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The Best Reviewed Memoirs and Biographies of 2022

Featuring buster keaton, jean rhys, bernardine evaristo, kate beaton, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Memoir and Biography .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole (Liveright) 17 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span … it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us … O’Toole, an agile cultural commentator, considers himself to be a representative of the blank slate on which the experiment of change was undertaken, but it’s a tribute to him that he maintains his humility, his sharpness and his enlightened distrust …

O’Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks. There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase … But the real accomplishment of this book is that it achieves a conscious form of history-telling, a personal hybrid that feels distinctly honest and humble at the same time. O’Toole has not invented the form, but he comes close to perfecting it. He embraces the contradictions and the confusion. In the process, he weaves the flag rather than waving it.”

–Colum McCann ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home by Kerri Ní Dochartaigh (Milkweed)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Assured and affecting … A powerful and bracing memoir … This is a book that will make you see the world differently: it asks you to reconsider the animals and insects we often view as pests – the rat, for example, and the moth. It asks you to look at the sea and the sky and the trees anew; to wonder, when you are somewhere beautiful, whether you might be in a thin place, and what your responsibilities are to your location.It asks you to show compassion for people you think are difficult, to cultivate empathy, to try to understand the trauma that made them the way they are.”

–Lynn Enright ( The Irish Times )

3. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly)

14 Rave • 4 Positive

“It could hardly be more different in tone from [Beaton’s] popular larky strip Hark! A Vagrant … Yes, it’s funny at moments; Beaton’s low-key wryness is present and correct, and her drawings of people are as charming and as expressive as ever. But its mood overall is deeply melancholic. Her story, which runs to more than 400 pages, encompasses not only such thorny matters as social class and environmental destruction; it may be the best book I have ever read about sexual harassment …

There are some gorgeous drawings in Ducks of the snow and the starry sky at night. But the human terrain, in her hands, is never only black and white … And it’s this that gives her story not only its richness and depth, but also its astonishing grace. Life is complex, she tell us, quietly, and we are all in it together; each one of us is only trying to survive. What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.”

–Rachel Cooke ( The Guardian )

4. Stay True by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

14 Rave • 3 Positive

“… quietly wrenching … To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. Hsu captures the past by conveying both its mood and specificity … This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion—all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life … Hsu is a subtle writer, not a showy one; the joy of Stay True sneaks up on you, and the wry jokes are threaded seamlessly throughout.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

5.  Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo (Grove)

13 Rave • 4 Positive

“Part coming-of-age story and part how-to manual, the book is, above all, one of the most down-to-earth and least self-aggrandizing works of self-reflection you could hope to read. Evaristo’s guilelessness is refreshing, even unsettling … With ribald humour and admirable candour, Evaristo takes us on a tour of her sexual history … Characterized by the resilience of its author, it is replete with stories about the communities and connections Evaristo has cultivated over forty years … Invigoratingly disruptive as an artist, Evaristo is a bridge-builder as a human being.”

–Emily Bernard ( The Times Literary Supplement )

1. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

14 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Rundell is right that Donne…must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called ‘felt thought’, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract … It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before … Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne’s misogyny head-on … This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an ‘infinity merchant’ … To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness”

–Laura Feigel ( The Guardian )

2. The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland (Harper)

12 Rave • 3 Positive

“Compelling … We know about Auschwitz. We know what happened there. But Freedland, with his strong, clear prose and vivid details, makes us feel it, and the first half of this book is not an easy read. The chillingly efficient mass murder of thousands of people is harrowing enough, but Freedland tells us stories of individual evils as well that are almost harder to take … His matter-of-fact tone makes it bearable for us to continue to read … The Escape Artist is riveting history, eloquently written and scrupulously researched. Rosenberg’s brilliance, courage and fortitude are nothing short of amazing.”

–Laurie Hertzel ( The Star Tribune )

3. I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour (W. W. Norton & Company)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Pan

“…illuminating and meticulously researched … paints a deft portrait of a flawed, complex, yet endlessly fascinating woman who, though repeatedly bowed, refused to be broken … Following dismal reviews of her fourth novel, Rhys drifted into obscurity. Ms. Seymour’s book could have lost momentum here. Instead, it compellingly charts turbulent, drink-fueled years of wild moods and reckless acts before building to a cathartic climax with Rhys’s rescue, renewed lease on life and late-career triumph … is at its most powerful when Ms. Seymour, clear-eyed but also with empathy, elaborates on Rhys’s woes …

Ms. Seymour is less convincing with her bold claim that Rhys was ‘perhaps the finest English woman novelist of the twentieth century.’ However, she does expertly demonstrate that Rhys led a challenging yet remarkable life and that her slim but substantial novels about beleaguered women were ahead of their time … This insightful biography brilliantly shows how her many battles were lost and won.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Wall Street Journal )

4. The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

9 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Grisly yet inspiring … Fitzharris depicts her hero as irrepressibly dedicated and unfailingly likable. The suspense of her narrative comes not from any interpersonal drama but from the formidable challenges posed by the physical world … The Facemaker is mostly a story of medical progress and extraordinary achievement, but as Gillies himself well knew—grappling daily with the unbearable suffering that people willingly inflicted on one another—failure was never far behind.”

5. Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis (Knopf)

8 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Keaton fans have often complained that nearly all biographies of him suffer from a questionable slant or a cursory treatment of key events. With Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life —at more than 800 pages dense with research and facts—Mr. Curtis rectifies that situation, and how. He digs deep into Keaton’s process and shows how something like the brilliant two-reeler Cops went from a storyline conceived from necessity—construction on the movie lot encouraged shooting outdoors—to a masterpiece … This will doubtless be the primary reference on Keaton’s life for a long time to come … the worse Keaton’s life gets, the more engrossing Mr. Curtis’s book becomes.”

–Farran Smith Nehme ( The Wall Street Journal )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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The Best Biographies of 2022

Summer Loomis

Summer Loomis has been writing for Book Riot since 2019. She obsessively curates her library holds and somehow still manages to borrow too many books at once. She appreciates a good deadline and likes knowing if 164 other people are waiting for the same title. It's good peer pressure! She doesn't have a podcast but if she did, she hopes it would sound like Buddhability . The world could always use more people creating value with their lives everyday.

View All posts by Summer Loomis

The following are the best biographies 2022 had to offer, according to my brain and my tastes. And I know it might sound like something everyone says, but it was really hard to pick them this year. Like many people, I love “best of” lists for the year, even when I disagree with the titles that make the cut. There is something about narrowing the field to “the best” that makes me excited to read the list and see what I’ve read already and which gems I’ve missed that year. If you want to look back at some of the titles Book Riot chose in 2021, try this best books of 2021 by genre or best books for 2020 . Both will probably quadruple your TBR, but they’re super fun to read anyway.

For 2022 in particular, there were a ton of excellent titles to choose from, in both biographies and memoirs. I am not being polite here but let me just say that it was genuinely hard to choose. To make it easier on myself, I have included some memoirs to pair with the best biographies of 2022 below. If you don’t see your absolute favorite, it’s either because I didn’t like it (I don’t believe in spending time on books I don’t like) or because I ran out of space. And it was most likely the latter!

His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

Samuels and Olorunnipa are two Washington Post journalists who meticulously researched Floyd’s personal history in order to better understand not only his life and experiences before his death, but also the systemic forces that eventually contributed to his murder. While very interesting, this is also a harder read and very frustrating at times as there is so much loss wrapped up into this story. Definitely one of the best biographies of 2022 and one that I think will be read for years to come.

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrew Jarrett

This is one of those classic biographies that I think readers will just love diving into. Rich in detail and nuance, it drops readers into Dunbar’s life and times, offering a fascinating look at both the literary and personal life of this great American poet. If you are able to read on audio, you may want to check out actor Mirron E. Willis’s excellent narration.

Didn’t We Almost Have it All: In Defense of Whitney Houston by Gerrick Kennedy

Maybe you’re a huge fan or maybe you don’t know who Whitney Houston was, but either way, you can still read this and enjoy it. Kennedy is very clear that he didn’t set out to write a traditional biography. He wasn’t trying to dig up new “dirt” about the singer or to ask people in her life to reflect back on her now that she has been gone for 10 years. Instead, Kennedy tackles something deeper and possibly harder: to see and appreciate Houston as the fully-formed and talented human being that she was and to understand in full her influence over popular culture and music.

