fiction best selling books 2022

The Best Books of 2022

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

The Essentials

Fiction & poetry.

Book cover for Afterlives

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

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

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fiction best selling books 2022

An Immense World

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

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

Bad Mexicans

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

Book cover for The Book of Goose

The Book of Goose

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

Book cover for The Books of Jacob

The Books of Jacob

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

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Checkout 19

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

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

Chilean Poet

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

Book cover for Constructing A Nervous System

Constructing a Nervous System

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

Books & Fiction

fiction best selling books 2022

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

Book cover for Continuous Creation by Les Murray

Continuous Creation

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

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

Solmaz Sharif poses outdoors.

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

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

A photograph of J. Edgar Hoover.

Getting Lost

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

Annie Ernaux, photographed by Bettina Pittaluga.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

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

Book cover for Invisible Kingdom

The Invisible Kingdom

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

Book cover for The Last White Man

The Last White Man

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

Book cover for Lessons

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

Book cover for Magnificent Rebels. Woman holding up feathere

Magnificent Rebels

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

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

The Rabbit Hutch

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

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The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

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

Portrait of Samuel Adams writing on a chair.

The Song of the Cell

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

Book cover for Stay True

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

Book cover for Strangers to Ourselves

Strangers to Ourselves

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

Book cover for Trust by Hernan Diaz

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

fiction best selling books 2022

We Don’t Know Ourselves

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

A cross over a silhouette of Ireland

Also Recommended

fiction best selling books 2022

The Individualists

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

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

Western Lane

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Young Bloomsbury

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

fiction best selling books 2022

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

fiction best selling books 2022

My Phantoms

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

Gwendoline Riley, photographed by Daragh Soden.

City of Newsmen

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

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

Cursed Bunny

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

fiction best selling books 2022

How Far the Light Reaches

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Of Boys and Men

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

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

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

fiction best selling books 2022

The Lion House

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

fiction best selling books 2022

This Afterlife

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

fiction best selling books 2022

A Private Spy

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

Photograph of John le Carré in London.

Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion

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

fiction best selling books 2022

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Dinner with Joseph Johnson

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

fiction best selling books 2022

The Mountain in the Sea

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Sybil & Cyril

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

fiction best selling books 2022

American Caliph

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Slouching Towards Utopia

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Visual Thinking

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Confidence Man

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

A portrait of the journalist Maggie Haberman.

The Easy Life

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

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

No One Left to Come Looking for You

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

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

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If Walls Could Speak

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

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The Latecomer

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

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The Island of Extraordinary Captives

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

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A Poison Like No Other

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

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

Seduced by Story

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

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

The Passenger

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

Portrait of writer Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris

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

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We Are Not One

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

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The Grand Affair

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

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

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Scatterlings

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

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They’re Going to Love You

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

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The Grimkes

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

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The White Mosque

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

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

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A Heart That Works

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

Actor Rob Delaney near his home in North London.

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss

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

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Life Is Everywhere

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

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

Hollywood: The Oral History

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

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

Everything the Light Touches

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

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Beyond Measure

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

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How to Speak Whale

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

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James Purdy

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

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

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A Left-Handed Woman

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

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Ted Kennedy: A Life

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

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Cheap Land Colorado

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

People standing outside a trailer in the mountains.

Well of Souls

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

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The Backstreets

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

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The Magic Kingdom

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

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The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution

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

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

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

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

Book cover for Finale

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

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The Escape Artist

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

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Shirley Hazzard

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

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Botticelli’s Secret

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

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

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

A Shiver in the Leaves

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

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

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

Indigenous Continent

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

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

Metamorphoses

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

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

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Number One Is Walking

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

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Power Failure

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

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

When We Were Sisters

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

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

Strollers in a line outside of a building

Diaghilev’s Empire

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

fiction best selling books 2022

New and Selected Stories

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

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

A Trail of Crab Tracks

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

Portrait of Patrice Nganang.

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

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

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

Book cover for The Hangman and His Wife by Nancy Dougherty

The Hangman and His Wife

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

Book cover for Keats by Lucasta Miller

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

Imaginary Languages by Marina Yaguello

Imaginary Languages

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

Book cover for Fire Island by Jack Parlett

Fire Island

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

fiction best selling books 2022

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

Anne Truitt at the André Emmerich gallery.

The Twilight World

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

Werner Herzog in New York City.

Tracy Flick Can’t Win

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

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

Streets of Gold

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

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

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

Book cover for School Days by Jonathan Galassi

School Days

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

Book cover for Metaphysical Animals

Metaphysical Animals

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

Book cover for Adriatic by Robert D. Kaplan

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

Book cover for Avalon by Nell Zink

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

Book cover for Love Marriage by Monica Ali

Love Marriage

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

Book cover for Fight Like Hell by Kim Kelly

Fight Like Hell

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

Book cover for Stepping Back from the Ledge by Laura Trujillo

Stepping Back from the Ledge

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

Book cover for Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman

Acts of Service

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

Book cover for Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

Time Shelter

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

Book cover for The Shores of Bohemia

The Shores of Bohemia

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

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Two Wheels Good

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

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What’s Good

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

A drawing of a pie and a tie.

Spin Dictators

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

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

The Letters of Thom Gunn

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

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

The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

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

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

The Last Days of Roger Federer

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

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

A Sister’s Story

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

Book cover for Life on the Rocks by Juli Berwald

Life on the Rocks

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Who Killed Jane Stanford?

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

A portrait of Jane Stanford.

The Revenge of Power

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

Book cover for Everything Abridged

Everything Abridged

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

Book cover for Either/Or

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

Book cover for Rouge Street by Shuang Xuetao

Rouge Street

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

Book cover for Dress Code by Véronique Hyland

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

Book cover for Journeys to Heaven and Hell

Journeys to Heaven and Hell

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

Book cover for Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej

Little Rabbit

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

Book cover for Essential Labor

Essential Labor

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

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

Private Notebooks

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

Portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein broken up by shapes

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

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

Ancestor Trouble

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

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

In the Early Times

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

Book cover for Eleutheria by Allegra Hyde

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

Book cover for Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde

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

Book cover for Serenade by Toni Bentley

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Activities of Daily Living

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

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

Homesickness

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

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

I’m More Dateable than a Plate of Refried Beans

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

Book cover for The Premonitions Bureau

The Premonitions Bureau

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

Book cover for La Nijinska by Lynn Garafola

La Nijinska

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

Book cover for How Strange A Season

How Strange a Season

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

Book cover for Glory

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

Book cover for Didn't We Almost Have It

Didn’t We Almost Have It All

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

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

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

Gathering Blossoms Under Fire

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

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

The Trees Witness Everything

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Making History

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

A knight on a horse, holding up a pen.

Winslow Homer

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

"Dressing for the Carnival" by Winslow Homer.

Africa’s Struggle for Its Art

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

Illustration of Benin Bronze mask

The Genesis Machine

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

Book cover for Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

Woman, Eating

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

Book cover for Whole Earth by John Markoff

Whole Earth

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

Book cover for Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh

Mercy Street

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

Book cover for let there Be Light

Let There Be Light

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

Book cover for The Believer

The Believer

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

Book cover for The Pages by Hugo Hamilton

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

Book cover for Portrait of an Unknown Lady by María Gainza

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

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

Book cover for The Subplot by Megan Walsh

The Subplot

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

fiction best selling books 2022

A Childhood

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

Harry Crews.

Animal Person

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

Book cover for The Candy House

The Candy House

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

Book cover for Riverman

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

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

My Fourth Time, We Drowned

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

Book cover for Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra

Run and Hide

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

Book cover for Dream-Child by Eric G. Wilson

Dream-Child

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

Book cover for The White Girl by Tony Birch

The White Girl

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

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Butler to the World

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

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

Aurelia, Aurélia

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

Book cover for Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

Lucky Breaks

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

Book cover for Otherlands by Thomas Halliday

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

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Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

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

Author John Gunther typing.

Let’s Get Physical

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

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

Every Good Boy Does Fine

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

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Sweat: A History of Exercise

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

Book cover for Defenestrate by Renée Branum

Defenestrate

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

Book cover for Civil Rights Queen by Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Civil Rights Queen

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

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

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water

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

Book cover for Be Pregnant

Be Pregnant

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

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The Trials of Harry S. Truman

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

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

Foreverland

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

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

The Door-Man

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

Book cover for Jena 1800 by Peter Neumann

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

Book cover for The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi

The Hummingbird

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

Book cover for Born of Lakes and Plains

Born of Lakes and Plains

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

Book cover for The Turning Point

The Turning Point

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

Charles Dickens speaking in front of the stage.

What's So Funny?

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

Book cover for Sex and the Single Panda

Sex and the Single Panda

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

Book cover for White Lies by A. J. Baime

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

Book cover for The Torqued Man by Peter Mann

The Torqued Man

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

Book cover for The Founders by Jimmy Soni

The Founders

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

Book cover for Free Love by Tessa Hadley

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

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Florine Stettheimer

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

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

Scattered All Over the Earth

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

Portrait of Yoko Tawada.

American Shtetl

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

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

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama

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

Book cover for Rebels Against the Raj

Rebels Against the Raj

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

Book cover for Eating to Extinction by Dan Saladino

Eating to Extinction

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

Book cover for Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti

Strangers I Know

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

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You Don’t Know Us Negroes

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

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

Black Cloud Rising

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

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

Index, a History of the

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

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

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat

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

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

The Great Mrs. Elias

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

Book cover for Last Resort by Andrew Lipstein

Last Resort

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

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Pure Colour

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

Book cover for Cold Enough for Snow

Cold Enough for Snow

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

An aerial view of Tokyo.

All the Flowers Kneeling

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

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

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

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

Book cover for Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

Very Cold People

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

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

The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson

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

Book cover for Speak Not by James Griffiths

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

Book cover for Bibliolepsy by Gina Apostol

Bibliolepsy

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

Book cover for The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

The School for Good Mothers

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

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

Buster Keaton

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

Portrait of Buster Keaton.

Thank You, Mr. Nixon

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

Book cover for Worn by Sofi Thanhauser

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

Book cover for The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed

The Fortune Men

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

Book cover for Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang

Joan Is Okay

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

Book cover for The Secret Listener by Yuan-tsung Chen

The Secret Listener

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

Book cover for The Swank Hotel by Lucy Corin

The Stars Are Not Yet Bells

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

Book cover for South to America by Imani Perry

South to America

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

Book cover for The Uninnocent by Katharine Blake

The Uninnocent

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

Book cover for The Swank Hotel

The Swank Hotel

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

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

Book cover for Free

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

Book cover for It’s Getting Dark by Peter Stamm

It’s Getting Dark

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

Book cover for The Urge by Carl Erik Fisher

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

Book cover for In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali

In Case of Emergency

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

Book cover for I Came all this Way to Meet You

I Came All This Way to Meet You

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

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Lost & Found

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

Book cover for Aftermath

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

Book cover for Pushing Cool

Pushing Cool

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

Book cover for The Wedding Party

The Wedding Party

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

Book cover for The Women I Love

The Women I Love

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

fiction best selling books 2022

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The Best Books We’ve Read in 2023 So Far

By The New Yorker

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The best new fiction of 2022 so far, from fantasy sequels to highly anticipated thrillers

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  • We gathered the top-rated and best-selling fiction books of 2022 so far.
  • These picks include new historical fiction, romance, fantasy, and sci-fi books.
  • For more great books, check out the best books of 2022 so far , according to Goodreads.

Insider Today

Every year brings new and amazing books to shelves everywhere, but it can be overwhelming to sort through hundreds of titles to find a book that truly stands out from the rest. Fortunately, with reviews from readers, bookshops, and editors, the most memorable new titles still rise to the top. 

To create this list of recommendations, we pulled readers' favorite new fiction books from a variety of sources including top-ranking titles on Goodreads , bestseller lists on Audible and Libro.fm , and books readers can't stop talking about on social media. From fantasy sequels to heart-pounding historical fiction, here is some of the best new fiction of 2022 so far.

The best fiction books of 2022 so far:

"black cake" by charmaine wilkerson.

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.81

Insightful, memorable, and masterfully written, " Black Cake " is a transportive and expansive novel that begins as Byron and Benny inherit a traditional Caribbean black cake and a voice recording in the wake of their mother's passing. In this story of heritage, memories, and history, the siblings must unravel their mother's story to create a new and deeper understanding of her, their family, and themselves.

"All My Rage" by Sabaa Tahir

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.99

Salahudin and Noor were more than best friends until a terrible fight destroyed their bond, leaving each of them to face their familial and personal challenges alone. As Sal tries to hold his family and their business together after his mother's passing and Noor attempts to avoid her uncle's wrath as she applies to college against his wishes, the two must decide the value of their friendship and what they need to move forward.

"Book Lovers" by Emily Henry

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.82

Emily Henry's latest beach-read romance follows Nora Stephens, an NYC literary agent whose own love life is far from perfect. When her sister, Libby, suggests a trip for just the two of them to a storybook-like town in North Carolina, Nora agrees in the hopes of becoming the heroine of her own story but almost immediately runs into Charlie Lastra, a brooding book editor — and her greatest rival. 

"Violeta" by Isabel Allende

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $22.84

" Violeta " is an epic new historical fiction novel about Violeta del Valle, born in 1920 in South America to a family of sons. Told in the form of a letter, Violeta's life spans a century of extraordinary events, from personal heartbreak and great triumphs to the fight for women's rights and two terrible pandemics.

"True Biz" by Sara Nović

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $18.91

At the River Valley School for the Deaf, Charlie is a new transfer student, Austin is the school's "golden boy," and February is their headmistress, fighting to keep the school open while juggling personal challenges of her own. " True Biz " follows the students and the school as they are rocked by personal, political, and familial unrest over a tumultuous year that will change their lives forever.

"House of Sky and Breath" by Sarah J. Maas

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.74

" House of Sky and Breath " is the highly anticipated sequel to Sarah J. Maas' " House of Earth and Blood ," both of which are loved by readers for the spellbinding magic systems, their deep care for the characters, and the exhilarating, suspenseful plot that keeps them invested for 800 pages. In this sequel, Bryce and Hunt have saved Cresent City and are looking for a moment of peace but as the rebels slowly chip away at the Asteri's power, the two know they cannot stay silent while others are oppressed.

