15 Great New Books to Read Over the Weekend

By Caroline Rogers
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Long weekend on the horizon? You’ll need a new book. Whether you want new reading material to keep you company on your travels or to engross you while you stay cozy at home, we’ve compiled a selection of stellar new page-turners. There’s something here for everyone, no matter your reading tastes. Pick up any and all of these great new books for unforgettable stories, captivating characters, and mesmerizing prose. These books are hot off the presses and ready to capture your imagination—and the imaginations of all your friends, because once you turn the last pages, you’ll want to pass them along to everyone you know. There’s a new release from Claire Messud, Robin Sloan’s follow-up to Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and a brand-new novel by Jesmyn Ward that’s already been recognized on the National Book Award shortlist. Worthy additions all. No matter the length of your weekend, there's a recent release to keep you entertained, so start browsing our book recs, and fill out your weekend reading plans now. Once you choose what books to add to your reading list, let us know your favorites!
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The Golden House by Salman Rushdie

amazon.com

Buy it: $28.99, amazon.com

This novel is at turns spellbinding and sophisticated, funny and provocative, playful and vaulting—a masterpiece of modern life told against the setting of contemporary New York. There, a billionaire named Nero Golden moves into an insulated Greenwich Village community with his family and stirs up curiosity among the neighbors. At least, that’s where it begins.

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The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

amazon.com

Buy it: $25.95, amazon.com

Claire Messud’s latest novel examines the relationship between two young girls named Julia and Cassie, who once shared everything, but eventually grow apart. As told by a 17-year-old Julia, the girls’ diverging paths open out into broader questions about youth, loss, power, and the complexities of identity while sensitively excavating the tectonics of girlhood friendship.

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Sourdough by Robin Sloan

amazon.com

Buy it: $26, amazon.com

Lois Clary, a software engineer burdened with a sourdough starter, is at the heart of this smart novel, the latest from Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore scribe Robin Sloan. As Lois keeps the sourdough starter alive, baking, sharing, and mastering the craft, she discovers a mysterious, underground world of food and technology.

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Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss

amazon.com

Buy it: $27.99, amazon.com

A young novelist and a 60-something attorney embark on separate journeys, physical and otherwise, with nebulous goals propelling them into the unknown. They find themselves in an Israeli desert seeking understanding and chasing a mystery that opens itself up to them every step of the way.

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Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

amazon.com

Buy it: $26, amazon.com

Attica Locke’s latest novel transports readers to rural East Texas, where an African-American Texas Ranger must navigate a landscape rife with racial tensions while solving two crimes and bringing justice to a small town called Lark.

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Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

amazon.com

Buy it: $26, amazon.com

In this bold new novel, Kamila Shamsie retells Sophocles’ Antigone, setting it in present-day London, Massachusetts, and the Middle East, and, in the process, illuminating the tale anew while deepening into its questions of family, loyalty, and sacrifice.

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Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo

amazon.com

Buy it: $25.95, amazon.com

In this, her debut novel, Ayobami Adebayo offers a heartbreakingly beautiful story about love, marriage, and expectation that follows a Nigerian couple, Yejide and Akin, as their marriage endures shifts and splinters that neither one of them could have predicted.

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Dinner at the Center of the Earth by Nathan Englander

amazon.com

Buy it: $26.95, amazon.com

From the author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges comes this tense thriller, a tale of politics and ambiguities set amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which characters swirl and collide, giving rise to essential questions of identity and culpability.

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The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott

amazon.com

Buy it: $26, amazon.com

Alice McDermott sets her new novel, an absorbing story told with immense sympathy and through lyrical prose, in early-20th century Brooklyn, where the consequences of a suicide ricochet through the community, haunting and stirring the lives touched by it.

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The Locals by Jonathan Dee

amazon.com

Buy it: $28, amazon.com

Jonathan Dee’s subject in The Locals is a small New England town where economic divides and political maneuvers within the community kindle conflict, rouse divides, and prompt major repercussions in the lives of two men, a contractor and a hedge fund manager.

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Catapult: Stories by Emily Fridlund

amazon.com

Buy it: $16.95, amazon.com

Emily Fridlund lends her singular voice to this collection of short stories, tales filled with sharply drawn characters and page-turning plots glimpsed through a bewitchingly tragicomic lens.

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Five-Carat Soul by James McBride

amazon.com

Buy it: $27, amazon.com

Five-Carat Soul follows James McBride’s National Book Award-winning novel The Good Lord Bird. In this page-turning short story collection, McBride introduces characters—including an antiques dealer, an American president, and the members of the Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band—with his signature wit, unmistakable tone, and immaculately employed eye for detail.

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Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

amazon.com

Buy it: $26, amazon.com

Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel plunges readers once again into the landscape of Mississippi, where mothers, fathers, and sons grapple with grief, yearning, acceptance, and love, all coalescing in a story vitalized by Ward’s signature poetic and moving prose.

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Fresh Complaint: Stories by Jeffrey Eugenides

amazon.com

Buy it: $27, amazon.com

Fresh Complaint is the first collection of short stories by Jeffrey Eugenides, whose past work includes novels The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot. Pick up these stories for accounts of crises big and small, told compellingly through Eugenides’ insightful pen.

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Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

amazon.com

Buy it: $28, amazon.com

Reading Jennifer Egan is always a pleasure, and her latest book will have you reading well into the night, immersed in an era and a story—that of Anna Kerrigan, a diver at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the midst of World War II, whose job it is to repair ships, and whose life changes when clues to a long-ago mystery begin to surface.

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