NYT Books

At its best, Joy Williams’s “The Pelican Child” is delightfully unhinged; at its worst, willfully weird and repetitive.

In “The Fire,” the reporter Cecilia Sala travels to Iran, Ukraine and Afghanistan and follows her generation into the fray.

In “Crick: A Mind in Motion,” the British biologist Matthew Cobb provides a biography both vivid and authoritative.

His new novel, “Palaver,” observes how an expat in Japan and his visiting mother find “a new language and way of being that’s amenable for them both.”

In Derrick Barnes’s fantastical tale, a 13-year-old Black football star is idolized by his town’s mostly white inhabitants, until they turn on him.

Reading recommendations from critics and editors at The New York Times.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s new novel, “Terry Dactyl,” follows a young trans woman figuring out who she is throughout the AIDS crisis and Covid pandemic.

Sarah Hall’s inventive new novel spans centuries, showing how Britain’s famed Helm shaped people and how people are shaping it.

During the government shutdown, booksellers are collecting food for Americans who receive federal aid to buy groceries.

In “Fateful Hours,” the road map to authoritarian disaster is laid out in gleamingly sinister detail by the German historian Volker Ullrich.