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27 best new books to read, from historical fiction to romance novels

Discover debut novelists and immersive page-turners from acclaimed authors this season, article bookmarked.

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Whether your summer is shaping up to be slow weekends at in the city, road trips to the coast or a beach holiday abroad, one thing for sure is that a page-turning tome (or two) is a must-have in your packing list .

The balmier months between May and September offer ample chance to dive into a new book. From easy-breezy sun lounger reads and immersive historical epics to novels that transport you to warmer climes even if you’re not jetting to one yourself, the criteria for a good summer book is simple: you won’t want to put it down.

Luckily, the releases (so far) for 2024 leave you spoiled for choice. From history novels to Booker Prize-winning thrillers and laugh-out-loud tomes, the mix is as eclectic as ever.

This year’s reading pile sees plenty of acclaimed debuts from the likes of Madeleine Grey, Roxy Dunn and Lottie Hazell, as well as eagerly anticipated titles from acclaimed authors such as Coco Mellors, David Nichols, Kiley Reid, Andrew O’Hagan and Katherine Min. Plus, the paperback releases of 2023 are equally worth diving into (and not just to save you hand luggage space)– think Yellowface, In Memoriam and The Bee Sting .

The varied authorship is reflected in the diverse themes addressed, ranging from an Irish family in turmoil and love in the trenches of the First World War to grieving sisters, slavery in the Caribbean, and dating across the political spectrum.

Fans of One Day will love Reese Witherspoon’s August book club pick

The books we’re packing for our summer holidays, from thrillers to romances

Catherine, The Princess of Wales: Explosive new Kate Middleton biography is out now

The best ereaders to buy in 2024, from Amazon Kindles to Kobo devices

The Devil Wears Prada is officially getting a sequel – and it could be based on this book

How we tested

We’ve read dozens of new releases over the last year, including both hardbacks and paperbacks. This list includes the best original page-turners with superb quality prose and the most captivating stories that stayed with us after we’d reached the end. From books for history lovers to romance novels, witty romantic comedies and acclaimed prize-winners, there’s something for every type of reader.

The best new books to read in 2024 are:

• Best summer book overall – Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, published by Faber & Faber: £15.45, Amazon.co.uk
• Best family saga – The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, published by Hamish Hamilton: £8.49, Amazon.co.uk
• Best literary thriller – Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang, published by The Borough Press: £4.99, Amazon.co.uk
• Best romance novel – You are Here by David Nicholls, published by Sceptre: £10, Amazon.co.uk
• Best time travel romance – The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, published by Sceptre: £14.09, Amazon.co.uk

Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, published by Faber & Faber

• Best : New book release
• Genre : Social satire
• Release date : 4 April 2024

Andrew O’Hagan (author of the beloved book Mayflies ) is back with his latest novel: Caledonian Road . A vast state-of-the-nation novel that jumps between characters and social worlds, the book’s near-700 pages contain Dukes and Duchesses, drill groups, refugees, journalists, students and more – painting a vivid picture of our post-pandemic, post-Brexit times.

Campbell Flynn is a well-known art historian who now mixes with the upper echelons, despite his Scottish tenement upbringing. As both his material and mental state become increasingly fragile, O’Hagan pays just as much attention to the wider cast of characters, from Milo, a young computer hacker, to Flynn’s publically disgraced old university friend and bitter sitting tenant (the book even comes with a cast list so you don’t lose track). A novel that’s just as much about the city of London and the fall of a man as it is a biting satire on modern society, class and politics, Caledonian Road is a masterful feat of storytelling.

Read the eBook now:

• Kindle: £9.99, Amazon.co.uk

Listen to the audiobook now:

• Audible: £24.87, Amazon.co.uk

‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray, published by Hamish Hamilton

• Best : Family saga
• Genre : Comedy drama
• Release date : 2 May 2024 (paperback)

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is a tour de force of fiction. The Barnes, a once-well-off Irish family, are in the midst of emotional and financial strain. Set during turbulent months in their claustrophobic town (think floods, droughts and the aftermath of recession), Murray expertly gives us each family member’s perspective of the same events – with flashbacks unravelling an intricate story of betrayal, crime and lust.

Profound on the human condition, utterly gripping and peppered with comedy, Murray’s novel is a must-read this year.

• Apple Books: £9.99, Apple.com
• Audible: £14.87, Amazon.co.uk

‘Good Material’ by Dolly Alderton, published by Fig Tree

• Best : Comedy novel
• Genre : Comedy
• Release date : 1 August 2024 (paperback)

Some writers suffer from second-novel syndrome, but not Dolly Alderton. The author and columinist’s second book Good Material is a cliché-avoiding break-up novel, in the vein of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity .

Told through the eyes of recently dumped Andy, we follow him as he grapples with single life after his girlfriend realised she wanted to be alone. This in itself is a powerful narrative, with Alderton making a case for the happy and single 30-something woman.

Genuinely laugh-out-loud funny – with characters straight out of a Richard Curtis film (the elderly lodger who’s prepping for doomsday is a highlight) – whipsmart dialogue and relatable millennial themes (Alderton’s forte) mean there’s never a dull moment. Despite it being a pleasingly easy read (we tore through it in a single day), Good Material still manages to be thought-provoking and wise.

• Audible: £11.37, Amazon.co.uk

‘Yellowface’ by Rebecca F Kuang, published by The Borough Press

• Best : Literary thriller
• Genre : Thriller
• Release date : 9 May 2024 (paperback)

A satire of the publishing industry and brazen exploration of cancel culture, Rebecca F Kuang’s literary heist Yellowface is one the most gripping books of the year. It begins with the freak accident death of young, famed writer Athena Liu (she chokes on pancake mixture, setting the preposterous tone for the rest of the book), witnessed by her sometimes-friend and aspiring (currently failing) novelist June Hayward.

After June steals Athena’s unfinished manuscript and publishes it under her own name to acclaim, she is thrown into the fame, money and relevance she’s always desired. But when her secret threatens to become known, June must decide how far she will go to maintain her reputation. Addictive and uncomfortable, with plenty of savagely funny moments, Kuang’s novel is a must-read.

• Apple Books: £4.99, Apple.com
• Kindle: £7.99, Amazon.co.uk
• Audible: £11.38, Amazon.co.uk

‘Green Dot’ by Madeleine Grey, published by W&N

• Best : Affair novel
• Genre : Romance
• Release date : 1 February 2024

There’s nothing new about an affair novel – but, testament to Madeleine Grey’s writing, Green Dot is fresh and modern. Hera, a 24-year-old, has just started an admin job at a newspaper, where she meets Arthur. Older, more senior and attractive, Hera distracts herself from the boredom of her day-to-day life by crashing headfirst into a workplace romance.

When she discovers he’s married, the illicit affair consumes her life. Part Bridget Jones , part Fleabag , Green Dot is funny, fast-paced and witty, with plenty of relatable millennial and Gen Z references (and not to mention a painfully relatable lockdown passage). We tore through it.

• Audible: £7.99, Amazon.co.uk

‘Come and Get It’ by Kiley Reid, published by Bloomsbury publishing

• Best : Society satire
• Release date : 30 January 2024

Kiley Reid’s debut Such a Fun Age was a runaway success in 2020. Now she’s back with Come and Get It , a page-turning take on money and power dynamics. Desperate to get on the property ladder, graduate and land a good job, Millie is working as a student advisor and living in dorms. Meanwhile, visiting professor and writer Agatha is doing research for a new book and wants to interview some of the students in Millie’s dorm.

Jumping at the chance to increase her income, Millie agrees, and the two women become embroiled in a world of student angst, pranks, and theatrics. Despite the story rarely leaving campus grounds, the novel has a gripping wide scope that explores society’s obsession with money, desire, and consumption.

• Apple Books: £10.99, Apple.com
• Kindle: £7.97, Amazon.co.uk
• Apple Books:  £8.99,  Apple.com

‘In Memoriam’ by Alice Winn, published by Viking

• Best : War novel
• Genre : Historical fiction
• Release date : 24 February 2024 (paperback)

Beginning in a private boarding school for boys, before taking us to the horror of the trenches during World War One, Alice Winn’s blistering debut is an unforgettable read. We’re first introduced to the book’s central figures – Gaunt and Ellwood – in 1914, when both schoolboys are secretly in love with each other. When half-German Gaunt is pressured by his mother to enlist in the British army, he is relieved to run away from his forbidden feelings for his best friend. But when the true terror of the war is revealed to him, he is soon devastated when Ellwood and other classmates follow him to the Western Front.

A love story set against the tragedies of war, Winn’s rousing writing transports you to the trenches, where an entire generation of lost men are brought to vivid life – the characters will stick with you, long after the final page.

