Editors Reads

All Books

2305 expert-reviewed books — rated honestly, recommended confidently.

The Reappearance of Rachel Price book cover
4.1

Eighteen years ago, Bel Price's mother vanished without a trace. Now a true crime documentary crew arrives to revisit the cold case — and Rachel Price suddenly reappears, alive, turning everything Bel thought she knew about her family upside down.

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The Republic of Thieves book cover
4.1

Locke and Jean are coerced by the Bondsmagi into rigging an election in Karthain — and Locke discovers his opponent is Sabetha, the one woman he has always loved and never quite managed to win.

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The Return of the Native book cover
4.1

On Egdon Heath, Clym Yeobright returns from Paris to improve the lives of the local people through education. His plans collide with the ambitions of Eustacia Vye, who yearns to escape the heath, and with the web of desire and disappointment that connects them both to others.

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The Road Back book cover

The Road Back

by Erich Maria Remarque

4.1

The direct sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front follows the surviving soldiers as they return to a Germany that has changed beyond recognition — where their sacrifice is simultaneously celebrated and disregarded, and where the civilian world has no framework for what they have seen. Remarque's second novel asks what happens after the war ends: harder to read and less celebrated than its predecessor, but in some ways more honest.

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The Running Man book cover

The Running Man

by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

4.1

In a brutal near-future America, desperate man Ben Richards enters a televised game show where contestants are hunted across the country and killed for entertainment — and prize money his family cannot survive without.

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The Scarlet Pimpernel book cover

The Scarlet Pimpernel

by Baroness Orczy

4.1

During the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, a mysterious English nobleman known only as the Scarlet Pimpernel leads a daring league to rescue condemned French aristocrats from the guillotine, while his wife Marguerite desperately tries to uncover his true identity.

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The Searcher book cover

The Searcher

by Tana French

4.1

Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective, buys a fixer-upper in rural Ireland seeking quiet and distance from his old life. A boy named Trey asks him to find his missing brother — and what Cal uncovers pulls him into a community with deep roots and older loyalties than he understands.

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The Sentence book cover

The Sentence

by Louise Erdrich

4.1

Tookie, a Native American woman who works at a Minneapolis independent bookshop (based on Erdrich's own Birchbark Books), is haunted by the ghost of the most annoying customer who ever died. Set during 2020 — the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the uprising that followed in the city where Erdrich lives.

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The Singer's Gun book cover

The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

4.1

Anton Waker, who has spent years laundering documents and facilitating his family's criminal enterprises, tries to go straight by taking an office job — only to find that the past is not easily outrun. Mandel's second novel is more overtly thriller-shaped than her debut, with multiple timelines and unreliable perspectives dissolving into a portrait of complicity.

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The Social Contract book cover

The Social Contract

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

4.1

Rousseau asks how humans can be both free and subject to law. His answer — the social contract, by which individuals submit to the general will — became the theoretical foundation of modern democracy, influenced the French Revolution, and is still the starting point for thinking about legitimate political authority.

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The Starless Sea book cover

The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

4.1

A graduate student discovers a mysterious book in his university library that contains a story about his own childhood — and is drawn through it into an underground world of stories, doors, and a sea that smells of honey and blood.

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The Subterraneans book cover

The Subterraneans

by Jack Kerouac

4.1

A three-week love affair between Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox, a young Black woman, in San Francisco's North Beach — narrated in the long, breath-driven sentences Kerouac developed from jazz improvisation. Written in three nights, his most formally concentrated novel.

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet book cover
4.1

Dejima, 1799: the Dutch trading post is the only window between Japan and the Western world. Clerk Jacob de Zoet arrives hoping to restore his family's fortune and falls in love with a Japanese midwife student. Mitchell's most disciplined novel is a masterwork of historical fiction.

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The Thread book cover

The Thread

by Victoria Hislop

4.1

Thessaloniki (Salonika) in the early twentieth century: a city of Greeks, Jews, Turks, and refugees, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Mediterranean. The Thread follows two families — one Greek Orthodox, one from the city's ancient Jewish community — across eight decades of fire, war, occupation, and transformation, as the city loses its plurality and becomes something more singular. Hislop's most historically ambitious novel.

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The Time of the Hero book cover

The Time of the Hero

by Mario Vargas Llosa

4.1

Lima's Leoncio Prado Military Academy: the cadets live under brutal hierarchy, organize theft rings, and maintain codes of silence. When a cadet is killed, someone informs. The search for the informer consumes the novel. Vargas Llosa's debut—written at twenty-six—was burned publicly in Peru and made him internationally famous.

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The Turn of the Screw book cover

The Turn of the Screw

by Henry James

4.1

A young governess at a remote English estate becomes convinced that the children in her charge are in contact with the malevolent spirits of two dead servants.

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The Veil and the Male Elite book cover

The Veil and the Male Elite

by Fatema Mernissi

4.1

Mernissi's most scholarly work — a feminist reading of Islamic sacred texts arguing that the veil and the seclusion of women were political decisions made by the male elite in the early Islamic period, not divine commandments.

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The Wealth of Nations book cover
4.1

Smith's investigation into the causes of national prosperity — the division of labour, free markets, the price system, and the folly of mercantilism. Published in 1776, it became the foundational text of modern economics and the primary intellectual source for arguments in favour of market capitalism.

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The White Book book cover

The White Book

by Han Kang

4.1

A meditation on whiteness, grief, and a sister who died hours after birth — Han Kang's most lyrical and formally experimental work.

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The Women of Troy book cover

The Women of Troy

by Pat Barker

4.1

A sequel to The Silence of the Girls, following Briseis and the Trojan women through the aftermath of the war's end as the Greeks are stranded on the beach, unable to sail home, and old wounds refuse to heal.

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Those Who Are Loved book cover

Those Who Are Loved

by Victoria Hislop

4.1

Athens, 1941. The German occupation begins, and with it the great famine in which hundreds of thousands of Greeks die. Themis, a young woman from a divided Athens family — some Communist, some right-wing, all suffering — lives through the occupation, the resistance, the civil war that follows, and the decades of political fracture that define 20th-century Greek history. Hislop's most politically complex novel, spanning sixty years of Greek history.

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Tithe book cover

Tithe

by Holly Black

4.1

Sixteen-year-old Kaye has spent her childhood moving between cities while her mother plays small venues. Returning to New Jersey, she discovers the faerie world she glimpsed as a child is real — and she is more entangled in its politics than she ever knew. Dark, seductive, and morally complicated, Tithe established the template for Holly Black's faerie fiction.

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Tom Jones book cover

Tom Jones

by Henry Fielding

4.1

Tom Jones, a foundling of unknown parentage raised by the good-natured Squire Allworthy, is in love with the beautiful Sophia Western. Expelled from the estate, he travels toward London through a comic series of adventures, misidentifications, and encounters with English society at every level. Fielding's masterpiece and the most important comic novel in English before Dickens.

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