Annalisa Quinn

In Jennifer Egan's novel, there is a persistent, lovely countermelody to the corporate project of mapping human experience; it's full of people engaged in a sweeter and more plaintive human algebra.

Even when nominally about something else, the essays in These Precious Days are about the weight and grief of relationships. "I was asking what mattered most in this precarious and precious life."

An unexpected and interesting aspect of the book is the way it brims with experiences of the body, including Couric's years struggling with bulimia and the warping effects of having her looks managed.

In On Freedom's allusive, blunt, funny essays, the author of The Argonauts and The Art of Cruelty tries to imagine freedom as it exists in the contemporary contexts of art, sex, drugs, and climate.

Pat Barker returns to the scene of the Trojan War in The Women of Troy, but this time after the city has fallen and its women are grieving their old lives while trying to figure out their new ones.

There's something that feels impossible about leaving behind the place in which we slunk our way through the last year plus. Until Proven Safe takes us to the places others lingered through time.

In a new book, The Radium Girls author Kate Moore follows the struggles of Elizabeth Packard who, locked up by her husband in 1860 for having opinions and voicing them, finds she's not the only one.

Olivia Laing weaves the history of people and ideas in with her own life, bringing readers on a fleet, gracious tour of bodily distress and joy that takes in Malcolm X, the Marquis de Sade and others.

Kazuo Ishiguro's lovely, mournful new novel is set in a world where children can have android companions, known as Artificial Friends — but can those artificial friends ever replace the children?

Sarah Moss's new novel takes place over a single, unrelentingly rainy day at a vacation site in Scotland, where families complain about each other and mounting dread builds to catastrophe at the end.

Former Washington Post leader Len Downie is well-placed to offer a look at 50 years in news — but he also writes of times he had to weigh the public's right to know against national security.

Ward says she didn't know as a journalist she would "have my heart broken in a hundred different ways, that I would lose friends and watch children die and grow to feel like an alien in my own skin."

Elena Ferrante's latest is as slinky and scowling as a Neapolitan cat, and as promised, it's all about the part of life adults lie about: sex — and the chaos, infidelity and fear that accompany it.

Johnson's chilly, uneasy novel follows two sisters in the wake of an unnamed "something" that happened. Critic Annalisa Quinn says it's slighter than Johnson's previous work, but genuinely surprising.

Hill's election to Congress in 2018 seemed like a sign of progress. A year later, she resigned after admitting to an affair with a young staffer, documented by her husband, and leaked to the press.

Kim Wall was 30 when she was killed by a source. Her parents are working to make sure her name will not be a warning but a tag under ambitious investigative pieces, a line on resumes, a calling card.

The flattening effect of political discourse, insipidity of the first lady role and her own remoteness have led us to either forget she has an inner life — or to imagine her as an elegant prisoner.

While Suzanne Collins leaves readers uncertain of the answer to the question she poses in The Hunger Games — how much of character is innate, how much formed — it becomes painfully obvious here.

In Curtis Sittenfeld's new novel, Hillary Rodham dumps Bill Clinton and goes on to forge a life of her own, in law and then politics. It's an uncomfortable, moving, technically brilliant book.

At her best, Olivia Laing turns criticism into an elevated form of hospitality: Like a good party host, she introduces you to someone, tells you what she likes about them, then leaves you to it.