best new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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.

best new books of 2022

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.

best new books of 2022

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

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These are the 12 most anticipated books of 2022, according to Goodreads members

best new books of 2022

Maybe your New Year's resolution is to go on more walks or eat healthier foods — or maybe it's as simple as reading more. Since you've got the next 12 months ahead of you, you might find a few good recommendations to be helpful when it comes to adding to your reading list .

So, we tapped Goodreads to see what new titles everyone wants to get their hands on this year. Goodreads found 12 books set to release this year that its members (more than 125 million of them) can't wait for. These new releases sit atop members' "want-to-read" shelves.

While not all of these books are available right now — most of them are available for pre-order until their expected release date, so you can have your monthly read planned ahead of time.

From mystery novels to romance reads, these are the most anticipated books of 2022, according to Goodreads members.

What to read in 2022

"to paradise," by hanya yanagihara.

"To Paradise"

"To Paradise"

This book starts out in an alternate version of America in 1893, but by the time you've reached the end, it has spanned three centuries. As you read, you'll find that each of the characters in each of the three different Americas in this book, despite living different lives, is united by the same things that have tested them. You'll find similar themes of love, wealth, family and paradise. This pick hits shelves on Jan. 11.

"Violeta," by Isabel Allende

"Violeta"

"Violeta"

New York Times-bestselling author Isabel Allende's newest novel is set to release on Jan. 25. It centers around Violeta, the first girl in a family of five boys, whose life is marked by "extraordinary events" such as the Spanish flu and the Great Depression. It is written in the form of letters to someone she loves, an inspiring and emotional detailed account of her life, and the joys and losses she has experienced.

"Black Cake," by Charmaine Wilkerson

"Black Cake," by Charmaine Wilkerson

"Black Cake"

Byron and Benny are left with a lot of questions after the death of their mother, Eleanor Bennett. Mainly, questions about the inheritance she left behind: a traditional Caribbean black cake. She also leaves them with a voice message that tells the story of her life in pieces — and they're left to put them together and share the cake "when the time is right." You can read this book on Feb. 1.

"The Paris Apartment," by Lucy Foley

"The Paris Apartment"

"The Paris Apartment"

New York Times-bestselling author Lucy Foley's new novel will debut on Feb. 22. It tells the story of Jess, who needs a fresh start and leans on her half-brother, Ben, who lives in Paris, for a place to stay. When she arrives at his apartment, however, he's not there. Although she comes to the city of lights to escape the past that has been plaguing her, she finds herself digging into Ben's future.

"Young Mungo," by Douglas Stuart

"Young Mungo"

"Young Mungo"

Douglas Stuart's " Shuggie Bain " won the 2020 Booker Prize. Stuart's next novel, "Young Mungo," is the love story of Mungo and James — a Protestant and Catholic, respectively. The hyper-masculine environment around them forces them to hide their true selves, and they eventually find themselves apart. They'll have to do everything they can to find their way together again. It will release on April 5.

"The Candy House," by Jennifer Egan

"The Candy House"

"The Candy House"

Bix Bouton is 40, the successful head of a tech company, the father of four kids and hungry for new ideas. After he stumbles into a conversation group, he gets his big new idea: “Own Your Unconscious.” With this technology, you can access every memory you've ever had — and exchange them for the memories of others. Centering around characters whose lives have all intersected at one point, this story tells the tale of love, human connection and privacy. You can find this book on shelves on April 5.

"Memphis," by Tara M. Stringfellow

"Memphis"

"Memphis"

After Joan discovers she has the power to change her family's legacy, she finds a way to heal with all of the trauma that they have been through — with her paintbrush. Her art becomes a way for her to understand the sacrifices those who came before her made. The story itself spans 70 years, touching upon the generational experiences and the complexities of life that we face both as individuals and as a country. This title will officially be released on April 5.

"Sea of Tranquility," by Emily St. John Mandel

"Sea of Tranquility"

"Sea of Tranquility"

In the latest from the author of " Station Eleven ," Edwin St. Andrew has crossed the Atlantic at just 18 years old and finds himself entering a forest when he reaches land. He hears a violin echoing in an airship terminal and is spooked. Two centuries later, a writer features a passage in a book that seems a little too familiar: A man plays his violin in an airship terminal as a forest rises around him. A detective is later hired to unearth the story of this occurrence, and what he finds is nothing short of extraordinary. It will be released on April 5.

"Book Lovers," by Emily Henry

"Book Lovers," by Emily Henry

"Book Lovers"

Another read from New York Times-bestselling author Emily Henry, "Book Lovers" centers around bookworm Nora Stephens and editor Charlie Lastra, who've met on more than one occasion (and it's never gone well). While they keep bumping into each other in the small town of Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, where Nora has escaped to for the summer, they can't help but wonder if it keeps happening for a reason. "Book Lovers" will be available on May 3.

"South to America," by Imani Perry

"South to America"

"South to America"

Imani Perry's book is built on the idea that the history of America is more linked to the South than you think and that if you want to understand the country as a whole, you might want to start by understanding this region. In this story, a native Alabaman returns home and looks at her state with fresh eyes — and learns about the stories and experiences of others she's met along the way. By weaving these stories together, Perry has crafted a book that takes you not only below the Mason-Dixon line but also through the country as a whole. It will be available starting Jan. 25.

"The It Girl," by Ruth Ware

"The It Girl"

"The It Girl"

New York Times-bestselling author Ruth Ware is back with a mystery about one woman's search to find answers about her friend's murder. The convicted killer might be innocent — and now Hannah must search for the truth all over again, which might hit closer to home than she expects. You can start reading this pick on July 12.

For more stories like this, check out:

  • Want to read more in 2022? Here are 4 books to get you started
  • Jenna Bush Hager picks 'captivating' dystopian drama for January 2022
  • 5 books to read after 'Bright Burning Things' by Lisa Harding

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best new books of 2022

Jillian Ortiz is a Production Associate at Shop TODAY. 

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.

preview for Good Housekeeping US Section: Life

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The best books of 2022

From Hanya Yanagihara’s epic novel to a brilliant memoir by Bono … Guardian critics pick the year’s best fiction, politics, science, children’s books and more. Tell us about your favourite books in the comments

Three book jackets - Bournville by Jonathan Coe, I’m Sorry You Feel That Way by Rebecca Wait and The Trees by Percival Everett - and an illustration of a bird shaped bauble

Hanya Yanagihara’s follow-up to A Little Life, Percival Everett’s biting satire and Ali Smith’s playful take on lockdown – Justine Jordan reflects on a year in fiction. Read all fiction

Children’s books

Three book jackets - Dogs of the Deadlandsby Anthony McGowan, Creature by Shaun Tan and Britannia’s Baby Encyclopedia - and an illustration of a woman listening to music.

Imogen Russell Williams picks the best titles for children and teenagers, from a spooky tale by Philip Pullman to the long-awaited new novel from SF Said – plus books for young readers by Oliver Jeffers and Maggie O’Farrell. Read all children’s books

Crime and thrillers

Three book jackets - More Than You’ll Ever Know by Kate Gutierrez, The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett and Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister - and an illustration of two baubles.

Cosy crime from Ajay Chowdhury, a new Rebus novel and a handful of excellent debuts – Laura Wilson rounds up the best page-turners. Read all crime and thrillers

Science fiction and fantasy

Three book jackets - Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel and Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles - and an illustration of a bauble.

A verse novel written in Orcadian Scots, a unique UFO story and a distinctive time-travel tale from the author of Station Eleven – Adam Roberts selects five of the best science fiction and fantasy books. Read all science fiction and fantasy

Biography and memoir

Three book jackets - Sins of my Father by Lily Dunn, The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama and Managing Expectations by Minnie Driver - and an illustration of a bearded man with headphones on carrying a book.

Fiona Sturges chooses the best memoirs, from Alan Rickman’s posthumous diaries to Michelle Obama’s follow-up to Becoming, as well as compelling biographies of Agatha Christie and John Donne. Read all biography and memoir

History and politics

Three book jackets - Uncommon Wealth by Kojo Koram, How to Stand up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa and The Curtain and the Wall by Timothy Phillips - and an illustration of a bespectacled man reading a book.

Reflections on the British empire, urgent stories of deadly migrant routes and a Nobel peace prize-winner’s thoughts on the future of democracy – Alex von Tunzelmann ’s choice of books about our past and present. Read all history and politics

Three book jackets - A New Formation by Calum Jacobs, Being Geoffrey Boycott by Geoffrey Boycott and Jon Hotten and God Is Dead by Andy McGrath - and an illustration of a bauble.

Jonathan Liew picks five of the year’s best books about sport, including a thought-provoking history of Black footballers and a fascinating biography of Geoffrey Boycott. Read all sport

Three book jackets - The Metaverse by Matthew Ball, The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris and Elusive by Frank Close - and an illustration of a man in a festive jumper carrying books.

With subjects ranging from the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic to the potential of digital virtual worlds, Alok Jha selects the year’s top science books. Read all science

Three book jackets - The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang, Unexhausted Time by Emily Berry and Home is not a Place by Roger Robinson and Johny Pitts-  and an illustration of a woman holding one book under her arm and another one held out with her other arm.

Black and queer communities are centred in much of this year’s poetry, including Joelle Taylor’s account of butch lesbian counterculture and Warsan Shire’s captivating take on home and identity – Rishi Dastidar chooses the best collections. Read all poetry

Graphic novels

Three book jackets - The Joy of Quitting by Keiler Roberts, Oxygen Mask by Jason Reynolds and Jason Griffin and Days of Sand by Aimée de Jongh - and an illustration of a man holding a gift box and a book.

James Smart picks out the finest comics and graphic books, from thoughtful memoirs to vividly illustrated fiction. Read all graphic novels

Three book jackets - Denim and Leather by Michael Han, In Perfect Harmony by Will Hodgkinson and The Come Up by Jonathan Abrams - and an illustration of a woman holding a gift box.

Bono’s autobiography, oral histories of hip-hop and heavy metal and a smart reflection on Black women in pop – Alexis Petridis ’s pick of books about music and musicians. Read all music

Three book jackets - Modern Pressure Cooking by Catherine Phipps, West Winds by Riaz Phillips and India Express by Rukmini Iyer - and an illustration of a bauble.

Rachel Roddy on the best food books of the year, from stories of growing up in a Chinese takeaway to pressure cooker recipes and a guide to snacking. Read all food

To browse all of the Guardian’s best books of 2022 visit guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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2022 Book Releases to Get Excited About

Expect highly-anticipated titles from Emma Straub, Akwaeke Emezi, Rebecca Serle, and more!

best books 2022

If you've finally completed your  2021 TBR pile , prepare yourself for 2022's stacked lineup of new releases. Expect an incredible mix of fiction including Rebecca Serle's  One Italian Summer  and Kai Harris's  What the Fireflies Knew   (one of the first titles from Phoebe Robinson's  new imprint ), as well as powerful memoirs like Viola Davis's  Finding Me . Excited yet? Find our running list of the most anticipated books of 2022 to pre-order now, ahead.

'Fiona and Jane' by Jean Chen Ho

If you're looking for a book about female friendship, look no further than Jean Chen Ho's 'Fiona and Jane,' which details the complex relationship between two Taiwanese American women over the course of 20 years.

Available January 4, 2022

'The Perfect Escape' by Leah Konen

Loved Leah Konen's ' All the Broken People ?' Prepare yourself for her newest thriller, 'The Perfect Escape,' about a group of friends whose girls' weekend goes wrong when they get stranded in the Catskills and one of them goes missing. 

'You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays' by Zora Neale Hurston

In Zora Neale Hurston's 'You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays,' readers will experience the revolutionary writer's work spanning three decades.

'Weather Girl' by Rachel Lynn Solomon

What's not to love about a TV meteorologist and a sports journalist who scheme to reunite their divorced bosses and may or may not catch feelings for each other along the way?

Available January 11, 2022

'Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?' by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

Lizzie Damilola Blackburn's debut novel is incredibly relatable for anybody whose family members frequently question their relationship status. In 'Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?' a thirty-something Nigerian woman attempts to find herself a wedding date and learns some valuable lessons about life and love.

Available January 18, 2022

'Greenwich Park' by Katherine Faulkner

Talk about suspense! Katherine Faulkner's 'Greenwich Park,' told from three perspectives,   centers on a pregnant woman who meets another mom-to-be who couldn't be more different from her. As their friendship develops, they realize they may be more connected than they think. 

Available January 25, 2022

'Notes on an Execution' by Danya Kukafka

Danya Kukafka's 'Notes on an Execution' isn't like the other books about serial killers you've read—this brilliant thriller takes readers inside the life of Ansel Packer, who's scheduled to die in 12 hours, through the perspectives of three women: his mother, his sister, and a homicide detective. 

Available January 25, 2022

'Violeta' by Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende's expansive collection of work continues with 'Violeta'—the story of a woman named Violeta Del Valle who gives readers a front-row seat to historic moments of the 20th century, from the Spanish flu to the Great Depression to the women's rights movement, as she recounts the highs and lows of her 100-year life in a series of letters to her grandson. 

'Black Cake' by Charmaine Wilkerson

Soon to be a  Hulu series , Charmaine Wilkerson's 'Black Cake'   is about two estranged siblings who reunite when their mother passes away. While confronting their mom's past, they must learn how to put aside their differences to honor their mother's wishes.   

Available February 1, 2022

'What the Fireflies Knew' by Kai Harris

Kai Harris's 'What the Fireflies Knew'   is a coming-of-age novel told from the perspective of an 11-year-old who, along with her sister, goes to live with her estranged grandfather after the death of her father and disappearance of her mother.

Available February 1, 2022

'The Paris Apartment' by Lucy Foley

If you enjoyed  ' The Guest List ', get ready for Lucy Foley's newest mystery, 'The Paris Apartment ,'  about a girl named Jess who discovers her half-brother Ben is missing when she goes to visit him in Paris.

Available February 22, 2022

'The Love of My Life' by Rosie Walsh

What do you do when you find out everything your wife ever told you about herself is a lie? Allow Rosie Walsh's love story slash mystery, 'The Love of My Life,' to explain. 

