Top 13+ new paperbacks for your reading list

Thrillers

1. ‘All the Colors of the Dark’ by Chris Whitaker

13 new paperbacks for your reading list

In Whitaker’s best-selling fourth novel, set in Missouri in 1975, a one-eyed boy named Patch saves the daughter of a wealthy family from the grasp of a serial killer. The bleak repercussions of that incident reverberate for decades, threatening to upend the lives of everyone involved.

2. ‘Here One Moment’ by Liane Moriarty

The latest by Moriarty (author of “Big Little Lies,” “Nine Perfect Strangers” and other bestsellers) opens onboard a delayed flight from Tasmania to Sydney. Suddenly, an unremarkable woman stands up and begins methodically telling each passenger and crew member when and how they will die. “In the end, the puzzle — will the predictions come true or won’t they? — becomes less interesting than the myriad ways people react when confronted with their ephemerality,” Stephanie Merry wrote in Book World.

Fiction

3. ‘Colored Television’ by Danzy Senna

Senna’s shrewd comic novel, named one of The Washington Post’s 10 Best Books of 2024, is about a biracial woman named Jane Gibson who is working on a second novel that has grown a bit too epic for its own good. So she swallows her pride and approaches Hollywood, pitching a sitcom about a mixed-race family. “What’s most rewarding” about the novel, Ron Charles wrote in Book World, “is how effortlessly Senna keeps the wings of this plot from getting clotted with bits of didactic wisdom or social reproof. … The way Senna keeps this wry story aloft may be the closest paper can come to levitation.”

4. ‘Creation Lake’ by Rachel Kushner

The latest from one of America’s most intellectually curious novelists was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Sadie, a former U.S. intelligence agent, is now a freelancer in southwest France, where powerful agricultural corporations are buying up land and marring the environment. She’s tasked with infiltrating a group of radical activists suspected of planning an ecoterrorist attack. Ron Charles wrote: “The real covert operative here is Kushner, who’s never felt more cunning.”

5. ‘The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store’ by James McBride

James McBride.

McBride’s novel takes place before and during the Depression, in a ramshackle Pennsylvania neighborhood called Chicken Hill, where Jewish immigrants and African Americans cling to the deferred dream of equality in the United States. Moshe Ludlow, a wannabe impresario from Romania, is married to Chona, a polio survivor with a pronounced limp. Moshe has the radical idea to open his All-American Dance Hall and Theater to Black patrons. At the center of the novel is a sweet 12-year-old orphan nicknamed Dodo. For childless Chona, he is an answer to a prayer. In Book World, Ron Charles wrote: “We all need — we all deserve — this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.”

6. ‘Come and Get It’ by Kiley Reid

Reid follows up her hit debut, “Such a Fun Age” (2019), with this novel set at the University of Arkansas, where a visiting professor named Agatha Paul enlists three female students to answer questions for her new work of cultural criticism about weddings. Some of the talk turns to sex, but the real complications and most intimate details involve money and the way unequal economic positions create clashing sets of values. Reid is a master plotter who has engineered a spectacular intersection of class, racism, academic politics and journalistic ethics.

7. ‘The Horse’ by Willy Vlautin

Vlautin’s novel tells the tale of Al Ward, a grizzled guitarist and recovering alcoholic in his 60s looking back on his life, and of his encounter in the present day with a dying horse on an isolated mining claim in the Nevada desert. In Book World, Hamilton Cain wrote, “‘The Horse’ taps a wealth of influences — Hemingway, Johnny Cash, John Huston’s film ‘The Misfits’ — but Vlautin’s cadences and wit are his alone, sharp and bracing, like shots of whiskey.”

8. ‘The Anthropologists’ by Aysegul Savas

Aysegul Savas

Over the course of Savas’s novel, a married couple attempt to find an apartment in an unidentified foreign city, with the plot structured around their visits to different places that could be home. “The Anthropologists” has received widespread praise since it was published, landing on Barack Obama’s list of his favorite books of 2024 and the National Book Critics Circle’s fiction longlist. Savas also has a new collection of short stories, “Long Distance,” out in hardcover this month.

9. ‘Make Your Way Home’ by Carrie R. Moore

“The summer Momma and I share pregnancies, the cottonmouths come crawling out of the marshes.” This opening sentence from one story captures much that is remarkable about Moore’s book: intense focus on family ties, vivid Southern setting and confident narrative voice. A reviewer in Kirkus wrote, “It’s likely you’d have to go all the way back to ‘Hue and Cry’ by James Alan McPherson (1968) to find a debut collection of short stories by a young Black writer as prodigiously humane and finely wrought as this.”

Fantasy

10. ‘The Bright Sword’ by Lev Grossman

Grossman, best-selling author of the Magicians Trilogy, takes up the Arthurian legend in his marvelous new fantasy. “Grossman affects a breezy 21st-century style that still allows plenty of room for magic,” Elizabeth Hand wrote in Book World. “He excels at colorful characterizations and vibrant action scenes, which are legion.”

Television

11. ‘Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV’ by Emily Nussbaum

In this history of reality television, Nussbaum shines a light on the people who have made some of the most beloved and most controversial shows, from the executives who green-lit (and turned down) “Survivor” to the field producers and editors who questioned and defended the ethics of their jobs. Along the way, Maura Judkis wrote in Book World, the book captures some of the interplay of naiveté and sadism that has long characterized reality programming.

Current affairs

12. ‘The Quiet Damage’ by Jesselyn Cook

In her assiduously researched and impeccably constructed book, Cook grapples with the personal ramifications of the QAnon conspiracy theory for many of its devotees and the people who care about them. “Cook contributes a vital piece to the vexing QAnon puzzle, chronicling the profound effects on those otherwise average people who have fallen into its grasp and the collateral damage done to those around them,” Jonathan Russell Clark wrote in Book World.

True crime

13. ‘Reap the Whirlwind: Violence, Race, Justice, and the Story of Sagon Penn’ by Peter Houlahan

In 1985, two White police officers in San Diego pulled over a pickup truck carrying Black men whom the officers wrongly suspected of gang affiliation. The driver of the truck, Sagon Penn, was an expert martial artist who, after a confrontation that quickly escalated, ended up shooting the officers, killing one of them. The ensuing trial and Penn’s acquittal exposed — and changed — the police department’s relationship with communities of color.