Books

Here’s your weekend round-up of the most-read stories from Today in Books, with my commentary. Grab your coffee and catch up! The Thriller Writer Outselling James Patterson & John Grisham You’re expecting this to be a story about the latest TikTok romantasy hit, aren’t you? The clock app may be hogging headlines with stories about

🦸 Books Where the Villain is Actually the Hero 🏆 The Most Popular Book Club Books of June, According to Goodreads, ☘️ Historical Fiction Books Set in Ireland The Best of Book Riot Newsletter Sign up to The Best of Book Riot to receive a round-up of the day’s new content. Thank you for signing up!

Kendra Winchester is a Contributing Editor for Book Riot where she writes about audiobooks and disability literature. She is also the Founder of Read Appalachia, which celebrates Appalachian literature and writing. Previously, Kendra co-founded and served as Executive Director for Reading Women, a podcast that gained an international following over its six-season run. In her

Arundati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, which celebrates writers whose work display an “unflinching, unswerving” look at the world. Roy, who was the first Indian writer to win the Booker Prize in 1997, said she was “delighted” to win the award, saying “I wish Harold Pinter were with us today to write

Diane Marie Brown’s Black Candle Women tells the story of three fierce Black women united by the spells and elixirs that have been passed down in their family. Willow, Augusta and Victoria Montrose lead a quiet existence in California until Victoria’s teenage daughter, Nickie, becomes involved with Felix. Unaware of the family curse—that anyone a

🤖 A new startup from the former co-founders of Scribd aims to help publishers license books to AI companies. 💖 In the mood for a summer fling? Check out these excellent deals on romance ebooks. 🎁 12 gifts for you and your book club buddies. The Best of Book Riot Newsletter Sign up to The

When Daniel Lohr’s and Leah Auerbach’s eyes meet as they wait to board the SS Raffaello, their connection is instant and electric. The year is 1939, and they’ve both booked first-class passage on a weekslong journey from Trieste, Italy, to Shanghai. But while the cruise liner is massive in size and gorgeous in design, its

We all love a good hero(ine) story, and today is all about celebrating them! We’re paying homage to the most iconic heroes, looking at the ordinary everyday heroes, celebrating our queeros, and questioning the hero’s journey. Are you feeling valiant? Gallant? Courageous? Grab your sword, summon up that secret dormant magical power you’ve probably got

A woman is standing beside me at the swings. I can see the exact expression on her face; I can hear her voice as she chats with her son. Her name is Tessa, and she isn’t real. Like all readers, I’m familiar with the way reality and fiction can blur together. I remember visiting Edinburgh,

Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over

For so many of us, the refrigerator is an appliance we’ve interacted with daily for as long as we can remember. It’s also one we take for granted, rather than viewing it as emblematic of the world-changing innovation Nicola Twilley explores in Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. As readers will

There’s nothing better than a beautifully written, well-narrated audiobook. Whether I’m trying to learn about a moment in history or simply relax, audiobooks have become one of my go-to methods of reading. And when it comes to Black historical audiobooks, there is a wide and wonderful world to choose from. I’m looking for two things

Last week, Jeff O’Neal rounded up the books being named the best of the year so far by tallying up all the titles on ten of the biggest lists out at the time of writing: The New York Times, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, The BBC, The New Yorker, Vogue, Vulture, Esquire, Goodreads, and Barnes & Noble.

10 Nebula Award Winners You Should Put on Your TBR Early June marks the latest round of Nebula Award winners. I’m writing this post before the awards, so by the time this goes live, the winners will have been announced. Congratulations to them all! As both an admiring reader and aspiring writer in the science

“Rat stories are like ghost stories: everybody has one,” writes British author Joe Shute at the start of Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat. Shute’s own original rat story involves going to an alley to watch a ratcatcher and his trained dogs at work. The rats escaped down a sewer, sparing the author the

Libro.fm, the independently owned audiobook service that lets you choose which indie bookstores receive a portion of your audiobook sales, has released a list of top 10 bestselling audiobooks of all time to commemorate their 10th anniversary. The list is based on sales reported to Libro.fm from over 3,000 indie bookstores and includes thought-provoking nonfiction,

Trains are, for whatever reason, surprisingly common in contemporary genre fiction. Perhaps it is their predictability, with their reliance on firmly laid tracks and regular timetables representing an imposition of order on a chaotic world. But rarely is this made so explicit as in Sarah Brooks’ The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, where a

Has the DEI Backlash Come for Publishing? Dan Sinykin and Richard Jean So have some fascinating data in The Atlantic. In looking at the racial breakdown of more than 1700 novels published by major publishers in the last five years (2019 – 2023), Sinykin and So found that the percentage by nonwhite writers doubled, from

There is an immediate richness to the historical fiction of Tracy Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring, Remarkable Creatures), one that goes beyond carefully researched details and evocative prose, and into deep emotion. In her 12th book, The Glassmaker, Chevalier weaves a tapestry of character and conflict, change and stability, to create a story that

The lead story today turned out to be so interesting that I am making it a one story day. Barnes & Noble Buys Tattered Cover In a surprise (to me at least) move, Barnes & Noble has bought Tattered Cover, a local indie chain of bookstores in the Denver, Colorado area. Tattered Cover had been

When little Afia can’t sleep, her mind as active as a summer night, she and her papa travel in their imaginations to find love. And find it they do—in the sun-warmed sand, on a snowy mountain top, in the ocean’s friendly waves and even in the darkest night sky. Before she finally drifts off to

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She’s the editor/author of (DON’T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen. View

Both Same as It Ever Was and your debut, The Most Fun We Ever Had, are lengthy novels that examine family dynamics over the course of decades. What draws you to this type of story? I’ve always been drawn as a reader to big, meaty novels that stick with a cast of characters over a

Here we go, the most-clicked news stories from this week of Today in Books. And here are a bunch of interesting stories that didn’t make the cut for the full Today in Books analysis but are still worth your time. The comments section is moderated according to our community guidelines. Please check them out so

🙌 The Best New Book Releases of the Week 🏆 The Most Popular Books of the Year So Far, According to Goodreads 🤖 New AI App Turns Famous Authors Into Reading Guides The Best of Book Riot Newsletter Sign up to The Best of Book Riot to receive a round-up of the day’s new content. Thank

The list of Amazon’s best books of the year so far has just been released. The list was compiled by Amazon’s editors, who collectively read thousands of books a year in order to curate best-of and other kinds of lists. This year, they chose 20 books as the best overall books, and provided lists of

This week, a list of the most popular Netflix shows was released. The rankings of each of the English-language shows — which include 335,200,000 hours of views for spot #10, and 1,718,800,000 hours of views for #1 — were determined based on the views each show got within its first 91 days on the streaming

Bestselling author Ellery Lloyd has become deliciously adept at drawing readers into the world of the wealthy: redolent of privilege and glamour, and tainted by darkness and deceit. In their third thriller, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, Lloyd (a pseudonym for married British authors Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos) builds upon the contemporary social