VOLUME I
Above Ground
Clint Smith’s second poetry collection explores the joys and anxieties of raising young children in a world full of contradictions and injustices.
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is a thrilling tale of a legendary pirate wrenched from retirement to complete a challenging quest. While encountering mystical places and creatures, she seeks redemption and confronts the ambitions she buried for her family.
After the Funeral and Other Stories
Tessa Hadley’s fourth short story collection explores the daily lives, hidden regrets, and life changes of various people living in England and Wales from the 1970s to the present day.
Age of Vice
Set in India around the turn of the twenty-first century, Age of Vice is a captivating novel following the infamous Wadia family and the bystanders caught in the crossfire of their grandiose yet immoral actions.
All the Sinners Bleed
Investigating a shooting at the local high school in his rural Virginia county, Sheriff Titus Crown discovers a deeper web of crime that puts him on the track of a serial killer. However, his investigation is complicated by the racial strife and other tensions that permeate every aspect of life in the community.
American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal
American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal is a meditative travelogue that recounts the author’s experience of walking 330 miles from his home on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, to Manhattan, exploring the nation’s past and present along the way.
An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created
Santi Elijah Holley’s carefully researched book traces the Shakurs, a family bonded by their commitment to the struggle for Black liberation, across multiple generations, highlighting their goals, triumphs, and tragedies.
The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
In The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession, Michael Finkel recounts the crimes of French art thief Stéphane Breitwieser and the events surrounding his arrests and imprisonment.
August Wilson: A Life
August Wilson: A Life is the first book-length biography of the influential American playwright. The book traces Wilson’s family from the moment of emancipation after the Civil War through Wilson’s death in 2005, with its principal focus on the playwright’s career and major theatrical works.
The Bee Sting
In The Bee Sting, Irish author Paul Murray tells the story of a family on the brink of collapse.
The Berry Pickers
A Mi’kmaq family is exposed to tragedy after tragedy over nearly a half-century, starting with the disappearance of four-year-old Ruthie while her family picks blueberries in a field in Maine. Intertwined with their tale are chapters narrated by Norma, a girl who struggles with an overprotective mother as well as the feeling that all is not right with her family.
Beyond the Door of No Return
David Diop’s historical novel imagines the secret life of eighteenth century French botanist Michel Adanson in order to shine a light on a dark chapter in Europe’s colonial history.
Big
Vashti Harrison’s award-winning picture book tells the story of a young girl attempting to come to terms with her body.
Big Tree
Spanning millennia, the children’s novel Big Tree tells the tale of two sycamore seeds. Through Brian Selznick’s thoughtful words and illustrations, the vast history of the natural world and how it connects to humankind is revealed.
Biography of X
Catherine Lacey’s fourth novel, Biography of X, is an ambitious project that encompasses biography, reportage, alternative history, politics, opinion, mystery, and adventure in the course of describing the life of a multitalented yet enigmatic woman.
Birnam Wood
Eleanor Catton’s third novel, the suspenseful Birnam Wood, pits a motley crew of New Zealand guerrilla gardeners against a ruthless American billionaire in an effort to protect precious natural resources.
Blackouts
Justin Torres’s experimental novel unfolds as a conversation between a young man and his older, dying friend as the latter passes along his incomplete life’s work, a project based around a real-life 1941 study of homosexuality. The result is a complex, lyrical narrative that blends rich fictional lives with historical documents to examine the complexity of queer experience.
Bright Young Women
Bright Young Women, a novel by suspense writer Jessica Knoll, tells the story of one of America’s most famous serial killers from the victims’ point of view. Featuring an intricately built plotline and carefully constructed characters, the novel gives the women the last word in the final murderous spree of Ted Bundy.
Chain-Gang All-Stars
In Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, the author of the acclaimed 2018 short story collection Friday Black, imagines a dystopian future in which American prisoners vie to win their freedom by participating in gladiatorial fight-to-the-death battles on a popular reality television show.
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
In Cobalt Red, prizewinning author and activist Siddarth Kara presents a searing depiction of the inhumane working conditions faced by cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kara demonstrates that the modern world economy is dependent upon a resource mined by people who are being treated like slaves.