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Finding Me by Viola Davis

If you are also interested in reading a memoir from 2022, you could pair Whitney Houston’s biography with Viola Davis’s book. It was a title I saw everywhere in 2022, but didn’t pick up until the end of the year. My only two cents to add to this strong choice is that I was also just about the last person on earth who hadn’t heard about Davis’s childhood. Please don’t go into this without knowing at least something about what she had to overcome. However, despite all that, I still think it is an excellent and ultimately uplifting read. Content warnings include domestic violence, child endangerment, physical and sexual abuse, rape and sexual assault, drug addiction, and animal death. And also the unrelentingly grinding nature of poverty.

Like Water: A Cultural History of Bruce Lee by Daryl Joji Maeda 

This is a much more academic presentation of Bruce Lee and the myriad of ways he can be “read” in his connections and contributions to American pop culture. If you or someone you know is itching to read an extremely detailed and deeply considered look at Lee’s life, then this is the book for you. If you read on audio, be sure to check out David Lee Huynh’s narration.

We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story by Simu Liu

If you want to read something much lighter but still connected to Asian representation in Western movies, you could do worse than Liu’s 2022 memoir. In comparison to other books on this list, this felt like a much lighter read to me, but it is not without some heavier moments. While I am not a superfan of Liu (because I’m not really a superfan of anyone), I did enjoy learning about Liu’s childhood and especially hearing little details like that his grandparents called him a nickname that basically translated to “little furry caterpillar” as a child. I mean, is there anything more adorable for a kid?

The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

This is another meaty biography that readers will just adore. Complex and fascinating, von Neumann’s curiosity was legendary and his contributions are so far-reaching that it is hard to imagine any one person undertaking them all. This is a good choice for readers who are fascinated by mathematics, big personalities, and intellectual puzzles.

Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley

This is another best biography of 2022 that many, many readers will want to sink into. The audio is also by the author so you may want to read it that way. Whether someone reads it with eyes or ears (or both!), this book is sure to interest many curious Christie fans. And if Worsley’s biography isn’t enough for you, you may also enjoy this breakdown of why Christie is one of the best-selling novelists of all time or these 8 audiobooks for Agatha Christie fans .

The School that Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler by Deborah Cadbury

Cadbury writes a fascinating biography of Anna Essinger, a schoolteacher who managed to smuggle her students out of a Germany succumbing to Hitler’s rise to power and all the horror that was to follow. Essinger’s bravery and clear-eyed understanding of what was happening around her is amazing. This is a thrilling and fascinating biography readers will no doubt find inspirational.

The Escape Artist: The Man who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland

Freedland is a British journalist who has written this thoroughly engrossing book about Rudolf Vrba, a man who managed to escape from Auschwitz. It’s no surprise that this is a very important but difficult read. For those who can manage it, I highly recommend immersing oneself in this historical nonfiction biography about a man who survived some of the darkest events of human history.

That is my list of the best biographies of 2022, with a few memoirs for those who are interested. And now of course, I need to mention several titles I have yet to get to from 2022: Hua Hsu’s Stay True , Zain Asher’s Where the Children Take Us , Fatima Ali’s Savor: A Chef’s Hunger for More , and Dan Charnas and Jeff Peretz’s Dilla Time , to name a few!

Also Bernardine Evaristo published Manifesto: On Never Giving Up in 2022 and somehow it slipped through the cracks of my TBR. I will have to make time for that one soon.

If you still need more titles to explore, try these 50 best biographies or 20 biographies for kids . And to that latter list, I might add that a children’s biography came out about Octavia Butler in 2022 called Star Child by Haitian American author Ibi Zoboi, so you might want to check that out too!

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Best Biographies

Award winning biographies of 2022, recommended by sophie roell.

Five Books Expert Recommendations

In telling stories of lives that are often very different from our own and yet connected to us by our common humanity, biographies are some of the most compelling nonfiction books around. Five Books editor Sophie Roell rounds up some of the biographies that have won or been shortlisted for prizes in 2022.

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III by Andrew Roberts

Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell

Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert

1 All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner

2 the last king of america: the misunderstood reign of george iii by andrew roberts, 3 burning boy: the life and work of stephen crane by paul auster, 4 the escape artist: the man who broke out of auschwitz to warn the world by jonathan freedland, 5 super-infinite: the transformations of john donne by katherine rundell, 6 chasing me to my grave: an artist's memoir of the jim crow south by winfred rembert.

The National Book Critics Circle award for biography and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography

The LA Times book prize for biography

Biographies Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

The Pulitzer Prize for Biography

The 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Biography (which also includes works of autobiography) went to Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by the late Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) . Rembert was from a family of field labourers in Cuthbert, Georgia and taught himself to paint at the age of 51 using leather tooling skills he learned in prison. In the preface, he writes that he had been scared to draw attention to what happened to him in Cuthbert during his lifetime, and so he only composed his memoir as he was dying. It’s a wrenching tale told in a very direct and touching way. The book also includes pictures of his paintings—of cotton fields, of his mother giving him away as a baby.

December 17, 2022

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

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Gripping novels, transporting poetry, and timely nonfiction that asked us to look deeper Andrew R. Chow, Lucy Feldman, Mahita Gajanan, Annabel Gutterman, Angela Haupt, Cady Lang, and Laura Zornosa

A Heart That Works

All the lovers in the night, all this could be different, an immense world, ancestor trouble, anna: the biography, bitter orange tree, the book of goose, butts: a backstory, calling for a blanket dance, the candy house, carrie soto is back, chef's kiss, civil rights queen, constructing a nervous system, cover story, the crane wife, the daughter of doctor moreau, dirtbag, massachusetts, ducks: two years in the oil sands, easy beauty, eating to extinction, the emergency, the employees, the escape artist, everything i need i get from you, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man, the family outing, fellowship point, fiona and jane, the furrows, getting lost, half american, the hero of this book, his name is george floyd, honey & spice, how far the light reaches, the hurting kind, i came all this way to meet you, i'm glad my mom died, if an egyptian cannot speak english, if i survive you, index, a history of the, the invisible kingdom, learning to talk, lesser known monsters of the 21st century, liberation day, life between the tides, the light we carry, lost & found, lucy by the sea, the man who could move clouds, maps of our spectacular bodies, the marriage portrait, mouth to mouth, the naked don't fear the water, night of the living rez, nightcrawling, now is not the time to panic, nuclear family, olga dies dreaming, our missing hearts, the rabbit hutch, the revolutionary: samuel adams, scattered all over the earth, the school for good mothers, shrines of gaiety, signal fires, siren queen, south to america, strangers to ourselves, ted kennedy: a life, this time tomorrow, time is a mother, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, the trayvon generation, under the skin, when we were sisters, woman without shame, the world keeps ending, and the world goes on, young mungo.

