In a tacky Iowa motel, a witness who cannot remember being shot feeds a quarter into a massage bed to eavesdrop on the men deciding her future. Cate Quinn's new thriller is sharp on memory and control, generous with cliffhangers, and finally overburdened by its own reveals.

A girl who has spent a year refusing to believe in the haunted resort that killed her mother walks into it anyway, chasing the friend she abandoned. Gould's novel is a ravenous, neon-lit fable about what parents hide and what children inherit, generous in feeling if loose in its logic.

A bruised American agent watches birds raid a sugar bowl in Sydney and envies their judgement. David Baldacci's fourth Travis Devine novel sends him after a murdered intelligence analyst and an Australian dynasty, and its best pages belong to a dying father at home. Its conspiracy, though, arrives mostly as conversation.

A rigged coin, a library nook and a mansion full of staff who notice everything. Devney Perry's first Aston University novel is a warm, steamy house-share romance in dark academia clothing, generous with its three couples and thin wherever the plot needs a villain.

A walled garden on a Devon estate, an empty circle of paving where a statue once stood, and two young people dancing a bolero to music nobody else can hear. Ishiguro's 1938 caper is funny, musical and haunted by the war it knows is coming.

At dawn on a Gujarat beach, a thin old man bends down and picks up a crust of salt, and an empire starts to lose its grip. Kurlansky's history treats that gesture as the end of a five-thousand-year story about who owns the most ordinary thing on the table.

A laid-off federal writer comes home to a Darke County village whose meat plant is about to close, just as its residents start bursting open and coming back as something stranger and happier. John Scalzi's comic horror novel is generous, profane and sharp about money, though it settles its villains too easily.

Sixty years after leaving her childhood home in York, an actress climbs its narrow stairs to the attic and finds two of her drawings still on the wall. The memoir that follows talks its way through a whole life, and rarely in a straight line.

Two floors under the New York Public Library, a guard unlocks an oak box and shows a broke usher a scroll of narrow paper strips sealed end to end with wax, every inch of it covered in a dead poet's handwriting. The usher goes home and starts writing.

Every morning before breakfast a schoolteacher in Nishinomiya sits with his eyes shut before a glass case holding a carved bodhisattva, praying for soldiers on both sides of a war he never discusses. His son, now Japan's most famous novelist, spends this slim book working out why.

David Gate's debut poetry collection, A Rebellion of Care,...

Hayley Chewins delivers a visceral, unflinching exploration of teenage...

In "Autopsy of an Ex-Teen Heartthrob," actor, director, and...

In her debut poetry collection, Marina Diamandis - known...

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is truly the poetic...

Six books, seven weeks until the winner, and one of them runs to six hundred pages. Which of the shortlisted novels to open first, which to save for a group, and which one I think wins.

Thirteen novels, one shortlist in September, and not enough evenings. Here is what each book on the Booker 2026 longlist actually is, and which one I would open first.

You have a ticket and not much time. Here is what I would actually read before Nolan's Odyssey, sorted by how many free evenings you have between now and the cinema.

Finishing Circe leaves a very specific hole. Here are the Greek myth retellings that actually fill it, and the ones that only pretend to.

Your group has decided to read Homer. Now comes the argument nobody expects: which Odyssey translation are you all reading, and what happens when half the room turns up with a different book?

M. John Harrison won the Booker Prize 2026 with The End of Everything. In September I told groups not to start with it. Here is how to make it work if your club wants the winner anyway.

The 2026 Nobel laureate writes verse novels, tango essays and boxed elegies. Here is which of Anne Carson's books work best in a group, what to ask about each, and how to run the meeting.

Three men in a kitchen disagree about a Hebrew verb, and six hundred pages depend on who is right. Here is how to run that argument at a meeting, including the part where Steinbeck's reading turns out to be contested.

Steinbeck told us Cathy Ames was born without a conscience and then wrote four hundred pages that contradict him. Zoe Kazan's adaptation takes the other side. Whether that is a repair or a rewrite is the argument worth having.

There is only one pearl buyer in town. He keeps several agents in separate offices so that it looks like a market. Once you notice that detail, the novella stops being a fable about greed and becomes something much angrier.

Christopher Null is an award-winning journalist, editor, and novelist.Null...

When an author services company fails, the loss is rarely just money. Here is what actually happens to your listings, your files, your identifiers and your unpaid royalties, stage by stage.

Most book club plot discussions end in summary or argument about plot holes. Here's a better set of questions — ones that get to what plot actually reveals about character, theme, and authorial intent — without the conversation feeling like a lecture.

Look, we've all been there. You're staring at a...

Let's face it, folks - we're living in the...

Let me tell you a story. It was 2...

When an author services company fails, the loss is rarely just money. Here is what actually happens to your listings, your files, your identifiers and your unpaid royalties, stage by stage.

Hey there, bookworms and aspiring authors! Ready to dive...

Remember the good old days when people would line...

So, picture this: I'm sitting in my favorite coffee...

Let me tell you, folks, the publishing world is...

Listen up, fellow book nerds and publishing pros—we're about...

Picture this: You're curled up in your favorite reading...

Welcome to the wild world of BookTok, where literature...

So, you've toiled for months, maybe even years, crafting...

As an author, venturing into the vast, chaotic wilderness...