"Lessons in Chemistry" by Bonnie Garmus

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $18.48

In this story set in 1960s California, Elizabeth Zott is a chemist whose male coworkers see her as little more than a woman in the way. When her career takes a sharp turn and she finds herself the star of a beloved American cooking show, people still aren't happy, as she not only takes a unique approach to cooking, but in many ways is teaching women to defy the status quo in this funny and feminist historical fiction read. 

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

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.99

As humanity is challenged with rebuilding after a climate plague reshapes life on Earth, this science fiction novel bends to follow linked narratives of those affected in a vast variety of ways, from a scientist searching for a cure to a painter and her granddaughter looking for a new home planet. Loved for its intricate and imitate connections between characters, themes, and stories, " How High We Go in the Dark " is a tale of compassion, resiliency, and hope.

"Daughter of the Moon Goddess" by Sue Lynn Tan

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $23.49

Inspired by the legend of the Chinese moon goddess, Chang'e, " Daughter of the Moon Goddess " is about Xingyin, who grew up on the moon, unaware that she is being hidden from the Celestial Emperor until her magic reveals her existence and she's forced to flee her home and leave her mother behind. To save her mother, Xingyin disguises her identity, learns mastery and magic alongside the emperor's son, and sets off on a dangerous quest of magic, honor, and betrayal.

"Young Mungo" by Douglas Stuart

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $23.99

Born into different religions, Mungo and James should be sworn enemies yet find safety in each other as their close friendship blooms into love. When Mungo is sent on a fishing trip with two of his mother's friends from AA, darker intentions arise in this story of masculinity, queerness, division, and violence. 

"This Time Tomorrow" by Emma Straub

fiction best selling books 2022

Available for pre-order on Amazon and Bookshop , from $21.99

When Alice wakes up on the morning of her 40th birthday, she seems to have been transported back in time to 1996 to relive her 16th birthday. Though her father is ailing in the present day, she's reunited with her younger, full-of-life dad and, armed with decades of experience, relives the day with a new perspective, bringing new meaning to memories and leaving Alice wondering if she could — or should — change anything about that day.

"Reminders of Him" by Colleen Hoover

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.57

" Reminders of Him " is a Colleen Hoover story of redemption as Kenna Rowan returns to her town after a five-year prison sentence, hoping to reunite with her young daughter, though all those who knew her determinedly shut her out. Turning to the local bar owner, Ledger Ward, Kenna finds a remaining link to her daughter, but when the two form a deeper connection, romance brings greater risk and Kenna must find a way to fix the past in order to solidify a better future.

"Memphis" by Tara M. Stringfellow

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $18.28

During the summer of 1995, 10-year-old Joan moves with her mother and younger sister into their mother's family home in Memphis, fleeing their father's violence, though the home is marked by a history of violence all its own. In her grief, Joan begins to create portraits of the women in North Memphis and unravels a past, present, and future of matrilineal tradition, healing, and curses from the stories of those she encounters.

"Sea of Tranquility" by Emily St. John Mandel

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.25

Part time travel epic and part pandemic literature, " Sea of Tranquility " is a science fiction novel that spans centuries from an airship terminal in the Canadian wilderness in 1912 to a moon colony 300 years in the future to tell a story of humanity and the many ways we are impacted by a pandemic world. Unique, profound, and memorable, this new novel combines speculative and literary elements to take readers on a fast-paced journey.

"Four Treasures of the Sky" by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $18.69

Though Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for which she was named, everything changes when she's kidnapped and smuggled from China to America. " Four Treasures of the Sky " is a story of self-discovery, Chinese history and folklore, and the ways in which Daiyu had to continuously change herself to survive.

"The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea" by Axie Oh

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.99

In Mina's homeland, the people believe the Sea God curses their land with terrible storms and war so they sacrifice a beautiful maiden in the hopes their choice will one day be his "true bride" and end their suffering. When Shim Cheong, Mina's brother's beloved, is chosen as the sacrifice, Mina throws herself into the water in her place and is swept away to the Spirit Realm. There, she sets out to wake the Sea God and end her home's suffering once and for all.

"Brown Girls" by Daphne Palasi Andreades

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.31

In Queens, New York, young girls and women of color are growing up in the center of vibrant culture, learning to balance their immigrant heritage with the American world around them. " Brown Girls " reads like a literary poem dedicated to the young women who experience this unique crossroads as they make their own place in the world, a story that continues to resonate with many readers.

"Peach Blossom Spring" by Melissa Fu

fiction best selling books 2022

Lily desperately wants to understand her family's heritage, but her father refuses to speak about his childhood and his story of fleeing his family home with his mother in 1938 as the Japanese army encroached on their land. " Peach Blossom Spring " is a powerful story of war, migration, and heritage that jumps across continents and centuries to convey the importance of telling our stories.

"Don't Cry for Me" by Daniel Black

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $22.48

As Jacob lays on his deathbed, he knows there are many truths he must share with his son, Isaac, though the two have not spoken in many years. Through letters, Jacob reveals ancestral stories, long-buried secrets, and hopeful explanations for his reaction to Isaac's being gay. " Don't Cry for Me " is an emotional historical fiction novel about reckoning, reconciliation, and healing.

"Take My Hand" by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $18.90

" Take My Hand " is a new historical fiction novel inspired by true events that begin with Civil Townsend in 1973 as she takes a job fresh out of nursing school at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic in Alabama. In her first week, she encounters 11- and 13-year-old sisters whose situation raises alarms for Civil. Decades later, Civil is ready to retire when history returns in this story of bravery, institutional racism and classism, and the ways Black communities have been targeted and attacked throughout history.

"The Diamond Eye" by Kate Quinn

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.87

Though Mila Pavlichenko's life in 1937 Ukraine revolves around her library job and her son, everything changes when Hilter invades and she's sent into war with a rifle, quickly becoming one of the deadliest snipers known to the Nazi regime. When her 300th kill makes national news, she's pulled from the war for a goodwill tour in America until an old enemy and new foe pull Mila into a battle deadlier than the war.

"Kaikeyi" by Vaishnavi Patel

fiction best selling books 2022

Available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $21.99

" Kaikeyi " is a beautiful new retelling of "The Ramayana," an ancient Indian epic. In this retelling, Kaikeyi is raised in her father's kingdom, taught to revere and respect the gods yet never receives the help she needs. When Kaikeyi discovers the magic inside her, she transforms into a warrior and queen with the power to change the world for women until her past, destiny, and present collide and force her to weigh the consequences of resistance.

fiction best selling books 2022

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Booklist Queen

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New York Times Fiction Bestseller List 2022

The New York Times Fiction Bestseller List 2022

Go beyond just the current list of New York Times Fiction Best Sellers to discover every bestselling book listed on the NYT Bestseller List in 2022.

Since 1931, The New York Times has been publishing a weekly list of bestselling books. Since then, becoming a New York Times bestseller has become a dream for virtually every writer.

When I first started reading adult fiction, one of the first places I went for book recommendations was the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers. I wanted to know what books were the most widely read, and start with those.

However, scrolling through the list week by week on The New York Times website is rather annoying. I just wanted all the bestselling fiction books gathered together in one place.

When I couldn’t find it, I decided to create it.

Here are all the New York Times fiction bestsellers from 2022. Instead of just the current best seller list , which you can find all over the place, I’ve compiled a list of every book that has appeared on the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers list in 2022 for Hardcover Fiction. 

Note: The week count in this list stops on the last week of 2022. Visit the 2023 Bestseller List if you want to find out which books kept ranking into the next year.

Since this is a bit of a sprawling post, feel free to jump to the section that most interests you or take your time scrolling through the complete list of New York Times fiction best sellers.

Quick Links

  • #1 Fiction Best Sellers of 2022
  • Heavyweights (10+ Weeks)
  • Fan Favorites (5+ Weeks)
  • Honorable Mention (2+ Weeks)
  • One Hit Wonders

Don’t Miss a Thing

#1 New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2022

book cover Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Where the Crawdads Sing

Delia owens.

(134 Weeks) For years, Kya Clark has survived alone in the marshes of the North Carolina coast. Dubbed “The Marsh Girl” by the locals, she raises herself in nature after her family abandons her. Now, as she comes of age, she begins to yearn for something more than her loneliness – maybe even a connection with the locals. An exquisitely written tale, Where the Crawdads Sing is one of the best books on nature for you to read.

Publication Date: 14 August 2018 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

The Midnight Library

(94 Weeks) In the Midnight Library, there are two books – one book for the life you’ve lived and one for the one you could have lived. Nora Seed must decide which book to choose from. What if she had made different choices? Would her life truly have been better?

Publication Date: 29 September 2020 Amazon | Goodreads |  More Info

book cover The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave

The Last Thing He Told Me

(63 Weeks) Before Owen Michaels disappeared, he smuggled a note to his new wife Hannah: Protect her . Hannah knows he’s referring to his sixteen-year-old daughter Bailey, but Bailey doesn’t want anything to do with Hannah. As Owen’s boss gets arrested and the FBI come knocking, Hannah and Bailey must come together to discover Owen’s secrets.

Publication Date: 4 May 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie garmus.

(31 Weeks) Elizabeth Zott has always defied stereotyping, especially as the only woman chemist at the Hastings Research Institute in the 1960s. After falling in love with another chemist who sees her for who she is, life throws her a curveball. Now as a single mom, she unexpectedly finds herself the host of a tv cooking show. When Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking charms her audience, the women who watch her begin to question the status quo in their own lives, making Elizabeth a target of those who find the change unwelcome.

Publication Date: 5 April 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

The Lincoln Highway

Amor towles.

(30 Weeks) After spending a year at a prison work farm for involuntary manslaughter, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson returns to his Nebraska hometown. With his mother gone and his father recently deceased, Emmett plans to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head West. But his plans are derailed when two friends from the work farm suddenly appear with a scheme of their own.

Publication Date: 5 October 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Billy Summers by Stephen King

Billy Summers

Stephen king.

(20 Weeks) From the master of fiction comes a new novel about a good guy in a bad job. Sniper for hire Billy Summers is picky about his jobs. The decorated Iraq war veteran only accepts hits on men who are truly evil. Before getting out of the game, Billy decides to accept one last job when everything goes wrong.

Publication Date: 3 August 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover The Judge's List by John Grisham

The Judge’s List

John grisham.

(20 Weeks) After taking on a criminal syndicate that was paying off a federal judge in The Whistler , Florida Board of Judicial Conduct investigator Lacy Stoltz returns in Grisham’s latest thriller. In her latest case, the crimes are even worse than before. Instead of taking bribes, a corrupt judge is taking lives with his own hit list.

Publication Date: 19 October 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley

The Paris Apartment

(21 Weeks) Looking for a fresh start, Jess moves into her half-brother’s Paris apartment only to find him missing. The longer Ben stays gone, the more Jess begins to question his living situation. Jess can tell the neighbors know more than they are telling, making each one a viable suspect in this new thriller from the author of The Guest List .

Publication Date: 22 February 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover The Stranger in the Lifeboat by Mitch Albom

The Stranger in the Lifeboat

Mitch albom.

(18 Weeks) How would you react if you called for help from God and He answered? In Albom’s new Christian novel, a group of shipwrecked strangers pulls a man from the sea. He claims to be “The Lord” and can save them, but only if they all believe in him.

Publication Date: 2 November 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover The Wish by Nicholas Sparks

Nicholas Sparks

(17 Weeks) As a troubled teenager, Maggie Dawes was sent to live with her aunt in a remote North Carolina beach town. Her life is changed forever when she met Bryce Trickett, a handsome local teen who taught her to love the island and introduced her to photography before he heads off to West Point. Now a renowned travel photographer, Maggie recounts the story of her first love to her young assistant after Maggie is diagnosed with a crippling illness.

Publication Date: 28 September 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Run Rose Run by Dolly Parton and James Patterson

Run, Rose, Run

Dolly parton and james patterson.

(17 Weeks) James Patterson, one of the bestselling authors of all times, teams up with beloved musician Dolly Parton for a thriller about an up-and-coming singer-songwriter. Singing about the hard life she left behind, her fame is only increasing. When she settles in Nashville looking for her big break, the past she has been running from comes back to haunt her.

Publication Date: 7 March 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Fairy Tale by Stephen King

(14 Weeks) Seventeen-year-old Charlie is used to being on his own until he befriends Howard, an old recluse, and his beloved dog Radar, who live in a large house on the hill. After Howard dies, he leaves Charlie a note about a magical portal to a parallel world where good and evil are at war. Now, it’s up to Charlie and Radar to save both worlds.

Publication Date: 6 September 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Sparring Partners by John Grisham

Sparring Partners

(13  Weeks ) In his first-ever collection of novellas, John Grisham uses the law as a common theme to talk much more about life. In one story, Jake Brigance must deal with the return of a former Clanton lawyer who stole money from clients and then disappeared. Also included are stories of a death row inmate with a final request and two brothers fighting over their inherited law firm.

Publication Date: 31 May 2022 Amazon  |  Goodreads | More Info

book cover Dreamland by Nicholas Sparks

(12 Weeks) After tragedy ruins his dream of becoming a musician, Colby Mills settles into the life of a small-town farmer. When he spontaneously takes a gig at a bar in Florida, Colby falls in love with Morgan, an ambitious up-and-coming singer. As Colby and Morgan fall head over heels, their lives are changed when they meet a woman fleeing an abusive husband.

Publication Date: 20 September 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover The Maid by Nita Prose

(12 Weeks ) Although she struggles to interact with people, her love of order and cleanliness makes Molly Gray an excellent maid at the Regency Grand Hotel. When Molly discovers a wealthy guest dead in his hotel bed, the police peg her as the prime suspect due to her unusual behaviors. With the help of her friends, Molly must investigate the murder to prove her innocence in this locked-room mystery.

Publication Date: 4 January 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand

The Hotel Nantucket

Elin hilderbrand.

(12  Weeks ) After a breakup, Lizbet Keaton is excited for a fresh start at a newly remodeled Gilded Age hotel. Lizbet is desperate to please the billionaire owner and the popular Instagram influencer staying there this summer. With a charismatic staff with hidden pasts and the ghost of a former chambermaid haunting the halls, Lizbet has her work cut out for her as she tries to maintain the hotel’s reputation and sort out her own love life.

Publication Date: 14 June 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover The 6:20 Man by David Baldacci

The 6:20 Man

David baldacci.

