The Book Review

In Alafair Burke’s new thriller, “The Note,” three friends are vacationing together in the Hamptons when they have an unpleasant run-in with a couple of strangers and decide to exact drunken, petty revenge. But the prank they pull — a note reading “He’s cheating on you” — snowballs, eventually embroiling them in a missing-persons investigation and forcing each woman to wonder what dark secrets her...

Decades ago, after he lost in home in a California wildfire, the travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer started to go to a small monastery in Big Sur in search of solitude. On this week's episode he discusses those retreats, which he writes about in his new book "Aflame: Learning from Silence." "It's true that even from a young age, I only had to step into the silence of any monastery or convent and...

And we're back! Happy new year, readers. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib talk about some of the upcoming books they’re most anticipating over the next several months. Books discussed on this episode: "Stone Yard Devotional," by Charlotte Wood "Aflame: Learning from Silence," by Pico Iyer "Onyx Storm," by Rebecca Yarros "Glyph," by Ali Smith "The Dream Hotel," by Laila Lalam...

The Book Review podcast is off for the holidays, but please enjoy this episode of the The New York Times's Culture Desk show from earlier this fall. In 2004, Susanna Clarke published her debut novel, the sprawling 800-page historical fantasy “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.” It was a sensation. Clarke sold millions of copies, won literary awards and landed on best-seller lists. After just one book...

Clare Keegan's slim 2021 novella about one Irishman's crisis of conscience during the Christmas season, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has also been adapted into a film starring Cillian Murphy . In this week’s episode, MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib, Lauren Christensen, and Elisabeth Egan.   Keegan's book was also one of The New York Times Book Revie...

Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs — staff critics for The New York Times Book Review — join host Gilbert Cruz to look back on highlights from their year in books. Books discussed: "Intermezzo," by Sally Rooney "All Fours," by Miranda July "You Dreamed of Empires," by Álvaro Enrigue "When the Clock Broke," by John Ganz "Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring," by Brad Gooch "M...

Following our Top 10 Books of 2024 episode, we are re-running our book club discussion about one of the novels on our year-end list: "Good Material." How to explain the British writer Dolly Alderton to an American audience? It might be best to let her work speak for itself — it certainly does! — but Alderton is such a cultural phenomenon in her native England that some context is probably helpful:...

Don't let anyone tell you differently — end of year list time is a wonderful time, indeed. And, as we do every December, we are ready to discuss the 10 best books of the year. Host Gilbert Cruz gathers the editors of the New York Times Book Review to discuss the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year. The New York Times Book Review's Top 10 Books of 2024 "James," by Percival Everett "You...

The broad outlines of "James" will be immediately familiar to anyone with even a basic knowledge of American literature: A boy named Huckleberry Finn and an enslaved man named Jim are fleeing down the Mississippi River together, each in search of his own kind of freedom. But where Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” treated Jim as a secondary character, a figure of pity and a target of f...

It begins with one of the most iconic lines in literature: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realist parable of imperialism in Latin America, is a tale of family, community, prophesy and disaster. In this week’s...

As part of The New York Times Book Review's project on the 100 Best Books published since the year 2000, Nick Hornby called "Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland" one of the "greatest literary achievements of the 21st century." The author Patrick Radden Keefe joins host Gilbert Cruz to talk about his book, which has now been adapted into an FX miniseries. Keefe has no...

The works of John le Carré, who died in 2020, are among the most beloved thrillers of all time. For some, books like "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," "A Perfect Spy" and "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" are simply among their favorite works of literature ever. So it was a perilous task that author Nick Harkaway, one of le Carré sons, set out for himself. The author of multiple well-received scie...

Sally Rooney is a writer people talk about. Since her first novel, “Conversations With Friends,” was published in 2017, Rooney has been hailed as a defining voice of the millennial generation because of her ability to capture the particular angst and confusion of young love, friendship and coming-of-age in our fraught digital era. “Intermezzo,” her fourth and latest novel, centers on two brothers...

Halloween is just around the corner, so we turned to two great horror authors — Joe Hill and Stephen Graham Jones — for their recommendations of books to read this season. Books discussed: "Mean Spirited," by Nick Roberts "Maeve Fly," by CJ Leede "Come Closer," by Sara Gran "It," by Stephen King "Experimental Film," by Gemma Files "A Head Full of Ghosts," by Paul Tremblay "Lost Man's Lane," by Sco...

Salman Rushdie's "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder," has been nominated in the nonfiction category as part of this year's National Book Awards, which will take place in mid-November. This week, we are running Rushdie's conversation with Ezra Klein from earlier this year. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite p...

The actor-director-producer Stanley Tucci is also, famously, an avid eater, who has explored his enthusiasm for food through his travel show “Searching for Italy” and through two books: “Taste,” in 2021, and now a food diary, “What I Ate in One Year." In this week’s episode, Tucci discusses his new book with host Gilbert Cruz and talks about bad meals, his food idol and his path to tracking a year...

In 2021, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz had a hit with “The Plot,” a book that was partly a mystery, partly a thriller and entirely a delicious sendup of the publishing industry. It told the tale of a once-promising writer, Jacob, who steals somebody else’s story idea and reaches undreamed-of levels of success before things go very badly for him. Korelitz’s new novel, “The Sequel,” is — yes — a...

Jo Hamya’s novel “The Hypocrite” follows a famous English novelist as he watches a new play by his daughter, Sophia, in London. The lights go down in the theater, and immediately the novelist realizes: The play is about him, the vacation he took with Sophia a decade earlier and the sins he committed while they were away. The novel is an art monster story and a dysfunctional family saga that explor...

This weekend marks the official start of autumn, so what better time to take a peek at the fall books we’re most excited to read? On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz chats with Joumana Khatib and Anna Dubenko about the upcoming season of reading and the books on the horizon that they’re looking forward to most eagerly. Books mentioned in this week’s episode: “Intermezzo,” by Sally Rooney “Playgro...

Robert Caro’s 1974 biography “The Power Broker” is a book befitting its subject, Robert Moses — the unelected parochial technocrat who used a series of appointed positions to entirely reshape New York City and its surrounding environment for generations to come. Like Moses, Caro’s book has exerted an enduring and outsize influence. This week, Caro joins the podcast and tells the host Gilbert Cruz...

The British writer Kate Atkinson has had a rich and varied career since her debut novel, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1996; her 14 subsequent books have included story collections, historical fiction and an inventive speculative novel, “Life After Life,” that landed on the Book Review’s recent survey of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century . But...

As part of its recent " 100 Best Books of the 21st Century " project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Isabel Wilkerson joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss "The Warmth of Other Suns," her sweeping history of the movement of Black Americans from the south to points north over the course of the 20th century. Subscribe toda...

This July, The New York Times Book Review published a list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century . The top choice was “My Brilliant Friend,” by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein. The book is the first novel in Ferrante’s so-called Neapolitan quartet, which tracks the lifelong friendship between Lenù and Lila, two women from a rough neighborhood in Naples, Italy, even as family, relat...

As part of its recent 100 Best Books of the 21st Century project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Jennifer Egan joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss her Pulitzer-winning novel about the music industry, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” and talks, among other things, about the early challenges it faced in finding an audience...

A summer camp in the Adirondacks. A rich girl gone missing, 14 years after her older brother also disappeared. A prominent local family harboring dark secrets. Liz Moore’s new novel, “The God in the Woods,” turns these elements into a complex and suspenseful meditation on parenting and social class and the rituals of summer friendship. On this week’s podcast, Liz Moore chats with Gilbert Cruz abou...