Paperback Picks
Spring is coming! Buy a new paperback! Here are 10 freshly published ones that should wile away a March afternoon nicely.
"The Candy House"
by Jennifer Egan (Scribner, $17.99, available March 7)
A follow-up to Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Visit From the Goon Squad" with a tech innovator at its center, this novel is "less a sequel to Goon Squad than a fraternal twin," writes a reviewer in The Guardian. "Minor characters are thrust into the thick of things; formerly major characters make Hitchcockian cameos. As befits its title, 'The Candy House' is a novel of Easter eggs — of hidden in-joke treats. It begs to be read alongside its more extroverted sibling, and to consider, in the space between them, the deflations — incremental and otherwise — of the last decade."
"What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year"
by Charles Finch (Vintage, $17)
Finch, the author of the bestselling Charles Lenox mystery series set in Victorian England, was commissioned in March 2020 by the Los Angeles Times to write a diary of his impressions during lockdown. "Even at its darkest," wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, "this serves as a moving testament to the resilience of humanity."
"Booth"
by Karen Joy Fowler (G.P. Putnam's Sons, $18)
Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Fowler's novel explores the family of John Wilkes Booth, who in real life left his acting career behind to become one of American history's most famous assassins. "We know even before we turn the first page where the intertwined timelines of the Booths and American history will lead," wrote a Washington Post reviewer, "but Fowler's deftly imagined family portrait keeps us riveted. Her exploration of the pathways by which a seemingly private family melodrama can bleed into public savagery illuminates not just a single household's, but an entire country's toxic dysfunction."
"Like a Sister"
by Kellye Garrett (Mulholland Books, $17.99)
An Edgar Award nominee for best crime novel of 2022, Garrett's third novel involves dead reality TV star Desiree, and her surviving half-sister Lena, who doesn't believe the official explanation of an overdose. Reading it with pleasure last year, "I wrote, It's a smart whodunit — for the record, the final reveal wasn't who I thought it was — and Lena's voice won me over instantly. Who couldn't love a narrator who notes, of someone's crocodile tears, 'Her eyes were as dry as my sex life'"?
"Olga Dies Dreaming"
by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron Books, $18.99)
Soon to be a Hulu TV series starring Aubrey Plaza, Gonzalez's debut novel centers on a wedding planner who's disappointed in love. "Aside from a collection of winning characters and an ingenious plot," wrote Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, "what's most impressive about 'Olga Dies Dreaming' is the way Gonzalez stretches the seams of the rom-com genre to accommodate her complex analysis of racial politics."
"Secret Identity"
by Alex Segura (Flatiron Books, $18.99)
Carmen Valdez, an assistant at a comic book publisher in the 1970s dreams of creating her own superhero book — but gets pulled into a mystery when a colleague unexpectedly turns up dead. An NPR reviewer described "Secret Identity" as "a well-crafted and layered mystery-thriller that excels in multiple dimensions" and called it "satisfying choice for lovers of comics, twentieth century historical fiction and mysteries that make you think."
"French Braid"
by Anne Tyler (Vintage, $17)
Tyler's novels, set in Baltimore and featuring a bustling tangle of family, are always a comfort. Her latest has a wider lens than usual, spanning 60 years in the loving but taciturn Garrett family. "Five decades into her career, one gets the sense that Tyler is no longer quite so interested in the details," wrote a New York Times reviewer. "Instead, 'French Braid' offers something subtler and finer, the long view on family: what remains years later, when the particulars have been sanded away by time."
"Joan Is Okay"
by Weike Wang (Random House Trade Paperbacks, $17)
The author of the award-winning "Chemistry" returns with a novel about a Manhattan ICU doctor who has a complicated relationship with her family. In Wang's hands, wrote a New York Times reviewer, "Joan's dry wit is downright hilarious, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes as a coping mechanism ... Throughout the novel, Joan's wry humor is sometimes punctuated by moments of unexpected tenderness."
"Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents"
by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House Trade Paperbacks, $20)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" here examines how America, past and present, has been shaped by a hidden caste system. New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner described it as "an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away."
"City on Fire"
by Don Winslow (William Morrow Paperbacks, $18.99, available March 13)
Winslow, author of multiple bestselling crime novels (several of which have been adapted for the screen), kicks off a new franchise here with a tale of two New England crime empires — one Irish, one Italian. "Don Winslow's terrific new novel, 'City on Fire,' does for Rhode Island what David Chase's 'The Sopranos' did for New Jersey," wrote a Washington Post reviewer.
