age. Such troubles—and an important same-sex relationship—made living in the public eye fraught. Even at her most successful (she remains the only recording artist to have had seven consecutive No. 1 hits), she was dismissed as a “yuppie icon,” with some Black radio stations refusing to play her music. Kennedy, however, highlights her “sisterhood” with younger Black singers, including Faith Evans and Monica.

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Sergeyich is an eastern Ukrainian Everyman, living in the “grey zone”—the twenty miles or so between the armed camps of Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed troops, three years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. In loving detail, Kurkov, a Kyiv-based novelist, describes Sergeyich’s care for his bees, his nighttime preparations, his careful rationing. But when the shelling becomes too much for Sergeyich’s bees (and maybe for Sergeyich), he embarks on a journey in his trusty old Lada, travelling through Ukraine proper and eventually to Crimea, where an “inspection” of one of his beehives by the Russian security service leaves his bees in an altered state, looking sickly and gray. Although grounded deeply in the disturbing reality of war, “Grey Bees” sometimes has the feeling of a fable.

A man standing in a honeycomb with smoke coming out of a hole nearby.

Gathering Blossoms Under Fire

Gathering thirty-five years’ worth of Walker’s journals, from 1965 to 2000, this volume shows she always sensed—even before a word of hers had been published—that all her writing, including the most diaristic, could well be destined for a public audience. The pages of the journal leave a record of both the pulsing epiphanies and the irritations of daily existence (“risk makes my back ache”), and chart, for a dimly perceived intimate reader, the progress of a literary pilgrim. “It has dawned on me lately that insecurity is one of the biggest killers of art,” she writes. Pain, joy, spells of depression, unease, engagement, even disaffection: all are material. Its entries accumulate to tell a story about accumulation—of pages, prizes, lovers, real estate, renown—and its perpetual inadequacy.

Alice Walker holds her hand to her face in a ray of light.

The Trees Witness Everything

In this collection, the constraints of the waka, a Japanese syllabic form, yield highly compressed, surreal meditations on time, desire, and the movements of the mind itself. Chang’s poems, some of which have appeared in the magazine, document a practice of sustained observation and imagination.

best reviewed books 2022

Making History

When we listen to a tale, we need to take into account the teller. This is a supremely entertaining survey of those who craft history, from Herodotus to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sketching their backgrounds and personalities, summarizing their output, and identifying their agendas. The coverage is epic. As Cohen says, it is a great irony of writing about the past that “any author is the prisoner of their character and circumstances yet often they are the making of him.” But a very good thing about this book is that, despite its premise, it is not reductive or debunking. Whatever Cohen writes about he writes about with brio.

A knight on a horse, holding up a pen.

Winslow Homer

Cross’s scrupulous new account of Homer’s life and work is a pleasure to read, despite the inevitable difficulties of a subject about whom so little is known. Cross calls him “a misfit by nature” or even a “human periscope”—a man who liked to observe others without being seen. Homer, at twenty-six, was a professional artist-reporter, his drawings often reproduced in the illustrated press, but he aspired to be a painter. In the spring of 1862, he observed the sharpshooting soldiers trained to use telescopic rifles while encamped with the Union Army at the Virginia front; “Sharpshooter,” completed in 1863, was likely his first oil painting, and Cross details how Homer continued to turn out paintings and drawings with quiet intensity, creating our richest artistic record of the Civil War.

"Dressing for the Carnival" by Winslow Homer.

Africa’s Struggle for Its Art

Bénédicte Savoy’s revelatory new book charts the course of an all-but-forgotten movement to reclaim African art expropriated under colonial rule. For twenty years, beginning in the nineteen-sixties, Africa’s decade of independence, battles over the restitution of stolen cultural property raged at conferences and exhibitions. In the quiet offices of Europe’s ethnographic collections, museum professionals mounted a white-gloved resistance, centered on West Germany, where Savoy unearths a coördinated effort to block restitution claims. The bureaucratic counter-revolution extended to sabotaging international committees, ostracizing dissenters, and denigrating African claimants as unfit to conserve their heritage. The most essential tactic was secrecy, particularly the concealment of inventories and provenance information. Savoy’s investigation yields a riveting scholarly whodunnit that doubles as a timely warning, in her words, that “museums also lie.”

Illustration of Benin Bronze mask

The Genesis Machine

Predicting that technologies for editing and programming DNA will bring a “great transformation” in our conception of life, the authors of this introduction to “synthetic biology” set out a road map for navigating the field’s opportunities and perils. If harnessed responsibly, these technologies may help humankind secure its food supply, combat climate change, and eradicate disease. Conversely, what will happen if, say, technology that’s intended to study and fight viruses is instead used to unleash them as bioweapons, or if wealthy people begin genetically “enhancing” their offspring? Answering these and other difficult questions will require robust public dialogues, which this book seeks to initiate now.

Book cover for Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

Woman, Eating

The chief trait that Lydia, the protagonist of this artful vampire novel, shares with monsters of old is hunger. A “Buffy”-watching, British Japanese Malaysian performance artist interning in London’s gallery scene, she is anxious and overwhelmed, torn between vampiric urges and human scruples. Most traditional lore doesn’t apply; Lydia won’t be destroyed by the sight of a cross or combust in direct sunlight (acute sunburn notwithstanding). But her vampire mother has taught her that their kind are “unnatural, disgusting, and ugly.” As Lydia encounters new people, including a pleasant artist turned property manager, and a new boss, a man with more influence than decency, she comes to understand what it is to become something “that is neither demon nor human.”

Book cover for Whole Earth by John Markoff

Whole Earth

This biography of Stewart Brand, the creator of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” explores the varied career of a “quixotic intellectual troubadour.” An early techno-utopian—he coined the phrase “information wants to be free” and was the first journalist to use the term “personal computer”—Brand also organized parties for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and helped spark the environmental movement, befriending such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Brian Eno, and the California governor Jerry Brown along the way. What emerges is a view of an insistently holistic thinker unafraid to pursue idiosyncratic ideas and possessing “an uncanny sixth sense for being in the right place at the right time.”

Book cover for Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh

Mercy Street

Dedicated “to the one in four” American women who has had an abortion, this novel revolves around a counsellor at an abortion clinic, a protester, and a would-be domestic terrorist who rants that abortion is theft as well as murder, because “there was a second, invisible victim, a man robbed of his progeny.” The novel’s central figure, the counsellor, is the most fully realized, experiencing her own path to motherhood while remaining devoted to her work. Musing on the way that anti-abortion arguments turn people into vessels for the production of babies, she asks, “What was the point of making yet another person, when the woman herself—a person who already existed—counted for so little?”

Book cover for let there Be Light

Let There Be Light

In this graphic novel, Finck reimagines the Book of Genesis with God as a woman, and a few other key updates. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

Book cover for The Believer

The Believer

The line between fact and fiction blurs to revelatory effect in this account of ghost hunters, death doulas, six-day creationists, U.F.O. investigators, and others who hold ideas at odds with, as the author judiciously puts it, “more accepted realities.” Krasnostein spends years among her subjects, in Australia and the U.S., hoping to reach an intimate understanding of what drives their devotion. Though her approach is journalistic, pure objectivity proves impossible; an attempt to bond with a group of Mennonite women in the Bronx falters because “they believe I am going to Hell and I believe they may already be living in one.” Ultimately, it is Krasnostein’s dawning awareness of herself as a believer which brings a kind of enlightenment.

Book cover for The Pages by Hugo Hamilton

The narrator of this timely mystery is a sentient book—a first edition of “Rebellion” by Joseph Roth—that “can tell when history is in danger of repeating itself.” Having once belonged to a Jewish professor and having narrowly escaped Nazi book burning while hidden beneath a student’s coat, the volume is now in the hands of that student’s granddaughter, an artist who has travelled from New York to Berlin in an effort to locate a place depicted in a hand-drawn map on a blank page. The book—variously stolen, returned, defaced by a neo-Nazi, incorporated into an art work—repeatedly bears witness to lovers’ desperate hopes for stability amid political violence.

Book cover for Portrait of an Unknown Lady by María Gainza

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

In Buenos Aires, a young auction-house employee turned art critic narrates her obsessive quest to find and understand a notorious art forger. Her search is propelled by disenchantment with the art world and a “melancholic desire for some intangible thing.” The novel considers whether forgery itself can be original—“I sometimes wonder if art fraud wasn’t the twentieth century’s single greatest piece of art”—and circles themes of truth, falsehood, legend, and virtuosity. According to the narrator, “Reality is perhaps a thing too inherently ruinous for there to be any abiding certainty about it.”

Book cover for The Subplot by Megan Walsh

The Subplot

In addition to providing succinct assessments of such writers as the Nobel laureate Mo Yan, the dissident Ma Jian, and the science-fiction visionary Liu Cixin, this survey of contemporary Chinese literature considers less prominent figures. We learn about migrant-worker poets who record the dislocations of factory life, writers from the persecuted Uyghur and Tibetan minorities, and the legions of Internet writers who compete for the attention of four hundred and thirty million online readers. Walsh writes, “Modern Chinese fiction is a mixture of staggering invention, bravery, and humanity, as well as soul-crushing submission and pragmatism—a confusing and intricate tapestry that offers a beguiling impression of Chinese society itself.”

best reviewed books 2022

A Childhood

Crews’s memoir, first published in 1978 and now reissued, is one of the finest ever written by an American. The author’s childhood unfolds in the thirties and forties, and the place that the memoir brings to life is Bacon County, Georgia, where Crews’s parents, Ray and Myrtice, were tenant farmers. Storytelling was something everyone in Bacon County did, and Crews paid attention. Although the tone of his memoir is anything but inspirational, the book itself is inherently so: we know that the little boy grows up to be the writer he always wanted to be. But the beauty of Crews’s writing is that it animates nostalgia and then annihilates it.

Harry Crews.

Animal Person

The second collection of stories from MacLeod explores a series of chance encounters between relatives, strangers, and even people and animals. One of the stories first appeared in the magazine.

Book cover for The Candy House

The Candy House

In this genre-bending sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” Egan imagines a technology that allows users to “externalize” their memories and to access a digitized collective unconscious. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

Book cover for Riverman

McGrath, a staff writer, explores the life and the disappearance of Dick Conant, a long-distance canoeist, whose boat was found washed up in North Carolina with no one in it. He first reported the story in the magazine, in 2015.

Book cover for My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Sally Hayden

My Fourth Time, We Drowned

In 2018, Hayden, an Irish journalist, received a Facebook message from an Eritrean man imprisoned in a migrant detention center in Tripoli. His missive afforded her a window into the horrors faced by African refugees seeking a Mediterranean route to Europe. Through interviews with hundreds of migrants, whose remarks punctuate the text, and humanitarian workers, Hayden learns of Libyan warehouses where starving detainees are held in scorching temperatures, raped and beaten, and sold to traffickers. While documenting these cruelties, Hayden also examines how Western institutions like the European Union perpetuate the conditions that allow them to take place.

Book cover for Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra

Run and Hide

An examination of “rising India” that casts a critical eye on its self-made men, Mishra’s novel follows three college classmates who are bonded by sexual trauma and desperate to escape their “dire lower-middle-class straits.” While two of them—a hedge-fund billionaire and a brash public intellectual—struggle with the vertiginous heights to which they have elevated themselves, the narrator, who has retreated to a mountain village to work as a translator, avoids becoming ensnared in similar dilemmas until he begins a romance with a wealthy woman. Written in lucid prose, with a keen sense for sociological detail, the novel is a study of figures “dazzled by their own hard-won freedom.”

Book cover for Dream-Child by Eric G. Wilson

Dream-Child

This electrifying portrait of Charles Lamb is the first full-length biography of the Romantic-era essayist, poet, and satirist to appear since 1905. Perhaps best remembered as the co-author, with his sister, Mary, of “Tales from Shakespeare,” and as the interlocutor of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lamb has long been regarded as a benevolent figure who cared for his sister after she murdered their mother in a psychotic break. This idealized rendering elides the Lamb who confronted drinking problems and depression, and whose urbane first-person essays—identified by Wilson as forerunners of those by Virginia Woolf and David Foster Wallace—exhibited a complicated embrace of city life and of modernity.

Book cover for The White Girl by Tony Birch

The White Girl

This novel, set in a remote Australian town in the nineteen-sixties, centers on an Aborigine woman, Odette, and her granddaughter, whose unusually light complexion draws the interest of a police officer intent on exercising the state’s legal guardianship of Indigenous children. As Odette attempts to protect her granddaughter, she finds that bureaucracy can dictate harsh consequences for performing innocuous actions without the prescribed permissions. While dramatizing the legal tightrope that Odette must walk, Birch illustrates how Australia’s policies dehumanized not only the Indigenous people they sought to control—often by taking children from their families and placing them in white mission schools—but also the white people who were complicit in enforcing them.

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Butler to the World

For the past several years, Bullough, a former Russia correspondent, has guided “kleptocracy tours” around London, explaining how dirty money from abroad has transformed the city. His book argues that England actively solicited such corrupting influences, by letting “some of the worst people in existence” know that it was open for business. Here, oligarchs could find access to everything from shopping at Harrods to “reputation managers” for inconvenient backstories. What’s most apt about Bullough’s butler analogy is the appearance of gray-flannel propriety, and the ways it can impart an aura of respectability to even the most disreputable fortune.

Butlers holding up trays of a helicopter, ship and mansion.

Aurelia, Aurélia

In this impressionistic wisp of a memoir, a well-known novelist reflects on the death of her husband, Eric, from cancer. Davis approaches grief slantways. Her chapters, essay-like, often seem to be about something else—having to get off a train during a snowstorm, a friend’s new piano—but then, suddenly, there’s Eric, saying something about home or requesting that the pianist friend play at his memorial. Davis’s dogged inquisitiveness makes it hard for her to find peace with her loss, but it offers moments of clarity. “The skin held the parts together,” she writes, of the brutal mechanics of illness. “Then the corruption set in and the unity of the body was forever destroyed.”

Book cover for Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

Lucky Breaks

Published in Ukraine in 2018, these surreal short stories by a noted photographer probe the experiences of women from the Donbas region, many of whom fled the separatist conflict that erupted in 2014 and now live as refugees in Kyiv. The stories, ethnographic in perspective but Gogolian in register, gravitate toward inexplicable disappearances, repressed memories, and phantasmagoria. Belorusets writes of “the deep penetration of traumatic historical events into the fantasies . . . of everyday life” and richly evokes the fatalistic humor of her marginalized characters, one of whom observes, “If you had the luck to be born here, you take things as they come.”

Book cover for Otherlands by Thomas Halliday

Covering some five hundred and fifty million years, this history of the Earth’s ecology proceeds in reverse chronological order. Each chapter focusses on a single place and time, from the relatively familiar vistas of Pleistocene Alaska to the teeming microbial mats of Ediacaran Australia. These accounts touch on some paleontological favorites—mammoths, dinosaurs, trilobites—but the real stars are the fantastical environments that once characterized our planet, including Antarctic rain forests, glass-sponge reefs, and valleys dominated by giant fungi. As alien as such vistas may seem, Halliday shows that contemporary ecosystems are subject to the same evolutionary and climatological forces, in ways that may point to an over-warm, plastic-strewn future.

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Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

The historian Deborah Cohen’s latest book is a loose group portrait of the legendary American foreign correspondents who came up in the freewheeling period between the two World Wars. “Last Call” is as effervescent, for more than four hundred pages, as its winsome and hyperactive characters, and it blends scholarly attention to topics such as psychoanalysis and Wilsonian liberal internationalism with novelistic renderings of its subjects’ dizzying trajectories abroad. These writers all struck out in a time when American foreign bureaus still had fluid norms and plucky stringers could elbow their way onto almost any beat. By the ends of their careers, they had created the model for writing about world affairs for the decades in which, as Cohen writes, “the United States went from hemispheric power to global hegemon.”

Author John Gunther typing.

Let’s Get Physical

For women, good advice about exercise has been particularly hard to separate from the pressure to diet and look hot. This history of women and exercise chronicles the rise of various fitness trends, and their founders, since the fifties, including Lotte Berk, whose family fled to London as Jewish refugees from Nazism, and who opened a dance studio that led to the barre method; and Judi Sheppard Missett, a lanky blonde who developed Jazzercise. But Friedman shows how the trajectories of these various trends converge: though they offer women an outlet for their energy, these pastimes harden into life styles, particular body types get exalted and fetishized, and some of the fun seeps out.

People drawn around a circle, each performing a different physical activity.

Every Good Boy Does Fine

Billed as “a love story, in music lessons,” this memoir by a MacArthur-winning pianist began as an article in the magazine . With self-deprecating humor, Denk charts his progress from awkward, precocious boyhood to awkward, precocious adulthood and classical-music eminence via the many teachers he had along the way. He also attempts—in a sequence of interludes examining rhythm, harmony, and so on—to account for music’s hold over us.

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Sweat: A History of Exercise

Exercise is evoked as freedom and play in this charming and idiosyncratic book. A blend of history and memoir, it does not count its steps, Fitbit style, but, quite appealingly, meanders. Hayes, while chronicling his pursuit of boxing, biking, swimming, running, yoga, and lifting, sprinkles in bits of exercise history that happen to capture his genial curiosity: from the late-nineteenth-century career of the circus strongman and bodybuilding impresario Eugen Sandow to the little-known story of an “unassuming British epidemiologist” named Jeremy Morris, who, in the late nineteen-forties, brought quantitative methods to observations of physical activity by studying thousands of London transit workers.

Book cover for Defenestrate by Renée Branum

Defenestrate

The protagonist of this novel, which riffs gently on the historical Defenestrations of Prague, is a young American woman whose family is dogged by a propensity for falling out of windows. Family lore says that it all started with a Prague forebear who shoved a stonemason out of a window, thinking that the man was having an affair with one of his daughters. The perpetrator fled to America, apparently cursed: his kin are continually falling off or out of things and learn to “keep far back from balcony railings.” When the protagonist’s beloved brother defenestrates himself, she begins to ask questions about the origin myth she’s been told.

Book cover for Civil Rights Queen by Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Civil Rights Queen

This nuanced biography of Constance Baker Motley examines the paradoxes in the remarkable life of a “first”: the first Black woman elected to the New York State Senate, the first female Manhattan borough president, the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Motley gained national fame as a lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, where she worked on Brown v. Board of Education and fought to desegregate Southern public universities. She forged high-profile connections—including ones with Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr.—but her identity profoundly shaped her career; she was passed over for promotions or was given them by people interested “in anointing an outsider to an important role.” That Motley is little known today is “a kind of historical malpractice,” Brown-Nagin writes; this book is a convincing corrective.

Book cover for The Naked Don’t Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water

In 2016, while reporting in Afghanistan, the author of this startling, humane account of the “refugee underground” abandoned his passports in order to pass as an Afghan migrant fleeing war-stricken Kabul. Entrusting his life to smugglers, illegally crossing from Bulgaria into Turkey, and boarding an “overgrown pool toy” of a boat to Lesbos, Aikins logs the often fatal obstacles that refugees face and provides an impassioned critique of cruel border policies. “In liberal democracies, the border has a unique power to transmute ordinary needs into criminal desires,” he writes.

Book cover for Be Pregnant

Be Pregnant

Taken from chats with real-life couples,Viti’s guide for expectant mothers book ruminates on the nature of love and includes funny and poignant details from the relationships that the author surveys. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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The Trials of Harry S. Truman

Truman emerges in this biography as the ultimate accidental President, a pipsqueak senator from Independence, Missouri, who had been Vice-President for less than three months when Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Once Truman assumed office, global events seemed to proceed according to their own logic and momentum. Truman’s unschooled, salt-of-the-earth pose was not always what the moment called for, but this nuanced biography has sympathy for a man whose Everyman pragmatism often put him at odds with advisers who thought that they were better than he was. Truman’s major strength as a chief executive was his ability to comprehend and synthesize the learned views of these many experts, borrowing other men’s visions in order to meet the daunting challenges he inherited—above all, preventing the world from descending into a nuclear-armed Third World War.

Harry S. Truman sitting in a limousine with Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Both men are smiling.

Foreverland

According to the author and advice columnist Heather Havrilesky, marriage is a cure for misanthropy—not because it erases our aversion to human particularity but because it teaches us to love in spite of our inevitable aggravation. Unlike the many memoirs that double as thinly veiled advertisements for their authors, “Foreverland” ventures occasionally unflattering honesty. Havrilesky is unafraid to admit to nursing unseemly sentiments that most of us would go to great lengths to conceal. Her aim is to remind us that a husband is “only human.” Lifelong monogamy is not an idyll, nor is it a casual undertaking. It is, in her words, “the world’s most impossible endurance challenge.” In its own sardonic and skeptical fashion, “Foreverland” is a tender book, full of touching descriptions of falling and staying in love, even in the face of the profound frustrations that inevitably spring from prolonged interpersonal contact.

A blurred photo of a bride, dressed in white, viewed from the side.

The Door-Man

The narrator of this novel, Piedmont Livingston Kinsolver III, is a doorman at a fancy apartment building on Central Park West, who, unbeknownst to his colleagues, commutes home to a penthouse on upper Fifth Avenue. The job, he says, affords him “solitude and invisibility,” the thrill of “hiding out inside one’s own life,” and the chance to “keep an eye on things” at the Central Park Reservoir. The reservoir’s water, it turns out, originates at a Catskills dam that submerged the Kinsolver ancestral home. When mysterious fossils appear at the reservoir, Kinsolver is forced to confront family secrets, including murder and incest, connected with a paleontological discovery made by one of his forebears at the dam site.

Book cover for Jena 1800 by Peter Neumann

This vivid group biography captures the moment, at the end of the eighteenth century, when Jena, a small university town, suddenly emerged as the “intellectual and cultural center of Germany.” Neumann’s cast of writers and philosophers includes Fichte, Novalis, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, and Caroline and Wilhelm Schelling, with cameo appearances from such luminaries as Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel. Neumann is adept both at conveying the gossip, feuds, and eccentricities of this tight-knit milieu and at grappling with his subjects’ political and philosophical ideas, which were crucial to the development of German Romanticism.

Book cover for The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi

The Hummingbird

“How do you begin telling the story of a great love when you know it ended in disaster?” this novel asks. Its answer is to narrate the life of its protagonist, a Florentine ophthalmologist named Marco Carrera, out of sequence. We see him first as a husband and father, and later as a boy and as a grandfather; we learn about the dissolution of his family, his wife’s mental instability, and the infidelities of both of them. Letters, e-mails, poetry, and telephone transcripts are interspersed throughout. The temporal leaps, though sometimes disorienting, cunningly mimic the eddying, insistent nature of memory itself.

Book cover for Born of Lakes and Plains

Born of Lakes and Plains

A new way of looking at the American West emerges in this history of the mixing and marrying of Indigenous people and settlers. Beginning with the fur trade, Hyde shows how marriage and procreation were crucial to integrating newcomers and building alliances. Commerce relied on networks of kin, and, as Native American clans would share knowledge only with those they considered family, mixed-descent children were vital intermediaries. The stories of five families through the nineteenth century illustrate how these intermediaries were also vulnerable to racist and expansionist policies. Though some were forced to hide their heritage, Hyde highlights their acts of agency, and tells “a narrative of our past with shared blood at its heart.”

Book cover for The Turning Point

The Turning Point

Douglas-Fairhurst’s second biography of Charles Dickens takes up a year in his subject’s life, 1851, and walks us through it virtually week by week. Dickens gave his full energy and attention to everything he did, and the book consists of closeups of Dickens editing his magazine Household Words; producing a play called “Not So Bad as We Seem”; running a home for “fallen women”; and buying and renovating a large London town house, on Tavistock Square. Yet Douglas-Fairhurst enriches not only our appreciation of Dickens’s personal circumstances but also the social, political, and literary circumstances in which the author, that year, began writing his ambitious condition-of-England novel, “Bleak House.”

Charles Dickens speaking in front of the stage.

What's So Funny?

In this memoir, Sipress describes his dreamy but sometimes oppressive childhood on the Upper West Side, and how he defied the expectations of his immigrant, business-man father to become a cartoonist. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Book cover for Sex and the Single Panda

Sex and the Single Panda

In this humorous survey of love in the animal kingdom, Ramirez illustrates the sometimes “revolting” romantic proclivities of species from flies to meerkats, and suggests that humans aren’t necessarily so different. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Book cover for White Lies by A. J. Baime

Walter F. White, the subject of this urgent, much needed biography, led the N.A.A.C.P. from 1929 until his death, in 1955. He joined in 1918, working undercover in the South—a light-skinned Black man, he could pass as white—to investigate lynchings, identifying perpetrators and sending reports to the press and to state capitols. White’s career, beginning three years after “The Birth of a Nation” came out and ending just before the Montgomery bus boycott, allows Baime to portray an entire society struggling and failing to reckon with its legacy of racial terror. None of the killers in the forty-one murders White investigated were convicted. And, though he spent decades campaigning for a federal anti-lynching law, only now does such a bill (named for Emmett Till) look set to pass Congress.

Book cover for The Torqued Man by Peter Mann

The Torqued Man

This début spy novel juxtaposes two manuscripts supposedly found in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. One tells the story of Frank Pike, an ex-I.R.A. fighter recruited by the Nazis to fan anti-British sentiment in Ireland, through the fastidious diary of his besotted German handler, Adrian de Groot. The other—dismissed by de Groot as a “puerile espionage potboiler”—narrates the same time line from the perspective of Pike’s mythical alter ego, Finn McCool, who embarks on a murder spree targeting Nazi doctors. As the chapters alternate between the manuscripts, two irreconcilable portraits of Pike emerge, while de Groot’s love for the Irishman gradually emboldens him to political resistance.

Book cover for The Founders by Jimmy Soni

The Founders

In 1998 and 1999, seven young men, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, founded two companies with related but distinct goals: Confinity aimed to facilitate the transmission of money between PalmPilots; X.com sought to unify all the offerings of the financial sector, such as bank accounts, investment funds, and transfers. The story of the companies’ bitter rivalry and eventual merger into the now ubiquitous platform PayPal is the subject of this entertaining history, which draws on interviews with founders and other staff. Soni’s account memorably renders the personalities involved and engages with ideas about financial sovereignty, open-source technology, and the place of politics in Silicon Valley.

Book cover for Free Love by Tessa Hadley

Phyllis, the protagonist of this novel set in England in 1967, lives a neat suburban life with her husband and their two children until she meets Nicholas, the twentysomething son of family friends. They begin an affair, and Phyllis, frequenting Nicholas’s grungy London digs and mixing with artists and counterculture intellectuals, feels a passion she has not experienced before. Hadley brilliantly renders both Phyllis’s flight from domesticity and her family’s attempts to deal with the social consequences of her absence. The radicalism of the cultural moment is underscored by the emergence of family secrets, once buried in the name of class and decorum and now fuelling raw desires.

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Florine Stettheimer

The painter and scenic designer Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) pioneered Pop subjects and Pop manners without Pop strategies. She’s a tricky subject: on the one hand, she was a perfect heroine for a feminist-minded art history; on the other, Stettheimer belonged, unashamedly, to a world of privilege. In the first extensive and scholarly biography of the artist, the art historian Barbara Bloemink unravels this contradiction by detailing how Stettheimer’s originality lay in how unapologetically she embraced her own condition, how clearly she looked at her world as it was. Stettheimer’s big pictures like “Spring Sale at Bendel’s” (1921) and “The Cathedrals of Broadway” (1929) kid the absurdities they show, and yet approve of society’s investment in the absurdities.

A newsreel image of Mayor Jimmy Walker on a screen with spectators and greeters beneath it.

Scattered All Over the Earth

Playful and deeply inventive, Tawada’s novel imagines a world in which Japan has disappeared. She applies fairy-tale conventions—mistaken identity, unexpected metamorphosis—to the dilemmas of finding linguistic shelter in a world of rising seas and ceaseless migration, achieving realism through surrealism. Stranded in Denmark, a refugee named Hiruko searches for fellow-survivors, torn between longing for her mother tongue and the desire to fashion a new one. Her odyssey becomes a test of the commonplace idea that, as one character puts it, “the language of a native speaker is perfectly fused with her soul.”

Portrait of Yoko Tawada.

American Shtetl

Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers offer an extraordinary and riveting account, based on fifteen years of research, of perhaps the most triumphant separatist group in American history. They are the Satmars, among the most exacting and most successful of the Hasidic dynasties, who have built, within a daily commute’s distance from New York, their own village, Kiryas Joel. One of the running themes of “American Shtetl” is that the Satmars’ success was due to the absorption of American norms, values, and tactics. As the authors write in their prologue, the community’s insularity, homogeneity, and political empowerment “are characteristics that have been actively fostered by America’s political, legal, and economic institutions.” With this insight, Stolzenberg and Myers put their extremely detailed, quasi-ethnographic case study in the service of a broad theoretical end. “American Shtetl” provides an unambiguous historical refutation of the idea that liberalism renders meaningful community impossible. It can also be read as a cautionary tale about how the dynamics of separatist communities unfold.

Black and white photo of a young boy on a tricycle.

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama

In his humorous memoir, Odenkirk shares stories about how he went from “Saturday Night Live” and “Mr. Show” to “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Book cover for Rebels Against the Raj

Rebels Against the Raj

An eminent historian of India and biographer of Gandhi turns his attention to seven “white-skinned heroes and heroines”—allies in the country’s bid to end colonial rule. Among them are the British theosophist Annie Besant, a leading figure in the home-rule movement until she was eclipsed by Gandhi (who’d been inspired by her as a boy); B. G. Horniman, a radical British editor; and Samuel Stokes, a Pennsylvania Quaker who helped eliminate forced labor. Guha notes that his subjects campaigned not only for freedom but also against numerous social ills, such as environmental abuse and caste-based discrimination, laying the groundwork for a movement that, he writes, “may yet be relevant for India’s future.”

Book cover for Eating to Extinction by Dan Saladino

Eating to Extinction

This chronicle of the local relationships between humans and what we eat reveals a pattern with dire implications for the future of food. “Where nature creates diversity, the food system crushes it,” Saladino writes. Mass production and globalization are eradicating the small, the wild, and the unique, at a cost to our stomachs and to traditional ways of life. Saladino extolls ancient strains of Anatolian wheat, sees an African pea grown in the American South as an act of culinary resistance, and observes that plants and animals modified for higher yields are often susceptible to disease and reliant on ever-dwindling resources. Ultimately, the most dangerous thing about our appetites is how they threaten to consume our increasingly fragile food system.

Book cover for Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti

Strangers I Know

Blending fiction, essay, and memoir, this narrative migrates from the Italian American neighborhood of Bensonhurst to rural southern Italy and contemporary London, and encompasses autobiographical episodes, musings on film and music, and current events. At its heart is the story of Durastanti’s charismatic parents, both deaf, who came to America from Italy only to return. “The story of a family is more like a map than a novel,” Durastanti writes, as the work expands to encompass lovers, teachers, and other relatives. Her inventive approach yields touching portraits of the characters, while respecting their ultimate unknowability.

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You Don’t Know Us Negroes

Among the fifty pieces compiled in the first book-length collection of Zora Neale Hurston’s short nonfiction are the well-known essays “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” and “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” Both are emblematic of the proud, bristling Southern woman with whom we’ve become familiar, as is “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” which provides a window into the studious side of Hurston. Yet reading any of those individual texts differs from knowing their author as an essayist. The latter requires letting go of the agonizing business of saving Hurston, who the writer and linguist John McWhorter has called “America’s favorite black conservative,” from her politics. What emerges from the sum of these writings is a Hurston who cannot be easily construed as a champion of race pride, which she once called “a luxury I cannot afford.” “The realization that Negroes are no better nor no worse, and at times just as boring as everybody else, will hardly kill off the population of the nation,” she writes in the titular essay. We can trace variations on this point across the collection.

Zora Neale Hurston, wearing a hat and gloves, stands near a bookcase holding a book.

Black Cloud Rising

Inspired by real events, Wright Faladé’s novel is about Richard Etheridge, the son of an enslaved woman and her master, who joins an all-Black regiment during the American Civil War and takes on the Confederacy. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

Book cover for Index, A History of the Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age

Index, a History of the

In this engaging study, the humble index emerges as an unexpected site of anxieties and tensions. From its beginnings, in the fifteenth century, it was viewed as both a miraculous time-saver and a threat to depth and concentration. As indexes gained in popularity, appearing in novels, poetry, and political writing, fears about their misuse intensified, sometimes justifiably; in the eighteenth century, the Whigs and the Tories produced mock indexes of each other’s literature. Duncan draws rich parallels to anxieties surrounding our own “age of search” and makes an impassioned case for the continued relevance of the human-crafted index, which he calls a “child of the imagination.”

