A Marriage at Sea
Sophie Elmhirst
Best books of 2025
The New Yorker’s books of 2025: 24 main picks and 312 more recommendations, across fiction, poetry and nonfiction.
Main picks
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A Truce That Is Not Peace
Miriam Toews
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Audition
Katie Kitamura
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Buckley
Sam Tanenhaus
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Dead and Alive
Zadie Smith
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Flashlight
Susan Choi
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Flesh
David Szalay
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The Fort Bragg Cartel
Seth Harp
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Is a River Alive?
Robert Macfarlane
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Joy Is My Middle Name
Sasha Debevec-McKenney
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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Kiran Desai
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Lorne
Susan Morrison
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Melting Point
Rachel Cockerell
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Ocean of Clouds
Garrett Hongo
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The Sisters
Jonas Hassen Khemiri
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Strangers in the Land
Michael Luo
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Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li
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Trip
Amie Barrodale
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We the People
Jill Lepore
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What We Can Know
Ian McEwan
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The Wilderness
Angela Flournoy
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Will There Ever Be Another You
Patricia Lockwood
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The Zorg
Siddharth Kara
Also recommended
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Disinheritance
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
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Cape Fever
Nadia Davids
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Some Bright Nowhere
Ann Packer
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Atlas’s Bones
D. Vance Smith
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Sitting Bull’s War
Paul L. Hedren
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Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever
Lamorna Ash
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Lightbreakers
Aja Gabel
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Before I Forget
Tory Henwood Hoen
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Godstruck
Kelsey Osgood
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Little Red Barns
Will Potter
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Heiresses
Miranda Kaufmann
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A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls
Adam Morgan
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Estate
Cynthia Zarin
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A Love Story from the End of the World
Juhea Kim
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Unabridged
Stefan Fatsis
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Daring to Be Free
Sudhir Hazareesingh
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The Second Estate
Ray D. Madoff
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Best Offer Wins
Marisa Kashino
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Matching Minds with Sondheim
Barry Joseph
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Ninette’s War
John Jay
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The Award
Matthew Pearl
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Looking for Tank Man
Ha Jin
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Analog Days
Damion Searls
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Bigger Than Fashion
Tyler Watamanuk
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Peacemaker
Thant Myint-U
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Cursed Daughters
Oyinkan Braithwaite
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Razzle Dazzle ’Em
John Lahr
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Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration
Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney
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Run the Song
Ben Ratliff
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Bog Queen
Anna North
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The Running Ground
Nicholas Thompson
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Troublemaker
Carla Kaplan
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The Diversity of Morals
Steven Lukes
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Night People
Mark Ronson
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Venetian Vespers
John Banville
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Television
Lauren Rothery
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The Tragedy of True Crime
John J. Lennon
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The Land in Winter
Andrew Miller
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Flop Era
Lara Egger
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The Emperor of All Maladies
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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The Innocents of Florence
Joseph Luzzi
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Embracing Exile
David Kraemer
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Splendid Liberators
Joe Jackson
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Dante
Prue Shaw
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The Season
Helen Garner
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Two Paths to Prosperity
Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr and Guido Tabellini
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The Eleventh Hour
Salman Rushdie
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The Insider
Gerald Howard
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The Salt Stones
Helen Whybrow
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The Poems of Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
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The Age of Extraction
Tim Wu
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Languages of Home
John Edgar Wideman
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A Hollywood Ending
Yaron Weitzman
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A Different Kind of Tension
Jonathan Lethem
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On the Calculation of Volume III
Solvej Balle
Translated by Sophia Hersi Smith, Jennifer Russell and Barbara J. Haveland
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The Genius of Trees
Harriet Rix
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Palaver
Bryan Washington
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At Last
Marisa Silver
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When Caesar Was King
David Margolick
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Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
Claire-Louise Bennett
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The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
Rabih Alameddine
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Flashes of Brilliance
Anika Burgess
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The Natural Order of Things
Donika Kelly
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We Did OK, Kid
Anthony Hopkins
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The Mind Reels
Fredrik deBoer
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Bread of Angels
Patti Smith
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Paper Girl
Beth Macy
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Pick a Color
Souvankham Thammavongsa
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Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
Barbara Demick
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We Survived the Night
Julian Brave NoiseCat
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Life on a Little-Known Planet
Elizabeth Kolbert
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Ready for My Close-Up
David M. Lubin
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The Eternal Forest
Elena Sheppard
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A Guardian and a Thief
Megha Majumdar
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Death in a Shallow Pond
