Maureen Corrigan

What if a child doesn't share a parent's ambition? Kaitlyn Greenidge's novel is inspired by the life of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, the third Black woman to earn a medical degree in the U.S.

A graduate student is teaching four courses while also trying to finish a dissertation. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Christine Smallwood's new novel one of the wittiest she's read in a long time.

Cell phones, social media and smart houses feature prominently in John Lanchester's Reality and Other Stories. A year into the pandemic, the collection speaks eerily to our tech-dependent lives.

Narrated by a robotic "artificial friend," Kazuo Ishiguro's latest novel offers readers a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

Ellen McGarrahan was a young reporter for The Miami Herald, when she witnessed an execution that went horribly wrong. She revisits the case of Jesse Tafero in an intense new true crime book.

Vendela Vida's novel centers on four 13-year-old girls who are perched on the edge of adulthood — and the recognition that some things they do or say now will change who they become as adults.

Chang-rae Lee's new novel follows an aimless college student on his year overseas, taking readers from the New Jersey suburbs into some of the more luxurious reaches of Asian megacities.

When Nadia Owusu was 4 years old, her Armenian American mother disappeared from her life. When she was 13, her Ghanaian father died. Owusu reflects the losses and her biracial identity in her memoir.

Critic Maureen Corrigan has been describing Anna North's new novel to friends as "The Handmaid's Tale meets Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." It's a glib tagline, but not without justification.

Smith's 1948 follow-up to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a forgotten novel that deserves to be exhumed. The things that made it an awkward response to its predecessor make it more intriguing now.

Sealed into our little Zoom boxes, masked when we're in contact with others, it's easy to feel separated from the world during the pandemic. These 10 books can help break through the solitude.

Delphine Minoui's slim new book tells the true story of a group of Syrian resistance fighters who founded a 15,000-volume library in the basement of an abandoned building.

In We Keep the Dead Close, author Becky Cooper revisits the killing of Harvard graduate student Jane Britton. The 440+ page book is overstuffed with suspects, motives, red herrings and interviews.

Jess Walter's sweeping new novel, which traces the adventures of two vagabond brothers, is set against the backdrop of the free speech demonstrations that erupted in Spokane, Wash., in 1909 and 1910.

Tana French's crime novel is a slow burn of a suspense story. It lulls readers into basking in the rough beauty of Western Ireland — before unspooling enough secrets and sins to fill an entire bog.

A family on vacation opens the door of their remote Airbnb rental one night to an older couple who claims to be the home's owners. Rumaan Alam's thrilling novel is about race, class and self-delusion.

As the central character struggles with grief and shock at her late husband's infidelity, author Sue Miller keeps deftly shifting what readers might anticipate to be the ending of this novel.

Southern pastry chef Lisa Donovan chronicles her messy, decades-long process of coming to own her worth in a smart and vulnerable new memoir.

Alice Randall's innovative new novel chronicles the history of Black Detroit beyond Motown, and features a cast of real life artists, doctors, sports figures, activists and movers and shakers.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan remembers the veteran NYC newsman, who died Aug. 5, as "a tenement kid and high school drop out who never lost connection to where he came from."