New Arrivals: The Best Recent Book Releases

Collected from his Le Monde columns, Piketty tracks the post-pandemic era of war, populism, and inequality, while arguing for an ecological socialism as the only path forward. "Piketty has made a distinguished career of explicating the whys and wherefores of inequality," noted Kirkus. "His outlook for a social democratic future is lucid and refreshingly optimistic."

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.”

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.”

The Booker-shortlisted author of No One Is Talking About This returns with a sharp and unsettling portrait of illness, loss, and disorientation in the COVID era. A young woman struggles to hold her family and her own mind together as grief and disease reshape her reality. Publishers Weekly praised it as “a knockout,” noting Lockwood’s “trademark humor, originality, and depth.”

Awad’s cult favorite Bunny gets a wildly inventive companion. Now her protagonist is abducted by her frenemies, who seize the chance to tell their own uncanny origin story. Booklist hailed it as “laugh-out-loud funny, cinematic prose… Readers will laugh to tears and be fully immersed in this ethereal trip back to Warren.”

The author of Motherless Brooklyn brings together thirty-five years of wild, genre-bending short fiction, from surreal parables to comic spoofs, plus a major new story. The Los Angeles Times hails it as “a must-read for both longtime fans and newcomers to Lethem’s expansive, off-kilter sensibility.”

In this long-awaited memoir, Priscilla Presley recounts her decision to leave Elvis and the difficult path of rediscovery that followed. She describes the reality of life inside Graceland, the enduring bond with Elvis even after divorce, and the reinvention required after his sudden death. Presley reflects on raising her children, transforming Graceland into a cultural landmark, and surviving devastating personal losses. As Publishers Weekly notes, it is “a heartfelt record of stepping into one’s own.”

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.”

After meeting her birth family for the first time, a high school graduate runs from everything familiar and reenters the world on her own terms. “Nuanced and enthralling, profound and funny,” said Booklist in a starred review. “A gorgeously written modern fairy tale.”

Set in 1915, this darkly thrilling novel follows orphaned twins who flee a murderous uncle and find refuge in a traveling carnival of misfits. From three-legged ladies to death-foretelling seers, Chaon creates a riotous ode to outsiders while weaving a chilling pursuit story across the American frontier.