The Book Review

This sweeping novel about the life, loves, struggles and triumphs of a queer English Burmese actor is the topic of our January book club discussion.

In Alafair Burke’s new thriller, “The Note,” three friends are vacationing together in the Hamptons when they have an unpleasant run-in with a couple of strangers and decide to exact drunken, petty revenge. But the prank they pull — a note reading “He’s cheating on you” — snowballs, eventually embroiling them in a missing-persons investigation and forcing each woman to wonder what dark secrets her friends are hiding. Burke joins host Gilbert Cruz and talks about how she came up with the idea for “The Note,” and how she goes about writing her books in general.

Decades ago, after he lost in home in a California wildfire, the travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer started to go to a small monastery in Big Sur in search of solitude. On this week's episode, he discusses those retreats, which he writes about in his new book "Aflame: Learning from Silence."

And we're back! Happy new year, readers. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib talk about some of the upcoming books they’re most anticipating over the next several months.

The Book Review podcast is off for the holidays, but please enjoy this episode of the The New York Times's Culture Desk show from earlier this fall in which reporter Alexandra Alter talks to author Susanna Clarke upon the 20th anniversary of her masterful fantasy novel “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.”

Clare Keegan's slim 2021 novella about one Irishman's crisis of conscience during the Christmas season, which was one of The New York Times Book Review's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, has also been adapted into a film starring Cillian Murphy. In this week’s episode, MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib, Lauren Christensen, and Elizabeth Egan.

Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs — staff critics for The New York Times Book Review — join host Gilbert Cruz to look back on highlights from their year in books.

Following our Top 10 Books of 2024 episode, we are re-running our book club discussion about one of the novels on our year-end list: Dolly Alderton's "Good Material."

Don't let anyone tell you differently — end-of-year list time is a wonderful time, indeed. And, as we do every December, we are ready to discuss the 10 best books of the year. Host Gilbert Cruz gathers the editors of the New York Times Book Review to discuss the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year.

This Thanksgiving weekend, we are re-running our roundtable conversation about Percival Everett's recent National Book Award winner for fiction.