New Arrivals: The Best Recent Book Releases

This “profound and irresistible page-turner” follows an American “spy-for-hire who infiltrates a commune of eco-activists in rural France,” remarked the 2024 Booker Prize judges about the latest caper from this two-time National Book Award finalist. “The prose is thrilling, the ideas electrifying."

From Jon Fosse's Nobel Prize last year, to the booming cult of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Norwegian writers are having a (global) moment. Vigdis Hjorth, who caused a tabloid kerfuffle years back in Norway for an excoriating novel that her family renounced for hitting too close to home, is now a rising star globally after picking up an International Booker Prize nomination last year. Of all Vigdis Hjorth’s critically acclaimed works, it’s actually this 2001 roman à clef about a married woman’s torrid affair that’s widely considered to be her masterpiece.

In this candid account, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson offers readers an intimate glimpse into her life, chronicling her family's journey from the era of segregation to her historic confirmation on the United States Supreme Court—all within a single generation.

This bestselling author’s “frank and soulful” second novel follows three estranged and very different siblings who return to their New York home after their beloved sister's death. “This story of addiction and grief will resonate with readers," declared Publishers Weekly.

A struggling biracial novelist at work on “her mulatto War and Peace” sells out to a streaming network in a “superbly ruthless and electric book” that Alta Journal's Anita Felicelli called “one of the best I’ve read about Hollywood.”

The latest from the bestselling author of The Midnight Library is a “fantastical exploration of grief, forgiveness, and second chances” that follows a retired math teacher who inherits a house in Ibiza. As she uncovers the mystery behind her late friend's life, she faces her own past and discovers the life-changing power of new beginnings.

The author of What Belongs to You returns with a luminous novel that’s landed on several most anticipated releases lists this fall. It chronicles a poet's sudden medical crisis, which unravels his world and plunges him into the depths of the American healthcare system and his own soul. “The best of Greenwell's writing brings to mind an overflowing container, a surfeit of emotion and insight," raved The Nation.

A woman’s hidden past erupts when she receives a letter from a women’s prison, unraveling her seemingly perfect life. “Bieker’s writing is raw, breathlessly confessional, brilliant in its depiction of the long shadows cast by domestic violence, the constant tension carried by survivors,” hailed The New York Times. “However, her true secret weapon is humor.”

The Guardian was enthralled by this “rich, sweeping tale spanning centuries, continents and cultures” from Ancient Mesopotamia to modern day London, which interweaves the lives of “an extraordinary child born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames in Victorian London, a Yazidi girl journeying across war-torn lands in 2014 Turkey, and a broken-hearted hydrologist in 2018 London.”

With a foreword by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this collection of essays by a philosopher, essayist, and leading voice in the Afro-Brazilian women's rights movement explores how social positions shape our voices and influence who gets heard, with Literary Hub finding "the makings of a truly modern feminist classic."