Book cover for Putting the Rabbit in the Hat by Brian Cox

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat

The author of this memoir, best known for his role as Logan Roy, on “Succession,” offers a bold, funny account of his path from an impoverished boyhood in Scotland to the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, and Hollywood. The narrative is punctuated with gossip (“Did I forget to mention that I got touched up by Princess Margaret once?”), frank appraisals of industry bigwigs (Johnny Depp is “so overblown, so overrated”), and reflections on his own shortcomings as a spouse and a father. At its core, though, the book is a meditation on craft and a paean to acting, which is, for Cox, “an almost spiritual experience. . . . about reflecting back to people how we are.”

Book cover for The Great Mrs. Elias by Barbara Chase-Riboud

The Great Mrs. Elias

Using hitherto overlooked documents, this novel reconstructs the life of Hannah Elias, who was born in poverty in Philadelphia in 1865 but became, at the turn of the century, one of the wealthiest Black women in the country. In this telling, Elias, confident that she is destined for greatness, joins New York’s “sisterhood” of sex workers and meets a rich client whose pillow talk consists of finance lessons. Putting her unorthodox education to use, Elias amasses a real-estate fortune, but the empire teeters after her unexpected connection to the murder, in 1903, of the civic leader Andrew Haswell Green. Chase-Riboud’s narrative challenges us to confront the ways in which race, class, and gender inform whose lives are deemed worthy of remembering.

Book cover for Last Resort by Andrew Lipstein

Last Resort

Caleb, the protagonist of this novel of literary-world chicanery, is an aspiring Brooklyn writer who discovers his voice by pinching someone else’s story. An acquaintance, Avi, tells him about a torrid affair in Greece, and Caleb, abandoning his own lacklustre project, fashions the material into something that neither of them could have produced alone. This gets him a lucrative book deal, but Avi and others quickly recognize themselves in the story. In the ensuing acrimony, Lipstein gleefully scrutinizes the nature of success in an industry that runs as much on vanity as on financial gain. The book’s command of contemporary-hipster details is wincingly precise, and Caleb’s voice, initially charming, gradually reveals his incompetent careerism.

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Pure Colour

This is an explicitly mystical novel about the creation of art and the creation of the universe, about the uses and abuses of doubt. The world in its pages is created by a God who manifests himself within it as three art critics, and their descendants include our protagonist, Mira, who’s training to be a critic and cherishes beauty, and the cool and detached Annie, who cherishes justice. Its characters feel constructed out of cobwebs, and the plot is sketched swiftly and faintly—Mira is, for some time, trapped in a leaf; she eventually tumbles out. She wonders if she can cease thinking of herself as someone “who another person could see, evaluate, and finally judge.” The novel wants to recast criticism as a form of intimacy.

Book cover for Cold Enough for Snow

Cold Enough for Snow

A mother and daughter meet in Japan for vacation. They take walks, ride trains, visit art galleries, eat in restaurants, and shop for gifts. This is just about all the surface action in the Australian author Jessica Au’s slim and sly second novel. Au’s narrator keeps prodding her mother to open up; her mother resists. By the last page, the daughter still doesn’t have the information she seems to have been searching for. The trip isn’t a bust, though, and neither is the book that it yields. The narrator may not have unearthed any secrets from her mother’s past, but the two have let their hours intertwine and paid attention to the same things. We can sense their intimacy in the soft, patient warmth of Au’s prose. “Cold Enough for Snow” understands the impulse to treat other people—especially our parents—as mysteries to be solved, but makes the quiet case for another approach, one that we might simply call, for lack of any more technical term, being together while we can.

An aerial view of Tokyo.

All the Flowers Kneeling

In dramatic yet precise poems like “ Bioluminescence ,” this début collection transforms trauma into a site of self-invention. Tran plumbs myth and history alongside personal experience—as a descendant of Vietnamese refugees, as a rape survivor, and foremost as an artist—to achieve an exquisite lyricism.

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The story of how a philosophy of performance pioneered in pre-Revolutionary Russia made its way to New York, took over Hollywood, and changed American acting for good is the subject of this entertaining and illuminating chronicle. Method acting was popularized in large part by Lee Strasberg, a Polish-born American actor, who adopted, redesigned, and implemented the techniques of Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian theatre director. Strasberg encouraged actors—his students included James Dean and Paul Newman—to comb through their lives for strong emotions they could deploy on stage. When Stella Adler split from him, she denounced his ways as “sick and schizophrenic,” while nurturing the likes of Marlon Brando. That people couldn’t agree on what the method was, exactly, made it all the more powerful.

A set onstage with people leaning out of the windows of a brick wall.

Mead’s moving memoir, which originated as an essay for this magazine, chronicles her wrenching decision to leave New York, where she lived for decades, and return to her native England—a place that feels at once like home and a foreign land.

Book cover for Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

Very Cold People

The poet and memoirist Sarah Manguso’s début novel has a fairy-tale quality, a ring of the nursery rhyme lent by its symmetries, prototypical figures, and brutality. Ruthie, an only child growing up in the fictional town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is sharply attuned to a force that she doesn’t understand and that Manguso suggests is some combination of class, whiteness, and the widespread sexual abuse of children. “Very Cold People” is itself a very cold book, with banks of white space piled up around Manguso’s short, accretive paragraphs. Ruthie’s halting narration and lack of affect suggest a girl caught within a net of pain; the task of the book is to unmask each node in the net, moving suspensefully inward to unearth the threats the town has ushered out of sight. Manguso adds nuance to her story by investigating how substitution and silence can be misguided acts of love, not just symptoms of damage: she knows how loving something so much that you are afraid to love it at all is not the same as not loving it.

The poet and writer Sarah Manguso (USA), Santa Monica, California, May 27, 2021.

The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson

In 1948, when the witness to a fatal shooting in a small Georgia town claimed that the attacker “sounded like a Negro,” the police arrested a Black sharecropper named Clarence Henderson. This history, by an Atlanta-based investigative reporter, examines the bizarre process by which Henderson was sentenced to death for murder in three separate trials but avoided execution each time. Using a range of archival sources, Joyner illustrates Henderson’s vulnerable position as a Black defendant, and shows how external factors—such as the introduction of lie-detection and ballistics analysis and the rivalry between the N.A.A.C.P. and the Communist Party, which were both determined to come to his defense—shaped the legal proceedings in unexpected ways.

Book cover for Speak Not by James Griffiths

This history of endangered languages assesses the political causes of their precariousness. Those in power—whether they speak English, Mandarin, or Hebrew—often hold condescending attitudes toward Indigenous languages and work to marginalize them. For nations undergoing colonial conflicts, such as Hawaii and Wales in the nineteenth century, a drastic decline can happen in the span of a lifetime. Languages are not only repositories of heritages but also a rallying point for self-determination movements, which perhaps explains why the preservation of local languages is sometimes criminalized as an act of separatism.

Book cover for Bibliolepsy by Gina Apostol

Bibliolepsy

The protagonist of this hypnotic coming-of-age novel is a young Filipina who becomes obsessed with literature, to the point of illness. Orphaned at age eight, when her parents disappear from an interisland ferry, she continues to grieve into her adolescence, when she is seduced by the work of Dickens and Dostoyevsky alongside that of such Filipino writers as Estrella Alfon and José Rizal. Feeling her passion for books as a “quickening between the thighs and in the points of the breast,” she seeks solace in the company of lovers who share her infatuation, among them a typewriter repairman and a politician. At the same time, she becomes a reluctant observer of the country’s political transformations, including the 1986 edsa Revolution, with its “confetti” sky filled with Yellow Pages, which led to the expulsion of Ferdinand Marcos.

Book cover for The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

The School for Good Mothers

This début novel takes place in a world where mothers are subject to strict state surveillance. When the protagonist, who is struggling to balance work and child care after her husband abandons her for a younger woman, leaves her daughter, a toddler, home alone for a few hours, she lands in a state-run rehabilitation program. She is told that she’ll get her child back if she’s able to “hone her maternal instincts,” but she seems destined to fail: the program deems human emotions—flashes of frustration, pangs of desire—incompatible with responsible parenthood.

Image may contain: Face, Human, Person, Buster Keaton, Clothing, and Apparel

Buster Keaton

Every detail of Keaton’s life and work is in this immense year-by-year account of Keaton as an artist and a man, starting with his birth, in 1895. (Curtis painstakingly clarifies which of two potential midwives attended to the matter.) Keaton’s father raised him to star in a brutal comedy act and instilled a lifelong mastery of the gag; we hear about gags that Keaton helped invent for Abbott and Costello in his later, apparently fallow, years. Keaton seems to have been one of those comic geniuses who, when not working, never felt entirely alive, and Curtis is particularly good on how his early years were key to understanding the core of his art: being anti-sentimental to the point of seeming coldhearted.

Portrait of Buster Keaton.

Thank You, Mr. Nixon

Eleven linked stories take on U.S.-China relations during the past fifty years, as seen through the eyes of Chinese nationals and expatriates. Two of the stories, including “ Detective Dog ,” first appeared in the magazine.

Book cover for Worn by Sofi Thanhauser

This expansive history documents the transformation of clothing manufacture from a handmade practice, rich with personal significance, to a mass-production industry. Thanhauser toggles between scenes of Louis XIV’s court, where the fashion season was invented, and Phoenix, Arizona, where Navajo weaving revivalists engage in the recovery of ancestral traditions. Elegantly chronicling how textile production came to be defined by worker exploitation, misogyny, environmental devastation, and colonialism, Thanhauser writes, “Our clothes are never neutral, and cannot be.” Yet she also finds space to appreciate sartorial marvels and to celebrate the loom aficionados, “denimheads,” and “wool enthusiasts” who aim for a more ethical, analog future.

Book cover for The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed

The Fortune Men

Set in postwar Cardiff, in the multiethnic docklands of Tiger Bay, this novel retells the life of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor who was executed in 1952, for a murder he did not commit. Arriving in Wales from British Somaliland, he encounters an “army of workers pulled in from all over the world”; he marries, starts an interracial family, and becomes disillusioned as he experiences white men “treating you like you’re the final insult.” The novel poignantly imagines Mattan’s trial and his time in jail, as his hopes of freedom dwindle. Mohamed underscores Mattan’s confidence in his good character—his belief that “the truth kill the lie”—while also showing how, “as each witness takes the stand, his previous estimation of his own power diminishes.”

Book cover for Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang

Joan Is Okay

Outwardly self-contained but inwardly often seething, the narrator of this novel, Joan, is a thirty-six-year-old Chinese American I.C.U. doctor. “A female brain is worth nothing,” she thinks. “Four lobes of the cerebrum, and I have sometimes imagined one of mine labeled rage .” She tends to let others talk—a habit from years of immigration worries—and is surrounded by well-meaning men keen to do the talking. At work, she is exceedingly capable, the kind of doctor with whom, in the worst circumstances, one can expect “a death handled well,” but she struggles to handle her father’s death. As she grieves, she keeps recalling their last chat—rushed, because Manhattan parking cost $17.99 an hour.

Book cover for The Secret Listener by Yuan-tsung Chen

The Secret Listener

This candid memoir by a self-described “ingenue in Mao’s court,” who worked in China’s Central Film Bureau, gives a personal dimension to the turmoil of the country’s recent past. Tracing her life from a childhood in Shanghai to her participation at the heart of the revolution in Beijing and her eventual exile, Chen gives a firsthand account of famine and terror during Mao’s long reign. At the book’s center is her marriage to a man with family ties to the Party élite, whose members fall prey to purges and counterpurges. Chen frames her remembrance as a bold demand for China “to face its Maoist past bravely and unflinchingly, and especially to restore the humanity of its victims.”

Book cover for The Swank Hotel by Lucy Corin

The Stars Are Not Yet Bells

Through the fog of dementia, Elle, the narrator of this novel, recounts her life on an island off the coast of Georgia during the Second World War. She, her husband, and a man named Gabriel (with whom she is in love, and who poses as her cousin) have come to mine an enigmatic mineral, Caeruleum, that glows blue in the coastal waters. They hope that its gemlike properties, or perhaps even its pharmaceutical ones, will make them rich. But events surrounding their excavations lead Elle to wonder if “beauty and death are coincident, codependent.” As her thoughts move back and forth in time, dual mysteries rise to the surface: what happened to her grasp on reality and what happened to Gabriel?

Book cover for South to America by Imani Perry

South to America

Structured as a journey, with chapters organized by location, this history of the American South examines its subject from both personal and sociopolitical perspectives. Perry, an Alabama-born Princeton professor, encounters a Confederate reënactor in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and visits the Equal Justice Initiative’s museum, in Montgomery, Alabama, which is situated near a parole office. She draws connections between the past and contemporary experience—for instance, she reads Thomas Jefferson’s racist observations on Black people in the light of her own Ancestry.com results. Threading her protagonists’ narratives through the book, Perry admits to “a bit of navel-gazing” but observes that, “if you gaze anywhere with a critical eye, you do have to look at your own belly, too.”

Book cover for The Uninnocent by Katharine Blake

The Uninnocent

When the author of this fragmentary memoir was at law school, a teen-age cousin had a psychotic break and killed a young boy. Blake, now a law professor, traces the aftermath of the killing and her attempts to comprehend it, examining Anna Freud’s writing on defense mechanisms after a psychotherapist tells her that “a psychotic break is just intense fear.” Having kept her distance from her cousin, Blake eventually corresponds with him and visits him in prison. She avoids neat conclusions or a sense of absolution, but her legal background and her insights yield a thought-provoking consideration of the limits of our criminal justice system.

Book cover for The Swank Hotel

The Swank Hotel

Unfolding amid the 2008 financial crisis, this hypnotic, antic novel revolves around two sisters: Emilie, who works at a drab job in a nondescript town where she has bought an “adorable starter home”; and Adeline, who suffers from mental illness and has gone missing. News arrives that Ad has committed suicide, then that she survived, and Em flies to be with her in Kansas City. Corin conveys a sense that insanity is everywhere: in the sisters’ family history, in a colleague’s affair, in news items and the plot of a television documentary. “The mad see the unseen,” she writes. “What the collective suspects but can’t express, a perpetual frictionless swing from object to subject.”

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In place of a standard social history of silent comedy, much less a standard biography, Stevens offers a series of pas de deux between Buster Keaton and other personages of his time, who shared one or another of his preoccupations or projects. It includes an illuminating chapter on Keaton and Robert Sherwood, who was early to recognize Keaton’s greatness, and argues that Keaton’s art was informed by the same social revolutions as the European avant-garde. It is the kind of account that makes more of overlapping horizontal “frames” than of direct chronological history, and Stevens pulls it off dexterously, taking up the big question: What made Keaton’s solo work seem so modern?

Book cover for Free

This memoir of growing up amid Albania’s transition to a democracy is bounded by two revolutions: the violent uprisings against the Communist regime in 1990, and those that took place seven years later, against the depredations of the economic “shock therapy” that followed its collapse. Ypi, who was twelve at the time of the first protests, writes with compassion and dry humor of the dismantling of the world view—in which socialism meant that “everyone was already free”—that she internalized in grade school. As the reductive tenets of proletarian struggle give way to the equally facile doctrines of capitalism and privatization, she finds the latter, which has devastated Albania’s economy, to be deeply flawed. She ultimately launches a search for a new definition of “freedom” that would tame “the violence of the state” in all its forms.

Book cover for It’s Getting Dark by Peter Stamm

It’s Getting Dark

The characters in this absorbing story collection are bound by loss—of love, of fortune, of the lives they once had, or the ones they’ve missed out on. In one tale, a man discovers a flirtatious e-mail on his girlfriend’s computer and, assuming the interlocutor’s name, carries on a written affair with her. In another, a model imagines switching places with a sculpture of herself, situated in the home of a well-to-do businessman. Though moody, the collection is tinged with hope, as when a tarot-card reader tells a woman, “I can see how everything will end. What I can’t see is what we make of it, what we’ll look back on. And that’s what happiness is.”

Book cover for The Urge by Carl Erik Fisher

Addiction is variously described as a brain disease, a personal demon, and an epidemic. This compelling history holds that it is simply “part of humanity.” Fisher, an addiction physician and a recovering addict, illustrates the “terrifying breakdown of reason” that accompanies the condition by drawing on patients’ anecdotes and on his own experience. He also highlights the ways in which stigmas—such as the “firewater” myth, which held that Native Americans were uniquely vulnerable to alcohol addiction—have provided “ideological cover” for policing certain groups.

Book cover for In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali

In Case of Emergency

This novel, published in Iran in 2008, takes place in Tehran in the course of a day when the city has been flung into chaos by a series of earthquakes. Shadi, the young, disaffected narrator, is less concerned with the disaster than she is with locating her next opium fix. Rather than flee the city with her family, she spends the day traversing it, getting high with various misfit friends and making observations about Tehrani society with her acerbic wit. Her sardonic commentary is interspersed with sensual descriptions of her highs, and of the periodic quakes roiling the ground beneath her. “I wish I could sink, pour into the earth and dance with her,” she declares. “Let the tremors crawl through my body. I don’t want them to stop.”

Book cover for I Came all this Way to Meet You

I Came All This Way to Meet You

Attenberg’s memoir traces a peripatetic life, as she switches jobs and cities and figures out who she is as a writer—and what it takes to sustain a career. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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Lost & Found

By bringing the story of her father’s death together with the story of how she met her wife, and refracting those experiences through a lifetime of reading, Schulz’s memoir intricately upends our ideas about the nature of grief and love. The book grew out of the piece “ When Things Go Missing ,” which Schulz wrote for the magazine in 2017.

Book cover for Aftermath

In November, 2019, on the day after the London Bridge knife attacks, the author of this experimental work of nonfiction learned that both the killer and one of his victims were people she knew. Usman Khan, the perpetrator, had been her student in a prison education program, and Jack Merritt, whom Khan stabbed to death, was her colleague. Taneja probes her own experience of the tragedy, surveys its public and private aftershocks, and scrutinizes the clichés that populate narratives of terror: stereotypes about young men who become radicalized, impenetrable institutional language that obscures more than it discloses, and the perennial, futile search for causes.

Book cover for Pushing Cool

Pushing Cool

Tracking the evolution of a century’s worth of targeted marketing, this history documents the sinister engineering of a Black consumer preference for menthol cigarettes. Wailoo details how Big Tobacco placed billboards in inner-city neighborhoods, strategically funded Black enterprises, and marshalled a vast network of influencers—from Ebony to the N.A.A.C.P.—to yoke ideas of Black authenticity to smoking menthols. His case study concludes with reflections on the resonant presence of menthol cigarettes in the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd, linking the dire plea “I can’t breathe” to tobacco’s long-term assault on Black lives.

Book cover for The Wedding Party

The Wedding Party

Set from 5 A.M. to 5 P.M. on a single December day in 1982, this novel introduces readers to the boisterous milieu of a siheyuan , one of Beijing’s traditional multifamily courtyard residences, via the story of the Xue family’s wedding banquet. Guests come and go—opera singers, factory workers, doctors, bureaucrats, literary editors—all of whom have experienced the vicissitudes of the country’s tumultuous history. Liu intertwines the stories of these lives with the spectacle of a rapidly changing Beijing, modern telecommunications arriving just as traditional shops and alleys vanish. A lovingly rendered portrait of a city and its inhabitants, the novel is also an act of preservation for the siheyuan , whose “strict proportions contain untold multitudes.”

Book cover for The Women I Love

The Women I Love

This mordant novel takes the form of a diary, with sections named for the women who have most profoundly shaped the narrator’s life: his mistress, his girlfriend, his sister-in-law, his sister, and his mother. The diary’s purpose, he claims, is to see if he can describe them without resorting to stereotypes, and if he can wrest himself from the lifelong habits of “a typical Italian” (“Guys like me are incapable of truly being alone and analyzing our own emotions”). As the novel charts the narrator’s transformation from an aspiring poet to an editor of frivolous books at a commercial publishing house, he has flashes of insight even as he inadvertently reveals the depths of his misogyny.

best reviewed books 2022

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The Best Books We’ve Read in 2024 So Far

By The New Yorker

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Best fiction of 2022

Dazzling invention from Jennifer Egan, a state-of-the nation tale from Jonathan Coe and impressive debut novels and short stories are among this year’s highlights

The best books of 2022

S ome of the year’s biggest books were the most divisive. In her follow-up to A Little Life, To Paradise (Picador), Hanya Yanagihara split the critics with an epic if inconclusive saga of privilege and suffering in three alternative Americas: a genderqueered late 19th century, the Aids-blasted 1980s, and a totalitarian future degraded by waves of pandemics. I was impressed by its vast canvas and portrayal of individual psychic damage set against seismic historical change.

There were mixed reactions, too, to Cormac McCarthy’s jet-black brace of novels The Passenger and Stella Maris (Picador), his first in 16 years; and to Ian McEwan’s Lessons (Cape), seen as both baggily self-indulgent and richly humane. Setting the protagonist’s life against the arc of postwar politics from the cold war to Brexit, and grappling with issues from the nature of creativity to the legacy of sexual abuse, it can be read as an indictment of the boomer generation who “ate all the cream”.

Also asking how we got here is Bournville by Jonathan Coe (Viking). With his third novel in four years, Coe is on a roll; he tracks the fortunes of a family through snapshots of communal experiences, from the Queen’s coronation through the 1966 World Cup to pandemic lockdown, in a moving, compassionate portrait of individual and national change.

Ali Smith Companion Piece

Ali Smith’s response to lockdown was typically playful and profound; Companion Piece (Hamish Hamilton) sees the outside world impinge on one woman’s careful isolation, in a novel about the importance of making connections between words, eras and people. Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House (Corsair), meanwhile, harnesses a near-future technological advance – the ability to upload and share memories – to reflect on current concerns around surveillance and privacy with dazzling inventiveness. Mohsin Hamid’s fable The Last White Man (Hamish Hamilton) interrogates race, community and the meaning of the other in a society where skin colour is changing. And I loved Joy Williams’s menacing and madcap Harrow (Tuskar Rock), set in a surreal future of environmental breakdown and human exhaustion, a kind of Alice in Wonderland of the apocalypse.

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

Radical invention characterises Percival Everett’s devastatingly absurdist The Trees (Influx): focusing on a string of gruesome murders in Mississippi, it weaponises the genres of horror, comedy and detective fiction to lay open the history of lynching. In her rambunctious satire of Robert Mugabe’s fall, Glory (Chatto), NoViolet Bulawayo braids the allegory of Animal Farm with an oral storytelling tradition and a social media chorus decrying dictatorship and repression around the world. Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho (Galley Beggar) is another novel that plays with form, reclaiming hidden lesbian stories by tumbling together biography, scholarship and poetic flights of fancy in sketches of modernist artists and writers from Virginia Woolf to Colette and Josephine Baker. This one-of-a-kind book channels a spirit of righteous anger as well as lyrical freedom and joy.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

Other standout novels illuminating the past include Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses (Bloomsbury), set in Northern Ireland during the 70s. Based around a dangerous affair between a young Catholic woman and an older Protestant man, it combines gorgeously direct and acute prose with an incisive eye for social detail. Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker prize with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort Of), a blistering murder-mystery-cum-ghost-story set amid the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil war that similarly focuses on the effort to preserve ordinary life in the face of sectarian violence. Catherine Chidgey’s Remote Sympathy (Europa) is an excellent investigation of communal guilt and obliviousness to Nazi atrocities, while in Trust (Picador) Hernan Diaz deconstructs capitalist excess and the illusion of money through different perspectives on the story of a New York financier. Maggie O’Farrell’s follow-up to Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait (Tinder), is a glittering Renaissance fable of a girl caught up in Italian aristocratic intrigue, and Kate Atkinson is on deliciously acerbic form in Shrines of Gaiety (Doubleday), exposing the underbelly of London nightlife in the roaring 20s. Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (W&N, translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel), in which a “clinic for the past” treats Alzheimer’s patients, plays with ideas of history and nostalgia to explore Europe’s 20th century and current confusion with wit and warmth.

It was a good year for unhappy families. Charlotte Mendelson skewers narcissistic control in The Exhibitionist (Mantle), a darkly witty portrait of an artist on the slide who has spent decades squashing the life and creative energies out of his wife and children. Rebecca Wait’s I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (Riverrun) is a very funny, emotionally wise story of sibling rivalry and difficult mothers. There are no laughs, however, in Sarah Manguso’s chilling Very Cold People (Picador), an uncomfortable, deeply impressive account of how silence, snobbery and repression in a New England town allow the poison of abuse to trickle down the decades.

The Furrows by Namwali Serpell

Ross Raisin has quietly become one of Britain’s most interesting novelists: A Hunger (Cape) explores the conflict between ambition and duty as a chef takes on a caring role when her husband develops dementia. Namwali Serpell’s second novel, The Furrows (Hogarth), brilliantly dramatises the psychic dislocations of grief over a lifetime through the story of a woman haunted by the memory of her younger brother, who died under her care in childhood. Douglas Stuart followed Booker winner Shuggie Bain with a tough and tender story of family dysfunction and first love in Young Mungo (Picador). And in Amy & Lan (Chatto), set on a ramshackle farm commune, Sadie Jones gives us a wonderfully achieved child’s-eye view of messy family interactions and the up-close life-and-death drama of the natural world.

Three hard-hitting debut novels shone out. An Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie (Wildfire) portrays a young Black man’s struggle to define what success might look like in a Bristol neighbourhood in the grip of gentrification. The book delves deep into faith, violence, addiction, ambition and love with power and grace. Jon Ransom’s The Whale Tattoo (Muswell), focusing on a gay working-class man in watery rural Norfolk, is lyrical, atmospheric and brutal by turns. And Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan (Rough Trade Books) punctures the bubbles of social media in a fierce tale of obsession and power dynamics.

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When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola

Set in the Pyrenees and giving voice to everything from mountains to storms, mushrooms to dogs, English-language debut When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà (Granta, translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem) is a playful, polyphonic triumph. Closer to home, poet Clare Pollard’s fiction debut, Delphi (Penguin), is an ingenious response to Covid, combining ancient Greek prophecy with the daily frustrations of lockdown to face up to our fears for the future. Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (Picador), a provocative post-MeToo morality tale about a female professor’s crush on a younger man, is sharp and deliciously readable; as is the huge hit Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday), which brings bite as well as charm to the tale of a super-rational scientist navigating sexism in early 60s America.

Send Nudes by Saba Sams Send Nudes: stories Hardcover – 20 Jan. 2022 by Saba Sams (Author)

Three notable debut short-story collections introduced fresh, contemporary new voices. Saba Sams’s unsettling, full-throated Send Nudes (Bloomsbury) captures girls and young women on the brink of change; Jem Calder’s Reward System (Faber) smartly anatomises contemporary life in the relentless glare of the smartphone; and Gurnaik Johal’s We Move (Serpent’s Tail) delicately traces relationships and disconnections across a British-Punjabi community. Short-story virtuoso George Saunders returned to the form with Liberation Day (Bloomsbury), tragicomic allegories of try-hard regular folk caught up in hells beyond their understanding.

Emmanuel Carrère continues to spin his fascinating web of social observation and self-inquiry in Yoga (Cape, translated from French by John Lambert), charting personal and psychic upheaval in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. Yiyun Li’s richly mysterious The Book of Goose (4th Estate) marks a departure from her recent autofiction; but this tale of a passionate friendship between two young peasant girls in postwar France, and how they parse their shared will to create and to act upon the world, seems to hold many layers of truth about art, love and self-creation. Lastly, a small miracle from another genre-hopper: in Marigold and Rose (Carcanet), Nobel-winning poet Louise Glück presents the first year in the life of twin baby girls with formal and philosophical sleight of hand. This wry, read-in-a-sitting delight channels the myriad possibilities of fiction with a huge sense of fun.

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The Best Books of 2022

Yes, this list features more than one book set in a postapocalyptic world, but have you looked around lately.

best reviewed books 2022

In a year when mega-best-selling authors and literary heavy hitters published new books (it’s okay — Cormac McCarthy won’t be reading this), how thrilling to see less familiar names and voices flourish. It’s a perfect time to pick up a book by a writer you’ve never read before. And, yes, this list features more than one book set in a postapocalyptic world, but have you checked social media lately?

10. X , by Davey Davis

best reviewed books 2022

Davey Davis’s neo-noir novel reads like a cross between Raymond Chandler and Jean Genet. The book follows Lee, a sadist, through a near-future underground queer scene as they go on the lookout for X, a woman they met at a warehouse party and can’t stop thinking about. Rumor has it that the fascist government has served her export papers (an Orwellian term for what is essentially expulsion of undesirables), and if Lee doesn’t find her soon, they never will. Davis is an excellent stylist who skillfully blends the hard-boiled tone of classic detective novels with the ironic detachment of millennials raised on the internet. Equal parts funny, insightful, and ruthless, X is a sexy and paranoid thriller about the lengths we go to get what we want — and the toll obsession can take. —Isle McElroy

9. Seduced by Story , by Peter Brooks

best reviewed books 2022

Society’s obsession with the résumé, and its use to construct an aura of credibility, is such a pervasive element of contemporary life that it inevitably implicates even the author and his own field of “literary humanities.” But that dynamic is exactly what Peter Brooks parses in his terrific critical survey: the essential differences between surface stories and the ways in which they’re constructed. It culminates in a postscript about how narratives impose themselves on the American judicial system that articulates a deeper parable about the ease of manipulating facts to one’s ends. The parameters of one’s story are personal; the onus of calling bullshit rests on us. —J. Howard Rosier

8. All This Could Be Different , by Sarah Thankam Mathews

best reviewed books 2022

Set in the wake of the Great Recession, All This Could Be Different is primed for a long life as a canonical queer coming-of-age novel. It follows Sneha, a woman who moves to Milwaukee after college for a job she despises and who decides, in her words, to “be a slut.” Sneha is a perfectly imperfect narrator. Her mistakes are massive, her desires contagious, her lies unjugglable. Sarah Thankam Mathews’s debut, written in prose as sharp and bright as a sword in the sun, offers an honest portrait of how alluring it is to hide from yourself in the process of finding yourself. And though Mathews includes a gripping romantic thread in the novel, All This Could Be Different truly shines as a love letter to the role that friendships play in times of crisis, as Sneha must reluctantly accept how deeply she needs community to survive. —I.M.

7. 2 A.M. in Little America , by Ken Kalfus

best reviewed books 2022

Ken Kalfus has spent his decades-long career mostly out of the mainstream — a writer’s writer with a blurb from David Foster Wallace to prove it — but 2 A.M. in Little America belongs among the year’s biggest hits. The speculative novel finds Ron Patterson, a humble security technician, in a world post–America’s fall. Avoiding specifics about what exactly happened to destroy the U.S. — does it really matter? — and how the rest of the world is responding, Kalfus follows Patterson as he moves from country to country, searching for asylum in a place that hasn’t closed its borders to U.S. citizens. Throughout, a sense of paranoia pervades, growing as Patterson is thrust unwillingly into the center of a conflict between factions that refuse to take advantage of their new ad hoc homes on the margins of a country that barely tolerates them. It’s bewildering and alarming and often darkly funny at the hapless Patterson’s expense, a scarily believable future. But it’s also a humbling glimpse of the circumstances millions of refugees are actually facing — a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God experience that shouldn’t be necessary to evoke empathy but certainly maximizes it. —Arianna Rebolini

6. The Furrows, by Namwali Serpell

best reviewed books 2022

Namwali Serpell’s provocative second novel follows C, a young biracial girl in Baltimore who witnesses the death of her younger brother, Wayne. What seems like a simple premise quickly becomes dark and twisted through the author’s expert use of repetition: Every few chapters, the book resets and C is forced to watch Wayne die yet again. As the book progresses, C finds more ways to attempt to cope with her grief — from distancing herself from her mother’s delusions that Wayne will one day return to developing an intimate relationship with a man who deeply reminds her of Wayne — but in the end, C and her family are forced to face their sorrows head-on. Unflinching first-person narration and lyric prose make C’s grief feel visceral, allowing the reader to mourn along with her each time Wayne passes away. At once heartfelt and dizzying, The Furrows is a powerful meditation on riding out the waves of grief. —Mary Retta

5. Siren Queen , by Nghi Vo

best reviewed books 2022

In an alternate version of pre-Code Hollywood, in which aspiring actors often meet their ends as fodder for the sinister ritual magic that powers the studio system, Luli Wei is determined to be a star. The odds, of course, are stacked against her as a gay Chinese American woman, but, driven by her ambition and willingness to play the studio heads’ dark game, she finds her breakout role — not as a heroine but as a monster. As she sinks further into the murk of the industry, risking her own soul in the process, Luli finds love (and a greater purpose, if she has the strength to see it through). Coming hot on the heels of last year’s The Chosen and the Beautiful , a queer, immigrant reimagining of The Great Gatsby , Siren Queen establishes Vo as an uncommonly talented new voice in fantasy, one who writes from a place of anger, insight, and deep compassion. — Emily Hughes

4. Strangers to Ourselves , by Rachel Aviv

best reviewed books 2022

Rachel Aviv set herself a seemingly impossible task in her mindful debut: to write about people who occupy the “psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience, where language tends to fail.” Her language assuredly does not fail. Strangers to Ourselves plaits personal narrative — it opens with Aviv being hospitalized at age 6 for anorexia — with stories of other tough cases, including a Brahman woman diagnosed with schizophrenia and a nephrologist who ran a successful dialysis business until he was institutionalized for depression (“a Horatio Alger story in reverse,” as he wryly puts it). Where conventional case studies might freeze erratic or socially deviant behaviors in the aspic of pathology, Aviv sensitively fills in what those narratives leave out. The result is a work of fierce moral intelligence: In withholding judgment and letting her subjects speak for themselves, Aviv grants them the dignity that society has so often denied. —Rhoda Feng

3. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On , by Franny Choi

best reviewed books 2022

The notion, so enthusiastically propagated by many news outlets, that our current moment is careering toward catastrophe may leave an audience on high alert. But to a certain reader — BIPOC/ALAANA, diasporic, marginalized — that’s old news. That position animates Franny Choi’s latest collection of poetry, which neutralizes the feeling of apocalyptic panic by showing that xenophobia and brutality within an unequal society are, indeed, nothing new. Compounding the weariness of the past several years with that of the ages flies rather close to despair, but World eludes cynicism to cast generational trauma as a paean to survival: “Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.” — J.H.R.

