Readers' Picks for New Books for This Week

Do you still need a reason to start a new book this week? Based on preliminary information from other readers, we've got things covered with this week's most anticipated releases.

1. The General and Julia by Jon Clinch

This epic and intimate novel from the author of the "masterly" novel Marley follows Ulysses S. Grant as he writes his memoirs and wrestles with his complex legacy as a spouse, father, commander, and president. If historical fiction about the American Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant, deathbed confessions, memory flashbacks, complex legacies, Gilded Age New York City, or Finn appeals to you, do read this book.

2. Good Girls Don't Die by Christina Henry

From the author of Alice and Near the Bone comes a taut and incredibly complex thriller about three women who become imprisoned in stories they know aren't their own. Three females. Three narratives. Merely a single exit. Until the very end, readers will be left guessing by this gripping book. If you enjoy mysteries, horror, thrillers, various points of view, intricately woven tales, outrageously imaginative concepts, and Alice, Lost Boy, you should read this book.

3. Before We Say Goodbye by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Geoffrey Trousselot (Translator)

The fourth book in the best-selling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, set in a mystical time-traveling Tokyo café, follows a new set of patrons. Geoffrey Trousselot's translation of Kawaguchi's Last Chance to Say Goodbye, which has her trademark endearing characters and melancholy writing, asks the reader once more, "What would you do if you could travel back in time?" If you enjoy magical realism, time travel narratives, peculiar Tokyo cafés, best-selling Japanese books translated into English, and the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, you should read this book.

4. Day by Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, offers a poignant and masterfully written meditation on love, loss, the challenges and constraints of family life, and how to live together and apart. Day follows a family as they grow older, fall in and out of love, lose the things that are most precious to them, and learn to move on. If you enjoy literary fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, stories of pandemic lockdowns, secluded cabins in Iceland, family conflict, love, sorrow, and life, then you should read this.

5. The Professor by Lauren Nossett

The Professor explores the murkiest reaches of intellectual ambition, deception, and obsession for lovers of Tana French. With the backdrop of a historic campus and an organization that occasionally fails its most vulnerable members, Marlitt will be compelled to confront the power structures embedded in the classroom in her unwavering quest to solve the mystery surrounding Ethan's murder. If you enjoy character studies, Tana French, mysteries, thrillers, strange murders, dubious teachers, and the peculiarities of the American college campus in the twenty-first century, you should read this book.

6. The New Naturals by Gabriel Bump

Readers of Paul Beatty's The Sellout and Jennifer Egan's The Candy House will find The New Naturals, one of the most intriguing new literary voices out today, to be both original and incredibly acute, encapsulating the absurdity of existence in the twenty-first century. Bump tells us that eventually, our love and connection to each other will be what saves us in this amazing act of creativity. If you enjoy literary fiction, highly buzzed-about books, hidden utopian societies, many points of view, hope triumphing over despair, love triumphing over fear, The Candy House, and Everywhere You Don't Belong, then you should read this book.