• Apple Books: £7.99, Apple.com

‘The Fraud’ by Zadie Smith, published by Hamish Hamilton

• Best : Novel about real people
• Genre : Historical
• Release date : 7 September 2023 (hardback), 6 June 2024 (paperback)

Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction, The Fraud is based on true events and juxtaposes a portrait of Victorian life and slavery in the Caribbean. The titular fraud in question is the Tichborne Claimant – a butcher who claimed to be an aristocratic heir in an 1873 trial that gripped the country. Real-life cousin and housekeeper to the largely forgotten novelist William Ainsworth, Smith reimagines Eliza Touchet’s mostly unknown life and her fascination with the case and its prime witness, an ageing Black man named Andrew Bogle.

The author’s version of Bogle’s backstory provides most of the second half of the book, beginning with his father’s abduction in the 1770s to the Hope Plantation in Jamaica. Affecting and devastating, it’s in stark contrast to the humdrum domestic middle-class Victorian life also explored. In typical Zadie style, the narrative structure and decade leaping require you to pay attention – but you’re heavily rewarded with the sheer breadth of the novel and its vividly painted characters.

‘The List’ by Yomi Adegoke, published by Fourth Estate

• Best : Buzzy summer book
• Genre : Relationships, social media
• Release date : 25 April 2024 (paperback)

The book that everyone was talking about last year, Slay In Your Lane writerYomi Adegoke’s debut novel is so buzzy that an HBO TV adaptation is already in the works. Podcaster Michael and journalist Ola are a young couple on the cusp of marriage when their world is blown apart by allegations of abuse made against Michael online in “The List”.

Having made a career of exposing such men, Ola is torn between believing Michael’s innocence or supporting the women who anonymously submitted their stories to the list. Thought-provoking and topical in its exploration of life both online and offline, and the fallout of cancel culture, it’s written with sharp insight and is impossible to put down. The hype is real.

• Kindle: £4.99, Amazon.co.uk
• Apple Books: £11.99, Apple.com

‘Big Swiss’ by Jen Beagin

• Best : Sex comedy
• Genre : Dark comedy
• Release date : 7 December 2023 (paperback)

A sex comedy with darkness at its centre, Jen Beagin’s latest novel is narrated by Greta, a 45-year-old who lives in a decrepit Dutch farmhouse and transcribes for a sex therapist. Knowing everyone’s secrets in the small town of Hudson is no problem when you’re a relative recluse – that is until she bumps into Flavia, aka Big Swiss, her nickname for the 28-year-old married Swiss woman who suffered a terrible beating that she regularly transcribes (and is infatuated with).

Their dog park meeting leads to a passionate relationship with both women trying to escape their own traumas. Greta’s mother committed suicide when she was 13 years old while Flavia’s attacker has just been released from prison. An off-kilter romance with lashings of psychological thriller, darker moments are balanced with Beagin’s witty writing, idiosyncratic characters and laugh-out-loud passages. Naturally, there’s already an HBO adaptation starring Jodie Comer in the works.

• Apple Books: £8.99, Apple.com

‘Everything’s Fine’ by Cecilia Rabess, published by Simon & Schuster

• Best : Subversive romance novel
• Release date : 8 June 2023 (hardback), 6 June 2024 (paperback)

A subversive love story set against the political polarisation of America, Cecilia Rabess’s Everything’s Fine is a funny and punchy debut. Jess – Black and liberal – immediately dislikes her Ivy League college classmate Josh – white and conservative – but when they find themselves working in the same company after graduating, a cantankerous friendship turns into a passionate relationship.

Set against the backdrop of Trump’s presidential campaign, the novel explores if ideological opposites can be together – with its most heated moments taking place over arguments about Maga hats, wealth inequality and wokeism. Commenting perceptively on politics and economics, Rabess’s writing is just as enthralling on lust and sex. Concluding on the eve of the 2016 election, the novel questions whether love really can conquer all. We tore through it in two sittings.

• Apple Books: £0.99, Apple.com

'The Ministry of Time’ by Kaliane Bradley, published by Sceptre

• Best : Time travel romance
• Genre : Time travel
• Release date : 16 May 2024

An addictive sci-fi romantic comedy, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is set a couple of years in the future, when the British goverment have got their hands on a time travel portal. As part of an undisclosed mission, they’ve brought back five “expats” from history. Among the time travellers is Commander Gore, a 38-year-old Navy officer from the 19th Century who was part of Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic. In real life he died in 1847, but in Bradley’s genre-bending tome he’s forced to acclimatise to the 21st Century, while our nameless narrator, a disaffected civil servant, is assigned as Gore’s “bridge” to help him settle in.

Grappling with everything from aeroplanes, dating apps, the British Empire and iPhones, what follows is a part girl-meets-boy (or Victorian-Arctic-explorer) love-story and part-thriller. Laugh-out-loud funny and a suprisingly powerful meditation on the climate crisis, it’s above all exciting, fun and a good old-fashioned page turner that you’ll recommend to all your friends.

‘The Fetishist’ by Katherine Min, published by Fleet

• Best : Revenge fantasy
• Genre : Darkly comic/romance
• Release date : 29 February 2024

Sadly, Katherine Min’s darkly comic novel The Fetishist was published posthumously following her death from cancer in 2019. The partially finished manuscript was edited and finished by her daughter, which adds to the poignancy of the novel. A riff on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita , the story is told from three perspectives: Daniel, an ageing violinist who fetishizes Asian woman; Alma, a prodigal cellist with a terminal diagnosis and the love of Daniel’s life; and Kyoko, a mid-Twenties punk singer who is seeking revenge on Daniel for driving her mother to her death through suicide.

Part revenge fantasy and part decade-spanning love story, it gives narrative control to the wronged women (unlike Lolita ) with the story seeing Daniel forced to reckon with his fetishisation. Exploring race and sexual politics, forgiveness and desire, the book is hilariously funny and often sexy, all while being deeply thought-provoking.

Buy the eBook now:

• Audible: 99p, Amazon.co.uk

‘Crook Manifesto’ by Colson Whitehead, published by Fleet

• Best : Best crime novel
• Genre : Crime, historical
• Release date : 18 July 2023 (hardback), 18 July 2024 (paperback)

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Colson Whitehead is back with the second instalment to his New York crime trilogy. First introduced in 2021’s Harlem Shuffle , furniture salesman and ex-fence Ray Carney returns to the criminal underbelly of the city in Crook Manifesto , in a bid to secure Jackson 5 tickets (which were like gold dust in 1971) for his daughter.

Jumping through the years up to 1976, Whitehead casts a satirical eye on New York during the tumultuous decade, touching on everything from police corruption and the Black Liberation Army to Blaxploitation. Blending family drama with history and culture, the sequel has the feel of a Quentin Tarantino movie and we were hooked.

‘You are Here’ by David Nicholls, published by Sceptre

• Best : Romance novel
• Genre : Romantic comedy
• Release date : 23 April 2024

Fresh from the success of Netflix’s One Day adaptation, David Nicholls is back with a comforting romance novel that serves as the perfect sun lounger companion. Marnie, a divorcee who works alone at the computer in her London flat, feels like life is passing her by, while Michael, recently seperated and increasingly misanthropic, has taken up long, solitary walks across the moors as his own form of therapy.

When a mutual friend organises a group hike through the Lake District, Nicholls not only beautifully evokes quintessential British landscapes, but also maps a will-they-or-won’t-they love story between the two midlifers (fans will be reminded of One Day ’s Dexter and Emma). The chapters alternate between Michael and Marnie’s narrative, with comic moments found in the pair’s bumbling, burgeoning romance. Rest assured, you’ll be very invested in a happy ending.

• Kindle: £11.49, Amazon.co.uk
• Apple Books:  £7.99,  Apple.com
• Audible:  £13.99,  Amazon.co.uk

‘Ordinary Human Failings’ by Megan Nolan, published by Vintage

• Best : Best family drama
• Genre : Crime
• Release date : 4 April 2024 (paperback)

Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation was one of our favourite reads last year and we loved the writer’s second novel just as much. A unique take on the crime genre, Ordinary Human Failings marks a dramatic departure from the tone and plot in Nolan’s debut. Set in the 1990s in London, tabloid journalist Tom Hargreaves believes he’s stumbled upon a career-making scoop when a child is murdered on a housing estate.

As fingers start pointing towards a family of Irish immigrants, the Greens family, Tom hunkers down with them to drive into their history. At the centre of the family is Carmel, a beautiful yet mysterious young mother, who is forced to reckon with how her 10-year-old daughter is implicated in a murder investigation. Tom’s probing soon reveals the regrets, secrets and silences that have trapped the Greens for decades. Intriguing and vast in scope, it’s an old-fashioned page-turner.

