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The Mighty Red. By Louise Erdrich. Oct. 2024. 384p. Harper, $32 (9780063277052). Crystal hauls sugar beets from field to processing plant deep into the night in the Red River Valley [...]

Sports, from hockey and football to golf and gymnastics, have inspired a recent slew of romances and family dramas that capture the glamour, thrills, competition, anguish, and conflicts of the [...]

As trailblazers, the top women athletes spotlighted in these memoirs, biographies, and works of history not only excelled in their chosen sports but also courageously and effectively spoke out for [...]

A legal eagle, a term coined in 1869, refers to a highly skilled and astute lawyer. As we find ourselves in a time of numerous headline court cases, we turn [...]

* The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America. By Sara B. Franklin. June 2024. 320p. Atria, $29.99 (9781982134341); e-book (9781982134389). 070.5. Editors ply their little-understood art [...]

The horrors of slavery and the Civil War tore the U.S. apart in ways that have yet to heal. Each of these deeply imaginative, thought-provoking, and moving novels grapples with [...]

California is the birthplace of hard-boiled detective novels, with James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett seeding the genre. Now, longtime heavy hitters continue to add new titles to [...]

The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent. By Kazuo Ishiguro. May 2024. 120p. illus. Knopf, $22 (9780593802519). 780. The pleasures of this unique album of [...]

Since the dawn of human creativity, people everywhere have expressed awe, fear, wonder, and gratitude in response to the beauty, mystery, and power of nature. In this time of environmental [...]

Peggy. By Rebecca Godfrey and Leslie Jamison. Aug. 2024. 384p. Random, $29 (9780385538282); e-book (9780385538275). Peggy tells her story of the boon and misery of family wealth and the liberation [...]

A Kid from Marlboro Road. By Edward Burns. Sept. 2024. 240p. Seven Stories, $27.95 (9781644214077); e-book (9781644214084). Filmmaker and actor Burns draws on his Irish American family history and boyhood [...]

* Creation Lake. By Rachel Kushner. Sept. 2024. 416p. Scribner, $29.99 (9781982116521). She had planned to earn a PhD in rhetoric at Berkley. Instead, the narrator in Kushner's surprising and [...]

Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History. By Anthony E. Kaye and Gregory P. Downs. Aug. 2024. 352p. Farrar, $30 (9780809024377); e-book (9781429943536). 975.5. Nat Turner, born enslaved in Virginia [...]

* The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. By Wright Thompson. Sept. 2024. 448P. Penguin Press, $35 (9780593299821); e-book (9780593299838). 364.1523. Renowned sportswriter Thompson's Mississippi family farm [...]

* There Are Rivers in the Sky. By Elif Shafak. Aug. 2024. 464p. Knopf, $30 (9780593801710); e-book (9780593801727). A raindrop, part of water's "eternal cycle," connects lives across time and [...]

* The Registry of Forgotten Objects. By Miles Harvey. Aug. 2024. 202p. Ohio State Univ./Mad Creek, paper, $22.95 (9780814259146); e-book (9780814283608). Harvey is prized for his exceptionally vivid narrative nonfiction, [...]

Hum. By Helen Phillips. Aug. 2024. 272p. Marysue Rucci, $27.99 (9781668008836); e-book (9781668008850). May excelled at training AI until she 'rendered herself obsolete.' With two young children and a struggling [...]

* The History of Sound. By Ben Shattuck. July 2024. 320p. Viking, $30 (9780593490389); e-book (9780593490396). A delving sense of place, attunement to hidden connections, and a passion for art [...]

* Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough. By Ian Frazier. Aug. 2024. 576p. Farrar, $35 (9780374280567); e-book (9780374709648). 974.71. Ardent explorer and longtime New Yorker [...]

A Termination. By Honor Moore. Aug. 2024. 112p. Public Space, paper, $20 (9798985976922). 363.46. It was her 'first autonomous decision.' The oldest of nine children in a prominent family in [...]

Villa E. By Jane Alison. Aug. 2024. 160p. Norton/Liveright, $23.99 (9781324095057). This concentrated tale of an epic duel between two temperamentally opposite artists opens with a vision of continents colliding [...]

Concerning the Future of Souls. By Joy Williams. July 2024. 176p. Tin House, $22.95 (9781959030591). Azrael is the angel who transports the soul after death. He has four thousand wings [...]

* Drawn Testimony: My Four Decades as a Courtroom Sketch Artist. By Jane Rosenberg. Aug. 2024. 320p. illus. Hanover Square, $30 (9781335008046); e-book (9780369746610). 741. Courtroom sketches have been all […]

Transformative musicians, key freedom fighters, scientists under siege, women intelligence officers, and an early photographer inspired the most commanding biographies reviewed in Booklist over the past 12 months.--Donna Seaman 3 [...]

