Book Reviews

The ABC White House correspondent avoids bravado and knows better than to let insiders use his book to sound off about their enemies. But the obviousness of his account reveals an alarming truth.

The author of Station Eleven weaves together stories of a hotel worker and an ultra-wealthy con man in a novel that captures how precarious life is — in a way that feels particularly resonant now.

Nghi Vo's new novel is poised at the end of one empire and the beginning of another, as a cleric and their talking-bird assistant set about uncovering the dangerous secrets of a forgotten palace.

In Samantha Mabry's new novel, three prickly sisters are haunted, maybe literally, by their fourth, who's died in an accident. She has a message for them, but they may be too sunk in grief to hear it.

Three-time Hugo Award winner N.K. Jemisin turns her attention to our world in her new book — or at least, a version of our world in which cities can be born in human form to fight evil.

Emily St. John Mandel's powerful new novel follows a troubled brother and sister who get involved with a crooked hotel magnate whose Ponzi scheme destroys the lives of his investors.

Journalist Eduardo Porter has written a book that cuts to the root of racism, tracing it from slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation — and bringing it to today — with unblinking honesty and facts.

Eddie Robson's slim but punchy new novel is set in an unnamed city, made mostly of wood. The city has a King. The King talks to a cat. It's a gem of offbeat weirdness — with a deeply thoughtful core.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai's new novel is a luminous, complex family saga that stretches across decades of Vietnamese history, from the French colonial period, through war and upheaval to the present day.

Princeton Profs. Anne Case and Angus Deaton make the case that something has gone grievously wrong, starting with the shift to declining life expectancy numbers around the year 2000.