by Rob Delaney

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

by Mieko Kawakami

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

by Maud Newton

by Nuar Alsadir

by Amy Odell

by R.F. Kuang

by Jokha Alharthi

by Yiyun Li

by David Quammen

by Heather Radke

by Oscar Hokeah

by Jennifer Egan

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

by TJ Alexander

by Tomiko Brown-Nagin

by Margo Jefferson

by Susan Rigetti

by CJ Hauser

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

by Lydia Millet

by Isaac Fitzgerald

by Kate Beaton

by Chloé Cooper Jones

by Dan Saladino

by Elif Batuman

by Thomas Fisher

by Olga Ravn

by Jonathan Freedland

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

by Paul Newman

by Jessi Hempel

by Alice Elliott Dark

by Viola Davis

by Jean Chen Ho

by Namwali Serpell

by Annie Ernaux

by NoViolet Bulawayo

by Tochi Onyebuchi

by Matthew F. Delmont

by Elizabeth McCracken

by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

by Bolu Babalola

by Sabrina Imbler

by Ada Limón

by Jami Attenberg

by Jennette McCurdy

by Noor Naga

by Jonathan Escoffery

by Amy Bloom

by Dennis Duncan

by Meghan O’Rourke

by Hilary Mantel

by George Saunders

by Adam Nicolson

by Michelle Obama

by Kathryn Schulz

by Elizabeth Strout

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

by Bernardine Evaristo

by Maddie Mortimer

by Maggie O’Farrell

by Isaac Butler

by Antoine Wilson

by Matthieu Aikins

by Morgan Talty

by Leila Mottley

by Kevin Wilson

by Joseph Han

by Xochitl Gonzalez

by Celeste Ng

by Tess Gunty

by Stacy Schiff

by Yoko Tawada

by Jessamine Chan

by Sarah Weinman

by Kate Atkinson

by Dani Shapiro

by Imani Perry

by Jay Hopler

by Rachel Aviv

by John A. Farrell

by Emma Straub

by Sara Freeman

by Ocean Vuong

by Gabrielle Zevin

by Elizabeth Alexander

by Hernan Diaz

by Linda Villarosa

by Blake Crouch

by Julia May Jonas

by Fatimah Asghar

by Sandra Cisneros

by Franny Choi

by Douglas Stuart

This project is led by Lucy Feldman and Annabel Gutterman, with writing, reporting, and additional editing by Andrew R. Chow, Mahita Gajanan, Angela Haupt, Cady Lang, Rachel Sonis, and Laura Zornosa; photography editing by Whitney Matewe; art direction by Victor Williams; video by Erica Solano; audience strategy by Alex Hinnant, Kari Sonde, and Kim Tal; and production by Nadia Suleman.

Mental Floss’s 16 Best Books of 2022

W hatever else has happened in 2022 , it’s been a great year for books . Beloved authors, seasoned journalists, and astonishingly talented newcomers all delivered tales that quickened our pulses, made us laugh, and helped us see the world in new and sometimes surprising ways. 

From histories and biographies that provide a crucial framework for understanding modern-day America, to genre novels that kept us reading long into the night, here are 16 of the best books of 2022 (listed alphabetically by title).

1. All the White Spaces : A Novel by Ally Wilkes; From $13 

From H.P. Lovecraft ’s “At the Mountains of Madness” to John Carpenter’s The Thing , there’s one element that seems intrinsic to polar horror: relentless, overbearing masculinity. In her astonishingly assured debut novel, Ally Wilkes interrogates and eviscerates that trope by inserting a transgender man into the mix: Jonathan Morgan, who stows away on an Antarctic expedition after his two older brothers are killed in World War I. Wilkes delivers on all the promises of the subgenre; All the White Spaces is a thrilling tale of adventure and subantarctic survival, and something inhuman waits in the bone-chilling cold. But by centering a queer character, she effectively subverts expectations and reinvents icebound horror. 

Buy it : Amazon

2. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong; From $14

The best science books don’t simply inform; they inspire a sense of genuine wonder at the world we inhabit. Some, like Ed Yong’s An Immense World , even compel us to reconsider our place in it. Yong, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, offers a breathtaking tour of the world as animals perceive it, from a dolphin ’s ability to “see” inside the bodies of other creatures to a jewel wasp’s staggeringly acute sense of touch. Besides offering wondrous details about how animals experience their environment, An Immense World paints a sometimes-disturbing portrait of how human’s sensory abilities—and limitations—have dramatically changed the planet. 

3. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan; From $14

Following up 2010’s Pulitzer Prize-winner A Visit From the Goon Squad was a tall order, but Jennifer Egan succeeds in spades with her sort-of sequel The Candy House . The book focuses on characters who lingered at Goon Squad ’s outer edges. Among them is Bix Bouton, who played a walk-on role in Goon Squad but has since changed the world with his invention of a social media app that allows users to explore one another’s (sometimes-repressed) memories. The technology serves as a backdrop for Egan’s interconnected, deeply humane vignettes. You don’t need to have read Goon Squad to appreciate Egan’s companion novel, but fans of the first book will be rewarded with cameos from characters who once commanded the spotlight, and satisfying star turns from bit players. 

4. The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier by April White; From $17

April White’s riveting, proudly feminist book offers everything you’d expect from a rousing historical drama, but it’s entirely true. White recounts the story of an odd little slice of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where 19th century socialites went to do what few American women of that era had ever managed: divorce their wealthy, often powerful husbands. White centers her narrative on a group of women who set up camp at a luxury hotel to wait out South Dakota’s three-month residency requirement, after which they were free to seek a divorce under the state’s then-lenient marriage laws. In telling their story, White vividly and entertainingly reconstructs a largely forgotten but vital chapter of American history. 

5. The Furrows by Namwali Serpell; From $14

Zambian-American novelist Namwali Serpell has been compared to filmmakers Jordan Peele and Christopher Nolan, and for good reason—her stories are twisty and often dreamlike, turning in on themselves and subverting expectations at every turn. Her second novel, The Furrows , will only increase those comparisons. It’s a genre-bending tale of a woman named Cassandra, whose younger brother dies when she’s 12 years old—or so she seems to believe. The tragedy, and Cassandra’s attempts to process it, shape her life in every imaginable way, but it’s only the starting point for a sly, surprising story that takes a sideways turn every time you think you’ve figured it out. 

6. G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage; From $18

It’s easy to vilify J. Edgar Hoover , but Yale historian Beverly Gage charts a tougher course in her sweeping biography: She paints a nuanced, fairhanded portrait that might even have you feeling a little bad for him by the final chapters. By no means does Gage attempt to whitewash Hoover’s record, but she reminds us that he was a cog in a political machine that included presidents from both major parties. Her masterful biography should be required reading for anyone hoping to understand America’s current political polarization and the rise of hardline conservatism. 

7. His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa; From $16 

What most of us know about George Floyd can be summed up in strokes that are both broad and reductive: his struggles with addiction, the agonizing details of his death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, and the societal impact of his death . In His Name Is George Floyd , Washington Post journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa remind us that Floyd lived for 46 years, and his life was shaped by the centuries of injustice that led up to his death. It’s a disturbing and heartbreaking read, but also a necessary one.      

8. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy; From $15

The title might be shocking, but there’s nothing lurid or sensational about former actress Jennette McCurdy’s incisive memoir about her stunningly dysfunctional upbringing. McCurdy proves to be as remarkably assured on the page as on the screen, and her memoir is an immensely readable, if often-disturbing, tale of parental malpractice and eventual independence. McCurdy’s fans would expect nothing less from the gifted young woman who brought iCarly ’s Sam Puckett to life. 

9. The Maid by Nita Prose; From $14

Here at Mental Floss, a book doesn’t have to change the world to win our hearts; sometimes it just needs to keep us reading—and smiling—well past bedtime. Nita Prose’s The Maid does just that by way of its winning heroine , Molly Gray, a 25-year-old, Olive Garden-loving staff maid accused of murdering a guest at the fictional Regency Grand Hotel. Molly sets out to find the killer and clear her name, partly to avoid prison and partly so she can get back to her job of keeping the hotel clean and tidy. If you’re not sold yet, consider this: Florence Pugh has been cast as Molly in Universal’s upcoming adaptation.      

Buy it: Amazon

10. The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World by David K. Randall; From $10

The thrill of discovery hangs over every chapter of David K. Randall’s exciting account of the unearthing of Tyrannosaurus rex in the wilds of Montana by fossil hunter Barnum Brown—and its world-shaking fallout. Randall , a senior reporter for Reuters, has a journalist’s eye for detail and a novelist’s flair for drama, and he brings both to the page in this fast-paced story of the discovery of the world’s most famous dinosaur , and the way it jolted our understanding of the world off its axis.      

11. Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment and the Courts to Set Him Free by Sarah Weinman; From $15

Any connoisseur of artful true crime should already be familiar with journalist, essayist, editor, and author Sarah Weinman , who gave us 2018’s The Real Lolita . She somehow outdoes herself with Scoundrel , about a man who was sentenced to death for the murder of a 15-year-old girl in 1957, only to walk free after conning conservative stalwart William F. Buckley into championing his case. Weinman’s meticulously researched, beautifully written book isn’t as concerned with teasing out a mystery—she succinctly lays out the facts of the case in her introduction—as it is with helping us understand how such a travesty of justice could occur in the first place. 

12. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel; From $12

Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel is both epic in scope and intimate in its treatment of characters separated by centuries but bound by shared experiences. Opening in 1912 before eventually jumping to the years 2203 and 2401, Sea of Tranquility is dazzling in its ambition, and Mandel somehow sticks the landing in every conceivable way. Its plot is difficult to sum up in a few words, but it involves a pandemic, a novelist, a moon colony, and a strain of violin music. Trust us: It all comes together in ways that are both affecting and entertaining, and it’s wrapped in Mandel’s signature, glittering prose.      

13. Sinkable: Obsession, the Deep Sea, and the Shipwreck of the Titanic by Daniel Stone; From $15

There’s no shortage of books about history’s most notorious shipwreck , but former National Geographic senior editor Daniel Stone takes a different tack: He dissects the very phenomenon that brings all those Titanic texts to our shelves. You’ll learn things you didn’t know about the RMS Titanic and other maritime disasters, but the true marvel of Stone’s book is its fascinating journey through the curious subculture that has risen in their wake.   

14. Stay True by Hua Hsu; From $14

In this beautifully written memoir, English professor and New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu recounts his attempts to make sense of the seemingly random murder of a college friend in the late ’90s, when both young men were students at UC Berkeley. Hsu is a first-generation American born to Taiwanese immigrants; his friend, who was shot to death during a robbery, was of Japanese descent. In trying to process the senseless killing, Hsu examines the vastly different nature of each young man’s experience as an Asian American and wonders what, if any, role his friend’s race might have played in the murder. Simultaneously sharp and gentle, tragic and even funny, Stay True is a beautiful portrait of friendship and devotion.      

15. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow : A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin; From $14

You need not be a gamer to appreciate Gabrielle Zevin’s 10th novel, which explores the lifelong friendship of two brilliant video game designers. Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital when they’re both 11 years old, where they bond over Super Mario Bros . The book tracks their relationship over the course of 30 years, during which time they will create a game that profoundly impacts the course of their lives. The narrative occasionally wanders into the virtual worlds Sam and Sadie create, but its real concern is the enduring, platonic love between its main characters. Think The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , but set in the world of video games rather than comic books.     

16. Tracy Flick Can’t Win by Tom Perrotta; $14

Tom Perrotta’s highly anticipated sequel to 1998’s Election , which inspired the 1999 film of the same name , does not disappoint. The story picks up two decades after Tracy Flick headed off to Georgetown at the end of the first book. Now in her 40s with a 10-year-old daughter, Tracy’s life hasn’t exactly turned out as she’d planned: She’s an assistant principal at a New Jersey high school, and she’s been passed over for several promotions. When her boss announces his retirement, Tracy is once again mired in a cutthroat competition—one that forces her (and the reader) to reevaluate the events of the first novel. Before you ask: An Alexander Payne-directed adaptation is in the works, with Reese Witherspoon returning as Tracy. 

This article was originally published on mentalfloss.com as Mental Floss’s 16 Best Books of 2022 .

The Best Books of 2024... So Far

The must-read novels, compelling memoirs, and incredible histories captivating us this year.

Every item on this page was chosen by a Town & Country editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

From buzzy biographies to literary fiction, mysteries, memoirs, and everything in between, here are the best books of 2024—so far.

Cyrus Shams is in my ways shaped by the history of his family—which has been difficult, strange, and at times tragic. But what if he doesn't know his own story as well as he thinks? In this smart, charming, and exceedingly clever novel, Cyrus is forced to grapple with the events that have shaped who he is today, and uncover the truth about who he might become.

Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions

Ed Zwick has had a long, storied career on screen, directing and producing iconic projects including thirtysomething , Legends of the Fall , About Last Night, and Shakespeare in Love . Now, he's sharing one of the most remarkable stories of all, his own, on the page. This funny, insightful, and deliciously dishy memoir covers the highs and lows of life in Hollywood, recalls the superstars and psychopaths who've crossed Zwick's path, and shares the all-too-rare truth about what really happens behind the scenes of one of the world's most glamorous industries.

Get the Picture

The art world is hard to understand on purpose. The people who buy, the prices they pay, and the places they go are all designed to be mysterious enough to both intrigue and befuddle everyone who isn't on the inside. That's exactly why Bianca Bosker decided to go inside and write this dispatch that covers everything from working as a museum guard to crashing an art party packed with billionaires. Through her funny and fascinating experiences, she does the seemingly impossible: sheds light on a strange world of beautiful things and the sometimes-ugly business around them.

The Book of Love

The debut novel of Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link is full of magic. The story begins when three teenagers—Laura, Daniel, and Mo—find themselves in their high school classroom, nearly a year after they disappeared from their small seaside Massachusetts town. How are they back? Why are they back? Why can't they remember what happened to them? They soon learn that they have to compete magical tasks—and only two of the three of them will get to stay alive. Link takes her readers on a wild, compelling ride, full of fantastical twists and turns.

The Anxious Generation

What does screen time really do to our kids? You might not want to know—but you need to. In this book, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores how the way kids are growing up today impacts their development and mental health, and is creating major problems for society at large. Beyond just identifying the problem, however, Haidt offers solutions to help turn the tide.

You Dreamed of Empires: A Novel

You Dreamed of Empires is history like you've never read it before. In this mesmerizing, almost hallucinogenic novel, Álvaro Enrigue (with expert translation by Natasha Wimmer) brings to life the day conquistador Hernán Cortés arrives in the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1519 . Enrigue vividly imagines the drama at Moctezuma's court, and how the colonizers would've experienced the great city.

Great Expectations: A Novel

Vinson Cunningham's debut novel may share a title with the work by Charles Dickens, but the coming-of-age story is rooted in a very different time period: on the campaign trail in 2008. Narrated by college dropout David, Cunningham's novel follows him as he works fundraising for a candidate who evokes Barack Obama (but is only referred to as "the Senator" and then "the Candidate"). It's a quiet, reflective novel that expertly captures a distinct moment in American history.

The Familiar: A Novel

Adam Rathe is Town & Country 's Deputy Features Director, covering arts and culture and a range of other subjects. 

Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma , a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram .

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22 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer

Books that will transport you from a beach to a road trip with messy friends or a round table with knights..

In a season ripe for luxuriating in small indulgences — a headfirst dip in the cold pool, the first lick of ice cream, an evening stroll in the long shadows of a late sunset — there are few more rewarding than an afternoon with a new book. This summer, we’re reading books about mothers (loving them, missing them, resenting them, being them), bad art friends (the type who commit fraud and otherwise), and even the Knights of the Round Table (yeah, there’s a new Arthurian retelling). We’re going on road trips with messy friends in a debut novel and on a trip to the 1970s with an established writer’s new memoir. Go ahead, find your place in the sun, and crack open a new book — you deserve a little treat.

Emma Copley Eisenberg made a name for herself with The Third Rainbow Girl , a gripping work of narrative nonfiction that weaved together a decades-old double murder in West Virginia with Eisenberg’s own queer self-discovery. Her debut novel, Housemates , proves she’s just as skilled a fiction writer as she is a journalist. Here, Eisenberg deftly reimagines and queers the road-trip novel by focusing on the lives of two young artists coming to terms with how they relate to themselves and to art. The story follows housemates Bernie and Leah, who embark on a trip across rural Pennsylvania to pick up artwork bequeathed to Bernie by her disgraced former photography teacher. Bernie would rather refuse, but Leah convinces her to go and turn the trip into a project by documenting the journey in photos and writing. The relationship between Leah and Bernie is messy and honest. Together, the two must confront how they feel about art produced by people who do harm — and the limits of their compassion. — Isle McElroy

Set in the summer of 1961 in a house in the Dutch countryside, this tantalizingly slow-paced novel sucks in readers by setting up an opposition between its two protagonists: repressed, isolated Isabel, who lives alone in a family house that’s been bequeathed to one of her brothers in the event that he marries, and that brother’s flashy, charismatic girlfriend Ava, who comes to stay with Isabel against her will, rupturing her quiet life for good. The tormented Dutch relationship with the Holocaust comes into play here, not quite surprisingly — processing the legacy of the Holocaust is mandatory in many Dutch best sellers — but here, it has truly surprising consequences. Fans of Patricia Highsmith and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen will find much to admire here. Recommended for reading outdoors while eating a ripe pear. — Emily Gould

Gretchen Felker-Martin’s impressive new novel , Cuckoo , shifts away from the large-scale dystopia of her previous novel, Manhunt , to explore the claustrophobic dystopia of a “conversion camp from hell.” Sixteen years after seven teens are abandoned at an isolated desert conversion camp, the survivors of that terrible summer must come together to put an end to Camp Resolution. Felker-Martin sees clearly how queerness and survival often go hand in hand, but what makes her work so exciting is the power and resourcefulness of her characters. Queerness is not something to survive, but a state of being that enables one to thrive in the face of ongoing attacks. In Cuckoo , the attempt to right past wrongs, to overcome collective trauma at the hands of institutions, transforms into a cosmic endeavor. By saving themselves, these characters are fighting to save the world. — I.M.