David Edmonds
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Selected Letters of John Updike
John Updike
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The Ten Year Affair
Erin Somers
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What a Time to Be Alive
Jade Chang
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Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything
Alyson Stoner
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Dinner with King Tut
Sam Kean
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Near Flesh
Katherine Dunn
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True Nature
Lance Richardson
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The Gods of New York
Jonathan Mahler
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Joyride
Susan Orlean
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The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter
Peter Orner
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Trying
Chloé Caldwell
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Original Sin
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
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Deep House
Jeremy Atherton Lin
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This Kind of Trouble
Tochi Eze
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The Unbroken Coast
Nalini Jones
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If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
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The Improbable Victoria Woodhull
Eden Collinsworth
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The Four Spent the Day Together
Chris Kraus
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Muscle Man
Jordan Castro
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The Einstein of Sex
Daniel Brook
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Good Things
Samin Nosrat
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Stan and Gus
Henry Wiencek
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Information Age
Cora Lewis
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Heart the Lover
Lily King
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Startlement
Ada Limón
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On Antisemitism
Mark Mazower
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No Sense in Wishing
Lawrence Burney
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The Martians
David Baron
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Tomorrow Is Yesterday
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley
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Cryptic
Garry J. Shaw
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Breakneck
Dan Wang
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God and Sex
Jon Raymond
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Threads of Empire
Dorothy Armstrong
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Mother Mary Comes to Me
Arundhati Roy
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Dark Renaissance
Stephen Greenblatt
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Hollywood High
Bruce Handy
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Here Comes the Sun
Bill McKibben
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Augustine the African
Catherine Conybeare
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Dusk
Robbie Arnott
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Changeover
Giri Nathan
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Twelve Churches
Fergus Butler-Gallie
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World Pacific
Peter Mann
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My Childhood in Pieces
Edward Hirsch
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Everything Evolves
Mark Vellend
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A New New Me
Helen Oyeyemi
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Pariah
Dan Fesperman
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Positive Obsession
Susana M. Morris
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Baldwin
Nicholas Boggs
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Empty Vessel
Ian Kumekawa
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Culpability
Bruce Holsinger
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To Lose a War
Jon Lee Anderson
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Shade
Sam Bloch
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King of Kings
Scott Anderson
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Make It Ours
Robin Givhan
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A Day Like Any Other
Nathan Kernan
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A Flower Traveled in My Blood
Haley Cohen Gilliland
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Putting Myself Together
Jamaica Kincaid
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Blessings and Disasters
Alexis Okeowo
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The Broken King
Michael Thomas
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Clint
Shawn Levy
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Moderation
Elaine Castillo
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Inventing the Renaissance
Ada Palmer
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The Key to Everything
Margaret A. Brucia
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Total Defense
Andrew Preston
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Misbehaving at the Crossroads
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
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The Mission
Tim Weiner
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The Girls Who Grew Big
Leila Mottley
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The Place of Tides
James Rebanks
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Wild Thing
Sue Prideaux
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The Scrapbook
Heather Clark
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Whiskerology
Sarah Gold McBride
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The Strangers
Ekow Eshun
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Long Distance
Ayşegül Savaş
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Theater Kid
Jeffrey Seller
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The Invention of Design
Maggie Gram
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Homework
Geoff Dyer
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The Aviator and the Showman
Laurie Gwen Shapiro
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The Compound
Aisling Rawle
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How We Grow Up
Matt Richtel
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The Doorman
Chris Pavone
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Cooler Than Cool
C. M. Kushins
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Among Friends
Hal Ebbott
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I’ll Tell You When I’m Home
Hala Alyan
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We Are Eating the Earth
Michael Grunwald
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Toni at Random
Dana A. Williams
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The House on Buzzards Bay
Dwyer Murphy
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How to Feed the World
Vaclav Smil
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Endling
Maria Reva
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The Second Coming
Carter Sherman
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How Things Are Made
Tim Minshall
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Murderland
Caroline Fraser
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The Last Supper
Paul Elie
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The Nimbus
Robert P. Baird
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Apple in China
Patrick McGee
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Spent
Alison Bechdel
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Apocalypse
Lizzie Wade
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The Book of Records
Madeleine Thien
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Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg
Kenneth Turan
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The End Is the Beginning
Jill Bialosky
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Eminent Jews
David Denby
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Unforgiving Places
Jens Ludwig
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The Very Heart of It
Thomas Mallon
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Marketcrafters