(11 Weeks) Every day, Travis Devine takes the 6:20 commuter train to Manhattan, staring out at all the mansions of the uber-wealthy. When his coworker and former girlfriend is found dead in a storage room at their investment firm, Travis is forced to secretly investigate the firm, uncovering a high stakes conspiracy that lands him directly in the crosshairs of a killer.

Publication Date: 12 July 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny

State of Terror

Hillary rodham clinton and louise penny.

(9 Weeks) Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton teams up with acclaimed mystery novelist Louise Penny in one of the most-anticipated best new thriller books of Fall 2021. Years of American withdrawal from the world stage have left a power vacuum that its enemies have been more than happy to fill. After a series of terrorist attacks, novice Secretary of State Ellen Adams, under the administration of her rival, must unravel a deadly global conspiracy.

Publication Date: 12 October 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Dream Town by David Baldacci

(9 Weeks) In the third Archer Book, private investigator Aloysisu Archer has his celebrations with actress Liberty Callahan interrupted on New Year’s Eve in 1953. Screenwriter Eleanor Lamb wants to hire Archer to investigate after a series of phone calls, a suspicious car, and a bloody knife left in her house. When Eleanor disappears and a body is found in her house, Archer must unravel the dark secrets in Hollywood.

Publication Date: 19 April 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers

All Good People Here

Ashley flowers.

( 9 Weeks ) When she was six years old, Margot’s next-door neighbor and best friend, January, was murdered in their small hometown. Now a big-city journalist, Margot returns home to help care for her uncle when another girl disappears. Determined to find the missing girl and solve January’s murder, Margot begins to wonder how well she knows her neighbors.

Publication Date: 16 August 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover The Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham

The Boys from Biloxi

(8  Weeks ) In the 1960s, Keith and Hugh were best friends and baseball all-stars. But as they grow older, their lives take different trajectories. Keith’s father becomes a legendary prosecutor determined to clean up Biloxi and Hugh’s dad works his way up to become the head of the local mob. As both boys follow in their father’s footsteps, they find themselves on opposite sides of the law in Grisham’s latest legal thriller.

Publication Date: 18 October 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone by Diana Gabaldon

Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone

Diana gabaldon.

(8 Weeks) In the 9th Outlander book, a reunited Claire and Jamie face being torn asunder again as the American Revolution approaches their North Carolina home. After finally being reunited with their daughter Brianna and her family, the family is worried as the tensions of the colonists grow and the perils of the 1700s seem less safe than they thought.

Publication Date: 23 November 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman

Call Us What We Carry

Amanda gorman.

(8 Weeks) In 2021, Amanda Gorman became the youngest presidential inaugural poet in US history when she read her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at President Biden’s inauguration. In her expanded collection, Amanda Gorman becomes a new voice in American poetry.

Publication Date: 7 December 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Verity by Colleen Hoover

Colleen Hoover

(8 Weeks) Struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh receives the chance of a lifetime when Jeremy Crawford hires her to complete the bestselling book series of his injured wife, Verity. However, in Verity’s study, Lowen stumbles upon an unpublished autobiography full of dark confessions. As Lowen falls in love with Jeremy, she debates whether to show Jeremy Verity’s writing. Although originally published in 2018, Verity has become a fan favorite on TikTok and was just reprinted with a brand new chapter.

Publication Date: 7 December 2018 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Sally rooney.

(7 Weeks) Hitting the upper end of the new adult genre, Sally Rooney’s latest novel follows the lives of four single 30ish Irish protagonists as they try to find their way in life. On a whim, Alice, a novelist, invites Felix, a warehouse worker she just met, to travel to Rome with her. Meanwhile, while recovering from a breakup, Alice’s best friend Eileen begins flirting with Simon, a childhood friend.

Publication Date: 7 September 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover House of Sky and Breath by Sarah J. Maas

House of Sky and Breath

Sarah j. maas.

(7 Weeks) In the second book of her Crescent City series, Bryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar just want some rest after saving Crescent City. As the rebels continue to chip away at the Asteri’s powers, Bryce and Hunt are faced with a decision. Should they keep quiet while others are oppressed or join the rebels fighting the Asteri?

Publication Date: 15 February 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover 22 Seconds by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

(7 Weeks) In another case for the Women’s Murder Club, Lindsay Boxer’s husband is investigating a group determined to repeal the ban on the sale of automatic weapons. The group has been linked to a Mexican cartel bringing large shipments of drugs and guns across the border. Meanwhile, Lindsay is investigating the death of a corrupt cop. When his colleagues begin dying, she suspects someone is trying to silence them.

Publication Date: 2 May 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Daniel Silva

Portrait of an Unknown Woman

Daniel silva.

(6 Weeks) In the 22nd book in the series, Gabriel Allon searches for the world’s greatest art forger. After cutting ties with Israeli intelligence, Gabriel settled in Venice with his family. When he is asked to help investigate the sale of a recently discovered centuries-old painting, Gabriel finds himself dragged into a dangerous cat-and-mouse game.

Publication Date: 19 July 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins

A Slow Fire Burning

Paula hawkins.

(6 Weeks) When a young man is murdered on a London houseboat, police investigate three women: his one-night stand Laura, his grieving aunt Carla, and his nosy neighbor Miriam. Even though Miriam spotted Laura leaving the houseboat that night covered in blood, she is loath to say anything. For Miriam knows exactly what it’s like to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Publication Date: 31 August 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Long Shadows by David Baldacci

Long Shadows

(6 Weeks) When a judge and her bodyguard are murdered, Amos Decker realizes what seems like a clearcut case is anything but. The judge’s long list of enemies gives plenty of choices, but Decker can’t rule out that the bodyguard was the true target. As witnesses start disappearing, Decker and his new partner must solve the murder before Decker’s past comes back to haunt him.

Publication Date: 11 October 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Desert Star by Michael Connelly

Desert Star

Michael connelly.

(5 Weeks ) LAPD Detective Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch team up to finally hunt down the killer of Bosch’s entire family. Returning to the police force to work the cold case unit, Ballard convinces Bosch to volunteer so he can use the task force’s resources to search for his family’s killer. While Ballard is working on solving the rape and murder of a teen girl, Bosch finds his focus fractured and they two must hunt down two killers at once.

Publication Date: 8 November 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Carrie Soto is Back

Taylor jenkins reid.

(5 Weeks) When Carrie Soto retired from tennis six years ago, she was the best player the world had ever seen, shattering every record imaginable. Now a hotshot new tennis star is threatening to break Carrie’s legacy. At 37, Carrie attempts to come back for one more epic season to defend her title, even if defying all the odds means she has to train with a man from her past.

Publication Date: 30 August 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Nightwork by Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts

(5  Weeks ) To provide money for his ailing mother, Harry Booth began stealing at the age of nine and now as an adult has developed in a master thief. When Harry falls for the beautiful Miranda Emerson, he forces himself to ghost her, worried his personal relationship will be used as leverage against him. But his connection to Miranda proves harder to sever than he thought, and know he must face his associates to finally free himself.

Publication Date: 24 May 2022 Amazon  |  Goodreads | More Info

book cover The Investigator by John Sandford

The Investigator

John sandford.

(5 Weeks) Recently graduated from Stanford with a master’s in economics, Letty Davenport is getting bored at her desk job with Senator Colles. The adopted daughter of famed detective Lucas Davenport, Letty wants to see more action, so Senator Colles allows her to investigate oil thefts in Texas. Along with a Homeland Security investigator, Letty looks into a domestic militia group with terrifying plans.

Publication Date: 12 April 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Abandoned in Death by J D Robb

Abandoned in Death

(4 Weeks) In New York City, a woman’s body is found in the park with her makeup and hair perfectly arranged, clothes decades out of date, and a note saying “Bad Mommy.” The clock is ticking for homicide detective Eve Dallas to find the killer when other women matching the victim’s description go missing.

Publication Date: 8 February 2022 Amazon | Goodreads |  More Info

book cover The Choice by Nora Roberts

(3  Weeks ) In the third book in the Dragon Heart Lecay series, Breen Siobhan Kelly spends her first Christmas in both Talamh and Ireland. Yet, peace is still elusive. As darkness appears to her in her sleep, Kelly must unite with Keegan and Talamh to rescue those in deepest need.

book cover A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny

A World of Curiosities

Louise penny.

(2 Weeks ) In the 18th book in the series, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir are worried when the children of a murdered woman return to Three Pines. Why are they back and has their mother’s murder damaged them beyond repair? Meanwhile, Gamache discovers a 150-year-old letter from a stone mason about a bricked-up attic. When the room is discovered, the villagers open it up to find a room of curiosities and hidden messages.

Publication Date: 29 November 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Babel by R. F. Kuang

R. F. Kuang

(2 Weeks) In 1828, Robin Swift, an orphan, is brought from Canton to London by the mysterious Dr. Lovell. For years he trains in different languages to be accepted to Oxford’s Royal Institute of Translation, known as Babel. Learning to translate, and the magic that comes with it, soon puts Swift on a collision course between loyalty to his homeland and his adopted company when Britain starts a war with China.

Publication Date: 23 August 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover In the Blood by Jack Carr

In the Blood

( 2 Weeks ) In the fifth book of The Terminal List series, former Navy SEAL James Reece sets out on a global search for revenge. After successfully assassinating a target for Israeli intelligence, a woman boards a plane in Burkina Faso, only to have it blow up after takeoff. When Reece learns of her death, he uses all his contacts to find her killer, which might lead him straight into a trap.

Publication Date: 17 May 2022 Amazon  |  Goodreads | More Info

book cover Invisible by Danielle Steel

Danielle Steel

(2 Weeks) Growing up a neglected child in a loveless marriage, Antonia Adams has perfected the art of making herself invisible, drawing as little attention as she possibly can. Dreaming of becoming a screenwriter, a summer job at a Hollywood studio unexpectedly lands her a spot in the limelight. Will Antonia be able to face the scrutiny and her demons or fall back into the security of obscurity?

book cover To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

To Paradise

Hanya yanagihara.

(2 Weeks) From the author of A Little Life , comes three stories spanning three centuries about different versions of the American experiment. In an alternate version of 1893, a person from a distinguished family wants to marry a lowly music teacher. Amid an AIDS epidemic in 1993 Manhattan, a young Hawaiian man keeps secrets from his much older and weather partner. Lastly, a woman grieves the death of her grandfather and searches for her husband in a totalitarian regime in 2093.

Publication Date: 11 January 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner

Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner

(2 Weeks) Picking up right where the iconic heist film Heat left off, Chris Shiherlis is injured, hiding in Koreatown desperately looking for a way out of Los Angeles. LAPD Detective Vincent Hanna will stop at nothing to track down Shiherlis, the last survivor of McCauley’s crew. Yet, the repercussions of McCauley’s heists and Hannah’s dogged pursuit while last for generations.

Publication Date: 9 August 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Save for Later

New York Times Fiction Bestseller List 2022

Heavyweights (10+ Weeks on the NYT Bestseller List)

book cover The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

V. e. schwab.

(44 Weeks) To escape a forced marriage, Addie LaRue makes a bargain with the devil in 1714. She gets to live forever, but the catch is she will be forgotten by everyone she meets. After 300 years, Addie has become resigned to her fate until she meets a young man who remembers her name.

Publication Date: 6 October 2020 Amazon | Goodreads |  More Info

book cover Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Anthony doerr.

(21 Weeks) From the author of All the Light We Cannot See comes an ambitious work of literary fiction. Doerr’s novel toggles between three timelines – the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, present-day Idaho, and interstellar ship far in the future. Each piece explores the power of stories as a fictional ancient Greek comedy weaves throughout the entire book. The awe-inspiring power of the written word that Doerr evokes in every sentence will be appreciated by literary fiction lovers.

book cover Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary

(17 Weeks) In a last-ditch effort to save Earth from an extinction-level event, a group of astronauts is sent on a desperate mission in a cobbled-together spacecraft. But when Ryland Grace wakes up, he has no memory of his mission or why the rest of the crew is dead. The sole survivor, he must take on an impossible task with no margin for failure.

book cover Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

Wish You Were Here

Jodi picoult.

(13 Weeks) Diana O’Toole has her life perfectly mapped out and with her 30th birthday on the horizon, she is right on target to get engaged to her doctor boyfriend. When a virus breaks out in the city, Finn encourages Diana to go on their nonrefundable trip to the Galapagos Islands without him. Soon, Diana finds herself quarantined on the island during the pandemic and begins to reexamine her choices and priorities in life.

Publication Date: 30 November 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle

One Italian Summer

Rebecca serle.

(14 Weeks) When her mother dies just before their planned mother-daughter trip to Italy, Katy decides to still spend the summer exploring the Amalfi coast as she grieves. Magically, Katy meets a younger version of her mother, giving Katy a whole new perspective on her mother as a person.

Publication Date: 1 March 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

book cover Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle zevin.

( 11 Weeks ) On a bitterly cold day, Sam Masur runs into Sadie Green on a train platform and they renew their childhood friendship bonding over video games. Together, they create Ichigo, a blockbuster game that changes their lives. Over the next three decades, their friendship is tested as their success leads them to money, fame, love, and betrayal. More a heartrending story about friendship than video games, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is an unputdownable read with complex character development.

book cover Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

( 10 Weeks ) Olivia McAfee’s picture-perfect life is shattered when she finds out her husband’s dark secrets. Now divorced, she moves to her quiet New Hampshire hometown with her teenage son Asher. When Asher’s girlfriend dies and he’s the prime suspect, Olivia knows he must be innocent. Yet as more of Asher’s secrets are revealed, she begins to wonder if he’s more like his father than she thought.

