The Stacks
239 honest reviews across fiction, non-fiction, mystery, sci-fi, romance, and more.
Showing 73-96 of 239
by Kristin Hannah
The Women by Kristin Hannah 2024 review. A California debutante follows her brother to Vietnam as an Army nurse in 1967. Kristin Hannah's structural masterwork and the best-selling adult novel of 2024.
by Trevor Noah
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah 2016 review. Trevor Noah's memoir of growing up mixed-race in late-apartheid and early-post-apartheid South Africa. The canonical contemporary South African memoir.
by Ariel Lawhon
The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon 2023 review. Maine midwife Martha Ballard examines a frozen-river body in November 1789. Lawhon reconstructs the four-month murder investigation from Ballard's actual surviving diary.
by Emily St. John Mandel
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel 2022 review. Four characters across four centuries are connected by the same anomalous moment. Mandel's third in the post-Station-Eleven sequence and the most structurally ambitious of the three.
by John Boyne
The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne 2017 review. Cyril Avery's life across seven decades - adopted out of 1945 Catholic Cork, navigating the closeted gay Ireland of the 1960s through the 2010s. Boyne's literary commercial masterwork.
by Abraham Verghese
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese 2009 review. Twin brothers are born in 1954 Addis Ababa to a secret affair between a nun and a surgeon. Verghese's first major novel and one of the canonical contemporary American literary novels of medicine.
by Amor Towles
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 2016 review. Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced in 1922 to lifelong house arrest at the Hotel Metropol. Towles's second novel and one of the most consistently recommended contemporary American literary commercial titles of the past decade.
by Rebecca Makkai
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai 2018 review. Two parallel narratives - Yale in the 1980s AIDS crisis in Chicago and Fiona in 2015 Paris. National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist 2019.
by Charles Frazier
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier 1997 review. A wounded Confederate deserter walks across the Civil-War-era Carolinas to return home. National Book Award 1997 and the basis for the 2003 Minghella film.
by John Carreyrou
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou 2018 review. The Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes blood-testing fraud. Carreyrou's investigative account built from his Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporting.
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe 2018 review. The 1972 disappearance of Belfast mother Jean McConville and the broader IRA history of the Troubles. Keefe's first major book and the basis for the 2024 FX Hulu limited series.
by David Grann
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann 2017 review. The 1920s murders of dozens of Osage people in Oklahoma after the discovery of oil. The Apple TV / Scorsese film source and Grann's narrative non-fiction breakthrough.
by Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante 2012 review. Two girls grow up in a poor neighborhood of 1950s Naples. The first Neapolitan Novel and one of the canonical contemporary European literary novels.
by Isabel Wilkerson
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson 2020 review. A comparative history of American racial hierarchy, the Indian caste system, and Nazi Germany's racial laws. Wilkerson's second book after The Warmth of Other Suns.
by Bessel van der Kolk
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk 2014 review. A trauma psychiatrist's three-decade synthesis of how chronic psychological trauma is stored in the body. The canonical contemporary popular-medicine book on trauma.
by Yaa Gyasi
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi 2020 review. A Stanford neuroscience graduate student runs reward-circuit experiments on mice while her Ghanaian-born mother lives in her apartment. Gyasi's second novel after Homegoing.
by James McBride
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride 2013 review. A twelve-year-old enslaved boy falls in with John Brown in 1856 Kansas and is dressed as a girl named Onion through Harpers Ferry. National Book Award 2013.
Deacon King Kong by James McBride 2020 review. An elderly deacon at a Brooklyn housing project shoots a local drug dealer in the face in September 1969. Oprah Book Club 2020 and the canonical contemporary American comic-literary novel.
by David Sedaris
Calypso by David Sedaris 2018 review. Twenty-one essays organized around Sedaris's Emerald Isle beach house and the death of one sister. Sedaris's most ambitious essay collection and the late-career return to form.
by Tommy Orange
There There by Tommy Orange 2018 review. Twelve Native American characters converge on the Big Oakland Powwow. PEN/Hemingway Award 2019 and the canonical contemporary urban Indigenous American literary novel.
by Ocean Vuong
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong 2019 review. A young Vietnamese-American man writes a letter to his illiterate mother about his Hartford childhood and the OxyContin crisis that takes his first love. Vuong's debut novel.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 2014 review. A roving theatre troupe performs Shakespeare in the Great Lakes twenty years after a pandemic. National Book Award finalist 2014 and the canonical contemporary post-apocalyptic literary novel.
by Min Jin Lee
Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee 2007 review. A Princeton graduate and Korean-American daughter of Queens immigrants in the early-2000s New York finance world. Min Jin Lee's debut and the Pachinko predecessor.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi 2016 review. Seven generations of two half-sister bloodlines, one in Ghana and one in America, from eighteenth-century Fanteland to present-day Stanford. Gyasi's debut and one of the canonical contemporary American diaspora novels.