* Consent. By Jill Ciment. June 2024. 160p. Pantheon, $27 (9780593701065); e-book (9780593701072). 813. If someone told you that a 16-year-old girl had an affair with a 47-year-old married art [...]

* 1974: A Personal History. By Francine Prose. June 2024. 272p. Harper, $27.99 (9780063314092). 810. Novelist and critic Prose brings all her artistry and astuteness to her first memoir. Prose [...]

* State of Paradise. By Laura van den Berg. July 2024. 224p. Farrar, $27 (9780374612207); e-book (9780374612214). Van den Berg follows her short-story collection, I Hold a Wolf by the [...]

Dave Eggers, dynamic literary force, is also a passionate, innovative, and generous advocate. The cofounder of 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers around the country, he [...]

* No Judgment. By Lauren Oyler. Mar. 2024. 288p. HarperOne, $28.99 (9780063235359); e-book, $14.99 (9780063235380). 814. The title is ironic. 'There is never no judgement, and certainly not in this [...]

Art from The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. This robustly varied list of recommendations for book groups and group conversations draws on Booklist print and audio reviews of [...]

Reading Genesis. By Marilynne Robinson. Mar. 2024. 352p. Farrar, $29 (9780374299408). 222.11. Robinson, of Gilead trilogy renown, offers a literary, scholarly, and personal reading of Genesis. It is also holistic [...]

Fascism, or authoritarianism, is a political system that allows heads of state to wield outsized power by undermining the legislative and judicial branches of government and repressing civil liberties, especially [...]

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. By Leslie Jamison. Feb. 2024. 272p. Little, Brown, $29 (9780316374880). 810. Jamison (Make It Scream, Make It Burn, 2019) is a ravenous observer and [...]

* Followed by the Lark. By Helen Humphreys. Feb. 2024. 240p. Farrar, $27 (9780374611491); e-book (9780374611507). Canadian poet and novelist Humphreys is not the first to write fiction about Henry [...]

* The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence. By David Waldstreicher. Mar. 2023. 496p. illus. Farrar, $30 (9780809098248); e-book (9781429969451). 811. Stolen from her [...]

Fourteen Days. Ed. by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston. Feb. 2024. 384p. Harper, $32 (9780358616382); e-book (9780358699088). The tenants in a dilapidated apartment building on New York's Lower East Side [...]

The finest debut historical novels reviewed in Booklist over the past 12 months reimagine classics from women's perspectives and take fresh approaches to infamous eras of tyranny and courage.--Donna Seaman [...]

Getting to Know Death: A Meditation. By Gail Godwin. June 2024. 192p. Bloomsbury, $26.99 (9781639734443). 810. Godwin's attempt to water a struggling dogwood tree in June 2022 resulted in a […]

Like Mother, Like Daughter. By Kimberly McCreight. July 2024. 320p. Knopf, $28 (9780593536421); e-book (9780593536438). NYU student Cleo is sick of her exacting mother's criticism, especially after their battles over [...]

* The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. By Zoe Schlanger. May 2024. 304p. Harper, $29.99 (9780063073852); e-book (9780063073876). [...]

* The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective. By Steven Johnson. May 2024. 368p. illus. Crown, $32 (9780593443958). 335. Anarchism, bombs, [...]

These mysteries, each a quest for personal and social justice, share key elements with Sara Paretsky's Pay Dirt, from secrets about family landholdings tied to the racist violence of the [...]

When poet and writer Hanif Abdurraqib received a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, the foundation observed that he 'is forging a new form of cultural criticism, one that is informed by lived [...]

The Limits. By Nell Freudenberger. Apr. 2024. 368p. Knopf, $29 (9780593448885); e-book (9780593448892). Freudenberger follows Lost and Wanted (2019) with another intriguing tale of a woman scientist, family, and life's [...]

From covering seahorses to the catastrophic impact of high ways and the work of Black environmentalists, the most outstanding environmental books reviewed in Booklist over the past year offer resounding [...]

H Is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z. By Elizabeth Kolbert. Illus. by Wesley Allsbrook. Mar. 2024. 160p. Ten Speed, $24.99 (9781984863522). 304.2. Kolbert, New Yorker staff writer [...]

* Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves. By J. Drew Lanham. Apr. 2024. 112p. Hub City, $17 (9798885740302); e-book (9798885740340). 811. Poet, wildlife biologist, birder, professor, and MacArthur fellow [...]

The Tree Doctor. By Marie Mutsuki Mockett. Mar. 2024. 256p. Graywolf, paper, $17 (9781644452776). COVID-19 has stranded Mockett's narrator in her childhood home in Northern California, unable to see her [...]

* Beneath the Surface of Things. By Wade Davis. Apr. 2024. 264p. Greystone, $27.95 (9781778400445). 814. Global explorations of anthropological and ethnobotanic intent seeded Davis' many previous books, including Magdalena: [...]