10 Books Critics Are Raving About Now

This recently National Book Award-longlisted novel-in-stories follows a cast of intricately linked characters as rejection throws their lives and relationships into chaos. "A blistering collection of interconnecting short stories, Rejection takes a magnifying glass to the mind in the internet age," hailed Vogue in its Best Books of 2024.

Publishers Weekly was delighted by this "boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement" from the sensational millennial Irish author. "This feels like Rooney's most fully realized work, especially as she channels the modernist styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf... Even the author's skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel's forceful currents of feeling."

A hope-filled drama set in the author’s familiar small town of Crosby, Maine that reunites readers with beloved characters like Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, and Bob Burgess as they navigate a shocking crime. "No novelist working today has [Elizabeth] Strout's extraordinary capacity for radical empathy, for seeing the essence of people beyond reductive categories, for uniting us without sentimentality,” hailed The Boston Globe.

The National Book Award finalist delivers a tale of money and morality as “engaging as it is unnerving" that follows an octogenarian billionaire’s assistant on a mission to change her life and the world. "Alam is quickly emerging as one of the best social novelists working today,” remarked Literary Hub. “It's a book about what it's like to be alive today.”

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.”

From a reflection on his mother's death to a love story between Jesus and Barabbas, each of these twelve stories blend memoir, comedy, gothic fiction and the personal obsessions of the Academy Award winner. Vulture discovered a "genre-agnostic spin through the Spanish filmmaker's favorite preoccupations: doleful divas, Catholic education, rebellion, and the countercultural ferment of Madrid after Franco's rule."

The latest masterwork from this Nobel Prize winner "reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious—and spooky—web of intrigue and suspense," praised Kirkus in their starred review, calling it "a crucial addition to Tokarczuk's oeuvre."

The first in a two-book series, this volume draws on years of personal interviews with survivors to recount the devastation and resilience that followed the atomic bomb drops in the Pacific War. The Washington Post calls it "sweeping, sensitive, and deeply researched... required reading for our human hearts."

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."

Recently longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, the new novel from this Pulitzer Prize winner “explores that last wild place we have yet to colonise and interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity” according to the Booker Prize 2024 judges.