Nineteen-year-old Margo gets pregnant by her community-college English teacher and decides to keep the baby. Once he’s born, Margo loses her waitressing job and half her roommates, then panics about how she’ll make ends meet. The solution? OnlyFans. Her former pro-wrestler dad Jinx helps her craft a persona on the site and even moves in to help with the baby. But trouble looms in the shape of Margo’s baby’s father, her newly morally upright mother, and Jinx’s druggy demons. Plus, Margo might be falling for one of her regulars. This deeply funny, thoughtful, riveting book has already been optioned for a TV series by A24, so if you actually read the book, you can safely claim to be an early adopter. — E.G.

By the mid-1970s, the revolution promised by the ’60s counterculture had failed, leaving its participants to confront a more cynical decade rife with paranoia and a general sense of futility. In her new memoir, 1974: A Personal History , novelist and critic Francine Prose traces that shift through the lens of her brief friendship and quasi-romance with Tony Russo, who a few years earlier had helped Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon Papers, a tranche of confidential files exposing the federal government’s lies to the public about the war in Vietnam. In excavating her relationship with Russo, Prose attempts to better understand the aimlessness of her 20s and to parse what exactly drew her to a compellingly brave but unstable man who had once hoped he could change the course of history. Along the way, Prose deftly zigzags through the pop-culture touchstones of her youth, throwing everything from Vertigo to Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night into dialogue with a chaotic period of both her life and American history. — Chris Stanton

Talent agent, producer, and podcaster are but a few of the titles Priyanka Mattoo has held over the course of a prolific career in Hollywood, and while she surely has a rich cache of stories featuring entertainment A-listers that could fill several memoirs, she largely avoids this period of her life in her forthcoming Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones . Instead, in a series of essays that jump through time, Mattoo paints a vivid portrait of a global upbringing that results from her family’s ousting from their home state of Kashmir, a historically disputed territory in northern India. Memoirs documenting the experience of conflict-induced displacement is a large subgenre, a somber reflection of the global state of affairs. But Mattoo’s book is rare in its humor, its curiosity, and its openness to a world that was seemingly reluctant to give its writer a place to call home. — Anusha Praturu

Tiya Miles’s 2021 book, All That She Carried , was a creative history of the Antebellum South told through a sack — containing a dress, pecans, and a lock of hair — that an enslaved woman gave her daughter when the latter was sold. Like the scholar Saidiya Hartman, Miles engages in “critical fabulation,” a way of reading between the lines of the historical record to imagine what’s been left out of the archive. With her new book, Night Flyer , she takes that same approach to write about Harriet Tubman, attending to the ecological and religious aspects of the 19th-century abolitionist’s political thought. — Brandon Sanchez

With 2021’s Second Place — inspired by Mabel Dodge’s account of D.H. Lawrence’s visit to Taos, New Mexico — Cusk reminded her devotees that she can do more than write in a seemingly autobiographical mode. Now the author returns with Parade , which promises to subvert the conventions of the novel. We’ve seen bits of the book already: In the braided New Yorker short story “The Stuntman,” an artist begins painting his wife upside-down; then, on the streets of Paris, one woman physically attacks another, turning to admire the result before fleeing. “I believed that the relationship between visual art and human character was more violent and psychologically revelatory than that between authors and their words,” Cusk said of the story. Expect a masterful marriage of her fictional and essayistic modes that probes questions of genius, cruelty, relationships, and art. — Jasmine Vojdani

What’s a tourist town without a little class tension? In Julia Phillips’s second novel (after 2019’s Disappearing Earth ), the fraught relationship between the hordes of vacationers that descend on Washington State’s San Juan Island every summer and the people who serve them is at the center of the action — that and a bear. Sisters Elena and Sam are approaching their 30s, but they still live with their mother, who’s been sick for much longer than anyone expected. Elena, who works at a golf club, and Sam, a snack-bar cashier on the ferry that runs back and forth from the mainland, have private dreams of escape, but for now, they’re in a frustrating holding pattern. When a massive bear starts lurking in the woods around their house, Elena is illogically drawn to it, despite Sam’s insistence that she’s putting herself in danger. Bear captures the tedium of servicework and the mood shifts, from love to anger and back again, inherent to sibling relationships. — Emma Alpern

Everyone has an opinion about reality TV — wouldn’t you like yours to be educated?  New Yorker  writer (and  former Vulture TV critic ) Emily Nussbaum charts the rise of the genre, starting with a compelling argument for its genesis in the late-1940s radio-TV crossovers of  Candid Microphone / Camera  and  Queen for a Day . “In an era when women were expected to marry early and have kids, then stay tight-lipped about anything that went wrong, these agonizing public displays of suffering were at once degrading and glorifying, like sainthood” — sound familiar? She goes on to update the many-times-retold story of  An American Family  with fresh reporting, explores the squishy ethics of ‘90s staples like  The Real World  and  Cops , and closes on the one-two punch of Bravo and  The Apprentice . Just when things were getting interesting! —Julie Kosin

Santiago Jose Sanchez’s debut , Hombrecito , is a beautiful coming-of-age novel about the fractured bond between a young queer man and his mother. After moving her sons from Colombia to Miami, the protagonist’s mother grows distant, disappearing into her new environment while her son embraces his sexuality and his life in the city. As he grows older, they drift further apart, and, when he moves to New York, he finds himself searching for — and failing to find — meaning in the beds of lovers. A return to Colombia forces him to grapple with a homeland he hasn’t known for much of his life while he attempts to restore his relationship with his father. At the center of it all, though, is the tense and moving relationship between mother and son. Seeing her in her home country reveals the sacrifices she made and the secrets she attempted to keep. Hombrecito is a remarkably honest portrait of self-discovery that is full of tenderness and desire and grief — all the things that make us human. — I.M.

During the early days of the pandemic, the novelist, raised in New England to adoptive Irish parents, became suddenly obsessed with the idea of finding her Korean birth mom. (“To friends, I declared I was only late to the party — as usual — on my own rotten mommy issues.”) O’Neill’s delightfully willful memoir recounts the twists and turns in her detective’s hunt, from being ghosted by a private investigator to heading to Korea at the height of lockdown. O’Neill is a true stylist; her prose brims with intelligence, energy, and humor. This memoir exploring identity and family is unlike any other. — J.V.

An elegant lady moves to New York, a place she finds depressing and filthy and which she comes to fear is filthifying her. But what choice does she have? She’s Palestinian, and for all her family’s money, none of them had ever managed to leave — until now. In her debut novel, Zaher draws a Venn diagram of the glamorously neurotic and the politically oppressed, then sets her protagonist spinning in that maddening little overlap. —Madeline Leung Coleman

“Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” That’s a bold question to ask at the beginning of a novel, especially when it’s arriving on a wave of high expectations following a debut best seller ( Fleishman Is in Trouble , in this case) that was made into an Emmy-nominated limited series. But Brodesser-Akner does not shy away from the bold in her writing, and that remains true in her forthcoming book, which opens with husband, father, and factory owner Carl Fletcher getting kidnapped right out of the driveway of his Long Island suburban home. This is not a story about a man who goes missing, though. It’s a family saga that explores how that singular event, which is resolved seemingly happily early in the novel, reverberates over the years through the lives of everyone in Carl’s wealthy Jewish family. As she did in Fleishman , Brodesser-Akner once again demonstrates a gift for capturing the dark, unforgiving things people do and say to the ones they are supposed to love the most. — Jen Chaney

In her first two novels, Jillian and The New Me , Halle Butler created captivating studies of obsession and discomfort. Her newest novel, Banal Nightmare , follows Moddie, a young woman who moves back home to the Midwest from New York after a breakup with her megalomaniac partner. There, she’s forced to endure the horror and humiliation of hanging out with her old childhood friends, facing off against all their buried resentments and revenge fantasies. The sudden arrival of a heralded artist — who is completing a residency at a nearby university — forces Moddie to confront the demons she tried to avoid in New York. Butler is a skilled and clever prose stylist who humanely spotlights the most ridiculous parts of being alive in this surprising and hilarious book. — I.M.