Publication Date: 4 October 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Fan Favorites (5+ Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List)

book cover Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

book cover Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

book cover Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

(8 Weeks) Ray Carney, a family man who sells furniture on 125th Street, gets a new clientele made up of vicious and unsavory characters.

book cover Horse by Geraldine Brooks

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

book cover Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Amazon | Goodreads | More Info (7 Weeks) A detective investigating in the wilderness discovers that his actions might affect the timeline of the universe.  

book cover No Plan B by Lee Child and Andrew Child

No Plan B by Lee Child and Andrew Child

Amazon | Goodreads (7 Weeks) The 27th book in the Jack Reacher series. Reacher goes after a killer but is unaware of the bigger implications.

book cover Triple Cross by James Patterson

Triple Cross by James Patterson

book cover Going Rogue by Janet Evanovich

Going Rogue by Janet Evanovich

book cover The IT Girl by Ruth Ware

The It Girl by Ruth Ware

book cover Mercy by David Baldacci

Mercy by David Baldacci

book cover The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly

The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly

Amazon | Goodreads

(6 Weeks) A death on New Year’s Eve, an unsolved murder and a hunt for serial rapists bring Bosch and Ballard back together.

book cover Meant to Be by Emily Giffin

Meant to Be by Emily Giffin

book cover The Homewreckers by Mary Kay Andrews

The Homewreckers by Mary Kay Andrews

(5 Weeks) A widow starring in a beach house renovation reality show gets caught up in competing love interests and an old missing persons case.

book cover Book of Night Holly Black

Book of Night by Holly Black

(5 Weeks) A bartender working at a Berkshires dive bar deals with doppelgängers, billionaires and magicians seeking a vast and terrible power.

book cover Fear No Evil by James Patterson

Fear No Evil by James Patterson

book cover The Horsewoman by James Patterson and Mike Lupica

The Horsewoman by James Patterson and Mike Lupica

Amazon | Goodreads (5 Weeks) As the Paris Olympics draw near, a mother and daughter, who are champion horse riders, compete against each other.  

book cover The Club by Ellery Lloyd

The Club by Ellery Lloyd

book cover What Happened to the Bennetts by Lisa Scottoline

What Happened to the Bennetts by Lisa Scottoline

Amazon | Goodreads (5 Weeks) A brush with members of a drug-trafficking organization ushers a suburban family to go into the witness protection program.  

book cover Shattered by James Patterson and James O. Born

Shattered by James Patterson and James O. Born

book cover Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

book cover Blowback by James Patterson and Brendan DuBois

Blowback by James Patterson and Brendan DuBois

Amazon | Goodreads (5 Weeks) President Keegan Barrett’s power grab tests the loyalties of two C.I.A. agents.  

New York Times Fiction Bestseller List 2022

Honorable Mention (2-4 Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List)

book cover Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

One Hit Wonders (1 Week on the New York Times Best Seller List)

book cover Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

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Best fiction of 2022

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

The best books of 2022

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

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

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

Ali Smith Companion Piece

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

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

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

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

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

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

The Furrows by Namwali Serpell

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

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

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When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola

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

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

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

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

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50 notable works of fiction

The year’s best novels, short-story collections and works of fiction in translation.

fiction best selling books 2022

‘All the Lovers in the Night,’ by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

The best-selling author of “ Breasts and Eggs ” tells the story of a Tokyo-based copy editor who buries a traumatic episode under a solitary, regimented existence. But when she discovers the liberating properties of alcohol, the past comes flooding back.

‘The Books of Jacob,’ by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

When Polish author Tokarczuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize for literature, the judges praised this hefty book. Finally, English speakers can see what all the fuss is about: a sprawling but consistently entertaining account of Jacob Frank , a real-life 18th-century mystic whose disciples believed he was the messiah.

‘City on Fire,’ by Don Winslow

Winslow, a crime fiction virtuoso, has designs on retiring after he completes the trilogy that this novel launched — a kind of Greek tragedy about organized crime in Providence, R.I. It all starts with Irish mobster Danny Ryan, who has to deal with the escalating fallout after his brother-in-law gets handsy with an Italian gangster’s girlfriend.

‘The Consequences: Stories,’ by Manuel Muñoz

California’s Central Valley in the 1980s and ’90s is the setting for most of the poignant stories in this collection. Muñoz, a three-time O. Henry Award winner, reveals the vastness of Mexican and Mexican American identity with tales of deportation, teen pregnancy, AIDS and the quotidian drudgery of farm work.

‘Cult Classic,’ by Sloane Crosley

Crosley, already known for piercing observations in such essay collections as “ I Was Told There’d Be Cake ,” takes aim at social media and start-up culture . The novel’s protagonist, Lola, is thinking about settling down — if only she could get over the parade of exes whose accomplishments haunt her news feed.

‘Dr. No,’ by Percival Everett

Shortly after his novel “ The Trees ” was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Everett released this very different book about a mathematician who specializes in the study of nothingness. As it turns out, that knowledge could be useful to an aspiring supervillain who will shell out millions in exchange for help in weaponizing naught.

‘Either/Or,’ by Elif Batuman

In this sequel to “The Idiot,” Batuman picks up the story of Selin Karadag as she begins her sophomore year at Harvard. After a summer spent pining over an unrequited love, the fledgling writer embarks on a series of sexual encounters in the hopes of uncovering some revelation — or at least inspiration.

‘Fencing With the King,’ by Diana Abu-Jaber

A Palestinian American woman, curious about her extended family, accompanies her father to a month-long birthday celebration for the king of Jordan. But when she begins piecing together puzzles of the past , she ends up at odds with her scheming uncle.

‘Forbidden City,’ by Vanessa Hua

In 1960s China, teenager Mei Xiang departs her small village to join Chairman Mao’s dance troupe, ultimately becoming his confidante and lover. Hua’s bestseller uses Mei’s decades-spanning story to consider the women who were used, then erased from the history of China’s Cultural Revolution.

‘The Foundling,’ by Ann Leary

A dark piece of history — the practice of incarcerating “feebleminded” women — inspires a twisting nail-biter with a caper of a climax . Protagonist Mary, an orphan, falls under the spell of the elegant doctor in charge of a home for women that turns out to be less altruistic than it appears.

‘Free Love,’ by Tessa Hadley

The year is 1967, and Phyllis Fischer embodies the suburban ideal : nice house, loving husband, two kids. But when a younger man she barely knows kisses her, Phyllis begins to question everything she thought she knew — and loved — about her life.

‘The Furrows,’ by Namwali Serpell

Serpell’s second novel is as stunning as her critically acclaimed first, “ The Old Drift .” Through this story of a woman whose brother disappeared when they were children, Serpell explores the disorienting, sometimes surreal effects of grief.

‘Glory,’ by NoViolet Bulawayo

Bulawayo’s second novel , and her second to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was inspired by the autocrats who have ruled the author’s native Zimbabwe. But in this brilliant allegorical satire, the characters based on Robert Mugabe, Emmerson Mnangagwa and others are stallions, goats and dogs.

‘Groundskeeping,’ by Lee Cole

You can choose your friends, but not your family. That’s one reminder in Cole’s emotionally rich debut about an aspiring writer who moves home to Kentucky, where his Trump-supporting uncle and grandfather complicate his budding relationship with the liberal daughter of Bosnian immigrants.

‘The Hero of This Book,’ by Elizabeth McCracken

When is a memoir not a memoir? McCracken straddles the line between real life and fiction in this story of a narrator whose trip to London prompts a deluge of memories about her late mother.

‘Horse,’ by Geraldine Brooks

The Pulitzer Prize winner offers a lesson in weaving together disparate narratives with this novel inspired by a real-life 19th-century racehorse . In the 1850s, the horse is trained by an enslaved boy; generations later, a man becomes obsessed with a discarded portrait of the horse just as a zoologist finds the animal’s bones in an attic. Inevitably, but never predictably, their stories intersect.

‘How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water,’ by Angie Cruz

The fourth novel by Women’s Prize finalist Cruz finds Cara Romero, a New Yorker from the Dominican Republic, unburdening herself to a woman meant to provide employment assistance. Instead, the woman ends up with 12 enlightening, sometimes hilarious sessions with Cara, who reveals the highs and lows of an eventful life.

‘Invisible Things,’ by Mat Johnson

What at first seems like a work of science fiction involving a group of astronauts who land on Jupiter’s moon grows into something broader and more trenchant — an accomplished work of cultural and political satire that calls to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s “ The Sirens of Titan ” and “ Cat’s Cradle ” and Robert A. Heinlein’s “ Stranger in a Strange Land .”

‘Jackie and Me,’ by Louis Bayard

A charming story that captures our ongoing fascination with the Kennedy marriage, “ Jackie & Me ” focuses on the years when Jack and Jackie were still two distinct individuals, a young man and a younger woman navigating their ways through Washington.

‘The Latecomer,’ by Jean Hanff Korelitz

There’s a jigsaw-puzzle thrill to Korelitz’s tale of a wealthy New York City family. Part farce, part revenge fantasy, the book reads like a latter-day Edith Wharton novel , as Korelitz (“ The Plot ”) simultaneously mocks and embraces these upper-class combatants.

‘Less Is Lost,’ by Andrew Sean Greer

Arthur Less, the hero of Greer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Less” (2017), is back . He’s living happily in San Francisco when he learns he owes 10 years of back rent and has only a month to come up with it. Hilarity ensues as our lovable, hapless protagonist is befallen by a series of accidents and misunderstandings.

‘Lessons,’ by Ian McEwan

McEwan, winner of the 1998 Booker for “ Amsterdam ,” tells the story of an ordinary man whose personal experience is woven into the social and political developments that have shaped all our lives, including the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the coronavirus pandemic. Through the tale of this imaginary life, McEwan deftly explores the interplay of will and chance, time and memory.

‘The Lioness,’ by Chris Bohjalian

From the author of “ The Flight Attendant ” and “ Hour of the Witch ,” this propulsive tale perfectly marries glamour and horror, as a group of Hollywood notables sets off on a safari in the Serengeti in the mid-1960s.

‘Lucky Breaks,’ by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky

This story collection is the first new full-length work of fiction out of Ukraine since Russia’s war with the country began. Slim but meaty, these tales — whose main players are women displaced by war — are both unsettling and illuminating.

‘Lucy by the Sea,’ by Elizabeth Strout

Lucy Barton returns , this time riding out the pandemic’s early wave with her ex-husband in Maine. Strout fans will delight in the appearance of beloved characters from previous novels, including Olive Kitteridge and Isabelle (“ Amy and Isabelle ”) as they struggle and hope — together but in isolation.

‘The Marriage Portrait,’ by Maggie O’Farrell

O’Farrell (“ Hamnet ”) drops us into the panicked mind of a teenage girl who knows that her husband is plotting to kill her. This is Florence in the 1550s — and the teen is Lucrezia de’Medici. In this masterful work , O’Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave the story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station.

‘Mercy Street,’ by Jennifer Haigh

Haigh’s restrained novel explores the precarious status of safe, legal abortion through the eyes of an experienced counselor at a reproductive-health clinic in downtown Boston, revealing the surprising ways lives intersect amid this divisive issue.

‘My Phantoms,’ by Gwendoline Riley

Bridget, the 40-something narrator of this quietly powerful novel, has, to put it mildly, a difficult relationship with her parents, particularly her mother. In deceptively simple prose, Riley delivers a compelling character study and an unflinching look at the complexity of family bonds.

‘Nightcrawling,’ by Leila Mottley

Inspired by a sexual exploitation scandal involving several police departments in the Bay Area , Mottley’s debut novel imagines the life of a 17-year-old African American high school dropout who is vulnerable to abuse. Mottley, who is 19, captures her narrator’s experience with painful, poetic beauty.

‘Olga Dies Dreaming,’ by Xochitl Gonzalez

Olga Isabel Acevedo is a 40-year-old dynamo from South Brooklyn who becomes an in-demand wedding planner — but she can’t seem to find romance herself. If you know anything about how romantic comedy works, you have some idea of how this story ends, but you’ll be completely surprised by how it gets there.

‘Our Missing Hearts,’ by Celeste Ng

As in her previous books, Ng (“ Little Fires Everywhere ,” “ Everything I Never Told You ”) explores race, family and belonging. Here the setting is a near-future dystopian America where 12-year-old Bird Gardner is searching for his estranged mother in a society where anti-Asian sentiment threatens his every move.

‘Our Wives Under the Sea,’ by Julia Armfield

Both a love story and a horror story, “ Our Wives ” follows a couple through some unusual twists in their relationship, as one spouse returns from a deep-sea expedition forever changed. There’s more than a drop of “ The Turn of the Screw ” in this exquisitely suspenseful debut novel.

‘The Passenger,’ by Cormac McCarthy

The first novel from McCarthy, now 89, since “The Road” in 2006 features Bobby Western, a contemplative, haunted salvage diver. What starts at the pace of a thriller — with a mystery surrounding a private jet on the ocean floor — becomes an extended rumination on subjects from atomic bombs (Bobby’s father helped create them) to the inappropriate, obsessive love between a brother and sister.

‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,’ by Shehan Karunatilaka

The winner of this year’s Booker Prize is a very unlikely combination: a murder mystery and a zany comedy about military atrocities. Narrated by a dead man. In the second person. Karunatilaka has said the combination of tragedy and absurdity was inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, but his story drifts across Sri Lankan history and culture with a spirit entirely its own.

‘Salka Valka,’ by Halldór Laxness, translated by Philip Roughton

This newly retranslated novel by Laxness , the prolific Icelandic writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955, focuses on the fortitude and inner life of the title character, who has to make it on her own in a small village. Marxism vs. capitalism is one theme of the book as it charts the changing social and economic circumstances of the village over the course of about 20 years.

‘Sea of Tranquility,’ by Emily St. John Mandel

St. John Mandel’s follow-up to “Station Eleven” and “The Glass Hotel” is a curious thought experiment that opens in 1912 before hopping ahead to 2203 and then 2401. This is science fiction that keeps its science largely in abeyance, as dark matter for a story about loneliness, grief and finding purpose.

‘Shrines of Gaiety,’ by Kate Atkinson

Atkinson sets out to evoke — with gusto and precision — a lost Roaring Twenties London that, perhaps, never was. This is a sprawling and sparkling tale overrun with flappers, gangsters, disillusioned war veterans, crooked coppers, a serial killer, absinthe cocktails, teenage runaways and a bevy of Bright Young Things.

‘Signal Fires,’ by Dani Shapiro

Shapiro’s novel , which balances grief with grace, starts in 1985, when 15-year-old Theo Wilf crashes his mother’s Buick into a huge oak tree in the family’s front yard. The story then hops through time to fill in the details of that event and how the secrecy surrounding it shaped, or deformed, the lives of the Wilfs.

‘The Singularities,’ by John Banville

Every page of Banville’s latest beautifully written novel is an enigmatic delight. A man named Felix Mordaunt, just released from prison, wanders onto the property where he spent his boyhood. But is that really his name? And is this his ancestral home? Unreliability runs throughout.

