Editors Reads

All Books

2849 expert-reviewed books — rated honestly, recommended confidently.

The Penelopiad book cover

The Penelopiad

by Margaret Atwood

3.9

Penelope narrates the story of her husband Odysseus's twenty-year absence from the afterlife, offering her own corrective to the heroic narrative — including her account of why the twelve maids who served her were hanged at Odysseus's return. Part of the Canongate Myths series.

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The People vs. Alex Cross book cover

The People vs. Alex Cross

by James Patterson

3.9

Alex Cross is in the dock. Charged with murder after a deadly shooting and suspended from duty, he faces a trial that could end his career and send him to prison. But even as he fights for his freedom, he can't ignore a string of disappearances pointing to a predator hiding behind a screen.

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The Piano Teacher book cover

The Piano Teacher

by Elfriede Jelinek

3.9

Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, living under the total control of her possessive mother. Her masochistic relationship with a younger student exposes the violence embedded in Austrian bourgeois culture and its insistence on female repression.

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The Pilgrimage book cover

The Pilgrimage

by Paulo Coelho

3.9

Before The Alchemist, there was the pilgrimage. Paulo Coelho's account of walking the Road to Santiago de Compostela — the ancient Spanish pilgrimage route — and the spiritual lessons his guide Petrus taught him along the way. Part memoir, part spiritual manual, part adventure, this is the book that made Coelho a writer.

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The Psychology of Time Travel book cover
3.9

Kate Mascarenhas's inventive debut. In 1967, four women invent time travel; decades later, one of them is found dead, and a locked-room murder unfolds across time. A genre-blending novel exploring how time travel would reshape the human mind, relationships, and a female-led institution.

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The Racketeer book cover

The Racketeer

by John Grisham

3.9

A disbarred lawyer serving time in federal prison claims to know who murdered a federal judge. In exchange for his freedom, he offers the FBI the killer's name. But Malcolm Bannister has a far more intricate game in play, and almost nothing is what it seems.

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The Reckoning book cover

The Reckoning

by John Grisham

3.9

In 1946 Mississippi, a decorated war hero walks into church and shoots his town's beloved Methodist minister dead, then refuses to say why. As his family fights to save the farm and his lawyer fights to save his life, the reason behind the killing reaches back to a hellish wartime ordeal.

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The Scarecrow book cover

The Scarecrow

by Michael Connelly

3.9

Laid off from the Los Angeles Times, crime reporter Jack McEvoy has two weeks left and one last story to chase. What looks like a routine murder becomes the trail of a serial killer who hides in the digital world — a data-center engineer who stalks his victims through the information they never knew they'd left behind.

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The Sea House book cover

The Sea House

by Esther Freud

3.9

Two stories separated by fifty years interweave in a Suffolk village: a contemporary woman researching an architect's life, and the architect's story itself — a portrait of a German-Jewish émigré and the house he built on the English coast.

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The Sentinel book cover

The Sentinel

by Lee Child

3.9

In a small Tennessee town, Jack Reacher saves a hapless IT manager from a kidnapping and uncovers a ransomware plot with national-security stakes. The Sentinel marks the first Reacher novel co-written by Lee Child and his brother Andrew, beginning the series handover.

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The Street Lawyer book cover

The Street Lawyer

by John Grisham

3.9

A hostage crisis at a powerful Washington law firm shatters a young attorney's gilded life. After a homeless man takes him captive at gunpoint, Michael Brock abandons his six-figure track to fight for the city's dispossessed, uncovering a wrongful eviction his own firm helped engineer.

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The Swiss Family Robinson book cover

The Swiss Family Robinson

by Johann David Wyss

3.9

Johann David Wyss's classic tale of survival and ingenuity. Shipwrecked on a tropical island, a resourceful Swiss family builds a new life from the wilderness, taming the land and its creatures in an episodic adventure that has delighted young readers for two centuries.

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The Testament book cover

The Testament

by John Grisham

3.9

An eccentric billionaire leaves his eleven-billion-dollar fortune to an illegitimate daughter no one knew existed, a missionary deep in the Brazilian wilderness. A burned-out, alcoholic lawyer is sent to find her, and the search becomes a journey toward redemption far from any courtroom.

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The Upside of Irrationality book cover
3.9

Ariely's follow-up to Predictably Irrational examines how our systematic cognitive quirks can work in our favour — in relationships, at work, and in how we adapt to adversity. The irrational behaviours that hurt us in markets can help us in life.

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The Waiting book cover

The Waiting

by Michael Connelly

3.9

When Renée Ballard's badge, gun, and ID are stolen, the theft becomes a personal crisis on top of her cold-case work — including a decades-old serial-killer case she's chasing through genetic genealogy. Help arrives from an unexpected volunteer: Maddie Bosch, Harry's daughter, now a patrol officer ready to take up the family calling.

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The Witches of Eastwick book cover
3.9

Three divorced women in a small Rhode Island town have acquired magical powers. When the mysterious Darryl Van Horne arrives, he disrupts their coven. A satirical novel about female power, desire, and the anxieties of the 1960s sexual revolution, told with Updike's characteristic density of observation.

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Theophilus North book cover

Theophilus North

by Thornton Wilder

3.9

In 1920s Newport, Rhode Island, a young man named Theophilus North arrives to teach tennis and finds himself drawn into the lives of the town's wealthy families — solving problems, righting wrongs, and falling in love.

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Thinner book cover

Thinner

by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

3.9

A morbidly obese lawyer accidentally kills an old Romani woman with his car and receives a single word from her ancient father — 'thinner' — triggering an unstoppable supernatural curse that begins to consume him.

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Those Who Walk Away book cover

Those Who Walk Away

by Patricia Highsmith

3.9

Ray Garrett's wife has died — a probable suicide — and her father, Ed Coleman, blames Ray and has tried to shoot him in Rome. The novel follows the two men as they circle each other through Venice and its islands — Coleman hunting Ray, Ray unable to leave, drawn back to a man who wants to kill him in a city that seems to conspire with grief.

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Timeline book cover

Timeline

by Michael Crichton

3.9

A group of history students and their professor are sent back to fourteenth-century France using quantum technology — arriving in the middle of the Hundred Years' War. They have six hours to find their missing colleague and return to the present. Crichton applies his techno-thriller formula to medieval history.

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To Have and Have Not book cover

To Have and Have Not

by Ernest Hemingway

3.9

Harry Morgan, a boat captain in Depression-era Key West, is forced into smuggling and running rum to survive. The novel Hemingway considered his worst tracks Morgan's degradation against the backdrop of wealthy vacationers whose money insulates them from consequence.

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U Is for Undertow book cover

U Is for Undertow

by Sue Grafton

3.9

A young man comes to Kinsey Millhone with a fragment of buried memory: as a six-year-old, he believes he saw two men digging a hole in the woods — perhaps burying a child kidnapped twenty-one years ago. The recollection is unreliable, the witness is suspect, but Kinsey can't let it go, and the past begins to surface.

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Unsheltered book cover

Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

3.9

Barbara Kingsolver's dual-timeline novel set at the same New Jersey corner. A present-day family struggles with economic precarity and a crumbling house, while in the 1870s a science teacher defends Darwin against a hostile town — a meditation on upheaval, certainty, and what it means when our shelters fail.

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