Grossman’s Magicians trilogy predated what would become a dominant trend in fantasy fiction in the last decade: taking familiar genres full of inhuman heroes, comforting magic, and brightly hued magical places, and recasting everything to be darker, more flawed, more strange, and unnerving. In The Magicians , Grossman’s world was a Narnia-esque land of escapism. In Bright Sword , it’s an Arthurian retelling from the point of view of a young knight who arrives at the Round Table just after everything has fallen apart. Like the best of Grossman’s work, it is funny and sweeping and occasionally uneasy, but the medieval-romance structure allows Bright Sword even more space to capitalize on Grossman’s talent for digression, dawdling, and finding unexpected trapdoors inside stories. — Kathryn VanArendonk

“In the beginning, I was only myself … Then I married a man, as women do.” The opening of Sarah Manguso’s second novel portends an epic tragedy: A writer falls in love with a struggling filmmaker who reveals himself to be intimidated by her success. As he cobbles together a career and instigates multiple moves across the country, an asymmetrical division of domestic labor cleaves between them, leaving the writer to raise “the child” and little time for much else. The narrator’s “all-consuming love” for the child grows in parallel to her anger at her husband’s slow betrayal. (“My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.”) In this painful and beautifully wrought story of a relationship that spans over a decade, short paragraphs make time pass fluidly, in bursts of propulsive specificity. Manguso is a poet-novelist who knows brevity can whittle the sharpest knife. — J.V.

Imagine your messiest college friend — the one who transfixed you early on, becoming a folk hero in your eyes through a mix of envy, possible lust, and car-crash looky-looism — commits a number of very chic crimes. And then you get to write the book about it, which immediately gets optioned by HBO. Orlando Whitfield is living the dream. All That Glitters, his accounting of Inigo Philbrick’s bad art friendship and even worse art fraud , is dishy and vulnerable and propulsive. The access Whitfield has as Philbrick’s friend (turned business partner, employee, and eventual professional rival) is astonishing, and even more astonishing that he’s spilling like this. It’s as if you’re in the room with him, going, “Wow, that’s crazy” as he processes the friendship in real time. — Bethy Squires

The author and essayist returns with a rigorous and compulsively readable memoir about her career as a sex worker and the possibilities of romantic love between men and women. Shane excavates her relationships with her father and the boys she grew up with, measuring the harm of inherited lessons about sex and the value of girls’ hotness against the power and freedom sex work later afforded her. “My sense that I wasn’t sexually appealing could have kept me from sex work,” she writes, “but instead, I think, it drove me to it.” This personal and professional investigation resonates and entices. —J.V.

Old resentments and generational differences between a father and a daughter are thrown under the spotlight, quite literally, in Jo Hamya’s new novel about a play about a book. Sophia is a young playwright, whose divorced boomer father is a famous author past his prime — his novels deal in certain sexual politics and gender dynamics that have aged poorly. He joins the audience of his daughter’s play without reading any reviews, which means he’s startled to see a staged version of a working vacation he and Sophia took a decade prior. While her father sits through the excruciating experience of watching an actor in his favorite shirt womanize and behave boorishly while dictating a book, Sophia anxiously awaits her father’s response to the show at lunch with her mother, who has her own baggage with Sophia’s father. Hamya’s tightly constructed story bounces through time, place, and perspective to maneuver the tricky nuances of personal experience and art. — Tolly Wright

In this epistolary novel, an unnamed narrator writes a fevered stream of text from Las Vegas, where she’s staying with her ill mother. In between searching the internet for symptoms, meeting with a bankruptcy lawyer, and trying to convince her “overzealous assimilated” mom to eat Vietnamese food, she fantasizes about sex and confesses every shameful aspect of her longing to her lover, who’s living with her husband in Italy. But it’s obvious that her attempts to maintain “the umbilical cord of desire and need” that connect them are bound to fall short. Vi Khi Nao’s work crosses mediums — poetry, film, and visual art, to name a few — and her intensely lyrical latest novel has a similar range, putting the erotic side by side with political and personal history. — E.A.

In this novel, based on the 1932 massacre of up to 30,000 mostly Indigenous people in El Salvador, a pair of sisters flee genocide: Garciela, who was raised in a community perched near a volcano but removed at age 9 and forced to serve as an oracle to dictator “El Gran Pendejo” (the Big Asshole), and her long-lost sister Consuelo. As the years pass and Garciela’s gruesome prophetic visions take shape, the sisters escape to Paris, California, and beyond, variously losing and recovering each other. “Stories all have masters who control the way they’re told and whom they’re told to,” the author writes. This tale is told by a chorus of lively ghosts, who “are dead but we sing, we cackle, we lose our shit, we tell you exactly what we think …” A bilingual, mythological, and original debut about resistance and survival. —J.V.

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Books We Love

20 new books hitting shelves this summer that our critics can't wait to read.

Meghan Collins Sullivan

June is around the corner, meaning summer is almost here! As we look forward to travel and staycations, plane rides and trips to the beach, we've asked our book critics for some advice: What upcoming fiction and nonfiction are they most looking forward to reading?

Their picks range from memoirs to sci-fi and fantasy to translations, love stories and everything in between. Here's a look:

Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope

I was hooked when I first saw the gorgeous cover for Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope. But the novel's premise put it at the top of my summer reading list. Penelope is known for unforgettable characters, world-building, beautiful writing and robust storytelling. Her latest work, inspired by actual events — the drowned Black towns of the American South — promises a magical, mythical and powerful tale of a young woman's quest to save her town. A historical fantasy must-read. (June 4) — Denny Bryce

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The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan

The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan has everything I look for in a book: a unique and startling voice, a queer protagonist and a deep understanding of a particular time and place. George — once György — is a gay Hungarian immigrant working as a screenwriter in McCarthy-era Hollywood, occasionally fantasizing about his officemate, Jack. When a once-famous actress named Madeline invites George to stay and write at her spacious Malibu house, she won't take no for an answer — and so George finds himself in a hedonistic milieu where pleasure, politics and strong personalities intermingle. (June 4) — Ilana Masad

Mirrored Heavens: Between Earth & Sky, Book 3 by Rebecca Roanhorse

Rebecca Roanhorse is one of my auto-read authors — and one major reason is because of her fire Between Earth and Sky series. That trilogy comes to a stunning, fevered conclusion with Mirrored Heavens . All of the characters you love, hate and love to hate will converge on the city of Tova. Get ready for an epic battle between ancient gods, their human avatars and the mortals caught in between. (June 4) — Alex Brown

Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water by Amorina Kingdon

You may know about 52 Blue , whose vocalizations likely go unheard by some other whales; it captured worldwide sympathy and became a pop-culture metaphor. But did you know all whale song is critically disrupted by ships? If that gets you wondering, keep an eye out for Sing Like Fish , which promises to illuminate the fragile symphony of the deep. (June 4) — Genevieve Valentine

Consent: A Memoir by Jill Ciment

I look forward to reading Jill Ciment's Consent and to the discussions it's sure to provoke. In this follow-up memoir to Half a Life, Ciment reconsiders what she wrote 25 years ago about her teenage affair and marriage to her art teacher, 30 years her senior. Half a Life was written before the #MeToo movement, and before her husband died at the age of 93 after 45 years of marriage. Consent promises a fuller picture. (June 11) — Heller McAlpin

Do What Godmother Says by L.S. Stratton

As we continue to experience the frenzy of Harlem Renaissance celebrations, commemorations and historical resonance, Do What Godmother Says by L.S. Stratton is the perfect addition to the litany of works set in this artistic period this year. It examines the intense and frequently degenerating relationship between patrons and artists during this intellectual and cultural movement. In this dual-timeline gothic thriller, a modern writer discovers a family heirloom painting by a Harlem Renaissance artist, which connects her family to a mysterious past. This historical novel is one I'm eager to read because it deftly exposes the layers of creative ownership, especially when race and wealth are involved. (June 11) — Keishel Williams