A Council of Dolls
A Council of Dolls, by bestselling author Mona Susan Power, is a sweeping historical novel following three separate generations of young Indigenous girls that focuses on the ways in which seemingly inanimate objects—their worn yet beloved dolls—help the young women survive discrimination and persecution.
The Covenant of Water
In this epic novel of twentieth-century India, the story of a family in Kerala that suffers from a mysterious medical condition causing the drowning deaths of at least one family member in each generation intertwines with that of a young Scottish doctor who joins the Indian Medical Services.
The Crane Husband
Kelly Barnhill’s short novel uses the device of a reimagined fairy tale to tell the story of a teenage girl dealing with familial abuse.
Crook Manifesto
Part crime novel and part social history, Crook Manifesto, Colson Whitehead’s sprawling and ambitious sequel to Harlem Shuffle (2021) continues the tragicomic misadventures of furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney, who, in a triptych of stories, encounters a wide cast of characters in corruption-riddled 1970s New York City.
A Day of Fallen Night
Set five centuries before the events of the 2019 novel The Priory of the Orange Tree, A Day of Fallen Night chronicles its protagonists’ efforts to combat a dire threat that has emerged from the volcano known as the Dreadmount.
The Deadline
The Deadline collects an array of essays by award-winning historian and columnist Jill Lepore, covering a wide range of topics including politics, law, and literature.
The Devil of the Provinces
Juan Cárdenas’s short novel The Devil of the Provinces is a twist on the classic crime novel that pursues the question of whether returning home again is ever truly possible.
The Diaspora Sonnets
In The Diaspora Sonnets, award-winning poet Oliver de la Paz uses deft and rich formal invention to convey a family’s search for home and belonging as members of the Filipino diaspora in the United States
Don’t Fear the Reaper
A sequel to the hugely successful horror novel My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Don’t Fear the Reaper continues the story of protagonist Jade Daniels, a rebellious young woman who must outthink a murderer as he embarks on a spree of revenge killings.
Dust Child
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s second novel, Dust Child (2023), focuses on the hidden casualties of the Vietnam War: lost children left behind, the result of temporary relationships between vulnerable people, and aggressive American soldiers.
The End of Drum-Time
Hanna Pylväinen’s historical novel tells the story of a mixed community of Sámi people and Christian settlers living in northern Scandinavia amid religious awakening and creeping colonialism in the nineteenth century.
The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science
In The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science, Kate Zernike chronicles the life and career of molecular biologist Hopkins and explores the role she and fifteen other women played in exposing systemic discrimination at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Family Lore
In Family Lore, Flor, the second eldest of the Marte sisters, has a special gift: she can accurately predict when and where someone will die. When Flor mysteriously decides to host her own living wake, the story explores its characters’ struggles in the days leading up to it in a tale that weaves present-day New York City with flashbacks to the Martes’ upbringing in the Dominican Republic.
Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam
In his graphic memoir Family Style, Thien Pham describes his journey from Vietnam to the United States as a youth and his gradual acculturation as an American citizen. Pham organizes his book in chapters featuring different kinds of foods, both Vietnamese and American. This culinary theme underscores the importance of family and community to his story.
The Ferryman
On a seemingly utopian tropical island in the far-distant future, privileged Prosperans enjoy the benefits of health, wealth, and happiness until they are retired and returned to society with their youth restored and their memories wiped.
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
Journalist Timothy Egan details the rise to power in the 1920s of the Ku Klux Klan in the Midwest under the leadership of D. C. Stephenson, and the events surrounding the death of Madge Oberholtzer that led to his swift fall from power.
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
In Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, John Vaillant investigates both the causes and effects of the massive wildfire that devastated the community of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, in May 2016.
A First Time for Everything
In this graphic memoir aimed at middle-grade readers, author and illustrator Dan Santat chronicles his thirteen-year-old self’s formative trip to Europe in 1989.
Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland
Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland recounts the life and accomplishments of Thomas Smallwood, a formerly enslaved man who helped hundreds of enslaved people escape via the Underground Railroad and published scathing accounts of how he outwitted slavecatchers, slave traders, and police officers.
The Fraud
Award-winning British author Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, The Fraud, is a groundbreaking chronicle of social and racial tension in Victorian England, populated by characters both real and fictional.
From From
Award-winning poet Monica Youn’s collection From From employs a wide range of forms and techniques to explore themes of anti-Asian racism, misogyny, desire, fear, and language.
From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]
From unincorporated territory [åmot], the fifth volume of Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing poetry series, considers how poetry and storytelling can heal the compounded trauma of colonialism, militarism, and environmental injustice endured by his CHamoru people on Guam.
The Future
Unsettling and thrilling in equal measure, British author Naomi Alderman’s dystopian novel The Future follows an unlikely group of friends working to defeat a common corporate enemy while saving the world from the apocalypse.
Ghost of the Orphanage: A Story of Mysterious Deaths, a Conspiracy of Silence, and a Search for Justice
Ghosts of the Orphanage traces Christine Kenneally’s historical research into orphanages of the early twentieth century. The author shares stories of abuse, illness, emotional upheaval, and even torture and death from across the globe in homes where children were supposed to be protected, mostly by Catholic nuns and priests.
The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
Journalist Jake Bittle profiles Americans who have been forced to move due to climate-related disasters and considers the future migrations that will reshape US demographics.
Greek Lessons
Greek Lessons (2023), the fourth novel of South Korean author Han Kang to be translated to English, was first published in South Korea in 2011 and presents the attempts of two lonely, flawed characters to communicate with one another.
The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise
Told through a series of essays divided into three sections, Pico Iyer’s The Half Known Life explores how people around the world use spirituality to find deeper meaning in their lives.
Happiness Falls
Framed against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, Happiness Falls follows a family torn apart by the disappearance of their father. As the investigation brings more questions than answers, they are forced to reconsider their perceptions of success, happiness, and each other.
The Hard Parts: A Memoir of Courage and Triumph
In this gripping, inspirational, and deeply personal memoir, Oksana Masters recounts her lifetime journey of survival and triumph, overcoming horrific conditions at a Ukrainian orphanage and severe physical disabilities to become one of the most decorated Paralympic athletes of all time.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store weaves realities about race and class into the plot through depictions of characters’ lived experiences as they earn their livelihoods, seek justice, and uphold family and community ties against a backdrop of endemic anti-Black and anti-Jewish discrimination.
Hell Bent
In the second installment of Leigh Bardugo’s dark academia fantasy series for adults, street-smart heroine Galaxy Stern, a wheelwalker who gains strength and knowledge from ghosts, battles the demons of hell to save the soul of her mentor, Darlington.
Hello Beautiful
Hello Beautiful examines the complex dynamics of familial love and estrangement by chronicling the relationships between four sisters over the course of three decades.
The Hive and the Honey
The Hive and the Honey is a collection of short stories about the Korean diaspora that span hundreds of years and multiple continents.
Holler, Child
LaToya Watkins’s short story collection brings to vivid life the stories of a handful of African American women and men living in Texas who experience trauma, pain, and racism.
The House of Doors
Tan Twan Eng’s third Booker Prize–nominated novel, The House of Doors, concerns events in Penang, Malaya, surrounding visits by author W. Somerset Maugham and Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen.
A House With Good Bones
A House With Good Bones is a Southern gothic horror novel from Hugo Award–winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher. In it, archaeoentomologist Sam Montgomery returns to her childhood home in rural North Carolina, where she is puzzled by the absence of insects, her mother’s strange behavior, and other unsettling phenomena. As she tries to solve these mysteries she must reckon with her family’s past.
How to Sell a Haunted House
How to Sell a Haunted House is a horror-comedy novel by Grady Hendrix that examines the impact of generational trauma on families.
Hula
Chronicling the lives of multiple generations of women in a Native Hawaiian family from the Big Island, Hula is both a classic coming-of-age tale and a depiction of the enduring trauma that Western colonialism continues to have on Hawaii.