2. Easy Beauty , by Chloé Cooper Jones

best reviewed books 2022

Pulitzer Prize finalist, doctor of philosophy, and general multi-hyphenate Chloé Cooper Jones’s debut shifted my understanding of a world I’ve experienced only while able-bodied. Easy Beauty follows Jones — who was born with a rare congenital condition known as sacral agenesis, a disability that visibly sets her apart from the general population and that has caused a lifetime of underlying pain — through a series of trips in pursuit of meaning, both personal and existential. This narrative propels the book while providing detours for the exploration of her life, and theories about beauty, a concept that has defined much of it. The through-line is the titular theory and its opposite — i.e., easy versus difficult beauty; i.e., beauty that is obvious versus beauty that makes you work for it — and the genius of Easy Beauty is in its functioning as the latter. It’s heady but accessible. Jones puts us through the wringer a bit, trusting us to keep up with her analyses and forcing us to stay close to her physical and emotional pain, but the result is extraordinary. —A.R.

1. Manhunt , by Gretchen Felker-Martin

best reviewed books 2022

In an era of cultural remakes, remixes, knockoffs, and infinite bland variations on corporate IP, it’s all too rare to encounter a book like Manhunt — a true original that not only eviscerates an existing subgenre (gender-based apocalypse stories like Y: The Last Man , in this case) but also plants a flag in its steaming corpse and says, “This is the future of queer horror.”

Anger simmers underneath every word of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s prose as she tells a story of trans women and men fighting for survival after a plague transforms anyone with a certain amount of testosterone in their system into a feral monstrosity. In the world of Manhunt , the already life-or-death nature of transition is taken to new heights: Protagonists Beth and Fran have to scavenge enough estrogen to keep from succumbing to the virus, while Robbie tries to forge a life in a state of persistent dysphoria since taking testosterone is a death sentence. Their odyssey across a postapocalyptic New England showcases an array of threats, from feral men to militant TERFs, self-loathing chasers to rich-idiot survivalists. The book is timely, visceral, grotesque, unflinching, and unexpectedly fun, full of sex and gore and messy, beautiful humanity; think of it as The Road with a sense of humor and 110 percent more queer sex. —E.H.

Honorable Mentions

All books are listed by U.S. release date.

Fiona and Jane , by Jean Chen Ho

best reviewed books 2022

Fiona and Jane , by Jean Chen HoIn the short stories of Jean Chen Ho’s Fiona and Jane , the author tracks the titular characters’ childhood friendship into adulthood through everything from romantic betrayal to grief to dropping out of law school. The pair reinforce one another’s foibles — oversharing and navel-gazing — by feeding on one another’s psychic supply: An interchangeable sister-mother-friend-annelid dynamic ripe for transference is constructed in alternating perspective shifts that are like jump scares in their abrupt changeover. The result is a confidently nonlinear debut collection that sluices through the interiority of its protagonists without diminishing the passion and powerfully mysterious intimacy of female friendship. — Safy-Hallan Farah

Last Resort , by Andrew Lipstein

best reviewed books 2022

Last Resort tells the story of Caleb, a frustrated writer who, after being told a gripping, true story by a college friend, Avi, steals the tale to serve as the plot of his own novel. What follows, at first, is entertaining drama — industry hype builds around the manuscript, Avi angrily finds out about the theft, and in one memorable scene, a bizarre contract is made between the two to resolve the dispute. But Last Resort really starts flying once that Faustian bargain has been made, and we’re left with Caleb in the wreckage. Strip away the insider-y publishing references (readings at Greenlight, the novelist Rachel Cusk, day trips to Storm King), and this is really a brilliant morality tale about what happens when a person refuses to learn from their mistakes, all the way down to the final scene, which had me laughing out loud and punching the air, even if it was at Caleb’s expense. — Louis Cheslaw

Dilla Time , by Dan Charnas

best reviewed books 2022

Dan Charnas’s biography of the late legendary producer J Dilla is both a meticulously compiled, compellingly illuminative retread of his long path to stardom and a manifesto on the beatmaker’s true legacy. (To wit: In dragging his kick drums ever so slightly behind the rest of the beat, Dilla helped recontextualize the entire idea of rhythm in hip-hop.) Charnas turns what might be your run-of-the-mill chronicle into an exploration of the history of the producer’s native Detroit, a thoroughly detailed analysis of music production and genre, and a rumination on how a voracious, unassuming kid from Conant Gardens went on to become his generation’s Beethoven. — Alex Suskind

Pure Colour , by Sheila Heti

best reviewed books 2022

Sheila Heti’s last two novels, How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood , treated self-doubt as a formal project: What shape can a writer give her own indecisiveness? Then, just as some parents of newborns find purpose and clarity, she emerged with a book full of declarations. In Pure Colour , God is preparing to scrap the first draft of existence and replace it with something better — a state of being that’s more humane, more egalitarian, and perhaps less vain. In the meantime, Heti relates the life of Mira, an aesthete, a critic, and a seller of fine lamps, as she grieves her father, whose corpse she’s taken up residency with inside of a leaf. The directness of Heti’s writing renders even her most twee scenes into something affecting. Of Mira’s work in the lamp store, for example, she writes, “The red and green stones shed its light upon her dark face and the white walls. And she loved her meager little existence, which was entirely her own.” — Maddie Crum

Read Jennifer Wilson’s review of Pure Colour .

Vladimir , by Julia May Jonas

best reviewed books 2022

Julia May Jonas’s debut novel is an intimate portrait of a failing marriage, yes, but it’s also a look at the reconstruction of a life meticulously built whose foundation begins to crack, then crumble. A middle-aged lit professor has to decide whether to stick beside her husband, also a middle-aged professor at the same liberal arts college, who is being investigated by the school for sexual misconduct with former students. Enter the titular Vladimir, an accomplished younger writer who’s the newest tenured professor. Suddenly, she’s bursting with desire — the kind that inspires her to write a book, masturbate, and ignore her increasingly needy husband. It’s self-conscious in the best way, sharp and observant without being didactic, something I’ve found to be increasingly rare. — Tembe Denton-Hurst

Then the War , by Carl Phillips

best reviewed books 2022

In Then the War , Carl Phillips’s newest poetry collection, he continues his exploration of love’s power dynamics. Clearing, garden, backyard, forest, path: Transitive spaces of nature act as both shelter, in which Phillips can cultivate his feelings of shame, longing, and queer desire into the fruit of self-expression, and battlefield, where destruction of the self and the other fertilize the ground for new forms of interior life. Through concise lyricism — in “Blue-Winged Warbler,” he locates “a nest of swords” somewhere “deep in the interstices // where dream and waking dream and what, between the two, I’ve called a life” — this produce is as likely to be imbued with the bitter weight of regret as it is to have sweet evanescence, mirroring back at us ideals, desires, and other possible selves, lost to us or left behind the very moment they’re glimpsed. — Alex Watkins

The Employees , by Olga Ravn

best reviewed books 2022

Aboard the Six-Thousand Ship, sometime in the 22nd century, employees are encouraged to be present-minded lest they lose themselves to memories of Earth and of their left-behind loved ones. Such nostalgia is not productive and is bound to interfere with their work performance. The Employees , translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, is made up of interviews with these workers, some of whom are human, others humanoid, although the distinction is at times made unclear. To stave off melancholy — another deterrent to work — they’re given child holograms and stimulating objects with which to interact. Unsurprisingly, labor peace eludes the ship, and a workplace novel devolves into a full-blown horror story, leaving behind few survivors. This is more than a clever reframing of sci-fi tropes, although it’s that, too; the employees’ voices themselves, some of them desperate, some of them meditative, form a touching, alienated chorus, narrating a tragedy that for many will ring eerily true. — M.C.

Checkout 19 , by Claire-Louise Bennett

best reviewed books 2022

As in her first book, the exuberant and formally inventive Pond , Claire-Louise Bennett’s second novel is moving in its sentence-level, voice-driven rhythms that relate scenes from a British schoolgirl’s first and most formative encounters with books and with invention — silly, strange, and touching moments in their intimacy. The epigraph for one chapter is an excerpt from John Milton’s pamphlet Areopagitica on the vitality of books that are free to be expressive, confessional, heretical, even; they project “a potency of life” and “preserve as in a vial the efficacy … of that living intellect that bred them.” It’s a familiar premise, that reading and creativity are life-giving, but in her stylish künstlerroman, Bennett gives the premise new life. — M.C.

Run and Hide , by Pankaj Mishra

best reviewed books 2022

Asian immigrant narratives in American fiction tend to follow a familiar script: Person arrives in the West wiped clean of caste tension, the relationships they had to money, class, and ambition in their home country subsumed by the fact of their recent arrival. In Pankaj Mishra’s second novel, Run and Hide , he reorients this narrative of escape to tell a stickier tale. His protagonist Arun is a poor young Indian man whose life becomes intertwined with two ladder-climbing university classmates and, eventually, a wealthy younger lover — the kind of expat for whom borders hold little transformative power. Mishra is a public intellectual and regular contributor to the London Review of Books as well as a rare and talented fiction writer: Here, he braids a headlong plot with commentary on what you lose while trying to make it big — and what you gain when you opt out. — Madeline Leung Coleman

Oedipus Tyrannos , by Sophocles

best reviewed books 2022

Emily Wilson is one of my favorite working classicists; I’ve followed her since she wrote a deliciously biting review of a Hesiod translation for the New York Review of Books . The new Norton Library edition of her translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos (also known by its Roman title, Oedipus Rex , which Wilson describes as a spoiler) is full of the historiographical precision and literary clarity I associate with Wilson’s other works, including her 2018 translation of The Odyssey . Wilson’s translation notes alone are a delight — translating Sophocles, she aims for an idiom that is “fluent, humane, natural, and also markedly artful; sometimes conversational, but never slangy … sometimes odd, but never stiff or unintentionally obscure.” Wilson’s verse captures the rich density of ancient poetry, and her notes also offer surprisingly funny insights into the play’s original context: An abundance of foot puns would sound less ridiculous to Athenian ears, and a final line she describes as “hokey” is characteristic of the “simplistic moralizing” that is “fairly common at the end of Athenian tragedy.” — Erin Schwartz 

The Doloriad , by Missouri Williams

best reviewed books 2022

Missouri Williams’s debut novel begins after humanity has been destroyed by a natural catastrophe, the details of which we’re spared. Unlike in, say, Station Eleven , pre-apocalypse days aren’t the focus; instead, we spend our time with a struggling, sordid, incestuous family, possibly the last family left on earth. A woman — the Matriarch — and her brother take on the task of remaking humanity with a crew of their own children. Williams’s book bears resemblances to William Faulkner in its conceit, in its wending sentences, and in its images: Noses point “off to one side like a rudder.” At one point, the Matriarch disposes of a daughter’s body not in a casket but with a wheelbarrow. And what could be more Gothic, more suffocating and cloistered, than an apocalypse that left behind only you and your most overbearing family members? — M.C.

Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo

best reviewed books 2022

There is a long tradition in literary criticism of evaluating a new book by a writer from a marginalized community from the vantage point of an older book — usually by a white male writer. The supposed advantages of this approach are manifold: The older book might provide a point of entry for readers who are unwilling to do the work of understanding the newer book on its own terms, and the newer book can shine in the reflected glory of the older one as the wan moon to the older book’s sun. I mention this because just about every appraisal — including this one, unfortunately — you will read of NoViolet Bulawayo’s latest, brilliant novel, Glory , will reference Animal Farm by George Orwell. In this case, the comparison is warranted but also limiting. Bulawayo’s book traverses new territory on its own radically creative terms. This book, like Orwell’s, is made up of a cast of animals, but the comparisons grow weaker from there. My recommendation: Pick this up, leave any preconceptions aside, and dive right in. — Tope Folarin

The Candy House , by Jennifer Egan

best reviewed books 2022

With The Candy House , Jennifer Egan accomplishes the rare feat of making a series of linked short stories feel like a complete, cohesive novel, one that imagines a parallel future where people are able to externalize their memories and upload them into a cloud. There are pluses: Murders are solved, the tragically separated are reunited, children get to truly know their parents. But there are downsides, too, mainly society’s collective immersion into a massive entangled web of constant surveillance. It feels like a slightly exaggerated version of our own current dilemma, down to shadowy countermovements desperate to dismantle the entire thing — if only we could all be so organized! Kaleidoscopic and epic and never boring, this sequel of sorts to 2010’s A Visit From the Goon Squad takes us from a country club to a tech start-up to a government operation on a remote island that we learn about through an instruction manual narrated in the second person. It’s a book unafraid of changing form because it’s married to this central cluster of ideas, and Egan thoroughly convinces us to come along for the ride. — T.D.H.

Read Mallika Rao’s review of The Candy House , by Jennifer Egan, and The Immortal King Rao, by Vauhini Vara.

Constructing a Nervous System , by Margo Jefferson

best reviewed books 2022

If every foray into writing about one’s life constitutes a tense negotiation between the past and the present, Margo Jefferson’s latest, Constructing a Nervous System , refuses those terms . A sequel of sorts to her award-winning 2015 memoir,  Negroland , Jefferson takes the form and blows it up — in the smoldering debris, synapses of memory make new connections. Constructing blends autobiography and criticism to gift readers with reflections and ruminations on the place of music, aesthetics, and celebrity in one’s personal and shared racial history. The sweat of Ella Fitzgerald, the audacity of Ike Turner, the genius of Josephine Baker, the virtuosity of Bud Powell — interwoven here are the mystifying qualities and talents of those and many other artists, all of which come together to tell of a life that has been influenced by and in turn influenced so many others — Omari Weekes

Read Jasmine Sanders’s profile of Margo Jefferson.

A Tiny Upward Shove, by Melissa Chadburn

best reviewed books 2022

On the first page of this startingly unconventional novel, we learn that the protagonist has been murdered and her body possessed by an avenging spirit called an aswang. This premise establishes the stakes of the story as an unflinching tale that privileges the brutal realities of its battered characters. The western impulse is to wave away or demystify anything that defies rational explanation, but this book advances a subtle, potent idea: The abuse that countless women — especially women of color — face is so extreme, so sadistic, that it cannot be classified as anything but supernatural, and so the response to this abuse must be supernatural as well. Melissa Chadburn’s is a harrowing and utterly unforgettable story.  — T.F.

Love Marriage , by Monica Ali

best reviewed books 2022

When we meet 20-something Yasmin, her life appears to be approaching the precipice of perfection. She’s a doctor marrying a more senior, even-more-attractive doctor who worships the ground she walks on. Soon we meet her parents, Shaokat and Anisah, Indian immigrants who have managed to achieve their slice of the British dream. But when Yasmin introduces her family to his, their differences of class (and race — he and his family are white) are abundantly clear, and Yasmin, who goes through much of the book misunderstanding or being ashamed of her mother, is shocked to find that her husband’s accomplished feminist artist mother is completely taken with her son’s future mother-in-law. The book is always interrogating perfection, asking if everything peachy is as it seems. The answer is often no, but it doesn’t matter because there’s something so much more interesting in its place. — T.D.H.

The Women’s House of Detention , by Hugh Ryan

best reviewed books 2022

Wild to think that within living memory, in the center of Greenwich Village’s present-day prettiness and wealth, stood one of the country’s most notorious prisons. The Women’s House of Detention, opened in 1932 at the foot of Greenwich Avenue and demolished in 1974, was grim, overcrowded, violent — and, in Hugh Ryan’s telling, a significant incubator of the Village’s queer history. Ryan has dredged social workers’ extensive documentation of life inside, and from their files, he has excavated horrifying stories of inmates’ abuse at the hands of the staff and other residents; he also reveals just how many of them awakened, while incarcerated, to their sexual identities. (A great many of those women were arrested for either sex work or public expressions of homosexuality, like cross-dressing.) Ryan argues that despite its miseries and dangers, the House of D, as it was often called, had the advantage of being a space where queer life could exist somewhat on its own terms. The building becomes a literary device, a vehicle for the recovered stories of its incarcerated as well as another affirmative point in the broader argument for prison abolition. — Christopher Bonanos

It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World that Made Him , by Justin Tinsely

best reviewed books 2022

In all the barbershop arguments that shore up the Notorious B.I.G.’s deserved place as the greatest rapper of all time, it can be easy to lose sight of the human behind the lyrics. With It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him, Justin Tinsley goes to great lengths to provide an extensively well-researched and empathetic look at Christopher Wallace’s tremendous but brief career. The book gets at not just the trivia but the structural and cultural circumstances of his life, from growing up in Brooklyn’s public-housing projects during the Reagan era to living in America as a first-generation Caribbean man to entering the rap game during its innovative, lucrative 1990s heyday. Tinsley does as much as he can to get into Wallace’s dark exclamation mark, the fatal East Coast–West Coast rap beef — it’s still a hard narrative to crystallize, 25 years later — but throughout brings a journalist’s rigor to capturing the murky details of Biggie’s story, putting the legendary Brooklyn maestro in the proper context of the times he lived in. This is more than a biography, it’s a snapshot of both the record industry and America itself at crucial junctures for both. — Israel Daramola

DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution , by Lance Scott Walker

best reviewed books 2022

Robert Earl Davis Jr., better known as DJ Screw, helped define the ’90s and early aughts Texas rap sound with the advent of his warped, hypnotic cassette playlists, and this book is the ultimate word on both him and his seismic imprint — one that continues to linger in modern music, from the aesthetic of Travis Scott to the slowed-and-reverbed production behind the likes of Justin Bieber and Frank Ocean. His expertly curated playlists of the era’s best hip-hop and R&B tracks (with the occasional rock record thrown in) — tweaked with his namesake technique of slowing down and chopping them up — paired well with Houston’s drug and nightlife culture; Lance Scott Walker transubstantiates Screw’s lore into something more permanent and tangible, interviewing just about everyone that ever knew the DJ, along with a number of aficionados and famous fans of his that helped make the Screw tape the hip-hop fetish objects that they have become in the decades since Davis’s death. — I.D.

An Island , by Karen Jennings

best reviewed books 2022

This slim, capacious novel, recently longlisted for the Booker Prize , is an allegorical meditation on colonialism and its enduring aftermath. As the novel opens, we meet Samuel, the lone inhabitant of and lighthouse keeper on a harbor island. His isolation is interrupted by an unexpected visitor — a man who washes ashore. This stranger’s sudden appearance prompts Samuel to consider the span of his life and reflect on the events that led him to the island. The wonder of this novel is how expansive it is despite its length; Samuel’s life doubles as beachhead for an intense examination of postcolonial African politics, xenophobia, family and its discontents, and, inevitably, the nature and meaning of love. Everything coheres because of Jennings’s immaculate understanding of craft. Each polished narrative piece perfectly complements the next. This is a novel of contrasts: understated and bold, spare and sweeping, slender and grand. — T.F.

Avalon , by Nell Zink

best reviewed books 2022

Have you heard? The zoomers are anxious, savvy, and very online, circulating bits of out-of-context theory and cultural references: How can such a thing as an IRL love story — or a plot of any kind — emerge from this carnival? Nell Zink’s Avalon is a valiant attempt; her crew of young artists bicker confidently about Marx and their dystopian screenplays, and they exist offline, too, on their parents’ couches, on a road trip to the desert, and in the lean-to on a biker gang’s farm. The Dickensian heroine, Bran, is an orphan at the heart of a smart and funny künstlerroman. She may know that the word used to describe her story’s genre is having a moment, but she’s too busy falling in love and evading danger to dwell long on trends. Like The Wallcreeper , Zink’s first book , Avalon is both fast paced and overtly interested in its ideas, challenging the false dichotomy of plot versus depth. — M.C.

You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, by Akwaeke Emezi

best reviewed books 2022

Akwaeke Emezi’s novels tend to begin with a bang, and this one’s no different. The first sentence reads, “Milan was the first person Feyi fucked since the accident.” It immediately sends the mind spinning. Who is Milan? Who is Feyi? What accident? Was the sex any good? This explosive entrance to the book sets the tone for what follows: a not-so-traditional love story that asks: How does someone love after their world ends? Emezi takes us to an unnamed Caribbean island to find out, in a lush journey filled with beautiful paragraphs about art and so many vivid food descriptions it’s best to read on a full stomach. Like Emezi’s previous novels, Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji, the book isn’t just about one thing. Sure, there’s a pretty scandalous take on the forbidden love trope that pushes it firmly into the romance space (it also gets a bit steamy!), but it’s also a snapshot into grief many years after a life-changing incident. — T.D.H.

Fruiting Bodies , by Kathryn Harlan

best reviewed books 2022

It is perhaps fitting that several of the short stories in Fruiting Bodies , science-fiction writer Kathryn Harlan’s debut, center on mushrooms: Much like the fungus, the characters in Harlan’s eight tales live among constant death and rot, and yet, somehow, they find surprisingly beautiful ways to keep growing. Harlan’s plots are impressively diverse: “Agal Bloom,” which follows two young girls daring each other to swim in a mysteriously contaminated lake against their families’ wishes, bleeds effortlessly into “Hunting the Viper King,” wherein a young girl and her father go on a yearslong search for a snake whose venom grants ultimate understanding of the universe. The worlds Harlan creates feel both expansively fantastical and palpably real. A stunning literary portrayal of the climate apocalypse, Fruiting Bodies provides a window into how we can make life out of decay. — Mary Retta 

Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence, by Lynne Tillman

best reviewed books 2022

When Lynne Tillman’s mother, Sophie, was diagnosed with a brain disorder called normal-pressure hydrocephalus at age 86, the writer began a long journey through the complexities of elder care. The condition, which left Sophie forgetful and unsteady, required a series of invasive surgeries, and she lived for 11 years after its sudden, startling onset. Her tenacity was confounding to the many doctors she encountered who were unaccustomed to prioritizing the lives of the elderly, and much of this memoir is about the defiance required of caretakers like Tillman in the face of the medical Establishment. At the center of it all is Tillman’s relationship with her mother, whom she describes as a competitive, distant personality she must nonetheless fight for fiercely. Her honesty about their irreconcilable disconnect is electrifying. — Emma Alpern

Afterlives , by Abdulrazak Gurnah

best reviewed books 2022

Abdulrazak Gurah, the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has crafted a wide-ranging, orchestral novel. Afterlives is set in East Africa in the early 20th century after the European powers of the day carved up Africa according to their colonial ambitions. Gurnah’s narrative approach is to foreground how colonialism infects and undermines every aspect of society by training our attention on the intimate details of his characters’ lives — every action they take is consciously (and oftentimes unconsciously) influenced by their desire to escape its grasp. His scenes are polished, elegant, and masterfully constructed, each building effortlessly upon the last until the final pages, when his glittering narrative mosaic, glimpsed only in flashes throughout the story, is fully revealed. You will want to start over so you can experience it again. — T.F.

My Phantoms , by Gwendoline Riley

best reviewed books 2022

Gwendoline Riley’s latest novel opens with Bridget’s childhood recollections of her blustering, dodgy father, but the character’s real fixation is her mother, Helen “Hen” Grant, a hopelessly naïve and needy figure. Bridget, now in her 40s, is hyperaware of all her mother’s little manipulations, and each of her verbal tics — the repeated “Mmm”s and “I don’t know”s, the botched jokes, the clumsy fake accents — are recorded in icy detail. Riley transcribes what other authors often skip , making her dialogue uncannily lifelike. The book is a study in irritation that unfolds with thrillerlike tension, except the central moments are less bank heist and more adversarial family dinner (a particularly memorable scene takes place in a vegetarian restaurant where Hen falls quiet while choking down a “detox salad”). By the end, the unjustness of the mother-daughter relationship takes on an unsettling new dimension. — E.A.

Read Rachel Connolly’s profile of author Gwendoline Riley .

Bright Unbearable Reality , by Anna Badkhen

best reviewed books 2022

In the opening pages of Bright Unbearable Reality , the latest collection of essays by Anna Badkhen, the writer poses a question that she promptly answers: “What is place? A memory of our presence, a memory of our absence.” In these lines one can glimpse the narrative design of this book and its primary obsession. Each of these essays is animated by questions that inspire Badkhen to immerse herself in various global contexts — the book is set on four continents — to understand how the places she visits have been shaped by humans, and how humans have been altered by them. We follow along as she leaves behind a trail of precise, glistening prose, and each time we arrive somewhere else we consider, once again, humanity’s shifting, unstable, and essential relationship with place. We have planted flags and drawn maps, but — as Badkhen brilliantly demonstrates — the intersecting challenges of the 21st century (climate, economic, epidemic) might force us to reconsider our conclusions. — T.F.

Toad , by Katherine Dunn

best reviewed books 2022

Before 1989’s Geek Love shot her to success, Katherine Dunn spent years trying to find a publisher for her third book, a semi-autobiographical novel following Sally Gunnar, a woman who spent her college years on the fringes of the 1960s counterculture scene in Portland, Oregon. In a state of middle-age isolation, Sally looks back bitterly at the unfocused idealism of her young friend group: “The hermit has an evil eye that chills the memory and upsets the digestion,” she says in her narration. The central event from her student years is an ill-fated pregnancy involving the object of Sally’s affection, bright-eyed, philosophy-quoting Sam, that is drawn out with savage humor. After extensive revisions to the manuscript of Toad , which the author began writing in 1971, Dunn received a final rejection letter in 1977: “I love TOAD as much as ever, more, actually,” her editor wrote, but she was overruled by her colleagues. Long consigned to a drawer, the book has finally been posthumously published ( Dunn died in 2016 ). The novel is frightfully lovable, a brutal and baroque treatise on loneliness that shares a grotesque core with Dunn’s most famous novel. — E.A.

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The 50 Best New Books of 2022 That You Won't Be Able to Put Down

Wondering what you should be reading this year? Our list includes romance novels, non-fiction best-sellers, thrillers and so much more.

30 best new books to read in 2022 so far

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And this year's crop of new releases will do all of that, and more. Some of your favorite authors have new books out that rival their previous releases (peep that new Jennifer Egan!) and a whole host of debut authors also came out with stellar reads that will leave you hungry for their next one before you reach the last page. These are the best and most-anticipated books we've found so far, with something for fans of every genre and style. Of course, we have to acknowledge that "best" might mean something different to everyone. There are as many reading appetites as there are readers, so if your favorite book of 2022 doesn't make our list, don't despair. Let us know in the comments, and you might just inspire someone else to pick it up, too.

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

Fiona and Jane are best friends, navigating their tumultuous teenage years together, as well as their family histories and all that comes with them. But when Fiona moves across the country, their bond weakens and threatens to break. This novel about the power of female friendship will give you a gorgeous peek into both women's perspectives on a shared story that has as many facets as they do.

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamin Chan

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamin Chan

Frida's daughter Harriet is everything to her. But when she makes a terrible one-time mistake, the state decides that she has to prove her ability to be a good mother in order to remain one at all. This scarily prescient novel that's reminiscent of Orwell and Vonnegut explores the depths of parents' love, how strictly we judge mothers and each other and the terrifying potential of government overreach.

30 Things I Love About Myself by Radhika Sanghani

30 Things I Love About Myself by Radhika Sanghani

Newly single freelance writer Nina isn’t exactly flourishing, especially after she has to move back in with her depressed brother and her overbearing mother. But when she finds herself reading a self-help book in jail on her 30th birthday (long story), she embarks on a journey toward self-love, learning lessons most of us could stand to hear, too.

Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories by Gwen E. Kirby

Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories by Gwen E. Kirby

Just because Cassandra can see the future doesn't mean she's sharing what she finds there. In this wildly inventive collection of stories, Kirby explores the power of feminity in its many forms – including as brazen witches, virgins who can't be sacrificed and even cockroaches who catcallers fear. It's laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes brightly painful, thought-provoking and completely original.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

When an archaeologist witnesses the unleashing of a long-buried plague, it changes the course of history. This hauntingly beautiful story focuses on how the human spirit perseveres through it all. With everything from a cosmic search for home to a theme park for terminally ill kids and a talking pig, it’s a lyrical adventure that feels fantastical yet familiar.

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

Serial killer Ansel Packer is going to die for his crimes in 12 hours. But as the clock ticks down, we get to know the women who passed through his life, including his desperate mother and the homicide detective who became obsessed with his case. It’s a chilling, surprisingly tender tale of how each tragedy ripples through many lives.

RELATED: 25 Best True Crime Books of All Time to Unleash Your Inner Sherlock

Good Rich People by Eliza Jane Brazier

Good Rich People by Eliza Jane Brazier

The rich live differently than the rest of us, and that's never more evident than this chilling account of one family that plays a sick and twisted game with their tenants. When one (an interloper herself) decides that she's not just a pawn, nobody wins – or do they?

Devil House by John Darnielle

Devil House by John Darnielle

Fans of true crime, police procedurals and books that stick with you for weeks after you reach the last page, don't sleep on the latest from the multitalented Mountain Goats singer. It follows a true crime writer who's trying to figure out what really happened at a dilapidated former porn store where locals (and lore) say the Satanic panic resulted in death, but the truth goes so much deeper than that.

Don't Say We Didn't Warn You by Ariel Delgado Dixon

Don't Say We Didn't Warn You by Ariel Delgado Dixon

Two sisters' paths repeatedly diverge and intersect through this story about trauma and reckoning with it. Through life in an abandoned warehouse just outside NYC, stints at a wilderness rehabilitation center and a scrabble to find their footing as young adults, this is a sharp and unsettling story of two girls' ongoing search for their own place in the world and how their history shapes who they become.

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

Midwesterners, New Englanders and anyone from small town America will recognize the contours in this quietly beautiful novel about what it feels like to grow up an outsider. It's a starkly lyrical exploration of the darkness that lies underneath a lily white community with an emotional resonance that sneaks up on you and won't let go.

Where I Can't Follow by Ashley Blooms

Where I Can't Follow by Ashley Blooms

In a little mountain town hit hard by poverty and the opioid epidemic, there's a chance at escape. Magical doors appear to some people as a way out, but once they step through, there's no turning back. This fantastically real, absorbing novel explores what it would feel like to have an escape hatch from the hardships of life, and the agonizing decision whether to leave everyone you love behind.

The Last Suspicious Holdout by Ladee Hubbard

The Last Suspicious Holdout by Ladee Hubbard

From the author of The Rib King comes a collection of stories about the Black residents of a southern suburb in the years between the beginning of the Clinton administration and Obama's election. It's about racism, the war on drugs, class and struggle, but at its heart, it's a portrait of a community. While it doesn't flinch away from the hard truth, it's also filled with love and a steely kind of hope.

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

This eerily magical, richly atmospheric novel follows Darwin, a devout Rastafarian whose poverty forces him to cast off his religion to become a gravedigger, and Yejide, one of a line of women who have the power to usher the dead into the afterlife. Darwin gets mixed up in some funny business and Yejide is looking for a way out of the life she's been handed. When they're drawn together, they discover whether their love can rival the forces working against them.

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Ingrid has hit a wall in her PhD research on poet Xiao-Wen Chou when she comes across something that suggests he may not have been who he seems. Before she knows it, Ingrid has blown open a scandal that threatens her relationship with her fiancé and her best friend, her academic department and even her own self-knowledge. This is a fresh, hilarious and thoughtful satire that'll make you think about cultural identity in a whole new way.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

If you loved Station Eleven , you'll adore this dystopian novel that's about time travel as much as it is about love and family, and what happens when we lose sight of what's truly important. It takes the reader from a plague-ravaged earth to moon colonies, from 1912 to the near future in a triumph of science fiction for those who think they hate science fiction.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

You don't have to read A Visit From the Goon Squad to love this sibling novel to Egan's stellar hit. The revolutionary technology Own Your Unconscious allows users to store and access their memories – and other people's. Through complex and intimate intertwining narratives, it follows a cast of characters' experiences with Bouton's creation, and how its consequences echo through the decades.

