The Book Show

Few contemporary writers have examined the inner life with the intensity and candor of Karl Ove Knausgaard. His latest is “The School of Night.” In it, he interrogates memory, identity, art, and the meaning we try to impose on our lives.

George Saunders is one of the most original voices in American fiction. His new novel, “Vigil,” follows Jill “Doll” Blaine, an afterlife usher summoned to guide an unrepentant oil tycoon toward death. Over one wild night, Saunders confronts power, greed, climate reckoning, and mercy itself.

Karen Russell's latest, “The Antidote,” is a dust bowl novel and a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting that enacts the settler amnesia and omissions passed down from generation to generation.

In his latest biography, “Mark Twain,” Ron Chernow brings to life the man known as the father of American literature, Mark Twain. Chernow peels back the layers of this complex figure, showing us the man behind classics like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Innocents Abroad.”

Ann Packer’s newest novel, “Some Bright Nowhere,” marks a profound return after a decade: it tells the story of Eliot and Claire, married nearly forty years in a quiet Connecticut town, facing the toughest chapter of their lives when Claire’s long-running illness draws toward its end.

In his newest novel, "Buckeye," Patrick Ryan explores the ways families hold together even as the past threatens to pull them apart. Moving between generations, Ryan explores how we inherit not just our parents’ habits and hopes, but their unfinished business.

Michael Connelly has long been a master at mapping the evolving landscape of crime and justice in America, and in his latest, "The Proving Ground," he turns his attention to one of the defining questions of the moment: what happens when artificial intelligence crosses dangerous ethical lines—and real people pay the price?

John Irving has long been one of America’s most distinctive and beloved novelists. With his new novel, “Queen Esther,” Irving once again returns to the questions that have animated his career: What shapes a life? How do we carry the burdens of the past? And how does love anchor us through the most unpredictable turns?

Jeffrey Archer's novels have always balanced suspense with insight into the corridors of power. From “Cain and Abel” to “The Clifton Chronicles,” he investigates ambition, betrayal and redemption on an international scale. His latest, “End Game” is swift and elegant and full of moral complexity.