10 Books Critics Are Raving About Now

Ten years after her National Book Award–finalist debut The Turner House, Flournoy returns with a sweeping story of five Black women navigating adulthood, estrangement, and shifting allegiances from the late 2000s through the 2020s. "It's easy to marvel at Flournoy's precision with character, the heart of the novel, but it's the book's hard look at social and political realities that give it its teeth," raved Kirkus Reviews. "Elegant and unsettling, this novel evades the expected at every turn."

Nearly two decades after The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker, Desai returns with a luminous, shape-shifting tale of modern love and alienation. Set between India, Vermont, and New York, it follows two distant souls bound by family myth, personal hauntings, and history’s weight. “Every character...feels fully realised,” praised the 2025 Booker Prize judges, who called it “philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny.”

Frances Wilson, acclaimed for her literary biographies, examines how Muriel Spark’s early life shaped her work. Electric Spark covers the years of divorce, espionage, religious conversion, and blackmail that became the foundation of her fiction. “A brilliant literary critic and chronicler turns her sharp-eyed attention to the life and works of Muriel Spark,” writes The Boston Globe. “Sure to be one of the most compelling biographies of the year, if not decade.”

In a small Ohio town, a wartime affair sets off decades of hidden truths and quiet consequences. As families grow and transform over the postwar decades, the emotional cost of one long-held secret deepens. Patrick Ryan brings warmth and precision to this sweeping novel that the Minneapolis Star Tribune calls “a magnum opus of depth and care,” noting there is “nary a false note” in its interwoven lives.

The Swerve author traces the audacious rise—and violent fall—of Shakespeare’s greatest rival in this vibrant literary biography. From erotic Latin translations to Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s dazzling imagination and radical ideas helped shape modern thought. “Greenblatt excels at immersing the reader in that time and place,” wrote Booklist, praising the book’s “thriller-like pacing” and rich detail.

Winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature and a three-time Booker Prize finalist, the Argentine author of Fever Dream once again proves herself a master of the uncanny. In these stories, ordinary lives tilt toward menace and tenderness, as characters stumble at the brink of tragedy or revelation. “Beautifully translated by Megan McDowell, in prose that shimmers with a sort of menacing lyricism… powerfully evocative and unsettling,” writes The New York Times.

The Booker-winning author of Atonement delivers a genre-bending novel that moves from a dinner party in 2014 to a flooded, post-nuclear England in 2119, where one scholar hunts a lost poem and uncovers a brutal crime. Kirkus praised it as “a philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.”

From the National Book Award finalist and PEN/Faulkner winner comes a wildly inventive portrait of a mother and son bound by love and exasperation. Spanning six decades of personal and national upheaval, this novel unfolds in a wickedly funny voice that captures Lebanon’s heartbreaks alongside the absurdities of daily life.

Building on her National Book Award finalist memoir Hold Still, the celebrated photographer returns with a richly illustrated reflection on a life shaped by artistic obsession. Known for her portraits of the American South, Mann turns inward here—through photographs, letters, and field notes—to explore ambition, rejection, and risk.

Harvard historian Jill Lepore delivers a revelatory, timely history of America's hardest-to-change document. Published for the 250th anniversary of U.S. founding, this compelling work traces the rarely told story of amendment attempts—almost all unsuccessful—and what that failure means for democracy today. "It is impossible to imagine a more instructive text on a more timely subject by a more accomplished historian," praised author Timothy Snyder.