The Book Review

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “What We Can Know,” is many things at once: It’s a science fiction imagining of a future world devastated by climate catastrophe; it’s a literary mystery about a scholar’s search for a long-lost poem; it’s a deep dive into complicated marriages; and it’s a meditation on how the past lingers and how history morphs with time.

“It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote in...

From political tell-alls to the continued triumph of romantasy novels, it’s been an eventful year in the publishing world. On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin talks with his Book Review colleagues Alexandra Alter, Tina Jordan and John Maher about the biggest book stories and most significant reading trends of 2025.

Correction: An earlier version of this podcast referred incorrectly to an arts grant from the Mellon Foundation. T...

Here we are in mid-December, which means that along with all of the other year-end lists we produce and avidly consume at this time each year, The New York Times Book Review's staff critics are also looking back on everything they read in 2025, and toasting the books that have stayed with them.

On this episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks with Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai about their standout fiction and nonfictio...

All year long, the staff of The New York Times Book Review conducts a running discussion over what belongs on its year-end Top 10 list. In this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz gathers a group of fellow Book Review editors to talk about the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year. 

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

Fiction

• “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai
• “Angel Down,” by Daniel Kraus
• ...

History has not graced us with many details about Shakespeare as a person, but we do know that he and his wife had three children, including a son named Hamnet who died at the age of 11 in 1596, four years before Shakespeare went on to write his great tragedy “Hamlet.”

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel “Hamnet” — one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2020, and the source of Chloé Zhao’s new movie of the same name — starts from those scan...

Literature isn’t a horse race. Taste is subjective, and artistic value can’t be measured in terms of “winners" and “losers.”

That doesn’t mean it’s not fun to try.

The book world’s awards season officially kicked off on Oct. 9, when the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize, and continued this month when the Booker Prize in England went to the novel “Flesh,” by the British writer David Szalay (also of Hunga...

Nicholas Boggs’s “Baldwin: A Love Story,” is many things at once. It’s a comprehensive biography of James Baldwin. It’s a nimble excavation of Baldwin’s work, filled with astute literary analysis of his books and prose. And, most pressingly, it’s an argument for a new critical framework to understand Baldwin through the lens of love. The biography is structured around Baldwin’s relationships with a series of men — relationships tha...

On Nov. 10, 1975, during a calamitous storm, the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk below the waves of Lake Superior. All 29 men aboard went down with the vessel. With no survivors and no eyewitnesses, there’s always been a sense of mystery to what is arguably the most famous shipwreck in American history. The story itself was almost immediately immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot’s surprise hit ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Fifty y...

“The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” by Stephen Graham Jones, is two things at once: a searching historical novel that examines America’s past sins and also a gory horror thriller.

The book opens in 2012, when a construction worker in a dilapidated church parsonage finds a 100-year-old journal written by a pastor named Arthur Beaucarne. The journal recounts a strange tale: In 1912, a mysterious Indigenous man, Good Stab of the Blackfeet tri...

May October never end! As Halloween approaches, we present you with two conversations from years past with great horror authors. Joe Hill, whose latest, "King Sorrow," is out now, recommends several great spooky reads. And Victor LaValle ("Lone Women") talks about the book he has read the most in his life: Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House."

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You c...

It's October, which means it's time for scary books and scary movies. There's one person who is well known for both: Stephen King. Since his first novel, "Carrie," was published in 1974 and adapted into a hit film two years later, his novels and short stories have been a reliable source of material for film and TV adaptations. And while he's known as a master of horror, some of the more popular films based on his work are drawn fro...

The novelist Brandon Taylor has been a force to reckon with right from the start: His debut, “Real Life,” was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2020, and he quickly followed that up with two other books, the story collection “Filthy Animals” in 2021 and another novel, “The Late Americans,” in 2023, along with a steady stream of reviews, essays and literary hot takes he publishes on his popular Substack account, Sweater Weather.

Now...

This week, the Book Review podcast presents an episode of The Sunday Special from early September.

Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz talks with fellow word lover Sadie Stein and the author Louis Sachar (“Wayside School” series, “Holes”) about the books that they all read when they were students, and ways to encourage young readers today to keep reading.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can ...

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

So opens Jane Austen’s Regency-era romantic comedy “Pride and Prejudice,” which for centuries has delighted readers with its story of the five Bennet sisters and their efforts to marry well. While the novel moves nimbly among all of the family members and their various entanglements, its particular focus remains on ...

The best-selling science journalist Mary Roach has written about sex and death and the digestive system — basically, all of the topics that children are taught to avoid in polite company. In her latest, “Replaceable You,” she examines prosthetics, robotics and other ways that technology can interact with human anatomy. 

On this week’s episode of the podcast, Roach tells host Gilbert Cruz how she comes up with her ideas and what keep...

In last week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, host Gilbert Cruz and his fellow editor Joumana Khatib offered a preview of some of the fall’s most anticipated works of fiction. This week they return to talk about upcoming nonfiction, from memoirs to literary biographies to the latest pop science offering from the incomparable Mary Roach.

Books discussed in this episode:

“All the Way to the River,” by Elizabeth Gilbert

“Dark Renais...

Every fall brings the promise of some of the year’s biggest books and this one is no different. On this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, the host Gilbert Cruz and fellow editor Joumana Khatib talk about several of their most anticipated titles as well as a few upcoming big screen adaptations. (Come back next week for our fall nonfiction preview.)

Books mentioned in this episode:

“The Secret of Secrets,” by Dan Brown

“The Way...

Charlotte McConaghy’s latest novel, “Wild Dark Shore,” opens with an enigma: A mysterious, half-drowned woman washes ashore.

The stranger’s name is Rowan, and she has arrived on Shearwater, a remote island near Antarctica. The island, which houses an important seed bank, was once teeming with a community of scientists, but now the project is shutting down, the workers have left and the land lies quiet and deserted, everybody gone ex...

Summer is slipping away and we are on break this week. But we have a fantastic rerun for you — our conversation with Min Jin Lee from last summer, when her book "Pachinko" was named one of the "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" by a New York Times Book Review panel. She spoke about her novel as well as the book she's read the most times — George Eliot's "Middlemarch."

“I’m willing to say it’s the best English language novel, perio...