Critics' Picks Out in Paperback in November 2024

"Piercingly tender... Ann Napolitano catalogues the multitudes of love and hurt that families contain, and lays bare their powers to both damage and heal... Like her deeply felt characters, she compels us to contemplate the complex tapestry of family love that can, despite grief and loss, still knit us together. She helps us see ourselves — and each other — whole." – Diane Cole, The Washington Post

"Nunez is one of our best writers on animals and the strange, touching bonds we form with them... [Her] rare ability to be at once wistfully elegiac and sharply hilarious make The Vulnerables a gift." – Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe

"Matthew McConaughey's book is exactly what we needed after the frenzy of Campaign 2020... [A] much-needed breather... [and] a recuperative journey... it is both calming and laugh, laugh, laugh-out-loud funny." – Hugh Hewitt, The Washington Post

"Reid has brought welcome narrative coherence to a globe-spanning, multilayered story. He manages a difficult balancing act, serving up the detail that will satisfy experts while providing the dramatic tension and character analysis craved by the general reader. Despite the story’s complexity, one’s attention never wanders." – Michela Wrong, The Atlantic

"Eloquent, discursive... Schama wisely avoids reportage, which is still evolving, and leans, instead, into the past, crafting a play in three acts: smallpox, cholera and bubonic plague... Casts familiar and lesser-known figures in a fresh light... Sterling cultural history, but it also reminds us that political concerns mold our choices as future pandemics brew." – Hamilton Cain, The Star Tribune

"Le Guin expanded the boundaries of fiction not just by committing to its revolutionary capacities but also by considering deeply, and with great clarity, other ways of being. The Dispossessed, her most intricate and beautifully realized book, channels her lifelong obsessions–Daoism, pacifism, humanity's sacred relationship to the natural world–into a moving story that is also about loneliness, will, and what it means to return home. More than a novel, this is an ontological work of extraordinary imagination and compassion." – Meng Jin, The Atlantic

"This slim but densely meditative novel, the first in a seven-volume series by veteran Danish author Balle, is narrated by Tara Selter, antiquarian bookseller living in northern France. She has recently discovered that she keeps repeating November 18—thrusting her into a world where 'time fell apart,' as she puts it. This doesn’t provoke panic, nor does it instill an urge for intellectual and moral improvement à la Groundhog Day. Rather, Tara moves in a sea of bemused curiosity... A sober, thoughtful study of time and connection." – Kirkus Reviews

"Collision of Power visits all the stations of the cross of Baron's spectacular makeover of the Post... Lots of editors get lucky when a big story breaks their way, but nobody gets lucky long enough to accomplish what Baron has... [Collision of Power's] real service is the way it open-sources the Baron method on how to break consequential news: Obsess about getting the truth. Know your limits. Listen. Be fair. Report, report, report and report some more." – Jack Shafer, Politico

"Blakley-Cartwright has created a character who is that crazy, that powerful and that obsessed with breaking boundaries... Boy, do those pages turn as the day of reckoning draws near!... After a gentle start, this book goes gangbusters, then has a completely unexpected and ingenious ending. It's almost as if Blakley-Cartwright invites us to participate in a thought experiment — how the hell is this going to turn out? She gets the prize for the winning solution." – Marion Winik, The Star Tribune

"Rachel Hawkins is the reigning queen of the Gothic thriller... In The Heiress, she turns her eyes to Jules and Camden McTavish, a married couple who are pulled into the thrall of a mysterious inheritance at a family estate in the Blue Ridge mountains." – Maureen Lee Lenker