End of the World House: A Novel by Adrienne Celt

End of the World House: A Novel by Adrienne Celt

What do you get when you take Groundhog Day, add a dash of the apocalypse, a little French obsession and mix in female friendship and romantic entanglement? This firecracker of a book that gets weirder and more bizarrely funny the more pages you turn.

Nobody Gets Out Alive: Stories by Leigh Newman

Nobody Gets Out Alive: Stories by Leigh Newman

The Alaskan wilderness is unforgiving, and so is life for the people who live there. In this arresting collection of stories, we meet people who are fighting not only the snowy tundra, but addiction, heartbreak, complicated families and the demons so many of us carry with us, regardless of when or where we live.

When We Fell Apart by Soon Wiley

When We Fell Apart by Soon Wiley

Min can’t believe his Korean girlfriend Yu-jin died by suicide, right before graduation. As he embarks on a quest to uncover the truth, he learns more about Yu-jin’s life as the daughter of a high-ranking government official, the true nature of her bond with her roommate So-ra, and his own bi-racial identity. This compelling, propulsive novel is as complex as the characters it follows.

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

A sharply original novel about love, friendship and the journey grief takes, this one will ring true for so many of us these days. Five years after losing the love of her life, Feyi's BFF, Joy, wants her to get back out there, but when she does, Feyi finds herself thrown into her future without a net. For anyone who's been feeling a little lost, let this book give you some inspiration.

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@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-o9j0dn:before{margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-right:0.625rem;color:#ffffff;width:1.25rem;bottom:-0.2rem;height:1.25rem;content:'_';display:inline-block;position:relative;line-height:1;background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-o9j0dn:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/goodhousekeeping/static/images/Clover.5c7a1a0.svg);}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.loaded .css-o9j0dn:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/goodhousekeeping/static/images/Clover.5c7a1a0.svg);}} All the Best Books to Read Next

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The Best Books of 2022 So Far

best reviewed books 2022

I n a time that continues to be marked by uncertainty and devastation , books can provide solace and, perhaps, some answers to the biggest questions that arise when living through crises. The best books of the year so far pick apart what it means to grieve, how to love after loss, and what it takes to survive the unthinkable. In his celebrated new poetry collection, Ocean Vuong picks up the pieces of his life following the death of his mother. Jessamine Chan examines the lengths a parent will go for her child in her startling debut novel. And Margo Jefferson explores the relationship between art and humanity in her brilliant second memoir. Their stories, along with several others, offer a comforting reminder that we all grapple with hardship—and that there is light, even in the darkest of situations. Here, the best books of 2022 so far.

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water , Matthieu Aikins

best reviewed books 2022

In 2016, Canadian journalist Matthieu Aikins went undercover, forgoing his passport and identity, to join his Afghan friend Omar who was fleeing his war-torn country and leaving the woman he loved behind. Their harrowing experience is the basis for Aikins’ book The Naked Don’t Fear the Water , which chronicles the duo’s dangerous and emotional journey on the refugee trail from Afghanistan to Europe. As they are confronted with the many realities of war, Aikins spares no details in his urgent and empathetic narrative.

Buy Now : The Naked Don’t Fear the Water on Bookshop | Amazon

In Love , Amy Bloom

best reviewed books 2022

The first pages of Amy Bloom’s memoir set up the book’s devastating ending: It’s January 2020 and Bloom and her husband are traveling to Switzerland, but only Bloom will return home. Her husband plans to end his life through a program based in Zurich. He has Alzheimer’s and wants to die on his terms. Bloom introduces these facts swiftly and then packs an emotional punch: The next time she’s on an airplane, she’ll be flying alone. From there, Bloom details her husband’s wrenching decision and all that led up to their trip abroad. Though In Love is rooted in an impossibly sad situation, Bloom’s narrative is more than just an expertly crafted narrative on death and grief. It’s a beautiful love letter from a wife to her husband, rendered in the most delicate terms, about the life they shared together.

Buy Now : In Love on Bookshop | Amazon

The School for Good Mothers , Jessamine Chan

best reviewed books 2022

Frida Liu is a 30-something single mother struggling to keep up with the demands of her office job and raising her 18-month-old daughter after her husband left her for a younger woman. In Jessamine Chan’s unsettling debut novel, we begin on Frida’s worst day, when her lack of sleep has caused a lapse in judgment and she leaves her baby at home alone for two hours. Soon, Frida is sent to a government run facility with other mothers deemed “failures” by the state. Reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale , this eerie page-turner is a captivating depiction of a dystopian world that feels entirely possible. It’s not only the gripping story of Frida’s personal struggle, but also a thought-provoking work of commentary on American motherhood.

Buy Now : The School for Good Mothers on Bookshop | Amazon

The Candy House , Jennifer Egan

best reviewed books 2022

One of the most anticipated books of the year, The Candy House is Jennifer Egan’s follow up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad . That book was hailed for its innovative structure—one chapter was written as a Powerpoint presentation—and the new narrative follows suit in its impressive construction. This time, Egan spins fresh commentary on technology, memory, and privacy through 14 interlinked stories. In them, a machine called Own your Unconscious allows people to revisit any memories from their past whenever they want—if only they make those memories accessible to everyone else. It’s a thrilling concept brought together by Egan’s astute hand, offering a powerful look at how we live in an increasingly interconnected world.

Buy Now : The Candy House on Bookshop | Amazon

Olga Dies Dreaming , Xochitl Gonzalez

best reviewed books 2022

It’s the summer of 2017 and Olga Acevedo is seemingly thriving: She’s a wedding planner for the Manhattan elite and living in a posh (and rapidly gentrifying) Brooklyn neighborhood. The protagonist of Xochitl Gonzalez’s absorbing debut novel had humble origins as the daughter of Puerto Rican activists, raised by her grandmother in another part of the borough where she taught herself everything she needed to know to be where she is today. But in Olga Dies Dreaming , the reality of Olga’s self-made success is more complicated. She struggles with the loneliness that has accompanied meeting her lofty goals, and she’s haunted by the absence of the mother who abandoned her family when Olga was just 12 years old. As hurricane season in Puerto Rico amps up, Olga begins to grapple with family secrets just as she falls in love for the first time. What ensues is a thoughtfully depicted romantic comedy full of domestic strife, executed in Gonzalez’s vibrant prose.

Buy Now : Olga Dies Dreaming on Bookshop | Amazon

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Fiona and Jane, Jean Chen Ho

best reviewed books 2022

In her debut short story collection, Jean Chen Ho traces the evolution of a friendship between two Taiwanese American women for two decades. In interlinked narratives, told in alternating voices, Ho captures what makes female friendship so special by following these characters from their adolescence and beyond. Fiona and Jane’s bond is constantly tested, particularly as they navigate loss, breakups, and betrayal, but they always find their way back to each other. In intimate and layered terms, Ho describes the love that keeps their friendship together, even when life tries to pull them apart.

Buy Now : Fiona and Jane on Bookshop | Amazon

Constructing A Nervous System , Margo Jefferson

best reviewed books 2022

In 2015, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson released her debut memoir Negroland . In the award-winning book, Jefferson reflected on her life as she reckoned with what it meant to grow up as a privileged Black person in a wealthy area of Chicago, crafting a searing examination of race and class in America. The author now returns with a bruising second memoir that goes beyond her personal story, blending criticism and autobiography. Constructing A Nervous System is an exciting collection of Jefferson’s thoughts and musings on the world, from her love of Ella Fitzgerald and Bud Powell to her own writing process.

Buy Now : Constructing A Nervous System on Bookshop | Amazon

Vladimir , Julia May Jonas

best reviewed books 2022

Julia May Jonas’ outrageously fun and discomfiting debut Vladimir puts an unexpected twist on the traditional campus novel . Her narrator is a prickly English professor at a small liberal arts college who has developed a crush on her department’s latest recruit. Meanwhile, an investigation into her husband, the chair of the same department, looms large. He’s been accused of having inappropriate relationships with former students, but our protagonist could care less. As her feelings for the new hire enter increasingly dark territory, Jonas unravels a taut and bold narrative about power, ambition, and female desire.

Buy Now : Vladimir on Bookshop | Amazon

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Life Between the Tides , Adam Nicolson

best reviewed books 2022

Historian Adam Nicolson dissects all aspects of marine life to make stirring observations about crustaceans, humans, and the world in which we all live in this deftly reported book. In Life Between the Tides , Nicolson zeroes in on the tide pools he creates in a Scottish bay, which he describes in lyrical and engaging prose. Blending scientific research, philosophy, and moving commentary on what it means to live, Nicolson’s book defies genre categorization as the author, with the help of stunning illustrations, strives to tackle the biggest questions about humanity through investigating a sliver of the sea’s inhabitants.

Buy Now : Life Between the Tides on Bookshop | Amazon

Young Mungo , Douglas Stuart

best reviewed books 2022

The latest novel from Douglas Stuart shares a lot in common with his first, the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain . In both, young men live in working-class Glasglow in the late 20th century with their alcoholic mothers. This time, the narrative focuses on the love story between two boys, Mungo and James, and the dangers that surround their romance. It’s a piercing examination of the violence inflicted upon queer people and a gripping portrayal of the lengths to which one will go to fight for love.

Buy Now : Young Mungo on Bookshop | Amazon

The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk

best reviewed books 2022

It’s been such a treat to read through Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s catalog as her books are being translated from Polish and released in English. The latest, translated by Jennifer Croft, is perhaps the author’s most ambitious. The Books of Jacob is a sprawling narrative set in the mid-18th century about a self-proclaimed Messiah who travels the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. At more than 900 pages, the novel is a gigantic undertaking, but Tokarczuk fills the chapters with delectable prose to paint a portrait of this complicated man—based on a real-life figure—through the perspectives of the people in his life. In doing so, Tokarczuk creates a compelling psychological profile of a mysterious leader that masterfully oscillates between humor and tragedy.

Buy Now : The Books of Jacob on Bookshop | Amazon

Time Is a Mother , Ocean Vuong

best reviewed books 2022

Ocean Vuong’s second poetry collection finds the acclaimed writer wrestling with grief after he lost his mother to breast cancer in 2019. Like his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous , this collection is a tender exploration of memory, loss, and love. Through 28 poems, Vuong showcases his original voice as he asks pressing questions about the limits of language and the power of poetry in times of crisis.

Buy Now : Time Is a Mother on Bookshop | Amazon

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39 Best Books of 2022

By Keziah Weir and Vanity Fair

39 Best Books of 2022

“Who is the greatest Italian painter?” the titular character of Muriel Spark’s  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie  asks her students. “Leonardo da Vinci,” they tell her. “That is incorrect,” she says. “The answer is Giotto, he is my favorite.”

It is that time of year. The greatest time. The best time. Best movies, best podcasts, best television, best books. Best. Best! Sorry to do this, but let’s establish some ground rules with a definition: in the Webster’s International Dictionary, Second Edition (the largest dictionary I own, and therefore the best) it’s “having good qualities in the highest degree.” So, first, it should be said that this leaves some room for interpretation. And second, that some would argue that, like Valentine’s Day and very tight jeans, at worst the year-end best-of list exists solely to make most people feel bad—at another worst, it’s here for the clicks. When it comes to books and Italian painters, best is in the eye of the beholder. But at  best, the list is a discoverability tool, and in 2022, in a world brimming with content, we do like to help the crème de la crème rise. So, here it is, the Brodie-scale best books of 2022: a highly subjective list of some personal favorites—bestsellers worth the hype, titles that flew more under the radar than merited, and everything in between—from the staff of  Vanity Fair.

All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

best reviewed books 2022

“The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man” by Paul Newman (Knopf)

Paul Newman sat for a series of no-holds-barred interviews with his longtime friend  Stewart Stern between 1986 and 1991—the transcripts of which were mined for Newman’s posthumous memoir, published this October. The book is an extraordinary glimpse into the psyche of one of Hollywood’s greatest icons—in large part because Newman was so unfiltered on subjects ranging from his complicated relationship with his looks and fame, his perceived failures as a father and husband to first wife Jackie Witte, and his fiery passion for second wife Joanne Woodward. You’ll be hard-pressed to find another star willing to share half as much. —Julie Miller, Senior Hollywood Correspondent

best reviewed books 2022

“The Man Who Could Move Clouds” by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Doubleday)

“This is a memoir of the ghostly,” writes  Ingrid Rojas Contreras in her author’s note to  The Man Who Could Move Clouds, “which celebrates cultural understandings of truth that are, at heart, Colombian.” The memoir, unusually, finds its center in acts of forgetting—two bouts of amnesia, one experienced by the author’s mother at age eight, having fallen (or perhaps been pushed) down a well, and Contreras’s at age 23, after a bike accident. Contreras comes from a lineage of curanderos, or healers. Her grandfather, called Nono, was a charming, philandering, illiterate man with a steel trap of a memory who once threatened his wife and newborn with a machete after one of his ominous premonitions. That newborn was Contreras’s mother, who from her accident and subsequent amnesia would gain and lose the ability to hear voices, but retain one to be in two places at once. In the wake of her own accident, 43 years later, Contreras writes, “I lost the impulse to hide that I was a brown woman born of a brown woman born of a poor man who said he had the power to move clouds”—but, she describes with some regret, “I cannot see ghosts like Mami could, I do not hear the dead, and the future is hidden from me as much as it ever was.” 

The family was driven by violence to leave Colombia in 1998, when Contreras was 14; the action of the memoir begins when three of Nono’s daughters—Mami, tía Perla, tía Nahía—dream that Nono wants his remains disinterred, and then Contreras dreams of Nono pointing to a river, saying “this is the scene,” which is enough for her mother to organize a trip back to Colombia to exhume his remains. Contreras’s book interweaves history of all magnitudes, from the atrocities perpetrated upon Native tribes by Spanish colonizers, to stories handed down through generations, to family lore—and in examining the past in this way, in bringing it back into the light, Contreras works an act of magic all her own. — Keziah Weir, Senior Editor

best reviewed books 2022

“Aesthetica” by Allie Rowbottom (SoHo Press)

This brutal tale of a teenage Instagram model teases out the ugliness of influencer culture against our rather ancient tradition of performative femininity. Under  Allie Rowbottom ’s patiently literary hand, this novel’s true gem lies in its central mother-daughter relationship—a reminder that our obsession with youth is never too far removed from what binds us to our lineage.  —Delia Cai, Senior Vanities Correspondent

best reviewed books 2022

“Less Is Lost” by Andrew Sean Greer (Little, Brown and Company)

More things are more important  now more than ever . Truth, we’re told. Accountability. Acceptance of historical and ongoing wrongs. Hard yes on all that. But also, humor. Humor is what I need now more than ever. Maybe it’s aging. Maybe it’s the last few years, all caught up. Maybe it’s just that it feels really good to laugh, and always does, but the present takes prominence.  Andrew Sean Greer ’s 2017 novel  Less, which follows bumbling, endearing, middle-aged, middling author Arthur Less through a grand tour of the world in the hopes of running far away from his ex’s wedding, made me laugh and laugh, and then it won the Pulitzer Prize. With the announcement of a sequel,  Less is Lost, I experienced both joy and dread; like the announcement of a film adaptation of a beloved book, a sequel can mean much more of a good thing, or a dark cloud over the whole endeavor. This book falls firmly in the first camp. On the off chance dear reader hasn’t yet experienced the first book, I’ll refrain from revealing the narrative sleight of hand that illuminates it, and which dwells out in the open in the second—but suffice to say that in  Lost  we find Less once again on the move, this time through our own vast country. It is sharp and smart and sad and sweet, and once again made me giggle aloud. More of Less, please. And well-earned happy endings. Would take more of those too. — K.W.

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“Stay True” by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

In  Hua Hsu ’s  Stay True —a coming-of-age memoir exploring identity forged at the margins—time is measured by alternate means. A college-era drive to the grocery store is six songs long. Balcony conversations tick by at the pace of a cigarette. “A day felt like forever, a year was a geological era,” Hsu writes of his impatient teenage stretch: faxing math questions to his dad in Taiwan, combing for Nirvana’s spiritual successor at the record store, editing zines while at UC Berkeley. Part of what makes the book so transfixing is the specificity of detail: a high-definition panorama that includes mixtape highlights, dorm-room riffs, and influences ( La Jetée, Derrida,  The Last Dragon ) captured at their flashpoints. But it’s the impetus behind that diligent chronicling—a friend’s sudden death—that casts a shadow throughout, leaving Hsu, a New Yorker writer, to sensitively chart those depths. “I remember an unshakable humidity, standing in a hangar where you could hear too many of the sound systems at once, the psychedelic aura smothered by gray clouds, a drifting weariness,” Hsu writes, recalling the rave he attended while, across town, a life was cut short. It was a premonition: “For a flash, I no longer felt young.” But even where memory fails (the book’s title comes from a long-forgotten inside joke), there’s a sense of history forever being reknit into the present.  —Laura Regensdorf, Beauty Director

best reviewed books 2022

“Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey” by Florence Williams (W.W. Norton and Co.)

Throughout her career, journalist  Florence Williams ’s work has focused on the environment, health and science, penning page-turners like  Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History. But when her 25-year marriage falls apart, Williams embarks on her most personal project yet: an investigation of heartbreak. While grappling with her own grieving (and, ultimately, healing) process, Williams’s research takes her from trying MDMA in a therapist’s living room to a solo quest deep into the mountains. By her own experience with her findings, this fascinating read will leave an indelible impression on your heart and mind.  —Maggie Coughlan, Senior Vanities Editor

best reviewed books 2022

“Incredible Doom: Vol. 2” by Matthew Bogart and Jesse Holden (HarperAlley)

As Twitter begins to unravel, super users are left wondering what will happen to the community that the platform created. But long before Elon Musk, during the internet’s infancy, friendships were forged across message boards and servers, with strangers bonding over fandom, punk rock, movies, and more. In this graphic novel (the sequel to  Incredible Doom: Vol 1 ), EVOL House, a dilapidated Ohio home serves as a real-life refuge for those who became friends online—but can these relationships persist offline? With every ultra-absorbing panel, you’ll be eager to find out.  —M.C.

best reviewed books 2022

“The Nineties: A Book” by Chuck Klosterman (Penguin Press)

The guide to explaining America’s Late Before Times to Gen Zers, this breezy, witty skip-hopping dissection of the decade’s defining events, personalities, pop culture, and Gen X stereotypes keeps overwrought phenomena from  Nevermind to the Clinton sex scandal fresh by interpreting them through the vagaries of looking back and our tendency toward sociocultural revisionism. When analyzing the nineties, “the central illusion is memory itself.” The veteran culture journalist’s take on the period’s hot topics and tropes are arranged in easily digestible, connectable theories, often based on the primacy of TV coupled with the lacuna of an instantly accessible repository of facts. Our last gasp of national monoculture was also “perhaps the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional.” Tapping everything from  The X Files to steroidal baseball in order to posit truths about collective memory during America’s “good time,”  Chuck Klosterman rationalizes his own career’s avoidance of those more serious issues—and offers privileged Gen Xers a chance to put our complicity on hold for a couple hours.  —Michael Quinones, Copy Manager

best reviewed books 2022

“How Far the Light Reaches a Life in Ten Sea Creatures” by Sabrina Imbler (Little, Brown)

It may be easy to find a simile in the depths of the soul and those of the sea; harder, for most, to go much further than that. In this collection of essays,  Sabrina Imbler (of the glorious “ When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray ” headline) has done a deep dive. “How to Draw a Sperm Whale” intersperses descriptions of whales and their deaths with a “necropsy report” of one of Imbler’s relationships. In “Hybrids,” an essay about, among other things, growing up with a white father and a Chinese mother, Imbler (conflicted about it) compares themself to a mixed-species butterfly fish. In “My Mother and the Starving Octopus” Imbler profiles a female octopus who brooded for more than four years, not eating, even actively refusing food: soft-bodied mollusk as hunger artist. In between these sections, Imbler writes about their mother, who is obsessed with being thin, and about Imbler’s own youthful disordered eating. It is once Imbler “begins dating people who are not cis men” that they learn to desire their own body, just as it is—though in “a wry twist of queerness,” they describe going on to wish again for other physical changes: “I predict I will always be in negotiation with my body, what it wants and what I want of it.”

Imbler is adept at capturing alien animals in succinct, often endearing descriptions. Giant isopods are “lavender pill bugs the size of casserole dishes”; a black-eyed squid “carries her thousands of eggs in her arms as she swims.” (Because some of these creatures die on the page, and often at the hands of a human, to fall in love with them can lead to devastation: An octopus captured for examination is “torn apart” in the process; a particularly protective and gregarious butterfly fish is shot with an explosive device and collected as a specimen.) It’s a world-expanding book, brimming with so much: life, pain, loss, wonder. — K.W.

best reviewed books 2022

“Lincoln and the Fight for Peace” by John Avlon (Simon & Schuster)

In these dark times, it can be hard to even imagine what good, let alone great, national leadership looks like. That’s what makes  John Avlon ’s account of Abraham Lincoln’s plan to win the peace after winning the Civil War so important. Though the plan itself was tragically cut short by his assassination, Lincoln’s keen intellect and profound human decency set a precedent that reverberated in the century that followed, as Avlon astutely demonstrates. The book kicks off with a tour de force narration of the 16th president’s triumphant arrival in Richmond (excerpted  right here on VF.com) and positively brims with astonishing details plucked from the vast library of historical facts that, as Avlon’s pal, I happen to know he carries around in his head. If you ask me, this is the perfect holiday read for anyone who, in spite of it all, just can’t quit the American Dream.  —Michael Hogan, Executive Digital Director

best reviewed books 2022

“Mr. B” by Jennifer Homans (Random House)

How on earth can anyone sum up the life of George Balanchine, the visionary, exacting choreographer behind New York City Ballet? To him, the art form existed on an otherworldly plane, with apotheosis springing from pure, unembroidered technique. “To dance this way, you have to take everything off. Expression, persona, personality—your very  self must go,” writes  Jennifer Homans  in  Mr. B, a decade-long project for which the scholar and former ballerina pored over archives across continents and interviewed nearly 200 dancers. (Stamina is a prerequisite for his work.) But this is not just a biography for balletomanes. Balanchine’s career, stretching from imperial Russia to 1980s New York, brims with 20th-century characters; collaborators include Igor Stravinsky, Katherine Dunham, Isamu Noguchi, and the powerhouse NYCB cofounder Lincoln Kirstein. Homans, an insightful magpie, braids together differing accounts—as with the opening gesture of  Serenade  (1934) , Balanchine’s first ballet on American soil, which some see as a commentary on the Nazi salute. (The choreographer managed several well-timed departures, leaving Russia ahead of Stalin, Europe before Hitler’s reign.) Balanchine’s revolving-door relationships with dancers—marriages, rumored abortions, roles bestowed and withheld—get a clear-eyed examination. “They were ‘dear,’ and he was ‘Mr. B,’” Homans writes of the complicated, if often treasured, symbiosis. Jealousy was common; weight, scrutinized. “He had an instinct, gently, for the jugular.” For a man who called himself a “cloud in trousers” (a line borrowed from poet Vladimir Mayakovsky), Homans captures many of those elusive contours within the fabric of her book, making special room for NYCB’s behind-the-scenes figures and lucid discussions of key ballets ( Agon, Firebird,  and others). Balanchine’s push for full-tilt momentum echoes still: “What are you saving it for, you might be dead tomorrow.” — L.R.

best reviewed books 2022

“You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty” by Akwaeke Emezi (Atria)

You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty takes grief and sadness and the frustration that comes with dating after losing love and turns it into the juiciest, messiest chaos. It’s been five years since Feyi’s husband was killed in a car crash. They were high school sweethearts, destined to be each other’s forevers, and she hasn’t been quite the same since. She meets some people, she falls in love. But…obviously, since, this is  Akwaeke Emezi we’re talking about, it gets more interesting, more nuanced. It’ll keep you turning pages all night if you’re not careful.  —Kathleen Creedon, Associate Web Producer

best reviewed books 2022

“In the Mouth of the Wolf” by Katherine Corcoran (Bloomsbury)

Regina Martínez was a bold woman. An investigative journalist out of Veracruz, Mexico, her stories outlined corruption, greed, and abuse in Mexican politics—an anomaly in a place where gangs and shady politicians often ruled what was (and wasn’t) printed. It was her steadfast dedication to the truth that many believe is the reason she was murdered. In the Mouth of the Wolf isn’t your ordinary true-crime account. It’s a deep dive into the injustice and danger many Mexican journalists face to this day.  Katherine Corcoran explores the mystery of Martínez’s death and the risk many reporters take to keep the press free.  —K.C.

best reviewed books 2022

“The Old Place” by Bobby Finger (G.P. Putnam & Sons)

I’m a longtime listener of  Bobby Finger ’s podcast  Who Weekly, which he tapes twice a week with cohost  Lindsey Weber, so I was excited to see what he could do with the generous space of a novel. An absolute ton, it turns out.  The Old Place, a story of a prickly, retired school teacher and the secrets at the heart of her most enduring relationships, gave me several gifts: a steady voice that handles pain and grief with as much humor and lightness as it does poignancy. Accounts of life in a small Southern town that feel well-studied, but never, ever clichéd. An emotionally devastating set piece involving large quantities of potato salad. I found myself thinking of each character’s complexities and their imperfect dynamics as much as I do those of lifelong friends, and know they’ll stay with me a long time.  —Kenzie Bryant, Staff Writer

best reviewed books 2022

“The Candy House” by Jennifer Egan (Scribner)

After her fiercely spectacular  A Visit From the Goon Squad, the odds seemed slim  Jennifer Egan could do it again—and yet, she did. Her follow-up novel,  The Candy House, is an undeniable page-turner. Egan presents a dystopian future wherein technology has subsumed individuality as the practice of “externalizing” one’s memories in exchange for those of others becomes pervasive. By seamlessly shifting between seemingly disparate perspectives, Egan creates a troubling tapestry of what could come should we continue to rely on and give ourselves over to technology—namely, the loss of unique human experience. I couldn’t put it down. —Abigail Tracy, National Political Reporter

best reviewed books 2022

“Trust” by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead)

What begins as an easily digestible tale of a Wall Street tycoon and his intellectual, well-bred wife—their successes and tragedies—against the backdrop of historic New York City twists into a masterpiece of competing perspectives that puts truth and its relativity front and center. Page by page,  Hernan Diaz introduces layers of complexity to his characters, all while dissecting wealth, greed, and love. As you follow the efforts of one woman to unravel fact from fiction, the reality that we are all editing our own narratives takes hold. — A.T.

best reviewed books 2022

“Constructing a Nervous System” by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon)

In fewer than 200 pages,  Margo Jefferson unlocks the ways by which we are and she has been influenced and shaped by art. Shifting between tone and material—songs, poems, memories, among others—Jefferson somehow manages to construct a cogent reflection on the subtle and stark ways in which we are shaped by what we consume all while tackling the complexities and contradictions of identity. She captures the struggles of being human. — A.T.

best reviewed books 2022

“Honey & Spice” by Bolu Babalola (William Morrow)

Amidst the typical stream of horror that social media offered in 2022, Twitter and TikTok also placed this sensual and thought-provoking romance into my lap.  Bolu Babalola ’s debut novel centers on Kiki Banjo, who would rather share frank and feminist romantic advice on her collegiate radio show,  Black Sugar, than delve into dating firsthand. Enter Malakai Korede, a smooth-talking aspiring filmmaker whom she promptly brands the “Wastemen of Whitewell” as warning to the female student body. Of course, their prickly dynamic gives way to a romantic comedy brimming with all of my favorite tropes: enemies-to-lovers, fake dating, and Brits bantering until you’re practically begging for them to  just snog already. Babalola expertly blends sex with societal discourse in ways that echo Jane Austen and Nora Ephron. Receiving updates on her follow-up is—for now—reason enough to keep Twitter activated.  —Savannah Walsh, Editorial Assistant

best reviewed books 2022

“I’m Glad My Mom Died” by Jennette McCurdy (Simon & Schuster)

Each year, there are a few interviews that linger. Our conversation long ended, story filed, book released—my mind often flickers back to  Jennette McCurdy and her all-consuming debut memoir  I’m Glad My Mom Died. That incendiary title beckons even the most passive to turn an ear her way—and after an existence centered on her abusive mother, she’s more than earned a moment of our time. McCurdy doesn’t stray from any of it: her turbulent time as a child star on Nickelodeon, crippling eating disorders introduced by her mom, and the painful journey to saying those five words aloud for the first time. It’s not only McCurdy’s story that resonates—it’s her ability to tell it all. With total command and sardonic comedic timing earned in  spite  of her sitcom training, she winds through her darkest days and makes a compelling case for getting to the other side, scars and all. In promoting her memoir, McCurdy was forced to rip that Bandaid time and again,  including with me . Her gumption to do so is something I’ll be carrying with me into the next year.  —S.W.

best reviewed books 2022

“Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records” by Jim Ruland (Hachette)

SST Records’ run in the 1980s was epic. Just flip to the end of  Jim Ruland ’s  Corporate Rock Sucks  and scan the catalog of groundbreaking albums from Hüsker Dü, Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and more. But the story begins with  Greg Ginn, a teenage ham-radio enthusiast who cofounded seminal hardcore band Black Flag and transformed his mail-order electronics business into the defining indie label of the era—and a harbinger of the alterna-rock and grunge explosion to come. (SST put out early records by Seattle’s Soundgarden and Screaming Trees, though Ginn passed on Nirvana.) Ruland digs into the drama, from SST’s clashes with police, the media, and the music business, to Ginn’s spats with everyone from bandmates like  Henry Rollins to his brother, the artist  Raymond Pettibon,  who came up with Black Flag’s name and iconic four-bar logo. That symbol, still a go-to tattoo for punks four decades later, speaks to the label’s imprint on underground culture.  —Michael Calderone, Editor of the Hive

best reviewed books 2022

“Young Mungo” by Douglas Stuart (Grove)

Young Mungo  marked the bracing back half of my 2022 introduction to Douglas Stuart —having caught up with his prize-winning  Shuggie Bain from 2020 in time to race through this spiritual sequel immediately after. As I suspect is the case for many, it’s hard to separate the two novels; maybe my head will get a little more clarity between the two with a little more distance. But for now I can only describe what  Young Mungo  left me with after living in Stuart’s exquisitely textured, wrenchingly brutal dual portraits of queer youth in ’80s and ’90s Glasgow: the sense of lives lived and lost, of hearts crushed and opened then crushed again, of what it takes for many to simply live.

There’s a classical quality to Stuart’s writing in the way he knows his time and place so well, and yet it feels everywhere, endless.  Young Mungo  ostensibly takes the shape of a friendship tale, of what happened to two boys who fell in love against the world’s wishes. And it tells it beautifully—avoiding misery porn, understanding the limits and the wonders of joy. But it’s in the quiet that turns  Young Mungo  masterful: the moments around the ingeniously engineered suspense, the way people look and eat and smell and dream—the moments that make you care, before the plot kicks in and their fate feels like the fate of the whole world.  —David Canfield, Awards Reporter

best reviewed books 2022

“Everything I Need I Get From You” by Kaitlyn Tiffany (MCD x FSG Originals)

My biggest takeaway from reading  Everything I Need I Get From You, is that one day, if you’re very lucky, hopefully you’ll love something or someone as much as teenage girls can love a boy band. Tiffany, a former One Direction fangirl turned  Atlantic  writer, bravely dives into the wild west of online fandom to give an in-depth account, both personal and reported, of “How Fan Girls Created the Internet as We Know It.” It’s an empathetic and entertaining analysis of the power and influence of the (mostly) young women who dedicate themselves to the stars they love. You’ll want to pass this book on to anyone who has ever cared deeply about anything at all. Come for the deep-fried memes, stay for the roadside shrine to Harry Styles’s puke. — Daniela Tijerina, Assistant to the Editor in Chief

best reviewed books 2022

“Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai” by Matti Friedman (Spiegel & Grau)

Matti Friedman ’s concise and poetic book recounts Cohen’s highly improvised concert tour of the front lines of the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The little-known episode marks a resurrection of sorts in Cohen’s life. Holed up on the island of Hydra before the war, he was in a personal crisis: Dried up creatively, he had spoken of retirement.