• Kindle: £8.99, Amazon.co.uk

‘The Happy Couple’ by Naoise Dolan, published by Orion Publishing

• Best : Anti-romance novel
• Genre : Comedy/satire

Naoise Dolan’s follow-up to 2020’s Exciting Times, this book is infused with the same biting social commentary and humour. A satirical spin on the marriage genre, it follows late-20-somethings Luke and Celine – both of whom think the other is out of love with them – on the cusp of their wedding day. Whether they’ll make it to the end of the aisle or not forms the tension of the novel.

Switching perspectives between their nearest and dearest, from best man Archie (Luke’s ex and sometimes-lover) to Celine’s sister (suspicious of Luke’s frequent disappearances), Dolan explores the anxieties of modern love. A wedding novel permeated by emotional turmoil rather than romance, its self-aware characters and comedic-timing cement Dolan as one of the sharpest writers around.

‘Blue Sisters’ by Coco Mellor, published by Fourth Estate

• Best : Novel about siblings
• Release date : 23 May 2024
• Genre : Family drama

After the runaway success of Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein in 2022, the author’s follow-up Blue Sisters has a lot of hype surrounding it. Mostly, it delivers. Swapping hedonistic lovers in her first novel for grieving siblings in her second, the book follows three sisters grappling with the loss of their fourth sister in an accidental overdose.

Not only are they grieving, but both are fighting personal battles. The youngest, Lucky, is a 26-year-old model in Paris who relies on drugs and alcohol to escape the noise of her mind; the middle child, Bonnie, has given up a successful career in boxing to be a bouncer in the LA bar; and Avery, the eldest, is having an affair with a man while her wife pines for them to have a child. If you can get over the cliché and slightly cringey characters, the sister’s stories are gripping enough to sink your teeth into.

‘Penance’ by Eliza Clark, published by Faber & Faber

• Best : Fictional non-fiction book

A fictional story told in the manner of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Eliza Clark’s Penance delves into the grisly torture and murder of 16-year-old Joan Wilson on the eve of the Brexit referendum in the seaside town of Crow. Three years after the murder, obsession with true crime is at an all-time high and an American podcast draws awareness to the case.

Ex-tabloid hack Alec Z Carelli sets out to write the “definitive account” of the murder – which was committed by three school girls – through eyewitness accounts, interviews and correspondence. Living in the town, exploring its history and its people, Carelli recounts the lives of the teenage murderers and the sinister world of online true-crime fandoms. As well as questioning Carelli’s morality in exploiting a horrific murder for his own career, Clark questions society’s preoccupation with gruesome true crime. Unnerving, superbly written and engrossing, the ending is pitch perfect.

• Apple Books: £12.99, Apple.com

‘As Young at This’ by Roxy Dunn, published by Fig Tree

• Best : Relatable novel
• Genre : Relationships novel

Roxy Dunn’s debut novel explores womanhood, relationships and what happens when your life takes an unexpected direction. Told from the point of view of 34-year-old Margot who has found herself single once again, each chapter tells the story of a man she’s dated.

From her first relationship at the end of school to the longer partners who have helped shape her, each one teaches her something new about herself and what it is to be a woman. Fertility is a theme that runs through the book, with Margot’s biological body clock a ticking time bomb in each relationship as she gets older. But there’s plenty for men to relate to too, with Dunn’s writing perfectly capturing the exciting beginnings and achingly sad ends of relationships. You won’t be able to put it down.

• Kindle: £5.99, Amazon.co.uk
• Audible: £11.49, Amazon.co.uk

‘The Only One Left’ by Riley Sager, published by Hodder & Stoughton

• Best : Gothic thriller
• Genre : Crime, mystery
• Release date : 28 December 2024 (paperback)

In 1929, three members of the Hope family were murdered in their clifftop mansion. Decades later, the book’s protagonist Kit McDeere takes on a job caring for Lenora Hope who has been in the house ever since and is the only remaining member of the Hope family. She also happens to be the one accused of carrying out the murders.

This book is breathtakingly twisty and while the mystery unravels, the claustrophobia becomes almost unbearable as the Hope’s End mansion itself begins succumbing to the sea and crumbling like the cliffs. We found ourselves literally gasping out loud as secrets were revealed. The Only One Left is a Gothic thriller, with horror elements and is perfect for cosying up with as autumn turns to winter.

• Apple Books:  £4.99,  Apple.com
• Kindle:  £4.99,  Amazon.co.uk
• Apple Books:  £9.99,  Apple.com
• Audible:  £11.37,  Amazon.co.uk

‘Sandwich’ by Catherine Newman, published by Doubleday

• Best : Holiday novel
• Release date : 6 June 2024
• Genre : Family comedy

Catherine Newman’s debut We All Want Impossible Things, made us cry and laugh simultaneously – and her second novel, Sandwich , is just as heartfelt and charming. Rachel (affectionately known as Rocky) is in her mid-fifties and her family has escaped to the picture-esque Cape Cod every summer for two decades. Pitching up annually at the same rustic beach town rental, the house, landscape and beaches are full of memories and nostalgia.

Her kids are now adults yet young enough to still need her, while her parents are still alive and healthy, leaving Rocky feeling sandwiched between the two generations (giving the book its title). But this blissful balance on holiday is soon disturbed by harboured secrets.

Whether it’s considering her now-foreign body as she goes through menopause or losses in the past, Rocky’s inner monologue reveals both the pains and joys of mid-life, as well as the passing of time. Full of warmth and hilarity, it makes you nostalgic for family holidays and sun-soaked days.

‘My Husband’ by Maud Ventura, published by Hutchinson Heinemann

• Best : Domestic thriller
• Genre : Domestic noir, thriller

Obsessed with her husband, the main character of this dark domestic drama spends her days over-analysing her husband’s words, agonising over perceived slights and fantasising about imagined scenarios that send her swirling into flights of jealousy and passion. Her deep obsession eclipses everything else in her life including her relationship with her children, her work and her friendships.

Her roller-coaster of emotions and unhinged antics are fascinating to follow and we found ourselves devouring this darkly humorous work in less than two days. This fresh and easy-to-read book is translated from French by Emma Ramadan.

‘Kala’ by Colin Walsh, published by Atlantic Books

• Best : Coming of age thriller
• Genre : Drama, crime
• Release date : 6 July 2023 (hardback), 4 July 2024 (paperback)

A group of six friends living in a small Irish seaside town are inseparable until one day, Kala goes missing. Fifteen years later, three of the friends are back in Kinlough and human remains are found in the woods nearby, bringing the past screaming back.

Jumping between the time when the group was in secondary school and the present day, the mystery slowly unravels as we explore the heavy family traumas and broken friendships from the past. A complicated small-town community is the claustrophobic backdrop to the story which creates a refreshing mixture of family drama and crime thriller.

The story is told from the point of view of three of Kala’s friends who come back together and delve into the past to try and make sense of Kala’s death. There’s the loyal Mush who has always been in Kinlough, working in his mother’s cafe, hiding his mysterious facial scars from the world. Helen is the hard-headed former best friend of Kala who is now a journalist and is in town for her father’s impending wedding. And Joe, who is now a world-famous musician, has a hometown residency in a local bar, and is trying to reconnect to his old friends.

The use of three distinct narrative voices is well executed with clues cleverly revealed via the three protagonists and concludes with a major twist that you won’t see coming.

• Apple Books: £5.99, Apple.com
• Kindle: £4.68, Amazon.co.uk
• Audible: £15.74, Amazon.co.uk

‘The Guest’ by Emma Cline, published by Vintage Publishing

• Best : Stylish novel
• Release date : 20 May 2024 (paperback)

A follow-up to the critically acclaimed The Girls , Emma Cline’s The Guest follows 22-year-old escort Alex as she drifts from pool to beach during a chaotic week in sun-drenched Long Island. Cast out by the older man she was staying with, instead of returning to the city, she stays on the island and adapts to survive – believing they can be romantically reunited five days later at his Labor Day party.

In each encounter with individuals, groups at parties or old acquaintances, she leaves disaster in her wake. Though the story is a simple premise, each page is loaded with tension and risk, thanks to Cline’s stylistic writing. The poetic form and metaphorical use of water (swimming is survival) adds to the novel’s hazy feel. The Guest is also a deft exploration of social mobility, as Alex navigates the class system of Long Island.

‘Piglet’ by Lottie Hazell, published by Doubleday

• Best : Food-themed book
• Genre : Satire
• Release date : 25 January 2024

Lottie Hazell’s searing debut challenges the notion of domestic bliss. Kit and Piglet (a derisive nickname from childhood) are the picture perfect couple. They own a new build home, have seemingly sucessful careers and are planning their wedding that’s straight out of a brochure.

But 13 days before the wedding, Kit reveals a terrible secret that sends Piglet spiralling and their life to come crumbling down around then. The motif of food threads throughout the novel, from evocative passages about binging to Piglet’s own insatiable appetite for following the rules. Dark, witty and very well-written (the descriptions of food are reminscent of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn ), Piglet is a satire that explores everything from class to body image.

