Annalisa Quinn

David Sedaris is great company in this new collected volume of his diaries. He buries emotions deep, but describes the world around him (and his love for IHOP) in chaotic and delightful fashion.

Patricia Lockwood's scabrous memoir of growing up with a married Catholic priest for a father is a little overreliant on quirky family details, but scorching in its approach to the Catholic Church.

Ivanka Trump's new book — named after her brand's marketing campaign — is packed with anodyne advice borrowed from others, and a striking lack of awareness about economic and racial realities.

Deb Olin Unferth's story collection delights in going in unexpected directions, and her sensitively-drawn characters feel the full, real, often contradictory and uneasy layering of human emotion.

Jean Hanff Korelitz's latest is set at a tony New England college rocked by racial unrest. It's a suggestive exploration of tough issues, but lacks the nuance and intellect of the best campus novels.

Elif Batuman has sung the praises of "long novels, pointless novels," and she puts her money where her mouth is with The Idiot, a tale of youthful confusion that can be both boring and beautiful.

Jamie Attenberg's newest novel follows a woman living her life unapologetically, and on her own terms. But that kind of life can is not necessarily a good one.

Katie Kitamura's new novel follows an unnamed narrator who tails her estranged, disappeared husband to Greece — while keeping the ominous surroundings and disquieting emotions at a cool remove.

Reporter Claudia Rowe documents her fascination with serial killer Kendall Francois in The Spider and the Fly — but the book focuses on Rowe's thoughts and needs at the expense of the victims.

In Han Kang's sharp, almost painfully sensitive new novel, set during and after South Korea's 1980 Gwangju student uprising, people spill blood — but they also brave death to donate it.

Aravind Adiga's new novel centers on Manju, a boy from Mumbai, and his tyrannical father, who wants just one thing: To raise the world's best cricketers. But what does Manju want for himself?

Matt Fraction and Christian Ward's splendidly trippy, genderbent retelling of the Odyssey sets the story in space, as warlike Odyssia, "witchjack and wanderer" winds her way home to far Ithicaa.

Marianne Kirby's new novel is set in an America overrun by zombies — and also an America in which no one is judged on their appearance; her protagonist is fat and queer, and never hindered by that.

The narrator of Zadie Smith's new novel is never named — fitting, for a book about the illusions of identity and the ways people try and fail to know and define themselves.

Anne Carson's unconventional collection of 22 chapbooks can be read in any order, and covers everything from Helen of Troy to H.G. Wells — but mostly, it's about women taking back their own stories.

Renowned chef Jeremiah Tower focuses on the consumption rather than the preparation of food in Table Manners. The book leans fussy and prim, turning a blind eye to hosts and hostesses short on cash.

Brit Bennett's new novel focuses on two best friends, both motherless, growing up in a black community in Southern California — and their shifting, lifelong negotiation with the idea of motherhood.

Fran Wilde built a glorious world of living bone towers and wing-gliding people in last year's Updraft. Her new Cloudbound has stunning skyscapes but lacks some of the first book's emotional heft.

Eimear McBride's latest follows a young drama student who goes to London and falls for an older man. Her live, wriggling language makes a beautiful account of the ways the self is built and rebuilt.

Ordinary family life provides all the tension and attraction in Ann Patchett's new book. The story of two families and a fateful party that upends both, it draws on Patchett's own life experiences.