Available March 1, 2022

'One Italian Summer' by Rebecca Serle

Following the release of her 'New York Times' bestselling book, ' In Five Years ', Rebecca Serle returns with 'One Italian Summer .'  When Katy's mother dies before their special mother-daughter trip to Positano, she's forced to go on the trip alone. While she's there, her mom appears as a 30-year-old and she gets to know her as a young woman before she became her mother.

'All My Rage' by Sabaa Tahir

Inspired by Sabaa Tahir's childhood growing up in California’s Mojave Desert at her family’s 18-room motel, 'All My Rage' tells the story of a family across generations dealing with love, loss, and friendship. 

'Hook, Line, and Sinker' by Tessa Bailey

Tessa Bailey's highly-anticipated second novel in the Bellinger Sisters series centers on fisherman Fox Thornton and his best friend-slash-crush, Hannah, who seeks Fox's help with her love life as she crushes on a coworker. Little does he know, he may be the one she wants after all. 

'Truth and Other Lies' by Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith's debut novel  ' Truth and Other Lies'   is about a young former reporter who clashes with her politically conservative mother who's running for Congress. After the former reporter lands an opportunity to work for an iconic journalist on her PR team, a scandal threatens her work, family, and relationships. 

Available March 8, 2022

'Girls Can Kiss Now' by Jill Gutowitz

Through a hilarious collection of essays, Jill Gutowitz explores how pop culture has shaped society's perception of lesbianism, how it's impacted her own life, and, ultimately, what we can expect from a very queer future that's in store for us. You can read more about the inspiration behind her debut book here .

'In the Margins' by Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante fans will be thrilled to learn that the acclaimed Italian novelist has given readers a deep dive into her process as a brilliant reader and a writer. This is one that will stay on your bookshelf for years.

Available March 15, 2022

'Memphis' by Tara M. Stringfellow

Tara M. Stringfellow's debut novel, 'Memphis,' takes readers inside the lives of three generations of a Southern Black family, exploring the complexities that live on within them—and around them. 

Available April 5, 2022

'The Wedding Crasher' by Mia Sosa

What happens when you end up helping your wedding planner cousin for one of her clients' big day and realize the groom is making a terrible mistake? You crash the wedding, of course! (...And may or may not have the groom unexpectedly fall in love with you somewhere along the way.) 

'Portrait of a Thief' by Grace D. Li

The second book from Phoebe Robinson's Tiny Reparations imprint, Grace D. Li's 'Portrait of a Thief' centers on five Chinese American students who steal back stolen Chinese art. If they succeed, they earn $50 million and a chance at making history. If not, things become a tad more complicated.

'Time Is a Mother' by Ocean Vuong

In award-winning writer Ocean Vuong's second poetry collection, 'Time Is a Mother,' Vuong grapples with grief, loss, and survival after the death of his mother.

'The Memory Librarian' by Janelle Monáe

Get an extensive look into the world of Janelle Monáe's third studio album, 'Dirty Computer' (2018), as the artist compiles stories of history, identity, expression, and love. 

Available April 19, 2022

'Finding Me' by Viola Davis

Viola Davis's highly-anticipated memoir will tell the award-winning actress' life story in her own words. "I believe that our stories, and the courage to share them, is the most powerful empathetic tool we have," she said in a statement, per the  Associated Press . "This is my story...straight, no chaser."

Available April 26, 2022

'Book Lovers' by Emily Henry

If you've read Emily Henry's 'Beach Read' and 'People We Meet on Vacation,' you'll enjoy her latest, 'Book Lovers.' This one is about a literary agent who goes on vacation with her little sister and ends up running into a well-known editor...who's the last person she'd expect to see. 

Available May 3, 2022

'I Kissed Shara Wheeler' by Casey McQuiston

Casey McQuiston, 'New York Times' bestselling author of 'One Last Stop' and 'Red, White & Royal Blue' returns with 'I Kissed Shara Wheeler.' The YA rom-com is about valedictorian Chloe Green who—you guessed it!—ends up kissing Shara Wheeler, the prom queen, before graduation. The twist? Shara disappears and Chloe ends up discovering a bunch of secrets about Shara and the town they live in.

'We Do What We Do in the Dark' by Michelle Hart

Michelle Hart's electric debut centers on Mallory, a freshman in college, who begins a secret relationship with another woman after the death of her mother. Years later, Mallory must confront how the affair shaped her into the woman she is today. 

'The Summer Place' by Jennifer Weiner

It wouldn't be summer without a fabulous new Jennifer Weiner book. A love letter to the Outer Cape, 'The Summer Place' is set at the Levy family summer home that matriarch Veronica Levy hoped would be utilized by her family for generations. Instead, her children have been preoccupied with their own lives every summer. When Veronica's step-granddaughter, Ruby, gets engaged to her pandemic boyfriend, she figures the summer home is the perfect place to host the wedding for one last family gathering before she says goodbye to it. As the wedding approaches, nothing seems to go as planned.

Available May 10, 2022

'This Time Tomorrow' by Emma Straub

A moving story about a father-daughter relationship, Emma Straub's 'This Time Tomorrow' chronicles what happens when one 40-year-old woman wakes up and is suddenly 16 years old again. But it's not her youth she's riveted by—it's her father's.

Available May 17, 2022

'Something Wilder' by Christina Lauren

Christina Lauren returns with their latest—'Something Wilder'—about second chances and complicated relationships. The daughter of a famous treasure hunter, Lily uses her father's maps to guide tourists on fake treasure hunts in Utah. When her ex, Leo, and his friends unexpectedly show up, they wonder if the treasure hunts might not be so fake after all. And maybe, just maybe, Lily and Leo can pick up where they left off. 

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

Akwaeke Emezi's 'You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty' is a deeply heartfelt romance novel about a woman named Feyi who eases back into the dating scene after an accident killed the love of her life five years prior. It's already being  adapted into a movie !

"After spending most of my teenage years buried in romance novels, I always wanted to write one myself," Emezi told ' Entertainment Weekly .' "'You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty' [is] a love letter to the brave choices we make in the name of love, the costs we pay for it, and the glory of the reward at the end."

Available May 24, 2022 

'Our Last Days in Barcelona' by Chanel Cleeton

Told through stories of the fictional Perez family with alternating timelines and perspectives, 'New York Times' bestselling author Chanel Cleeton's 'Our Last Days in Barcelona' explores Cuba’s involvement in the Spanish Revolution of 1936.

Available May 24, 2022

'The Counselors' by Jessica Goodman

If you loved Jessica Goodman's 'They’ll Never Catch Us' and 'They Wish They Were Us,' Goodman's third book, 'The Counselors,' is just as twisty. The novel centers on Goldie Easton, a former-camper-turned-counselor at Camp Alpine Lake, who has a dark secret she's been hiding. The truth starts to unravel when a camper turns up dead in the lake one night and, well, we won't tell you what happens next.

Available May 31, 2022

'Meant to Be Mine' by Hannah Orenstein

What happens when the perfect person comes with not-so-perfect timing? Hannah Orenstein explores this in her latest novel, 'Meant to Be Mine,' after main character Edie's Grandma Gloria predicts when she meets her match and things don't exactly go as planned. 

Available June 7, 2022

'Mika in Real Life' by Emiko Jean

When Mika receives a call from her daughter she put up for adoption 16 years ago, she does everything she can to portray a "perfect picture" of her not-so-perfect life. After a white lie quickly snowballs into something bigger, she must decide whether or not to tell the truth and risk what she's built with her daughter or continue to live an illusion. 

Available August 9, 2022

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Rachel Epstein is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in New York City. Most recently, she was the Managing Editor at Coveteur, where she oversaw the site’s day-to-day editorial operations. Previously, she was an editor at Marie Claire , where she wrote and edited culture, politics, and lifestyle stories ranging from op-eds to profiles to ambitious packages. She also launched and managed the site’s virtual book club, #ReadWithMC. Offline, she’s likely watching a Heat game or finding a new coffee shop. 

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best new books of 2022

The Best Books of 2022

If you want to read about spaceships, talking pigs, or supervillains, you’ve come to the right place.

best books

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

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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The Best, Buzziest New Books of 2022

Celebrity memoirs, page-turning fantasy novels, romantic reads, and more.

a collage of new books released in 2022 in a roundup of the best new books 2022 – 35 best and buzziest new books

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2022's best novels, biographies, and memoirs weren’t limited to a single genre or literary clique. When we wanted to get swept away, swoony-worthy and romantic books were in ample supply. The best beach reads brought some jet-setting vibes (whether we could actually take time off or not). Fans of Hanya Yanagihara, Jennifer Egan, and Elif Batuman were all treated to new releases; literary debuts by Sarah Thakam Mathews and Xochitl Gonzalez captured our imaginations and made us eager for the stories they’ll tell next.

There’s still time left to update your reading list for the remainder of the year. In no particular order, we’ve gathered the 35 best new books of 2022 ahead—some already released, others coming soon. Find a comfortable chair and crack one open.

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

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Sneha has just graduated from college and is taking her first shaky steps into adult life with an entry-level gig in Milwaukee, MI. Against a backdrop of the 2012 recession and her parents’ deportation to India, Sneha’s equally vulnerable and cutting narration of new friendships, new romances, and generally figuring it out captures the queer, immigrant experience unlike any other.

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

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Four teens overlooked and abandoned by the foster care system. One dilapidated apartment building, otherwise known as the Rabbit Hutch, on the edge of Vacca Vale, Indiana. One week where Blandine, a member of the aforementioned quartet, seeks a reprieve from the systems that harmed her, and her search escalates to a harrowing conclusion.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

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After years apart, Sam Masur spots Sadie Green—a childhood friend turned nemesis, then stranger—at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, subway station. A brief conversation spawns what becomes the reunion and working relationship of a lifetime, in the cutthroat, ever-changing world of video game design. You don’t have to be a gamer to appreciate the pulsing heart of this best-seller: In a story spanning three decades and references from Oregon Trail to Macbeth , Gabrielle Zevlin has written a modern, definitive story about work, love, and friends for whom you’d do and risk everything.

Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley

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Running into an ex once without warning is disorienting. Running into two, or three, or more exes in a row without warning is a touch more sinister than fate, at least in the version of New York City Sloane Crosley creates for her dark and hilarious second novel. For Lola, the narrator of Cult Classic , frequent brushes with her romantic past spiral into a satirical examination of love, wellness culture, and modern surveillance that's impossible to put down.

The Furrows by Namwali Serpell

the cover of the furrows by namwali serpell in a roundup of the best new books of 2022

The Furrows tells you upfront that it is an elegy, a lament for someone who has died. The person lost is Wayne, a seven-year-old boy; the person remembering is Cassandra, his twelve-year-old sister. But as Cassandra grows up and continues mourning Wayne's untimely passing, she meets another Wayne—one who casts her understanding of mourning into a new light.

Velorio by Xavier Navarro Aquino

best books 2022

Set in the wake of Hurricane Maria, the deadly storm that devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, Velorio follows Camila, a survivor of the disaster whose grief leads her to a rural cult called Memoria. But Urayoán, the idealistic leader of Memoria, has demons of his own.

Dead End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto

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Nineteen years have passed between Dead-End Memories' original publication in Japan in 2003 and its arrival in the United States in 2022. The translation of this volume from Japanese into English was well worth the wait. Yoshimoto offers five stories that read like tiny miracles, facilitated by Asa Yoneda's thoughtful translation. Even when Yoshimoto's characters face tragedy or due reason for hopelessness, they quietly find a path toward hope.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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Sea of Tranquility traverses distances that feel galaxies apart, from the Canadian wilderness of 1912 to an ill-fated book tour in 2203 to a mysterious "Night City," one of three colonies on the Moon, in 2401. Solving the puzzle of how these three settings and their protagonists connect is a journey that's as poetic as it is heart-pounding. Readers who loved St. John Mandel's previous novels won't be disappointed by this masterpiece of speculative science fiction.

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

best books 2022

This buzzy debut (there's already an adaptation for Hulu, starring Aubrey Plaza, in the works) centers on the Acevedo family: Olga is a Nuyorican wedding planner to the stars, and her brother, Prieto, is a congressman representing their rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. When the militant radical mother who abandoned them crashes back into their lives, all three must confront the secrets and resentments lurking behind their family’s shiny public facade.

A Hundred Other Girls by Iman Hariri-Kia

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A Hundred Other Girls asks the age-old striver question—what would you really do to secure your dream job?—with fresh, often funny twists. As Noora ascends from part-time blogger, part-time tutor to assistant to the editor-in-chief at her favorite magazine, Vinyl, she lands on the answer she least expected. The titular Devil Wears Prada reference isn't the only homage fashion obsessives and media followers will love in in this breezy career novel.

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

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Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Strout’s third novel starring Lucy Barton, due in September 2022, will strike a chord with any reader reflecting on life in a post-pandemic world. Lucy by the Sea opens at the onset of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak, when lockdowns irreversibly changed, well, everything. The same happens in this fictional rumination on loss, illness, and resilience, as Barton and her ex-husband William depart New York City to quarantine in Crosby, Maine. Confined to an oceanside cottage and adjusting to the so-called new normal, Lucy Barton’s return in Strout’s contemplative prose echoes the feelings we’ve had or seen since everything turned upside-down—and reminds us we’re never truly alone.

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

best books 2022

If A Little Life emotionally wrecked you sometime in the last six years, get ready for round two, because Hanya Yanagihara’s latest epic is gunning to make you weep. A 720-page tome spanning three New York City–set stories over three centuries, To Paradise is an incisive look at love, loss, and the consequences of the American experiment.

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

best books 2022

This riveting behind-the-scenes story of the clothes on our backs is a must-read for clotheshorses everywhere. Remember that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly details the industry’s worth of labor that went into Andy Sachs’s bargain-bin sweater? Add in some climate journalism, a deep dive into modern history, and a crash course on workers’ rights, and you’ve got this book in a nutshell.

You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston

best books 2022

Unappreciated by the masses until long after her death, Zora Neale Hurston was an unparalleled storyteller and one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Whether you’re new to her writing or a longtime devotee, don't miss this new collection spanning more than 35 years of her nonfiction work—including some previously unpublished pieces.