‘The Lagos Wife’ by Vanessa Walters, published by Hutchinson Heinemann

• Best : Thriller

Part mystery and part domestic noir, The Lagos Wife takes us to the heart of Lagos after the disappearence of Nicole Oruwari. Escaping London and a trouble family past, Nicole married a handsome Nigerian man, moved to a palatial house and became involved in a glamorous group of other wives.

After she vanishes without a trace after a boat trip, her aunt Claudine flies to Nigeria to take matters into her own hands. As she digs deeper into Nicole’s life, the cracks begin to show and Claudine’s own buried history threatens to be unconvered. Gripping and thought-provoking, Walter’s writes with nuance but in the page-turning style of a classic thriller.

The verdict: Best novels to read 2024

Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road is storytelling at its best. Vast in scope, the social satire is a biting tragicomedy about British society, class, politics and money.Moving, witty and funny, Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting will similarly keep you gripped until the very last page.

Zeitgeist-y and engrossing, Rebecca K Kuang’s Yellowface is the perfect literary thriller for diving into this spring while Dolly Alderton’s Good Material is funny and wise. For a historical tome that will linger long in your mind, pick up In Memoriam by Alice Winn .

Discover more great authors and books you’ll love in our fiction review section

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Review: Grisham’s ‘The Guardians’ is suspenseful thriller

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“The Guardians: a Novel,” published by Doubleday, by John Grisham

In John Grisham’s latest novel, “The Guardians,” a former priest named Cullen Post works for an organization called Guardian Ministries that scours court transcripts and personal letters from convicts to determine if someone is wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he or she didn’t commit. If the organization believes without a doubt that the potential client is innocent, it will do everything it can within the boundaries of the law to free an innocent person, investigating and pushing for a new trial.

Quincy Miller has been in prison for 22 years — and still claims his innocence. A young lawyer was murdered, and suspicion quickly turned to Miller pulling the trigger. He says a fellow inmate fabricated a story about Miller confessing, and his ex-wife claimed that he owned several guns, which also wasn’t true. Another witness lied about seeing him flee the scene. Miller swears he never owned a gun, wasn’t anywhere in the area that night and that a key piece of evidence that later disappeared was planted.

It’s a bit much to believe that so many folks would be involved in a miscarriage of justice, but Post believes Miller and begins to dig into what happened that fateful night.

Grisham again delivers a suspenseful thriller mixed with powerful themes such as false incarceration, the death penalty and how the legal system shows prejudice. The Guardian team of characters is first-rate, and Miller’s attitude and mannerisms will have readers questioning what truth means in the world of the legal system.

https://www.jgrisham.com/

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Literary fiction dominates Maureen Corrigan's 2021 Best Books list

Maureen Corrigan

This was a spectacular year for literary fiction, so my "Best Books" list is exclusively composed of novels and short story collections — and I wish I could triple its length, but I'll keep it to 10.

Klara and the Sun

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara and the Sun takes pride of place in this list. As he did in his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go , Kazuo Ishiguro here explores what it means to be human through the perspective of a being who's regarded as merely "humanlike." Ishiguro is the master of slowly deepening our awareness of fragility and the inevitability of death — all that, even as he deepens our awareness of what temporary magic it is to be alive in the first place.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

Of all our contemporary literary fiction writers, Anthony Doerr is the one whose novels seem to be the most full-hearted response to the primal request, "Tell me a story." Doerr's latest, Cloud Cuckoo Land , spans eight centuries and dramatizes how an ancient tale gives light and hope to five young people, each living in dangerous times, with correspondences to our own.

Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford's historical novel, Light Perpetual , is a miracle not only of art, but of empathy. It opens with a real-life incident: the dropping of a V-2 rocket on a Woolworths in London one Saturday in 1944. What follows is a narrative that unsentimentally imagines the lives that five of the victims, all children, might have lived. Light Perpetual is a resonant novel about chance, as well as a God's-eye meditation on mutability and loss.

by Lauren Groff

Don't be misled by the title, Lauren Groff 's historical novel Matrix is no dystopian thriller, but rather a radiant novel about the 12 th -century poet and mystic Marie de France, about whose life we know almost nothing. No matter. Groff richly imagines Marie's decades of exile in a royal convent, which she eventually leads. A charged novel about female ambition, Matrix also dramatizes Marie's canny political insight that: "most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves."

Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

I'm beginning to think that any year Colson Whitehead brings out a new novel I should just reserve a spot on my "Best Books" list for it. Harlem Shuffle is a crime story in the sardonic style of Chester Himes ' classic Cotton Comes to Harlem, crossed with every film noir ever made about a good man caught up in a bad situation. Ray Carney, a family man, sells used furniture in the New York of the late 1950s and early '60s: You can smell the dust on the blond wood console radios he's trying to unload as TV sets are taking over. When Ray's cousin lures him into a heist at the Hotel Theresa — the so-called "Waldorf of Harlem" — Ray's hard-won respectability threatens to crumble.

Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

Afterparties , by the late Anthony Veasna So, was one of the big buzz books this year and it exceeded and upended my expectations. So, who died at the age of 28 before the book came out, was a queer first-generation Cambodian American who wrote smart, flip, rude, funny, sexually explicit and compassionate stories about the Cambodian refugee community in Stockton, Calif.

My Monticello

by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

The title novella of Jocelyn Nicole Johnson 's collection, My Monticello , is set in the near future when a group of mostly African American characters takes a last stand against the forces of racism high atop the "little mountain" that gives Thomas Jefferson's plantation its name. That novella is a rich, eerie riff on American mythology.

by Yoon Choi

The eight stories in Yoon Choi's collection, Skinship , splinter out to touch on decades of family history shaped, sometimes warped, by immigration. Choi takes that familiar topic and makes her characters' predicaments vivid and nuanced.

Oh William!

by Elizabeth Strout

In Oh William! Elizabeth Strout returns to her writer character, Lucy Barton, who, with her ex-husband, goes on a road trip that carries them deep into the wilderness of their failed marriage and personal pasts. That summary sounds grim, but if you know Strout you know that she compresses into the most ordinary conversations epiphanies about love, parenting and the untold ways we humans mess up.

We Run the Tides

by Vendela Vida

Finally, I want to give one last plug to a novel that I don't think has yet gotten all the recognition it deserves: Vendela Vida 's We Run the Tides . Set in the mid-1980s in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco that's perched on the very edge of the Pacific, the novel follows a squad of four 13-year-old girls also perched on the very edge of things. Haunted, tough and exquisite, this sliver of a novel summons up a world of female adolescence that I, for one, wanted to remain lost in — and yet also felt relieved to have outgrown.

Check Out NPR's 2021 Book We Love!

NPR's Book We Love returns with 360+ new books handpicked by NPR staff and critics — including recommendations from Maureen Corrigan and Fresh Air staffer Molly Seavy-Nesper. Click to find your next great read. NPR hide caption

NPR's Book We Love returns with 360+ new books handpicked by NPR staff and critics — including recommendations from Maureen Corrigan and Fresh Air staffer Molly Seavy-Nesper. Click to find your next great read.

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The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2022

Merve emre on gerald murnane, casey cep on harry crews, maggie doherty on cormac mccarthy, and more.

Way back in the mid-aughts when I first started writing about books, pitching a print publication was the only reliable way for book critics to get paid, and third-person point of view was all the vogue. Much has changed in the years since: Newspaper and magazine book sections have shuttered, many digital outlets offer compensation when they can, and first-person criticism has become much more pervasive.

I don’t celebrate all these changes, but I’m certain of one thing in particular: I love book reviews and critical essays written in the first-person. Done well, they are generous invitations into the lives of critics—and into their memory palaces. With that in mind, most of my picks for the best book reviews of 2022 were written in the first person this year.

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

Adam Dalva on Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story , translated by Joel Rotenberg ( Los Angeles Review of Books )

Dalva’s review of Chess Story is a great example of the power of a first-person point of view—he doesn’t just examine the book, he narrates his own journey to understand it.

“In my own quest to understand Chess Story, I gradually realized that I would have to learn the game it centers on. And that has led me into a second obsession, much more problematic: I have fallen passionately in love with online bullet chess.”

Merve Emre on Gerald Murnane’s Last Letter to a Reader ( The New Yorker )

Merve Emre’s analysis of Gerald Murnane’s final book is a beautiful piece of writing. I love how she opens on a note of suspense, pulling you into a story you can’t stop reading.

“On most evenings this past spring, the man who lives across the street sat at his small desk, turned on the lamp, and began to write as the light faded. The white curtains in his room were seldom drawn. From where I sat, I had a clear view of him, and he, were he to look up from his writing, would have had a clear view of a house across the street, where a woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion was seated by a window, watching him write. At the moment he glanced up from his page, the woman supposed him to be contemplating the look, or perhaps the sound, of the sentence he had just written. The sentence was this: ‘Since then I have tried to avoid those rooms that grow steadily more crowded with works to explain away Time.’”