‘The Stone World,’ by Joel Agee

Agee has published acclaimed nonfiction about his boyhood in East Germany with his mother and stepfather after the family migrated from Mexico. (His father was the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer James Agee.) This new novel , written with wondrous simplicity and depth, is a kind of fictional prequel: Set in an unnamed Mexican town in the 1940s, it tells the story of a quiet, sensitive boy named Peter.

‘Thrust,’ by Lidia Yuknavitch

“ Thrust ” is part history, part prophecy and all fever dream. Its chapters ebb and flow across 200 years in and around the New York Harbor, moving from 19th-century laborers toiling to erect the Statue of Liberty to a drowned East Coast in 2079. This sometimes surreal book offers a mind-blowing critique of America’s ideals.

‘To Paradise,’ by Hanya Yanagihara

Seven years after her novel “ A Little Life ,” Yanagihara returns with another epic , this one made up of three novella-length sections set in the past, present and future. The final one is a blistering analysis of what an endless cycle of pandemics can do to a society. “To Paradise” demonstrates the inexhaustible ingenuity of an author who keeps shattering expectations.

‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,’ by Gabrielle Zevin

This novel about two childhood friends who reunite in college and design a successful video game together is not really a workplace romance; it’s a novel about the romance of work. It portrays a creative partnership as intense and as fraught as a marriage, and it draws readers into the pioneering days of a vast entertainment industry too often scorned by bookworms.

‘Trespasses,’ by Louise Kennedy

Kennedy’s captivating first novel manages to be beautiful and devastating in equal measure. It’s set in Northern Ireland during the 1970s amid the Troubles. The book’s protagonist, 24-year-old Cushla Lavery, lives with her mother in a small, “mixed” town outside Belfast, and she emerges as a flawed, bruised but ultimately defiant heroine.

‘True Biz,’ by Sara Nović

“ True Biz ” follows an eventful year in the lives of students and a headmistress at a residential school for the deaf. Nović is a thoughtful tour guide through her own deaf culture, careful to explain what people unaware of her world may be missing, and providing mini history lessons and illustrations of vocabulary words in American Sign Language.

‘The Unfolding,’ by A.M. Homes

Homes’s latest novel is very funny and often unsettling. The sharp satire begins after the election of Barack Obama, when a major Republican donor referred to only as the Big Guy assembles a group of advisers who devise a long-term plan for retaking control of American politics.

‘Vladimir,’ by Julia May Jonas

Jonas’s provocative debut novel revolves around the fallout from accusations of sexual misconduct against the unnamed narrator’s husband, who is chair of the English department at the college where they both teach. The narrator is filled with both desire and shame about aging, and has at least one foot on the wrong side of #MeToo.

‘We All Want Impossible Things,’ by Catherine Newman

Genuinely heartbreaking and hilarious is a tough combination to pull off, but Newman does it in her first novel for adults. Edith and Ashley have been the closest of friends for more than 40 years. When Edith’s ovarian cancer diagnosis becomes terminal, the women contend with Edi’s transition into hospice. Tears mix with laughter in everyday moments, showing the power of female friendship.

‘The Whalebone Theatre,’ by Joanna Quinn

Quinn’s richly imagined and energetically told debut novel , set mostly in England before and during World War II, focuses on a creative young girl named Cristabel and her stepsiblings. These spunky, somewhat benignly neglected children, with a pedigree stretching from Charles Dickens to Lemony Snicket, might seem familiar, but they have their own peculiar and particular charm.

‘Yonder,’ by Jabari Asim

Set on a Southern plantation in 1852, “ Yonder ” explores with great depth the intertwined lives of four enslaved people, alternating between the points of view of each character. The final section of the book follows their exodus, a bold and dangerous journey whose outcome remains uncertain until the very last page.

fiction best selling books 2022

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The Best Fiction Books » Best Fiction of 2022

Most recommended books.

fiction best selling books 2022

The Books of Jacob: A Novel by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

“This book is attempting to embrace an entire world and culture, a particular period in Poland and Eastern Europe, and fold it into everything that can be known. It is a maximalist novel in that sense. There’s the theology of it, but also how market garden towns worked, how peasants lived, what beliefs people had and how those were challenged or changed. Both The Books of Jacob and A New Name are dealing with the numinous, a sense of God. But Jacob Frank is an apostate, he’s someone who is prepared to overturn centuries of his own religion in an attempt to create something new. Thanks to Olga—through Jenny—we get to witness this vast pageant of what it means to have lived through that time in Poland. It’s like a very, very large Bayeux Tapestry. But also, what it is to look back on that, given what we know now, because there are outside observers.” Frank Wynne , Translator

fiction best selling books 2022

Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère

“This is a book that made me think: wow, I didn’t know we were allowed to do that. For all sorts of reasons—some moral—but many of them literary. Carrère does not hesitate to put his personal failings on display—nay, to parade them, in this book. Yoga charts his mental breakdown, after several self-congratulatory years of career success and marital bliss. His dramatic self-destruction spools out in slow motion—but there is something liberating in that for the reader, to see a writer dissect their own inner workings so mercilessly and under such a clear, bright light.” Cal Flyn , Five Books Editor

fiction best selling books 2022

Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel by Harry Josephine Giles

“The action of Deep Wheel Orcadia is mostly set on or close to an isolated space station, at a crisis point in the solar system, and focuses on the working and private lives of the characters on board. You could decide to read the Orcadian version and then the English, or vice versa, or just one—but you’d miss so much if you only read half. I think you can pick up the Orcadian, as you might the Riddleyspeak in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker . It’s the sort of book the prize exists to draw attention to for die-hard scifi readers, and to make non-scifi readers question their assumptions about the genre.” Andrew M. Butler , Film Critics & Scholar

fiction best selling books 2022

The Trees by Percival Everett

“How to explain The Trees ? It has so many disparate ingredients, which should not work together, but absolutely do. It is a gritty examination of the legacy of extreme racism and lynching in the Deep South. It’s a revenge thriller. It’s a buddy cop farce. It’s a detective novel with shades of the supernatural. And, well, it’s one of the best, most readable, funniest, and most hard-hitting novels I have ever read.” Cal Flyn , Five Books Editor

fiction best selling books 2022

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

“The hero of this book is already dead. In the afterlife, he’s given a chance to revisit moments and places from his life, which took place during the Sri Lankan Civil War, in which the hero—who was a photographer—was ultimately killed. It’s a fantasy of a dead figure coming back, revisiting and understanding what happened, and also watching what the significance of their own life was. So at one level, it’s an enormous subject, almost a theological issue—what did this person do with their life? what does it add up to?—but it’s done, again, with enormous humour.” Neil MacGregor , Art Historians, Critics & Curator

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With so many novels to choose from, it's not easy to find the best fiction of 2022, books that are really worth spending your time reading. To help, we've collected all our books recommendations relating to the best fiction of 2022 here.

We also have lists of the:

- mystery books 2022 - fantasy books 2022 - romance books of 2022 - science fiction books 2022 - historical fiction books 2022

Editor’s Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year , recommended by Cal Flyn

Editor’s Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year - Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère

The Candy House: A Novel by Jennifer Egan

Editor’s Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year - Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer

Editor’s Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year - Septology by Jon Fosse

Septology by Jon Fosse

Author and Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn highlights her favourite novels of 2022—from Jennifer Egan's highly anticipated follow-up to the multi-award-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad, to a debut novel by a twenty-something writer who gave voice to cancer, literally.

Author and Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn highlights her favourite novels of 2022—from Jennifer Egan’s highly anticipated follow-up to the multi-award-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad, to a debut novel by a twenty-something writer who gave voice to cancer, literally.

Award-Winning Novels of 2022 , recommended by Cal Flyn

Award-Winning Novels of 2022 - The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

The Book of Form and Emptiness: A Novel by Ruth Ozeki

Award-Winning Novels of 2022 - The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Award-Winning Novels of 2022 - The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Award-Winning Novels of 2022 - Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel by Harry Josephine Giles

Any end-of-year list is necessarily partial; no one person could hope to read every novel published in the English language in any given year. That's why prize lists are so useful for guiding the casual reader's literary diet. Here, our deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a brief round-up of the books that ruled victorious during the 2022 awards season.

Any end-of-year list is necessarily partial; no one person could hope to read every novel published in the English language in any given year. That’s why prize lists are so useful for guiding the casual reader’s literary diet. Here, our deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a brief round-up of the books that ruled victorious during the 2022 awards season.

The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist , recommended by Neil MacGregor

The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist - Glory: A Novel by NoViolet Bulawayo

Glory: A Novel by NoViolet Bulawayo

The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist - The Trees by Percival Everett

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist - The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist - Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best original novel written in the English language. We asked the art historian Neil MacGregor , chair of this year's judging panel, to talk us through the six novels that made the 2022 shortlist—and why fiction can be a most effective means of engaging us emotionally in social and political crisis elsewhere.

The Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best original novel written in the English language. We asked the art historian Neil MacGregor, chair of this year’s judging panel, to talk us through the six novels that made the 2022 shortlist—and why fiction can be a most effective means of engaging us emotionally in social and political crisis elsewhere.

The Best Thrillers of 2022 , recommended by Tosca Lee

The Best Thrillers of 2022 - Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

The Best Thrillers of 2022 - The Turnout by Megan Abbott

The Turnout by Megan Abbott

The Best Thrillers of 2022 - Rock, Paper, Scissors by Alice Feeney

Rock, Paper, Scissors by Alice Feeney

The Best Thrillers of 2022 - These Toxic Things: A Thriller by Rachel Howzell Hall

These Toxic Things: A Thriller by Rachel Howzell Hall

The Best Thrillers of 2022 - Red Widow by Alma Katsu

Red Widow by Alma Katsu

The Best Thrillers of 2022 - I Am Not Who You Think I Am: A Novel by Eric Rickstad

I Am Not Who You Think I Am: A Novel by Eric Rickstad

Every year, the International Thriller Writers—an honorary organisation of authors—showcases the best new books in the genre at their annual awards. Here, bestselling author and the organisation's vice-president Tosca Lee talks us through the six-strong shortlist of books, and explains why 'Southern noir' writer S.A. Cosby won the title for the best thriller of 2022—only a year on from his last triumph.

Every year, the International Thriller Writers—an honorary organisation of authors—showcases the best new books in the genre at their annual awards. Here, bestselling author and the organisation’s vice-president Tosca Lee talks us through the six-strong shortlist of books, and explains why ‘Southern noir’ writer S.A. Cosby won the title for the best thriller of 2022—only a year on from his last triumph.

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist , recommended by Elizabeth Laird

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - Rose Nicolson: A Novel by Andrew Greig

Rose Nicolson: A Novel by Andrew Greig

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - News of the Dead by James Robertson

News of the Dead by James Robertson

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - Fortune by Amanda Smyth

Fortune by Amanda Smyth

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - The Magician by Colm Tóibín

The Magician by Colm Tóibín

Every year, the Walter Scott Prize highlights the best new historical novels. In 2022, the shortlist comprises four fantastic works of historical fiction that immerse the reader in the past—from 16th-century Scotland to 1920s Trinidad—while confronting universal human dramas we still struggle with today. Elizabeth Laird , one of the judges, talks us through their choices this year.

Every year, the Walter Scott Prize highlights the best new historical novels. In 2022, the shortlist comprises four fantastic works of historical fiction that immerse the reader in the past—from 16th-century Scotland to 1920s Trinidad—while confronting universal human dramas we still struggle with today. Elizabeth Laird, one of the judges, talks us through their choices this year.

The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist , recommended by Andrew M. Butler

The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist - Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel by Harry Josephine Giles

Klara and the Sun: A Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist - A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist - A River Called Time by Courttia Newland

A River Called Time by Courttia Newland

The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist - Wergen: The Alien Love War by Mercurio D Rivera

Wergen: The Alien Love War by Mercurio D Rivera

The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist - Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley

Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley

Every year, the judges for the Arthur C. Clarke Award select the best of the latest batch of new scifi books. In 2022, the science fiction award's shortlist includes new work from Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, a novel-in-verse from the Scottish writer Harry Josephine Giles, and a new title in Arkady Martine's beloved Teixcalaan series. Andrew M. Butler , academic and chair of the judges, talks us through the finalists.

Every year, the judges for the Arthur C. Clarke Award select the best of the latest batch of new scifi books. In 2022, the science fiction award’s shortlist includes new work from Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, a novel-in-verse from the Scottish writer Harry Josephine Giles, and a new title in Arkady Martine’s beloved Teixcalaan series. Andrew M. Butler, academic and chair of the judges, talks us through the finalists.

Notable New Novels of Fall 2022 , recommended by Cal Flyn

Notable New Novels of Fall 2022 - The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Notable New Novels of Fall 2022 - The Marriage Portrait: A Novel by Maggie O'Farrell & narrated by Genevieve Gaunt

The Marriage Portrait: A Novel by Maggie O'Farrell & narrated by Genevieve Gaunt

Notable New Novels of Fall 2022 - Liberation Day: Stories by George Saunders

Liberation Day: Stories by George Saunders

Notable New Novels of Fall 2022 - Our Share of Night: A Novel by Mariana Enriquez

Our Share of Night: A Novel by Mariana Enriquez

Notable New Novels of Fall 2022 - The Furrows: An Elegy by Namwali Serpell

The Furrows: An Elegy by Namwali Serpell

Fall is a busy time in publishing, as the biggest names in fiction prepare to release new books in the months leading up to Christmas. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up some of the most notable novels of Fall 2022—including two new books from the great American novelist Cormac McCarthy and a sumptuous work of historical fiction from Maggie O'Farrell.

Fall is a busy time in publishing, as the biggest names in fiction prepare to release new books in the months leading up to Christmas. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up some of the most notable novels of Fall 2022—including two new books from the great American novelist Cormac McCarthy and a sumptuous work of historical fiction from Maggie O’Farrell.

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist , recommended by Frank Wynne

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist - Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist - Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist - A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls

A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist - Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist - The Books of Jacob: A Novel by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle

The International Booker Prize celebrates the best fiction in translation published over the previous year. Frank Wynne , acclaimed translator and chair of the 2022 judging panel, tells Five Books about the six novels that made the shortlist, and reminds readers that world literature need not be tough, consumed only in the interests of self-improvement—but is often joyful, surprising and full of feeling.

