The Book Review

Paul Yoon’s new novel, “Etna,” follows a haunted, battle-scarred war veteran who wants desperately to go home. He also happens to be a dog — a mixed-breed shepherd trained to sniff out bombs for an unnamed military in...

MJ Franklin is in the host chair this week, in for Gilbert Cruz. MJ spoke with New York Times book critic Dwight Garner about Marlon James’s new novel, “The Disappearers.” Dwight recently reviewed the book, calling it...

If you were a reading adult in the early 2000s, you probably tackled, or at least heard about, “The Corrections,” Jonathan Franzen’s best-selling and much discussed book. The novel won the National Book Award, was a...

Jordan Baker said it best: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” In just one short sentence, the character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” sums up that wonderful feeling of...

At the center of Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, “London Falling,” is a mystery: In 2019, a young man named Zac Brettler disappeared, and a few days later his body was found in the Thames River. Surveillance footage...

What is it about a bookstore? You walk in planning to browse for a few minutes, and somehow an hour later you’re still wandering the stacks with an armful of books you can’t seem to put down. For this week’s episode...

Imagine, if you will, that for unknown reasons North Korea has just launched a nuclear bomb at the United States. What happens next? The journalist Annie Jacobsen has imagined exactly that, and spent more than a decade...

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...

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...

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...

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. And it’s also a daring story of survival. “Marriage at Sea...

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...

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...

“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...

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...