Horror Movie: A Novel by Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay is one of the most entertaining and innovative voices in contemporary fiction regardless of genre. Horror Movie , a story about a cursed movie that never came out and is about to get a remake, is a love letter to horror novels and horror movies, as well as a tense narrative that will redefine the cursed film subgenre. Tremblay is one of the modern masters of horror, and this new novel promises to be packed with the author's distinctive voice, knack for ambiguity and intrigue, and superb atmosphere. (June 11) — Gabino Iglesias

Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

Every so often there's a nonfiction title I covet like it's the next installment in my favorite mystery series. This summer it's Cue the Sun! Based on in-depth interviews with more than 300 sources from every aspect of the production process, this book is a cultural history of the genre that ate American entertainment, from New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum. It combines the appeal of a page-turning thriller and the heft of serious scholarship. Juicy and thoughtful, it's a must-read for anyone interested in television or popular culture. (June 25) — Carole V. Bell

The Undermining of Twyla and Frank by Megan Bannen

In this return to the delightfully wacky world established in one of my personal top-five romance novels of all time, The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy , Megan Bannen takes on the friends to lovers trope with a combination of madcap joie de vivre and the exhausted practicality of a mom who's had enough. Also, there are dragons! (July 2) — Caitlyn Paxson

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş

I am eagerly awaiting Ayşegül Savaş' The Anthropologists . Born in Istanbul, Savaş has lived in England, Denmark and the U.S. also and now resides in France; in this novel she takes up themes of cultural migration through focus on a young couple seeking an apartment in a foreign city. I'm intrigued to discover how Savaş gifts her characters with an anthropological lens of exploration. (July 9) — Barbara J. King

Elevator in Saigon by Thuân, translated by Nguyen An Lý

Elevator in Saigon is a literal and structural exquisite corpse , capturing Vietnam's eventful period from 1954 to 2004. Mimicking an elevator's movement, the novel heightens our yearning for romance and mystery, while unflinchingly exposing such narrative shaft. Channeling Marguerite Duras and Patrick Modiano, the book also offers a dead-on tour of a society cunningly leaping from one ideological mode to the next. As if challenging Rick's parting words to Ilsa in Casablanca , Thuận's sophomore novel in English implies that geopolitical debacles might have been mitigated if personal relations were held in more elevated regard than "a hill of beans." (July 9) — Thúy Đinh

Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida, translated by Haydn Trowell

Atsuhiro Yoshida's Goodnight Tokyo begins with a film company procurer who's tasked with finding fresh kumquats for a production. From there, interlinked tales of Tokyo residents unspool in unpredictable directions. Characters range from a cabdriver to a star of a detective TV series who might be an actual detective. Readers will be reminded of Jim Jarmusch's 1991 movie Night on Earth , which also takes place in the wee hours of the morning and threads together the stories of strangers. (July 9) — Leland Cheuk

Navola: A novel by Paolo Bacigalupi

I love when a beloved author — especially one known mostly for a certain type of book — throws us a daring curveball. Navola is exactly such a pitch. Paolo Bacigalupi, who has won pretty much every major award in the science-fiction field with his climate-conscious dystopianism, is veering hard left with his new novel. It doesn't take place in the future, and it isn't a cautionary tale. Instead, it's a hefty tome of high fantasy set in a dreamed-up world akin to Renaissance Florence. Only with, you guessed it, dragons. But also high finance, political intrigue, and de' Medici-esque opulence. Bacigalupi is one of today's most gripping spinners of speculative fiction, and I can't wait to dive into this surprising magical foray. (July 9) — Jason Heller

The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary

In 2002, two train carriages were set on fire in Gujarat, India. Within three weeks, more than 2,000 Muslims were murdered in response by Hindu mobs. By the end of the year, more than 50,000 Muslims became refugees in their own country. The Lucky Ones is a unique memoir in English of this largest-ever massacre in independent India . It is also about a communal crisis bringing a fractured family together. A must-read in our warring world today. (July 16) — Jenny Bhatt

Sharks Don't Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist by Jasmin Graham

Author Jasmin Graham is a marine biologist specializing in smalltooth sawfish and hammerhead sharks. Who are the real sharks in this story? Graham had to face the sharp-teethed truths of academia, while creating a world of curiosity and discovery around the complex lives of sharks. To combat the racism she encountered in academia, Graham created an "ocean of her own" to become an independent scientist and a champion of social justice, a journey she unspools in this new memoir. (July 16) — Martha Ann Toll

Liars by Sarah Manguso

I have long been a fan of Sarah Manguso's crystalline prose, from her fragmented illness memoir The Two Kinds of Decay to her tightly constrained 2022 novel Very Cold People . Her second novel , Liars , marries restraint with rage — in it, Manguso traces the full arc of a 15-year relationship between Jane, a successful writer, and John, a dilettante artist-cum-techie, in aphoristic vignettes. The result is a furious, propulsive meditation on wifehood, motherhood and artistic ambition. (July 23) — Kristen Martin

The Horse: A Novel by Willy Vlautin

Musician and Lean on Pete author Willy Vlautin captures the American West like few other writers. His prose is always excellent, his characters always beautifully drawn, and that promises to be the case with his next novel, about an isolated Nevada man in his 60s who is visited by a blind horse that refuses to leave. (July 30) — Michael Schaub

Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe by Ken Krimstein

Art and science collide in Ken Krimstein's new graphic biography . In this book, the author of the brilliant and whimsical The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt similarly translates careful research into scenic, emotive comics — in this case tracking the potential effects of an adventitious meeting in Prague between two geniuses on the cusp of world-changing discoveries. (Aug. 20) — Tahneer Oksman

Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I'd probably be interested in a new biography of Audre Lorde if it focused on the eating habits of the brilliant thinker, poet, feminist and activist. But biographer Alexis Pauline Gumbs promises to more than exceed that bar. An award-winning poet, writer, feminist and activist in her own right, Gumbs is among the first researchers to delve into Lorde's manuscript archives. The resulting book highlights the late author's commitment to interrogating what it means to survive on this planet — and how Lorde's radical understanding of ecology can guide us today. (Aug. 20) — Ericka Taylor

Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases by Maia Lee-Chin, illustrated by Marta Bertello

To those claiming Latin is dead, I say res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself — in children's cartoons , Hollywood cartoons and enduring epics . As a fan of both Mr. Peabody and the Muses, the idea of combining Maia Lee-Chin's thoughtful scholarship and Marta Bertello's dynamic artistry is captivating. Their new book reimagines the world of Latin's invention and tops my summer reading list. (Aug. 27) — Marcela Davison Avilés

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The Best Mental Health Books to Read in 2024

Top picks from our most trusted therapists.

Our product picks are editor-tested, expert-approved. We may earn a commission through links on our site. Why Trust Us?

But finding that "right book"? Overwhelming sometimes. So we asked four of our favorite mental health experts— Jay Barnett , Gregory Scott Brown, M.D. , Kier Gaines , and Avi Klein —for their favorite mental health books. We wondered which they go to themselves, which they recommend to clients, and which they think are just plain excellent.

While many of these books can help with aspects of life like reducing stress and living well without overthinking things, if you suspect you might be experiencing anxiety, depression or another mental health condition, it’s important to seek help from a licensed professional, as these books are not meant to provide a diagnosis or provide individual medical advice and treatment.

These books, however, may help you nail down signs to watch for, understand what's going on in and around you, and relate to individuals who have gone through something similar. Here are the favorite books from some of today's most insightful therapists.

Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

Recommended by Kier Gaines: "Dr. Brewer lays out, in great detail, how anxiety affects the brain, how to map out better awareness of it and useful tools to cope."

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

Recommended by: Kier Gaines. "A great book to dissect the epidemic of anxiety."

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

Recommended by: Kier Gaines. "A great book to help reframe the mind into conscientious examination of how social conditioning impacts society."

The Gift of Fear

Recommended by: Kier Gaines. "This book helped me understand how to not be disarmed by someone's kindness and become more aware of how fear can be used as a powerful tool."

