The Stacks

All book reviews

239 honest reviews across fiction, non-fiction, mystery, sci-fi, romance, and more.

Showing 97-120 of 239

The Only Good Indians

by Stephen Graham Jones

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones 2020 review. Four Blackfeet men who committed a hunting transgression are tracked across the present-day American West by something that wants the moral debt paid. Bram Stoker Award 2020.

Empire of Pain

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe 2021 review. The Sackler family and the operational mechanics of Purdue Pharma's OxyContin marketing strategy across three generations. The canonical contemporary investigative non-fiction book on the opioid crisis.

A Court of Mist and Fury

by Sarah J. Maas

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas 2016 review. The second ACOTAR book and the volume that broke the romantasy genre open. Feyre's recovery from Under the Mountain and the Night Court arc.

Lincoln in the Bardo

by George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 2017 review. Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie dies and Lincoln returns to the Georgetown cemetery. The Bardo is populated by the cemetery's reluctant dead. Man Booker Prize 2017.

The Sympathizer

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen 2015 review. A communist double agent flees with the South Vietnamese government to Los Angeles in April 1975. Pulitzer Prize 2016 and the canonical contemporary Vietnamese-American novel.

The Covenant of Water

by Abraham Verghese

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese 2023 review. Three generations of a Christian family on the Malabar Coast of Kerala, connected by a generational drowning condition. Verghese's second major novel.

The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray 2023 review. A four-POV Irish family novel about the slow collapse of one car-dealer family in the post-2008 recession. Booker Prize shortlist 2023.

Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch 2023 review. A Dublin mother of four watches Ireland slide into an emergency-power dictatorship. Booker Prize 2023 and one of the canonical contemporary dystopian literary novels.

The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett 2020 review. Identical twin sisters from a small light-skinned Black Louisiana town diverge in the 1960s: one returns with her daughter, the other passes for white in California. Bennett's second novel and one of the canonical 2020s American literary novels.

All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 2014 review. A blind French girl and a German orphan radio specialist meet briefly in occupied Saint-Malo at the end of World War II. Pulitzer Prize 2015 and the canonical contemporary World War II novel.

An Immense World

by Ed Yong

An Immense World by Ed Yong 2022 review. How animals sense the world: bat echolocation, electric eels, the magnetic compass of birds, the chemical world of moths. The most-cited contemporary popular science book on animal perception.

The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 2016 review. Cora, an enslaved woman, escapes a Georgia plantation by riding an actual subterranean rail network. Pulitzer Prize 2017 and the National Book Award winner.

Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner 2021 review. Michelle Zauner's memoir about her Korean mother's death from pancreatic cancer and the Korean food that connected them. The breakout literary commercial memoir of 2021.

Solito

by Javier Zamora

Solito by Javier Zamora 2022 review. The 1999 migration of a nine-year-old Salvadoran boy on foot and by sea across two months. The canonical contemporary memoir of unaccompanied minor migration to the United States.

North Woods

by Daniel Mason

North Woods by Daniel Mason 2023 review. Three centuries of one house in the western Massachusetts forest, told through a chain of inhabitants whose lives connect across time. National Book Award finalist.

Trust

by Hernan Diaz

Trust by Hernan Diaz 2022 review. Four narratives about a Gilded Age financier, his wife, the ghostwriter of his memoir, and the woman who finally tells the true story. Pulitzer Prize 2023 and the canonical contemporary literary novel about American capitalism.

Tom Lake

by Ann Patchett

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett 2023 review. A mother tells her three adult daughters about her brief romance with a future movie star while picking cherries during the COVID lockdown. Patchett's late-career literary commercial novel and the most-discussed Meryl Streep audiobook narration of 2023.

Beartown

by Fredrik Backman

Beartown by Fredrik Backman 2017 review. A small Swedish forest town stakes its identity on its junior hockey team. An assault by the star player splits the town. Backman's most ambitious novel and the first of the Beartown trilogy.

Babel

by R. F. Kuang

Babel by R. F. Kuang 2022 review. An alternate 1830s Oxford where the British Empire is powered by silver bars enchanted with the lost meaning between translated words. Nebula and Locus Award winner.

Yellowface

by R. F. Kuang

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang 2023 review. A struggling white novelist witnesses the accidental death of her successful Asian-American novelist friend and steals her unfinished manuscript. Kuang's contemporary satirical novel about race and publishing.

Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 2022 review. A Dickensian retelling of David Copperfield in the opioid-crisis Appalachia of the 1990s and 2000s. Pulitzer Prize and Women's Prize 2023 and Kingsolver's defining late-career novel.

The Wager

by David Grann

The Wager by David Grann 2023 review. The 1741 shipwreck of HMS Wager off Patagonia and the two contradictory mutiny narratives that returned to England. Grann's third major narrative non-fiction book and the canonical contemporary maritime-disaster story.

Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell 2020 review. The death of William Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son and the four years before Hamlet is written. The Women's Prize winning novel about marriage, grief, and the play that came out of it.

Project Hail Mary

by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir 2021 review. A junior-high science teacher wakes alone on a deep-space craft with no memory. Andy Weir's third novel and the canonical contemporary hard science fiction novel about a single problem solved correctly.