Heller McAlpin

In this expansive novel, which ranks among McEwan's best work, a man assesses his life's trajectory from childhood to old age, focusing especially on what he considers wrong turns and disappointments.

Barnes' 25th novel is about the power of influence and obsessions, wrong turns, and the difficulty of pinning down another's life, whether someone you knew or someone who predated you by centuries.

Nell Stevens' debut novel is a curious mashup of historical fiction, a ghost story, and a queer love story. It combines elements of her prior books, both memoirs with nods to 19th century literature.

Happy-Go-Lucky is more somber than David Sedaris' usual fare, but there are some fresh, funny bits wedged between the weighty boulders.

Emma Straub's new novel is a charmer that unleashes the magic of time travel to sweeten its exploration of some heavy themes like mortality, the march of time, and how small choices can alter a life.

Novelist Ann Hood, whose Fly Girl paints a picture of her time as a flight attendant, was a beneficiary of the fight by the women profiled in Nell McShane Wulfhart's book to be treated professionally.

By exploring binaries such as imagination versus reality and surface versus depth — with their often blurred boundaries — Ali Smith's latest challenges readers to embrace the indeterminate.

The question overshadowing Amy Bloom's memoir is how far you'd be willing to go for the one you love. Would you agree to help your beloved end his life when he receives a hopeless diagnosis?

Manguso made a name for herself in minutely observed memoirs. Now she uses fiction to write about what it is to feel poor, poorly nurtured, and inadequately loved in a class-conscious town.

Phyllis Fischer, a 40-year-old wife and mother, is drawn into a liberating relationship with a much younger man. She soon realizes that perhaps she wasn't so content as she thought.

Most readers spend a lot of time happily immersed in words. But for a change of pace, these gorgeous art books provide hours of blissful visual diversion.

Lily King's first story collection demonstrates her range, pulling you in and making you wonder where she's going, whether it's a brutal encounter between former roommates or a sudden act of kindness.

The writer and artist Tamara Shopsin takes a fond look at the past in her new novel, set at the famous Manhattan computer repair store Tekserve in the days before Apple and its Genius Bars took over.

Lucy Barton — the redoubtable memoirist we've met in two previous novels — returns in Elizabeth Strout's Oh William!, reconnecting with her estranged first husband after her second husband dies.

Set in the early summer of 1954, The Lincoln Highway follows a crew of kids — some fresh out of reform school — who hit the road in search of a better future, with a few detours along the way.

Powers climbs down from the treetops of The Overstory in his latest novel, to tell the story of a widowed father and his troubled son who head into the wilderness to try to figure out their lives.

Author Hilma Wolitzer, mother of Meg Wolitzer, tackles the ups and downs of a long, not always happy marriage in her excellently named new story collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.

Beautiful World, Where Are You? follows two women, college friends now on the cusp of 30, as they struggle to live and find meaning in a world that's become increasingly unlivable on many levels.

James Rebanks' new book Pastoral Song urgently conveys how the drive for cheap, mass-produced food has impoverished both small farmers and the soil, threatening humanity's future.

Helen Ellis, author of American Housewife and Southern Lady Code, is back with her third book in five years — in which the connection with her longtime, close-knit female friends features prominently.