Rave Reviews: 12 Recent Books Loved by Critics

"A charming, smart, heart-blistering and heart-healing novel… brilliantly captures a rapidly changing country… McBride offers us a thorough reminder: Against seemingly impossible odds, even in the midst of humanity’s most wicked designs, love, community and action can save us." – Danez Smith via The New York Times

"Rooted in the anxieties that crystallised for many during the pandemic… With a protagonist who is happy with the way her life has panned out even when she considers the alternative, Patchett celebrates not just the smallest events of our lives, but 'small' lives themselves." – Zehra Munir via Financial Times

"…a delight, bringing depth and complexity to familiar characters, not least New York itself. Few writers combine depth of insight and compassion with exquisite prose; Whitehead is one of them. I’d rather read his novels than those of just about any other writer alive." – Alex Preston via Financial Times

"An unnerving intellectual thriller about the intimate, easily exploited bonds between girls and women... a landmark in the small but potent canon of contemporary novels about unusual girls reckoning with themselves and the world around them." – Ruth Franklin via The New York Times

"Moore has never before so thoroughly blended the historical and the contemporary, or the real world and the spiritual one, as she does in I Am Homeless." –Maggie Doherty via The New Republic

"[Levy's] storytelling moves to its own music. Her sentences are sharp, sensuous, crackling with ironic humor. Her paragraphs are compact, full of tension that pulls the reader forward. The novel offers the reader a dazzling gaze at the conundrums of existence." – Alden Mudge via BookPage

"Wilson’s artistic story, throbbing with the ancestral memory Wilson felt in his blood, is profoundly inspiring in Hartigan’s magnificent rendering… Hartigan brings a sharp critical perspective to bear that keeps 'August Wilson: A Life' from crossing over into hagiography." – Charles McNulty via Los Angeles Times

"The Art Thief, like its title character, has confidence, élan, and a great sense of timing. It is propelled by suspense and surprises, and it is neither ashamed of nor stingy with the fundamental emotional payoffs of the heist… Nor does it hesitate… to bring down the boom." – Kathryn Schulz via The New Yorker

"The writer’s unquenched curiosity about people and gift for eloquent phrasing sit easily with both the storytellers’ commitment to a nail-biting mystery... It’s 400 pages longer than le Carré’s classic, but remains immersive, pacey and thought-provoking throughout." – Jane Graham via The Big Issue

"The fascinatingly macabre details of an Irish nuclear family's turmoil after a stretch of bad luck provides ample material for Paul Murray's The Bee Sting... With dark humor and unflinching honesty, Murray paints an arresting portrait of a family that can't catch a break." – Cady Lang via Time