37 books we’ve loved
so far in 2016

Part travelogue, part intellectual history, part geopolitical tract and part thriller, Hammer tells the remarkable story of the librarian who oversaw a plot to smuggle ancient manuscripts out of Timbuktu, Mali, in an effort to save them from war.

Simon & Schuster

Review: Meet ‘The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu’

By drilling deep into the forests that enabled this country to conquer the world, Proulx has laid out the whole history of American capitalism and its rapacious destruction of the land.

Scribner

Review: Annie Proulx’s long-awaited, spectacular new novel ‘Barkskins’

A miraculous story about a pair of jazz musicians who travel from Harlem to Paris just before the Nazi occupation.

Akashic

Review: Bernice L. McFadden’s ‘The Book of Harlan’ is simply miraculous

Set in 1970s New York amid one of baseball’s most famous pennant races, the “X-Files” star’s second novel traces a rite of passage: a son coming to grips with a distant father who has only a few months to live.

Farrar Straus Giroux

Review: David Duchovny’s hilarious new novel hits a home run

How does one comic-book character remain so consistently intriguing to so many people over eight decades? A look at the history of Batman.

Simon & Schuster

Review: Holy longevity, Batman! This crusader has staying power.

The finale to the trilogy that began with “Mr. Mercedes,” this grimly entertaining tale follows the diabolical machinations of a villain thought to be in a vegetative state but who is in fact masterminding a fiendish plan to fool people into killing themselves. Can he be stopped?

Scribner

Review: Stephen King’s ‘End of Watch’: This summer’s undeniable page-turner

When courts fail to protect our rights, citizen advocacy groups step in, as this book shows, and produce sometimes stunning constitutional changes.

Basic

Review: Who leads constitutional change: Community advocates or the Supreme Court?

This big-hearted, often hilarious sequel to “Nobody’s Fool” finds police chief Douglas Raymer trying to track down his late wife’s lover.

Knopf

Review: ‘Everybody’s Fool’ by Richard Russo: A wry, bittersweet sequel to ‘Nobody’s Fool’

An extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography, Desmond has made it impossible to again consider poverty in America without tackling the central role of housing — and the demise of opportunity and of hope that occurs when people are forced to leave their homes.

Crown

Review: If you lose your home, you lose everything else, too

What causes a liberal to swing to the right? Here are the stories of six 20th-century intellectuals, politicians and journalists who underwent jarring transformations.

Simon & Schuster

Review: Could you trade in your political beliefs for their exact opposite? These six people did.

A fascinating portrait of the unusual friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and a young black activist named Pauli Murray, who went on to become an influential lawyer, Episcopal minister, writer and co-founder of the National Organization for Women.

Knopf

Review: The little-known black activist who captured a first lady’s attention

Thomas, a former partner at Lehman Brothers, spins an audacious financial thriller based on real-life events — the 2008 financial crisis — that features cameos by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The novel juxtaposes the ideals of loyalty, service, patriotism and noblesse oblige against the venality of contemporary Wall Street.

Melville

Review: ‘Fixers’: A financial thriller with cameos by Hillary Clinton and Obama

A thorough and thought-provoking biography of the gene: its science, the scientists who study it and the controversies that have spun from our understanding of it.

Simon & Schuster

Review: When we unlock the secrets of our genes, what do we do with that knowledge?

A woman looks back on her involvement with a Charles Manson-like cult.

Random House

Review: ‘The Girls,’ by Emma Cline: Charles Manson, reimagined

A fascinating exploration of the major businesses and families that have manufactured firearms — and manufactured the seductiveness of firearms — in this country over the past 150 years.

Basic

Review: Guns in America were no big deal, until big business made us love them

A Pennsylvania town is torn apart by the dirty business of fracking.

Ecco

Review: ‘Heat & Light’ is the best fracking novel ever

In his 14th novel, Furst captures the dangers and intrigue of the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris. Showcasing Furst’s perfect pacing, eloquent prose style and meticulous research, the book is a masterly tale of espionage and historical fiction.

Random House

Review: Review: Alan Furst's 'A Hero of France' lacks intensity

Before Hillary, there were Victoria, Margaret and Shirley. The presidential campaigns of Victoria Woodhull, Margaret Chase Smith and Shirley Chisholm hail from another era — but has much really changed?

Harvard

Review: Clinton is following the frustrated efforts of earlier female candidates

Parkes, who fled a job in high tech and launched an online magazine, Knitter’s Review, here she shares her travels through the world of knitting, from Iceland to Paris and Portland.

Stewart, Tabori and Chang

Review: ‘Knitlandia: A Knitter Sees the World’ review

The story of a girl who becomes a scientist, the book is also the story of a career and the endless struggles over funding, recognition and politics that get in the way. It is also really the story of two lab partners and their uncommon bond.

