New Arrivals: The Best Recent Book Releases

In his first work of fiction since the 2022 attack, Rushdie delivers five inventive, deeply felt stories that confront mortality with wit, rage, and imagination. From a ghost’s revenge in Cambridge to a prodigy’s meltdown in Mumbai, each story explores what it means to face the end—of a life, a legacy, a story. Kirkus calls it “a brilliant series of intimations of mortality… [that] celebrate life, language, and love in the face of death.”

Punk rock's beloved poet laureate and National Book Award winner is back with a sparkling new memoir which takes us through her teenage years. Smith details the inspiration she took from artists like Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan as she begins to merge poetry and music into the form that she has become celebrated for.

In her first memoir, the author made famous by her extraordinarily crafted dystopian stories, turns her gaze inward. Book of Lives traces her unconventional childhood in the Canadian wilderness, her formative years spent abroad, and the intellectual and political battles that shaped novels like The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood is now 85, a two-time Booker Prize winner and cultural icon whose work has shaped how entire generations think about power and gender.

When a long-lost photograph resurfaces, the Albanian writer reconstructs her grandmother’s hidden life across the Ottoman Empire, wartime Europe, and communist Albania. Blending family inquiry with political philosophy, she probes how truth and myth entwine across generations. “Ypi displays a certain audacity as she sets about reconstructing a world she never witnessed, but she is no more presumptuous than the files she is working from … remarkable and ambitious,” writes The Washington Post.

From the award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, this novel follows a queer Black man living in Tokyo whose mother shows up unannounced after ten years apart. Over shared meals and difficult conversations, the two slowly face what pushed them apart—and whether they can find their way back to each other.

Decades after his beloved classic and Oscar-winning film, Irving revisits St. Cloud’s with the story of Esther Nacht, a Jewish orphan navigating faith, loss, and identity across continents and generations.

In a northern English resort town in the 1960s, a young shrimp fisher living with his mother works the tide flats by horse and cart, his imagination fired by folk songs and films. When an American director arrives to shoot a movie on the coast, their meeting opens a fragile path toward escape and self-reinvention.

In Lagos, a young woman struggles to break free from a family curse and the belief that she carries the soul of her dead cousin. Both hilarious and unsettling, Braithwaite’s novel explores the weight of superstition and the fight for self-determination in a world eager to define her. Real Simple calls it “a delicious page-turner with characters who burst off the page, and a lesson in fighting for the life you want.”

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis deliver a sobering account of the Trump administration’s full fledged assault on the Justice Department and the rule of law, making this a work of urgent relevance. Drawing on years of reporting experience for the Washington Post, they expose the erosion of independence inside one of America’s most important institutions.

The NYU professor and cohost of the Pivot podcast examines what it means to live, love, and lead as a man today. Blending memoir and manifesto, Galloway explores fatherhood, friendship, ambition, and vulnerability, arguing for compassion and accountability in an age of isolation. His call to action is both deeply personal and broadly cultural—a map toward strength defined by kindness, not dominance.