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World

Recommended by: Kier Gaines. "This book comes from a more contemporary Christian perspective and it gives a very practical summarization of the ways that unnecessary hurry has crept into our thoughts and habits."

It's Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self

Recommended by: Avi Klein. "An excellent guide to your emotions and how to foster a better connection with them to improve your wellbeing and foster deeper connections with those closest to you."

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Recommended by: Avi Klein. "I often reach for this book when a client of mine is struggling to accept big changes in their lives. This book helped me through a difficult moment in my life by showing me the rich possibilities for growth (spiritual, emotional, relational) when I accept loss and change in my life instead of fighting it."

Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner's Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship

Recommended by: Avi Klein. "I work with many couples, and this is usually the first book that I recommend to them. It offers a helpful introduction to what creates conflict as well as closer connection in a relationship in a way that helps both people in a couple feel understood."

To Be a Man: A Guide to True Masculine Power

Recommended by: Avi Klein. "To my mind, this is the best book about masculinity and men's emotional wellbeing out there. It offers ways to be a man who is in touch with his emotions without shaming or denigrating our ideas of masculinity."

Workbook For Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think by Dennis Greenberger and Christine A. Padesky: 90 Exercises to ... Strategies for Implementing Lasting Change

Recommended by: Dr. Gregory Scott Brown. "I recommend this workbook for learning how cognitive behavioral therapy can prevent negative thoughts from controlling how you act and feel."

The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

Recommended by: Dr. Gregory Scott Brown. "I recommend this book if you are indecisive, anxious, or afraid to take the next move toward accomplishing your goals."

Cry Like a Man: Fighting for Freedom from Emotional Incarceration

Recommended by: Jay Barnett. "Jason does a great job of articulating the importance of men possessing the ability to be vulnerable and that tears are necessary because they water the soil for our healing."

Why Didn't Daddy Fix Me?: How To Heal From and Adjust Your Expectations of Fathers and Father Figures

Recommended by: Jay Barnett. "Vincent speaks to many men who are looking for their fathers to correct the issues that we're often plagued with as sons due to the absence of a father. He challenges men to seek healing for their father's wounds so they can experience true attunement in that area."

The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire (20th Anniversary Edition)

Recommended by: Jay Barnett. "David Deida speaks to the many layers of a man and how important it is to navigate with intentionality, grit, and a clear mental and physical focus. He also expounds on the importance of discovering oneself before entering into a romantic relationship, which is critical for any young man's development."

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Read Like the Wind

Sometimes, obsession finds its outlet in a book. here are 2..

A Gwendolyn Brooks biography; a Bill Cunningham photo collection.

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By Sadie Stein

Dear readers,

My first experience with writing a fan letter didn’t go well. It was to the children’s writer and illustrator Tasha Tudor, known as much for her total commitment to living an 1830s lifestyle as for her watercolors of corgis and children. I tried to fashion a quill pen from a feather I’d found in the park (I had to switch to ballpoint) and donned the pair of pantaloons I favored for moments of maximum picturesqueness. “Dear Tasha Tudor” (I wrote), “I think we have a lot in common.” I detailed my near-worship of “A Time to Keep,” my attempts to replicate the Pumpkin House of “The Dolls’ Christmas,” the wonky maypole I had rigged up in the yard.

A classmate, over for a playdate, found the letter and mocked it, but I was undeterred. I applied sealing wax and dropped it in a mailbox. Maybe it was the fact that I sent it to “Tasha Tudor, Marlboro, VT,” but I never heard back.

I should have learned my lesson, but my misadventures did result in the following recommendations.

“Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice,” by D.H. Melhem

Nonfiction, 1987

When I got to college, I learned that Gwendolyn Brooks lived not far from campus. I didn’t want to bother her, but I was moved to write my second fan letter. (You know how I feel about “Maud Martha.” ) She died shortly after I sent my note — I doubt she’d have gotten it — but I’m not sorry I did. And I went down a deep Brooks rabbit hole; the university library had the majority of Brooks’s own writings, and also those dedicated to her work. I read Melhem’s biography of Brooks and then became interested in the biographer, who, I learned, had also been a dear personal friend and respected peer — Brooks recommended Melham’s “Notes on 94th Street” for a Pulitzer Prize.

That book — an unforgettable love-hate letter to New York City that’s considered the first English-language poetry collection published by an Arab American woman — is worth reading if you can get your hands on it. (With its follow-up, it’s collected in “New York Poems.”) But definitely read the more easily found Brooks biography. Don’t be deterred by the academic trappings: While this is, no question, a serious critical study, it’s also a vibrant portrait of the artist by a gifted poet. Brooks emerges as a complex figure who, almost until her death, was a tireless advocate for other Black writers, particularly young ones. Melhem locates Brooks’s large body of work in the context of her Chicago youth and her civil rights work; she studies her influences and her place in the canon. The book was published in 1987, but it remains relevant.

Read if you like: Gwendolyn Brooks; D.H. Melhem; Chicago Available from: University Press of Kentucky (eBook)

“Facades,” by Bill Cunningham

Photography, 1978

By the time I was out of college, where I’d started freelancing, I was still shy but had learned that the fig leaf of journalism allowed me to meet all kinds of people in a relatively uncreepy way. Asked for story ideas from an embryonic online publication that wanted people to write for no pay (websites back then really emphasized the “free” in freelancer), I proposed an interview with the legendary portrait photographer and New York City character Editta Sherman . Sherman was one of the last holdouts at the studios in Carnegie Hall, a series of spaces above the theater that had been intended for the same creative types who were now being driven out; eventually, by 2010, they were all evicted. But when I visited Sherman, she was still living in the double-height studio with its black-and-white tiling and narrow mezzanine-second story where she’d raised her large family and photographed scores of celebrities and bohemians.

Sherman told me all about her eventful life; she showed me a VHS tape of her performing her signature party piece, “The Dying Swan,” in a feathered tutu; she and her neighbor Bill Cunningham — the longtime fashion photographer for The New York Times, who dropped by while I was there — dressed me in a series of hats he’d crafted as a young milliner. It was one of the best days of my life, even though the publication died before the piece could run. But as a memento, Editta gave me a copy of the book “Facades.”

“Facades” was printed from a 1976 exhibit of Cunningham’s photographs that he had donated to the New-York Historical Society. They were mostly of Editta, in period costumes the two had scavenged and rebuilt, then photographed over eight years, standing in front of New York architectural landmarks of the same era. The book is a photo essay featuring 91 photos of her in outfits ranging from mob caps (St. Paul’s Chapel) to Gilded Age gowns (Fifth Avenue mansions) to the chapeaux of the 1950s and Mies van der Rohe’s modern marvels, as well as anachronisms like a gowned Sherman in a graffiti-bedecked 1970s subway car. As Sherman explained, she did not have a conventional model’s figure, but posed with such dash and drama that she’d quickly become her friend’s muse. And the book is fabulous: a history of costume, of architecture, of two artists and their friendship and a moment when architecture and housing, appropriately enough, allowed for such inspired flights of fancy.

Read if you like: “ Bill Cunningham: New York ”; “Just Kids”; “ The Dying Swan ” Available from: Used-book sites. You can see some of the images at the New-York Historical Society’s site — they also have a copy of the book.

Why don’t you …

Take a road trip? Perhaps scarred by the Tasha Tudor experience, when I wrote to Jane and Michael Stern with a tip for their book “Roadfood” (a donut shop near my grandparents’ house with great maple bars) I concealed the fact that I was 11. (When they printed it, it was, technically, my first published work and arguably my best.) I still admire their oeuvre, celebrating roadside arcana — “The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste,” “Elvis World” — and have a special love for “American Gourmet,” which charts the country’s changing midcentury tastes, from the 1950s’ bohemians’ embrace of garlic-scented rusticity to the white-tableclothed temples of Capote’s swans.

Read a writer who answers letters from children? I recently learned that, as a child, my friend Flora had not only written to Rumer Godden, but corresponded with her! I have also read that Ashley Bryan, Tove Jansson and Maurice Sendak all responded to their young fans. (Of course, those fans might have done a better job addressing their letters than I did.)

Buy your budding nerd a real quill pen? This website is not called Pen Heaven for nothing.

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