The Book Review

What are the best thrillers published since 2000?

That was the question that the team at The New York Times’s Book Review posed to hundreds of writers of every kind of crime fiction, from legal thrillers to spy novels to cozy mysteries, as well as librarians, editors, critics and bookstagrammers. We counted up all those votes and came up with a list of the 50 best thrillers of the 21st century, available here.

In this episode...

Early in Douglas Stuart’s new novel, “John of John,” the Booker Prize-winning author describes a peculiar irony: “What skinned him was that the closer he got to home, the more lost he felt.”

It’s a passing line, but it captures the tension at the heart of this magnificent book: Here is a story of two men, each profoundly isolated, trying to figure out how to exist in a small, claustrophobic world...

The editors at The New York Times Book Review spend almost the entire year discussing, debating and sometimes arguing about the year’s best books. We’re halfway through 2026, which means it’s time for the host Gilbert Cruz and the Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin to talk about some of the best releases of the year as well as a few hidden gems that captured their attention and affection.

Fiction

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Today we want to bring back an episode from our archives. 

It’s about a book that has real beach read vibes. There’s a lot of water. It’s a relationship drama. Andit’s also a daring story of survival. 

“Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck" made it onto the Book Review Top 10 Books of 2025 and the paperback edition just came out a few weeks ago. It tells the unbeliev...

If you can’t tell your Eurylochus from your Telemachus, fear not: Your primer on “The Odyssey” is here, just in time for Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of the 3,000-year-old epic.

Madeline Miller, who reinvented “The Odyssey” in her best-selling novel “Circe,” explains why you shouldn’t be intimidated by the classic.

Plus, our critic at large A.O. Scott explains how nea...

The United States is celebrating its 250th birthday this summer, giving Americans a chance to reflect on the nation’s past and imagine its future.

Who better to help us make sense of this moment than Jill Lepore? The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and author of “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” joined the “Book Review” podcast to recommend so...

“Yesteryear,” Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, tells the story of Natalie Heller Mills: an ultrasuccessful tradwife influencer who posts about her life on Yesteryear Ranch, a homestead where she grows her own food, tends to cows and chickens, raises her six children and models a particular brand of conservative Christian womanhood. But not all is as it seems. Behind the cameras, nannies care for the children, Nata...

In April 1989, a newspaper clipping about an art exhibit landed in the mailbox of the Rev. Donald Wildmon, the founder of a conservative evangelical group, the American Family Association.

Partly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the exhibit included a now-infamous photograph by Andres Serrano that showed a crucifix submerged in Serrano’s own urine. Incensed, Wildmon sent a copy of the photo to every member of Co...

In 2024, The New York Times Book Review gathered more than 500 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets and literary enthusiasts to help pick the best books of the 21st century so far. One of those books was Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Road,” which came in at No. 13. That book tells the story of a man and his young son trying to survive in a postapocalyptic United States. Like other books by M...

June is here and the long summer days are stretching out ahead, which means it’s time to settle in front of the air-conditioner with a pile of books. (Just us?) But which ones should you read this summer? The “Book Review” podcast’s Gilbert Cruz talks with the Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin about the titles they’re most excited about.

Books discussed in this episode:

“Red Shee...

Ben Lerner’s slender new novel, “Transcription,” is just 130 pages long, yet it cracks open some of our most colossal and enduring philosophical questions.
The novel is told in three parts. We open with an unnamed narrator going to interview his mentor, Thomas — an acclaimed artist in his 90s who also happens to be the father of one of the narrator’s friends, Max — for a magazine. Before the...

Today we are delighted to share an episode from our colleagues on “The Ezra Klein Show,” originally published on March 31. Ezra interviewed author Michael Pollan, whose best-selling books include “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food,” and “How to Change Your Mind.” Pollan’s latest book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” came out earlier ...

Matt Haig was already several books into his career as a writer by the time he published “The Midnight Library” in 2020. One of those books, the 2015 memoir “Reasons to Stay Alive,” had even been a best seller in England, his home nation. Yet, “The Midnight Library” was a true breakout phenomenon. The novel, about a depressed woman who, after deciding to end her own life, ends up in a magical lib...

“Angel Down,” a grisly novel about World War I told in a single, almost 300-page-long sentence, was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In a review for The New York Times, Ben H. Winters described it as a “thunderous gallop” that captures the “cruel and self-perpetuating logic of war.” (It was also one of the Book Review’s Top 10 books of 2025.)

The day after the Pulitzers...

Since its first episode in April 2006, the “Book Review” podcast has played host to hundreds of authors talking about their new works and possibly as many conversations about the best (and sometimes worst) that books have to offer. In this anniversary episode, the Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz is joined by the deputy editor Tina Jordan and the critic Dwight Garner to look back at some of the titles, trends and turning...

Dilara, the heroine of Kenan Orhan’s debut novel, is a Turkish exile living in Italy and undergoing a routine bathroom renovation that turns out to be not so routine: When the contractors leave, she steps into the refurbished space and finds herself somehow transported to an actual cell in Istanbul’s infamous Silivri Prison.

Initially dismayed, she soon grows resigned and even magnetically attracted to the cell, which o...

How is it that a seven-book series written in Danish about a single day repeating over and over has become something of a sensation among the literary set? Since the English translations of Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume” series were first published in the United States in 2024, they have been nominated for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award.

With the latest volume to be trans...

Patrick Radden Keefe joins “The Book Review” to discuss his new book, “London Falling,” which begins when a family loses a 19-year-old son, Zac Brettler, under mysterious circumstances. His parents eventually discover he had been living a secret life, posing as the son of a Russian oligarch.

Speaking with the host Gilbert Cruz, Keefe describes the moment he first heard the story and how he immediately knew i...

We have made it to April. We survived the snowstorms and the cold, and now that the days are getting longer, there’s more time to read. So this week, if you are looking for some books to tide you over until summer, our Book Review editors Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib have got you covered.

Also on this week’s episode, the former United States poet laureate Ada Limón joins us to talk about her new book, “Against ...