I Have Some Questions for You
An astute critique of true crime and the inherent misogyny baked into contemporary culture, Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You is the story of a woman returning to the boarding school of her adolescence, and becoming entangled in a mysterious murder that took place when she was a student.
I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction
Williams chronicles the stories of Southern Black families who were terrorized by bands of White vigilantes for daring to exercise their newly acquired civil rights during the years immediately following the American Civil War.
Imogen, Obviously
Becky Albertalli’s novel Imogen, Obviously is a coming-of-age story focused on friendship, family, and first love. The young adult novel presents a cast of relatable and endearing characters who show what it means to support and love each other through the trials that come with discovering one’s sexuality and identity.
Impossible Escape: A True Story of Survival and Heroism in Nazi Europe
In this meticulously researched nonfiction thriller, Sheinkin chronicles the remarkable Holocaust survival story of Rudolf Vrba, who, with fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler in 1944, escaped from the Nazis’ notorious Auschwitz concentration camp and became one of the most famous whistleblowers during World War II. Lending added perspective to the book is the parallel story of Vrba’s friend and future wife Gerta Sidonová, who similarly overcomes great odds while hiding in Hungary.
In the Lives of Puppets
In the Lives of Puppets tells the story of a young human who must travel to the City of Electric Dreams to save his android father from the collective Authority, learning challenging truths about himself and his companions along the way.
Into the Light
Mark Oshiro’s young adult novel Into the Light follows the journey of an unhoused teenager as he searches for his sister who has fallen victim to a dangerous religious group.
King: A Life
In the National Book Award-nominated King: A Life (2023), biographer Jonathan Eig uses new sources and interviews to provide readers with an updated understanding of who civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. really was.
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
Lisa See’s 2023 novel draws on real-life events to tell the story of a female doctor who successfully navigates the rigid class and gender structures of Ming Dynasty China over many decades.
Land of Milk and Honey
In a dystopian near-future where Earth is engulfed in smog, Land of Milk and Honey tells the story of a young chef recruited to serve the residents of a secluded mountaintop colony. Through the depictions of culinary abundance, wealth disparity, and scientific innovation, the novel grapples with the ethical quandary of indulgence in a dying world.
The Last Animal
The Last Animal tells the story of a teenager, her sister, and their mother as they navigate grief and attempt to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction.
The Last Tale of the Flower Bride
In The Last Tale of the Flower Bride, the husband of wealthy heiress Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada seeks to uncover the truth about her long-missing childhood friend, Azure, while also reckoning with his own memories of the past.
Let Us Descend
Let Us Descend follows an African American teenager enslaved in the antebellum South as her separation from loved ones after being sold becomes a journey into hell.
The Librarianist
The Librarianist is a moving tale of a retired librarian, an examination of one introvert’s life and the people who pass through it, marked by melancholy but also tinged with humor.
Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice
Cristina Rivera Garza’s hybrid nonfiction book follows her efforts to both bring justice to her sister, who was murdered by her boyfriend in 1990, and to recreate her sister’s life.
Lone Women
Victor LaValle’s novel uses elements of speculative fiction, horror, and the western genres to probe previously underexplored corners of American history and to craft a compelling drama of self- and community-empowerment.
Loot
At the heart of Tania James’s historical novel Loot is a life-sized automaton of a tiger eating a soldier of the British East India Company. The tiger was fabricated by a French artisan and an Indian woodcarver for Tipu Sultan, the warlike ruler of the Indian state of Mysore and an inveterate opponent of the British.
The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine
While helping his hundred-year-old great-grandmother during the COVID-19 pandemic, thirteen-year-old Matthew discovers the long-hidden history of the Holodomor, Joseph Stalin’s planned famine in Soviet Ukraine. This middle-grade novel, a National Book Award finalist, connects the twin tragedies of the COVID epidemic and the Holodomor to confront the past in a rapidly changing world.
VOLUME II
A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial
In his eccentric but stimulating memoir A Man of Two Faces, Viet Thanh Nguyen presents a politically charged explanation of his life and work, including an analysis of his experiences as a Vietnamese American in a White-dominated culture and a wrenching recovery of memories about his parents.
