15 Great New Books to Read Over the Weekend

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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 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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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.