The war deeply rattles his sensibilities and awakens his sense of purpose—within a few months of the war’s end, he releases one of his best albums,  New Skin for the Old Ceremony, and reenters the musical world, becoming over time the priestly elder statesman we’ve come to know, the focus of near religious devotion.  —Eric Miles, Visuals Editor

best reviewed books 2022

“Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America” by Hugh Eakin (Crown)

A fresh take on Picasso and Modernism? Impossible? Well, look no further. You’ll read the little-known saga of how a previously apolitical Picasso—then 54, love-harried and rather disengaged—rebooted, rebounded, and created one of the great antiwar statements in the history of art: his massive “Guernica,” which was initially reviled by critics. You’ll be riveted by the stories of Rousseau’s long-lost masterpiece, “The Sleeping Gypsy”; America’s Depression-era obsession with Van Gogh; and New York’s wartime ascendance as a Modernist stronghold. Hugh Eakin spins neglected yarns of art history into pure gold in this clear, sensitive, and deftly written narrative. — David Friend, Creative Development Editor

best reviewed books 2022

“Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington” by James Kirchick (Holt)

James Kirchick ’s opus is the definitive book on the intersection of Washington politics and gay and lesbian history.  Secret City  presents the largely unknown backstories of the DC power brokers who helped shepherd or scuttle the careers—indeed, the lives—of their LGBTQ+ colleagues, friends, and enemies. Insightful, astute, and exhaustively researched through scores of interviews, archives, long-lost articles, and declassified documents, Kirchik’s doorstop of a book is an ingenious unicorn of scholarship: leviathan in length (848 pages!) but also a page-turner. — D.F.

best reviewed books 2022

“Portrait of an Unknown Woman” by Daniel Silva (Harper)

Daniel Silva’s latest had to be one of  Vanity Fair ’s favorites this year. The novel not only braids together art forgery, murder, spycraft, sex, and a Baedeker of swank locales, but its climax is set in the  Vanity Fair offices at One World Trade Center, featuring a dogged investigative reporter inspired by  V.F. ’s own  Marie Brenner. Silva’s central character—as in many of his previous thrillers—is the spymaster/art-restorer Gabriel Allon, who, after his near-demise in Silva’s last tour de force,  The Cellist, manages (spoiler alert!) to evade yet another attempt on his life (this time by a cell phone-detonated bomb at a Paris art gallery). Long live Allon—and Hi Ho, Silva! — D.F.

best reviewed books 2022

“Temples of Books: Magnificent Libraries Around the World” by Marianne Julia Strauss (Gestalten/Berlin)

No one who purports to own a proper home library should be without  Temple of Books. This sumptuous coffee-table tome showcases photograph after jaw-dropping photograph of the most well-designed and well-stocked libraries on earth. Most of the world’s grand shrines to books are featured, from the fabled (the Long Room of Dublin’s Trinity College Library) to the contemporary (Seattle Public Library) to the sublime (Rio’s Real Gabinete Portugués de Leitura). It’s a perfect companion volume to your dog-eared copy of Borges’s  Labyrinth s (with its seminal short story, “The Library of Babel”). — D.F.

best reviewed books 2022

“All This Could Be Different” by Sarah Thankham Matthews (Viking)

“This is not a story about work or precarity,”  Sarah Thankham Matthews ’s narrator explains early on in  All This Could Be Different. “I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separable from the other shit.” Love all ways: familial, friend, romance. Sneha, 22 years old, lives in a Milwaukee apartment paid for by her employer, a corporate consulting firm for whose client she creates Gantt charts while sipping whiskey from a Nalgene. Sneha, according to her mother, is “cold,” and this is an affect she actively attempts to cultivate. She longs to let people in, but to do so makes her nervous. She sends far less than half-hearted attempts at pickups to women on a dating app:  sup, hey, hey gorgeous.  She makes a wonderful new friend, finds complications with old ones, and thinks about home. “To send my parents the transfer to replace the roof and the damp-rotted door,” she rationalizes, “was easier than saying, I think of you always. Than asking, why did you leave me.” (Matthews’s language is, across the board, so succinctly precise as to appear tossed off. A street lamp’s glow is “a dog cone for the night,” the feeling of taking hydrocodone akin to “the foamy white soap that machines into your palms at public bathrooms, without you having to touch a thing.”) And she falls in love. There’s something a little bit fated about the pair of them, the way they keep crossing paths—Matthews  has said that  Richard Linklater ’s  Before  trilogy was an inspiration, which tracks—and then fit together so well. But we all know, now, about the course of true love. I closed this book feeling frustrated that, because this is Mathews’s debut, I had no backlist to turn to for more—and equally elated that this is just her beginning. — K.W.

best reviewed books 2022

“Just Passing Through: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday—The Diaries and Photographs of Milton Gendel” edited by Cullen Murphy (FSG)

Everyone came to Milton’s. That is, the enchanted Roman palazzo of critic, aesthete, and social magnet Milton Gendel. Camera forever in tow, Gendel chronicled a coterie of 20th-century sophisticates, exposing 72,000 black-and-white frames and maintaining (until his death at 99, in 2018) voluminous diaries about his life amid this charmed circle. And what photographs! Here are intimate and sweetly forgiving images of everyone from Peggy Guggenheim to Salvador Dali, Gianni Agnelli to Babe Paley, André Leon Talley to Gore Vidal. A smiling Princess Margaret is photographed beaming in a bathtub. A slightly shleppy Queen Elizabeth II appears in a headscarf, tending her corgis. Expertly weaving Gendel’s pictures with his observational barbs, legendary editor  Cullen Murphy constructs a vivid fresco of an endangered world of art, fortune, and impeccable taste. — D.F.

best reviewed books 2022

“The Ruin of All Witches” by Malcolm Gaskill (Knopf)

Did you know there was another witchcraft hysteria in 17th-century Massachusetts, a whole four decades before the madness in Salem?  Malcolm Gaskill ’s cinematic retelling of this earlier and lesser known witch panic is every bit as spellbinding as the Arthur Miller classic. Gaskill is a British academic whose specialities include witchcraft scholarship; with Ruin he demonstrates his skill at page-turning popular history as well. — Joe Pompeo, Senior Media Correspondent

best reviewed books 2022

“Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy” by Damien Lewis (PublicAffairs)

Damien Lewis journeyed down the rabbit hole of arcane European archives to piece together the elusive tale of Josephine Baker’s French espionage service during World War II. The result, which evokes the sensuous glamour of Baker’s expatriate superstardom, is 400 pages of bravery and heroism that read like a spy novel you can’t put down. — J.P.

best reviewed books 2022

“Last Call at Hotel Imperial” by Deborah Cohen (Random House)

Meet the talented, complex, and sometimes messy foreign correspondents who rose to stardom in the run-up to World War II—a larger-than-life posse of globe-trotting American reporters whose personalities leap off the page in  Deborah Cohen ’s rollicking postmortem of their careers. Set against the creeping menace of European fascism, it’s a story of love, loss, adventure, and, above all, the thrill of crusading journalism. — J.P.

best reviewed books 2022

“Dele Weds Destiny” by Tomi Obaro (2022, Knopf)

It’s been 30 years and three women find themselves back together in the place where their story began, Lagos, Nigeria, by way of a wedding invitation—Funmi’s daughter is getting married!  They’ve lived lives, kept secrets, found love, have been scarred by loss, and given birth to new generations—one now to wed—but reuniting means the delicate balance of nostalgia and new beginnings. Tomi Obaro ’s immersive storytelling delves into the intricacies of female friendship and familial bonds and explores the emotions and complexities of passion, romance, and commitment or lack thereof with such care that you almost feel like you embody each woman as the point of view shifts throughout her novel while we trace their crossed paths through who they were, who they are, and who they are becoming. Obaro’s writing not only tells a story, it invites you into a world so masterly crafted that you, too, feel like you have arrived in Lagos for the weekend as these characters’ past, present, and future comes to life. — Kayla Holliday, Editorial Assistant  

best reviewed books 2022

“Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Poems” by Warsan Shire (Random House Trade Paperbacks)

“No one would leave home unless home/chased you.” Warsan Shire  states in “Home” one of the poems included in her debut full-length poetry collection. Shire retraces familiar thematic paths of girlhood and womanhood, uncovering new trails through dissecting refugee and immigrant experiences as fuller, messier, and  more than just imagery of camps and the foreign Other all accomplished with reverence for the simple nobility of being. With this collection Shire takes on a task which would perhaps be cumbersome in other hands but hers. “Bless the Type 4 child,” she writes and, as one, it was a blessing to encounter the world through her perspective.  —Arimeta Diop, Editorial Assistant

best reviewed books 2022

“Time Is a Mother” by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)

Poet, essayist, and novelist  Ocean Vuong mused in an Instagram Story on just how many more stories he had left in him to give. Amid a content saturation with titles in every medium and platform, pumped out at a dizzying pace it was an invitation to pause and consider a moment without any more of his work. Before that inevitable, if saddening (and selfishly, I hope long off) time comes, Vuong has provided readers a collection that is a perfect companion to grief, as he writes through the aftermath of losing his mother. Each included poem a dedication to himself, to the love that lives through grieving. Proving regardless of how many titles the writer produces he will be ever prolific in my eyes: even just one of his poems plentiful of heart, of meaning, of devastation.  —A.D.

best reviewed books 2022

“I’ll Show Myself Out” by Jessi Klein (Harper)

Jessi Klein ’s  I’ll Show Myself Out is the only parenting book I need. Honestly, even if you don’t have kids, it’s also the only parenting book you need. It won’t give you tips on how to avoid little-kid tantrums, or how to get them to sleep through the night or whatever, but it will have you cry-laughing over tales of power struggles in a Starbucks bathroom where a kid is acting like a feral cat and the mom is determined to get potty training done and dusted, and then just straight up cry-crying and considering making yourself a Little Book to help ease through difficult life transitions, advice that Klein gets for her son that turns out to be useful for her too. Pro tip: Klein reads the audiobook of her own essays, and it’s well worth the listen.  —Kase Wickman, Contributing Editor

best reviewed books 2022

“The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human” by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner)

With  The Emperor of All Maladies and  The Gene,   Siddartha Mukergee  established himself as one of the most lucid, stylish, and downright exciting physician-writers working now. In  The Song of the Cell,  his breadth gets even wider, with an eye toward helping a reader understand how a living organism works and how doctors use their knowledge of cells to treat and innovate. — Erin Vanderhoof, Staff Writer

best reviewed books 2022

“Lungfish” by Meghan Gilliss (Catapult)

Lungfish, the debut novel by  Meghan Gilliss, tells the story of a mother named Tuck who takes her daughter and husband to an abandoned island in a quest to live off the grid and scrape up money for the future. The novel has the sweep of an epic, and its juxtaposition of natural detail and the detritus of modern life in hardscrabble circumstances makes for an enjoyably uncategorizable reading experience. — E.V.

best reviewed books 2022

“The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act” by Isaac Butler (Bloomsbury)

For anyone enamored with the silver screen, Isaac M. Butler ’s book  The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act became an immediate essential text this year. A fascinating history that chronicles the birth of “Method acting” from its roots in Moscow with Russian actor Konstantin Stanislavsky to flourishing in New York City under legendary acting coaches like Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, Butler’s  The Method provides an exhaustive yet never exhausting account of the system that would define the American stage and screen, all the while showing how the craft of acting—and our perception of that craft—has evolved over time.  —Chris Murphy, Staff Writer  

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The Best Books of 2022 So Far

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One of the best parts of working at a magazine? The piles of books that arrive months before the rest of the world gets to see them. But the influx can often be overwhelming, so when something rises to the top, we like to take note. We have been collecting and curating our favorite titles all year; here we present our selection of the best books that have been published in 2022.  

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan (January 4)

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The School for Good Mothers

Jessamine Chan’s debut—like all truly terrifying nightmares—starts off in a banal, familiar way: an utterly exhausted mother, in a moment of sleep-deprived despair, does the unthinkable (and yet understandable) and walks out of her apartment, leaving her baby behind. She doesn’t intend to be gone for long, but somehow time slips away, and before she realizes it, she’s been gone for hours. It’s a terrible thing to have done, and she knows it. But no degree of contrition will spare her from the authorities who descend, first removing her child and then transplanting her to an abandoned college campus turned dystopian re-education facility where she will, ostensibly, learn what it truly takes to be a good mother. The tool for her forensically monitored progress is an uncanny robot baby, meant to stimulate her, challenge her, and, crucially, record her every movement, from loving gestures to instants of inattention. The School for Good Mothers (Simon & Schuster) picks up the mantel of writers like Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro , with their skin-crawling themes of surveillance, control, and technology; but it also stands on its own as a remarkable, propulsive novel. — Chloe Schama

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez (January 4)

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Olga Dies Dreaming

Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel is a vivacious account of Olga Acevedo’s life as a premier party planner to Manhattan’s elite—a demanding job that opens with the ordering of luxurious embroidered linen napkins for an exorbitantly priced wedding, some which Olga will pocket to impress her own family. The contiguity of Olga’s career life and her familial roots in Puerto Rican Brooklyn creates a tension that ultimately underlines the sacrifices each world constantly asks Olga to upkeep. Gonzalez’s story may be that of a woman seeking career success, love, and happiness, but the dynamic story amounts to a slow-burn chronicle of the American Dream, with moments of humor and bare-bones honesty throughout. —Carolina Gonzalez

Lost and Found by Kathryn Schulz (January 11)

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Lost and Found

The first half of Kathryn Schulz’s new book, Lost and Found (Random House), a sensitive and timely meditation on loss and grief, is balanced by the celebration of love and joy in the second half. But rather than the spoonful-of-sugar structure that this division implies, the book is united—even in its darkest moments—as a lively exploration of some of the strongest emotions we humans have the luck to feel and a wondrous look at how they work in tandem. As Schulz puts it in the book: “What an astonishing thing to find someone. Loss may alter our sense of scale, reminding us that the world is overwhelmingly large while we are incredibly tiny. But finding does the same; the only difference is that it makes us marvel rather than despair.” The book grew out of a New Yorker meditation, “ Losing Streak ,” which chronicles the experience of misplacing the mundane and suffering the utmost loss, but it moves far beyond it—into the literary, historical, and philosophical roots of both poles of experience. It offers a sure- and light-footed wander through these heavy topics, though, written with grace and comedy as well as rigor. —C.S.

Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson (January 11)

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Mouth to Mouth

A chance run-in at an airport between our nameless narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, and an acquaintance from college who has now become an art-world hotshot, Jeff Cook, sets the stage for Antoine Wilson’s taut, compulsive chamber piece of a novel, which you’ll struggle not to rip through in one sitting. (Thankfully it clocks in at a brisk 192 pages, allowing you to do just that.) After settling in an airport lounge, the enigmatic Jeff begins recounting a wild (and allegedly never-before-shared) tale that begins with him resuscitating a drowning man on a beach and discovering after the fact that the man he saved is a major art dealer. When Jeff pays a visit to his gallery and realizes the man doesn’t remember him, he slowly begins ingratiating himself into his life, climbing the ranks of his gallery and eventually even dating his daughter, in a story that carries distinct shades of Patricia Highsmith and Donna Tartt—but to tell any more would spoil the book’s thrilling surprises. It may not come with any sweeping messages or moral takeaways (although that ambivalence is surely the point), but Mouth to Mouth is an elegantly told and supremely gripping tale of serendipity and deception—and delivers a brilliant ending that will leave you guessing about everything that came before. —Liam Hess

I Came All This Way to Meet You by Jami Attenberg (January 11)

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I Came All This Way to Meet You

Jami Attenberg’s 2017 novel, All Grown Up , was a bit of a gateway drug. It felt like it was made for me, in that it reminded me of me: a 30-something Jewish woman looking for love in the big city. I assumed, as often is the case for many fine novels, that this was also Attenberg’s story. Her latest book (and first memoir), I Came All This Way to Meet You (Ecco), reveals that the New Orleans–based writer is even more layered and idiosyncratic than her fictional characters. Her newest is an episodic collection of Attenberg’s life—her cross-country travels, debilitating injuries, bad plane rides, bad boyfriends—which are all told through her signature intimate and humorous style. But it’s her writing on her own work I found particularly revealing. “I became a fiction writer in the first place because stories are a beautiful place to hide,” she writes. I Came All This Way details the highs and lows of finding yourself through your work and living a creative life—it’s a thrill for superfans and newcomers alike. —Jessie Heyman

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara (January 11)

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To Paradise

The confounding, brilliant, intricate, beautiful, horrific To Paradise is—if this string of adjectives did not sufficiently convey it—an extraordinary book. Divided into three seemingly distinct sections, positioned 100 years apart, the book is one part historical fiction (set in 1893), part present-ish-day chronicle (1993), and part futuristic sci-fi story (2093). (That last chapter, which must have been informed by, if not fully drafted within, the pandemic, presents a dystopian future filled with “cooling suits” required to venture outside and “decontamination chambers” to ward off the ever-present possibility of infection.) Those who consumed Yanagihara’s most recent work, A Little Life , will not be surprised that this book, like its predecessor, is interested in pain and suffering more than joy and happiness. But it is also a book full of gloriously painted scenes and tantalizing connection—and despite all its gutting turns, one that maintains an abiding hope for the possibility and power of love. (That may just be the only paradise truly on offer.) In and of themselves, some sections feel in some ways quite conventional, but taken together—with all of their extreme cliffhangers and unanswered questions—the stories seem to be asking: What do we want from a novel? Resolution is not available here, but some of the most poignant feelings that literature can elicit certainly are. —C.S.

Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School by Kendra James (January 18)

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For years, the world of elite prep schools was thought of in only the most romanticized terms; lacrosse games, leaf-festooned campuses, and, of course, educational values that prepared America’s next generation of winners to ascend their thrones. Kendra James’s Admissions (Grand Central) is a thorough, necessary, and overdue repudiation of that trope. In the memoir, James—now an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment for independent prep schools—looks back at the three years she spent at Taft, a private boarding school in Connecticut, recalling the insidious yet not particularly subtle racism she faced as the first African-American legacy student at the predominantly white institution. Admissions is a tale in the mold of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep , but instead of relegating the racism that is so often found in “well-meaning liberal” space to a parenthetical, the book addresses it head-on, boldly naming the confusion, fear, and trauma that can so often come with being the only person who looks like you in any given room. —Emma Specter

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (February 1)

best reviewed books 2022

Vladimir: A Novel

The smartest take on campus culture comes by way of Julia May Jonas’s slyly hilarious Vladimir (Simon & Schuster). Don’t be dissuaded (or erroneously excited) by the romance-novel aesthetics of the cover. It’s the story of a somewhat lonely and embittered, and yet eminently appealing, English professor whose husband has been felled by a series of sexual assault allegations. But just how real were those allegations? It’s a question almost impossible to ask in real life, but deliciously explored here through our acerbic narrator, who has a quite pre-MeToo view of power, consent, and sexual politics. The titular Vladimir is a new professor in town and the subject of a crush on the part of the narrator that also veers off into deeply inappropriate territory. The novel works on several different registers at once, deftly layering comedy with subtle commentary in an entirely engrossing read. —C.S.

The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang (February 1)

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The Family Chao

For Asians in America, the perpetual foreigners, it’s the eternal question regardless of birthplace: How exactly does one become American ? This interrogation is keenly felt by immigrants and their children in particular, as Lan Samantha Chang, director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, explores in-depth in The Family Chao (Norton), the story of the tyrannical proprietor of a small-town Wisconsin Chinese restaurant (The Fine Chao) and his three unhappy but obedient American-born sons (The brothers Karamahjong). When a scandal engulfs the Chaos, they’re forced to reconsider their place in the society they’ve toiled in and called home for decades, as well as their roles within the family itself. At times scathing and hilarious, the rollicking tale considers the thorny themes of assimilation, identity, pride, filial piety, transracial adoption, and interracial relationships. It’s a fine chaos indeed; you’ll never look at Chinese restaurant families the same. —L.W.M.

The Arc by Tory Henwood Hoen (February 8)

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In her debut novel, The Arc (St. Martin’s Press), Tory Henwood Hoen has woven a bracingly entertaining antidote to the hellscape of online dating. Thirty-five-year-old branding wiz Ursula Bryne is in the grip of a third-life crisis, ambivalent about her job and unable to sustain a lasting relationship with anybody other than her cat. That is, until she is tapped to visit the lab of The Arc, a mysterious place that promises lasting love to those lucky enough to spend a week at its unnervingly glossy lab. Ursula is paired with Rafael, an improbably modest and handsome Yale grad blessed with a sense of humor and killer dance moves. The book wears its sci-fi lightly, focusing instead on anatomizing a whirlwind romance that begins to fray around the edges. As the duo’s faith in the arc’s highly proprietary pairing methodologies begins to falter, they are left to determine if they still buy into each other. Set in a privileged slice of pre-pandemic New York, the story has a sunny feel and a rich supply of semi-satirical backdrops, making pit stops at bro-infested tech conferences and members-only temples to fourth-wave feminism. With its intelligent and unfussy bent, the novel is foremost a plucky city romance that recalls the work of Laurie Colwin . Beneath the dystopian veil lies a thoroughly modern love story with old-fashioned heart. —Lauren Mechling

A Very Nice Girl by Imogen Crimp (February 8)

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A Very Nice Girl

Imogen Crimp’s A Very Nice Girl (Henry Holt) follows Anna, a talented young opera singer who is defying her provincial parents to carve out an artistic life for herself in London. That bohemian existence can prove, at times, a bit trying (she has to share a bed with her roommate and moves into a quasi-feminist commune where tampons are deemed a tool of the patriarchy), and so she takes refuge in the sterile quarters of her finance-professional boyfriend. The book eschews easy “tale of two cities” contrasts, however, and asks some serious if lightly deployed questions about the sacrifices, rewards, and worth of an artistic life (and how you pay for it). With some steamy sex scenes in the mix, Crimp feels like she’s channeling something of the Sally Rooney style: interior and complex, but also unafraid to incorporate corporeal forces among all the others that govern us. This is high-class romance at its best. —C.S.

Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary by Johanna Kaplan (February 15)

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Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary

A joy of discovery attends the publication of Johanna Kaplan’s Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary (Ecco)—a volume that gathers her cacophonous, mordantly funny stories from the 1960s and ’70s (and includes the contents of her prized debut, Other People’s Lives ). How had I never heard of Kaplan? You’ll wonder the same as you get swept up in the world of her slightly neurotic, status-aware postwar Jewish characters who mine humor from dislocation and anxiety. The bravura novella-length “Other People’s Lives” is the masterpiece here, a rollicking account of several days in the life of Louise Weil, a piercingly observant, mentally fragile young woman marooned in the ramshackle milieu of a Manhattan artistic couple who take a day trip to the country. It fizzes with the urbane energy of J.D. Salinger, Grace Paley, and Deborah Eisenberg—a restless delight. —Taylor Antrim

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka (February 22)

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The Swimmers

The Swimmers , by Julie Otsuka, begins at an underground pool in an unnamed city, where regulars find almost-sacred refuge in their favorite lanes and go-to strokes. (Others—like the “binge swimmers” who periodically rush the pool to melt off holiday pounds—are tolerated more than welcomed.) Yet as Otsuka’s elegant third novel wends on, its focus narrows to one swimmer in particular: an older woman for whom the water is a stabilizing, comfortingly familiar force. Even as dementia sets in, Alice knows exactly who she is at the pool—that is, until it closes, and she’s thrust headlong into the swirling memories, strained relationships, and ever-fracturing sense of self that await her on land. —Marley Marius

Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett (March 1)

best reviewed books 2022

Checkout 19

The cryptic stream of consciousness that coursed through Claire-Louise Bennett’s 2015 debut short-story collection  Pond,  all told from the perspective of a single narrator who lives a solitary existence in a cottage on the west coast of Ireland, made her one of that year’s breakout new voices. Seven years later, Bennett returns with  Checkout 19,  a similarly impressionistic, and perhaps even more challenging, work of autofiction that further showcases her talents for blending the micro with the macro across a melting pot of genres, from seemingly autobiographical minutiae plumbed from her youth in Wiltshire to impressively erudite forays into literary criticism. While ostensibly it tells the story of a writer looking back on her formative years as a young woman, it’s easier to think about the book as a kind of tapestry. Once you allow yourself to get swept along by Bennett’s instinctive, synaptic abilities as a storyteller, the vivid textures of her sentences, and her subversive sense of humor,  Checkout 19  is a strange and delicious treat. —L.H.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire (March 1)

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Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice In Her Head

Warsan Shire is perhaps best known for having her work featured in Beyoncé Knowles’s 2016 feature-length film, Lemonade , but the British-Somali poet is charting a new course with her first full-length poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head (Random House), which weaves together the themes of migration, womanhood, Black identity, and intergenerational collection that Shire is so singularly gifted at exploring. Shire frequently draws on her own life to create her art, and the end result is a collection of poems that will shine as a beacon for marginalized communities everywhere (and, perhaps, inspire those who have always taken their own belonging for granted to think beyond the confines of their individual experience). —Emma Spector

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke (March 21)

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The Invisible Kingdom

Chronic illness has been relegated to the margins of public consciousness for far too long, a reality that has only become more painfully stark since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago. Tens of millions of Americans live with chronic, often “invisible” illnesses, and Yale Review editor Meghan O’Rourke’s book is a searing and thoroughly researched exploration of the pain and confusion that many of them go through in their quest to have their health issues taken seriously by the medical establishment—and, often, the world at large. —E.S.

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (March 22)

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Disorientation

Taiwanese American writer Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel, Disorientation , however, manages to tell a deeply vital and insightful story about Asian experience and identity in post-Trump America while still being absurdist to the point of IRL laughter. In the book, 29-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang experiences a rupture in her calm, orderly life of writing her dissertation on late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou (and coming home to her doting fiance, Stephen, a white literary translator with a penchant for mansplaining and Japanese-schoolgirl costumes) when she discovers that Chou is—wait for it—a total fiction, a character invented and embodied by one white man and propped up by another. Suddenly, Ingrid is thrust into a world of high-stakes espionage, book burnings, and campus protests and is forced to question the things most fundamental to her, including her field of study, her relationship, her friendships, and her identity as the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants living in the U.S. —E.S.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (April 5)

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Young Mungo

Douglas Stuart’s new book bears a good deal of resemblance to his debut, Shuggie Bain , which was published quietly just before the pandemic to limited fanfare and then slowly became one of the most lauded novels of the year. (It was my personal favorite.) Young Mungo (Grove), like Shuggie , is told from the perspective of a young boy growing up in a Glasgow tenement with an alcoholic mother and little prospect of escape. But while Shuggie took the claustrophobia of that scenario and expanded it into a broad and treacherous emotional landscape, Young Mungo allows its protagonist to roam a bit wider, making it a more open and ambitious book. If Shuggie took after the great, detail-laden social realist novels of the late 19th century, Young Mungo feel more rooted in the 21st, with alternating settings, shifting time frames, and divergent plots that eventually converge to calamitous effect. Some early descriptions of the book, perhaps desiring to tamp down the inevitable bleakness of its premise, have emphasized a love affair that crosses religious and sectarian lines (and sheds new light on the divisions that plagued not just the more prominently troubled Ireland of the late 20th century but Scotland as well). And there is sporadic love (romantic and familial) to offer warmth and light within the novel’s terrifying expanse—but this is a book that sucks you into its darkness and makes you feel its profound, beating heart. —C.S.

Little Foxes Took Up Matches by Katya Kazbek (April 5)

best reviewed books 2022

Little Foxes Took Up Matches

In  Little Foxes Took Up Matches —a notable debut from the writer, editor, and translator Katya Kazbek—a sense of enchantment animates dreary post-Soviet Moscow, where a beautiful boy named Mitya lives in a crowded apartment on a stately old street. As a baby, Mitya swallowed an embroidery needle—or so he and his family believe—and he’s certain it made him immortal, like the folktale figure Koschei the Deathless; he discovers another kind of deliverance, and no small amount of danger, dressing up in his mother’s clothes, using her makeup, and letting his hair grow long. (He calls this persona Devchonka, or “girl.”) A queer coming-of-age narrative in every sense of the words, Kazbek’s novel is twisty, tragic, and deeply charming—an endearing exploration of the stories we tell and the people we find in order to live. —M.M.

Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong (April 5)

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Time Is a Mother

In 2019, mere weeks after publishing his celebrated novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and receiving a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Ocean Vuong’s mother died following a short battle with breast cancer. Yet if the title of Time Is a Mother, Vuong’s second poetry collection, appears to suggest this might be a circumscribed exploration of grief in the aftermath of this event, its approach is unusually wide angle. Stories of personal loss are woven into vignettes and memories that explore the most sweeping of subjects—addiction, racism, war, death, family—through Vuong’s gentle, modest voice and the occasional touch of wry humor. So, too, does he once again prove himself the rare writer in whose hands experiments with form can become a thing of beauty in and of themselves. With On Earth , Vuong used his experience as a poet to reshape the contours of the first-person novel into something more amorphous; here, his experience with prose feeds back into his poetry through cinematic poems like “Künstlerroman” and “Not Even,” where full, novelistic paragraphs are delicately strung together with single-word stanzas, open and closing like concertina windows into the lives of those whose stories they tell. (One of the few more overt tributes to his mother consists simply of an itemized list of her Amazon purchases, before delivering a gut punch in the form of a “warrior mom” breast cancer awareness T-shirt.) After all, despite its technical prowess, the most striking thing about Vuong’s writing will always be its warm, beating heart even in the face of life’s cruelties. The penultimate poem, “Dear Rose,” is written directly to his mother as a kind of sensorial biography of her journey as an immigrant from Vietnam to America—napalm on a schoolhouse, bullets in amber, churning fish sauce, dew-speckled roses—images both dazzling and devastating; in the end she simply leaves “a pink rose blazing in the middle of the hospital.” It’s a body of work as hauntingly beautiful as it is ultimately hopeful, and very possibly Vuong’s best yet. —L.H.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (April 5)

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The Candy House

Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House is something of a follow-up to her beloved A Visit From the Goon Squad . Composed of interconnected short pieces (featuring a few of the same characters that populated Goon Squad ), The Candy House is also united by the omnipresence of a sci-fi technology that doesn’t feel quite so far off from our current reality: a widely available memory download device that allows your consciousness (should you so desire) to live in an openly accessible cloud. The Candy House is a book that goes down deceptively easy. The writing is light and buoyant, the characters quite often a rollicking delight—energized by rock and roll; the countercultures of the ’60s and ’70s; high-wire acts of espionage; and technological subterfuge. But when you slow down and begin to parse the web that connects it all, the novel takes on increasing gravity. It’s a dazzling feat of literary construction that belies the profound questions at its core: Does technology aid our sense of narrative or obscure it? —C.S.

Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman (April 12)

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Nobody Gets Out Alive

The funny, earthy, and compulsively readable stories in Leigh Newman’s debut collection, Nobody Gets Out Alive (Scribner), are about wildness in all its forms. The author’s home state of Alaska is vividly rendered in its untamed, frontier beauty—but so too are its denizens, who are fierce Alaskans with questionable taste in home decor and hilariously unrefined personalities. Newman, the author of a 2013 memoir, Still Points North (excerpted in Vogue ), which was also set in Alaska, is especially unsentimental on women—on girls kicking free of their fathers (or not); desperate mothers doing the best they can; and, in the prizewinning lead-off story, “Howl Palace,” a mordant widow who is not going gracefully into the good Alaskan night. Newman’s fiction recalls the flinty humor of Annie Proulx, Ann Patchett, and Antonya Nelson—excellent company to be in. —T.A. 

Hello Molly: A Memoir (April 12)

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Hello, Molly!

Molly Shannon’s memoir is much more than a celebrity tell-all—it would have to be, since it starts with unimaginable tragedy: When she was four, her mother and baby sister died in a car accident while her father was driving them home from a party at which he’d been drinking. Hello, Molly! is a story of resilience and resourcefulness; her father cycled through various degrees of indulgence and sobriety for most of her life. (There are memorable scenes of him cleaning the house on speed.) But it sidesteps the trappings of addiction-adjacent memoirs, avoiding the easy stereotypes of suffering. Hello, Molly! is about one of the great comic actors of our era finding her footing, but it is also a loving portrait of a deeply unconventional parent, who launched his daughter (literally: when she still was just a child, he dared her to sneak onto a plane, and she succeeded) into the world. —C.S.

Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life by Delia Ephron (April 12)

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Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

After the long illness and death of her older sister, Nora, and the long illness and death of her first husband, Jerry, Delia Ephron was stunned—if not entirely surprised—to learn in 2017 that she’d been diagnosed with leukemia. Her engaging, wise, and funny new memoir, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life , chronicles her fierce reckoning with cancer, with grief (“I took the sun setting personally,” she writes of the loneliness of early widowhood), with the life-affirming power of friendship, and, at age 72, with a new love—Peter, a Jungian psychiatrist who wrote Ephron a friendly email after she published an op-ed in the Times about trying to disconnect Jerry’s landline. (Her record of their courtship, conducted initially over email, is as breathlessly romantic as anything she’s put into a screenplay—and this is a woman who co-wrote You’ve Got Mail .) —M.M.