The Verifiers by Jane Pek

best books 2022

What kind of person would want to work at an online dating detective agency: a hopeless romantic, or a consummate cynic? Twenty-five-year-old Claudia Lin, the protagonist of this funny and touching modern detective story, is a little bit of both. (Her traditional Chinese mother thinks she works at a finance firm—and, uh, is straight—but that’s a problem for another day.) When one of her agency’s clients turns up dead, Claudia takes it upon herself to investigate, but quickly gets in over her head.

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

jennette mccudy on the cover of her book

The dark side of childhood stardom is the only side in Jennette McCurdy’s talked-about memoir. McCurdy recounts the lead-up to landing roles on Nickelodeon , and all that came after, without holding back how her now-deceased mother’s mistreatment and abuse shaped every moment.

The World Cannot Give by Tara Isabella Burton

best books 2022

Described as The Girls meets Fight Club , this new novel from the author of Social Creature plunges readers into a vortex of dark academia and queer desire. Soon after arriving at a Christian boarding school in Maine, Laura finds a sense of belonging in the school’s intensely insular chapel choir—and falls deep under the thrall of its obsessive, charismatic student leader, Virginia.

Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde

best books 2022

The many characters who populate Eloghosa Osunde’s debut novel are vagabonds in the truest sense of the word: queer, impoverished, nonconforming—those who exist at the fringes of society. Out in the streets of Lagos, they fight to make their way in the world, sometimes at odds with one another and on other occasions coming to each other’s rescue. Together, they add up to a novel as vivid and varied as the city itself.

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

best books 2022

Lydia is a mixed-race vampire squatting in a London artists’ studio. Away from her vampire mother for the first time, she’s scrambling to source fresh pigs’ blood—her best option to avoid preying on her new human artist friends—all while longing to taste vegetables, ramen, and all the other people food she can’t digest. In short, Lydia isn’t just searching for something to eat; she’s also looking for a way to reconcile her demon and human sides, her half-Japanese heritage, and her relationship to food itself.

Girls Can Kiss Now by Jill Gutowitz

best books 2022

Humorist and Twitter sage Jill Gutowitz’s debut essay collection is a laugh-out-loud look at the mainstreaming of queer culture. Tackling important topics such as Lindsay Lohan’s relationship with Samantha Ronson, the omnipresence of oat milk, and the enduring lesbian appeal of Taylor Swift, Gutowitz’s book is perhaps the definitive authority on what it means to be gay and a little too online.

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Keely Weiss is a writer and filmmaker. She has lived in Los Angeles, New York, and Virginia and has a cat named after Perry Mason.

Halie LeSavage is the fashion commerce editor at Harper's BAZAAR . Her style reporting covers everything from reviewing the best designer products to profiling emerging brands and designers. Previously, she was the founding retail writer at Morning Brew and a fashion associate at Glamour .

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The 20 best books of 2022, according to our critics

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Ask four critics to name their favorite books of any year and you’ll get an array of singular narratives. But if any theme emerged among our top 20 books of 2022, it was the individual struggle to shape the future in a range of hostile words: the harsh dystopias crafted by Celeste Ng and Sequoia Nagamatsu; the vicious liars who questioned Sandy Hook; the British colonizers Samuel Adams outwitted and the American colonizers bested by the great Native athlete Jim Thorpe. These are stories told brilliantly — substance meeting its match in style — in which reality might be inescapable, but hope is unkillable.

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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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 best new books of 2022 so far

best new books of 2022

Summer reading season is well underway, and the publishing industry typically saves the most anticipated releases of the year for fall. But there have been plenty of bestsellers and must-reads already released in fiction and nonfiction this year.

“Juicy, compelling stories of love and relationships are all the rage right now. We think of them as rom-coms with unique twists,” says Al Woodworth, senior editor of Amazon Books, where she is part of the Amazon Books editorial team that compiles the retail giant’s own Best Books of the Month and Best Books of the Year lists. “There’s so much going on in the world right now that’s challenging; these books are heartfelt, genuine, and about people striving for their hopes and dreams. You know that when you pass them on to a friend, they’re going to love it.”

Woodworth cites popular novelists Colleen Hoover, Taylor Jenkins Reid, and Emily Henry—all of whom have new releases this year—as “having a moment” in this waning time of the pandemic when most people are going out again, but maybe their pandemic-induced reading habits are holding steady.

“I think people are always looking for good stories, and this won’t change,” says Sarah Gelman, editorial director of Amazon Books, where she oversees the Amazon Books editorial team and recently launched her own book club on Amazon called Sarah Selects . “During the pandemic, we saw readers getting excited about books that were adapted for the screen, and this trend has continued with recent adaptations such as  Conversations With Friends  by Sally Rooney or  Station Eleven  by Emily St. John Mandel.”

From a nonfiction perspective, Woodworth notes, “so many readers are looking to understand this pandemic moment, with books like Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma , which has been on the Amazon Charts bestseller list for 81 weeks (which was first published in 2014).”

Here are some of the best books already published in 2022 to date, as read and nominated by the staff of  Fortune,  in no particular order.

best new books of 2022

Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay by Mollie West Duffy and Liz Fosslien

This isn’t any ordinary self-help book. This book epitomizes when a book feels like a friend who truly understands you. Following up the droll but sincere workplace guide No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work , Big Feelings is the appropriate mid-pandemic sequel. Addressing feelings we don’t often like to talk about—let alone share in the social media age when everyone puts their “best” selves only on Instagram—authors Mollie West Duffy and Liz Fosslien fully explore grief, despair, and resentment, and how even these dark feelings can be productive. (Productive doesn’t always have to mean work output; it can also just be about getting to a better state with your mental health. The writers fully admit the irony of writing a book essentially about burnout while suffering burnout themselves.) — Rachel King, editor

best new books of 2022

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

At the heart of this engrossing multigenerational family drama is the person who so often holds everything together: the matriarch. And her adult children’s issues are palpable from page one as the siblings reunite in person for the first time in eight years since the sister (Benny) departed after feeling rejected by her family’s reaction to her coming out, which is given greater attention and nuance throughout the book. But their mother’s will-reading is eye-opening, as it is for any child who knows little to nothing about their parents’ lives before they were born. Eleanor, their mother, leaves behind an eight-hour recording, revealing a life and immigration journey from the Caribbean in the 1960s to the U.K. to the U.S., involving numerous personal traumas and secrets (including parental abandonment, false identities, and accusations of murder). Eleanor also leaves behind a frozen black cake, a traditional rum-soaked dessert made from a treasured family recipe, which she used to bake for her children. Yes, how the cake is made is explained repeatedly throughout the book (and Wilkerson’s brilliant descriptions are positively sumptuous for the mind’s eye), but it’s also an allegory for life, love, and tribulations. — R.K.

best new books of 2022

The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung

There is probably no one book that can explain all of Hong Kong’s complexity, but Karen Cheung comes pretty close. The Impossible City tells Cheung’s story as she grows up, goes to school, and becomes a writer and journalist—and in doing so, paints a picture of the city that goes deeper than the headlines. The Impossible City is a must-read for those who want to know what makes the city so interesting, so complicated—and so misunderstood. — Nicholas Gordon, associate editor

best new books of 2022

There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price by Jessie Singer

This is a thorough, compelling book by a journalist tracking the skyrocketing rate of “accidental deaths” in the U.S. over the past century. Singer deftly shows how all deaths deemed “accidental” are actually the product of corporate greed, power, and decades of bad policy—while poor people and non-white people bear the brunt of both violence and blame. I haven’t looked at news stories on traffic accidents, opioid overdoses, or oil spills the same way since. — Jane Thier, reporter

best new books of 2022

Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy by Erich Schwartzel

The Wall Street Journal ’s Hollywood reporter reveals how dependent on China Hollywood became—and how China learned not to need blockbusters conceived in L.A. anymore. By the time the book ends, Hollywood is just like the tech sector. China has learned how to make its own megahits, and American fare designed to perform big in China, like Marvel’s Shang-Chi , isn’t even allowed to be shown. — Nick Lichtenberg, executive news editor

best new books of 2022

River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads by Cat Jarman

Vikings have been having a moment for about a decade. There’s the Thor movies from Marvel, a History Channel series, and lately the prestige slasher flick The Northman . If you want a short, masterful account of the reality, this book by an archeologist takes you from northern England to eastern Russia to the Middle East and—if you haven’t been paying attention—redraws your map of European history. If you are into Vikings anyway, you’ll still love it for the beauty of the writing. It also explains just who the “Rus” were that gave their name to Vladimir Putin’s nation-state, and why Ukraine is such a foundational part of eastern European history. — N.L.

best new books of 2022

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman , Dilla Time by Dan Charnas , Blood in the Garden by Chris Herring

The 2020s are shaping up as the decade when every Gen Xer is old enough to write about the subjects that dominated their childhood and early adulthood in the 1990s. First there’s Chuck Klosterman, the essayist whose 2003 collection, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs , was a dorm-room must-have. He summons back in his inimitable fashion the strange mix of apathy, boredom, and cynicism that feels like much longer than 30-odd years ago. Then there’s music journalist Dan Charnas diving into the legendary Detroit hip-hop scene and the savant producer Jay Dilla, the man who paved the way for Eminem and Kanye West but didn’t live to see it. Finally, for any fan of HBO’s Winning Time , there’s a sports epic starring Pat Riley taking place in Midtown Manhattan, when the New York Knicks brought a physicality to basketball that hasn’t been seen since. There’s one unforgettable anecdote of Riley plunging his head into an ice bucket. — N.L.

best new books of 2022

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

This memoir details the relationship between a journalist, her art critic father, and the famous poet who has captivated them both throughout their creative lives. What starts as the author’s desire to finish a project her father never could turns into a meditation on the meaning of family, art, and love. And like Patti Smith’s  Just Kids , it brings back to life a New York City many of us have longed to experience—and helped me fall back in love with the city we inhabit now. — Alicia Adamczyk, senior writer

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best new books of 2022

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Check out both forthcoming titles to pre-order, and recently-released books to dive into now.

'Checkout 19,' 'Violeta,' 'Sea of Tranquility,' and 'You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty' are ...

Now that spring is here, summer feels like it’s right around the corner, and the good books just keep coming. In spite of recent difficulties , the publishing machine continues to bring its best and brightest new books to anxious readers in 2022. Among the year’s most anticipated titles are new releases from lit-fic darlings Hanya Yanagihara, Elena Ferrante, Emily St. John Mandel, and Ottessa Moshfegh. Literary fiction readers looking to expand their horizons should also check out debut novels from Julia May Jonas, Charmaine Wilkerson, and Jessamine Chan, all landing in stores this year.

Genre fans have plenty of new 2022 reads to dig into, as well. Thriller fanatics will delight in new novels from fan-favorite authors Lucy Foley and Simone St. James, as well as newcomer Gretchen Felker-Martin’s novel. In the world of science fiction and fantasy, Marlon James, Elizabeth Lim, Seanan McGuire, Tamsyn Muir, and Rebecca Roanhorse all have series continuations out in 2022.

That’s just a taste of what the year has in store! Below, the 100 most anticipated books of 2022.

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The School for Good Mothers

'The School for Good Mothers' by Jessamine Chan

After her husband abandons her and their young daughter to live with his mistress, Frida finds herself in a dystopian re-education program for unfit mothers, in Jessamine Chan’s insightful debut.

Luckenbooth

'Luckenbooth' by Jenni Fagan

Luckenbooth begins in 1910, when the childless Minister of Culture and his fiancée hire a new maid, with the understanding that she’ll bear the Minister’s child. Unfortunately, this maid just so happens to be the daughter of the Devil himself, and her entrance into this unholy pact will have downstream effects for the residents of their Edinburgh tenement.

When You Get the Chance

'When You Get the Chance' by Emma Lord

From the author of Tweet Cute and You Have a Match comes When You Get the Chance , a coming-of-age story with a musical theater bent. It centers on Millie, a girl raised by a single dad who spends her days dreaming of Broadway. When she finds her dad’s old blog, Millie goes looking for her estranged mother. But will she get the answers she’s looking for? And, perhaps more importantly, how will what she finds change her plans for the future?

Where the Drowned Girls Go

'Where the Drowned Girls Go' by Seanan McGuire

The seventh installment in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, Where the Drowned Girls Go , follows Cora. She used to be a mermaid; now, knowing she’ll never go back to the Trenches, she’s determined to forget everything that happened to her in her previous life. But forgetting requires Cora to enroll at the Whitehorn Institute — another school for children who survived their magical adventures and returned to the “real world,” one that wants the children to forget instead of cope.

Olga Dies Dreaming

'Olga Dies Dreaming' by Xóchitl González

As Hurricane Maria devastates Puerto Rico, a pair of adult Nuyorican siblings — one a lawmaker, the other a high-profile wedding planner — reunite with their estranged, activist mother and wrestle with her complicated legacy, in this raw debut from Xóchitl González.

'Wahala' by Nikki May

In Nikki May’s debut, a tight-knit trio of Anglo-Nigerian friends find themselves increasingly at odds after a fourth woman infiltrates their friend group.

Daughter of the Moon Goddess

'Daughter of the Moon Goddess' by Sue Lynn Tan

When the Celestial Emperor sent Chang’e to live in exile, he forbade her from receiving visitors. Her daughter, Xingyin, is living proof that the Moon Goddess broke this rule, and Chang’e has done her best to hide her. After Xingyin’s magic attracts unwanted attention, however, she must venture into the Celestial Kingdom and hide in plain sight.

To Paradise

'To Paradise' by Hanya Yanagihara

From A Little Life author Hanya Yanagihara comes In Paradise , a novel that gingerly connects the stories of three very different Americans living in an alternate version of the United States. Set in the Gilded Age, the early ’90s, and the dystopic near-future, In Paradise is just as tender and shocking as its predecessor.

Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?

'Yinka, Where Is Your Husband?' by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

In Lizzie Damilola Blackburn’s debut novel, a British Nigerian woman straddles her friends’ and her family’s conflicting cultural expectations. Yinka, an Oxford grad, is focused on things other than love. But when her cousin’s wedding catches her without a prospective date, she finds herself actively looking for a partner for the first time.

Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School

'Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School' by Kendra James

As an admissions officer, Kendra James encouraged students from marginalized backgrounds to apply to the nation’s most elite boarding schools. As The Taft School’s first Black legacy student, she had much insight to offer them. Now, in Admissions , James tells her story in its entirety, for the first time.

You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays

'You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays' by Zora Neale Hurston

Although she’s best known for novels like Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dust Tracks on a Road , Zora Neale Hurston was also one of her generation’s premier essayists. You Don’t Know Us Negroes , the first comprehensive collection of her nonfiction work, spans 35 years of essays, criticism, articles, and more.

Electric Idol

‘Electric Idol’ by Katee Robert

In this follow-up to Neon Gods , Katee Robert reimagines another Greek myth as a steamy romance. After Eros and Psyche attract paparazzi attention, Aphrodite demands that Eros assassinate the woman he was seen with. Instead, Eros marries her. It’s the first time he’s ever defied one of Aphrodite’s orders, and things don’t go as smoothly as he expects.

How High We Go in the Dark

'How High We Go in the Dark' by Sequoia Nagamatsu

After an Arctic expedition unleashes a deadly, long-dormant virus on the world in 2030, generations of humans find their lives irrevocably altered. Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark follows humanity as it crashes, adapts, survives, and rebuilds over the course of centuries.

'Violeta' by Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende’s newest novel centers on the eponymous Violeta, a 100-year-old woman who writes her life story in a series of four letters. She begins on the night she was born 1920s-era Chile, and moves forward, capturing the 20th century just as it was in her brilliant little corner of the world — even as war, death, and devastation crept closer and closer to home.

The Red Palace

'Devil House' by John Darnielle

From author and The Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle comes this Satanic Panic-infused novel. Here, a true-crime writer is presented with a lucrative proposition: move into an infamous murder house where two grisly killings took place in the ‘80s, and write the story of what really happened within its walls. As he digs further into the mystery of the titular Devil House, though, it quickly becomes clear that this is no ordinary case.

'The Red Palace' by June Hur

Set in 18th-century Seoul, June Hur’s The Red Palace centers on Hyeon, a lord’s daughter born out of wedlock. She takes a prestigious job working in the palace as a nurse, which she hopes will make her father proud. But when four women are found dead, the suspected killer — Hyeon’s mentor, Jeongsu — is thrust into the ignoble spotlight. It’s up to Hyeon and Eojin, a young policeman, to prove that Jeongsu is innocent, but as they close in on finding the real killer, the magnitude of their situation is made all too clear. After all, how can two commoners accuse the Crown Price of murder?

Thank You, Mr. Nixon

'Thank You, Mr. Nixon' by Gish Jen

The Resisters author Gish Jen returns this year with Thank You, Mr. Nixon — a short story collection that explores China, the United States, and how they’ve evolved over the past 50 years. From one girl’s letter to the late Richard Nixon, to a story about a pair of Hong Kong parents desperate to reconnect with their estranged, American daughter, Thank You, Mr. Nixon is as wry and sharply observed as Jen’s 2020 novel.

The Roughest Draft

'The Roughest Draft' by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka

Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka — a married writing duo known for their YA rom-coms — make their adult romance debut this year with The Roughest Draft . The novel centers on Katrina and Nathan, co-authors who haven’t written a book together since their falling out three years ago. When they fall on hard times, however, Katrina and Nathan are forced to join forces once again for an all-new book. But will they be able to put the past aside?

The Family Chao

'The Family Chao' by Lan Samantha Chang

In her first novel since 2010’s All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost , Iowa Writers’ Workshop Director Lan Samantha Chang introduces readers to Big Leo Chao — the proprietor of Haven, Wisconsin’s beloved Chinese restaurant, Fine Chao — his wife, Winnie, and their three sons: Dagou, Ming, and James. Haven’s residents have always looked favorably upon Fine Chao and the family that runs it — but when Leo is murdered, and it becomes clear that all three of his sons had a motive, the community quickly turns on the boys.

Finlay Donovan Knocks ’Em Dead

'Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead' by Elle Cosimano

Elle Cosimano returns to bookstores with the sequel to Finlay Donovan Is Killing It . In Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead , forever-struggling writer Finlay faces another assassination plot. This time, it’s her ex-husband’s life that’s on the line, and only she can save him.

'Vladimir' by Julia May Jonas

As she weathers a slew of accusations against her husband, an English professor finds herself falling for a young visiting professor in Julia May Jonas’ debut. As slim as it is taut, Vladimir is perfect for fans of My Dark Vanessa and Adèle .

'Black Cake' by Charmaine Wilkerson

Charmaine Wilkerson’s Black Cake tells the story of two grieving, estranged siblings who must join forces to solve a mystery: Their recently deceased mother left them a black cake, the recipe, and a recording of her most tender secrets — revelations that might seal the siblings’ rift. Before publication, the novel was optioned by Hulu under Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films production company — as strong an endorsement as any.

Yerba Buena

'Yerba Buena' by Nina LaCour

Nina LaCour’s enthralling Yerba Buena centers on Sara and Emilie, a bartender and a florist who find themselves drawn to one other. But both young women have unprocessed trauma to reckon with, and that may be enough to sink their burgeoning relationship.

Homicide and Halo-Halo

'Homicide and Halo-Halo' by Mia P. Manansala

In her follow-up to Arsenic and Adobo , Mia P. Manansala picks up with Lila right where she left off: at Tita Rosie’s Kitchen in Shady Palms. A teen beauty pageant has just come back to town, and Lila, a former pageant queen, isn’t feeling great about it. But when the event is rocked by a murder — a crime that’s pinned on Lila’s cousin and pageantry rival, Bernadette — Lila has no choice but to roll up her sleeves and solve another mystery.

Cherish Farrah

'Cherish Farrah' by Bethany C. Morrow

Bethany C. Morrow’s new thriller centers on Farrah and Cherish, teen best friends whose parents both belong to the same country club. Being the only two Black girls in the neighborhood is tough, but Farrah knows Cherish has it easy — her parents are white, after all. The two girls are pushed even closer together when financial hardship forces Farrah’s family to move, and she decides to live with Cherish. As Farrah becomes closer with Cherish’s parents, though, she begins to notice strange things happening around their home.

'Jawbone' by Mónica Ojeda

Teenage BFFs Annelise and Fernanda are inseparable — so what has Fernanda done to fall so far from Annelise’s good graces that, when she’s kidnapped and held hostage by their teacher, Annelise doesn’t come rushing to her side? Their conflict stems from the cult Annelise leads, which has Fernanda and their Catholic school classmates engaging in ever more dangerous rituals, all in the name of Annelise’s invented drag-queen god. Grim and twisted, Jawbone is one of the year’s most gripping must-reads.

Reclaim the Stars: 17 Tales Across Realms & Space

'Reclaim the Stars: 17 Tales Across Realms & Space,' edited by Zoraida Córdova

Edited by The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina author Zoraida Córdova, Reclaim the Stars is a must-read new collection of speculative fiction, comprised of 17 sci-fi and fantasy stories from Latin American diaspora writers.

Pure Colour

'Pure Colour' by Sheila Heti

From the author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? comes this highly anticipated new novel about a “first draft of the world” — a mysterious, magical place where people can become leaves, and spirits can travel through portals.

Moon Witch, Spider King

'Moon Witch, Spider King' by Marlon James

The second installment in Marlon James’ Dark Star trilogy centers on Sogolon the Moon Witch, a 177-year-old sorceress locked in a long-running battle with Aesi, the chancellor to the king. She was a villain in Black Leopard, Red Wolf , but in Moon Witch, Spider King , Sogolon gets the chance to share her side of the story.

When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East

'When I'm Gone, Look for Me in the East' by Quan Barry

Quan Barry’s new novel, When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East , takes readers on a journey across Vietnam and Mongolia. There, a pair of identical twin brothers who know each other’s thoughts — one a monk, the other a reincarnated soul — search for the reincarnation of a great Tibetan Buddhist leader.

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care

'Delilah Green Doesn’t Care' by Ashley Herring Blake

Delilah has never gotten along with her stepsister, Astrid, nor has she ever felt any fondness toward Astrid’s friends. When Astrid lays the guilt on thick, however, Delilah reluctantly agrees to photograph Astrid’s wedding, which will be held in their hometown. There, Delilah reunites with Claire — a member of Astrid’s old clique, who’s now a bookstore owner and single mom to an 11-year-old daughter. When sparks fly between the two of them, Delilah begins to wonder if her hometown isn’t so bad after all.

'Manhunt' by Gretchen Felker-Martin

If you have too much testosterone, you might as well be an animal. That’s a fact of life in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s social-horror novel, Manhunt , which takes place in a world where a disease is turning cis men feral. The story follows two trans women forced to hunt down infected people in the hopes that they’ll learn something that’ll save them from the same fate — a fate faced not just by their cis male targets, but by unlucky trans women, some trans men, and some people with PCOS. Together with a fertility doctor and a young trans man, these intrepid heroines face down a brutal landscape where far too many people — feral and not — would be happy to see them dead.

The Paris Apartment

'The Paris Apartment' by Lucy Foley

From the author of The Guest List and The Hunting Party comes The Paris Apartment . The story here centers on Jess, a down-on-her-luck woman who calls in a favor with her half-brother to get a fresh start. Ben didn’t seem too enthused about sharing his swanky Parisian digs with his half-sister, and he isn’t at home when Jess arrives. As Jess is about to realize, Ben may not be coming home at all.

'Scorpica' by G.R. Macallister

When the Queen of Scorpica — an all-female society of Amazon-esque fighters — gives birth to a daughter, the line of succession is thrown into chaos. One of her best fighters, the previous heir presumptive, challenges her and dies in the process, leaving behind a daughter of her own to one day challenge the queen. But Scorpica may have far bigger problems, as the young princess turns out to be one of the last girls born — not just in Scorpica, but in the world.

The Swimmers

'The Swimmers' by Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka’s latest novel is The Swimmers . Here, Otsuka introduces readers to an eclectic cast of characters, all connected by their penchant for swimming at the local recreational facility. Thanks to her dementia, one of these swimmers frequently finds herself flung backward into her past, reliving her wartime childhood spent in an internment camp — leaving her daughter to witness her steady decline.

Checkout 19

'Checkout 19' by Claire Louise Bennett

Pond author Claire-Louise Bennett returns to store shelves in 2022 with Checkout 19 , a coming-of-age story about a young, hyper-observant British writer.

The Rumor Game

'The Rumor Game' by Dhonielle Clayton and Sonia Charaipotra

From the authors of Tiny Pretty Things comes The Rumor Game , a YA thriller about three teen girls who must solve a mystery in order to protect their reputations. At their tony prep school, image is everything. But ex-It Girl Bryn, cheer captain Cora, and newly popular Georgie are beginning to realize that their social lives are mere houses of cards. Someone’s spreading rumors through the school’s social networks, but who? And, perhaps more importantly, why ?

The One True Me and You

'The One True Me and You' by Remi K. England

Fans of This Is How We Fly and Spoiler Alert would do well to check out Remi K. England’s The One True Me and You , a delicious queer rom-com. Kay, a burgeoning fanfic writer figuring out their gender identity, crosses paths with Teagan, a secretly nerdy — and secretly gay — pageant queen, when a hotel hosts a fandom convention and beauty pageant on the same weekend. There’s an instant connection between them, but will what happens at GreatCon stay at GreatCon?

'Gallant' by V.E. Schwab

A new standalone from V.E. Schwab? Yes, please! In this dark and magical YA novel, an orphaned teen receives a summons to her family’s ancestral home: the titular Gallant, haunted by ghouls. As Olivia works to unravel Gallant’s mysteries, she accidentally crosses a threshold into a dark-side-of-the-moon version of the stately manor, one in which the ghouls are real and Gallant is on its last legs.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

'Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head' by Warsan Shire

Warsan Shire’s first new book since 2015’s Her Blue Body is also her first full-length collection. Drawing on Shire’s experience as the Kenyan-born British daughter of Somali British parents, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head tackles many of the same themes as her previous work, with the same striking verse we’ve come to expect from her.

All My Rage

'All My Rage' by Sabaa Tahir

When the foundation of their friendship is shaken by a dramatic fight, two teens living in a small California town are forced to pick up the pieces of their lives — pieces their families cannot or will not reclaim. As Sal takes control of his family’s motel, Noor struggles to keep her college plans a secret from her abusive uncle, who expects her to spend the rest of her life working for him. They think their friendship is over, but when tragedy strikes, each will only have the other’s shoulder to cry on .

The Doloriad

'The Doloriad' by Missouri Williams

Missouri Williams’ postapocalyptic novel centers on one incestuous family cult, led by an enigmatic Matriarch. After a vision indicates there are other human survivors of the eco-catastrophe that led to society’s downfall, the Matriarch sends her daughter, Dolores, into the woods. Dolores is supposed to be an offering — a wife to another survivor, a bridge between the two groups — but she crawls back home, unmarried. Soon, the Matriarch’s grip on her children begins to weaken, and her carefully laid plans begin to crumble.

'Glory' by NoViolet Bulawayo

An allegory in the vein of Animal Farm , NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory tells the story of a nation populated by animals whose world is rocked by the loss of their longtime leader, Old Horse. Taking inspiration from the coup that ended Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s 30-year-long reign, Glory is a timely examination of what happens when generations of people must navigate a world in which major cultural touchstones have been lost.

The World Cannot Give

'The World Cannot Give' by Tara Isabella Burton

Laura, the new girl at St. Dunstan’s Academy, thinks she knows just what to expect. St. Dunstan’s is the school her favorite novelist, Sebastian Webster, attended, and Laura expects it to mirror his writing perfectly. She quickly falls in with a clique of Webster fans, led by fellow student Virginia Strauss — a girl who’s every bit as devoted to her schoolwork and physical fitness as she is to Christ. But when Virginia’s clique begins to look suspiciously cult-like, the school’s chaplain steps in, and Laura is forced to make a series of difficult, if not impossible, choices.

Girls Can Kiss Now

'Girls Can Kiss Now' by Jill Gutowitz

The ever-hilarious and insightful Jill Gutowitz hits bookshelves this Spring with Girls Can Kiss Now , her debut essay collection. Using anecdotes from her own personal history and pop culture relics, Gutowitz explores how lesbianism went mainstream.

Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments

'Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments' by T.L. Huchu

In this sequel to The Library of the Dead , Ropa, a Scottish ghostalker of Zimbabwean heritage, attempts to crack the case of Max Wu — a student attending a magical school for boys. Max is currently in a coma, and neither magic nor modern medicine has a cure for what ails him. As she investigates Max’s school, Ropa soon stumbles on a ghostly entity that may be the cause of the boy’s illness.

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

'Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative' by Melissa Febos

Substance use disorder, sex work, violence, and recovery each play a large role in this new memoir from the author of Whip Smart and Girlhood . Dubbed a “must read” by no less than Mary Karr, Body Work examines the ways in which our bodies are linked to our labor and production — philosophically, physically, and psychically.

In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

'In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing' by Elena Ferrante

From the beloved, pseudonymous author of My Brilliant Friend comes In the Margins , a new collection containing Ferrante’s own reflections on her literary life.

The Cartographers

'The Cartographers' by Peng Shepherd

For Nell Young, there’s no one who can outshine dear old dad, Daniel Young. Sure, Daniel fired Nell, scuttled her burgeoning cartography career, and stopped speaking to her, but that doesn’t mean she can’t still love him. When Daniel dies in his office, however, Nell finds herself in possession of a rare map — the one that led to their cataclysmic falling out. Not only is it rare, but it’s also highly sought after… by someone who wants to destroy both the map and its owners.

The Book of Cold Cases

'The Book of Cold Cases' by Simone St. James

Forty years after she was acquitted of two murder charges, Beth sits down with Shea — a former abductee-turned-crime blogger — to tell her side of the story. As Shea conducts interview after interview with Beth, she becomes increasingly unsettled. Something in Beth’s palatial house is even more fearsome than her reputation.

Disorientation

'Disorientation' by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Ingrid Yang has a problem. The 29-year-old, Taiwanese American PhD candidate has spent the last four years working on her dissertation about one Chinese poet’s body of work — but she’s still not sure what part of it, exactly, to write about. When she makes a chance discovery in the poet’s archive, Ingrid thinks she’s found the answer to her problems. But finishing this PhD will take more than mere chance, and it might just change Ingrid’s perspective forever.

The Bone Orchard

'The Bone Orchard' by Sara A. Mueller

Sara A. Mueller’s The Bone Orchard centers on Charm: a witch, a war bride, and the last of her people. Held in sexual bondage by the Emperor, Charm has made the best of a bad situation — but freedom may be just around the corner. When her captor dies, he leaves Charm with one final task, after which her servitude will be ended: identifying which one of the Emperor’s own sons murdered him, and declaring the other heir to his throne.

Four Aunties and a Wedding

'Four Aunties and a Wedding' by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Jesse Q. Sutanto’s follow-up to Dial A for Aunties is Four Aunties and a Wedding . Meddy’s getting married, and she’s hired another Chinese-Indonesian family’s business to take care of the catering and photography, all so her own aunties can enjoy the big day without having to work. Everything seems great... until Meddy finds out what the contractors’ real family business is. Looks like the aunties will have to work on this wedding, one way or another.

The Resting Place

'The Resting Place' by Camilla Sten

Eleanor once looked into the eyes of her grandmother’s killer and lived, but her prosopagnosia guarantees that she’ll never be able to identify the perpetrator — not if they’re caught, and not if they come back looking for her. Now, Eleanor has inherited her grandmother’s home: a place full of family secrets, some of them deadly. After moving in, Eleanor quickly becomes convinced that the killer has come to finish the job. But which one of her new neighbors could it be?

'Monarch' by Candice Wuehle

Jessica just wanted to know where her mysterious bruises were coming from. Now, she’s uncovered a deeply rooted government conspiracy: a Project MKUltra-adjacent endeavor, called MONARCH, which turned child beauty queens into sleeper agents. As one of MONARCH’s own agents, Jessica realizes her whole life has been a lie. Now, she has a new mission in life: figuring out if her childhood love, Veronica, was part of MONARCH.

The Return of Faraz Ali

'The Return of Faraz Ali' by Aamina Ahmad

Faraz Ali has lived his life according to his father’s whims. His father is the reason why Faraz was removed from his mother’s home in Lahore’s red-light district, and he’s the reason why Faraz is going back to the Mohalla now. Acting as the new police chief, Faraz is living a new, very different life in the Mohalla. But when he’s instructed to cover up the murder of a young sex worker, something about the case is rubs him the wrong way. He’s going to defy his father’s wishes for the first time... even if he’s worried about the consequences.

'Finding Me' by Viola Davis

Viola Davis, the Academy Award-winning star of Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom , tells her life story for the first time in her new memoir.

The Candy House

'The Candy House' by Jennifer Egan

The companion to A Visit from the Goon Squad , Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Candy House centers on Bix — the 40-year-old CEO of a company that lets people own, control, and share their memories.

'True Biz' by Sara Nović

Girl at War author Sara Nović returns to store shelves this year with True Biz . Set in the halls of the River Valley School for the Deaf, this insightful novel follows two students, Charlie and Austin, who, along with their headmistress, February, find themselves embroiled in a desperate bid to protect River Valley and its way of life. This is an immersive look at the too-rarely explored world of Deaf culture.

Time Is a Mother

'Time Is a Mother' by Ocean Vuong

Six years after he published his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds , Ocean Vuong is back on the scene with an all new set of short stories. Time Is a Mother explores many of the same themes as On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous , Vuong’s recent, acclaimed novel, including the poet’s identity as a Vietnamese American.

Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

'Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life' by Delia Ephron

Following the loss of her sister and husband to cancer, You’ve Got Mail screenwriter Delia Ephron wrote an op-ed that caught the attention of an old beau — a man she couldn’t remember dating, but fell in love with, nonetheless. Four months into their relationship, Ephron discovered that she, herself, had cancer. In Left on Tenth , the Siracusa author ruminates on this new phase of her life.

The Romantic Agenda

'The Romantic Agenda' by Claire Kann

From the author of Let’s Talk About Love comes this adult rom-com about two people — an asexual woman harboring a secret crush and a jilted ex-boyfriend with a chip on his shoulder — who team up to sink another couple’s ship. Naturally, they choose to do so by pretending to fall for one another, thinking it’ll make the couple jealous… and, as all romance readers well know, fake-dating hijinks will soon ensue.

The End of the World House

'End of the World House' by Adrienne Celt

One woman’s attempts to keep her best friend from moving hours away leave them both trapped in the Louvre, forced to live the same day over and over again, in this novel from The Daughters author Adrienne Celt.

Sea of Tranquility

'Sea of Tranquility' by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel author Emily St. John Mandel is back next year with Sea of Tranquility , a novel that traces three very different lives — those of an early-20th century aristocrat shunned by his peers, a lunar colonist conducting a book tour on Earth, and a detective who tracks his childhood friend to the least likely place imaginable — over the course of three eventful centuries.

The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories from Dirty Computer

'The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories from Dirty Computer' by Janelle Monáe

Set in the world of superstar Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer , The Memory Librarian collects Afrofuturist short stories written by Monáe and others, including acclaimed writers like Eve L. Ewing and Sheree Renée Thomas.

Fevered Star

'Fevered Star' by Rebecca Roanhorse

Rebecca Roanhorse returns in 2022 with Fevered Star , the highly anticipated follow-up to Black Sun . As a sea change brings a new force in to rule over Tova, new alliances will be forged, tested, and broken.

'The Fervor' by Alma Katsu

Historical horror master Alma Katsu’s next book looks deep into the dark heart of World War II-era America. Set in 1944, The Fervor follows Meiko and Aiko from their home in Seattle to an isolated Japanese internment camp in Idaho. There, the mother and daughter find themselves threatened, not only by racism and war, but also by a seemingly innocuous virus that swiftly turns deadly. With a potentially supernatural disease ravaging the camp, Meiko and Aiko team up with two allies to fight back. But can they put a stop to the epidemic before it’s too late?

Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor

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

In this slim volume, Teen Vogue journalist Kim Kelly recounts the history of Americans’ ongoing fight for unionization. Spanning more than 150 years of American history, Fight Like Hell is a must-read for any U.S. worker.

Book of Night

'Book of Night' by Holly Black

Holly Black’s adult debut is Book of Night , an urban fantasy set in an alternate reality where shadows can be magically manipulated to affect others’ memories and emotions. For con artist Charlie, shadow trading is a part of her past she’d just as soon forget. Fortunately, she’s beginning to make a life for herself outside of it — until a figure from her past comes back to haunt her, and her whole life is thrown into chaos.

Book Lovers

'Book Lovers' by Emily Henry

Emily Henry’s new romance novel is an enemies-to-lovers story you won’t want to miss. Libby knows what her older sister, Nora, needs to get her groove back: a girls’ trip to a sleepy North Carolina town. Away from the big city, the last person literary agent Nora expects to run into is Charlie, an editor she’s never gotten along with. Yet here Charlie is. And there. And there. And there . As the two keep running into each other over the course of their vacations, they begin to realize kismet may want a word with them.

I Kissed Shara Wheeler

'I Kissed Shara Wheeler' by Casey McQuiston

Chloe didn’t want to uproot her Southern California life to spend her high school years among the holier-than-thou students at Willowgrove Christian Academy in Alabama — that was her moms’ decision. Still, she’s determined to win valedictorian, and there’s just one person standing in her way: the principal’s very popular daughter, Shara. But when Shara disappears after kissing Chloe and two of the boys in their class, Chloe finds herself racing against the clock to solve a mystery before graduation .

'Elektra' by Jennifer Saint

Ariadne author Jennifer Saint returns to store shelves in 2022 with Elektra . Set in the midst of the Trojan War, this Greek myth re-telling centers on three women. First, there’s Clytemnestra, whose husband, King Agamemnon, goes to war with Troy when Helen — Clytemnestra’s sister and the wife of Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus — is kidnapped by Paris. Then, there’s Paris’ sister, Cassandra, whose visions of Troy’s coming reckoning are ignored by all, thanks to Apollo’s curse. Finally, there’s Elektra herself: Clytemnestra’s youngest daughter, who is fated to witness her people’s undoing in the aftermath of the war.

Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

'Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up' by Selma Blair

Selma Blair has written a haunting memoir about alcohol use disorder, attention-seeking behaviors, and life in Hollywood.

Siren Queen

'Siren Queen' by Nghi Vo

Set in an alternate version of Old Hollywood, in which studio executives and aspiring stars make magical pacts and sign them in blood, Nghi Vo’s Siren Queen centers on Luli Wei — a Chinese American actress whose refuses to portray stereotypical characters on-screen, and winds up exclusively playing monstrous villains.

This Time Tomorrow

'This Time Tomorrow' by Emma Straub

When Alice goes to bed on the night before she turns 40, she’s struck by the absence of her father: the man who raised her himself, who’s now living alone in poor health. When she wakes up, she’s 16 again. Her 49-year-old father is full of vim and vigor. But given a second chance, can Alice save their relationship?

'Either/Or' by Elif Batuman

Taking its name from a Kierkegaard work, Either/Or picks up with Selin — the protagonist of Elif Batuman’s celebrated 2017 novel, The Idiot — during her sophomore year at Harvard. She’s just returned from her trip to the Hungarian countryside, which was arranged by her crush, Ivan. Now, she’s looking for answers to the big questions, like what to do when your crush’s ex keeps trying to contact you.

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

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

From the author of Pet and The Death of Vivek Oji comes You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty . In their stunning romance debut, Akwaeke Emezi introduces readers to Feyi Adekola, a young woman who lost her partner five years ago. Now, with her career about to take off, Feyi’s finally ready to give in to her friend’s demands that she re-enter the dating pool. But something’s about to change in Feyi’s life, something that may make her pump the brakes on her new relationship... or give up love for good.

The Messy Lives of Book People

'The Messy Lives of Book People' by Phaedra Patrick

A bookish maid who dreams of becoming an author scores her dream job when she’s hired to clean the home of her favorite writer, Essie Starling. Everyone knows Essie is antisocial, so color Liv surprised when the two begin to build a friendship. Color Liv even more surprised when Essie dies… and tasks her with finishing her novel-in-progress. Now working in Essie’s stead, Liv begins to uncover secrets about the late author’s life, including a connection she didn’t know they shared.

Tracy Flick Can’t Win

'Tracy Flick Can't Win' by Tom Perotta

One of 2022’s most anticipated sequels is Tracy Flick Can’t Win , the long-awaited follow-up to 1998’s Election — the source material for Reese Witherspoon’s classic film. Plucky go-getter Tracy may not be a student anymore, but that doesn’t mean she’s left high school behind. Now working as an assistant principal, Tracy gets sees an opportunity to get the promotion she deserves when the school’s principal retires. But will anyone see how perfect Tracy is for the job?

For the Throne

'For the Throne' by Hannah Whitten

As the Second Daughter of the queen, Red was born to be sacrificed to the Wolf who controls the Wilderwood. In For the Wolf , Red was shocked to learn the Wolf was a man, not an animal, and was even more surprised when she found herself falling for and marrying him. Now, Red’s story continues in For the Throne , which finds her older sister, the First Daughter, lost in the magical territory belonging to their greatest enemies. She’ll have to play nicely with an unlikely ally — and face a new destiny — if she wants to save her world.

'Lapvona' by Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest follows Marek, a shepherd’s son who’s been born into an uncaring, unjust world. He lives in Lapvona: a small village lorded over by the cruel and excessive Villiam, whose wickedness is only magnified when famine spreads across his fiefdom. Villiam’s preparing to attack his own people, and Marek, his pagan wet nurse, and the village priest are about to find themselves inextricably linked to one another.

A Taste of Gold and Iron

'A Taste of Gold and Iron' by Alexandra Rowland

A fantasy romance set in an Ottoman Empire-inspired world where myths come to life, A Taste of Gold and Iron is one of the year’s most exciting new books. The novel follows the shy, anxious Prince Kadou, who agrees to investigate crimes against a local guild after he publicly embarrasses his sister, the queen, by fighting with her child’s father. Accompanied by his handsome new bodyguard, the stoic Evemer, Kadou stumbles upon a counterfeiting scandal that will rock all of Arasht, where such a crime is both felony and heresy.

