At The New York Times Book Review, we write about thousands of books every year. Many of them are good. Some are even great. But we get that sometimes you just want to know, “What should I read that is good or great for me?”
Well, here you go — a running list of some of the year’s best, most interesting, most talked-about books. Check back next month to see what we’ve added.
(For more recommendations, subscribe to our Read Like the Wind newsletter, check out our romance columnist’s favorite books of the year so far or visit our What to Read page.)
Nonfiction
I want a dazzling biography of a civil rights icon
King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig
The first comprehensive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, Eig’s book draws on a landslide of recently released government documents as well as letters and interviews. This is a book worthy of its subject: both an intimate study of a complex and flawed human being and a journalistic account of a civil rights titan.
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I’d like a dramatic history that reads like a novel
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom, by Ilyon Woo
Woo’s book recounts a daring feat: the successful flight north from Georgia in 1848 by an enslaved couple disguised as a sickly young white planter and his male slave. But her meticulous retelling is equally a feat — of research, storytelling, sympathy and insight.
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I want a celebrity memoir that doesn’t hold back
Pageboy: A Memoir, by Elliot Page
Page, known for his roles in “Juno” and “Inception,” came out as trans in late 2020. In this “brutally honest” memoir, he recounts the fears and obstacles to gender transition — and the hard-won happiness that’s followed.
How about some real-life ‘Succession’?
Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy, by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams
This jaw-dropping chronicle by two Times reporters of the final years of Sumner Redstone, the head of Paramount, is an epic tale of toxic wealth and greed populated by connivers and manipulators, not least Redstone himself.
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Give me a swashbuckling tale of survival
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann
After the H.M.S. Wager, a British man-of-war, was shipwrecked off the coast of Patagonia in 1742, surviving crew members returned to England with dramatic — and starkly conflicting — tales about what had transpired. Grann recreates the voyage in all its enthralling horror.
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I’d like a moving memoir about friendship and mental illness
The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen
In his engrossing new memoir, Rosen pieces together how he and his brilliant childhood friend, Michael Laudor, ended up taking sharply divergent paths. (Laudor came to prominence as a Yale Law School graduate working to destigmatize schizophrenia, but later killed his pregnant girlfriend.) Rosen brings plenty of compassion to this gripping reconstruction of Laudor’s life and their friendship.
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I’m in the mood for some hot literary gossip!
Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages, by Carmela Ciuraru
The relationships at the center of Ciuraru’s lively and absorbing new literary history vary widely, but are united by questions of ego and agency, competition and resentment. In most cases, unsurprisingly, the female creative got the short end of the stick.
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Take me on a head-spinning trip through the deep state
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, by Kerry Howley
The people in this darkly funny book include fabulists, truth tellers, combatants, whistle-blowers. Like many of us, they have left traces of themselves in the digital ether by making a phone call, texting a friend, looking up something online. Howley writes about the national security state and those who get entangled in it — Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner all figure into Howley’s riveting account.
I want an eye-opening investigation
Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond
The central claim of this manifesto by the Princeton sociologist (who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 book “Evicted,” about exploitation in Milwaukee’s poorest housing market) is that poverty in the United States is the product not only of larger economic shifts, but of choices and actions by more fortunate Americans.
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Fiction
Give me a crackling, fast-moving literary thriller
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton
In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes. The billionaire decides to support the collective, citing common interests, but some of the activists suspect ulterior motives.
I want a sweeping family story with a hopeful bent
The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese
Verghese’s first novel since the enormously successful “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor, will make. At over 700 pages, this is a long saga — but the author’s gift for suspense, and his easy relationship to language, helps the story fly by.
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I want a provocative, wildly entertaining crime novel
All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby
In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime/suspense genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children — he’s written a crackling good police procedural.
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I’d like a fizzy novel of manners
Pineapple Street, by Jenny Jackson
Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems (which threaten to weaken the clan’s stiffest upper lip). Does money buy happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does it buy honesty?
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I’d like to be scared — but not too scared
Lone Women, by Victor LaValle
It’s 1915 when Adelaide, a young Black woman, makes her way from California to the Montana wilds in the wake of a family tragedy. As she establishes herself as a homesteader, adjusting to the isolation and wide open spaces, the contents of a locked steamer trunk — and some dark secrets — weigh heavily on her conscience.
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How about a hard-boiled tale from a master of noir?
Every Man a King, by Walter Mosley
In the second novel in Mosley’s King Oliver series, a Black private detective in New York investigates whether the government framed a prominent white supremacist. The plot gets more intricate the more he digs, with prison contractors, alt-right militias and Russian oil traffickers all in play.
I want a lavish, fantastical tale by one of our greatest living writers
Victory City, by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals.
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Give me a rich, decades-spanning family saga
Hello Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano
In her radiant and brilliantly crafted fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on a classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago, add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly original story.