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
Master Slave Husband Wife is the story of Ellen and William Craft, enslaved in Georgia, who escaped to freedom by disguising themselves as a wealthy, ailing young man and an enslaved valet, and of the lives they made for themselves as free people.
Monica
In the graphic novel Monica, distinguished cartoonist and writer Daniel Clowes presents a compelling tale of a woman’s quest to find her parents, an endeavor that eventually takes on cosmic significance. In a series of sometimes subtly interrelated chapters, Clowes evokes various genres from the history of comic books, ranging from military comics to cosmic horror.
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
Claire Dederer’s memoir/criticism hybrid Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma attempts to reconcile fandom with moral code by examining such artists as Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and Roman Polanski, among others.
Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story
In this graphic memoir, Sarah Myer recounts their childhood struggles with feelings of abandonment and incidents of racism as they explore their gender identity and develop a passion for art and anime.
More Than a Dream: The Radical March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Historians Yohuru Williams and Michael G. Long offer middle-grade readers an in-depth look at the making of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, an iconic episode in the civil rights movement.
The Most Secret Memory of Men
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s genre-defying novel, The Most Secret Memory of Men, follows a rising Senegalese novelist solving the mystery of another novelist while simultaneously immersing himself in the African French literary scene.
Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming
Ava Chin’s Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming examines the lives of the author’s key ancestors, many of whom resided at the same apartment building in New York City’s Chinatown.
Nearer My Freedom: The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano by Himself
Educators Monica Edinger and Lesley Younge reshape Olaudah Equiano’s classic eighteenth-century slave narrative into a work of found verse for contemporary young adult readers.
No One Prayed Over Their Graves
A poetic novel spanning several decades, No One Prayed Over Their Graves follows two childhood friends and their descendants as they seek to find purpose among strife in early twentieth-century Aleppo, Syria.
North Woods
Daniel Mason offers a sweeping vision of life in western Massachusetts and a commentary on the relationship between humans and the environment through the interlocking stories of several generations of families who inhabit a cabin set in the deep woods.
Old God’s Time
In the novel Old God’s Time, police officer Tom Kettle emerges from retirement to investigate a case from his past, reckon with the magnitude of his personal losses, and separate reality from fiction.
Ordinary Notes
Ordinary Notes is Christina Sharpe’s depiction of the love, joy, triumph, labor, pain, and tragedy that marks everyday Black life under the White supremacist regime of the United States. As the title suggests, the work collects notes composed by the author—fragments of memoir, personal reflection, critical theory, literature, and archival documents—blended with art images, artifacts of public history and personal life, and the author’s photographs.
Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Héctor Tobar explores what it means to be Latino in twenty-first-century American culture with his essay collection Our Migrant Souls. Through careful self-examination and a curiosity about the experiences of others, Tobar creates a moving tapestry that questions the foundation of modern ideas about race and culture.
Owner of a Lonely Heart
Beth Nguyen’s second memoir chronicles the complicated relationship she and her mother share after being separated following the author’s birth. Gravitating around the events of the Fall of Saigon in 1975, the memoir traces the fallout and trauma that accompanied her family’s upheaval from the lives they knew before immigrating to the United States as refugees.
Parachute Kids
After traveling to the US from Taiwan under the unknowing guise of a family vacation to Disney Land, Feng-Li and her two older siblings are left to take care of themselves in Betty C. Tang’s graphic novel Parachute Kids. Filled with poignant moments, Parachute Kids is a story about resilience and bravery in the face of uncertainty.
The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial
The Parrot and the Igloo offers a deep dive, over more than two centuries, into three types of figures central to human civilization’s ability to engage with climate change: the inventors, the scientists, and the deniers. Author David Lipsky explores several such figures to make a clarifying determination of the role played by a small group of deniers in obfuscating, attacking, and crippling positive change.
Pineapple Street
The fictional story of a wealthy New York City family, Pineapple Street provides witty yet humanizing insight into the lives of the one percent, including their attitudes toward marriage, the factors that motivate them, and how they interact with those outside of their social circles.
