Every week, the critics and editors at the New York Times Book Review pick the most interesting and notable new releases, from literary fiction and serious nonfiction to thrillers, romance novels, mysteries and everything in between.

You can save the books you’re most excited to read on a personal reading list, and find even more recommendations from our book experts.

Mystery

Tokyo Express

by Seicho Matsumoto

Newly translated by Jesse Kirkwood, Matsumoto’s masterpiece stands out thanks to the “elegant spareness of the prose,” as Amor Towles writes in the introduction, but also because of the ingenuity of the tightly coiled plot. A laborer walking to his factory job early one morning discovers the bodies of a man and woman on the beach — an apparent double “love suicide.” Or is it? The old-school detective Jutaro Torigai and a young colleague, Kiichi Mihara, solve the crime with the help of a railway schedule. Read our review.

Literary Fiction

The Rest of Our Lives

by Ben Markovits

A law professor challenged by his students while navigating a quietly hostile marriage drives his daughter to college — and keeps going. Yes, it sounds like a sexed-down “All Fours.” But Markovits’s 12th novel, which made the 2025 Booker Prize shortlist, takes in mortality, white fragility and pickup basketball along the way. “At some level,” Markovits writes, “everything you feel or think is a kind of taking sides.” Read our review.

Historical Fiction

Beasts of the Sea

by Iida Turpeinen

Translated from the Finnish by David Hackston, this eloquent, impassioned novel — which spans some 200 years — uses the demise of a gentle marine mammal to chart mankind’s evolution from arrogant explorer of nature to “as great a threat as an asteroid or flood” to other species. Read our review.

Mystery

The Murder at World’s End

by Ross Montgomery

It’s 1910, and the imminent arrival of Halley’s comet has thrown the world into a tizzy. At an isolated estate called Tithe Hall, fake science reigns. “Hailstorms as large as boulders will rain down across cities!” shouts the owner, Lord Stockingham-Welt. “Electrical storms will blind all who set eyes on them!” When he turns up dead, it’s up to his elderly aunt and a second footman to solve the crime. Read our review.

historical fiction

I Am You

by Victoria Redel

The narrator of “I Am You” is Gerta Wyntges, about whom little is known apart from her status as servant and apprentice to the 17th-century Dutch painter Maria van Oosterwijck. From this, Redel has reconstructed a vibrant depiction of Amsterdam’s golden age, filled with conspicuous consumption and even more conspicuous artistic rivalries. Read our review.

Memoir

How to Cook a Coyote

by Betty Fussell

Fussell, who has long been among America’s earthiest and most cerebral cookery writers, is best known for “My Kitchen Wars” (1999), a prickly pear of a book that recounts her marriage to the historian Paul Fussell. One of the lessons of this new book, which is about aging, is “to stir what’s left of your wits and to, at all costs, keep your sense of humor intact,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote. “It functions like the little mesh on the halved lemon that keeps the pips from falling into your oysters.” Read our review.

Graphic Novel

Hobtown Mystery Stories Vol. 3: The Secret of the Saucer

by Kris Bertin; illustrated by Alexander Forbes

Detective fiction is about getting to the bottom of things; weird fiction is about the abyss in its bottomless depths. The “Hobtown Mystery Stories,” in their layered and satisfying surrealism, are about both. For their third installment in the supernatural series, Bertin and Forbes subject the unlucky Nova Scotia burg of Hobtown to an attack (not exactly) by an alien (sort of) in a flying saucer (more of a pod, really). Read our review.

Literary fiction

Grand Rapids

by Natasha Stagg

This artful, unassuming portrait of a Midwestern teenager’s grief and transformation takes place during a single summer in the early aughts, the heyday of reality TV, megachurches and chat rooms. Tess spends her free hours on the household PC, flirting with a Michigan politician who tells her that she has a bright future, though she already senses the limits of her horizon. “The thing that was keeping me here was my age,” she realizes. “Once I was an adult, though, it would be money.” Read our review.