Our Crooked Hearts

'Our Crooked Hearts' by Melissa Albert

Dana and Ivy have a lot in common, and not just because Dana is Ivy’s mom. Years ago, over the course of one unspeakable summer in the city, a teenaged Dana was forced to reckon with powers she didn’t not truly understand. Now, a series of strange events is about to bring 17-year-old Ivy’s suburban adolescence to a shocking end, and her mom may be the only one who truly understands what she’s up against.

'Godslayers' by Zoe Hana Mikuta

In this sequel to Gearbreakers , Eris and Sona find themselves on opposing sides of the war between Godolia and the occupied territory known as the Badlands. Now, Sona is convinced she’s always been loyal to Godolia — thanks to some brainwashing from the colonizers’ leadership — and Eris must decide how far she’ll go to save the girl she loves.

Honey & Spice

'Honey & Spice' by Bolu Babalola

If there’s one thing Kiki knows, it’s how to avoid being tied down. There are too few men out there worthy of wasting time on, at least in her opinion — which she shares with anyone who’ll listen on the Whitewell University campus. Soon, though, circumstances forced Kiki to fake-date Malakai, a guy who embodies everything wrong with the men she’s told young women to stay away from. Her reputation is at stake, but Kiki’s got another, bigger problem — she’s falling for Malakai, and hard .

The Pallbearers’ Club

'The Pallbearers' Club' by Paul Tremblay

Back in high school, Art was the very antithesis of cool. I mean, a metalhead who volunteered as a pallbearer and wore a brace to correct his scoliosis is... not exactly someone others aspire to be. Art’s only friend, Mercy, was just as much of an outcast as Art, but she was cool. Sure, she took pictures of corpses and talked a lot about digging up graves, but who really cared at the end of the day? She was his friend, and Art could use as many of those as he could get. Except now that he’s writing his memoir, Mercy’s blown back into his life, and she doesn’t remember things the way he’s written them.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

'A Prayer for the Crown-Shy' by Becky Chambers

Becky Chambers’ sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built follows Sibling Dex and Mosscap — a Tea Monk and a robot sent to commune with human society — as they visit the more urban areas of their home moon, searching for answers to the robots’ questions about humanity’s intrinsic needs.

The Man Who Could Move Clouds

'The Man Who Could Move Clouds' by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Fruit of the Drunken Tree author Ingrid Rojas Contreras returns to stores this summer with a memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds . When she was 8 years old, Rojas Contreras’ mother awoke from a coma with the ability to commune with spirits. Decades later, Rojas Contreras herself sustained a head injury that led to amnesia, which blurred parts of her Colombian childhood with her fortune-telling mother and curandero grandfather. As her memories returned, Rojas Contreras was left not with supernatural talents, but with the desire to know more about her family’s legacy.

What Moves the Dead

'What Moves the Dead' by T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher’s new novel is an Edgar Allan Poe retelling that shouldn’t be missed. What Moves the Dead follows Alex as they rush to be by the side of their childhood friend, Madeline, who lies on her deathbed at her family’s estate. But the Usher estate is strange, and its inhabitants — which include Madeline’s brother, Roderick — are even stranger. With few allies to aid them, Alex plunges into the mystery of the House of Usher.

It Sounds Like This

'It Sounds Like This' by Anna Meriano

Anna Meriano’s It Sounds Like This centers on Yasmín, a high-school flutist whose dream of making first chair is dashed when she accidentally gets the entire low brass section in trouble. A band without a low brass section isn’t a band at all, but Yasmín has a plan to achieve her dreams. All she has to do is learn to play the tuba and whip some freshmen brass players into shape. Easy peasy, right?

Blood Like Fate

'Blood Like Fate' by Liselle Sanbury

Fans of Liselle Sambury’s Blood Like Magic pick up with Voya at her lowest point yet. She’s lost everything, including the boy she refused to kill. To make matters worse, she may have to end his life anyway. With the fate of the world at stake, Voya faces even bigger challenges in this highly anticipated sequel.

My Government Means to Kill Me

'My Government Means to Kill Me' by Rasheed Newson

This debut novel from The Chi producer Rasheed Newson follows one young, gay Black man as he forsakes the Midwest to join ACT UP in 1980s New York City.

The Dragon’s Promise

'The Dragon's Promise' by Elizabeth Lim

The sequel to Elizabeth Lim’s Six Crimson Cranes is out in Fall 2022. Although not much is known yet about this sure-to-be-a-bestseller, Lim’s 2020 novel — a retelling of “The Six Swans” fairytale — has readers excited for what’s to come.

Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix

'Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix' by Anna-Marie McLemore

Anna-Marie McLemore’s Great Gatsby retelling casts Nick as a young, Latino trans man who discovers that his cousin, Daisy, is now passing for white in the big city. As he’s swept up into the glitz and glamor of Daisy’s new life, Nick discovers that his mysterious and fabulously wealthy new neighbor, Jay, is also trans — and he’s carrying a torch for Daisy.

The Sunbearer Trials

'The Sunbearer Trials' by Aiden Thomas

The Sunbearer Trials is the first book in a planned duology from Cemetery Boys author Aiden Thomas. The novel follows Teo — the 17-year-old trans son of the bird goddess, Quetzal — as he unexpectedly finds himself forced to compete in a deadly challenge with nine other teenage semidioses. It’s a game where the loser is sacrificed to fuel the sun, and Teo’s up against stiff competition.

Nona the Ninth

'Nona the Ninth' by Tamsyn Muir

The third novel in Tamsyn Muir Locked Tomb quartet — formerly a trilogy — Nona the Ninth is currently slated for release next fall. Not much is known about the third Locked Tomb book at the time of this writing, and after the murder mystery of Gideon and the court intrigue of Harrow , what comes next is anyone’s guess.

Lark & Kasim Start a Revolution

'Lark & Kasim Start a Revolution' by Kacen Callender

Kacen Callender’s new YA novel centers on Lark, a 17-year-old writer who decides that they need to amass 50,000 Twitter followers in order to land a book deal. When their ex-best friend, Kasim, tweets out a missive on unrequited love from Lark’s account, Lark covers for him and takes responsibility for writing the post. Now, everyone thinks Lark was tweeting about their own crush, Eli. Everyone, that is, except those who know the truth: Kasim wrote the tweets… and he was writing about Lark.

Station Eternity

'Station Eternity' by Mur Lafferty

Mallory has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You see, people die around her constantly . And the minute someone finds out this isn’t your first time being at a murder scene? Well, you become Suspect No. 1. To get away from the carnage that inexplicably follows her, Mallory moves as far away from human society as she can get: outer space. Living on a sentient space station turns out to be just what she needed… until the other humans begin to arrive.

Strike the Zither

'Strike the Zither' by Joan He

Another retelling, Joan He’s 2022 novel Strike the Zither takes on the legendary Romance of the Three Kingdoms . Here, two women — a warlordess and her chief strategist — face insurmountable odds to win a war on two fronts and do battle against the powers of Fate itself.

Tread of Angels

'Tread of Angels' by Rebecca Roanhorse

The Fallen — descendants of the angels who fought God and paid the price — would have been wiped out long ago, were it not for their unique ability to find a resource necessary to live life as they know it. Even still, the Fallen remain at the tail end of the pecking order — though some, like Celeste, manage to live a comfortable life. When her estranged sister Mariel is accused of murdering an Archangel, however, Celeste will risk everything to save her, even if it means becoming embroiled in the trial of the century.

This article was originally published on Dec. 14, 2021

best new books of 2022

ELLE Editors’ Favorite Books of 2022

best books of 2022

Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

Not only did 2022 bless us with a new Beyoncé album and a chaotic second season of The White Lotus , but it also gave us some amazing books. Take Dress Code , for example, written by ELLE’s very own Véronique Hyland, which traces the way fashion affects politics, pop culture, and our daily lives. On the fiction side, Akwaeke Emezi dipped into the romance genre for the first time with their seventh book You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty .

The point being, it was an excellent year for reading. Whether you're into personal essays or gripping dramas, there's something for everyone. Below, the ELLE editors wax poetic about their favorite books of 2022. Happy reading!

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng’s latest novel Our Missing Hearts tells the story of Bird, a 12-year-old boy navigating a dystopian world consumed by paranoia and groupthink that feels just familiar enough to our present reality to be absolutely terrifying. We find Bird and his father living in an America that has been ravaged by The Crisis—years of economic instability and violence that Americans blamed on China. In an effort to restore normalcy, a decade earlier, the government passed the draconian PACT (Preserving American and Culture Traditions) Act, allowing authorities to remove the children of alleged dissidents, particularly those of Asian descent, from their homes and place them with foster families. At the center of all of this is Bird’s mother, Margaret, a poet turned unintentional activist forced to abandon her family in order to keep it partially intact, and Bird’s quest to find her. The stunning story Ng beautifully weaves is the perfect book for our present moment—a cautionary tale of what happens when fear goes unchecked and of the power of art and brave individuals to bring social change. Ng writes in her author’s note that “it is hard to analyze your own era,” but with Our Missing Hearts , she has nailed it.— Kayla Webley Adler, ELLE Deputy Editor

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

Full disclosure, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Emma Straub’s previous novels, but This Time Tomorrow tugged on my heart. Her creative take on traditional time-travel tropes will have you frantically turning each page, and reaching for the phone to call your dad.— Claire Stern, Digital Deputy Editor

I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

Don't let the young adult label fool you, this one is for rom-com lovers everywhere. New York Times bestselling author Casey McQuiston's ( Red, White, & Royal Blue ) third novel tells the story of Chloe Green, whose mission is to be the valedictorian of Willowgrove Christian Academy—whatever it takes. The only person who stands in her way is Shara Wheeler, the seemingly perfect principal's daughter. When Shara goes missing after kissing Chloe and leaves a trail of clues, Chloe becomes hellbent on finding her academic rival. With a rag-tag team of classmates, cryptic puzzles, and about as much pink as humanly possible, Chloe works to uncover the secrets surrounding Shara and, in the process, finds herself. McQuiston's YA debut is a natural and real take on discovering one's identity, proving that the process of finding oneself is a journey worth taking. I cried, laughed, and devoured this one in a day. McQuiston has a winner in Shara Wheeler. Let the scavenger hunt begin.— Sam Maude, Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief

Carolina Built by Kianna Alexander

If you're looking for some inspiration—this book is it. It's a historical fiction novel based on the life of entrepreneur Josephine N. Leary, a Black slave from North Carolina who was emancipated in 1865 and focuses on her journey of building a real estate empire. Alexander did an extensive two year investigation process, including combing original documents from the Rubenstein Library at Duke University and visiting Edenton, NC to see Josephine Leary's building, which is still standing all these years later, to creatively tell Leary's story. I was in awe as I read about Leary's drive, tenacity, and resilience.— Danielle James, Digital Beauty Director

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Bonnie Garmus' debut novel has been 2022's literary little engine that could. The heartfelt and bitingly funny '50s-set story introduces Elizabeth Zott, a straight-shooting scientist born decades too soon. Workplace harrassment forces her into a TV career where she helps a nation of women recognize their potential. As a first-time novelist in her 60s, Garmus has a story almost as interesting as Zott's. The book was published to good reviews last spring, alongside a fiction slate that included some of the biggest names in books. But as the year continued on, it remained on the best-seller lists long after its peers—it's been on the Times list for 31 weeks. Barnes & Noble named it their book of the year and a New York Times story called it “a book whose success is the stuff publishing dreams are made of.”— Adrienne Gaffney, Associate Editor

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Diaz takes a new angle into the story of a dynastic fortune, the inscrutable son who inherits it, and his brilliant wife. Within Trust are four distinct books. One is a novel about the life and times of Benjamin Rask, a mysterious figure in New York society in the early 1900s, and his complicated wife before the pair became became overnight pariahs after profiting on the market crash of 1929. Part two is an effort at autobiography by Andrew Bevel, the man on which Rask was based. The third section gives a whole new perspective on the Bevel story, from a writer with some distance, while the fourth is a whole other thing. It's an artful approach to a traditional story which brings The Lehman Trilogy to mind. —AG

‎ Ballantine Books The Maid by Nita Prose

Molly is a truly sweet and sheltered 25-year-old who loves her job as a hotel housekeeper. She reads situations incredibly literally and is left without a social translator after her grandmother dies. Molly is an easy target for manipulation and when a hotel guest is killed, she's set up to be the top suspect. It's a fun mystery, yes, but Prose's loving depiction of her characters creates true emotional depth.— AG

Dress Code: Unlocking Fashion from the New Look to Millennial Pink by Véronique Hyland

When you finish Dress Code , you’ll realize the impact of fashion is so much greater than even those most committed to it could ever imagine. It aces tracing the expected path of demonstrating the ways clothing reflects politics, sexuality, and society, but her brilliance is in giving fashion its due credit for actually shaping culture itself. In the hand of Hyland, one of ELLE’s own, topics easily dismissed, like influencers, normcore, and millennial pink (a term she actually coined), are treated with dignity and analyzed as true documents of life today.— AG

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

I’m a little biased with this pick since I interviewed Akwaeke earlier this year, but this really was one of my favorite books of 2022. After a woman named Feyi loses the love of her life in an accident, she’s ready to start dating again. What follows is a heartfelt and entertaining romance filled with hookups, tropical vacations, and the joys of starting over.— Julianna Ukiomogbe, Assistant Editor

Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

I spent a glorious afternoon this summer reading through On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous author Ocean Vuong’s compact new collection of poems, Time Is A Mother , which is as gut-wrenching as anything we’ve come to expect from the visionary. A meditation on grief and resilience after the loss of his mother, the book can easily be read in one sitting, but I'd recommend taking it slow—or at least bookmarking the poems you’d best like to revisit, as you’ll certainly feel called to do after turning the last page.— Lauren Puckett-Pope, Associate Editor

Finding Me by Viola Davis

I love a good memoir. There’s something so fascinating about getting a little peek into the life of someone who has been so ubiquitous in pop culture. Viola Davis leaves it all on the page. From her childhood growing up in poverty to her experience attending Juilliard, you get a little bit of everything. If you’re a film buff, you’ll love reading about her artistry and how she approaches her craft. Celebrity memoirs are definitely hit or miss, and I’m so elated that this is a hit.— JU