Pomegranate
Helen Elaine Lee’s groundbreaking novel about incarceration, healing, and self-actualization is a stark condemnation of the US prison system, a spotlight on the exploitation of Black women and their bodies, and, finally, an inspiring road to beauty and recovery in spite of these seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Poverty, by America
In Poverty, by America, sociologist Matthew Desmond lays out the systemic sources of entrenched poverty in the United States and, without assigning blame to one political party or the other, describes ways Americans of means can become “poverty abolitionists” for the betterment of the entire country.
Promise Boys
This young-adult novel about three charter-school students suspected in the murder of their principal is as much a portrait of systemic racism in the American school system as it is a page-turning, unpredictable mystery.
Promises of Gold
Drawing on his background as the son of Mexican immigrants, José Olivarez employs colloquial speech and a range of poetic forms to explore the Chicano experience.
Prophet Song
In a future Ireland in which the elected government is sliding into totalitarianism and civil unrest is brewing, microbiologist Eilish attempts to care for her children and aging father as she watches the situation spiral increasingly out of control.
Quietly Hostile
Quietly Hostile is the fourth collection of autobiographical essays by humorist Samantha Irby.
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
In The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, historian Ned Blackhawk retells five hundred years of postcolonial history to illustrate the fundamental role that Indigenous peoples have played in shaping the nation that the United States would eventually become.
Remember Us
Jacqueline Woodson’s lyrical middle grade novel tells the story of a girl growing up in 1970s Brooklyn while dealing with a number of trying circumstances.
Roaming
Cousins Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki bring to brilliant life an event that touches most young peoples’ lives: traveling with friends for the first time. Set in New York City in 2009, Roaming follows the adventures of childhood friends Dani and Zoe, and Dani’s new college friend Fiona and explores how relationships shift and evolve with age.
Roman Stories
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories is a return to the writer’s celebrated form: the short story. Set in the Eternal City, the stories that make up this collection explore many paths of life, including those of locals, expats, immigrants, and tourists. The rich backdrop of Rome lends each story an additional element of drama and atmosphere.
Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People
Rough Sleepers explores the storied career of Dr. Jim O’Connell, a Harvard Medical School graduate who founded Boston Health Care for the Homeless and led the program for almost forty years. Paired with the history of O’Connell’s career, Tracy Kidder presents vivid descriptions of unhoused patients, giving the reader intimate and unromanticized portraits of these complex individuals and their life stories.
Saints of the Household
Saints of the Household is a young adult novel about two teenaged brothers born of a Bribri mother and a father of Nordic descent. Told in alternating voices, the book follows the two as they navigate life in a small Minnesota town in the aftermath of a violent incident.
Saying It Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement
In chapters organized chronologically around core dates and events throughout 1966, Mark Whitaker traces the competing origins of the Black Power movement in Saying It Loud. The book seeks to set an accurate historical course between contradictory first-person accounts and inflammatory journalistic coverage. Saying It Loud also probes the origins of the movement in intersection and conflict with the civil rights movement.
Silver Nitrate
Following a pair of film industry workers neglected by the business they love, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Silver Nitrate is both an homage to classic horror films and a chilling tale of the real occult terror that might be lurking nearby.
Simon Sort of Says
A heart-wrenching yet hopeful middle-grade novel, Simon Sort of Says follows a young boy who moves to a deliberately isolated town in order to escape the past trauma of a school shooting, only to find that you can never completely evade the past, even in the most remote of places.
The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts
In The Six, science journalist Loren Grush chronicles the experiences, struggles, and accomplishments of the first six American women to ever go to space.
The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed Art Forever
Art historian Prudence Peiffer chronicles the lives of a group of artists who lived in the same New York City neighborhood during the 1950s and ’60s, revealing a unique perspective on the postwar American art scene.
Small Mercies
Set against the backdrop of the South Boston riots protesting school busing, Small Mercies is at once a taut crime novel and a harrowing study of a fractious time in American history.