Minyoung Lee on Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family ( Chicago Review of Books )

Lee brings her own experience to bear in this insightful review of a novel about Korean Americans in the diaspora. (Disclosure: I founded the Chicago Review of Books in 2016, but stepped back from an editorial role in 2019.)

“In diaspora communities, it’s not uncommon to find cultural practices from the homeland, even after they’ve become unpopular or forgotten there. This is colloquially referred to as ‘the immigrant time capsule effect.’ It can be experienced in many of the ethnic enclaves in the U.S. My first impression of Los Angeles’ Koreatown when I visited in the 2010s, for example, was that it felt very much like Seoul in the 1980s. Grocery stores were even selling canned grape drinks that were popular when I was a child but that I haven’t seen since.”

Chelsea Leu on Thuận’s Chinatown , translated by Nguyen An Lý ( Astra )

Astra magazine’s “ bangers only ” editorial policy led to some spectacular reviews, like this Chelsea Leu number that opens with a fascinating linguistics lesson.

“It was in high school Latin that I learned that language could have moods, and that one of those moods was the subjunctive. We use the indicative mood for statements of fact, but the subjunctive (which barely exists in English anymore) expresses possibilities, wishes, hopes and fears: ‘I wouldn’t trust those Greeks bearing gifts if I were you.’ More recently, I’ve learned there exists a whole class of moods called irrealis moods, of which the subjunctive is merely one flavor. André Aciman’s recent essay collection, Homo Irrealis, is entirely dedicated to these moods, celebrating the fact that they express sentiments that fly in the face of settled reality.”

Casey Cep on Harry Crews’ A Childhood: The Biography of a Place ( The New Yorker )

Cep is a magician when it comes to capturing a sense of place, as evidenced by her book about Harper Lee, Furious Hours , and this review of a book about another Southern writer, Harry Crews.

“Dehairing a shoat is the sort of thing Crews knew all about, along with cooking possum, cleaning a rooster’s craw, making moonshine, trapping birds, tanning hides, and getting rid of screwworms. Although he lived until 2012, Crews and his books—sixteen novels, two essay collections, and a memoir—recall a bygone era. The best of what he wrote evokes W.P.A. guides or Foxfire books, full of gripping folklore and hardscrabble lives, stories from the back of beyond about a time when the world seemed black and white in all possible senses.”

Victoria Chang and Dean Rader on Roger Reeves’ Best Barbarian ( Los Angeles Review of Books )

Last year I professed my love for “reviews in dialogue” between two critics, and Chang and Rader continue to be masters of the form in this conversation about Roger Reeves’ second poetry collection.

“Victoria: Do you have thoughts on the flow of the poems or allusions? I have a feeling you will talk about the biblical references. But I’m most curious to hear what you have to say about the purpose of the allusions and references. Is the speaker agreeing with them, subverting them, both? Is the speaker using them as a way to press against or think against, or toward? I know you will say something smart and insightful.”

“Dean: That is a lot of pressure. I’ll try not to let you down.”

Maggie Doherty on Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris ( The New Republic )

I didn’t think anyone could persuade me to read another Cormac McCarthy novel after The Road, but Maggie Doherty makes every book sound fascinating by making it part of a bigger, true story.

“Such is the paradox of The Passenger , a novel at once highly attuned to the pleasures of collective life and resistant to the very idea of it. Unlike the violent, stylized books for which McCarthy is best known, this new novel is loose, warm, colloquial. It explores the sustaining, if impermanent, bonds formed among male friends. It’s full of theories and anecdotes, memories and stories, all voiced by some of the liveliest characters McCarthy has ever crafted. The Passenger is McCarthy’s first novel in over 15 years; its coda, S tella Maris , is published in December. Together, the books represent a new, perhaps final direction for McCarthy. The Passenger in particular is McCarthy’s most peopled novel, his most polyphonic—and it’s wonderfully entertaining, in a way that few of his previous books have been. It is also his loneliest novel yet.”

Allison Bulger on Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria , translated by Max Lawton ( Words Without Borders )

I’m always interested in how critics find new ways to start a review, and Bulger’s opening lines here are a particularly sharp hook.

“Of all the jobs esteemed translator Larissa Volokhonsky has rejected, only one text was physically removed from her apartment on the Villa Poirier in Paris.

‘Take it back,’ she said. ‘Rid me of its presence.’

“The cursed title was Blue Lard (1999) by Vladimir Sorokin, known to some as Russia’s De Sade, and Volokhonsky’s revulsion was par for the course. It would be twenty years before another translator, Max Lawton, would provide eight Sorokin works unseen in the West, including Blue Lard , in which a clone of Khrushchev sodomizes a clone of Stalin.”

Summer Farah on Solmaz Sharif’s Customs ( Cleveland Review of Books )

Farah’s nuanced review of Solmaz Sharif’s new poetry collection further illustrates the potency of a first-person voice.

“Our poets write of our martyrs and resist alongside them; sometimes, I wonder, what life will be like after we are free, and what a truly free Palestine looks like. Last spring, the hashtag “#غرد_كأنها_حرة” circulated on Twitter, a collection of Palestinians imagining life as if our land was free; people imagined themselves moving from Akka to Ramallah with ease, returning to their homes their grandparents left in 1948, and traveling across the Levant without the obstacle of borders. This stanza acknowledges there is more work to be done than just ridding ourselves of the obvious systems that oppress us; decolonization and anti-imperial work are more holistic than we know. Sharif’s work is about attunement to the ways imperialism is ingrained into our lives, our speech, our poetry; this moment is direct in that acknowledgement.”

Nicole LeFebvre on Dorthe Nors’ A Line in the World ( On the Seawall )

LeFebvre opens this review like she’s writing a memoir or a personal essay—an unexpected joy that would be very hard to do in third-person.

“Each morning when I wake up, I hear the gentle crash and lull of waves on a beach. ‘Gather, scatter,’ as Dorthe Nors describes the sound. My eyes open and blink, adjusting to the dark. The sun’s not up yet. I scoot back into my partner’s body, kept asleep by the rhythmic thrum of the white noise machine, which covers the cars idling in the 7-Eleven parking lot, the motorcyclists showing off their scary-high speeds. For a few minutes, I accept the illusion of a calmer, quiet life. ‘Gather, scatter.’ A life by the sea.”

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Blog – Posted on Friday, Mar 29

17 book review examples to help you write the perfect review.

It’s an exciting time to be a book reviewer. Once confined to print newspapers and journals, reviews now dot many corridors of the Internet — forever helping others discover their next great read. That said, every book reviewer will face a familiar panic: how can you do justice to a great book in just a thousand words?

As you know, the best way to learn how to do something is by immersing yourself in it. Luckily, the Internet (i.e. Goodreads and other review sites , in particular) has made book reviews more accessible than ever — which means that there are a lot of book reviews examples out there for you to view!

In this post, we compiled 17 prototypical book review examples in multiple genres to help you figure out how to write the perfect review . If you want to jump straight to the examples, you can skip the next section. Otherwise, let’s first check out what makes up a good review.

Are you interested in becoming a book reviewer? We recommend you check out Reedsy Discovery , where you can earn money for writing reviews — and are guaranteed people will read your reviews! To register as a book reviewer, sign up here.

Pro-tip : But wait! How are you sure if you should become a book reviewer in the first place? If you're on the fence, or curious about your match with a book reviewing career, take our quick quiz:

Should you become a book reviewer?

Find out the answer. Takes 30 seconds!

What must a book review contain?

Like all works of art, no two book reviews will be identical. But fear not: there are a few guidelines for any aspiring book reviewer to follow. Most book reviews, for instance, are less than 1,500 words long, with the sweet spot hitting somewhere around the 1,000-word mark. (However, this may vary depending on the platform on which you’re writing, as we’ll see later.)

In addition, all reviews share some universal elements, as shown in our book review templates . These include:

• A review will offer a concise plot summary of the book. 
• A book review will offer an evaluation of the work. 
• A book review will offer a recommendation for the audience. 

If these are the basic ingredients that make up a book review, it’s the tone and style with which the book reviewer writes that brings the extra panache. This will differ from platform to platform, of course. A book review on Goodreads, for instance, will be much more informal and personal than a book review on Kirkus Reviews, as it is catering to a different audience. However, at the end of the day, the goal of all book reviews is to give the audience the tools to determine whether or not they’d like to read the book themselves.

Keeping that in mind, let’s proceed to some book review examples to put all of this in action.

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Book review examples for fiction books

Since story is king in the world of fiction, it probably won’t come as any surprise to learn that a book review for a novel will concentrate on how well the story was told .