The Trouble With Happiness by Tove Ditlevsen (April 19)

best reviewed books 2022

The Trouble with Happiness: And Other Stories

One of the most (posthumously) lauded novelists of recent years, Tove Ditlevsen is known to most as the author of  The Copenhagen Trilogy,  a sprawling three-part memoir that chronicles both her interior life and major events of the 20th century. In this collection, the landscape is more compact, but the insight into human nature is no less poignant: A young girl watches her mother put on a costume, a temporary and tenuous escape threatened by the whims of the father; with calm remove, a woman imagines her married lover’s domestic life, a simmering, suppressed anger providing a more forceful undercurrent; a young pregnant couple looking to buy a house confronts the contraction of another family’s life at the moment they’re expanding theirs. These spare and sparkling stories summon deep wells of emotion without the slightest trace of sentimentality. —C.S.

The Palace Papers by Tina Brown (April 26)

best reviewed books 2022

The Palace Papers

Whether or not you will tune in for the much-discussed Season 5 of The Crown , The Palace Papers deserves a read. Tina Brown does not seem to have researched her subjects so much as lived with them: Indeed, her own career as a young journalist, and then an editor (of many magazines, including several owned by Condé Nast) circled the royal family, and so she writes with the kind of familiarity earned through years of fine-tuned observation. There is definite bias here, but it is the kind that only sharpens her depictions; she’s not afraid to let you know which occupants of the royal palaces she thinks are up to snuff and which she thinks should fade into oblivion. In this year of royal transition (as well as entertainment), The Palace Papers is a supremely satisfying read. —C.S.

When We Fell Apart by Soon Wiley (April 26)

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When We Fell Apart

A young Korean American man reeling from the recent suicide of his girlfriend sets out to learn more about the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death in this powerful novel that delves unflinchingly into the deeply timely question of what it means to belong to more than one culture. Wiley’s protagonist’s experience of trying to find links between his California upbringing and his adult life in Seoul will resonate with anyone who has ever been asked, “Where are you  really  from?” —E.S.

The Last Days of Roger Federer, and Other Endings by Geoff Dyer (May 3)

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The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings

If you’re coming to this book expecting an extended meditation on the late career of the titular tennis legend, you might be—well,  disappointed  isn’t the word, really: The book is dotted with such thoughts throughout. It’s true joy, though, is its buck-wild discursiveness. The entire book is a brooding, a searching, and an investigation—in three parts, each composed of exactly 60 more-or-less brief thoughts, about Dylan, Camus, John Berger, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Redford, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, Chuck Yeager, T.C. Boyle, Scorsese, J.M.W. Turner, Michelangelo, Boris Becker, Browning, Ruskin, the Battle of Britain, and yes, Roger Federer (that’s a wildly incomplete list from just the first 40 pages)—of what it means to come to the end of something: painting, writing, striving, playing, living. If you’ve read Dyer before, you know what you’re in for, and it’s in glorious abundance here: humor, memoir, wit, verve, pathos, and an arsenal of erudition. If this is your first immersion, simply be prepared to chase the wind. —Corey Seymour

Trust by Hernan Diaz (May 3)

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What begins as a Henry James–esque chronicle of a Wall Street tycoon’s breathtaking ascent to power at the beginning of the 20th century reveals itself to be so much more in Hernan Diaz’s second novel, Trust: a rip-roaring, razor-sharp dissection of capitalism, class, greed, and the meaning of money itself that also manages to be a dazzling feat of storytelling on its own terms. Trust is a matryoshka doll of a novel, in which the layers peel back to reveal four alternative takes on the same narrative of the financial titan Andrew Bevel and, just as importantly, his wife, Mildred, each as riveting and full of surprises as the next. Its central theme of wealth—what it actually means, who it should belong to, how its relationship with some of the central mythologies of American life developed, and its inextricable linkage with the patriarchy—may feel both important and timely. But the uniquely brilliant way in which Diaz tells that story, as meticulously researched as it is narratively exhilarating, makes it a novel not just for the present age but for the ages. —L.H.

Linea Nigra by Jazmina Barrera (May 3)

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Linea Nigra

For those unacquainted with the vocabulary that accompanies the childbearing process, the linea nigra refers to a dark vertical line that can appear to bisect a pregnant person’s abdomen. Essayist Jazmina Barrera takes that physical line and writes about and (metaphorically) beyond it, packing her narrative memoir full of carefully considered and exquisitely worded musings on motherhood. Barrera wrote throughout her first pregnancy and into the beginning of her journey as a mother, and the multilayered, deeply felt work that her life experience and obvious talent have combined to produce is eminently worthy of acclaim. —E.S.

A Hard Place to Leave: Stories From a Restless Life by Marcia DeSanctis (May 3)

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A Hard Place to Leave

Longtime  Vogue  contributor Marcia DeSanctis recounts a peripatetic life—and the episodes that were less so. DeSanctis had a career as a tour guide, a TV producer (who worked, among other things, on Eastern European stories after the fall of the Berlin Wall), a cosmopolitan writer who marched to “the city’s incessant, invigorating drumbeat.” And then she moved to the quiet countryside, where she had to come to terms with a sense of herself that wasn’t based on constant movement and the frictions of foreign encounters. The essays in this collection (which include a tale of marital infidelity that made a marriage stronger  originally published in  Vogue ) might be framed as travel writing, but they are just as much stories of self-definition that take place here, there, and everywhere. —C.S. 

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub (May 17)

best reviewed books 2022

This Time Tomorrow

Known for her plucky voice and sweetly amusing ensemble comedies, Emma Straub returns with her most emotionally resonant work yet,  This Time Tomorrow.  On the night of her 40th birthday, a newly single and slightly intoxicated Alice drops by her father’s home, located on an Upper West Side alley that time and foot traffic forgot. She passes out and wakes up in 1996, transported back to a moment when her father was still her energetic 40-something roommate, not an ailing 73-year-old whom she faithfully visits at the hospital. Shuttling between her teenage and middle-aged lives, Alice attempts to engineer a new destiny for her father and experiments with a panoply of what-ifs, one of which lands her the guy that got away. All the while, she grapples with the headstrong and heartbreaking nature of time. Beneath the layers of ’90s nostalgia and sci-fi portals to the past lies something even more satisfying: a complicated tale that doesn’t feel the slightest bit complicated. —L.M.

The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker (May 17)

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The Cherry Robbers

From the author of 2015 cult hit  Dietland  comes a more-than-worthy sophomore effort that follows Sylvia Wren—formerly known as Iris Chapel—the second youngest in a family of six heiress sisters, all seemingly cursed to live (and die) tragically. When Iris becomes Sylvia, she thinks she’s escaped her ominous familial fate, but has she? When we meet her in New Mexico in 2017, she’s an internationally famous yet reclusive artist ducking the attention of an overzealous journalist determined to track down the story of how Iris became Sylvia. Compelling, no? (Trust us, it is.) —E.S.

The Red Arrow by William Brewer (May 17)

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The Red Arrow

Something old is new again in William Brewer’s The Red Arrow , a rollicking bildungsroman meets wellness-through-hallucinogenics debut. Our hero has risen from the sticks of West Virginia to become a penniless painter and writer in New York who lucks into a gorgeous tech-employed fiancée and a hefty book contract. Trouble ensues. The advance is spent, the novel is not written (even as we’re given vivid glimpses of what it could be), and a suicidal depression descends. But our protagonist lucks out again—a ghostwriting gig for a star physicist seems to pull him out of his hole—until more trouble strikes. The Red Arrow is about how to survive a creative life in 21st-century America, and its answer will surprise you. Brewer’s earnest description of psilocybin therapy turns a bravura comic novel into something deeper and stranger: an account of unexpected, hard-won joy. —T.A.

Either/Or by Elif Batuman (May 24)

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Elif Batuman’s stupendous  Either/Or  is the hilarious follow-up to the author’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated  The Idiot , which introduced wannabe writer Selin during her first year at Harvard. Now a sophomore, Selin joins the literary magazine, attends campus costume parties, and visits a psychiatrist and Pilates classes, set pieces that dazzle with the author’s deadpan prose and superpowers of observation. “I thought humorlessness was the essence of stupidity,” Selin narrates, and by that metric Batuman is a genius, rendering human folly at its most colorful and borderline surreal. Readers of her essay collection,  The Possessed,  might notice stories that overlap with the author’s own life—and underscore that for lovers of literature, the line between life on and off the page is barely legible. –L.M.

Nevada by Imogen Binnie (June 7)

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Originally published by Topside Press in 2013, Binnie’s debut novel—which follows a young, punk-aspiring trans woman who heads west from New York City in her ex-girlfriend’s stolen car, attempting to play the fraught role of role model to a younger, not-yet-out acolyte she meets in Nevada—is a beautiful and occasionally disturbing complication of the oh-so-American trope of the cross-country road trip.  Detransition, Baby  author Torrey Peters is just one of a long list of trans women writers who name Binnie as an influence, and it’s long past time for the cis reader to form a bond with the brilliance of her work. —E.S.

The Lovers by Paolo Cognetti (June 7)

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In The Lovers , the celebrated Italian novelist Paolo Cognetti (author of 2018’s prize-winning debut The Eight Mountains ) has crafted a short novel of affecting elegance, set in and around the Italian Alpine town of Fontana Fredda. Our protagonist, Fausto, is a stalled writer who abandons his petit bourgeois life in Milan (and his former fiancée) for a rather more elemental existence in the mountains, where he finds work as a cook and begins an affair with Silvia, an alluring young waitress. There’s also Babette, the restaurant’s owner who “had also come from the city… though who knows when and how she got there,” and a flinty snow-cat driver called Santorso, a man forged—and eventually destroyed—by the wild surrounding landscape. Cognetti’s prose, translated into English by the poet Stash Luczkiw, knowingly calls Hemingway to mind (in one chapter, Fausto remembers teaching “In Another Country”), but the more important influence is Kent Haruf’s Plainsong . Here as there, a small community of simple people seems uncommonly beautiful. —M.M.

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun (June 14)

best reviewed books 2022

Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me

It’s a complicated thing, the father-daughter relationship, particularly when the two share a profession. So it’s fitting that Ada Calhoun’s  Also a Poet  is a complicated, difficult-to-encapsulate book: Labeled a memoir, it’s also Calhoun’s attempt to finish a biography of the New York School poet Frank O’Hara abandoned by her father, the longtime  New Yorker  art critic Peter Schjeldahl. The book is composed of unpublished interview transcripts, domestic scenes from her childhood on the Lower East Side (see Calhoun’s masterly  St. Mark’s Is Dead  for an expanded disquisition on the site of her youth), and a sweetly personal reckoning with the anxiety of influence. All this sounds like a pretty heady brew, but Calhoun’s voice is clear and cogent, a winning and personable guide. —C.S.

The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid (August 2)

best reviewed books 2022

The Last White Man

An unlikely love story is the warming center of Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man (Riverhead)—unlikely because the novel presents as the kind of cool, elegant fable Hamid has become known for. (His most recent, 2017’s masterful Exit West , used a magical realist trick to lay bare the exigencies of the refugee crisis.) Here, the characters find themselves subjected to a mysterious force that shifts their skin from white to a deep, undeniable brown. At first the change seems to affect only a few, but as it spreads, so do the attendant disruptions and paranoias. The book is obviously about race—Hamid has said that he has been mulling this work for 20 years, ever since the events of September 11 made him acutely aware of his own skin color—but it is also about the burgeoning love and chemistry between its two unabashedly physical main characters, Anders, a trainer at a gym, and Oona, a yoga instructor. Even when corporeal form seems a mysterious and mutable thing, the bond between the two acts as a bulwark against the unpredictability of the world. —C.S.

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews (August 2)

best reviewed books 2022

All This Could Be Different

Sarah Thankam Mathews wrote All This Could Be Different (Viking) in the first year of the pandemic, when COVID produced a drastic loss of her income. As founder of the mutual-aid organization Bed-Stuy Strong, she was galvanized by witnessing not only the catastrophes and flaws of ordinary humans but also their glorious capacity. Equal parts incandescent love story and frank explorations of everything from sexuality to work to racism, this debut novel—focused on the struggles of a queer young Indian woman in Milwaukee—evokes the precariousness of life for so many in 21st-century America and the necessity of showing up and breaking free if we truly want all this to be different. —L.W.M.

Amy & Lan by Sadie Jones (August 16)

best reviewed books 2022

Amy & Lan

Set deep in the bucolic fields of rural England, Sadie Jones’s new novel, Amy and Lan , charts five years in the lives of the two young children (and best friends) after whom the book is titled. Living in a commune of sorts, the duo are left largely to roam free, aside from the odd bit of fulfilling their duties on the farm, written with a particularly evocative eye for blood and muck. Things go south when entanglements between the adults start to draw their attention, and as Amy and Lan reach their early teenage years, these glimpses of grown-up life become an inescapable reality with devastating consequences. What at first reads as a deeply atmospheric bildungsroman (dung being the operative word here), Amy and Lan quietly builds to a cautionary tale of the good life turned sour. —L.H.

Touch by Olaf Olafsson (August 16)

best reviewed books 2022

In the Icelandic author (and erstwhile media executive) Olaf Olafsson’s delicate, absorbing new novel Touch , COVID lockdowns serve as a backdrop to the gentle unfolding of reawakened desire in its lead character, a 75-year-old Icelandic man who sets off on a journey to track down the Japanese woman who was his first great love back in 1960s London. His story begins with an out-of-the-blue Facebook message on the same evening he shutters his restaurant of 20 years, and continues to weave through past and present in an addictive structure of short, unnumbered chapters that also reflect his fraying recollections due to dementia. Really, to call Touch a pandemic novel would be doing it a disservice. With Olafsson’s gorgeous, lyrical writing, it feels weighted with deeper questions about memory, intergenerational trauma, and the enduring forces of love that can bridge decades and cultures—all reaching a denouement as satisfying as it is profoundly moving. —L.H.

The Hundred Waters by Lauren Acampora (August 23)

best reviewed books 2022

The Hundred Waters

In The Hundred Waters (Grove), Lauren Acampora’s quietly thrilling latest, a strange drama plays out between one Connecticut family and the 18-year-old son of their new neighbors. While Gabriel Steiger’s righteous anger about the climate crisis rivets 12-year-old Sylvie Rader, who lost a friend to cancer after toxic construction debris were buried in a nearby town, his dark features and compulsive creativity remind Sylvie’s mother, Louisa, of the man she loved before her husband, when she was a young photographer living in New York. The triangle that forms between mother, daughter, and the shifty boy next door is disquieting from the start, but as both relationships tip into disquieting new territory, the Raders’ lush, monied suburb stops feeling quite so staid. —M.M.

A Visible Man: A Memoir by Edward Enninful (September 6)

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A Visible Man: A Memoir

Charting Enninful’s earliest days in Ghana to his family’s emigration to London (where they settled under the “soggy skies” and repressive policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain), to his rise to the EIC seat and his wedding—punctuated by an 11th-hour arrival by Rihanna— A Visible Man (Penguin Press) is both a chronicle of a singular life and a universally inspiring portrait of ambition. As Enninful writes in his introduction of his dubious stance toward memoir: “Why look back when you can look forward?” It’s our good fortune that he does both. —Chloe Schama

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv (September 13)

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Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Combining the cool poise of Janet Malcolm and the confessional bravery of Joan Didion, journalist and New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv challenges the way we think about mental illness in her absorbing debut, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us (FSG). Through half a dozen vivid case studies–one being the story of her own hospitalization at age six—she unravels medical diagnoses and demonstrates how societal narratives around illness take hold. The result is a fascinating and empathetic look at the mysterious ways our minds can fail us. —Taylor Antrim 

Lessons by Ian McEwan (September 13)

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Ian McEwan’s new novel Lessons (Knopf) is rangingly ambitious, teasingly autobiographical, and unsettling in the manner of his best work, a story of monstrous behavior set against major tides of the last 70 years. Roland Baines, a kind of spectator to history, is our hero—the product of a quintessentially English boarding school, a frustrated poet, occasional tennis instructor, and better-than-average piano player. The episode that shapes his life occurs in the opening pages, during a piano lesson with Miriam Cornell, a young instructor at Roland’s school. While teaching him Bach, she pinches his bare leg, an act of sexual sadism that leads, eventually, to the real thing in her bed. Roland never quite recovers from this wildly predatory affair (he 14, she 25). And in adulthood, another villain awaits: his first wife, Alissa Baines, who leaves him and their newborn son so that she can pursue a soaring literary career unencumbered. How can a novel populated by such (notably female) cruelty feel so expansively humanist? Roland is both haunted by trauma and able to push away from it, toward love (a second marriage), parenthood, forgiveness, grace. Lessons is a luminous, beautifully written, and oddly gripping book about lives imperfectly lived. —T.A.

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (September 13)

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Bliss Montage

We’re in the thick of a dystopian golden age, but the indisputable leader of the pandemic lit pack came out in 2018. Ling Ma’s Severance was half tongue-in-cheek critique of capitalism, half science fiction about a group of New Yorkers fleeing a fatal airborne epidemic believed to have originated in Shenzhen, China. In Bliss Montage (FSG), her panic-slicked and wildly inventive new short story collection, the author continues to mine anxieties particular to our time. The narrator of “Los Angeles” lives with her uncommunicative husband and her 100 ex-boyfriends. “G,” named after the recreational drug that two young women take together in order to become invisible, gives a new spin to the notion of “ghosting.” The awful term “geriatric pregnancy” becomes a literal horror story in “Tomorrow,” whose protagonist must conceal the arm that is developing on the outside of her body—a common aspect of high-risk pregnancies, her doctor crisply informs her. These eight tales don’t build up to traditional climaxes, but the tension between the familiar and the unfathomable pulses on every page. —Lauren Mechling

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout (September 20)

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Lucy by the Sea

Elizabeth Strout has kept her readers well acquainted with the doings of Lucy Barton, a bestselling writer (like Strout herself) from a devastatingly poor background, twice married and now a widow with two adult daughters, who in last year’s diverting novel Oh, William forged a kind of chummy detente with her first husband, William, as he discovered a hidden past. In Strout’s poised and moving Lucy by the Sea (Random House), Lucy and William are fleeing Manhattan in the face of COVID and setting up a lockdown life in Maine. It is only in the steady hands of Strout, whose prose has an uncanny, plainspoken elegance, that you will want to relive those early months of wiping down groceries and social isolation. Here, the Maine landscape is gorgeously rendered in its COVID hush, and Strout balances the tension of viral spread with the complex minuet of Lucy and William coming to terms with their resentments and enduring love. This is a slim, beautifully controlled book that bursts with emotion. —T.A.

Stay True by Hua Hsu (September 27)  

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Hua Hsu’s steady, searching memoir, Stay True (Doubleday), brings a certain 1990s collegiate persona into clarion focus: the undergraduate who is highly cultivated in his interests (Pavement yes, Pearl Jam no; cigarettes yes, alcohol no; indie films yes, fraternity parties no), a young Gen Xer studiedly indifferent to mainstream culture, and rigorously obsessed with what’s cool. As an undergrad at Berkeley, Hsu was this person to a T and his memoir digs, in a lovely, low-key way beneath the surface of the pose. Hsu’s Taiwanese parents immigrated to the U.S. and harbored a kind of poignant enthusiasm for their new lives–especially his father who was interested in his son’s thoughts about everything and anything. Hsu is an intellectual slacker who studies rhetoric and political science, but is outwardly bored by most everything, a creator of Zines and a cultivator of misfit friends. One friend, named Ken, bucks the trend. Ken is handsome, into Dave Matthews, and likes (the horror!) swing dancing. Hua has a curious bond with him in spite of all that and then when Ken is killed in horrific circumstances, Hsu is unmoored. A moving portrait of a persona undone by tragedy. –T. A.

Foster by Claire Keegan (November 1)

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In Claire Keegan’s Foster (Grove) , first published by The New Yorker as a short story in 2010 and now expanded to a novella, the Irish writer traces the journey of a nameless girl who is palmed off to distant relatives in a bucolic corner of rural County Wexford for a summer while her poverty-stricken, neglectful parents prepare for the birth of their next child. What unspools from there is a deceptively complex coming-of-age tale, both intimate and richly expansive, as the girl’s foster family provides her with the room and space to blossom, before a heartbreaking secret threatens to shatter her newfound idyll. Balancing Keegan’s delicate, sparing prose and masterful ear for dialogue with a tale that is almost overwhelming in its tenderness, Foster is a heart-wrenching treasure of a book that only serves to confirm Keegan’s place as one of contemporary Irish literature’s leading lights. —Liam Hess

Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono (November 1)

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Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

Bono’s deeply personal memoir chronicles his earliest memories, the formation of his band, the meeting of his wife when he was still a teen (he joined the band the same week that he first asked her to go out with him). The book is also about his father, a figure that loomed over him, especially after the early death of his mother, with almost comic nonchalance regarding his son’s epically blossoming career. (It took a meeting with Princess Di, arranged by his son, to truly ruffle him.) It is about Ireland, the legacy of the violence that raged through much of the 20th century, and Africa, and also the promise of America. It is not a short or compact book. But do you want that from the man behind some of the most stirring and soaring ballads of all time? Sink into your plush chair of choice with this one in your lap and the stereo blasting. —C.S.

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Book Reviews

Maureen corrigan's favorite books of the year: 10 disparate reads for a hectic 2022.

Maureen Corrigan

Maureen Corrigan

Composite of Maureen Corrigan's best 10 books of 2022.

Some years, my best books list falls into a pattern: like a year that's dominated by dystopian fiction or stand-out memoirs. But, as perhaps befits this hectic year, the best books I read in 2022 sprawl all over the place in subject and form. Here are 10 superb titles from 2022:

Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun

Also a Poet

Also a Poet is a moving account of Ada Calhoun's attempt to connect with her elusive father, art critic Peter Schjeldahl , by trying to complete his abandoned biography of the beloved New York poet, Frank O'Hara. Calhoun recalls how, one day, in the basement of the East Village apartment house where her parents lived for decades, she stumbled upon a treasure trove of cassette tapes from the 1970s; interviews that her father conducted with O'Hara's painter friends and fellow poets. Ultimately, the book Calhoun writes isn't an O'Hara biography either: It's a genre-defying memoir and work of criticism, as well as a love letter to O'Hara's poetry and to the city that inspired it.

Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson

Constructing a Nervous System

Renowned critic Margo Jefferson's book, Constructing a Nervous System, is also a virtuoso fusion of different forms: memoir, quick riffs and cultural criticism. As one of the few prominent African American female critics of her generation, Jefferson tells us she was "always calculating — not always well — how to achieve; succeed as a symbol, and a self." The pieces collected here range from a sharp consideration of the significance of Ella Fitzgerald's sweat during her television performances to the challenges Jefferson herself faced in teaching Willa Cather's work — along with its racist passages — to her majority white college students. Jefferson writes: "I wanted them to feel chagrined ... And I wanted them to be disappointed ... " That last response is one I'm certain Jefferson's own readers will not experience.

Interview: Margo Jefferson's new memoir is like a kaleidoscope into someone's life

The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris

The Facemaker

The Facemaker, by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris, tells the story of British surgeon Harold Gillies' pioneering work in reconstructing the faces of some of the estimated 280,000 men who suffered facial trauma during World War I. Those soldiers' faces were shattered and burned by the new technologies that that war ushered in: machine guns, chemical weapons, flamethrowers, shells and hot chunks of shrapnel from explosives. To cite the poetic words of one battlefield nurse, before Gillies came along, "the science of healing stood baffled before the science of destroying."

Interview: With no textbooks or antibiotics, this WWI surgeon pioneered facial reconstruction

Review: 'The Facemaker' profiles the British surgeon who treated WWI's disfigured soldiers

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacey Schiff

The Revolutionary

Stacy Schiff's biography of Samuel Adams is a thrilling, timely account of how the American Revolution happened: how the colonists were radicalized and came to think of themselves, not as Bostonians or Virginians, but as "Americans." It also tells the story of how Samuel Adams, the so-called "forgotten Founder," played an essential role in that transformation through countless conversations, clandestine meetings and newspaper essays written under 30-some pseudonyms.

Review: Author reminds Americans that Samuel Adams was a revolutionary before he was a beer

Signal Fires: A Novel by Dani Shapiro

Signal Fires

Dani Shapiro's profound new novel jumps around in time to piece together the story of three teenagers, a car accident, two families and what persists even after neighborhoods change, people grow old, relationships fray and collective memories fade. The "signal fires" of Shapiro's title are the stars in the ancient night sky as seen through a lonely boy's computerized astronomy device. The boy shares his device with our protagonist, an elderly doctor, who's strangely comforted by the vastness: "The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path ... "

Interview: Dani Shapiro on her new novel 'Signal Fires'

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

If I Survive You

Jonathan Escoffery's debut collection of eight interconnected short stories overwhelmed me with its originality, heart, wit and sweeping social vision. Escoffery's aspiring, mostly Jamaican-born immigrant characters keep getting knocked down: by racism, the 2008 recession and, most literally, by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which reduces their house to its "skeletal frame." But, in its largest sense, the "You" his characters are trying to survive is America itself.

Review: 'If I Survive You' is a sweeping portrait of a family's fight to make it in America

Interview: Acclaimed short-story collection 'If I Survive You' explores Jamaican-American immigrant experience

Foster by Claire Keegan

Foster

Survival, of sorts, is also the subject of Claire Keegan's matchless novella, Foster , in which a young girl in the Ireland of the early 1980s is palmed off by her parents for a summer with relatives she doesn't know. None of the adults explains much: the girl's father takes his leave of her by curtly saying, "try not to fall into the fire, you." Keegan, who's a writer who revels in emotional tension, has a sharp ear for mundane meanness; but she has an even keener appreciation for the complications of kindness.

Review: With 'Foster,' Claire Keegan asks that readers look outward

Review: Small in scope, Claire Keegan's 'Foster' packs an emotional wallop

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Young Mungo

Young Mungo is a disquieting work of fiction about the dangers of being different. In working class Glasgow, Scotland in the 1990s, a 15-year-old Protestant boy named Mungo falls in love with a Catholic boy. We readers know none of this will end well, but it's a testament to Stuart's unsparing powers as a storyteller that we can't possibly anticipate how very badly — and baroquely — things will turn out. Young Mungo is a suspense story wrapped around a novel of acute psychological observation.

Review: Brace yourself for 'Young Mungo,' a nuanced heartbreaker of a novel

Interview: 'Young Mungo' tells the love story of 2 boys — one Protestant, the other Catholic

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Trust

Trust is an ingeniously constructed historical novel with a postmodern point: namely, that readers can't wholly "trust" any of the slippery stories we read here, especially the opening one about the rise of a Wall Street tycoon much like Charles Schwab or J.P. Morgan. Throughout, Hernan Diaz makes dazzling connections between the realms of finance and fiction. As one character, an anarchist, says: "Money is a fantastic commodity. You can't eat or wear money, but it represents all the food and clothes in the world. This is why it's a fiction. ... Stocks, shares, bonds. ... That's what all these criminals trade in: fictions."

Review: You can't 'Trust' this novel. And that's a very good thing

Interview: Hernan Diaz's anticipated novel 'Trust' probes the illusion of money — and the truth

Lucy by the Sea: A Novel by Elizabeth Strout

Lucy by the Sea

I was reluctant to put Elizabeth Strout's latest novel Lucy by the Sea on this best of the year list. After all, her novel Oh William! was on last year's list . But it's no use to hold out against Strout, she's too good. Lucy by the Sea transports Strout's familiar heroine, Lucy Barton, out of New York City and into a ramshackle house in Maine with her ex-husband, William. The two shelter in place there during the worst months of pandemic, months Lucy recalls as having about them "a feeling of diffuse grief" and "mutedness." Strout's spare sentences and her simple pacing constitute her own idiosyncratic take on Hemingway's famous "iceberg theory," in which a depth of meaning and emotion lurks beneath the surface of the words on the page.

Review: 'Lucy By The Sea' succeeds at capturing disruptions, anxieties of pandemic

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NPR's Book We Love returns with 400+ new books handpicked by NPR staff and critics — including recommendations from Maureen Corrigan. Click to find your next great read. NPR hide caption

The Best Books of 2022

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Check back with us in the new year, when we'll start rounding up our favorite books of 2023. In the meantime, happy reading!

Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, by James Hannaham

Hannaham’s buoyant sophomore novel introduces us to the unforgettable Carlotta Mercedes, an Afro-Latinx trans woman released from a men’s prison after serving two decades. Returning home to Brooklyn, she encounters a gentrified city she doesn’t recognize, as well as a host of new stressors; life on the outside soon involves an unforgiving parole process and a family that struggles to recognize her transition. Over the course of one zany Fourth of July weekend, Carlotta descends into Brooklyn’s roiling underbelly on a quest to stand in her truth. Angry, saucy, and joyful, Carlotta is a true survivor—one whose story shines a disinfecting light on the injustices of our world.

Harry Sylvester Bird, by Chinelo Okparanta

The title character of Okparanta’s gutsy new novel is a white teenager born to xenophobic parents, but everything changes for young Harry Sylvester Bird on a safari in Tanzania, when he develops an enduring fascination with Blackness. Harry soon escapes to college in Manhattan and begins to identify as Black, joining a “Transracial-Anon” support group and longing for “racial reassignment.” When he falls in love with Maryam, a student from Nigeria, a study-abroad trip to Ghana’s Gold Coast puts both their romance and his identity to the test. Outlandish and arresting, Harry’s miseducation is a deft satire of prejudice and allyship.

Young Mungo, by Douglas Stuart

When his Shuggie Bain took home the Booker Prize in 2020, readers were desperate to see what this astounding debut novelist would do next. It will come as no surprise that Stuart’s second effort soars—and socks you right in the belly. Set in the tenements of Glasgow during the 1990s, Young Mungo is the wrenching story of the doomed and forbidden love between two teenage boys, one Catholic and the other Protestant. Insecure, self-loathing Mungo is forever changed by the calming influence of tender-hearted James, but in a stratified society such as this one, their bond can’t be allowed to stand. When the adults in their lives intervene, James and Mungo learn heartbreaking lessons about how boys become men. In a world where hope and despair coexist, Young Mungo is both brutal and breathtaking.

Time Is a Mother, by Ocean Vuong

Vuong’s second collection of poetry is a bruising journey through the devastating aftershocks of his mother’s death. Like Orpheus descending into the underworld, Vuong takes us to the white-hot limits of his grief, writing with visionary fervor about love, agony, and time. Without his mother, Vuong must remake his understanding of the world: what is identity when its source is gone? What is language without the cultural memory of our elders? Aesthetically ambitious and ferociously original, Time Is A Mother interrogates these impossibilities. “Nobody’s free without breaking open,” Vuong writes in one searing poem. Here, he breaks open and rebuilds.

Trust, by Hernan Diaz

In 2018, Diaz came close to the Pulitzer Prize with In the Distance , a probing western honored as a finalist; now, with Trust , he may finally take home the gold. Trust is the story of a Wall Street tycoon and his brilliant wife, who become outlandishly wealthy in Prohibition-era New York. In this puzzle box of stories-within-a-story, the mystery of their affluence becomes the subject of a novel, a memoir, an unfinished manuscript, and finally, a diary. Each layer builds and recontextualizes Diaz's riveting story of class, capitalism, and greed. The result is a mesmerizing metafictional alchemy of grand scope and even grander accomplishment.

Liarmouth, by John Waters

Waters takes his first bow as a novelist with this "perfectly perverted feel-bad romance” about Marsha “Liarmouth” Sprinkle, a con woman caught up in a bad romance with Darryl, the degenerate loser with whom she steals suitcases from airport luggage carousels. Marsha has promised Darryl sex for his services after one year of employment, but when she skips out without paying up, Darryl is out for revenge. In the acknowledgments, Waters aptly describes this novel as “fictitious anarchy.” That’s as good a description as any for this campy, raunchy, surreal story, rife with ribald pleasures. Read an interview with Waters here at Esquire.

Butts: A Backstory, by Heather Radke

This crackling cultural history melds scholarship and pop culture to arrive at a comprehensive taxonomy of the female bottom. From 19th-century burlesque to the eighties aerobics craze to Kim Kardashian’s internet-breaking backside, Radke leaves no stone unturned. Her sources range from anthropological scholarship to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” making for a vivacious blend, but Butts isn’t all fun and games. Radke explores how women’s butts have been used “as a means to create and reinforce racial hierarchies,” acting as locuses of racism, control, and desire. Lively and thorough, Butts is the best kind of nonfiction—the kind that forces you to see something ordinary through completely new eyes. Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, by Kim Kelly

With a galvanizing groundswell of unionization efforts rocking mega-corporations like Amazon and Starbucks, there’s never been a better time to learn about the history of the American labor movement. Fight Like Hell will be your indispensable guide to the past, present, and future of organized labor. Rather than structure this comprehensive history chronologically, Kelly organizes it into chapter-sized profiles of different labor sectors, from sex workers to incarcerated laborers to domestic workers. Each chapter contains capsule biographies of working-class heroes, along with a painstaking focus on those who were hidden or dismissed from the movement. So too do these chapters illuminate how many civil rights struggles, like women’s liberation and fair wages for disabled workers, are also, at their core, labor struggles. After reading Fight Like Hell , you’ll never look at American history the same way again—and you may just be inspired to organize your own workplace. Read an interview with Kelly here at Esquire.

Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library, by Amanda Oliver

Library-goers have long labored under a romanticized portrait of libraries as sacred spaces. In Overdue , a former librarian explores the importance of demanding better from what we love. Through the lens of her time as a librarian in one of Washington D.C.’s most impoverished neighborhoods, Oliver illuminates how libraries have long been vectors for some of our biggest social ills, from segregation to racism to inequality. Now, as unhoused patrons take refuge in libraries and librarians are trained to administer Narcan, our overlapping mental healthcare and opioid crises come to a head in these spaces. At once a love letter and a call to action, Overdue dispels mythology and demands a better future. You’ll never see libraries the same way again.

Woman, Eating, by Claire Kohda

My Year of Rest and Relaxation meets Milk Fed in this slacker comedy about Lydia, a multiracial Gen Z vampire suffering an identity crisis. Fresh out of art school and eager to make a new life for herself in London, Lydia soon gets a harsh reality check: her gallery internship is unfulfilling, her crush is dating someone else, and her supply of pig's blood is running dangerously low. Ravenous and lonesome, she becomes addicted to watching #WhatIEatInADay videos, desperate for the embodied connection to food and life that humans experience. But for this yearning young vampire, self-acceptance won’t come until she finds something (or someone) to eat. Thoughtful and thrilling, Woman, Eating makes a meal of themes like cultural alienation, disordered eating, and the growing pains of adulthood.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy

After sixteen years of characteristic seclusion, McCarthy returns with a one-two punch: The Passenger , out in October, and Stella Maris , a companion volume set to follow in November. In The Passenger , the stronger of the two works, we meet Bobby Western, a salvage diver and mathematical genius reckoning with his troubled personal history. Western is tormented by the legacy of his father, who worked on the atomic bomb, and the suicide of his sister, who suffered from schizophrenia. Told in meandering form, The Passenger is an elegiac meditation on guilt, grief, and spirituality. Packed with textbook McCarthy hallmarks, like transgressive behaviors and cascades of ecstatic language, it’s a welcome return from a legend who’s been gone too long.

Fen, Bog and Swamp, by Annie Proulx

The legendary author of “Brokeback Mountain” and The Shipping News delivers an enchanting history of our wetlands, a vitally important but criminally misunderstood landscape now imperiled by climate change. As Proulx explains, fens, bogs, swamps, and estuaries preserve our environment by storing carbon emissions. Roving through peatlands around the world, Proulx weaves a riveting history of their role in brewing diseases and fueling industrialization. Imbued with the same reverence for nature as Proulx’s fiction, Fen, Bog, and Swamp is both an enchanting work of nature writing and a rousing call to action. Read an exclusive interview with the author here at Esquire.

Because Our Fathers Lied, by Craig McNamara

How do we reckon with the sins of our parents? That’s the thorny question at the center of this moving and courageous memoir authored by the son of Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy’s architect of the Vietnam War. In this conflicted son’s telling, a complicated man comes into intimate view, as does the “mixture of love and rage” at the heart of their relationship. At once a loving and neglectful parent, the elder McNamara’s controversial lies about the war ultimately estranged him from his son, who hung Viet Cong flags in his childhood bedroom as a protest. The pursuit of a life unlike his father’s saw the younger McNamara drop out of Stanford and travel through South America on a motorcycle, leading him to ultimately become a sustainable walnut farmer. Through his own personal story of disappointment and disillusionment, McNamara captures an intergenerational conflict and a journey of moral identity.

A Ballet of Lepers, by Leonard Cohen

A Ballet of Lepers collects never-before-seen early works from beloved singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, including short stories, a novel, and a radio play. The titular novel, Cohen believed, was “probably a better novel” than his celebrated book The Favorite Game . These recovered gems traffic in the themes that would always obsess their author, like shame, desire, and longing. Cohen’s life and art have been dissected for years, but as this revealing volume proves, there are still new shades of him to discover.

Lost & Found, by Kathryn Schultz

Eighteen months before Schultz’s father died after a long battle with cancer, she met the love of her life. It’s this painful dichotomy that sets the foundation for Lost & Found , a poignant memoir about how love and loss often coexist. Braiding her personal experiences together with psychological, philosophical and scientific insight, Schultz weaves a taxonomy of our losses, which can “encompass both the trivial as well as the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone.” But so too does she celebrate the act of discovery, from finding what we’ve mislaid to lucking into lasting love. Penetrating and profound, Lost & Found captures the extraordinary joys and sorrows of ordinary life.

Less Is Lost, by Andrew Sean Greer

In 2018, Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Less , an unforgettable comic novel about aging writer Arthur Less and his international misadventures. Less is back for more in this beguiling sequel, bursting with just as much absurdity, heartache, and laugh-out-loud joy as its predecessor. Dogged by financial crisis and the death of his former lover, Less sets out across the American landscape with nothing but a rusty camper van, a somber pug, and a zigzagging itinerary of literary gigs. Our reluctant hero blunders his way into a cascade of disasters, but the more lost Less gets, the closer he is to being found. Rambunctious and life-affirming, Less is Lost is a winsome reminder of all that fiction can do and be. As Greer writes of novelists, “Are we not that fraction of old magic that remains?” Read an exclusive interview with the author here at Esquire.

Fairy Tale, by Stephen King

The master of horror turns his talents to coming-of-age fantasy in this spellbinding tale about seventeen-year-old Charlie Reade, a resourceful teenager who inherits the keys to a parallel world. It all starts when Charlie meets Mr. Bowditch, a local recluse living in a spooky house with his lovable hound. When Mr. Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie the house, a massive stockpile of gold, and the keys to a locked shed containing a portal to another world. But as Charlie soon discovers, that parallel world is full of danger, dungeons, and time travel—and it has the power to imperil our own universe. Packed with glorious flights of imagination and characteristic tenderness about childhood, Fairy Tale is vintage King at his finest. Read an exclusive excerpt here at Esquire.

The Furrows, by Namwali Serpell

Fresh off the stratospheric achievement of The Old Drift , Serpell’s sophomore novel is a wrenching examination of grief, memory, and reality. When Cassandra Williams was twelve years old, her seven-year-old brother Wayne drowned off the Delaware coast. Or did he? While the first half of The Furrows examines the long half-life of Cassandra’s grief, the second half gets slippery, exploring the possibility that Wayne survived. As the blurry boundaries between what’s true and what’s possible collapse, Serpell resets her novel again and again, like a scratched record skipping back to the beginning. Old wounds never heal, and Cassandra can’t stop revisiting them. Let this breathtaking novel roll over you in waves.

The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li

Time and time again, Li has proven herself a master storyteller obsessed with the nature of storytelling. In her latest novel, she takes that obsession to spectacular new heights. Set in the ruined countryside of post-WWII France, The Book of Goose centers on the friendship between shy Agnès and rebellious Fabienne. Fabienne devises a game: she will imagine a lurid story, and Agnès, with her perfect penmanship, will write it. When the book becomes a runaway bestseller credited to Agnès alone, it propels the girls on a trajectory of fame and fortune that threatens to sever their friendship. Fans of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels will love this gripping tale of art, power, and intimacy.

Liberation Day, by George Saunders

The godfather of the contemporary short story is back and better than ever in Liberation Day , his first collection of short fiction in nearly a decade. In one memorable story set in a near future police state, a grandfather explains how Americans lost their freedoms through small concessions to an authoritarian government. In another standout, vulnerable Americans are brainwashed and reprogrammed as political protestors, with their services available to the highest bidder. The rousing title novella sees the poor enslaved to entertain the rich, forced to recreate scenes from American history. In these powerful and perceptive stories, Saunders conjures a nation in moral and spiritual decline, where acts of kindness wink through like lights in the darkness.

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9 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Our recommended books this week run the gamut from a behind-the-scenes look at the classic film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to a portrait of suburbia in decline to a collection of presidential love letters with the amazing title “Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?” (That question comes from a mash note written by Woodrow Wilson.) In fiction, we recommend debuts from DéLana R.A. Dameron, Alexander Sammartino and Rebecca K Reilly, alongside new novels by Cormac James, Ashley Elston and Kristin Hannah. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA: Movies, Marriage and the Making of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Philip Gefter

Rarely seen diary entries from the screenwriter who adapted Edward Albee’s Broadway hit are a highlight of this unapologetically obsessive behind-the-scenes look at the classic film starring the super-couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

best reviewed books 2022

“Showed how the ‘cartoon versions of marriage’ long served up by American popular culture ... always came with a secret side of bitters.”

From Alexandra Jacobs’s review

Bloomsbury | $32

TRONDHEIM Cormac James

James’s new novel is a deep dive into a family navigating a crisis. It follows two mothers waiting in the I.C.U. to see if their son will wake up from a coma, and through that framework, explores their lives, their relationship, their beliefs and much more.

best reviewed books 2022

“Hospital time has a particular and peculiar quality, and ‘Trondheim’ is dedicated to capturing the way it unfolds.”

From Katie Kitamura’s review

Bellevue Literary Press | Paperback, $17.99

REDWOOD COURT DéLana R.A. Dameron

This richly textured and deeply moving debut novel begins with an innocuous question: “What am I made of?” From there, a young Black girl in South Carolina begins to grapple with — and attempt to make sense of — a complicated family history and her place in it.

best reviewed books 2022

“Dameron is a prizewinning poet and it shows: She does a beautiful job weaving in local vernacular and casting a fresh gaze on an engaging, though flawed, cast of characters.”

From Charmaine Wilkerson’s review

Dial Press | $28

LAST ACTS Alexander Sammartino

In this hilarious debut, a young man moves in with his father after a near-fatal overdose and decides to help save the family business, a Phoenix gun shop facing foreclosure. Their idea is to pledge a cut of every sale to fighting drug addiction, but they soon find themselves mired in controversy.

best reviewed books 2022

“Sammartino is extraordinarily good at balancing the farcical nature of contemporary America with the complex humanity of his characters. He’s also a magnificent sentence writer.”

From Dan Chaon’s review

Scribner | $27

DISILLUSIONED: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs Benjamin Herold

Once defined by big homes, great schools and low taxes, the country’s suburbs, Herold shows in this dispiriting but insightful account, were poorly planned and are now saddled with poverty, struggling schools, dilapidated infrastructure and piles of debt.

best reviewed books 2022

“An important, cleareyed account of suburban boom and bust, and the challenges facing the country today.”

From Ben Austen’s review

Penguin Press | $32

ARE YOU PREPARED FOR THE STORM OF LOVE MAKING? Letters of Love and Lust From the White House Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler

This charming collection features presidents from Washington to Obama writing about courtship, marriage, war, diplomacy, love, lust and loss, in winningly besotted tones.

best reviewed books 2022

“Answers the question ‘What does a president in love sound like?’ with a refreshing ‘Just as dopey as anybody else.’ ... It is a lovely book, stuffed with romantic details.”

From W.M. Akers’s review

Simon & Schuster | $28.99

GRETA & VALDIN Rebecca K Reilly

Reilly’s generous, tender debut novel follows the exploits of two queer New Zealand 20-something siblings from a hodgepodge, multicultural family as they navigate the chaos of young adulthood, and as they come closer to understanding themselves and their desires.

best reviewed books 2022

“If this novel shows us anything, it’s that love — of family, of romantic partners, of community — is most joyful when it’s without limits.”

From Eleanor Dunn’s review

Avid Reader Press | $28

THE WOMEN Kristin Hannah

In her latest historical novel, Hannah shows the Vietnam War through the eyes of a combat nurse. But what the former debutante witnesses and experiences when she comes home from the war is the true gut punch of this timely story.

best reviewed books 2022

“The familiar beats snare you from the outset. ... Hannah’s real superpower is her ability to hook you along from catastrophe to catastrophe, sometimes peering between your fingers, because you simply cannot give up on her characters.”

From Beatriz Williams’s review

St. Martin’s | $27

FIRST LIE WINS Ashley Elston

In Elston’s edgy, smart thriller, Evie Porter has just moved in with her boyfriend, a hunky Louisiana businessman. Sadly for him, their relationship is likely to be short-lived, because she’s a criminal and he’s her latest mark.

best reviewed books 2022

“Evie makes for a winning, nimble character. Elston raises the stakes with unexpected developments.”

From Sarah Lyall’s thrillers column

Pamela Dorman Books | $28

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Even in countries where homophobia is pervasive and same-sex relationships are illegal, queer African writers are pushing boundaries , finding an audience and winning awards.

In Lucy Sante’s new memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the author reflects on her life and embarking on a gender transition  in her late 60s.

For people of all ages in Pasadena, Calif., Vroman’s Bookstore, founded in 1894, has been a mainstay in a world of rapid change. Now, its longtime owner says he’s ready to turn over the reins .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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QuickBooks Payroll review 2024: Cost, plans, features and more

Laura Gariepy

Alana Rudder

Alana Rudder

“Verified by an expert” means that this article has been thoroughly reviewed and evaluated for accuracy.

Updated 4:57 p.m. UTC Jan. 3, 2024

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Best for integrations

Quickbooks payroll.

QuickBooks Payroll

Monthly fee

Direct deposit

24/7 customer support

  • More than 750 integrations available.
  • Feature-rich platform.
  • 30-day free trial.
  • More expensive than some competitors.
  • 24/7 support isn’t offered with the base plan.
  • Must pay for additional states for tax filing on some plans.

Why trust our small business experts

Our team of experts evaluates hundreds of business products and analyzes thousands of data points to help you find the best product for your situation. We use a data-driven methodology to determine each rating. Advertisers do not influence our editorial content. You can read more about our methodology below.

  • 25 companies reviewed.
  • 40 hours of product testing.
  • 1,025 data points analyzed.

Featured payroll software offers

best reviewed books 2022

Via Rippling’s website

Starting at $8 per month per user

best reviewed books 2022

Via OnPay’s website

$40 per month plus $6 per employee

best reviewed books 2022

Via Paychex’s website

$39 plus $5 per user

SurePayroll

best reviewed books 2022

Via SurePayroll’s website

$29.99 per month plus $5 per employee

QuickBooks Payroll software review

best reviewed books 2022

Pricing and plans

QuickBooks Payroll offers three tiers: Payroll Core, Payroll Premium and Payroll Elite. Here’s how they compare:

QuickBooks Payroll costs more than some other providers in the industry. For example, Patriot’s most expensive plan is $37 per month, and its cheapest plan costs $17 per month. If you have no budget to spend on payroll and only need basic service, you can also pay your employees for free using tools like Payroll4Free. However, if you have the budget, QuickBooks Payroll may be worth the added price due to its robust functionality and the ability to integrate over 750 other software options to make a catered solution that seamlessly works with your business needs.

Features and add-ons

QuickBooks Payroll offers users a long list of premium features, such as:

  • Automatic payroll processing.
  • Same or next-day direct deposit.
  • Time tracking (via mobile device or computer).
  • Customizable, printable and exportable payroll reports that include deductions and contributions, payroll tax liability, vacation and sick time, payroll tax and wage summary, worker’s compensation and more.
  • 1099 form generation.
  • Automatic federal and state tax filings. 
  • Contractor payment processing.
  • Multi-currency support.
  • The ability to integrate over 750 applications. 
  • Personal HR advisors.
  • Project tracking. 
  • Tax penalty protection. 
  • Workers compensation administration.

Standout features

QuickBooks’ Tax Penalty Protection is a stand-out feature in its Elite plan. For tax notices not in collections, it will deal directly with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and cover up to $25,000 per year in penalties, regardless of who’s at fault. However, you must submit IRS notices to QuickBooks within 15 days of receiving them, and it must have reviewed your payroll setup before the incident.

In addition, QuickBooks partnered with other companies to enhance its payroll product. For example, Mineral, Inc. offers personalized HR advisory services when you need guidance. If you’re an Elite-level customer, you can call or send in your question through the HR support center. Premium plan customers can access the HR support center but not a personal HR advisor.

best reviewed books 2022

In addition to payroll processing, QuickBooks Payroll offers tools to administer employee benefits. It partners with SimplyInsured to offer employees medical, dental and vision coverage. Premium deductions get automatically calculated and added to the payroll. Plus, users receive assistance with benefits-related issues. Another partner, Guideline offers a 401(k) plan with automatic contributions or employer-set contributions amounts.

best reviewed books 2022

Powered by QuickBooks Payroll partner, Next, QuickBooks users can provide employees with workers’ compensation administration services. To do so, you can get a free policy quote, connect your policy to your payroll and pay as you go instead of in one lump sum. However, this feature is only free for QuickBooks Payroll’s Premium and Elite members. Payroll Core users must pay an extra $5 per month for workers’ compensation administration tools. 

best reviewed books 2022

QuickBooks also gives you access to many free payroll tools and resources, including:

  • An employee toolkit containing downloadable guides about paid time off, direct deposit, time tracking and more.
  • A payroll map showing updated tax laws by state.
  • A glossary of payroll terms.
  • A paycheck calculator.
  • A library of tips, articles and videos on hiring, payroll processing and payroll laws.

In general, QuickBooks offers more features than its competitors . For example, Paycor can’t handle contractor payments, and Roll by ADP won’t track vacation time or time worked. QuickBooks Payroll could be the right solution for your business if you need these capabilities or think you may in the future.

If you’re not already using QuickBooks to handle your other accounting needs, you can bundle the payroll software with a bookkeeping product. The bundle is available in these three plans:

Customer support and experience

If you’re paying for QuickBooks Payroll’s Premium or Elite plan, you can contact customer support 24/7 by phone or online chat. However, if you’re using the Core plan, your support window is only 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Pacific Time. You can speak to a representative via online chat or request a call during that time.

We spoke with a sales representative via the company’s online chat during our testing. They responded right away, answered all of our questions and were personable throughout the conversation. 

However, other users have reported subpar customer support experiences. QuickBooks Payroll users complain that customer support is often difficult to understand due to outsourced, out-of-country support. They also report representatives’ inability to fix user issues, long waiting times and frequent dropped calls. 

QuickBooks’ website is relatively simple to navigate. However, the information there sometimes contradicts what sales representatives told us during testing. For instance, the pricing page shows that 24/7 customer support is only available to Elite customers. A sales representative said Premium customers can also access that level of assistance.

QuickBooks Payroll’s mobile app, QuickBooks Workforce, is well-rated by Android and iOS users. It’s earned 4.5 out of five stars from the Apple App Store across more than 102,000 reviews. It has earned a 4.1 out of five-star rating on the Google Play Store across more than 28,000 reviews. Users praise the app for its ease of use, data-syncing capabilities and the fact that employees can use it to log time worked. However, glitches arise when the app is updated, causing user frustration. 

When we checked reviews for QuickBooks, we noted that the parent company’s (Intuit) overall online reputation isn’t as favorable. For example, it received 1.2 out of five stars on Trustpilot after 529 user reviews. Common complaints included software glitches and customer service issues. However, QuickBooks Payroll, on its own, received better ratings with 4.5 out of five stars on Capterra across more than 800 reviews.

QuickBooks Payroll vs. the competition

QuickBooks Payroll outshines many competitors regarding functionality and available integrations. It also has extra features to help ensure you can offer competitive payment packages for your employees, such as benefits and 401(k) administration tools. However, the software is pricey compared to other options on the market. Some users also report sub-par customer support experiences.

If these disadvantages are important to you, you may consider a competitor. For example, OnPay is our top pick for expert support. When our team tested OnPay, we found its customer support representatives to be experienced even in niche industries and willing to go above and beyond to meet each customer’s unique needs. 

For a payroll software that’s more fitting for companies on a tight budget, consider Patriot . Its plans start at $17 per month, while its highest-tiered plan is $37 per month, which beats QuickBooks Payroll’s first-tier plan. And, despite the lower price point, you can use Patriot to pay both salaried and contract employees, enjoy automatic tax reporting and filing and pay employees via two-day direct deposit.

Is QuickBooks Payroll right for your business?

We named QuickBooks Payroll best for integrations because it plugs directly into QuickBooks Online, which can integrate with over 750 other applications you may use to run your business. It also offers premium features, such as access to benefits administration solutions, time and project tracking and an employee self-serve mobile app. 

However, if you need knowledgeable and easily-accessible customer support or want a bare-bones budget-friendly solution, it’s wise to consider other options. For example, Patriot is a great choice for companies on a budget, and OnPay offers expert support for a flat-fee service. Gusto is also a good choice for large, global companies.

Methodology

We extensively research the key competitors within an industry to determine the best products and services for your business. Our experts identify the factors that matter most to business owners, including pricing, features, and customer support, to ensure that our recommendations offer well-rounded products that will meet the needs of various small businesses.

We collect extensive data to narrow our best list to reputable, easy-to-use products with stand-out features at a reasonable price point. And we look at user reviews to ensure that business owners like you are satisfied with our top picks’ services. We use the same rubric to assess companies within a particular space so you can confidently follow our blueprint to the best payroll software.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

QuickBooks Payroll offers a 30-day free trial, the standard length of a free trial in this industry. However, some companies, such as Rippling and Paycor, don’t allow you to try before you buy. Other providers, like Roll by ADP, beat QuickBooks in this area, offering a three-month free trial.

QuickBooks Payroll offers direct deposit at no extra cost. With its basic plan, you get next-day direct deposit for employees, and mid- and upper-tier plans come with same-day direct deposit.

QuickBooks Payroll offers automated payroll tax filing at the federal, state and local levels. However, the Core tier does not handle local payroll taxes. 

Plan prices include one state. Additional states cost $12 each if you’re on the Core or Premium plan. Other states don’t cost extra if you’re on the Elite plan.

QuickBooks Payroll offers time tracking with its Premium or Elite plans at no extra cost. However, the feature is unavailable in its Core plan.

QuickBooks Payroll offers a well-rated mobile app. You can download and access it from any iOS or Android mobile device.

QuickBooks Payroll integrates with QuickBooks Online, which integrates with over 750 other business applications. Popular integrations include Bill, Fundbox and MailChimp.

Blueprint is an independent publisher and comparison service, not an investment advisor. The information provided is for educational purposes only and we encourage you to seek personalized advice from qualified professionals regarding specific financial decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Blueprint has an advertiser disclosure policy . The opinions, analyses, reviews or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the Blueprint editorial staff alone. Blueprint adheres to strict editorial integrity standards. The information is accurate as of the publish date, but always check the provider’s website for the most current information.

Laura Gariepy

Laura started writing about personal finance in early 2018 when she took a sabbatical from her career in human resources and launched a blog discussing her journey. She realized she could earn a more lucrative and flexible living as a freelance writer, so she soon went all-in on being self-employed. Laura loves to write about managing your money, navigating your career, and running a successful business. Her work has been featured in Forbes, LendingTree, Rocket Mortgage, The Balance, and many other publications. She has also earned an MBA and a Bachelor's degree in Psychology.

Alana is the deputy editor for USA Today Blueprint's small business team. She has served as a technology and marketing SME for countless businesses, from startups to leading tech firms — including Adobe and Workfusion. She has zealously shared her expertise with small businesses — including via Forbes Advisor and Fit Small Business — to help them compete for market share. She covers technologies pertaining to payroll and payment processing, online security, customer relationship management, accounting, human resources, marketing, project management, resource planning, customer data management and how small businesses can use process automation, AI and ML to more easily meet their goals. Alana has an MBA from Excelsior University.

How to start a small business: A step-by-step guide

How to start a small business: A step-by-step guide

Business Eric Rosenberg

The i

The best new books to read in February 2024

Fiction pick, the list of suspicious things, by jennie godfrey.

I t’s 1979 and the Yokshire Ripper serial killer has yet to be captured, leaving locals across the county terrified to walk down their own streets. So much so that 12-year-old Miv’s father is considering moving the family ‘Down South’ , which would mean leaving her best friend Sharon behind – and this simply won’t do. The pair devise a plan to solve the case of the murders themselves, and they start by listing all the suspicious people and things they come across in their neighbourhood. In the process, they stumble upon more secrets in their town and families than they could have imagined, including why Miv’s mother suddenly fell silent all those months ago. A mystery wrapped up in a story of community and family, The List of Suspicious Things is a gorgeous, page-turning book.

(Hutchinson Heinemann, £14.99)

Nonfiction pick

How the world made the west, by josephine quinn.

(Bloomsbury, £30)

An astounding 500-page read, How the World Made the West calls for a major reassessment of everything we thought we knew about how western ‘civilisations’ were created. From the Bronze Age through to the Age of Exploration, Quinn charts more than 4,000 years of history in order to reveal a new and much wider picture – one that illustrates how much more interconnected cultures were than was traditionally thought, and underlines the enormous roles that migration and trade played in shaping the world we know today. Both erudite and witty, sweeping and granular, this book is revisionist history at its best.

Memoir pick

A bookshop of one’s own, by jane cholmeley.

In Thatcher-era Britain, three women set up a feminist bookshop in Charing Cross, London, and Jane Cholmeley was one of them. Now, in this brilliantly-named memoir, she recalls what it was like to co-found the legendary Silver Moon bookshop, which went on to become Europe’s biggest women’s bookshop and host everyone from Maya Angelou to Margaret Atwood . But this memoir also serves as a slice of social history contemplating the world which Silver Moon found itself in, where it was not only important to champion the works of female writers but also provide a safe space in an atmosphere marred by misogyny and homophobia. Whether you remember the famous bookshop or not, this is a wonderful, rallying read.

(Mudlark, £16.99)

Thriller pick

The fury, by alex michaelides.

Alex Michaelides’ debut novel The Silent Patient was a record-breaking, international bestseller of multi-million copies, so it is little surprise a major film adaptation is in the works. While we wait, the author has returned with another breathtakingly twisty thriller. The Fury centres on a group of seven people who are trapped on a small, private Greek island . Their host is a former movie star, Lana, and one of them is a murderer. On the island, nothing is as it seems – and the same can be said for the novel itself, which takes the classic murder mystery format and twists it into something devious and enthralling and consistently surprising.

(Michael Joseph, £18.99)

Best of the rest

Parasol against the axe, by helen oyeyemi.

This surreal, whimsical novel is narrated from the perspective of the city of Prague , where a hen do has descended and where one of the group has a book whose text changes every time it is opened. Playful, original fun.

(Faber, £16.99)

Pity, by Andrew McMillan

As their lives fall apart in very different ways, three generations of a South Yorkshire mining family contemplate authenticity, resilience and our capacity to change. The poet’s fiction debut is as lyrical and evocative as you would expect.

(Canongate, £14.99)

Anna O, by Mathew Blake

It has been four years since Anna O was found in a deep sleep next to the bodies of her two best friends, bloodied and holding a knife. Suspected of double murder, she hasn’t opened her eyes since and Benedict Prince is the forensic psychologist tasked with waking her up.

(HarperCollins, £16.99)

Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux

George Orwell once stated that ‘here is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever’. For the 1984 author himself, this was his years spent as a police trainee in Burma, a time that Theroux has re-imagined with storytelling prowess.

(Hamish Hamilton, £20)

Green Dot, by Madeleine Gray

In Sydney, 20-something Hera’s first job as a comment moderator for a news outlet is exceptionally boring – until she meets and falls in love with Arthur: the older, married journalist who works there. This buzzy debut about growing up and making mistakes also happens to be rip-roaringly funny.

(W&N, £16.99)

The Fox Wife, by Yangsze Choo

Following her acclaimed bestselling novel The Night Tiger, Choo has penned an enchanting, mythological novel which revolves around the mystery of a woman found frozen in the snow – and the foxes that are rumoured to have the powers to take people’s life force.

(Quercus, £20)

Newborn, by Kerry Hudson

In Kerry Hudson ’s terrific 2019 memoir Lowborn , she explored how poverty shaped her childhood. In Newborn , she reveals the next chapter of her story, which involves finding love, giving birth to a son, and building a family without a blueprint to work from.

(Chatto & Windus £18.99)

Jaded, by Ela Lee

One night after a work event, Jade’s perfectly constructed life comes crumbling down. As the victim of sexual assault , she is caught between people who don’t understand and those who expect her to remain silent. A raw, compulsive and nuanced novel about identity, race and consent.

(Harvill Secker, £16.99)

The Happiest Ever After, by Milly Johnson

After her life falls apart, Polly finds solace in her writing, where she creates a fictionalised version of herself who gets a better ending. Soon, she finds herself living out that exact storyline. You can always rely on Milly Johnson to make you feel good.

(Simon & Schuster, £16.99)

Mad Woman, by Bryony Gordon

A decade on since Mad Girl , Gordon’s bestselling memoir about her experiences with mental illness, she has penned a follow-up on everything she has learned since, be it on sobriety, burnout , binge eating, perimenopause or what she got wrong about mental health in the first place.

(Headline, £20)

The Book of Doors, by Gareth Brown

Cassie Andrews is a bookseller in New York whose life feels directionless until a customer hands her a book filled with mysterious drawings. It transpires to be a book with magic powers, and the adventure that unfurls from there is mesmerising to read.

(Bantam, £16.99)

Fourteen Days, edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston

It is lockdown in a Manhattan apartment and tenants are gathering every night on the roof to share stories. But this isn’t your typical novel. Fourteen Days is a collaborative project where each character has been written by a different author, from Margaret Atwood to John Grisham, Emma Donoghue to Celeste Ng.

(Chatto & Windus, £20)

Nuclear Family, by Kate Davies

Davies’s 2019 debut In at the Deep End was one of the funniest novels of that year. This follow up, about what happens when a DNA testing kit ends up blowing a family apart, is just as good a comedy of manners.

(Borough Press, £16.99)

Frank and Red, by Matt Coyne

Frank is a grumpy widower who is estranged from his only son; Red is the six-year-old who moves in next door and has an annoyingly noisy trampoline. Still, the pair form an unlikely friendship in this heartwarming novel.

(Wildfire, £18.99)

The Story Collector, by Iris Costello

From pre First World War Germany through to present day Cornwall, the lives of three women are inextricably linked by a long-buried secret. When Edie renovates her cottage and comes across a mysterious box that had been hidden in the walls, it finally comes to light.

(Penguin, £8.99)

This Love, by Lotte Jeffs

Mae and Ari first meet outside a gay club in Leeds , where they are both in their final year of university. Over the decade that follows, the pair become one another’s anchors in this beautiful platonic love story about friendship, queerness, found family and connection.

(Dialogue, £22)

Private Equity, by Carrie Sun

A memoir so gripping and propulsive that it reads like a thriller, Private Equity is Sun’s account of working on Wall Street in one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world, and a searing indictment of work culture, extreme wealth and power.

(Bloomsbury, £20)

Happiness Falls, by Angie Kim

When Mia’s father goes missing, the only witness is her younger brother Eugene – whose rare genetic condition means he cannot speak. Happiness Falls is by turns a riveting mystery and an astute family drama.

The Fetishist, by Katherine Min

This posthumously published book follows a daughter taking revenge on the man she believes drove her mother to her death. Quite the testament to the talent of its author, The Fetishist is a wild, darkly funny ride.

(Fleet, £16.99)

A Sign of Her Own, by Sarah Marsh

A novel that tells the story of a young deaf woman named Ellen Lark and her role in the invention of the telephone, A Sign of Her Own is an enrapturing read about betrayal, community, speaking out, and being heard.

(Tinder, £18.99)

Data Grab by, Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry

How many times have you unthinkingly clicked ‘accept’ on Terms and Conditions? In today’s world, data is the new oil and Big Tech is exploiting it – or so argue the two global researchers behind this insightful book.

(WH Allen, £22)

Alphabetical Diaries, by Sheila Heti

Author Sheila Heti is known for pushing the boundaries in her work, and never more so than her new memoir, which takes 10 years’ worth of her diaries and re-organises every sentence alphabetically. The result of this experiment is surprisingly compelling.

(Fitzcarraldo Editions, £10.99)

What Will Survive of Us, by Howard Jacobson

Lily, a filmmaker, and Sam, a writer, are brought together by work and despite being married to other people, are kept together by romance. What begins as a tale of a midlife affair turns into a profound study of love, desire and ageing from the Booker Prize winning author of The Finkler Question.

(Jonathan Cape, £20)

The Ladder, by Cathy Newman

The presenter’s compendium of life lessons from inspiring women who have scaled their fair share of ladders includes wisdom from activists, scientists, politicians and leaders. An empowering read.

(William Collins, £18.99)

Blessings, by Chukwuebuka Ibeh

When Obiefuna is caught with another boy by his father, he is banished to a strict Christian boarding school. This Nigeria-set debut is both a brutal and tender coming of age story, marking Ibeh as a major new literary voice.

(Viking, £14.99)

The Painter’s Daughters, by Emily Howes

Before she passed away, Hilary Mantel described this debut as ‘beautifully written…I raced through it’. It tells the story of painter Thomas Gainsborough’s two daughters, and is a rich evocation of secrets, art, sisterhood and class in 18th century Britain.

