Editors Reads

All Books

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

The Plumed Serpent book cover

The Plumed Serpent

by D.H. Lawrence

4.0

An Irish woman in Mexico encounters a political and religious movement attempting to revive the ancient Aztec religion and displace Christianity — Lawrence's most politically troubling and visually extraordinary novel.

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The Refugees book cover

The Refugees

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

4.0

Eight stories exploring the lives of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants caught between cultures — the ghost-haunted, the displaced, the American-born, and those who never made it out — drawn from two decades of Nguyen's work.

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The Return book cover

The Return

by Victoria Hislop

4.0

Sonia, a British woman, travels to Granada to learn flamenco after her relationship ends. Staying with family friends, she discovers letters and photographs that reveal the story of the Ramirez family during the Spanish Civil War — a story of love, betrayal, and the violence that divided Spain. Alternating between the present day and the 1930s, The Return is Hislop's portrait of Granada and the civil war's lasting trauma.

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The Rosie Project book cover

The Rosie Project

by Graeme Simsion

4.0

Don Tillman, a brilliant but socially rigid genetics professor, designs the Wife Project — a rigorous questionnaire to identify the perfect partner — only to find himself derailed by Rosie, who fails every criterion.

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The Silent and the Damned book cover
4.0

Falcón is called to investigate a domestic murder-suicide in a Seville suburb — a prominent businessman apparently shot his wife and then himself. The investigation reveals the case is far more complex, pulling Falcón into the world of Seville's wealthy elite and the corruption that underlies the city's surface prosperity. The third Falcón novel deepens the detective's psychological portrait while delivering Wilson's most tightly plotted thriller.

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The Sorrows of Young Werther book cover

The Sorrows of Young Werther

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

4.0

Werther, a young man of sensitivity and artistic feeling, falls in love with Charlotte, who is engaged and then married to another. His inability to either act on his love or let it go leads to his suicide. Written in epistolary form by the twenty-four-year-old Goethe, the novel triggered a wave of imitative suicides across Europe.

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The Spider's House book cover

The Spider's House

by Paul Bowles

4.0

In Fez during the last days of French Morocco in 1954, an American writer and a Moroccan boy encounter each other against the backdrop of the independence movement. Bowles's most politically engaged novel.

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The Sunrise book cover

The Sunrise

by Victoria Hislop

4.0

Famagusta, Cyprus, 1972. The Sunrise hotel is the most glamorous in the eastern Mediterranean, and the Georgious and Özkan families are its heart — one Greek Cypriot, one Turkish Cypriot, bound by friendship across the island's division. Then 1974 arrives: the Turkish invasion, the occupation of northern Cyprus, and the abandonment of Famagusta — a ghost city still frozen in that summer. Hislop's most politically charged novel.

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The Temple of My Familiar book cover
4.0

A loose sequel to The Color Purple following several characters — including an aged spirit named Miss Lissie who remembers multiple past lives — through a meditation on African and African American history, gender, and spiritual continuity. Walker's most ambitious and most polarizing novel.

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The Time Keeper book cover

The Time Keeper

by Mitch Albom

4.0

Father Time is the man who first counted the hours — and was punished for it by being forced to hear all of humanity's pleas for more time, or for time to stop. Albom's modern fable weaves three stories across millennia to examine humanity's complicated relationship with time.

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The Tremor of Forgery book cover

The Tremor of Forgery

by Patricia Highsmith

4.0

Howard Ingham, an American writer, has come to Tunisia to work on a screenplay. His fiancée doesn't arrive. A colleague dies ambiguously. One night Ingham may have killed an intruder with a typewriter. He isn't certain. Set almost entirely in Hammamet, Tunisia, this is Highsmith's most existential novel — the question of whether Ingham committed a crime becomes less important than the question of whether it matters to him that he might have.

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The Two Faces of January book cover

The Two Faces of January

by Patricia Highsmith

4.0

Athens, 1960s. Rydal Keener, a young American drifting through Greece on his father's money, encounters Chester MacFarland — a small-time con man on the run with his wife Colette. When Chester accidentally kills a man and Rydal witnesses it, the two become fatally linked. A thriller set across Greek landscapes — Athens, Crete, Istanbul — exploring the father-son dynamic between two men who are drawn to each other and threatening to each other.

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The Utopia Avenue book cover

The Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

4.0

A fictional British rock band in 1967 London — Utopia Avenue — rises from Soho to the Royal Albert Hall and across America, with chapter-length songs as the structural unit and the actual music scene of 1967 as the setting.

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The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts book cover
4.0

The first novel in Louis de Bernières's South American trilogy — a magical realist tale of a Colombian village caught between a corrupt landowner, the army, and guerrillas, as a British woman tries to divert the river to water her garden.

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The Waves book cover

The Waves

by Virginia Woolf

4.0

Six friends speak their inner lives across childhood, youth, and middle age — not in dialogue but in pure soliloquy, interspersed with wave descriptions. Woolf's most radical novel dissolves the boundaries between prose and poetry, self and world.

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The Witch Elm book cover

The Witch Elm

by Tana French

4.0

Toby, charming and fortunate, wakes up in his cousin's home after a violent attack that has left him changed. When a skull is found in the wych elm in the garden, Toby becomes entangled in a decades-old death — and begins to question everything he believed about himself and his family.

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This Side of Paradise book cover

This Side of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

4.0

Amory Blaine moves through Princeton and the First World War and a series of love affairs toward a nebulous self-awareness. Fitzgerald's debut novel made him famous at twenty-three and introduced the Jazz Age to American literature.

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This Sweet Sickness book cover

This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

4.0

David Kelsey maintains a double life: during the week he lives in a boarding house and works as a chemist; on weekends he retreats to a house he has secretly bought and furnished for a woman named Annabelle — who doesn't love him and has married someone else. A study in erotic obsession so complete that the obsessive has replaced reality with a private fiction. One of Highsmith's most psychologically acute portraits of a particular masculine pathology.

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Through the Looking-Glass book cover
4.0

Alice steps through a mirror into a reversed world organized as a chess game. Carroll's sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland introduces Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty, and the White Queen — and refines his philosophical games with language, identity, and time.

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Timbuktu book cover

Timbuktu

by Paul Auster

4.0

Narrated by Mr. Bones, a dog, as he accompanies his dying owner Willy G. Christmas — a homeless poet of genuine but unrecognised talent — to Baltimore to find Willy's former teacher, and then navigates the world alone after Willy's death.

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Time Out of Joint book cover

Time Out of Joint

by Philip K. Dick

4.0

Ragle Gumm wins a newspaper contest called Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? every single day. He lives in a pleasant 1950s suburb. He begins to notice that things in his world are slightly wrong — objects dissolve, structures fail to match their descriptions, reality seems to have seams. His comfortable suburban life may be an elaborate construction.

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To Paradise book cover

To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

4.0

Three novellas set in the same New York apartment in 1893, 1993, and 2093, connected by recurring names and the theme of freedom — what it means, what it costs, and whether it is ever truly available.

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Troy book cover

Troy

by Stephen Fry

4.0

Stephen Fry retells the complete story of the Trojan War, from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and the Judgment of Paris through the fall of Troy and the fates of its heroes, with characteristic wit and erudition.

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Twice-Told Tales book cover

Twice-Told Tales

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

4.0

Hawthorne's first major collection includes 'The Minister's Black Veil,' 'Dr. Heidegger's Experiment,' 'The Gray Champion,' and 'Wakefield' — stories of Puritan guilt, scientific hubris, moral allegory, and the stranger who removes himself from human society.

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