That said, book reviews in all genres follow the same basic formula that we discussed earlier. In these examples, you’ll be able to see how book reviewers on different platforms expertly intertwine the plot summary and their personal opinions of the book to produce a clear, informative, and concise review.

Note: Some of the book review examples run very long. If a book review is truncated in this post, we’ve indicated by including a […] at the end, but you can always read the entire review if you click on the link provided.

Examples of literary fiction book reviews

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man :

An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.

His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.

This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.

Lyndsey reviews George Orwell’s 1984 on Goodreads:

YOU. ARE. THE. DEAD. Oh my God. I got the chills so many times toward the end of this book. It completely blew my mind. It managed to surpass my high expectations AND be nothing at all like I expected. Or in Newspeak "Double Plus Good." Let me preface this with an apology. If I sound stunningly inarticulate at times in this review, I can't help it. My mind is completely fried.

This book is like the dystopian Lord of the Rings, with its richly developed culture and economics, not to mention a fully developed language called Newspeak, or rather more of the anti-language, whose purpose is to limit speech and understanding instead of to enhance and expand it. The world-building is so fully fleshed out and spine-tinglingly terrifying that it's almost as if George travelled to such a place, escaped from it, and then just wrote it all down.

I read Fahrenheit 451 over ten years ago in my early teens. At the time, I remember really wanting to read 1984, although I never managed to get my hands on it. I'm almost glad I didn't. Though I would not have admitted it at the time, it would have gone over my head. Or at the very least, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it fully. […]

The New York Times reviews Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry :

Three-quarters of the way through Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, “Asymmetry,” a British foreign correspondent named Alistair is spending Christmas on a compound outside of Baghdad. His fellow revelers include cameramen, defense contractors, United Nations employees and aid workers. Someone’s mother has FedExed a HoneyBaked ham from Maine; people are smoking by the swimming pool. It is 2003, just days after Saddam Hussein’s capture, and though the mood is optimistic, Alistair is worrying aloud about the ethics of his chosen profession, wondering if reporting on violence doesn’t indirectly abet violence and questioning why he’d rather be in a combat zone than reading a picture book to his son. But every time he returns to London, he begins to “spin out.” He can’t go home. “You observe what people do with their freedom — what they don’t do — and it’s impossible not to judge them for it,” he says.

The line, embedded unceremoniously in the middle of a page-long paragraph, doubles, like so many others in “Asymmetry,” as literary criticism. Halliday’s novel is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction. One finishes “Asymmetry” for the first or second (or like this reader, third) time and is left wondering what other writers are not doing with their freedom — and, like Alistair, judging them for it.

Despite its title, “Asymmetry” comprises two seemingly unrelated sections of equal length, appended by a slim and quietly shocking coda. Halliday’s prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald, and like the murmurings of a shy person at a cocktail party, often comic only in single clauses. It’s a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years. […]

Emily W. Thompson reviews Michael Doane's The Crossing on Reedsy Discovery :

In Doane’s debut novel, a young man embarks on a journey of self-discovery with surprising results.

An unnamed protagonist (The Narrator) is dealing with heartbreak. His love, determined to see the world, sets out for Portland, Oregon. But he’s a small-town boy who hasn’t traveled much. So, the Narrator mourns her loss and hides from life, throwing himself into rehabbing an old motorcycle. Until one day, he takes a leap; he packs his bike and a few belongings and heads out to find the Girl.

Following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat-Moon, Doane offers a coming of age story about a man finding himself on the backroads of America. Doane’s a gifted writer with fluid prose and insightful observations, using The Narrator’s personal interactions to illuminate the diversity of the United States.

The Narrator initially sticks to the highways, trying to make it to the West Coast as quickly as possible. But a hitchhiker named Duke convinces him to get off the beaten path and enjoy the ride. “There’s not a place that’s like any other,” [39] Dukes contends, and The Narrator realizes he’s right. Suddenly, the trip is about the journey, not just the destination. The Narrator ditches his truck and traverses the deserts and mountains on his bike. He destroys his phone, cutting off ties with his past and living only in the moment.

As he crosses the country, The Narrator connects with several unique personalities whose experiences and views deeply impact his own. Duke, the complicated cowboy and drifter, who opens The Narrator’s eyes to a larger world. Zooey, the waitress in Colorado who opens his heart and reminds him that love can be found in this big world. And Rosie, The Narrator’s sweet landlady in Portland, who helps piece him back together both physically and emotionally.

This supporting cast of characters is excellent. Duke, in particular, is wonderfully nuanced and complicated. He’s a throwback to another time, a man without a cell phone who reads Sartre and sleeps under the stars. Yet he’s also a grifter with a “love ‘em and leave ‘em” attitude that harms those around him. It’s fascinating to watch The Narrator wrestle with Duke’s behavior, trying to determine which to model and which to discard.

Doane creates a relatable protagonist in The Narrator, whose personal growth doesn’t erase his faults. His willingness to hit the road with few resources is admirable, and he’s prescient enough to recognize the jealousy of those who cannot or will not take the leap. His encounters with new foods, places, and people broaden his horizons. Yet his immaturity and selfishness persist. He tells Rosie she’s been a good mother to him but chooses to ignore the continuing concern from his own parents as he effectively disappears from his old life.

Despite his flaws, it’s a pleasure to accompany The Narrator on his physical and emotional journey. The unexpected ending is a fitting denouement to an epic and memorable road trip.

The Book Smugglers review Anissa Gray’s The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls :

I am still dipping my toes into the literally fiction pool, finding what works for me and what doesn’t. Books like The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray are definitely my cup of tea.

Althea and Proctor Cochran had been pillars of their economically disadvantaged community for years – with their local restaurant/small market and their charity drives. Until they are found guilty of fraud for stealing and keeping most of the money they raised and sent to jail. Now disgraced, their entire family is suffering the consequences, specially their twin teenage daughters Baby Vi and Kim.  To complicate matters even more: Kim was actually the one to call the police on her parents after yet another fight with her mother. […]

Examples of children’s and YA fiction book reviews

The Book Hookup reviews Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give :

♥ Quick Thoughts and Rating: 5 stars! I can’t imagine how challenging it would be to tackle the voice of a movement like Black Lives Matter, but I do know that Thomas did it with a finesse only a talented author like herself possibly could. With an unapologetically realistic delivery packed with emotion, The Hate U Give is a crucially important portrayal of the difficulties minorities face in our country every single day. I have no doubt that this book will be met with resistance by some (possibly many) and slapped with a “controversial” label, but if you’ve ever wondered what it was like to walk in a POC’s shoes, then I feel like this is an unflinchingly honest place to start.

In Angie Thomas’s debut novel, Starr Carter bursts on to the YA scene with both heart-wrecking and heartwarming sincerity. This author is definitely one to watch.

♥ Review: The hype around this book has been unquestionable and, admittedly, that made me both eager to get my hands on it and terrified to read it. I mean, what if I was to be the one person that didn’t love it as much as others? (That seems silly now because of how truly mesmerizing THUG was in the most heartbreakingly realistic way.) However, with the relevancy of its summary in regards to the unjust predicaments POC currently face in the US, I knew this one was a must-read, so I was ready to set my fears aside and dive in. That said, I had an altogether more personal, ulterior motive for wanting to read this book. […]

The New York Times reviews Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood :

Alice Crewe (a last name she’s chosen for herself) is a fairy tale legacy: the granddaughter of Althea Proserpine, author of a collection of dark-as-night fairy tales called “Tales From the Hinterland.” The book has a cult following, and though Alice has never met her grandmother, she’s learned a little about her through internet research. She hasn’t read the stories, because her mother, Ella Proserpine, forbids it.

Alice and Ella have moved from place to place in an attempt to avoid the “bad luck” that seems to follow them. Weird things have happened. As a child, Alice was kidnapped by a man who took her on a road trip to find her grandmother; he was stopped by the police before they did so. When at 17 she sees that man again, unchanged despite the years, Alice panics. Then Ella goes missing, and Alice turns to Ellery Finch, a schoolmate who’s an Althea Proserpine superfan, for help in tracking down her mother. Not only has Finch read every fairy tale in the collection, but handily, he remembers them, sharing them with Alice as they journey to the mysterious Hazel Wood, the estate of her now-dead grandmother, where they hope to find Ella.

“The Hazel Wood” starts out strange and gets stranger, in the best way possible. (The fairy stories Finch relays, which Albert includes as their own chapters, are as creepy and evocative as you’d hope.) Albert seamlessly combines contemporary realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that highlights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth and the world as it appears is false, where just about anything can happen, particularly in the pages of a very good book. It’s a captivating debut. […]

James reviews Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight, Moon on Goodreads:

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown is one of the books that followers of my blog voted as a must-read for our Children's Book August 2018 Readathon. Come check it out and join the next few weeks!