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

In Jessamine Chan's debut novel, Frida Liu is a mother who has a bad day and finds that one single act of poor judgment while parenting is enough to send her to an institution where she must prove a bad mother can turn good or risk losing her daughter forever. But as Frida soon learns, there is no such thing as being “good” in a system stacked against her and other moms like her. Chan’s world might be dystopian, but the themes she hits on—state separation of parents and children, judgment and “perfect” parenting, and a mother’s unending love—are very much relevant to our present.— KWA

Girls Can Kiss Now by Jill Gutowitz

Jill Gutowitz’s collection of essays on “the mainstreaming of queer women in pop culture” is hilarious, sharp, and yet deeply personal. She offers touching, intimate reflections on self-discovery and coming of age amidst analyses on the impact of Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U” music video or that masochistic social media trend of begging a celebrity to “step on me/run me over with a car/punch me in the face.” Come for the laughs and Taylor Swift references; stay for the “Most Important Sapphic Paparazzi Photos in Modern History” (which of course includes the snap of Cara Delevingne and Ashley Benson carrying a sex bench into their home).— Erica Gonzales, ELLE.com Senior Culture Editor

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

Fiona and Jane is a collection of stories about a pair of Taiwanese American girls and longtime best friends, told from their alternating perspectives; but it feels more like a continuous narrative of their relatable yet complex friendship. From facing the messiness of adolescence together to growing apart (but never really losing touch) as adults, Fiona and Jane’s intertwined story is one of lasting love, family, and forgiveness.— EG

The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor—The Truth and the Turmoil by Tina Brown

Former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown is back on the royals beat, and her latest volume, The Palace Papers , is a dishy but deeply researched look under the hood of the House of Windsor. If you loved her Princess Diana biography, The Diana Chronicles , you'll find just as much to relish here: thoughtful commentary on the future of the monarchy; a full accounting of the romances between Prince William and Prince Harry and their wives; the true impetus behind “Megxit”; and so much more. With Brown's signature dry wit and keen eye, The Palace Papers is an essential primer for anyone with even a passing interest in what's going on across the pond—and, more importantly, why it matters. —LPP

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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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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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best new books of 2022

“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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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 new books of 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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Here Are the 12 New Books You Should Read in October

The covers of Rest Is Resistance, Dinosaurs, When We Were Sisters, and When They Tell You to Be Good

M any of this month’s best new books border on the surreal or otherworldly, transporting readers to settings slightly removed from our everyday realities. In Marigold and Rose: A Fiction , Louise Glück narrates the inner lives of two infant twins, who, it turns out, have much the same grasp on the world that adults do. Lydia Millet’s Dinosaurs dips a toe into the uncanny territory between community and self. Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses (translated by Megan McDowell) dabbles in the eerie and the absent. And George Saunders’s Liberation Day explores the haunting nature of a dream derailed. Here, the best new books to read this October.

Catching the Light , Joy Harjo (Oct. 4)

The cover of 'Catching the Light': An author's photo of Joy Harjo on a white background

Joy Harjo has enjoyed a long and storied career as a poet, from becoming the first Native American to serve as the U.S. Poet Laureate to being elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets—not to mention publishing her own nine books of poetry. Now, 50 years into her career, she has written something of a memoir—part of Yale University Press’ “Why I Write” series—about the “why” of writing poetry. In 50 vignettes, Harjo recalls the moments that shaped her own journey and how Indigenous people have been treated by history. “To write,” she asserts, “is to make a mark in the world, to assert ‘I am.’”

Buy Now : Catching the Light on Bookshop | Amazon

When They Tell You to Be Good , Prince Shakur (Oct. 4)

The cover of 'When They Tell You to Be Good': a black background with yellow block text

The magnetic debut book from the essayist and organizer Prince Shakur delves into his Black, queer identity, his family’s immigration from Jamaica to the United States, and the longlasting impacts of colonial and patriarchal violence through generations. Shakur pairs his own experience with familial homophobia with his broader recognition of social injustice in the U.S. to gradually unravel both forces. “If America could not deliver me what I deserved as a young and curious Black person,” he writes, “I deserved to try to find it where I could and not be overpowered by the kind of son or citizen I needed to be.”

Buy Now : When They Tell You to Be Good on Bookshop | Amazon

Marigold and Rose: A Fiction , Louise Glück (Oct. 11)

The cover of 'Marigold and Rose': two little humanoid shapes drawn in scribbles

In her fiction debut, 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Louise Glück harnesses her background in poetry to tell the luminous tale of two infant twins who engage with the world in much the same way adults do—albeit with perhaps a bit more wonder. Marigold is quietly mentally writing a book about what their mother was like as a child. Rose is more outgoing and outspoken: her first words arrive “ in loud gusts and torrents .” The slim book, though fiction, shimmers with Glück’s trademark poetic voice, weaving everyday magic into playpens and cribs.

Buy Now : Marigold and Rose: A Fiction on Bookshop | Amazon

Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto , Tricia Hersey (Oct. 11)

A purple, orange, and blue gradient book cover with yellow text

The Instagram page @thenapministry , with roughly 477,000 followers, has changed lives. Founded in 2016 by artist and theologian Tricia Hersey, the Nap Ministry is an organization that believes rest is “a form of resistance and reparations” and examines the liberating power of naps. Now Hersey is coming out with a manifesto of sorts that expands on the meaning and power of rest. Rooted in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism, Rest Is Resistance connects the dots between capitalism and white supremacy. Rest, Hersey posits, asserts humanity and pushes back against all-consuming grind culture. “All of culture is collaborating for us not to rest,” Hersey writes —and she wants to change that.

Buy Now : Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto on Bookshop | Amazon

Dinosaurs , Lydia Millet (Oct. 11)

An orange silhouette of a bird perched on a windblown tree

Forty-something Gil has just moved—walked, to be specific—from New York to Arizona in the wake of a necessary but painful breakup. In Phoenix, he meets a family of four who live next door: Arlis, Ted, and their kids, Clem and Tom. The neighbors become unlikely friends as Gil bonds with Ted over manly things and keeps the high-energy Tom occupied with sports. Gradually, Gil seems to become part of the family, which raises some philosophical questions—like where the individual ends and the community begins.

Buy Now : Dinosaurs on Bookshop | Amazon

When We Were Sisters , Fatimah Asghar (Oct. 18)

Three siblings, all with brown skin in purples dresses, are splayed out on the grass

With If They Come For Us , their 2018 debut poetry collection, Fatimah Asghar established their lyrical voice as one to contend with. Now, the artist is back with their debut novel, When We Were Sisters , which channels their poetic sensibilities into a tender tale about three siblings—Noreen, Aisha, and Kausar, from oldest to youngest—and how they care for each other in the aftermath of their parents’ deaths. The siblings are taken in by their uncle and learn to rely on one another as they grow. Through Kausar’s eyes, readers experience the ebb and flow of grief alongside the tumultuous journey that is adolescence.

Buy Now : When We Were Sisters on Bookshop | Amazon

Demon Copperhead , Barbara Kingsolver (Oct. 18)

A cream-colored background with delicate black illustrations around the edges of the cover

In this contemporary reimagining of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield , Barbara Kingsolver transposes a Victorian epic novel to the American South—the mountains of southern Appalachia, to be specific. When we meet him, Demon Copperhead is 11 and living in poverty with a single mother who has an opioid addiction. In this modern coming-of-age story, Demon learns to navigate the inhospitable landscape of the foster care system, landing in the home of the town’s celebrated high school football coach, where he’ll face his own opioid addiction. “Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out,” Kingsolver writes , “win or lose.”

Buy Now : Demon Copperhead on Bookshop | Amazon

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man , Paul Newman (Oct. 18)

A black-and-white photo portrait of Paul Newman with his hand covering the left side of his face

The late Paul Newman is known for quite a few accomplishments, among them his memorable roles in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , and The Sting , 10 Oscar nominations, and one Oscar win (for best actor in The Color of Money ). But he was, as his posthumous memoir illustrates, also a deeply private man. Among the intimate topics he covers in the book are his turbulent childhood, his relationship with the love of his life, Joanne Woodward, and the grief and guilt he bore after losing his son. Acting, he says in the book, “gave me a sanctuary where I was able to create emotions without being penalized for having them.”

Buy Now : The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man on Bookshop | Amazon

Liberation Day , George Saunders (Oct. 18)

An illustration of a dove flies through a black portal on the right side of the cover toward a red portal on the left side

In 2013, for TIME100, the poet Mary Karr wrote that “for more than a decade, George Saunders has been the best short-story writer in English.” Now, almost a decade later, Saunders has written the short story collection to defend his title. In the titular essay, three workers, called “Speakers,” are indentured to entertain a family in an alternate reality. In another dystopia, this one Trumpian, a grandfather writes to his grandson to warn him about the perils of a world in which “loyalists” report dissenters for infractions. In the story “Ghoul,” the narrator, Brian, who works at a Hell-themed amusement park, prays, “Though I will not live to see it, may these words play some part in bringing the old world down.”

Buy Now : Liberation Day on Bookshop | Amazon

The White Mosque , Sofia Samatar (Oct. 25)

A cream-colored background with orange and red star-shaped designs

Sofia Samatar, a professor of African and Arabic literature and a fantasy novelist, is also the daughter of Swiss Mennonite and Somali Muslim parents—religious identities that, to many, may seem diametrically opposed. Samatar breaks from her usual sci-fi and fantasy writing to offer an enthralling memoir tracing the path of Mennonite minister Claas Epp Jr. from Russia into what is now Uzbekistan in the 1880s. In the summer of 2016, Samatar retraced this journey for two weeks, ending at Ak Mechet, a Mennonite church that resembles a white mosque.

Buy Now : The White Mosque on Bookshop | Amazon

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams , Stacy Schiff (Oct. 25)

A close-up portrait painting of a young Samuel Adams

Stacy Schiff has mastered the art of writing thoroughly researched, often captivating biographies, breathing new life into history. (She won the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 2000 for her biography of Vera Nabokov.) For her latest act, Schiff re-introduces readers to Samuel Adams, considered to be one of the more historically overlooked of the founding fathers. And that, in fact, may have been intentional: Adams destroyed most of his personal correspondence and countless documents, preferring to move inconspicuously. This biography, at times brimming with drama, carefully sifts through the limited remaining materials available to build a hearty portrait of a founding father.

Buy Now : The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams on Bookshop | Amazon

Seven Empty Houses , Samanta Schweblin, translation by Megan McDowell (Oct. 25)

A distorted, surreal door behind the title text and on a pale green background

Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature, Seven Empty Houses , originally written in Spanish, depicts, yes, seven empty houses. But it simultaneously seeks to capture both the absence that defines them and what exactly it is that creeps back inside. In the opening story, “None of That,” what’s missing is, perhaps, control: a mother and daughter are driving through a wealthy neighborhood, seemingly unsure of how they got there. When the pair end up inside the landowner’s house, that control is regained, in a way—the mother obsessively straightens up the landowner’s belongings. The slightly unnerving and surreal tone throughout the stories, translated by Megan McDowell, makes for an ideal October read.

Buy Now : Seven Empty Houses on Bookshop | Amazon

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Nuclear fusion world record: The science behind the energy technology explained

Nuclear fusion is what happens in the Sun and other stars and involves joining two atomic nuclei to make one larger one.

Nuclear fusion is what happens in the Sun and other stars and involves joining two atomic nuclei to make one larger one. Image:  Reuters

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Simon torkington.

best new books of 2022

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This article was most recently updated in February 2024.

  • A new world record for nuclear fusion power generation has been set in the UK.
  • At COP28, US special climate envoy John Kerry announced an international plan to boost nuclear fusion as an emissions-free technology.
  • At Davos in January 2023, the lead US government scientist behind a nuclear fusion breakthrough called for more public investment to scale the technology.

In a fitting end to the UK's JET fusion laboratory in Oxford, the lab's final experiment produced a new world record for power generation.

It produced 69 megajoules of energy over five seconds - or enough energy to heat up to five hot baths, according to the BBC, triple what it produced back in 1997.

The UK's Minister for Nuclear and Networks, Andrew Bowie, said: "JET's final fusion experiment is a fitting swansong after all the ground-breaking work that has gone into the project since 1983. We are closer to fusion energy than ever before thanks to the international team of scientists and engineers in Oxfordshire."

The buzz around fusion energy as a way to reduce emissions has been growing over the past year. Emissions-free nuclear fusion technology could be a game-changer in the fight against climate change, if it can be scaled up.

"There is potential in fusion to revolutionize our world," US special climate envoy John Kerry told the UN climate conference, COP28, in Dubai in December 2023.

He was launching an international engagement plan – involving 35 countries – to boost nuclear fusion through research and development . The initiative will also focus on regulation and safety, and look to reduce supply chain issues.

Kerry's announcement comes after Britain and the US signed a cooperation agreement on fusion in November. Australia, China, Germany and Japan are also pursuing fusion, according to Reuters.

Nuclear fusion breakthroughs

In August 2023, scientists at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California repeated a breakthrough they first made in December 2022, achieving a "net energy gain" in fusion ignition.

Using laser beams, the amount of energy from the fusion reaction surpassed that concentrated on the target for an instant.

Back in January 2023 at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos, nuclear scientist and Director of the lab, Kim Budil , spoke on a panel, a month after her team made the original breakthrough.

"If we want to take this forward, public-private partnerships are going to be essential," she said.

How the private sector has backed nuclear fusion in the past two decades.

Private-sector investment in the nascent technology has surged in the past 20 years , according to McKinsey.

In May 2023, Microsoft announced a deal with private US nuclear fusion company Helion to buy electricity made using fusion technology in 2028.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said Helion's work "supports our own long-term clean energy goals and will advance the market to establish a new, efficient method for bringing more clean energy to the grid, faster".

Companies have raised around $5 billion in private funding for nuclear fusion, in a quest to replicate the power source that fuels the sun, Reuters says.

Pioneering nuclear fusion

These companies are building on the earlier work of pioneering researchers, including those at the JET fusion lab. The Joint European Torus site, to give it its full name, was a collaboration of European nuclear scientists.