The International Booker Prize celebrates the best fiction in translation published over the previous year. Frank Wynne, acclaimed translator and chair of the 2022 judging panel, tells Five Books about the six novels that made the shortlist, and reminds readers that world literature need not be tough, consumed only in the interests of self-improvement—but is often joyful, surprising and full of feeling.

The Best Romance Books of 2022 , recommended by Katherine D. Morgan

The Best Romance Books of 2022 - The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen

The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen

The Best Romance Books of 2022 - Vanessa Jared’s Got a Man by LaQuette

Vanessa Jared’s Got a Man by LaQuette

The Best Romance Books of 2022 - Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake

The Best Romance Books of 2022 - Do You Take This Man by Denise Williams

Do You Take This Man by Denise Williams

The Best Romance Books of 2022 - Digging Up Love by Chandra Blumberg

Digging Up Love by Chandra Blumberg

If you like your novels to end happily ever after, then do we have reading recommendations for you. Guest editor Katherine D. Morgan selects five of the best romance books of 2022, and offers a quick round-up of the love stories you should be looking forward to over the next few months.

Notable Novels of Spring 2022 , recommended by Cal Flyn

Notable Novels of Spring 2022 - To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

Notable Novels of Spring 2022 - Pure Colour: A Novel by Sheila Heti

Pure Colour: A Novel by Sheila Heti

Notable Novels of Spring 2022 - Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Notable Novels of Spring 2022 - The Books of Jacob: A Novel by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

If you're nervous of what 2022 has in store for us, you're not alone. But at least there will be plenty of excellent new books to read. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of the notable novels of spring 2022, including exciting new work from Sheila Heti, Ali Smith and Marlon James.

If you’re nervous of what 2022 has in store for us, you’re not alone. But at least there will be plenty of excellent new books to read. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of the notable novels of spring 2022, including exciting new work from Sheila Heti, Ali Smith and Marlon James.

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fiction best selling books 2022

These are the bestselling books of 2022.

Emily Temple

Another trip around the sun, another year of bookselling. You’ve heard about the best books of 2022 , but what about the best sellers ? Well, you’ve probably heard about a few of them too. Here’s the list of the 25 bestselling books of the year, per Publishers Weekly :

1. Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us (Atria) – 2,729,007 copies sold

2. Colleen Hoover, Verity   (Grand Central) – 2,000,418 copies sold

3. Colleen Hoover, It Starts with Us   (Atria) – 1,885,351 copies sold

4. Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing   (Putnam) – 1,868,518 copies sold

5. Colleen Hoover, Ugly Love   (Atria) – 1,502,036 copies sold

6. James Clear, Atomic Habits   (Avery) – 1,287,253 copies sold

7. Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo   (Washington Square) – 1,272,458 copies sold

8. Colleen Hoover, Reminders of Him   (Montlake) – 1,235,655 copies sold

9. Colleen Hoover, November 9   (Atria) – 999,552 copies sold

10. Jeff Kinney, Diper Överlöde (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #17)  (Amulet) – 830,325 copies sold

11. Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar   (Philomel) – 738,840 copies sold

12. Michelle Obama, The Light We Carry   (Crown) – 733,949 copies sold

13. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score   (Penguin Books) – 636,831 copies sold

14. Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!   (Random House) – 627,750 copies sold

15. Stephen King, Fairy Tale (Scribner) – 627,598 copies sold

16. Dav Pilkey, On Purpose (Cat Kid Comic Club #3)  (Graphix) – 623,347 copies sold

17. Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements   (Amber-Allen) – 605,859 copies sold

18. Colleen Hoover, All Your Perfects   (Atria) – 591,936 copies sold

19. Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?   (Holt) – 583,564 copies sold

20. Jennette McCurdy, I’m Glad My Mom Died (Simon & Schuster) – 583,027 copies sold

21. Emily Henry, Book Lovers   (Berkley) – 576,701 copies sold

22. Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient   (Celadon) – 572,876 copies sold

23. Holly Jackson, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder   (Ember) – 556,546 copies sold

24. Colleen Hoover, Maybe Someday   (Atria) – 543,658 copies sold

25. Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation   (Berkley) – 540,803 copies sold

As you can see, Colleen Hoover swept the board, selling over 14.3 million books this year in total. BookTok strikes again.

You may have also noticed that a lot of the bestselling books of 2022 did not actually come out in 2022. Backlist is always a strong presence on this list—Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a confirmed staple , for instance. But as Publishers Lunch pointed out , 70 percent of print book sales last year reported by NPD Bookscan were backlist, and “roughly three quarters” of the 200 best sellers were published before 2022. Publishers Lunch also put together this list of the 20 bestselling new books of 2022, with their rank on the larger Bookscan list:

3. Colleen Hoover,  It Starts With Us  (Atria, Oct. 18)

17. Colleen Hoover,  Reminders of Him  (Montlake, Jan. 18)

19. Jeff Kinney,  Diper Överlöde  (Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book 17) (Amulet, Oct. 25)

21. Michelle Obama,  The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times (Crown, Nov. 15)

24. Stephen King,  Fairy Tale  (Scribner, Sept 6.)

25. Dav Pilkey,  Cat Kid Comic Club: On Purpose  (Cat Kid Comic Club #3) (Graphix, Nov. 12)

29. Jennette McCurdy,  I’m Glad My Mom Died  (Simon & Schuster, Aug. 9)

30. Emily Henry,  Book Lovers  (Berkley, May 3)

35. James Patterson and Dolly Parton,  Run, Rose, Run  (Little, Brown, Mar. 7)

38. John Grisham,  The Boys From Biloxi  (Doubleday, Oct. 18)

47. Bonnie Garmus,  Lessons In Chemistry  (Doubleday, Apr. 5)

50. Ina Garten,  Go-To Dinners: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook  (Clarkson Potter, Oct. 25)

54. Nicholas Sparks,  Dreamland  (Random, Sept. 20)

63. Tieghan Gerard,  Half Baked Harvest Every Day: Recipes For Balanced, Flexible, Feel-Good Meals  (Clarkson Potter, Mar. 29)

64. Lucy Score,  Things We Never Got Over  (Bloom Books, Jan. 12)

66. Dav Pilkey,  Cat Kid Comic Club: Collaborations  (Cat Kid Comic Club #4) (Graphix, Nov. 29)

71. Carley Fortune,  Every Summer After  (Berkley, May 10)

73. Matthew Perry,  Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing  (Flatiron, Nov. 1)

78. Shea Ernshaw, Long Live the Pumpkin Queen: Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas  (Disney, Aug. 2)

81. John Grisham,  Sparring Partners: Novellas  (Doubleday, May 31)

And on both lists, literary fiction is once again left out in the cold…

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

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

30 best new books to read in 2022 so far

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

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

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

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamin Chan

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamin Chan

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

30 Things I Love About Myself by Radhika Sanghani

30 Things I Love About Myself by Radhika Sanghani

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

Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories by Gwen E. Kirby

Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories by Gwen E. Kirby

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

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

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

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

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

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

Good Rich People by Eliza Jane Brazier

Good Rich People by Eliza Jane Brazier

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

Devil House by John Darnielle

Devil House by John Darnielle

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

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

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

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

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

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

Where I Can't Follow by Ashley Blooms

Where I Can't Follow by Ashley Blooms

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

The Last Suspicious Holdout by Ladee Hubbard

The Last Suspicious Holdout by Ladee Hubbard

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

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

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

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

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

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

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

End of the World House: A Novel by Adrienne Celt

End of the World House: A Novel by Adrienne Celt

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

Nobody Gets Out Alive: Stories by Leigh Newman

Nobody Gets Out Alive: Stories by Leigh Newman

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

When We Fell Apart by Soon Wiley

When We Fell Apart by Soon Wiley

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

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

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

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

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The Best Nonfiction Books of 2022

Whether you’re looking to learn, laugh, or lose yourself in a great story, there’s something here for every kind of reader.

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Our favorite nonfiction books of the year, several of them just the very best books of the year , touch on some of the most pressing topics of our time, from autocracy to conspiracy to healthcare reform. They vary in form, from reported nonfiction to memoir to a comic guidebook to supervillainy. Whether you’re looking to learn, laugh, or lose yourself in a great story, there’s something here for every kind of reader.

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, by Paul Newman

After six decades of Hollywood superstardom, it’s difficult to imagine that anything could remain unknown about Paul Newman . But that’s the particular magic trick of this memoir, assembled by way of a literary scavenger hunt. Between 1986 and 1991, Newman sat down with screenwriter Stewart Stern for a series of soul-baring interviews about his life and career. With the actor’s encouragement, Stern also recorded hundreds of hours worth of interviews with his friends, family, and colleagues. The whole enterprise was destined to become Newman’s authorized biography, but his feelings on the project soured; in 1998, he gathered the tapes in a pile and set fire to them. Luckily, Stern kept transcripts—over 14,000 pages worth. Now, those transcripts have been streamlined into this honest and unvarnished memoir, in which the actor speaks openly about his traumatic childhood, his lifelong struggle with alcoholism, and his tormenting self-doubt. But the highs are there too—like his 50-year marriage to actress Joanne Woodward—as well as the mysteries of making art, and the “imponderable of being a human being.” All told, the memoir is an extraordinary act of resurrection and reimagination.

Bad Sex, by Nona Willis Aronowitz

When Teen Vogue ’s sex columnist decided to end her marriage at 32 years old, chief among her complaints was “bad sex.” Newly divorced, Aronowitz went in search of good sex, but along the way, she discovered thorny truths about “the problem that has no name”—that despite the advances of feminism and the sexual revolution, true sexual freedom remains out of reach. Cultural criticism, memoir, and social history collide in Aronowitz’s no-nonsense investigation of all that ails young lovers, like questions about desire, consent, and patriarchy. It’s a revealing read bound to expand your thinking.

The High Sierra, by Kim Stanley Robinson

A titan of science fiction masters a new form in this winsome love letter to California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range. Constructed from an impassioned blend of memoir, history, and science writing, The High Sierra chronicles Robinson’s 100-plus trips to his beloved mountains, from his LSD-laced first encounter in 1973 to the dozens of ​​“rambling and scrambling” days to follow. From descriptions of the region’s multitudinous flora and fauna to practical advice about when and where to hike, this is as comprehensive a guidebook as any, complete with all the lucid ecstasy of nature writing greats like John Muir and Annie Dillard.

My Pinup, by Hilton Als

Has any book ever roved so far and wide in just 48 pages as My Pinup ? In this slim and brilliant memoir, Als explores race, power, and desire through the lens of Prince. Styling the legendary musician in the image of his lovers and himself, Als explores injustice on multiple levels, from racist record labels to the world's hostility to gay Black boys. “There was so much love between us,” the author muses. “Why didn’t anyone want us to share it?” These 48 meandering pages are difficult to describe, but trust us: My Pinup is a heady cocktail you won’t soon forget.

Bloomsbury Publishing Dirtbag, Massachusetts, by Isaac Fitzgerald

In this bleeding heart memoir, Fitzgerald peels back the layers of his extraordinary life. Dirtbag, Massachusetts opens with his hardscrabble childhood in a dysfunctional Catholic family, then spins out into the decades of jobs and identities that followed. From bartending at a biker bar to smuggling medical supplies to starring in porn films, it’s all led him to here and now: he’s still a work in progress, but gradually, he’s arriving at profound realizations about masculinity, family, and selfhood. Dirtbag, Massachusetts is the best of what memoir can accomplish. It's blisteringly honest and vulnerable, pulling no punches on the path to truth, but it always finds the capacity for grace and joy. “To any young men out there who aren’t too far gone,” Fitzgerald writes, “I say you’re not done becoming yourself.”

Dickens and Prince, by Nick Hornby

What do Charles Dickens, nineteenth century chronicler of social issues, and Prince, modern-day music’s master of sensuality, have in common? You’d be forgiven for struggling to come up with an answer, but for Nick Hornby, the ties are obvious—and numerous, too. In Dickens and Prince , the biographical similarities between these two late luminaries come into plain sight. But what really links Dickens and Prince, Hornby argues, is their “particular kind of genius”—as the author reveals, both shared an extraordinary drive to create and generated massive bodies of work, even though they died before reaching sixty. But beneath the surface of this fascinating biography, there lies a warm and wise craft book about what it takes to make great art in any century. Read an interview with Hornby 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.

Raising Lazarus, by Beth Macy

Macy’s gripping follow-up to the mega-bestselling Dopesick finds her in a familiar milieu: back on the frontlines of the opioid crisis, where she embeds with healthcare workers, legislators, and activists seeking to save lives and heal communities. Where Dopesick focused on addiction sufferers and their families, Raising Lazarus turns the lens to the fight for justice, from the prosecution of the Sackler family to the reformers pioneering innovative treatments for the afflicted. Enlightening and exhaustive, it’s at once a damning exposé about greed and a moving paean to the power of community activism.

Fight Like Hell, 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.

Phasers on Stun!, by Ryan Britt

Whether you're a tried and true Trekkie or a newbie hooked on Strange New Worlds , there's something for every science fiction obsessive in this lively cultural history of Star Trek . Through extensive reporting and research, Britt takes us inside the franchise's nearly sixty-year history, from its influence on diversifying the space program to its history-making strides for LGBTQIA+ representation. Featuring interviews with multiple generations of cast members and creatives, Phasers On Stun! merrily surprises, informs, and entertains. Read an exclusive excerpt about Star Trek 's efforts to diversify television here at Esquire.

Year of the Tiger, by Alice Wong

In this mixed media memoir, disability activist Alice Wong outlines her journey as an advocate and educator. Wong was born with a form of progressive muscular dystrophy; as a young woman, she attended her dream college, but had to drop out when changes to Medicaid prevented her from retaining the aides she needed on an inaccessible campus. In one standout essay, Wong recounts her struggle to access Covid-19 vaccines as a high-risk individual. The author's rage about moving through an ableist world is palpable, but so too is her joy and delight about Lunar New Year, cats, family, and so much more. Innovative and informative, Year of the Tiger is a multidimensional portrait of a powerful thinker.

Fen, Bog & 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.

Butts, 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.

