Editors Reads

All Books

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

Go Set a Watchman book cover

Go Set a Watchman

by Harper Lee

4.0

Scout Finch, now Jean Louise and twenty-six, returns to Maycomb from New York to visit her father — and discovers that Atticus Finch holds views on race and segregation she cannot reconcile with the man she idolized.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Going Infinite book cover

Going Infinite

by Michael Lewis

4.0

Lewis spent a year embedded with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX before the cryptocurrency exchange's catastrophic collapse. The result is a portrait of the man at the centre of one of the largest financial frauds in history — a portrait that refuses easy categorisation of SBF as either visionary or villain.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Grunt book cover

Grunt

by Mary Roach

4.0

Mary Roach investigates the science behind military research — the labs, researchers, and experimental programs working on problems of survival in combat. Chapters cover uniforms that resist bacteria, the acoustics of IED blasts, the psychology of diarrhea in the field, and the science of keeping soldiers alive in increasingly hostile conditions.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Hannibal book cover

Hannibal

by Thomas Harris

4.0

Seven years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is living freely in Florence under an assumed identity, pursued simultaneously by a vengeful Mason Verger — the only surviving victim — and by Clarice Starling, now an embattled FBI agent.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Harlem Shuffle book cover

Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

4.0

Harlem, 1960s: Ray Carney sells furniture by day and fences stolen goods on the side, telling himself he's only "slightly bent." Whitehead's crime novel is a departure from his recent literary fiction — a Harlem panorama that celebrates a world and an era while examining the costs of respectability.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Henderson the Rain King book cover
4.0

Eugene Henderson — a huge, rich, impossible Connecticut pig farmer with a voice in his head that insists 'I want, I want' — abandons everything and travels to Africa, where he becomes entangled with two tribes and discovers something about what he wants.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
I Married a Communist book cover

I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

4.0

Nathan Zuckerman hears the story of Ira Ringold — a Newark ironworker turned radio actor who became a Communist in the 1940s and was destroyed by McCarthyism, betrayed by his wife, the actress Eve Frame, who wrote a memoir exposing him. The second novel of Roth's American Trilogy.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Invisible book cover

Invisible

by Paul Auster

4.0

Adam Walker, a Columbia student in 1967, meets the charismatic Rudolf Born at a party — and a single violent act, witnessed and then reported with growing unreliability across four different narrative perspectives, shapes the rest of his life.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
It Can't Happen Here book cover

It Can't Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

4.0

In 1936, charismatic demagogue Buzz Windrip wins the US presidency on a platform of patriotism, nostalgia, and contempt for elites, then rapidly dismantles American democracy to establish a fascist state. Seen through the eyes of Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, Sinclair Lewis's 1935 satire is a manual for recognising authoritarianism written before the word was widely used.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Ivanhoe book cover

Ivanhoe

by Sir Walter Scott

4.0

Set in twelfth-century England during the aftermath of the Crusades, Ivanhoe follows the disinherited Saxon knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe as he jousts for honor, navigates treacherous Norman politics, and fights alongside a mysterious Black Knight revealed to be King Richard I.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Juneteenth book cover

Juneteenth

by Ralph Ellison

4.0

A white senator who was raised as a Black child by a Black preacher in the American South is shot on the floor of the Senate and, as he lies dying, remembers his childhood with Reverend Hickman. Ellison's posthumously published second novel — assembled from forty years of manuscript — is flawed and incomplete but contains passages equal to anything in Invisible Man, and the central figure of the Black minister who raised a white child is among the most complex moral situations in American fiction.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Knots and Crosses book cover

Knots and Crosses

by Ian Rankin

4.0

Edinburgh detective John Rebus investigates a series of murders of young girls while receiving taunting messages from a person who seems to know his past. The first Inspector Rebus novel — shorter and darker than the later series, more psychological thriller than police procedural.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Last Night in Montreal book cover

Last Night in Montreal

by Emily St. John Mandel

4.0

Lilia Albert has been disappearing her whole life — taken by her father as a child, re-disappearing every few years, leaving behind whoever has come to love her. Her most recent boyfriend follows her across the country trying to understand why. Mandel's debut shows the same intelligence as her later work applied to the same questions: identity, memory, the people who vanish.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Life, the Universe and Everything book cover
4.0

Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect discover that the people of Krikkit — a planet that had never known there were other stars — have declared war on the entire universe, and it falls to an extremely unlikely group of heroes to stop them.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Little Men book cover

Little Men

by Louisa May Alcott

4.0

Jo March, now married to Professor Bhaer, runs Plumfield School for boys, where she and her husband put their progressive educational ideals into practice with a diverse cast of boys each needing something different from school.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Longbourn book cover

Longbourn

by Jo Baker

4.0

Jo Baker retells Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennet household's servants — particularly the housemaid Sarah — revealing the physical labor, social vulnerability, and hidden lives that sustained the genteel world Austen depicted.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Many Waters book cover

Many Waters

by Madeleine L'Engle

4.0

Sandy and Dennys Murry — the 'normal' twins — accidentally travel back to biblical times, to the era just before Noah's flood, where they encounter nephilim, seraphim, and Noah's family in a story about choice, mortality, and the nature of good and evil.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Maps of Meaning book cover

Maps of Meaning

by Jordan B. Peterson

4.0

Peterson's foundational academic work, exploring how myths, religious narratives, and ideological systems function as maps of meaning that orient human beings toward action in a world of complexity and danger.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
MASH book cover

MASH

by Richard Hooker

4.0

In a mobile army surgical hospital near the front lines of the Korean War, a team of brilliant surgeons maintain their sanity through elaborate pranks, outrageous insubordination, and black humor in the face of relentless carnage.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Mona Lisa Overdrive book cover

Mona Lisa Overdrive

by William Gibson

4.0

The concluding volume of the Sprawl trilogy follows four separate storylines — including a young girl called Mona, a simstim star's bodyguard, and Kumiko, the daughter of a Japanese crime lord — as they converge on the mystery of what Angie Mitchell's direct neural interface connects her to.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Mr Mac and Me book cover

Mr Mac and Me

by Esther Freud

4.0

In 1914, a Suffolk fishing village. Thomas Maggs, thirteen, befriends an artist named Mr Mac — the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who spent his final years painting in the Suffolk village of Walberswick.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
Mr. Vertigo book cover

Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

4.0

Walt, a nine-year-old orphan on the streets of St. Louis in 1927, is taken in by the mysterious Master Yehudi who spends two years teaching him to levitate — and the novel follows Walt's career as a performer across the turbulent American decades from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
On Beauty book cover

On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

4.0

Two rival academic families — one liberal white, one conservative Black — collide at a New England university in a novel loosely inspired by E.M. Forster's Howards End.

Check Price on Amazon (paid link)

Disclosure: Editors Reads is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. When you click an Amazon link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. This helps fund our independent editorial team.

Skip to main content