Chris Hughes
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Heart, Be at Peace
Donal Ryan
-
The Haves and Have-Yachts
Evan Osnos
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The Spinach King
John Seabrook
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Children of Radium
Joe Dunthorne
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Antimemetics
Nadia Asparouhova
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The South
Tash Aw
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When It All Burns
Jordan Thomas
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The Words of Dr. L
Karen E. Bender
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The Emperor of Gladness
Ocean Vuong
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William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love
Philip Hoare
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Shamanism
Manvir Singh
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Valley of Forgetting
Jennie Erin Smith
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Who Knew
Barry Diller
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The Weaponization of Expertise
Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson
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Happiness Forever
Adelaide Faith
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The Thinking Machine
Stephen Witt
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In Covid’s Wake
Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee
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The Lost Orchid
Sarah Bilston
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Other Worlds
André Alexis
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Ghosts of Iron Mountain
Phil Tinline
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I Regret Almost Everything
Keith McNally
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The Imagined Life
Andrew Porter
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Turning to Birds
Lili Taylor
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America, América
Greg Grandin
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The Float Test
Lynn Steger Strong
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A Fractured Liberation
Kornel Chang
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Capitalism and Its Critics
John Cassidy
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Careless People
Sarah Wynn-Williams
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Lincoln’s Peace
Michael Vorenberg
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Crumb
Dan Nadel
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Mỹ Documents
Kevin Nguyen
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Second Life
Amanda Hess
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1861
Jay Winik
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When the City Stopped
Robert W. Snyder
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The Maverick’s Museum
Blake Gopnik
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Sister, Sinner
Claire Hoffman
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The Dream Hotel
Laila Lalami
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The Franklin Stove
Joyce E. Chaplin
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Tilt
Emma Pattee
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Atomic Dreams
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
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Dream State
Eric Puchner
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In Praise of Floods
James C. Scott
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The Crossing
Richard Parker
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Taking Manhattan
Russell Shorto
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Goddess Complex
Sanjena Sathian
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The Containment
Michelle Adams
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Miracles and Wonder
Elaine Pagels
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Seeking Shelter
Jeff Hobbs
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What You Make of Me
Sophie Madeline Dess
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No Fault
Haley Mlotek
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Adaptable
Herman Pontzer
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Dust and Light
Andrea Barrett
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Original Sins
Eve L. Ewing
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Notes on Surviving the Fire
Christine Murphy
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Immaculate Forms
Helen King
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When the Going Was Good
Graydon Carter
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Strike
Sarah E. Bond
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Lower Than the Angels
Diarmaid MacCulloch
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There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die
Tove Ditlevsen
Translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
-
Red Scare
Clay Risen
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The Boyhood of Cain
Michael Amherst
-
Rot
Padraic X. Scanlan
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Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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The Moral Circle
Jeff Sebo
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A Matter of Complexion
Tess Chakkalakal
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Homes for Living
Jonathan Tarleton
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Theory & Practice
Michelle de Kretser
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Jesus Wept
Philip Shenon
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The Many Lives of Anne Frank
Ruth Franklin
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A Gorgeous Excitement
Cynthia Weiner
-
Ends of the Earth
Neil Shubin
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Stone Yard Devotional
Charlotte Wood
-
Cold Kitchen
Caroline Eden
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Love and Need
Adam Plunkett
-
Code Noir
Canisia Lubrin
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Victorian Psycho
Virginia Feito
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Land Power
Michael Albertus
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Helen of Troy, 1993
Maria Zoccola
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After Lives
Megan Marshall
-
The Riveter
Jack Wang
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The Secret History of the Rape Kit
Pagan Kennedy
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Shattered
Hanif Kureishi
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The Dissenters
Youssef Rakha
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New and Collected Hell
Shane McCrae
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In Defense of Partisanship
Julian E. Zelizer
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Somewhere Toward Freedom
Bennett Parten
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Blob
Maggie Su
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Everything Must Go
Dorian Lynskey
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Black in Blues
Imani Perry
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Make Your Own Job
Erik Baker
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My Darling Boy
John Dufresne
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The Vanishing Point
Paul Theroux
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American Laughter, American Fury
Eran A. Zelnik
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Open Socrates
Agnes Callard
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Too Soon
Betty Shamieh
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Gliff
Ali Smith
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American Oasis
Kyle Paoletta
-
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Before Elvis
Preston Lauterbach
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The Sirens’ Call
Chris Hayes
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Going Home
Tom Lamont
-
The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant
Mavis Gallant
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Another Man in the Street
Caryl Phillips
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Rosarita
Anita Desai
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Embers of the Hands
Eleanor Barraclough
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Aflame
Pico Iyer
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Mood Machine
Liz Pelly
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Playworld
Adam Ross
