NYT Books

Your imaginary audience has a note taped to them: “I can’t read. I can’t talk. I don’t care about stories, plots or characters. What do you have for me?”

His new book, “Aflame,” tells of his decades visiting a silent Benedictine retreat. “You learn to love the world only by looking at it closely,” he wrote.

Karissa Chen’s debut, “Homeseeking,” follows two childhood sweethearts who meet in Shanghai, and whose lives are upended by the forces of history.

Among the notable figures who died in a sometimes polarizing 2024, many championed justice, equal rights and political freedom.

His first novel, “Tanguy,” published when he was 24, was a fact-based Holocaust story that one reviewer said “begins where Anne Frank’s diary ended.”

In “Embers of the Hands,” the historian Eleanor Barraclough looks beyond the soap-opera sagas to those lost in the cracks of history.

The author of “The Note” traces her “real obsession” to discovering “a slew of smart, gritty female sleuths who began to feel like friends.”

In Kate Fagan’s novel, “The Three Lives of Cate Kay,” a best-selling writer decides to reveal the tragedy behind her success.

In “You’ll Never Believe Me,” Kari Ferrell details going from internet notoriety to self-knowledge in a captivating, sharp and very funny memoir.

Rebecca Kauffman’s fifth novel, “I’ll Come to You,” is a “Corrections”-esque tale of one clan’s dysfunctions and joys in mid-90s America.