This picture book was such a delight. I hadn't remembered reading it when I was a child, but it might have been read to me... either way, it was like a whole new experience! It's always so difficult to convince a child to fall asleep at night. I don't have kids, but I do have a 5-month-old puppy who whines for 5 minutes every night when he goes in his cage/crate (hopefully he'll be fully housebroken soon so he can roam around when he wants). I can only imagine! I babysat a lot as a teenager and I have tons of younger cousins, nieces, and nephews, so I've been through it before, too. This was a believable experience, and it really helps show kids how to relax and just let go when it's time to sleep.

The bunny's are adorable. The rhymes are exquisite. I found it pretty fun, but possibly a little dated given many of those things aren't normal routines anymore. But the lessons to take from it are still powerful. Loved it! I want to sample some more books by this fine author and her illustrators.

Publishers Weekly reviews Elizabeth Lilly’s Geraldine :

This funny, thoroughly accomplished debut opens with two words: “I’m moving.” They’re spoken by the title character while she swoons across her family’s ottoman, and because Geraldine is a giraffe, her full-on melancholy mode is quite a spectacle. But while Geraldine may be a drama queen (even her mother says so), it won’t take readers long to warm up to her. The move takes Geraldine from Giraffe City, where everyone is like her, to a new school, where everyone else is human. Suddenly, the former extrovert becomes “That Giraffe Girl,” and all she wants to do is hide, which is pretty much impossible. “Even my voice tries to hide,” she says, in the book’s most poignant moment. “It’s gotten quiet and whispery.” Then she meets Cassie, who, though human, is also an outlier (“I’m that girl who wears glasses and likes MATH and always organizes her food”), and things begin to look up.

Lilly’s watercolor-and-ink drawings are as vividly comic and emotionally astute as her writing; just when readers think there are no more ways for Geraldine to contort her long neck, this highly promising talent comes up with something new.

Examples of genre fiction book reviews

Karlyn P reviews Nora Roberts’ Dark Witch , a paranormal romance novel , on Goodreads:

4 stars. Great world-building, weak romance, but still worth the read.

I hesitate to describe this book as a 'romance' novel simply because the book spent little time actually exploring the romance between Iona and Boyle. Sure, there IS a romance in this novel. Sprinkled throughout the book are a few scenes where Iona and Boyle meet, chat, wink at each, flirt some more, sleep together, have a misunderstanding, make up, and then profess their undying love. Very formulaic stuff, and all woven around the more important parts of this book.

The meat of this book is far more focused on the story of the Dark witch and her magically-gifted descendants living in Ireland. Despite being weak on the romance, I really enjoyed it. I think the book is probably better for it, because the romance itself was pretty lackluster stuff.

I absolutely plan to stick with this series as I enjoyed the world building, loved the Ireland setting, and was intrigued by all of the secondary characters. However, If you read Nora Roberts strictly for the romance scenes, this one might disappoint. But if you enjoy a solid background story with some dark magic and prophesies, you might enjoy it as much as I did.

I listened to this one on audio, and felt the narration was excellent.

Emily May reviews R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy Wars , an epic fantasy novel , on Goodreads:

“But I warn you, little warrior. The price of power is pain.”

Holy hell, what did I just read??

➽ A fantasy military school

➽ A rich world based on modern Chinese history

➽ Shamans and gods

➽ Detailed characterization leading to unforgettable characters

➽ Adorable, opium-smoking mentors

That's a basic list, but this book is all of that and SO MUCH MORE. I know 100% that The Poppy War will be one of my best reads of 2018.

Isn't it just so great when you find one of those books that completely drags you in, makes you fall in love with the characters, and demands that you sit on the edge of your seat for every horrific, nail-biting moment of it? This is one of those books for me. And I must issue a serious content warning: this book explores some very dark themes. Proceed with caution (or not at all) if you are particularly sensitive to scenes of war, drug use and addiction, genocide, racism, sexism, ableism, self-harm, torture, and rape (off-page but extremely horrific).

Because, despite the fairly innocuous first 200 pages, the title speaks the truth: this is a book about war. All of its horrors and atrocities. It is not sugar-coated, and it is often graphic. The "poppy" aspect refers to opium, which is a big part of this book. It is a fantasy, but the book draws inspiration from the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanking.

Crime Fiction Lover reviews Jessica Barry’s Freefall , a crime novel:

In some crime novels, the wrongdoing hits you between the eyes from page one. With others it’s a more subtle process, and that’s OK too. So where does Freefall fit into the sliding scale?

In truth, it’s not clear. This is a novel with a thrilling concept at its core. A woman survives plane crash, then runs for her life. However, it is the subtleties at play that will draw you in like a spider beckoning to an unwitting fly.

Like the heroine in Sharon Bolton’s Dead Woman Walking, Allison is lucky to be alive. She was the only passenger in a private plane, belonging to her fiancé, Ben, who was piloting the expensive aircraft, when it came down in woodlands in the Colorado Rockies. Ally is also the only survivor, but rather than sitting back and waiting for rescue, she is soon pulling together items that may help her survive a little longer – first aid kit, energy bars, warm clothes, trainers – before fleeing the scene. If you’re hearing the faint sound of alarm bells ringing, get used to it. There’s much, much more to learn about Ally before this tale is over.

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One , a science-fiction novel :

Video-game players embrace the quest of a lifetime in a virtual world; screenwriter Cline’s first novel is old wine in new bottles.

The real world, in 2045, is the usual dystopian horror story. So who can blame Wade, our narrator, if he spends most of his time in a virtual world? The 18-year-old, orphaned at 11, has no friends in his vertical trailer park in Oklahoma City, while the OASIS has captivating bells and whistles, and it’s free. Its creator, the legendary billionaire James Halliday, left a curious will. He had devised an elaborate online game, a hunt for a hidden Easter egg. The finder would inherit his estate. Old-fashioned riddles lead to three keys and three gates. Wade, or rather his avatar Parzival, is the first gunter (egg-hunter) to win the Copper Key, first of three.

Halliday was obsessed with the pop culture of the 1980s, primarily the arcade games, so the novel is as much retro as futurist. Parzival’s great strength is that he has absorbed all Halliday’s obsessions; he knows by heart three essential movies, crossing the line from geek to freak. His most formidable competitors are the Sixers, contract gunters working for the evil conglomerate IOI, whose goal is to acquire the OASIS. Cline’s narrative is straightforward but loaded with exposition. It takes a while to reach a scene that crackles with excitement: the meeting between Parzival (now world famous as the lead contender) and Sorrento, the head of IOI. The latter tries to recruit Parzival; when he fails, he issues and executes a death threat. Wade’s trailer is demolished, his relatives killed; luckily Wade was not at home. Too bad this is the dramatic high point. Parzival threads his way between more ’80s games and movies to gain the other keys; it’s clever but not exciting. Even a romance with another avatar and the ultimate “epic throwdown” fail to stir the blood.

Too much puzzle-solving, not enough suspense.

Book review examples for non-fiction books

Nonfiction books are generally written to inform readers about a certain topic. As such, the focus of a nonfiction book review will be on the clarity and effectiveness of this communication . In carrying this out, a book review may analyze the author’s source materials and assess the thesis in order to determine whether or not the book meets expectations.

Again, we’ve included abbreviated versions of long reviews here, so feel free to click on the link to read the entire piece!

The Washington Post reviews David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon :

The arc of David Grann’s career reminds one of a software whiz-kid or a latest-thing talk-show host — certainly not an investigative reporter, even if he is one of the best in the business. The newly released movie of his first book, “The Lost City of Z,” is generating all kinds of Oscar talk, and now comes the release of his second book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” the film rights to which have already been sold for $5 million in what one industry journal called the “biggest and wildest book rights auction in memory.”

Grann deserves the attention. He’s canny about the stories he chases, he’s willing to go anywhere to chase them, and he’s a maestro in his ability to parcel out information at just the right clip: a hint here, a shading of meaning there, a smartly paced buildup of multiple possibilities followed by an inevitable reversal of readerly expectations or, in some cases, by a thrilling and dislocating pull of the entire narrative rug.