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
Camille T. Dungy’s memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden connects societal issues such as racism, sexism, and climate change denial to the loving labor that goes into tending to a garden and family. Vivid scenes from Dungy’s “prairie project” combine with careful examinations of historical wrongs to culminate in a surprising and exciting read.
A Spell of Good Things
In Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s second novel, a local election entangles the fate of two Nigerian families from very different social classes.
Starling House
Opal, a high school dropout and sole caretaker of her younger brother, Jasper, is plagued by nightmares involving Starling House—a sinister place shrouded in mystery and the subject of many ghost stories. When she accepts a cleaning job from the house’s warden, Opal is drawn into a real-life nightmare that threatens to tear apart not just her own life, but that of all the residents of the small coal town of Eden, Kentucky.
A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War
Journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad chronicles the modern history of conflict, occupation, corruption, and war in Iraq—a history that resulted in a severely fragmented Baghdad, leaving the author to feel like an outsider in the city in which he was born.
suddenly we
Evie Shockley’s poetry collection suddenly we, a 2023 National Book Award finalist, seeks to understand what it means to exist in the world, today and in the past. Poems in the collection focus on the struggles and triumphs of historic characters, like Ida B. Wells, as placed alongside more exploratory pieces with an eye on the pandemic and post-pandemic life.
Symphony of Secrets
Interspersed between 1920s and present-day Manhattan, Symphony of Secrets explores the enduring power of music connecting individuals across centuries, and the troubling erasure of diverse voices within the industry.
Temple Folk
Aaliyah Bilal’s debut short story collection, Temple Folk, explores the lives of Black Muslims in the United States through carefully written stories that expose both the good and the bad experienced by members of the Nation of Islam community.
Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think about Animals
In Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think about Animals, Christopher J. Preston discusses efforts to increase the populations of select animal species and the lessons that can be learned from such resurgences.
The Terraformers
With a plot spanning more than a thousand years in a distant future, Annalee Newitz’s ambitious novel The Terraformers (2023) explores complex ethical challenges facing inhabitants of a planet purpose-built to be a paradise, offering both highly imaginative worldbuilding and insightful social commentary.
Thin Skin
Thin Skin is a collection of essays about different topics, including racism, environmental concerns, late-stage capitalism, and post–Roe v. Wade motherhood that have come to define life in the 2020s.
This Other Eden
Paul Harding’s third novel, This Other Eden, follows the fate of a small colony of people who live on an isolated island off the coast of Maine. Inspired by true events that took place on Malaga Island, the story explores themes of racism and prejudice in the face of extreme poverty.
Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap is a memoir recounting her father’s life as an artist in Scotland, her own development as an art critic, and her avid appreciation for artists of the Dutch Golden Age, particularly a little-known artist from that period, Carel Fabritius.
Tom Lake
A masterclass in homespun storytelling, Tom Lake follows a mother recounting her fleeting acting career to her grown daughters. Presented through a series of flashbacks interspersed with the present, the novel provides a profound commentary on love, family, and the decisions one makes in life.
Tremor
Teju Cole’s largely plotless novel offers a collage of shifting viewpoints and styles to reflect on such issues as art, race, and death.
The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church
The 272 is an in-depth exposé of how the American Catholic Church and Georgetown University were both originally funded by slavery and the slave trade.
Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II
Andrews provides a detailed history of World War II, viewed from the perspective of American women who served with the armed forces, noting their contributions in supporting the United States’ efforts to defeat Axis forces.
The Vaster Wilds
A survivalist thriller, this historical fiction novel follows a girl from the lowest rungs of English society as she fights to stay alive amidst the inhospitable terrain of the seventeenth-century American wilderness.
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers
Jesse Q. Sutanto’s novel Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is a cozy mystery set in present-day San Francisco. Vera Wong is an empty-nester whose Chinatown tea shop has fallen on hard times. When a man mysteriously dies there one night, Vera is convinced he was murdered and begins to gather her cast of suspects. Told in vivid detail with a heavy dose of humor, this book provides a delightful read that is able to broach harder topics like loneliness and death while maintaining a lightness that serves its plot well.