Novelist as a Vocation, by Haruki Murakami

In this winsome volume, one of our greatest novelists invites readers into his creative process. The result is a revealing self-portrait that answers many burning questions about its reclusive subject, like: where do Murakami’s strange and surreal ideas come from? When and how did he start writing? How does he view the role of novels in contemporary society? Novelist as a Vocation is a rare and welcome peek behind the curtain of a singular mind.

How You Get Famous: Ten Years of Drag Madness in Brooklyn, by Nicole Pasulka

Pasulka takes us tumbling down a glittery rabbit hole in this engrossing look at the last decade of Brooklyn ballroom culture. How You Get Famous introduces readers to electric performers like Merrie Cherry, who overcame a stroke to continue her drag career; Aja, a multiple-time contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race ; and Sasha Velour, who made waves with her bald head. Through this electric constellation of performers, Pasulka paints a vivid portrait of a singular subculture: joyful and scrappy, it’s gone on to galvanize a community and inspire a wider cultural movement.

The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach, by Sarah Stodola

Quick—picture your perfect vacation. Does it involve staying at a resort and sipping a Mai Tai on the beach? We’re not out to yuck anyone’s yum, but beachgoers everywhere need to read this gripping account about the dark side of paradise. In The Last Resort , Stodola investigates the origins of beach culture, revealing that our understanding of the beach as paradise is actually a modern concept; it wasn’t until the 18th century that the seaside wellness craze changed our views about the ocean, once seen as a fearsome foe. Today, beach travel has become de rigueur, but it carries heavy costs, as it strangles local economies, threatens natural resources, and widens social inequality. After reading The Last Resort , you’ll never look at an all-inclusive vacation quite the same way.

Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, by Ken Auletta

Twenty years ago, Ken Auletta wrote a definitive New Yorker profile of Harvey Weinsten, which exposed the movie mogul as a violent and volatile person. But one story remained frustratingly ungraspable: though it was rumored that Weinstein was a sexual abuser, none of his victims would go on the record. Award-winning journalists including Megan Twohey, Jodi Kantor, and Ronan Farrow would later draw on Auletta’s reporting in their quests to expose the truth about Weinstein. Now, with his erstwhile subject behind bars, Auletta is revisiting him anew—and paying dogged attention to the systems that allowed him to operate unchecked. From the executives who abetted him to the brother who covered his tracks, Weinstein didn’t act in a vacuum, Auletta reveals—rather, he was enabled at nearly every turn. Exhaustively reported and utterly enraging, Hollywood Ending is a damning look at Hollywood’s history of corruption and complicity.

The Last Days of Roger Federer, by Geoff Dyer

“Life is weather. Life is meals,” the great James Salter once wrote. Life is also endings, according to Dyer, as fine and curious a cultural critic as they come. In this roving volume, Dyer explores ​​“things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out,” from Roger Federer’s impending retirement to Nietzsche’s descent into madness. Assessing the long twilight of his many subjects, Dyer leads us through the peripatetic maze of his free-associative thinking. Expect to emerge from the other side feeling grateful for “this magnificent life, whatever ruin comes in its wake.”

The Gotti Wars, by John Gleeson

For decades, Mafioso John Gotti captivated the American imagination. This notorious mobster, known as “The Dapper Don,” became a sartorial icon and graced the cover of Time (by way of an Andy Warhol portrait)—until it all came crashing down, thanks to federal prosecutor John Gleeson. The Gotti Wars is the riveting story of Gleeson’s fight to bring Gotti to justice, which spanned years, brought him into the crosshairs of organized crime, and ultimately took down five major mob families. It’s an electrifying true crime story of the Mafia-smitten 80s and 90s, to be certain, but also a vivid memoir of Gleeson’s development as a lawyer, and an excavation of the celebrity culture that turned a murderer into a superstar. Suspenseful and multifaceted, The Gotti Wars can’t be missed.

Dress Code, by Véronique Hyland

In an age where what we wear is shaped as much by algorithms and influencers as by personal taste, the fashion landscape looks different than ever before. To make sense of it all, turn to this roving, insightful collection of essays from a bona fide fashion expert, who breaks down everything from normcore to politicians’ wardrobes to the ubiquity of leggings. Rich in historical context and cultural criticism, Dress Code unpacks how clothing is both personal and political, and how it deserves serious consideration as a distinctive lens on the world. After all, as Hyland writes, “With fashion, you have no choice but to opt in.”

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The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022

A good nonfiction book doesn’t just tell you something new about the world, it pulls you out of your place in it and dares you to reconsider what you thought you knew, maybe even who you are. The best nonfiction books that arrived this year vary in scope—some are highly specific, some broad and searching—but they all ask giant questions about loss, strength, and survival. In The Escape Artist , Jonathan Freedland underlines the power of the truth through the journey of one of the first Jews to escape Auschwitz . In How Far the Light Reaches , Sabrina Imbler reveals the ways marine biology can teach us about the deepest, most human parts of ourselves. From Stacy Schiff’s brilliant chronicle of Samuel Adams’ role in the American Revolution to Imani Perry’s illuminating tour of the American South, here are the 10 best nonfiction books of 2022.

10. The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Stacy Schiff

fiction best selling books 2022

Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff revisits the American Revolution in her engrossing biography of founding father Samuel Adams. The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams centers on the years leading up to 1776 when Adams helped fan the earliest flames of the independence movement. Though he drove the anti-British rebellion in Massachusetts and had an outsized role in the Revolution, Adams’ story has been told far less than those of other founders like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton . Schiff details his clandestine work and his growing radicalization to show how vital he was to American independence, crafting an intricate portrait of a man long overshadowed by his contemporaries.

Buy Now : The Revolutionary on Bookshop | Amazon

9. The Invisible Kingdom, Meghan O’Rourke

fiction best selling books 2022

Beginning in the late 1990s, Meghan O’Rourke was tormented by mysterious symptoms that would consume her life for years to follow. She describes her wrenching experience searching for a diagnosis in The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness , a 2022 National Book Award finalist. O’Rourke’s reported memoir is an indictment of the U.S. health care system and its approach—or lack thereof—to identifying and treating chronic illnesses, which take a grave toll on millions of Americans. Moving between her own medical journey, the history of illness in the U.S., and the crisis faced by millions currently suffering from long COVID , O’Rourke writes with an empathetic hand to argue why and how we need to change our systems to better support patients. The book is a bold and brave exploration into a much-overlooked topic, one that she punctuates with candor and urgency.

Buy Now : The Invisible Kingdom on Bookshop | Amazon

8. How Far the Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler

fiction best selling books 2022

Sabrina Imbler thoughtfully examines connections between science and humanity, tying together what should be very loose threads in 10 dazzling essays, each a study of a different sea creature. In one piece from their debut collection, Imbler explores their mother’s tumultuous relationship with eating while simultaneously looking at how female octopi starve themselves to death to protect their young. In another, they relate the morphing nature of cuttlefish with their own experiences navigating their gender identity. Throughout, Imbler reveals the surprising ways that sea creatures can teach us about family, sexuality, and survival.

Buy Now : How Far the Light Reaches on Bookshop | Amazon

7. His Name Is George Floyd, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

fiction best selling books 2022

In their engaging book, Washington Post journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnpia expand on their reporting of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin. His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice centers on the life Floyd led before he was killed, captured through hundreds of interviews and richly textured research. The biography explores how Floyd’s experiences were shaped by systemic racism, from the over-policed communities where he was raised to the segregated schools he attended. Samuels and Olorunnipa illustrate, in compassionate terms, the father and friend who wanted more for his life, and how his death became a global symbol for change .

Buy Now : His Name Is George Floyd on Bookshop | Amazon

6. Constructing a Nervous System, Margo Jefferson

fiction best selling books 2022

In her second memoir, Pulitzer Prize winner Margo Jefferson brilliantly interrogates and expands the form. Constructing a Nervous System finds the author reflecting on her life, the lives of her family, and those of her literary and artistic heroes. Jefferson oscillates between criticism and personal narrative, engaging with ideas about performance, artistry, and the act of writing through a plethora of lively threads. She considers everything: her parents, Bing Crosby and Ike Turner, the way a ballerina moves on stage. What emerges is a carefully woven tapestry of American life, brought together by Jefferson’s lyrical and electric prose.

Buy Now : Constructing a Nervous System on Bookshop | Amazon

5. An Immense World, Ed Yong

fiction best selling books 2022

Journalist Ed Yong reminds readers that the world is very large and full of incredible things. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us is a celebration of sights and sounds, smells and tastes, and the unique ways different animals exist on the planet we all share. Yong’s absorbing book is a joyful blend of scientific study and elegant prose that transforms textbook fodder into something much more exciting and accessible. From dissecting why dogs love to sniff around so much to detailing how fish move in rivers, Yong underlines why it’s so important to take the time to stop and appreciate the perspectives of all the living things that surround us.

Buy Now : An Immense World on Bookshop | Amazon

4. The Escape Artist, Jonathan Freedland

fiction best selling books 2022

When he was just 19 years old, Rudolf Vrba became one of the first Jews to break out of Auschwitz. It was April 1944, and Vrba had spent the last two years enduring horror after horror at the concentration camp, determined to make it out alive. As Jonathan Freedland captures in his harrowing biography, Vrba was fixated on remembering every atrocity because he knew that one day his story could save lives. The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World is heavy reading that spares no detail of the brutalities perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust . It’s also a crucial, skillfully rendered look inside the journey of a teenager who risked his life to warn Jews, and the rest of the world, about what was happening in Auschwitz.

Buy Now : The Escape Artist on Bookshop | Amazon

3. Ducks, Kate Beaton

fiction best selling books 2022

In 2005, Kate Beaton had just graduated from college and was yearning to start her career as an artist. But she had student loans to pay off and the oil boom meant that it was easy to get a job out in the sands, so she did. In her first full-length graphic memoir, Beaton reflects on her time working with a primarily male labor force in harsh conditions where trauma lingered and loneliness prevailed. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is a bruising and intimate account of survival and exploitation—of both the land and the people who worked on it—and is brought to life by Beaton’s immersive illustrations. In unveiling her plight, Beaton makes stunning observations about the intersections of class, gender, and capitalism.

Buy Now : Ducks on Bookshop | Amazon

2. South to America, Imani Perry

fiction best selling books 2022

For her striking work of nonfiction, Imani Perry takes a tour of the American South , visiting more than 10 states, including her native Alabama. Perry argues that the associations and assumptions made about the South—with racism at their core—are essential to understanding the United States as a whole. While there is plenty of history embedded throughout South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation , the winner of the 2022 National Book Award for nonfiction, it is no history book. Instead, it’s an impressive mix of deftly compiled research and memoir, with Perry making poignant reflections on the lives of her own ancestors. The result is a revelatory account of the South’s ugly past—the Civil War, slavery, and Jim Crow Laws—and how that history still reverberates today.

Buy Now : South to America on Bookshop | Amazon

1. In Love, Amy Bloom

fiction best selling books 2022

After Amy Bloom’s husband Brian was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, she supported him through the impossibly difficult decision to end his life, on his terms, with the aid of an organization based in Switzerland. Bloom’s memoir begins with their last flight together—on the way to Zurich—as she reflects on the reality that she will be flying home alone. But in these moments of despair, and the enormous grief that follows their trip, she finds tenderness and hope in remembering all that came before it. In writing about their marriage, Bloom unveils a powerful truth about the slippery nature of time. The book is a beautiful, heartfelt tribute to her husband, and a crucial reminder that what drives grief is often the most profound kind of love.

Buy Now : In Love on Bookshop | Amazon

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The Best (and Most Anticipated) Nonfiction Books of 2024, So Far

Here’s what memoirs, histories, and essay collections we’re indulging in this spring.

the covers of the best and most anticipated nonfiction books of 2024

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

Truth-swallowing can too often taste of forced medicine. Where the most successful nonfiction triumphs is in its ability to instruct, encourage, and demand without spoon-feeding. Getting to read and reward this year’s best nonfiction, then, is as much a treat as a lesson. I can’t pretend to be as intelligent, empathetic, self-knowledgeable, or even as well-read as many of the authors on this list. But appreciating the results of their labors is a more-than-sufficient consolation.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka

There’s a lot to ponder in the latest project from New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka, who elegantly argues that algorithms have eroded—if not erased—the essential development of personal taste. As Chayka puts forth in Filterworld , the age of flawed-but-fulfilling human cultural curation has given way to the sanitization of Spotify’s so-called “Discover” playlists, or of Netflix’s Emily in Paris, or of subway tile and shiplap . There’s perhaps an old-school sanctimony to this criticism that some readers might chafe against. But there’s also a very real and alarming truth to Chayka’s insights, assembled alongside interviews and examples that span decades, mediums, and genres under the giant umbrella we call “culture.” Filterworld is the kind of book worth wrestling with, critiquing, and absorbing deeply—the antithesis of mindless consumption.

American Girls: One Woman's Journey Into the Islamic State and Her Sister's Fight to Bring Her Home by Jessica Roy

In 2019, former ELLE digital director Jessica Roy published a story about the Sally sisters , two American women who grew up in the same Jehovah’s Witness family and married a pair of brothers—but only one of those sisters ended up in Syria, her husband fighting on behalf of ISIS. American Girls , Roy’s nonfiction debut, expands upon that story of sibling love, sibling rivalry, abuse and extremism, adding reams of reporting to create a riveting tale that treats its subjects with true empathy while never flinching from the reality of their choices.

Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood by Paula Delgado-Kling

In this small but gutting work of memoir-meets-biography, Colombian journalist Paula Delgado-King chronicles two lives that intersect in violence: hers, and that of Leonor, a Colombian child solider who was beckoned into the guerilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) only to endure years of death and abuse. Over the course of 19 years, Delgago-King followed Leonor through her recruitment into FARC; her sexual slavery to a man decades her senior; her eventual escape; and her rehabilitation. The author’s resulting account is visceral, a clear-eyed account of the utterly human impact wrought by war.

Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton

A meticulous work of research and commitment, Antonia Hylton’s Madness takes readers deep inside the nearly century-old history of Maryland’s Crownsville State Hospital, one of the only segregated mental asylums with records—and a campus—that remain to this day. Featuring interviews with both former Crownsville staff and family members of those who lived there, Madness is a radically complex work of historical study, etching the intersections of race, mental health, criminal justice, public health, memory, and the essential quest for human dignity.

Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections by Emily Nagoski

Out January 30.