All of these strengths are on display in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Around the turn of the 20th century, oil was discovered underneath Osage lands in the Oklahoma Territory, lands that were soon to become part of the state of Oklahoma. Through foresight and legal maneuvering, the Osage found a way to permanently attach that oil to themselves and shield it from the prying hands of white interlopers; this mechanism was known as “headrights,” which forbade the outright sale of oil rights and granted each full member of the tribe — and, supposedly, no one else — a share in the proceeds from any lease arrangement. For a while, the fail-safes did their job, and the Osage got rich — diamond-ring and chauffeured-car and imported-French-fashion rich — following which quite a large group of white men started to work like devils to separate the Osage from their money. And soon enough, and predictably enough, this work involved murder. Here in Jazz Age America’s most isolated of locales, dozens or even hundreds of Osage in possession of great fortunes — and of the potential for even greater fortunes in the future — were dispatched by poison, by gunshot and by dynamite. […]

Stacked Books reviews Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers :

I’ve heard a lot of great things about Malcolm Gladwell’s writing. Friends and co-workers tell me that his subjects are interesting and his writing style is easy to follow without talking down to the reader. I wasn’t disappointed with Outliers. In it, Gladwell tackles the subject of success – how people obtain it and what contributes to extraordinary success as opposed to everyday success.

The thesis – that our success depends much more on circumstances out of our control than any effort we put forth – isn’t exactly revolutionary. Most of us know it to be true. However, I don’t think I’m lying when I say that most of us also believe that we if we just try that much harder and develop our talent that much further, it will be enough to become wildly successful, despite bad or just mediocre beginnings. Not so, says Gladwell.

Most of the evidence Gladwell gives us is anecdotal, which is my favorite kind to read. I can’t really speak to how scientifically valid it is, but it sure makes for engrossing listening. For example, did you know that successful hockey players are almost all born in January, February, or March? Kids born during these months are older than the others kids when they start playing in the youth leagues, which means they’re already better at the game (because they’re bigger). Thus, they get more play time, which means their skill increases at a faster rate, and it compounds as time goes by. Within a few years, they’re much, much better than the kids born just a few months later in the year. Basically, these kids’ birthdates are a huge factor in their success as adults – and it’s nothing they can do anything about. If anyone could make hockey interesting to a Texan who only grudgingly admits the sport even exists, it’s Gladwell. […]

Quill and Quire reviews Rick Prashaw’s Soar, Adam, Soar :

Ten years ago, I read a book called Almost Perfect. The young-adult novel by Brian Katcher won some awards and was held up as a powerful, nuanced portrayal of a young trans person. But the reality did not live up to the book’s billing. Instead, it turned out to be a one-dimensional and highly fetishized portrait of a trans person’s life, one that was nevertheless repeatedly dubbed “realistic” and “affecting” by non-transgender readers possessing only a vague, mass-market understanding of trans experiences.

In the intervening decade, trans narratives have emerged further into the literary spotlight, but those authored by trans people ourselves – and by trans men in particular – have seemed to fall under the shadow of cisgender sensationalized imaginings. Two current Canadian releases – Soar, Adam, Soar and This One Looks Like a Boy – provide a pointed object lesson into why trans-authored work about transgender experiences remains critical.

To be fair, Soar, Adam, Soar isn’t just a story about a trans man. It’s also a story about epilepsy, the medical establishment, and coming of age as seen through a grieving father’s eyes. Adam, Prashaw’s trans son, died unexpectedly at age 22. Woven through the elder Prashaw’s narrative are excerpts from Adam’s social media posts, giving us glimpses into the young man’s interior life as he traverses his late teens and early 20s. […]

Book Geeks reviews Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love :

WRITING STYLE: 3.5/5

SUBJECT: 4/5

CANDIDNESS: 4.5/5

RELEVANCE: 3.5/5

ENTERTAINMENT QUOTIENT: 3.5/5

“Eat Pray Love” is so popular that it is almost impossible to not read it. Having felt ashamed many times on my not having read this book, I quietly ordered the book (before I saw the movie) from amazon.in and sat down to read it. I don’t remember what I expected it to be – maybe more like a chick lit thing but it turned out quite different. The book is a real story and is a short journal from the time when its writer went travelling to three different countries in pursuit of three different things – Italy (Pleasure), India (Spirituality), Bali (Balance) and this is what corresponds to the book’s name – EAT (in Italy), PRAY (in India) and LOVE (in Bali, Indonesia). These are also the three Is – ITALY, INDIA, INDONESIA.

Though she had everything a middle-aged American woman can aspire for – MONEY, CAREER, FRIENDS, HUSBAND; Elizabeth was not happy in her life, she wasn’t happy in her marriage. Having suffered a terrible divorce and terrible breakup soon after, Elizabeth was shattered. She didn’t know where to go and what to do – all she knew was that she wanted to run away. So she set out on a weird adventure – she will go to three countries in a year and see if she can find out what she was looking for in life. This book is about that life changing journey that she takes for one whole year. […]

Emily May reviews Michelle Obama’s Becoming on Goodreads:

Look, I'm not a happy crier. I might cry at songs about leaving and missing someone; I might cry at books where things don't work out; I might cry at movies where someone dies. I've just never really understood why people get all choked up over happy, inspirational things. But Michelle Obama's kindness and empathy changed that. This book had me in tears for all the right reasons.

This is not really a book about politics, though political experiences obviously do come into it. It's a shame that some will dismiss this book because of a difference in political opinion, when it is really about a woman's life. About growing up poor and black on the South Side of Chicago; about getting married and struggling to maintain that marriage; about motherhood; about being thrown into an amazing and terrifying position.

I hate words like "inspirational" because they've become so overdone and cheesy, but I just have to say it-- Michelle Obama is an inspiration. I had the privilege of seeing her speak at The Forum in Inglewood, and she is one of the warmest, funniest, smartest, down-to-earth people I have ever seen in this world.

And yes, I know we present what we want the world to see, but I truly do think it's genuine. I think she is someone who really cares about people - especially kids - and wants to give them better lives and opportunities.

She's obviously intelligent, but she also doesn't gussy up her words. She talks straight, with an openness and honesty rarely seen. She's been one of the most powerful women in the world, she's been a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, she's had her own successful career, and yet she has remained throughout that same girl - Michelle Robinson - from a working class family in Chicago.

I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't benefit from reading this book.

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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SEEN & HEARD

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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by Lisa Jewell

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New York Times Bestseller

THE GREAT ALONE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018

A tour de force.

In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.

After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s ( The Nightingale , 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0

Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017

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‘Alien: Romulus’ Review: Go Ahead, Scream (No One Can Hear You)

The seventh installment of the series centers on Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a contract worker in an outer-space mining colony, and her friend Andy (David Jonsson), an android.

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By Manohla Dargis

Some movie sequels take a series in new directions, adding original ideas, new characters, different approaches and, at times, heft and myth. Other sequels are more like filler. They help plug the spaces between movies and keep the franchise’s brand in the public’s imagination, all while trying to make some cash. The newest “Alien” movie, “Alien: Romulus,” the seventh installment in this storied, apparently inexhaustible cycle of films, is perfectly adequate filler.

Since Ridley Scott’s “Alien” burst into gripping, gruesome life in 1979, the series has generated hits and misses, tankers of acidic slobber and a sizable body count. The franchise turned Sigourney Weaver into an icon and gave David Fincher his start as a film director. As the movies piled up, they also reminded you that the original “Alien” is a masterpiece and that even the lesser follow-ups that Scott directed, “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” have their virtues, among them striking visuals, filmmaking intelligence, a curiosity about the cosmos, and a twinned appreciation for the mystery of life and the inevitability of death.

“Alien: Romulus” is a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure horror story with boos and splatter. It doesn’t have much on its mind but it has some good jump scares along with a disappointingly bland heroine, a sympathetic android and the usual collection of disposable characters who are unduly killed by slavering, rampaging extraterrestrials. In series terms, the events in “Romulus” take place between those in “Alien” and those in the second film, “Aliens.” Written and directed by James Cameron, and crowded with big guns and bulging biceps, “Aliens” is largely notable for its swaggering action sequences that have become de rigueur in the series and for giving Weaver’s Ripley a muscular makeover while turning her into a surrogate mom.

Directed by Fede Álvarez (“ Don’t Breathe ”), who shares script credit with Rodo Sayagues, “Romulus” tells a familiar, half-baked story of adversity, gritty perseverance, quick thinking and a drag-down fight for survival. It centers on Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a 20-something contract worker in a grim outer-space mining colony. There, along with Andy (David Jonsson), a glitchy android that she loves and calls her brother, Rain yearns to leave the sunless planet and the punishing conditions that condemned both her parents to early deaths. She soon gets her chance when some other friends share that they’re planning an escape in an abandoned space station that has conveniently drifted above their planet.

Álvarez gets through this setup economically, and it isn’t long before Rain and company are creeping through the station’s eerily empty corridors, exploring its topsy-turvy rooms and pondering its not particularly mysterious mysteries. (Álvarez spends a lot of time showing off his sets, which are more engaging than the writing.) Spaeny, who played Priscilla Presley in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” is an appealing performer — her youth and slight frame deceptively suggest near-childlike vulnerability — and you’re on Rain’s side straightaway. What keeps you rooted there is largely a matter of film-going habit and franchise familiarity: She’s the heroine and Ripley’s symbolic heir, after all, and the monsters are coming.

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