Editors Reads

All Books

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

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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Utopia book cover

Utopia

by Thomas More

3.9

A dialogue in which the traveller Raphael Hythloday describes the island of Utopia — a society with communal property, religious tolerance, and rational social organisation. Written in Latin by Thomas More in 1516, the book gave the word 'utopia' (no-place) to all subsequent thinking about ideal societies.

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Vulture Peak book cover

Vulture Peak

by John Burdett

3.9

Sonchai is sent to Dubai and beyond to investigate a human organ-trafficking operation — the harvesting and sale of kidneys, corneas, and hearts from the living poor to the wealthy dying. The fifth Sonchai novel takes the series global, from Bangkok to Shanghai to Dubai, asking what Buddhist teachings have to say about the commodification of the human body.

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Weather book cover

Weather

by Jenny Offill

3.9

Lizzie Benson is a librarian, a mother, a sister to a difficult brother in recovery. Her former mentor, a climate scientist, asks her to answer listener mail for her podcast on environmental collapse. The novel moves between Lizzie's domestic life and the approaching catastrophe — climate anxiety as the ambient condition of contemporary American life.

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Wind/Pinball book cover

Wind/Pinball

by Haruki Murakami

3.9

The two novellas that launched Murakami's career — 'Hear the Wind Sing' (1979) and 'Pinball, 1973' (1980) — published together for the first time in English. The unnamed narrator and his friend 'the Rat' move through a coastal Japanese town, listening to music, drinking beer, and circling the losses of youth. Quieter and more elliptical than Murakami's later work, these novellas show the essential qualities of his sensibility in concentrated form.

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Without Merit book cover

Without Merit

by Colleen Hoover

3.9

A young woman living in a converted church with her deeply dysfunctional family falls for a boy hiding his own secrets while navigating depression and family dysfunction.

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Young Jane Young book cover

Young Jane Young

by Gabrielle Zevin

3.9

Aviva Grossman has an affair with the congressman she interns for — the internet destroys her life, but not her. A multi-perspective novel about women, politics, and the asymmetry of public scandal.

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Zone One book cover

Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

3.9

Mark Spitz is a sweeper — part of a civilian unit tasked with clearing zombies from lower Manhattan after a plague. The novel covers three days of his work, interspersed with flashbacks to the collapse and his survival of it. A literary zombie novel about grief, memory, and the texture of the American city in ruins.

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A Slow Fire Burning book cover

A Slow Fire Burning

by Paula Hawkins

3.8

A young man is found dead on a houseboat in London. Three women — each damaged, each with a connection to the dead man — become suspects in an investigation that reaches back through years of loss and resentment.

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A Week in December book cover

A Week in December

by Sebastian Faulks

3.8

Seven interconnected characters in contemporary London — a hedge fund manager shorting bank stocks before the 2008 financial crisis, a footballer's wife, a Muslim radicalisation plot, a reality TV contestant, a tube driver, a book reviewer. A state-of-England novel of pre-crash London.

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Acceptance book cover

Acceptance

by Jeff VanderMeer

3.8

The Southern Reach trilogy concludes with three parallel timelines: Control and Ghost Bird inside Area X, the former Director on the last expedition she ever launched, and the original lighthouse keeper in the years before Area X appeared.

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After Dark book cover

After Dark

by Haruki Murakami

3.8

One night in Tokyo, told in real time and in the second person plural — 'we' observe, as if a camera, the city between midnight and dawn. Mari, a student, sits in a Denny's with a book; her sister Eri sleeps in their apartment, apparently unable to wake. The night connects them to musicians, a Chinese woman beaten in a love hotel, and the city's insomniac underside. Murakami's shortest and most experimental novel.

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Amnesty book cover

Amnesty

by Aravind Adiga

3.8

Danny, an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant cleaning houses in Sydney, recognises that a client of one of his regular houses may know something about a murder — and spends a single day deciding whether to go to the police, knowing that doing so will mean deportation.

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An Acceptable Time book cover

An Acceptable Time

by Madeleine L'Engle

3.8

Polly O'Keefe — daughter of Meg Murry — discovers a time gate near her grandparents' New England farm that opens into the world of three thousand years ago, where she becomes entangled in a conflict between two ancient peoples and a druid named Karralys.

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Artemis book cover

Artemis

by Andy Weir

3.8

Jazz Bashara is a porter and small-time smuggler in Artemis — humanity's first and only city on the Moon. When she's offered an opportunity to pull off a corporate heist that could solve her financial problems permanently, she discovers the job connects to a conspiracy that threatens the entire lunar colony.

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At Fault book cover

At Fault

by Kate Chopin

3.8

Chopin's first novel follows Thérèse Lafirme, a Louisiana plantation widow whose moral convictions force a divorced man to remarry his alcoholic ex-wife, with tragic consequences that challenge her certainties.

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Beautiful World, Where Are You book cover
3.8

Alice, a novelist recovering from a breakdown, and Eileen, a literary editor in Dublin, exchange long emails about love, politics, art, and how to live ethically in the present. Meanwhile, their respective relationships — Alice with Felix, Eileen with Simon — test what they believe against what they actually do.

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Birnam Wood book cover

Birnam Wood

by Eleanor Catton

3.8

A New Zealand guerrilla gardening collective called Birnam Wood begins farming unused land without permission; when their activities bring them into contact with a reclusive American tech billionaire with interests in the land, the collision between their idealism and his power becomes increasingly dangerous.

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Brida book cover

Brida

by Paulo Coelho

3.8

Brida O'Fern is a young Irish woman driven by a hunger for spiritual knowledge. She seeks out two teachers — a wise man in the forest and a witch who teaches through the Wiccan Tradition of the Sun — in search of magic, purpose, and her soulmate.

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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage book cover
3.8

At twenty, Tsukuru Tazaki was suddenly cut off by his four closest friends without explanation. Sixteen years later, at his girlfriend's urging, he sets out to find out why. A quieter and more realist Murakami — a novel about the wounds that friendship inflicts and the years of recovery they require, structured around a pilgrimage to three countries.

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Dear Thief book cover

Dear Thief

by Samantha Harvey

3.8

A woman writes a series of unsent letters to a childhood friend who vanished thirty years ago — examining what was taken when she left, what remained, and what a friendship between women actually contains.

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Eldest book cover

Eldest

by Christopher Paolini

3.8

Eragon travels to the elvish homeland to train with the Dragon Riders while Roran leads the villagers of Carvahall in a desperate flight from the Empire. The second Inheritance Cycle novel deepens its world's mythology and pushes Eragon's powers and understanding to new levels.

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