Victory City
Rushdie’s epic novel unfolds an alternate, mythological history of the real-life Vijayanagara Empire, which flourished for several centuries in southern India.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
In The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, David Grann chronicles the wreck of an eighteenth-century British ship and the mutiny that followed, illuminating not only the gripping details of the event itself but also its broader historical and social implications.
Warrior Girl Unearthed
An Ojibwe Tribe’s summer internship program, Kinomaage, takes sixteen-year-old identical twin sisters on a mysterious, life-changing adventure of cultural twists and turns that solidify their passion for their heritage and fuel their outrage over its appropriation and desecration.
We Are All So Good At Smiling
Whimsy is tired of being handled as if she is too fragile to survive. She does struggle with depression that her parents cannot understand, but her sadness is the result of a childhood trauma that she can barely remember and that her parents cannot remember at all. During a stay in a hospital, Whimsy meets Faerry, a boy who seems familiar.
Wednesday’s Child
Wednesday’s Child, Yiyun Li’s third short fiction collection, following A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005) and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010), explores far-ranging yet subtle differences between various types of woe. (Content contains references to suicide.)
Wellness
Wellness is a sprawling satiric novel that tellingly touches upon the absurdities of consumer culture, academia, diet and fitness trends, the art world, the internet, suburbia, and various other facets of modern life.
Western Lane
Chetna Maroo’s unique coming-of-age novel tells the story of an eleven-year-old Indian British girl who uses squash to cope with her mother’s death.
Weyward
Despite living in three very different time periods and worlds, three women are tied together through a powerful family connection to the natural world in this intricate novel. All three protagonists search for peace and enlightenment as they navigate womanhood, face trauma, and find themselves.
Whalefall
While scuba diving off the Californian coast to find his father’s remains, seventeen-year-old Jay Gardiner is swallowed by a sperm whale and has only an hour left of oxygen to escape in this thrilling work of fiction by Daniel Kraus.
What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds
In What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds, Jennifer Ackerman explores contemporary research into the capabilities, biology, and behavior of the world’s many owl species.
When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era
Alternating the in-depth stories of four individuals with historical and political background, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey paints a multifaceted portrait of the US crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.
White Cat, Black Dog
In the short story collection White Cat, Black Dog, acclaimed writer Kelly Link puts a modern, genre-blending spin on seven classic fairy tales.
The Wind Knows My Name
Isabel Allende’s continent and generation spanning novel The Wind Knows My Name explores the trauma of child separation, from the horrors of the lead up to World War II to US border policies that saw thousands of children taken from their parents.
The Windeby Puzzle: History and Story
In The Windeby Puzzle, a unique blend of historical facts and fictional imaginings, Lowry enchants and educates young readers about teenage life during the Iron Age and the existence of bog people.
Witness
In this insightful collection of ten short stories, Jamel Brinkley explores the inherent tension that exists between observation and action in life.
Women We Buried, Women We Burned
Rachel Louise Snyder’s fourth book, Women We Buried, Women We Burned (2023), tells how she became a journalist, activist, and author, and why she began specializing in reporting about domestic abuse and violence.
The Words That Remain
Stênio Gardel’s debut novel employ shifting narrative voices and a scrambled chronology to tell the powerful story of a Brazilian man’s coming to terms with his sexuality.
The World: A Family History of Humanity
The World: A Family History of Humanity approaches the history of human civilization through the lens of lineages and dynasties, following power families across the globe from ca. 2613 BCE into the twenty-first century CE in a massive, yet concise, twenty-three-act tome.
Yellowface
Yellowface is a dark, thrilling satire about competition, greed, privilege, cultural appropriation, and tokenism in the publishing industry. It is the fifth book by Poppy War trilogy author R. F. Kuang.
You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America
Paul Kix provides an in-depth look at a pivotal ten-week period in which civil rights leaders staged an operation in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.
You: The Story: A Writer’s Guide to Craft through Memory
In You: The Story; A Writer’s Guide to Craft through Memory, best-selling novelist Ruta Sepetys introduces aspiring writers to the valuable creative inspiration they can glean from their own lives, from the lives of the people around them, and from history.