The JET lab, which was the world's largest and most advanced fusion reactor, conducted its first experiments in 1983. Due to its success, it continued for 40 years until the reactor entered the decommissioning stage in October 2023 . It conducted its last, ground-breaking experiment in December.

The interior of the record-breaking nuclear fusion reactor at the JET fusion lab in Oxford, UK

Its successor is a facility called ITER, based in France and due to start operating in 2025, according to the BBC, but without the UK's involvement.

Instead, the UK government announced last year it would commit £650 million to national research programmes, including a plan to build the world's first fusion power plant in Nottinghamshire with operations due to begin in the 2040s.

The nuclear fusion race

Globally, government labs and more than 30 companies are racing to generate power from fusion – including Budil's team in California.

In December 2022, they managed to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumed – a net gain of 1.5 megajoules in less time than it takes light to travel one inch.

"Monday 5 December was an important day for science," said Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Jill Hruby.

At Davos, Budil explained the experiment involved beaming 192 lasers on a tiny target and heating it to create a self-sustaining reaction.

Have you read?

Nuclear fusion's future, according to the woman leading the charge, small reactors, big ambitions, is this the future of nuclear energy .

But she said the timescale to generating power could be "two or three decades away" and urged great collaboration to build a fusion "ecosystem".

"If I look at the private-sector fusion companies that have already been spun out, they have needs for expertise and certain specific skills that it would be cost prohibitive to develop within a start-up framework. So they can partner with the laboratories to get access to that capability and expertise.

"To advance the cause of fusion, we have to create an ecosystem where any private sector players in this area who want to commercialize the technology can work with us to help advance the target designs – think about laser architectures or other driver architectures –to benefit from our expertise and what will be required to operate a facility at this scale.

"I'm hopeful we will start seeing significant public sector investments in the energy application of this technology. We already have several companies formed around inertial confinement fusion that are starting to explore partnerships with us on how to take the technology forward.

"For the next few years, it's essential to work together."

Moving to clean energy is key to combating climate change, yet in the past five years, the energy transition has stagnated.

Energy consumption and production contribute to two-thirds of global emissions, and 81% of the global energy system is still based on fossil fuels, the same percentage as 30 years ago. Plus, improvements in the energy intensity of the global economy (the amount of energy used per unit of economic activity) are slowing. In 2018 energy intensity improved by 1.2%, the slowest rate since 2010.

Effective policies, private-sector action and public-private cooperation are needed to create a more inclusive, sustainable, affordable and secure global energy system.

Benchmarking progress is essential to a successful transition. The World Economic Forum’s Energy Transition Index , which ranks 115 economies on how well they balance energy security and access with environmental sustainability and affordability, shows that the biggest challenge facing energy transition is the lack of readiness among the world’s largest emitters, including US, China, India and Russia. The 10 countries that score the highest in terms of readiness account for only 2.6% of global annual emissions.

best new books of 2022

To future-proof the global energy system, the Forum’s Shaping the Future of Energy and Materials Platform is working on initiatives including, Systemic Efficiency , Innovation and Clean Energy and the Global Battery Alliance to encourage and enable innovative energy investments, technologies and solutions.

Additionally, the Mission Possible Platform (MPP) is working to assemble public and private partners to further the industry transition to set heavy industry and mobility sectors on the pathway towards net-zero emissions. MPP is an initiative created by the World Economic Forum and the Energy Transitions Commission.

Is your organisation interested in working with the World Economic Forum? Find out more here .

What is nuclear fusion exactly?

Our current nuclear power stations use nuclear fission – essentially splitting an atom’s nucleus.

Nuclear fusion is what happens in the Sun and other stars and involves joining two atomic nuclei to make one larger one. Both reactions release large amounts of energy, but with nuclear fusion, there is very high energy yield and very low nuclear waste production.

Fusion occurs when two light atoms bond together, or fuse, to make a heavier one. The total mass of the new atom is less than that of the two that formed it; the "missing" mass is given off as energy, as described by Albert Einstein's famous E=mc2 equation.

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of clean energy.

There are several "recipes" for cooking up nuclear fusion, which rely on different atomic combinations.

The most promising combination for power on Earth today is the fusion of a deuterium atom with a tritium one. The process, which requires temperatures of approximately 72 million degrees Fahrenheit (39 million degrees Celsius), produces 17.6 million electron volts of energy.

Deuterium is a promising ingredient because it is an isotope of hydrogen. In turn, hydrogen is a key part of water. A gallon of seawater (3.8 litres) could produce as much energy as 300 gallons (1,136 litres) of petrol.

Challenges for nuclear fusion researchers

While nuclear fusion power offers the prospect of an almost inexhaustible energy source for future generations, it has also presented many so-far-insurmountable scientific and engineering challenges.

In the Sun, massive gravitational forces create the right conditions for nuclear fusion in the star’s core, but on Earth they are much harder to achieve.

Fusion fuel – different isotopes of hydrogen – must be heated to extreme temperatures of around 50 million degrees Celsius, kept stable under intense pressure, and dense enough and confined for long enough to allow the nuclei to fuse.

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World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

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The New York Public Library: Best Books of 2022

The New York Public Library is proud to present our Best Books of 2022. Our annual recommendations for kids, teens, and adults, curated by our expert librarians, encompass fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, poetry, kids’ books in Spanish, and much more.

All of these books are in the Library’s catalog and many are available in multiple formats, including e-books, audiobooks, and accessible editions. Happy reading!

For Adults: Explore the List

For teens: explore the list, for kids: explore the list, para pequeños: explore la lista, download our 2022 lists.

Print and check off the titles as you read them!

  • Best New Books for Adults
  • Best New Books for Kids
  • Best New Books for Teens
  • Los mejores libros nuevos para pequeños

Discover Our Top 10 Picks for Kids, Teens, and Adults

Not sure where to start? Check out our top 10 picks for kids, teens, and adults.

Los Mejores libros para pequeños

Nuestro comité hispanohablante experto seleccionó los mejores libros infantiles publicados este año. ¡Tómelos prestados ya!

Available in Accessible Formats

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About Best Books at NYPL

Every year the librarians and staff on our Best Books committees read thousands of titles to select noteworthy new books for readers of all ages. Find out more—and check out the highlights of previous years!

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If you don’t already have a library card, you can sign up for one for free online today and start reading the Best Books of 2022! Access everything the Library has to offer, from free one-on-one online tutoring to e-books, with your library card.

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Readers Share Their Favorite Books of 2022

New York Times readers recommend some of their favorite books, new and old, that they read in 2022.

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best new books of 2022

By MJ Franklin

What a year for reading! Over at the Book Review, we’ve already announced our 10 Best Books of 2022 and our 100 Notables list, and our genre columnists shared their best-of-the-year lists. With 2022 just about over and 2023 on the horizon, we asked Times readers to share their favorite books, new or old, that they read and loved this year.

Below are some of the responses, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.

“ Lessons in Chemistry ,” by Bonnie Garmus

I don’t think I have ever laughed out loud so many times while reading a novel. As hilariously funny as it was, “Lessons in Chemistry” has at its heart a deeply important feminist message of how sexism and misogyny thwarted many women in the 1950s and 1960s when they had intelligence and skills to give the world. To be able to write such a strong feminist message in a truly funny book is a remarkable achievement!

—Mary Logan Rothschild, Phoenix

“ Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow ,” by Gabrielle Zevin

Gabrielle Zevin’s novel is exactly the kind of book I always wanted to get assigned in school; it’s vivid and insightful, but doesn’t get bogged down by overindulgent prose. It’s a sentimental story about love, work and friendship, meaningfully set against the backdrop of gaming — a subject which fiction too often treats as a narrative gimmick, objective correlative or some other transient device. Instead, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” uses video games to explore the natures of its main characters, manifesting a story saturated with so much complexity that it holds up to reading again and again — and it makes my heart ache every single time.

—Jake Carson Steinberg, Philadelphia

“ Honey & Spice ,” by Bolu Babalola

This book felt like me.

Having attended a British uni with a big African-Brit community (very much like the characters Kiki and Malakai at their society, Blackwell), reading about all that existed in their world while their story took place was nothing short of amazing. Everything about the way the story moved and flowed was so familiar. I felt like I lived it and to me, that is why I read — to see myself in pages and bask in the knowledge that I *get* it. This was one of those reads.

Beyond that, it is definitely my favorite because you can feel the care and thoughtfulness that went into crafting the very realistic characters. As a big lover girl, it helped that the whole book literally bled romance and Black joy and excellence. Totally swoon-worthy.

—Anna-Maria Poku, London

“ The Family Roe: An American Story ,” by Joshua Prager

Though this powerhouse work was released before Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, its content has never been more relevant. This is a masterful work of journalism that also conveys a very human story. We not only learn the story of Norma McCorvey (a.k.a. Jane Roe), but we also see others directly impacted by her story and the term “abortion” — whether in legal, medicinal or advocacy contexts. This book will also have you going through the full palette of emotions: empathy, sadness and rage included.

—Ira Kantor, Belmont, Mass.

“ Killers of a Certain Age ,” by Deanna Raybourn

I’m not going gracefully into my 50s. Things have started to hurt, relationships are beginning to fray, and my kids are needing me less and less. I’m feeling a bit invisible.

In this book, four women over 60 refuse to become invisible, or die for that matter. The book is a wonderful race around the world and a fun romp, as seen through the eyes of women with experience and full lives. Old birds were the stars of a thriller! And they kicked butt too!

The book made me take my bucket list out and start rethinking this “invisibility” nonsense!

—Erica Woods, Raleigh, N.C.

“ Hello, Molly! ,” by Molly Shannon with Sean Wilsey

I didn’t expect to be as captivated by this book as I was. Shannon told her story, which began horribly tragically, with wonderful verve, humor and positivity. This book also gave very interesting and specific details of the incredible effort she made to break into the business. I found her discussion of the impact of trauma on herself and her family to ring true to me.

—Mona Shapiro, Katonah, N.Y.

“ Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth ,” by Elizabeth Williamson

At first, America responded to the Sandy Hook tragedy with charity and empathy. But those feelings were supplanted with envy and eventually accusations of fraud and conspiracy. No other book I read this year conveyed the perils of mass communication and social media. The parents of those lost children became victims themselves. How they struck back made a great cautionary tale.

—Myles Kesten, Toronto

“ Matrix, ” by Lauren Groff

I picked this on a whim from the list of available audio titles at my library. I couldn’t believe my attention was held so raptly by the story of 12th-century nuns, but I loved their community, their personalities, their ambitions especially. This all while I was up late taking care of my newborn. I loved it.

—Chloe Burnham, Augusta, Ga.

“ Gay Bar: Why We Went Out ,” by Jeremy Atherton Lin

I read this book after the shooting in Colorado Springs. I love the book’s blend of memoir and history. It’s trying to answer the question of why gay bars are important and Atherton Lin was able to answer it in a very human way, helping me to unpack my own feelings as a gay man living in 2022.

—Michael Padden, Kansas City, Mo.

“ One Hundred Years of Solitude ,” by Gabriel García Márquez

I had started the book as a teen but couldn’t get into it. So at the ripe old age of 35, I picked it up again and found it absolutely mesmerizing. The book was one of my favorite reads of the year not only because it is so obviously beautiful, but also because it served as a reminder of how I have changed and evolved over the years.

—Nyda Mukhtar, Washington, D.C.

“ Crying in H Mart ,” by Michelle Zauner

I haven’t read very much that speaks to exactly what it feels like growing up as a biracial person in the United States. There are differences between me and Michelle Zauner, but the way she wrote about her identity was so significant for me.

—Olivia Butts, Bloomington, Ill.

“ Natural History ,” by Carlos Fonseca, translated by Megan McDowell

At a point when the weight of the world and the fears of our politics were weighing down on me, this book served somehow as escapism while tackling the very serious topics I couldn’t get out of my mind. It’s a multi-decade drama of a fashion designer’s family, encompassing multiple continents, varying political philosophies, betrayal, abandonment, and a long and rewarding section where art is put on trial.

This book stayed with me all year and helped me pledge to read more Latin and South American authors.

—Scot Sedley, Beacon, N.Y.

“ Eighty-Sixed ,” by David B. Feinberg

Most gay books that take place in New York in the 1980s are angry and filled with despair as AIDS ravages the community. David Feinberg’s “Eighty-Sixed” is unique in that the whole first half is a joyous celebration of gay life in the city, from bathhouses to gay bars to bedrooms. Feinberg is hilarious and heartfelt as he navigates sex, dating, his family and his friends. And even though the second half, which takes place in 1986, inevitably descends into the heartbreak and chaos of the AIDS epidemic, Feinberg remains his neurotic, hyper-self-conscious, hilarious self.

—Adam Roberts, Los Angeles

“ The Indomitable Florence Finch: The Untold Story of a War Widow Turned Resistance Fighter and Savior of American POWs ,” by Robert J. Mrazek

Every once in a while we need to be reminded that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. We need a healthy dose of inspiration. This book provided that.

It is my No. 1 choice because the humble Florence Finch, a young, widowed Filipino woman living in Manila during World War II, left me in awe of her bravery and courage. Why had I never heard of this woman? Her actions saved countless lives. This book was hard to put down, a “fix your own dinner, I am reading” book. It will remain in my soul as inspiration.

—Jan Drury, Portland, Ore.

“ Lucy by the Sea ,” by Elizabeth Strout

“Lucy by the Sea” was my favorite read of 2022. It brought back the early days of the pandemic so clearly with the experiences of the familiar character, Lucy Barton, by the masterful writer Elizabeth Strout. You could feel the raw emotions, the fear and wonder, the sights, sounds and tastes of those first few months so clearly. It brought the reader back to a unique time where our lives and relationships changed and will never be the same again.

—Karen Hartman, Westminster, Colo.

“ The Story of the Lost Child ,” by Elena Ferrante

It’s the end of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. One story spanning four novels — and five decades of births and deaths, alliances and betrayals — it ends as intensely as it begins. You never forget that the epic rests on the archetypal friendship of two vividly drawn girls, best friends often in conflict.

It reads like 19th-century realism, except for the brutal, morally complex clarity with which the narrator examines her surroundings and herself. I’ve recommended the series to every reader I meet.

—Clinton Springer, West Linn, Ore.

MJ Franklin is an editor at the Book Review.

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