Knopf

Review: A scientist’s uncommon bond with her odd lab-partner-for-life

When a man accidentally kills his neighbor’s 5-year-old son, he tries to make amends by turning over his own boy to the grieving parents.

Harper

Review: Louise Erdrich’s ‘LaRose’: A gun accident sets off a masterly tale of grief and love

Like her 2014 novel “The Vacationers,” Straub’s witty book has a warm-weather vibe, even if it is set in the less idyllic, if beautifully gentrified, Brooklyn. Here a group of friends from college, now nearing 50, are forced to take a hard look at their relationships.

Riverhead

Review: Review: Emma Straub’s delightful new novel, ‘Modern Lovers’

Seventeen years after Columbine shooting, the mother of Dylan Klebold tells her story.

Crown

Review: Columbine killer’s mother: ‘The greatest mercy I could pray for was . . . for his death’

Lucy Barton wakes in the hospital to find her estranged mother at the foot of her bed. For the next five nights, she sits in a chair and tells Lucy stories about her past.

Random House

Review: Elizabeth Strout’s ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ review

Just before the Plumb siblings are about to cash in the trust fund that will solve all their problems, they discover it’s been almost completely depleted. A comic novel about familiar greed and affection.

Ecco

Review: ‘The Nest’ review: What happens when that nest egg cracks?

A riveting account of a medical team’s frantic search for the genetic error threatening a little boy’s life. What they found proved that it was possible to use a person’s genes to diagnose and treat a previously unknown disease and helped usher in the use of genome sequencing for people with unusual disorders.

Simon & Schuster

Review: A boy’s mysterious illness, a bold gamble and a breakthrough in genetic medicine

The merging of public relations and politics gave us presidential spin and, ever since, the electorate’s head has been spinning — trying to sort fact from hype.

Norton

Review: How presidents manipulate the media and the public

Drawing on a wide array of Russian sources, Sebag Montefiore paints an unforgettable portrait of characters fascinating and charismatic, odd and odious.

Knopf

Review: The Romanovs: fascinating, odd and odious

Part memoir, part manifesto and social critique, West has memorably taken on fat-shaming, rape jokes and men who harass women under the guise of Internet free speech.

Hachette

Review: Lindy West’s ‘Shrill’ is an eloquent chronicle of the costs of activism

In this engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America, Kendi hunts for racist ideas, stretching back to the 15th century, sometimes finding them in unexpected places.

Nation Books

Review: The racism of good intentions

Anglophiles mourning the end of “Downton Abbey” will find solace in this novel that begins in pre-World War I England and deftly observes the effect of war on the staid Edwardian sensibilities of the coastal village of Rye.

Random House

Review: A novel to cure your ‘Downton Abbey’ withdrawal: ‘The Summer Before the War’

Rich Cohen approaches the Stones from two perspectives — as the kid discovering the group from glorious sounds emerging from his older brother’s room and a young magazine writer, backstage as he works his way into the good graces of the aging rockers.

Spiegel & Grau

Review: Grappling with the Rolling Stones, the greatest band that ever sold out

Robison, who has Asperger’s syndrome, chronicles his rich emotional life following a scientific experiment on his brain. Exhilarated but chastened, Robison delivers an account that is both poignant and scientifically important.

Spiegel & Grau

Review: What it’s like for someone with Asperger’s suddenly to connect with the world

A series of loosely connected, magically tinged tales about personal and social justice. Built around the idea of keys, locks and magic doors, the stories cover a wide territory — from mythology and fairy tales to smartphones and YouTube stars.

Riverhead

Review: Best science fiction and fantasy this month

Written by a young neurosurgeon as he faced a terminal cancer diagnosis, this memoir is inherently sad. Still, this moving and thoughtful tale of family, medicine and literature is well worth the emotional investment.

Random House

Review: ‘When Breath Becomes Air’: Young doctor’s last words of wisdom, hope

A new case dredges up painful memories for Luisa (Lu) Brant, the new state’s attorney of Howard County, Maryland. In what feels like Lippman’s most personal novel, the book is as much a legal drama as it is tale of childhood and family life.

Morrow

Review: ‘Wilde Lake,’ one of Laura Lippman’s finest novels, feels personal

“The Year of the Runaways” is essentially “The Grapes of Wrath” for the 21st century. By following a handful of young Indian men in England, Sahota has captured the plight of millions of desperate people struggling to find work, to eke out some semblance of a decent life in a world increasingly closed-fisted and mean.

Knopf

Review: ‘The Year of the Runaways’ review: ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ for the 21st century