10 Books Critics Are Raving About Now

Set in a near-future Indian city reeling from collapse, this Kirkus Prize finalist unfolds over one tense week as two families—one fleeing, one stealing—collide in a desperate bid to protect their children. “The way Majumdar manages to connect all the storylines with a resolution that unfolds both globally and in one small living room is genius,” Kirkus wrote in its starred review.

Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award, this sweeping narrative blends memoir, reportage, and historical research to chart Russia’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the lives of its women—from Lenin’s lover to Soviet war veterans to Pussy Riot and Yulia Navalnaya. Ioffe, who fled the USSR as a child, returns to document the promises and betrayals that shaped a generation and helped clear the path for Putin’s rule.

Susan Orlean has profiled everything from orchid thieves to bullfighters to librarians to a 10-year-old boy with a pet ferret. In Joyride, the bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book traces her evolution as a journalist and storyteller—from her early days at alt-weeklies to decades at The New Yorker to Hollywood adaptations of her work. She writes candidly about deadlines and dead ends motherhood and reinvention writer’s block and obsession and the joy of paying very close attention to the world. “An ebullient frank moving and inspiring memoir” says Booklist.

The final installment in Pullman’s acclaimed trilogy follows two seekers drawn toward a mysterious desert where the secret of existence itself may lie hidden. Combining adventure with searching moral inquiry, it closes one of the most ambitious fantasy sagas of our time. The New York Times calls it “a stunning achievement, this universe Pullman has created and continues to build on.”

Beth Macy returns to the Ohio town where she once delivered newspapers to understand how a working-class community became disillusioned and divided. In this searching memoir, the author of Dopesick turns her lens inward, tracing the collapse of local journalism, public trust, and civic life while holding onto the complicated love she still feels for home.

Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Adam Johnson returns with a visionary tale of exile, empire, and resistance set in a fractured South Pacific kingdom. A girl from a forgotten island is thrust into Tonga’s warring courts, where talking corpses, poetic parrots, and politics swirl like storm tides. “A majestic saga of political unrest in the South Pacific and a girl's quest to save her people,” raves Publishers Weekly. “This is remarkable.”

Rocky is back—still funny, still spiraling, and now dealing with a grown daughter at home, an elderly father who’s moved in, and a local train crash she can’t stop fixating on. Set in Western Massachusett and packed with Newman’s signature warmth and wit, this standalone follow-up delivers big feelings in domestic doses. People calls it “honest, hilarious and heartbreaking… You’ll savor the prose from the very first line.”

John Banville delivers a richly unsettling tale set in 1899 Venice, where an English writer and his new wife arrive seeking fortune and peace but find only illusion. In the mist-drenched corridors of a fading palazzo, sanity begins to slip and desire takes a darker shape. “With a gift for words that raises novel-writing to dizzy heights of literary excellence, Banville is producing some of his best work yet,” writes The Guardian.

In his first novel in more than a decade, the 88-year-old author drops a down-on-his-luck private eye into a missing person case that spirals from Depression-era Milwaukee to prewar Europe, unfolding into a cross-continental tangle of spies, mystics, double agents, and political paranoia. Critics have been enthusiastic; The New Yorker calls Pynchon “still panoptic, exciting, abstruse, distractible, and, for good or ill, unrestrained.”

This is Jon Fosse’s first novel since receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the quiet beginning of a new trilogy. Set on Norway’s rugged coast, it traces how one unexpected reunion at the harbor reshapes three lives. Told in spare, meditative prose, this story of loneliness, love, and death was called “unforgettable” by Publishers Weekly.