(Phoenix, £20)

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki

This Japanese novel, which has become quite the cult phenomenon, is nothing short of ingenious. Inspired by a real case, it tells the story of a female cook who murders lonely businessmen – and of the journalist desperate to crack the case.

(Fourth Estate, £14.99)

‘Everything can change in an instant’

Every smile you fake, by dorothy koomson.

Since she published her debut novel The Cupid Effect , Dorothy Koomson has gone on to sell 2.5 million copies of her books in the UK alone, been translated into 30 languages, and in the process, become the biggest-selling Black female writer of adult fiction in the country.

From The Ice Cream Girls to The Brighton Mermaid, My Other Husband to All My Lies Are True , she might be known (and loved) for being “the queen of the big reveal”, but her success lies in the fact that Koomson’s books are more than just your average thriller. They are thought-provoking – even powerful – reads, in which moral dilemmas and complex relationships are consistently explored.

“I find humans intriguing and I find the things we do when we’re put in challenging situations even more fascinating,” she explains. “I love to drop my characters into a difficult spot and then work out how they’re going to navigate it. I put them through hell and they’re not always – actually very rarely – guaranteed the kind of happy ending we’ve come to expect.”

Koomson’s latest, Every Smile You Fake , follows Kez Lanyon, a profiler and therapist, who finds a baby on the backseat of her car one night with an unsigned note. She suspects the mother is popular social media star Brandee, who (if the online rumours are true) is in danger. The novel explores the sinister impact of social media, and asks, in an age of AI and deep fakes, whether we can trust what we see online.

“I started with the premise of: ‘What if you came back to your car and found a baby on the back seat?’ and went from there,” she says. “As I tried to work out who would be forced to leave their child in such a way, the idea of uncovering the real world secrets of a social media influencer came up. And with that, the idea of the disconnect between our reality and the fakery of our online lives blossomed and kept blossoming.”

In her 20 years of being an author, Koomson has learned a lot. “It is virtually impossible to boil it down to one lesson , but if I was pushed, I think I’d say my biggest lesson is accepting the fact that anything and everything can change in an instant; nothing stays the same,” she muses. “If you can initiate that change before it’s forced on you, all the better. With this change, you have to try to stay true to who you are and what you do.”

This, she thinks, is part of the reason why her books are constantly evolving. “I’m always striving to keep my writing and storytelling fresh; I always challenge myself to make sure the next book is better than the last.”

(Headline Review, £16.99)

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How Russia Became an Empire

Dominic lieven on the rise of a singularly remote global economy.

The founders of the Russian Empire were the rulers of Moscow, an initially small principality formed in the last decades of the 13th century. Moscow’s rulers were descendants of Rurik, the semi-mythical Viking chieftain who had ruled the area around Kiev towards the end of the 9th century. At a pinch one might describe these Vikings as riverborne nomadic war-bands.

In the following four centuries Rurik’s dynasty came to rule over much of today’s European Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Since the Rurikids divided their realms between their sons, by 1200 a maze of mostly tiny principalities covered this vast territory. The most powerful Rurikid by then was the Grand Prince of Vladimir, who dominated the north-eastern territories (“Great Russia”) which became the core of the Muscovite and then Russian state.

Moscow’s princes were a junior branch of the grand princes of Vladimir. For almost 250 years after the Mongol invasions of the 1240s most of the Rurikid lands were part of the empire of Chinggis Khan and his successors. The Chinggisids ruled their Slav subjects indirectly, using the Rurikid princes to extract tribute and transmit it to the ruling khan.

During the fourteenth century Moscow’s rulers emerged as the most powerful princes in “Great Russia.” Their position as “Grand Princes” was recognized both by the Tatar/Mongol khan and by the Orthodox Church, whose patriarch (originally located in Kiev) moved to Moscow for good in the first half of the fourteenth century.

A crucial factor in Moscow’s rise was the fact that whereas rival principalities were divided among many heirs, over four long generations biological chance kept the whole Muscovite inheritance united. This good fortune ended in 1425 when Vasily I died, leaving his adult younger brother and his ten-year-old son (Vasily II) as rival candidates for the throne. The vicious 20-year civil war that followed brought anarchy and the intervention of outside rulers, but Vasily II’s final victory established the inheritance of the undivided realm by male primogeniture as the unchallenged “law” of the realm.

In the century that followed Vasily II’s victory Moscow made the first steps towards empire. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 left Moscow’s rulers the only independent Orthodox monarchs and allowed them to claim the Byzantine imperial heritage. This included the title of tsar (a corruption of “caesar”) and Byzantine imperial rituals, symbols and ideology. All the other Rurikid principalities of Great Russia were absorbed by 1520, as was the vast and wealthy trading state of Novgorod. Ivan IV—”the Terrible” (r. 1547–84)—conquered the main successor states to the Mongol Empire in Europe, the Muslim khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, in the 1550s.

His subsequent attempt to conquer Livonia (today’s Latvia and Estonia) and plant Russian power on the shores of the Baltic Sea overstretched his realm’s resources and resulted in economic and political crisis. Ivan’s reaction to this crisis was massive purges of the ruling elite, including the killing of the junior branch of the Muscovite dynasty and—perhaps—of his eldest son and heir. One plausible explanation for his extreme and counter-productive cruelty is that his brain was increasingly affected by the mercury he took to counter a painful and debilitating disease of the spine.

Largely thanks to Ivan, in 1598 the Moscow dynasty died out, unleashing two decades of anarchy, civil war and foreign intervention known as the Time of Troubles, which culminated in an attempt to set up the Polish king’s son as ruler in Moscow. The Orthodox and proto-nationalist revolt that ensued drove out the Poles and elected as tsar Michael Romanov, a member of an aristocratic family prominent since Moscow’s creation and one which had intermarried with the reigning dynasty.

Memory of the Time of Troubles greatly strengthened the belief that only a powerful and legitimate monarchy could save the Russians from domestic anarchy and foreign domination. This memory was one of the foundation myths of the Romanov dynasty and empire.

Inevitably the political system and traditions of the Muscovite principality were deeply influenced by its geographical setting. No other great sedentary empire in history had a heartland in so northern a latitude, so far from the centers of international trade and culture. Moscow was some 1,300 miles north-east of Constantinople, which was at the center of trading routes that linked the Mediterranean region to Asia from ancient times. It was even further from the Atlantic, which became the center of the global economy from the 18th century.

In civilizational terms Moscow was perched on the furthest periphery of the Orthodox and Byzantine community, which itself by 1450 was much the junior partner in the European and Christian world. Distance from the great trade routes and cultural centers meant relative poverty, few towns and small numbers of merchants, professional men and skilled craftsmen. States able to tap into international trade could place smaller tax burdens on their people.

The overwhelming majority of the tsar’s subjects even in 1700 were peasants, whose “surplus” had to sustain the monarchy and its armies. In most of the world’s great “agrarian” empires peasant farmers lived in densely populated and fertile river valleys. In Russia by contrast the peasantry was thinly sprinkled across a vast but infertile zone. Even in 1750 the empire’s population was smaller than that of France. Distance and climate placed a high tax on all the operations of the Russian state, economy and people. Fixing the population to the soil—in other words serfdom—was the only way to sustain the state, its armed forces and the warrior-landholding elite.

There was nothing at all inevitable in the rise of a powerful state in the Muscovite heartland. If such a state did emerge, however, geography more or less determined how it would seek to expand its power and territory. One reason for the foundation of the city of Moscow was its good water communications with Russia’s greatest river, the Volga, and thereby its links to the Baltic and Caspian seas.

Any state rooted in Moscow would seek to control these waterways and their outlets to the sea, in order to stop its trade being constrained, taxed and interdicted by rival powers. Even more elemental was the drive to expand out of the poor soils of the Muscovite heartland towards the much more fertile land of the steppe.

Still, the geographical location of the Russian heartland did offer some advantages. Its dense network of rivers flowed slowly across a flat landscape and were in most cases easily managed and navigated by the standards even of the Nile, let alone the Yellow River. The remote and densely forested terrain offered some security against nomadic armies. It was even better security against early modern European infantry and artillery-based armies which found it hard to feed themselves on Russian soil and even harder to move across Russia’s vast distances, especially in spring and autumn when all roads dissolved into mud.

Above all, Russia benefited after 1500 from its peripheral location in the European state system, which facilitated its expansion across the whole of northern Asia. Russia would gain enormous wealth from Siberia’s fur, silver and gold, and other minerals. The Russian military and metallurgical industry was created in the Urals in the reign of Peter I “the Great” (r. 1682–1725) and was based on the region’s vast resources of iron and timber. In comparative imperial terms the native forest peoples of Siberia offered weak opposition to Russian expansion.

Already by the end of the 17th century the Russians had reached the Pacific Ocean and had achieved a stable compromise with the Qing Empire, which contributed among other things to the rapid demise of Mongol military nomadism. Not until the emergence of Japan at the end of the nineteenth century did Russia face a serious military threat to its Asian territories. Essentially the Russians had moved into the geopolitical void created by the collapse of the Mongol Empire. Comparisons with the Ottoman experience are illuminating. When the Chinggisid Ilkhanate disintegrated in Iran it was in time replaced by the Safavid dynasty, which quickly became a formidable enemy on the Ottomans’ eastern frontier.

The basic geopolitical imperatives of the Muscovite and then Russian state—in other words control of river-borne trade routes and expansion on to the rich soils of the steppe—were far harder to achieve and faced major opposition. Expansion southwards ran head-on into nomadic warrior communities, above all the Crimean Tatars. Scores of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians were netted by the Crimean slave raids that occurred regularly between 1500 and 1650.

Europe’s first slave-based sugar plantations were in Cyprus with captured Russians and Ukrainians providing the labour. Most of Moscow was burned down in a Crimean Tatar raid as late as 1571. Building and manning the fortified lines that protected Russian colonization as it advanced across the steppe from the 16th to the 18th centuries could only be achieved by a state capable of mobilizing resources and manpower on a considerable scale. Behind the Crimean Tartars stood their overlord, the Ottoman sultan. In military terms the Ottoman Empire was more powerful than Russia until the eighteenth century.

In 1711 the Ottomans came close to destroying Peter the Great and his army and forced the tsar to make a humiliating peace. Even later in the 18th century it took enormous military and logistical efforts to secure Russia’s hold on the northern shore of the Black Sea and thereby make possible the economic development of southern Russia and Ukraine.

For a state rooted in the Moscow region, access to the Baltic was always likely to be an earlier and more credible priority than advancing across the steppe to challenge Ottoman dominance of the distant Black Sea coastline. From early days Russia’s rulers fought on two fronts—northern and southern. Managing diplomatic relations in order to exploit opportunities as they arose in one of these theaters and avoid simultaneous two-front wars required diplomatic skill and experience.

In the early 18th century Russia fulfilled its long-held goal of establishing its control over the south-eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Opening up the trade routes to the booming economies of western and central Europe led to enormous economic gains but it also embroiled Russia in direct competition with the European great powers.

Right down to 1917 the single greatest priority for Russian tsars was to maintain the empire’s security and status in competition with the economically and culturally more advanced great powers to its west. This continued to be true for the tsars’ communist successors. Any state whose roots lay in the bare Muscovite heartland and which evolved through surmounting these geopolitical challenges was unlikely to be a model of liberty and benevolence.

Once again, comparisons with the Ottomans are to the point. The Russian and Ottoman empires were located on the immediate periphery of Latin Europe in an era (1500–1918) when European power grew enormously and came to dominate the world. The Russian people paid a high price for the creation of an often ruthlessly exploitative state and its military machine.

On the other hand, as we have seen, Ottoman failure to sustain the state’s military power led in time to the killing or ethnic cleansing of millions of Muslims in the empire’s northern borderlands and European domination and even colonization of the Islamic heartlands. By the traditional measure of empire—in other words military power and glory—Russia did much better than the Ottomans in the 18th century.

Leadership was a major factor in Russian success and Ottoman failure in this geopolitical competition. Two longer-term structural factors were also vital to Russian success: first, the creation of an effective but ruthless system to control and mobilize Russian manpower through serfdom and conscription into the armed forces: and, second, the rapid westernization of Russian elites.

In long-term historical perspective it is easy to see the awful hatreds and brutality of the Russian Revolution as in part a belated revenge against exploitative but also culturally alien rulers. There were no easy or cheap answers to the geopolitical challenges faced by the Russians or Ottomans in the early modern and modern eras.

__________________________________

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From IN THE  SHADOW  OF THE  GODS  by Dominic Lieven, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

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  • 11 Best Hotels in Moscow

11 Best Hotels in Moscow

Home to more than 12 million people, Moscow is one of the most vibrant capitals in Europe. It’s a place where you’ll find people always running to places and streets with heavy traffic. But make no mistake, The Third Rome is an extraordinary city. The Russian metropolis has enough to keep you busy for months. From old fort complexes, dynamic green spaces, to modern skyscrapers. So, are you ready to be blown away by the nation’s biggest city? Stay here, as we unveiled some of the best hotels in Moscow, Russia.

Where to Stay in Moscow

During the days of the Soviet Union, Moscow was built with remarkable uniformity. Instead of using the grid system that is common in European cities, this city works with a ring system. This is why you’ll find neighborhoods scattered like flower petals, with the Kremlin at the center. So when you’re about to choose the best hotels in Moscow, apart from the location you also have to think about traffic.

For nightlife with clubs and bars, Kitay-Gorod would be a great choice. It’s close to the Kremlin and offers a more colorful Russian society. This 400-year-old neighborhood is also the place where you can find many of the top 11 things to do in Moscow .

If you want to get away from the center a little bit, Krasnoselsky would be great. It’s a little less crowded, with some notable landmarks such as the Moscow Lights Museum, Perlov Tea House, and the Menshikov Tower. And don’t forget about Komsomolskaya, one of the world’s 11 most unique train stations .

You foodies, Patriarch Ponds is definitely worth considering. There are many types of food to taste here. From Finnish to French cuisine. Expect some of the top class restaurants from independent chefs, including those run by the famous Berezutsky brothers.

If you’re into art and performance, look for hotels around Theater Square in the Tverskoy District. It’s one of the capital’s most beautiful squares and is also home to some of Moscow’s most prestigious performance venues, including the Bolshoi Theater aka one of the world’s 10 most amazing opera houses .

AZIMUT Hotel Smolenskaya

If you’re all the way to fly to Moscow mostly for business, the AZIMUT Hotel Smolenskaya will be one of the best homes while you’re in the Russian metropolis. This four-star accommodation is a business-class hotel occupying a grand 23-story building, complete with 10 fully equipped conference halls. It also has a very strategic location, right in the center of Moscow, aka the economic heart of the city. Meanwhile, a few steps will take you to Smolenskaya Square, an area that is home to the main building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia.

Once you’re done with all the business, it’s time to let off some steam. Head over to the great AZIMUT Hotel guest rooms. All are packed with thoughtful amenities, including air conditioning and a flat-screen TV. Rehydrate yourself after a busy day, as the hotel provides a complimentary bottle of mineral water. Unwind in the spacious and comfy seating area. Since a safety box is also featured here, you can keep all your valuables safe. And just like most of the best hotels in Moscow Russia, free WiFi is also available in all rooms.

As soon as morning approaches enjoy breakfast with international menus at the Avenue Restaurant. Once done, you can relax a little in the lounge area on the 19th floor. Order a cocktail or your other favorite drink, enjoy it while sitting relaxed on the leathery seats while admiring the beautiful view of the city from above. Trust us, this is one of the most incomparable vacation experiences you can have in Moscow!

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AZIMUT Hotel Smolenskaya - by Booking

Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel & Business Center

Did you know that Moscow is one of the cities with the most comprehensive metro system in the world? It covers almost the entire capital city and is the lifeblood of Russia’s largest metropolis. If you’re planning to visit The Third Rome in the near future, be sure to choose a hotel near a metro station, such as the Radisson Blu Slavyanskaya .

Apart from being just steps away from public transportation, this four-star accommodation also just steps away from some of the important local businesses and the country’s top attractions. You should try the thrill of walking along the exciting streets of Arbat, exploring the legendary Red Square, or seeing with your own eyes how amazing the Kremlin is.

Once done, head back to the hotel for an intimate dinner session at Talavera Restaurant. They serve up some of the best Italian dishes you can get in Moscow. If you prefer something more oriental, Japanese Sumosan is ready to pamper your palate with their brilliant sushi.

Even if you’re on vacation, you can maintain your fitness routine since the hotel provides an on-site fitness center, complete with aerobics classes and personal trainers! After all this intense workout, close your day with a therapy session at the great hotel Asia Spa. Overall, this is one of the best hotels in Moscow that’s worth considering. 

Izmailovo Beta Hotel

Become a part of Moscow’s history by staying at one of the highlights of the biggest event ever to be held in the Russian capital. Izmailovo Beta Hotel occupies a building designed by the architect Rabaev, which was built in 1980 for the 33rd Olympics. Today, it has turned into modern and multifunctional accommodation.

All guest rooms at Izmailovo Beta Hotel aren’t only spacious but also comfortable. You can choose between 975 different rooms, all offering a distinctive style but with an inviting aura. Enjoy great hours of local entertainment through the provided flat-screen TV. Get one of the best night’s rest in Moscow, as you lie on top of the soft beds. Find out everything you need on the Internet, as WiFi access is free in all areas, just like most of the best hotels in Moscow.

Thanks to its prime location, Izmailovo Beta Hotel has so much to offer in the vicinity. Lokomotiv Stadium, one of the capital’s largest sports arenas, is only 10 minutes’ drive away. Izmailovsky Park, the favorite relaxation spot for Muscovites and the largest in the city, can be found within a three-minute walk. Intrigued by the lively city center? Just take a 15-minute metro ride and you will arrive at your destination.

Ararat Park Hyatt Moscow (CU)

When it comes to the ultimate comfort and stay in Moscow, it doesn’t get any better than Ararat Park Hyatt Moscow . This five-star accommodation boasts more than 200 luxury rooms, all equipped with luxurious amenities. Get a good rest like no other, in gorgeous quarters thoughtfully designed by designer Tony Chi. If you need extra comfort, a suite type room that features a more spacious sitting area is highly recommended.

Being in the heart of Moscow, the Ararat Park Hyatt offers easy access to some of the city’s must-see sights. The Kremlin is just around the corner and the Bolshoi Theater, one of the capital’s historic performing halls, is just steps away. Meanwhile, a little over a mile from here’s Arbat Street, Moscow’s most famous street filled with shops, restaurants, and street performers.

After a busy day strolling around the city, relax your muscles and mind at the Quantum Spa & Health Club. Enjoy their remarkable massage service. If you think it’s too early to return to your room, head to the Conservatory Lounge & Bar on the 10th floor. Enjoy your favorite wine or cocktail, while admiring the magnificent panoramic views of the city on its incredible outdoor terrace. If you still haven’t chosen among the best hotels in Moscow Russia, this one is worth reckoning with.

Hyatt Regency Moscow Petrovsky Park (CU)

Here’s another excellent alternative to staying in Moscow. You know how much we love spending time in the spacious rooms and the Hyatt Regency Moscow Petrovsky Park has exactly that. The addition of panoramic windows makes everything feel lighter. The abundance of natural lighting really emphasizes the modern interiors and the great work of contemporary Russian artists decorating the rooms at this five-star accommodation. Apart from that, you’ll also get the usual basics like a work desk, private bathroom, TV, and minibar, just like most of the best hotels in Moscow.

As soon as the first light creeps across Moscow, head to the Regency Club Lounge on the 12th floor. Enjoy a hearty continental breakfast, while being accompanied by a gorgeous view of the capital from above. Stopping here around five to seven in the afternoon is also highly recommended, as they provide complimentary evening cocktails for all guests.

Once you’ve finished the fuel up, go outside and experience for yourself how great Russia’s largest city is. There are the legendary Kremlin and Red Square in less than four miles. For your shopping solution, Palladium Shopping Center is just less than a mile away. If you have a big passion for performing arts, be sure to stop by the Bolshoi Theater. Witness how graceful and superb the ballet performances of the famous Bolshoi Academy, which are so good they have a branch in Brazil!

Pentahotel Moscow, Arbat

You can find this four-star accommodation at The Book, one of the most unique architectural structures in the capital. Pentahotels Moscow, Arbat also sits right on Novy Arbat Avenue, a district known as one of the epicenters of the fashion scene in Russia’s largest metropolis. Discover the best of The Third Rome, as this hotel is within easy reach of some of the top attractions, including the Pushkin Museum, Saint Basil’s Cathedral, and the legendary Red Square.

As for accommodation Pentahotels offers more than 200 guest rooms to choose from, scattered across six floors with gorgeous views of Moscow from a height. All feature a lounge-style design that creates a relaxed atmosphere. You’ll get day-to-day basics such as air conditioning, flat-screen TV, and minibar. A private bathroom is also featured here. WiFi? No problem. Like all the best hotels in Moscow Russia, Pentahotels also provides high-speed wireless Internet access throughout the property.

Enjoy a complimentary breakfast in the lobby area every morning. For some light refreshment, head over to the bar. Make sure to maintain your exercise routine, since Pentahotels also provides a fully equipped on-site fitness center. In case you need something else, the hotel reception desk is at your service. Oh, and one more thing, guests will also have access to bicycle rental. If you want to try to experience the fun of traveling around the city like a local, this is highly recommended!

Moscow Marriott Grand Hotel (CU)

Embrace the vibrant Moscow vibe, as the Moscow Marriott Grand Hotel stands on the famous Tverskaya Street. Get one of the grandest stays in the capital, as this five-star accommodation occupies a magnificent building with glass domes and tranquil fountains. Once you step into their lobby, you’ll be greeted with high ceilings and glorious decorations, as if to signal that something special is waiting for you.

And sure enough, the guest rooms at the Moscow Marriott Grand Hotel are all well-appointed and feature a gorgeous view of the Russian metropolis from above. Enjoy some deluxe amenities, including plush bedding, flat-screen TV, minibar. Manage your itinerary smoothly, because just like most of the best hotels in Moscow, free WiFi is available throughout the property. All wrapped in carefully designed quarters in a remarkable Art Deco style.

Make sure to stay in shape in between busy activities while on vacation, as the Moscow Marriott features a state-of-the-art on-site fitness center. Need to entertain colleagues or meet friends? A lobby bar or hotel restaurant would be a great place. Meanwhile, for business travelers, there’s an event venue that’ll be an ideal place to organize meetings, training, and so on.

Discover the best of Moscow, as hotels are just steps away from the Kremlin and Red Square, two of the quintessential destinations of the Russian capital. Besides that, in less than a mile you can also find several hot spots such as the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, Satire Theater, and Lenkom Theater. Craving a more natural charm? Fewer than two miles here’s Moskva, a picturesque river that flows through the city and inspired the name Moscow.

Park Inn by Radisson Sadu

Park Inn by Radisson Sadu will be a great launchpad for first-time visitors to Moscow. This four-star accommodation sits in the heart of the capital, only a stone’s throw away from some of the notable landmarks. The Kremlin, the default symbol of the land of the Red Bear, can be found in less than a mile. Likewise with Red Square, which was once famous for its massive military parades. If you want to explore the city even further, take advantage of Moscow’s extensive metro system. Within 300 meters across the hotel is Polyanka Station and you should be able to reach the entire metropolis in a few tens of minutes from there.

Enjoy first-class service in more than 100 guest rooms provided by Park Inn by Radisson Sadu. All offer the utmost comfort with some thoughtful amenities, including complimentary bottled mineral water, satellite TV, and, like most of the best hotels in Moscow Russia, free WiFi access throughout the property.

For your culinary desires, Park Inn has the elegant SADU Cafe. This 24-hour on-site restaurant serves a wide range of classic dishes and delicious desserts. Need some light refreshment after a busy day? The Hotel Bar will be ready to greet you with their fabulous cocktails and drinks.

Discover how charming Russia’s largest metropolis is on Arbat Street. Moscow’s most famous street is a little over a mile from the hotel. There you have tons of interesting activities to do, enough to keep you busy for the week! Feel the delicious local cuisine at the cozy Varenichnaya cafe. Meet one of the street performers and have them draw a picture of you. And don’t forget to visit Alexander Pushkin’s famous memorial flat.

Novotel Moscow City

Business travelers will especially love staying at the Novotel Moscow City Hotel . Being the largest accommodation in the city’s famous business center, this four-star property would be a great hub for getting all the work done. Once that happens, you’ll be set for a great staycation. It’s because this hotel is set among the tallest skyscrapers in Europe. Have a memorable stay while enjoying the beautiful vista around. Enjoy some appreciable amenities, including a flat-screen TV, minibar, and a private bathroom with a hairdryer. Stay connected, as Novotel provides free WiFi, just like the best hotels in Moscow.

Discover one of the best shopping paradises in the Russian capital, since you only have to take a few steps to reach the six-floor shopping center Afimall. Want to get to know Moscow’s life and its people better? Have a great afternoon at the Krasnaya Presnya Park. It’s also one of the most beautiful and famous streets leading to the legendary Red Square. Football fans, don’t miss a visit to the Luzhniki Stadium which is just a little over two miles away. Marvel at an extraordinary sports arena that has hosted dozens of historic events, including the Champions League final.

After a busy day, indulging in the hotel’s spa center will be a great way to unwind. Enjoy the Turkish Bath, steam bath, sauna, and other excellent treatments for a little extra rest. It’s guaranteed to make you feel fantastic, ready for a great night’s rest!

Vega Izmailovo Hotel

If you’re comfortable with public transportation to get around while on vacation, staying near a metro station or bus stop would be a logical choice. In this case, we recommend the Vega Izmailovo Hotel . This four-star property just steps away from Partizanskaya metro station and Izmailovo MCC station. Within a few minutes, you should be able to find some of the capital’s most interesting parts.

As for the rooms, Vega Izmailovo offers spacious accommodation in a modern style. There’s a geometric-shaped mirror affixed to one of the wall surfaces, making the room look more spacious. The decor is dominated by red tone, believed to stimulate energy and passion, two things you’ll need for a great vacation. You’ll also find some of the usual knick-knacks, such as a flat-screen TV with satellite channels, air conditioning, and a private bathroom. Free WiFi is also featured here, as are most of the best hotels in Moscow Russia. Oh and there’s one more thing, each room here comes with sizeable windows that offer a scenic landscape of the city!

Just around the corner, about 15 minutes, is the famous Red Square. For those who like artwork, a little to the south is the Tretyakov Gallery. Visited by more than one million visitors per year, it’s an art gallery with the world’s leading collection of Russian fine art. This is definitely a must if you have a passion for painting and sculpture.

Crowne Plaza Moscow World Trade Center (CU)

Staying at the Crowne Plaza Moscow World Trade Center is like seeing a good doctor. They always have great recipes for everything you need! Having trouble sleeping after long, tiring hours in the airplane cabin? Relax, as they have the Sleep Advantage Program, which consists of an orthopedic bed, high-quality bedding, and a special spray to improve the quality of your rest. Worried about the safety of your private car? The hotel provides a complimentary parking service with a guard, available without advance booking!

Apart from that, this five-star hotel also has a prime location, just like most of the best hotels in Moscow. Sitting in Presnensky, Moscow’s financial district, the property is within easy reach of some of the capital’s cool spots. Red Square, the Kremlin, and the Bolshoi Theater, a must-have trio on any itinerary while at The Third Rome, can be found in a little over two miles. But if you want to know about famous people who have lived in the Russian metropolis, see some splendid monuments and admire the city’s greatest graffiti, we highly recommend taking the Private Arbat Street Tour in Moscow with All Museums . For no less than three hours, soak up the extraordinary atmosphere of the downtown streets of the capital.

Once you’ve finished, head back to the hotel for a moment to unwind at some of their remarkable leisure facilities. Take a dive in the indoor pool or relax a bit at Real Food Restaurants, which serves several European, local, and Chef specialties. After that make your way to the room, set individual climate controls to your liking, and you’re set for a quality night’s sleep.

Recommended Restaurants and Bars in Moscow: 

  • Delicatessen – Sample some of the most incredible burgers, pizzas, and pasta you’ve ever had. All thanks to the experimentation and innovation of the owner, who gathered a lot of taste knowledge from traveling around the world. Round off your visit with a fabulous drink, as this dining establishment also has a great selection of fruity liquors.
  • Lavka-Lavka – Local cuisines served in a distinctive style, all made from high-quality local ingredients. That’s what you’ll get when you visit this rustic-style dining place. Their lamb and chicken-based dishes are especially outstanding. For those who adore organic food, a visit here is a must.
  • Darbazi – Craving for kebabs and dumplings while in Moscow? This classy dining institution is the place to be. For us personally, the chakapuli , lamb cooked in white wine with tarragon, is the winner here. The megreli kharcho , duck in walnut sauce, is also not to be missed. Just make sure you book ahead, as this is one of the most popular Georgian restaurants in the capital.

Recommended Activities in Moscow: 

  • Moscow: Imperia Tower 56th Floor Visit & Museum – Marvel at Russia’s great metropolis from above the skyline. See the astonishing architecture of one of the capital’s most intricate skyscrapers. Learn all of its histories and discover why an area that was once a minor town, is now become a powerful city that continues to grow high.
  • Moscow Kremlin: Skip-the-Line Ticket and Introduction – Save your precious time while in Moscow. Skip the long lines to admire the capital’s most remarkable monument. Get a great 40-minute overview of why this architectural achievement has become so famous around the world.
  • Moscow: Private AK-47 Shooting Experience Tour – Get up close and personal with one of Russia’s most iconic and infamous exports. Shoot an original unit in Moscow’s largest shooting gallery. Get a once in a lifetime experience, accompanied by some great gunsmiths.

Author:  Emma Landa

I'm a traveler with a thirst for adventure and a passion for style. From the runways of Paris to the boutiques of Milan, I've traveled the world in search of the most glamorous and exclusive fashion experiences. I love nothing more than indulging in the latest designer collections and discovering hidden gems in the world of fashion. I've explored the streets of Tokyo, discovering unique and avant-garde styles that are pushing the boundaries of fashion. And in New York, I've attended the most exclusive fashion shows, rubbing shoulders with the industry's elite. But fashion isn't the only thing that I indulge in. I've also stayed in some of the most luxurious hotels and properties around the world. From the stunning resorts in Bali to the opulent villas in Tuscany, I know how to travel in style and comfort. Sharing my experiences and insights with others is something that I'm passionate about. Through my social media channels, I offer a glimpse into the world of luxury fashion and travel, inspiring others to explore the world of high-end fashion and indulge in the finer things in life. So, come along with me on my journey and let me show you the world of luxury fashion and travel like you've never seen it before!

best reviewed books 2022

New era begins at Moscow City Hall

Monday’s Moscow City Council meeting ushered in a new era as three new city councilmembers, a new city supervisor and new mayor were sworn into office.

Mayor Art Bettge took the oath of office, Julia Parker, Hailey Lewis and Gina Taruscio were sworn onto City Council and Bill Belknap took his position as the new city supervisor.

Much of the meeting was devoted to sharing kind words for outgoing mayor Bill Lambert, outgoing city supervisor Gary Riedner and outgoing city council member Brandy Sullivan.

Riedner is leaving after 26 years.

“Gary embodies the complex multifaceted character trait of understanding,” city attorney Mia Bautista said.

Deputy city supervisor Tyler Palmer said Riedner practiced “selfless service” and his work to oversee Moscow’s city services affected every citizen.

Deputy city supervisor Jen Pfiffner said Riedner has worked through every hard decision with an empathetic approach and is a “living example of ethical management.”

Riedner then took to the podium to share his brief remarks.

“I don’t know who you folks were describing tonight,” he joked. “He sounds like a heck of a guy.”

Riedner thanked city staff for doing their jobs with the “heart of a servant” and said he was grateful to work with the mayor, council and the community.

“The community means a lot to me,” he said.

As a parting gift, he was allowed to keep a wooden duck decoy that was part of Moscow’s public art collection and on Riedner’s wall since 2004.

As Lambert gave his final remarks, he thanked the 170 people who work for the city as well as the many who volunteer on the city’s commissions.

“That’s what makes our city great is the volunteerism,” he said.

He credited the council for being steadfast in their actions, including when it came to making decisions in response to COVID-19. He said they did what they thought was right for the community and did not let politics interfere with their decision making.

Lambert has served the city of Moscow for 21 years as a member of the planning and zoning commission, board of adjustment, city council and as mayor.

“I never took it for granted ever,” he said.

As Parker, Lewis and Taruscio were sworn in, it began what is likely the first term in Moscow’s history with a council of all women.

Sullivan chose not to run for re-election this year and former council member Bettge now takes his post as mayor.

Sullivan thanked residents for being involved in city government by attending meetings and joining commissions. She credited the council for being respectful of each other and approaching issues with an open mind.

“You all play a big part in why this has been a positive experience for me,” she said.

Home to ‘The Best Care in Washington'

Matt Durham sees himself as lucky.

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