Emily Nagoski’s bestselling Come As You Are opened up a generations-wide conversation about women and their relationship with sex: why some love it, why some hate it, and why it can feel so impossible to find help or answers in either camp. In Come Together , Nagoski returns to the subject with a renewed focus on pleasure—and why it is ultimately so much more pivotal for long-term sexual relationships than spontaneity or frequency. This is not only an accessible, gentle-hearted guide to a still-taboo topic; it’s a fascinating exploration of how our most intimate connections can not just endure but thrive.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer

A remarkable volume—its 500-page length itself underscoring the author’s commitment to the complexity of the problem—Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here tracks the history of the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border through the intimate accounts of those who’ve lived it. In painstaking detail, Blitzer compiles the history of the U.S.’s involvement in Central America, and illustrates how foreign and immigration policies have irrevocably altered human lives—as well as tying them to one another. “Immigrants have a way of changing two places at once: their new homes and their old ones,” Blitzer writes. “Rather than cleaving apart the worlds of the U.S., El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the Americans were irrevocably binding them together.”

How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir by Shayla Lawson

Out February 6.

“I used to say taking a trip was just a coping mechanism,” writes Shayla Lawson in their travel-memoir-in-essays How to Live Free in a Dangerous World . “I know better now; it’s my way of mapping the Earth, so I know there’s something to come back to.” In stream-of-consciousness prose, the This Is Major author guides the reader through an enthralling journey across Zimbabwe, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Bermuda, and beyond, using each location as the touchstone for their essays exploring how (and why) race, gender, grief, sexuality, beauty, and autonomy impact their experience of a land and its people. There’s a real courage and generosity to Lawson’s work; readers will find much here to embolden their own self-exploration.

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

There’s no end to the arguments for “why art matters,” but in our era of ephemeral imagery and mass-produced decor, there is enormous wisdom to be gleaned from Get the Picture , Bianca Bosker’s insider account of art-world infatuation. In this new work of nonfiction, readers have the pleasure of following the Cork Dork author as she embeds herself amongst the gallerists, collectors, painters, critics, and performers who fill today’s contemporary scene. There, they teach her (and us) what makes art art— and why that question’s worth asking in an increasingly fractured world.

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

A profoundly unusual, experimental, yet engrossing work of not-quite-memoir, Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries is exactly what its title promises: The book comprises a decade of the author’s personal diaries, the sentences copied and pasted into alphabetical order. Each chapter begins with a new letter, all the accumulated sentences starting with “A”, then “B,” and so forth. The resulting effect is all but certain to repel some readers who crave a more linear storyline, but for those who can understand her ambition beyond the form, settling into the rhythm of Heti’s poetic observations gives way to a rich narrative reward.

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon

Out February 20.

“Even now, I can taste my own history,” writes Chantha Nguon in her gorgeous Slow Noodles . “One occupying force tried to erase it all.” In this deeply personal memoir, Nguon guides us through her life as a Cambodian refugee from the Khmer Rouge; her escapes to Vietnam and Thailand; the loss of all those she loved and held dear; and the foods that kept her heritage—and her story—ultimately intact. Interwoven with recipes and lists of ingredients, Nguon’s heart-rending writing reinforces the joy and agony of her core thesis: “The past never goes away.”

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison

The first time I stumbled upon a Leslie Jamison essay on (the platform formerly known as) Twitter, I was transfixed; I stayed in bed late into the morning as I clicked through her work, swallowing paragraphs like Skittles. But, of course, Jamison’s work is so much more satisfying than candy, and her new memoir, Splinters , is Jamison operating at the height of her talents. A tale of Jamison’s early motherhood and the end of her marriage, the book is unshrinking, nuanced, radiant, and so wondrously honest—a referendum on the splintered identities that complicate and comprise the artist, the wife, the mother, the woman.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider by Michiko Kakutani

The former chief book critic of the New York Times , Michiko Kakutani is not only an invaluable literary denizen, but also a brilliant observer of how politics and culture disrupt the mechanics of power and influence. In The Great Wave , she turns our attention toward global instability as epitomized by figures such as Donald Trump and watershed moments such as the creation of AI. In the midst of these numerous case studies, she argues for how our deeply interconnected world might better weather the competing crises that threaten to submerge us, should we not choose to better understand them.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg

From the author of the now-ubiquitous The Power of Habit arrives Supercommunicators , a head-first study of the tools that make conversations actually work . Charles Duhigg makes the case that every chat is really about one of three inquiries (“What’s this about?” “How do we feel?” or “Who are we?”) and knowing one from another is the key to real connection. Executives and professional-speaker types are sure to glom on to this sort of work, but my hope is that other, less business-oriented motives might be satisfied by the logic this volume imbues.

Whiskey Tender by Deborah Jackson Taffa

Out February 27.

“Tell me your favorite childhood memory, and I’ll tell you who you are,” or so writes Deborah Jackson Taffa in Whiskey Tender , her memoir of assimilation and separation as a mixed-tribe Native woman raised in the shadow of a specific portrait of the American Dream. As a descendant of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, Taffa illustrates her childhood in New Mexico while threading through the histories of her parents and grandparents, themselves forever altered by Indian boarding schools, government relocation, prison systems, and the “erasure of [our] own people.” Taffa’s is a story of immense and reverent heart, told with precise and pure skill.

Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley

With its chapters organized by their position in the infamous five stages of grief, Sloane Crosley’s Grief is For People is at times bracingly funny, then abruptly sober. The effect is less like whiplash than recognition; anyone who has lost or grieved understands the way these emotions crash into each other without warning. Crosley makes excellent use of this reality in Grief is For People , as she weaves between two wrenching losses in her own life: the death of her dear friend Russell Perreault, and the robbery of her apartment. Crosley’s resulting story—short but powerful—is as difficult and precious and singular as grief itself.

American Negra by Natasha S. Alford

In American Negra , theGrio and CNN journalist Natasha S. Alford turns toward her own story, tracing the contours of her childhood in Syracuse, New York, as she came to understand the ways her Afro-Latino background built her—and set her apart. As the memoir follows Alford’s coming-of-age from Syracuse to Harvard University, then abroad and, later, across the U.S., the author highlights how she learned to embrace the cornerstones of intersectionality, in spite of her country’s many efforts to encourage the opposite.

The House of Hidden Meanings by RuPaul

Out March 5.

A raw and assured account by one of the most famous queer icons of our era, RuPaul’s memoir, The House of Hidden Meanings , promises readers arms-wide-open access to the drag queen before Drag Race . Detailing his childhood in California, his come-up in the drag scene, his own intimate love story, and his quest for living proudly in the face of unceasing condemnation, The House of Hidden Meanings is easily one of the most intriguing celebrity projects of the year.

Here After by Amy Lin

Here After reads like poetry: Its tiny, mere-sentences-long chapters only serve to strengthen its elegiac, ferocious impact. I was sobbing within minutes of opening this book. But I implore readers not to avoid the heavy subject matter; they will find in Amy Lin’s memoir such a profound and complex gift: the truth of her devotion to her husband, Kurtis, and the reality of her pain when he died suddenly, with neither platitudes nor hyperbole. This book is a little wonder—a clear, utterly courageous act of love.

Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe

Red Paint author and poet Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe returns this spring with a rhythmic memoir-in-essays called Thunder Song , following the beats of her upbringing as a queer Coast Salish woman entrenched in communities—the punk and music scenes, in particular—that did not always reflect or respect her. Blending beautiful family history with her own personal memories, LaPointe’s writing is a ballad against amnesia, and a call to action for healing, for decolonization, for hope.

Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse" by Emily Raboteau

Out March 12.

In Emily Raboteau’s Lessons For Survival , the author (and novelist, essayist, professor, and street photographer) tells us her framework for the book is modeled loosely after one of her mother’s quilts: “pieced together out of love by a parent who wants her children to inherit a world where life is sustainable.” The essays that follow are meditations and reports on motherhood in the midst of compounding crises, whether climate change or war or racism or mental health. Through stories and photographs drawn from her own life and her studies abroad, Raboteau grounds the audience in the beauty—and resilience—of nature.

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Books | Best Sellers

About the best sellers - february 18, 2024.

This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only.

A version of this Best Sellers report appears in the February 18, 2024 issue of The New York Times Book Review . Rankings on weekly lists reflect sales for the week ending February 3, 2024 .

Rankings reflect unit sales reported on a confidential basis by vendors offering a wide range of general interest titles published in the United States. Every week, thousands of diverse selling locations report their actual sales on hundreds of thousands of individual titles. The panel of reporting retailers is comprehensive and reflects sales in tens of thousands of stores of all sizes and demographics across the United States.

The book selling universe is comprised of well-established vendors as well as emerging ones. The sales venues for print books include national, regional and local chains representing tens of thousands of storefronts; many hundreds of independent book retailers; scores of online and multimedia entertainment retailers; supermarkets, university, gift and big-box department stores; and newsstands.

E-book rankings reflect sales from leading online vendors of e-books in a variety of popular e-reader formats and are included in our combined fiction, combined nonfiction, advice, children's series and monthly lists. Titles are included regardless of whether they are published in both print and electronic formats or just one format. In general, publisher credits for e-books are listed under the corporate publishing name instead of by publisher's division or imprint, unless by special request. Graphic book rankings include all print and digital formats. Adult, children's, young adult, fiction and nonfiction graphic books are eligible for inclusion on the graphic books and manga list. Audiobook rankings are created from sales of physical and digital audio products. Free-trial or low-cost audiobook sales are not eligible for inclusion. Publisher credits for audiobooks are listed under the audiobook publisher name.

The appearance of a ranked title reflects the fact that sales data from reporting vendors has been provided to The Times and has satisfied commonly accepted industry standards of universal identification (such as ISBN13 and EISBN13 codes). All identities, anecdotal, contextual, and other information about the retail sales of any title, as well as overall sales data, are provided with the expectation and assurance of confidentiality by every vendor and are protected by Non-Disclosure Agreements.

Sales are defined as completed transactions by vendors and individual end users during the period on or after the official publication date of a title. Institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases, if and when they are included, are at the discretion of The New York Times Best-Seller List Desk editors based on standards for inclusion that encompass proprietary vetting and audit protocols, corroborative reporting and other statistical determinations. When included, such bulk purchases appear with a dagger (†).

Publishers and vendors of all ranked titles must conform in a timely fashion to The New York Times Best-Seller Lists requirement to allow for examination and independent corroboration of their reported sales for that week. Sales are statistically weighted to represent and accurately reflect all outlets proportionally nationwide. An asterisk (*) indicates that a book's sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above.

Among the categories not actively tracked at this time are: perennial sellers, required classroom reading, textbooks, reference and test preparation guides, e-books available exclusively from a single vendor, journals, workbooks, calorie counters, shopping guides, periodicals and crossword puzzles.

The New York Times Best Sellers are compiled and archived by The Best-Seller Lists Desk of The New York Times News Department, and are separate from the Editorial, Culture, Advertising and Business sides of The New York Times Company.

If you are a book retailer interested in reporting your store's weekly sales to The New York Times Best-Seller Lists, send a request here .

Please direct other questions and feedback to [email protected] .

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The affair that split new york high society.

In “Strong Passions,” the historian Barbara Weisberg tells the story of an explosive, lurid 1860s case that still resonates today.

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    In 2022, the science fiction award's shortlist includes new work from Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, a novel-in-verse from the Scottish writer Harry Josephine Giles, and a new title in Arkady Martine's beloved Teixcalaan series. Andrew M. Butler, academic and chair of the judges, talks us through the finalists.

  15. These are the bestselling books of 2022. ‹ Literary Hub

    You've heard about the best books of 2022, but what about the best sellers? Well, you've probably heard about a few of them too. Here's the list of the 25 bestselling books of the year, per Publishers Weekly: 1. Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us (Atria) - 2,729,007 copies sold 2. Colleen Hoover, Verity (Grand Central) - 2,000,418 copies sold 3.

  16. 50 Best New Books of 2022 (So Far), Including Best-Selling Reads

    Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho. Now 58% Off. $11 at Amazon. Credit: Viking. Fiona and Jane are best friends, navigating their tumultuous teenage years together, as well as their family histories ...

  17. The Best Books of 2022: Fiction

    Jennifer Saint £14.99 Hardback Out of stock The author of Ariadne returns with another spellbinding reimagining of Greek myth, this time focused on the origins of the Trojan War and the dreadful curse blighting the House of Atreus. This product is currently unavailable. The House of Fortune (Hardback) Jessie Burton £16.99 Hardback 10+ in stock

  18. The 50 best books of the year 2022

    Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver Barbara Kingsolver's modern reimagining of David Copperfield is a "powerful reworking" of Charles Dickens's most celebrated and personal novel, writes The...

  19. 35 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022

    Bad Sex, by Nona Willis Aronowitz. Now 16% Off. $23 at Amazon. When Teen Vogue 's sex columnist decided to end her marriage at 32 years old, chief among her complaints was "bad sex.". Newly ...

  20. Best Sellers

    115 weeks on the list KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON by David Grann The story of a murder spree in 1920s Oklahoma that targeted Osage Indians, whose lands contained oil. Buy Read Review 180 weeks on...

  21. The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022

    10. The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Stacy Schiff. Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff revisits the American Revolution in her engrossing biography of founding father Samuel Adams. The ...

  22. 60 of the Best Books for Women Written by Female Authors

    Jane Sherron De Hart's sweeping narrative about Ginsburg's life would make a great gift, coffee table book or read for any American woman. The 2018 biography, following Justice Ginsburg's ...

  23. Best Historical Fiction 2022

    WINNER 100,745 votes. At age 37, former tennis champion Carrie Soto is back in the game to establish her legacy, defeat her young rival, and prove some things to herself and everyone else. Author Reid is something of a regular in the Historical Fiction category, having won last year with Malibu Rising and in 2019 with Daisy Jones and the Six.

  24. The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2022 (Published 2022)

    February Releases New Romance Novels Your Next Read Critics' Reviews Editors' Choice 100 Notable Books Advertisement The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2022 Pandemics, witchcraft,...

  25. The 29 Best and Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2024

    Little Brown and Company, MCD, Plume Penguin Random House, Celadon Books. Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. Truth ...

  26. About the Best Sellers

    The New York Times Best Sellers are up-to-date and authoritative lists of the most popular books in the United States, based on sales in the past week, including fiction, non-fiction, paperbacks ...