Editors Reads

All Books

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

Typee book cover

Typee

by Herman Melville

4.0

Melville's first novel, based on his actual time among the Typee people of the Marquesas Islands after jumping ship, is part adventure narrative, part ethnography, and part critique of Western civilization's assumptions about 'savagery.'

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Ulysses book cover

Ulysses

by James Joyce

4.0

Set over a single day in Dublin on June 16, 1904, James Joyce's Ulysses follows advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and the young writer Stephen Dedalus through the city in a revolutionary act of literary modernism modeled on Homer's Odyssey.

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Under the Dome book cover

Under the Dome

by Stephen King

4.0

An invisible, impenetrable dome descends without warning on the small town of Chester's Mill, Maine, sealing it off from the outside world. As resources dwindle and communication with the exterior becomes impossible, the town's worst political instincts emerge with terrifying speed.

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Unravel Me book cover

Unravel Me

by Tahereh Mafi

4.0

Juliette has escaped the Reestablishment and found safety at Omega Point, a refuge for those with supernatural abilities. But safety has its own demands, and when Warner — the Reestablishment commander she fled — reveals unexpected depths, Juliette's certainties begin to unravel.

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Watt book cover

Watt

by Samuel Beckett

4.0

Watt arrives at the house of Mr. Knott to serve as his domestic. He observes everything with extreme precision and cannot understand any of it. When his service ends, he moves to an asylum and dictates the story to a man named Sam. Beckett's most comic novel—and the one in which he worked out the machinery he would use for the rest of his career.

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Wonder Boys book cover

Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

4.0

Grady Tripp, a creative writing professor at a Pittsburgh university, has been working on his second novel for seven years. It is 2,600 pages and shows no signs of ending. Over one chaotic weekend — during a literary festival — everything in his life comes apart at once: his wife leaves, his editor arrives, his student steals a jacket from the chancellor's house.

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A Darkening Stain book cover

A Darkening Stain

by Robert Wilson

3.9

The fourth and final Bruce Medway novel, returning to Benin — where the series began — as Medway investigates a brutal murder connected to the region's vodoun culture and its underworld of ritual and violence. A fitting close to the West African series, darker and more interior than the earlier books.

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A Partisan's Daughter book cover

A Partisan's Daughter

by Louis de Bernières

3.9

In 1970s London, a middle-aged travelling salesman is captivated by a young Yugoslav woman named Roza, who claims to be a prostitute and tells him stories about her father — a partisan in Tito's Yugoslavia — that may or may not be true.

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After the Quake book cover

After the Quake

by Haruki Murakami

3.9

Six stories set in the weeks following the 1995 Kobe earthquake, all featuring characters who are not in Kobe but are affected by the disaster at a psychological distance. The earthquake becomes a figure for the ruptures in ordinary life that expose what is missing underneath. Murakami's most politically engaged fiction — a meditation on collective trauma and individual isolation in Japan in the 1990s.

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An Abundance of Katherines book cover
3.9

Colin Singleton has dated nineteen girls named Katherine and been dumped by all nineteen. A child prodigy now between his last Katherine and his uncertain future, Colin and his best friend Hassan embark on a post-graduation road trip to Gutshot, Tennessee, where Colin tries to derive a mathematical theorem to predict the rise and fall of romantic relationships.

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Anil's Ghost book cover

Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

3.9

Sri Lanka in the 1980s civil war: Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist sent by a human rights organization, works with archaeologist Sarath Diyasena to identify the victims of atrocity. Ondaatje's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel explores testimony, identity, and what it means to bear witness.

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Autumn book cover

Autumn

by Ali Smith

3.9

Elisabeth Demand, a young woman, visits Daniel Gluck, her hundred-year-old neighbour, who is dreaming in a care home. The novel moves between their past friendship and the present moment — post-Brexit Britain, 2016, a country divided in ways it cannot articulate. The first of the Seasonal Quartet.

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Big Brother book cover

Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

3.9

Pandora picks up her brother Edison from the airport and barely recognizes him — he has gained nearly two hundred pounds. What follows is her attempt to save him, and the question of how much we owe the people we love when they are destroying themselves.

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Black Leopard, Red Wolf book cover
3.9

Tracker, a hunter with a nose that can follow anyone anywhere, is hired to find a missing boy across a mythological Africa of shapeshifters, witches, and ancient gods. The first volume of the Dark Star Trilogy, told as Tracker's interrogation-room account of what happened and why the boy is now dead.

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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman book cover
3.9

Twenty-four short stories spanning twenty-five years of Murakami's career, many translated into English for the first time in this collection. A frog saves Tokyo, a man's dead wife appears as a crab, a couple separates over a mysterious birthday present. The full range of his imagination in a single volume.

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Briefing for a Descent into Hell book cover
3.9

A middle-aged professor is found wandering and amnesiac. As psychiatrists attempt to restore his 'normal' mind, the reader experiences the world he inhabits—visions of a cosmic mission, a tropical island, the war between light and dark. Lessing's most experimental novel, a challenge to the very concept of normality.

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Camouflage book cover

Camouflage

by Joe Haldeman

3.9

Two shapeshifting alien entities — one benign, one predatory — have lived on Earth for millions of years, each gradually learning to pass as human. A mysterious artifact discovered on the ocean floor draws them both toward the same location.

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Cosmopolis book cover

Cosmopolis

by Don DeLillo

3.9

Eric Packer, a 28-year-old billionaire currency trader, crosses midtown Manhattan in his stretch limousine on a day when his bet against the yen is going catastrophically wrong, the city is gridlocked by a presidential motorcade, and someone — possibly himself — is trying to kill him.

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Crossroads of Twilight book cover

Crossroads of Twilight

by Robert Jordan

3.9

Multiple storylines converge around the aftermath of Rand's cleansing of saidin, each character reacting to a distant magical event they witnessed but did not understand. The series' most divisive entry for its pacing, yet a necessary bridge to the series' final acceleration.

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Dangling Man book cover

Dangling Man

by Saul Bellow

3.9

Chicago, 1942. Joseph, waiting to be drafted, keeps a journal for seven months. He has left his job; he cannot do anything else; he hangs in suspension. Bellow's first novel—written under the influence of Dostoevsky and Kafka—is the purest statement of the anxious intellectual that would define his career.

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Deviant King book cover

Deviant King

by Rina Kent

3.9

Ellie has always avoided the Elites — the four students who run Elites Academy with brutal authority. Now Aiden King, the most dangerous of them, has decided she is his. She has no idea why. She is not sure she wants to find out.

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Eleven Minutes book cover

Eleven Minutes

by Paulo Coelho

3.9

Maria, a young Brazilian woman, travels to Geneva dreaming of fame and fortune. Instead, she becomes a high-end prostitute, all while searching for — and philosophising about — the nature of love, desire, and the sacred in the profane.

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God Emperor of Dune book cover

God Emperor of Dune

by Frank Herbert

3.9

Three thousand five hundred years after the events of Children of Dune, Leto II — now half-human, half-sandworm — rules as God Emperor. He has seen all possible human futures and chosen the only path that ensures humanity's survival: a brutal peace that will ultimately shatter into the Scattering. The most philosophical and challenging book in the Dune series.

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