10 Fantastic Novels Now in Paperback

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz 

A true page-turner by the author of 2014's You Should Have Known (called The Undoing in the recent HBO version starring Nicole Kidman), the novel focuses on a writing professor, Jacob Bonner, who has a student with a fantastic story idea; after the student dies, Jake makes it his own, with serious consequences.

Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan

The setting for this mesmerizing novel is a quiet suburban street whose center literally and figuratively falls away during a brutally hot summer when a sinkhole opens up, spewing a smelly black sludge. After a girl falls in, a troubled woman starts pointing fingers at one family (they never did fit in), and the nastiness escalates on Maple Street — Langan's witty reference to “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” the famous Twilight Zone episode about scapegoating turned deadly. It offers both page-turning suspense and brilliant social commentary.

The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.

This beautifully written debut novel — a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction — is a love story about two enslaved men, Isaiah and Samuel, whose devotion to each other leads to trouble on a brutally run Mississippi plantation. Voices of their African ancestors are woven throughout the book, Toni Morrison-style, with a complex mix of characters, including an older enslaved man, Amos, who embraces the plantation owner's Christianity and becomes a preacher. This draws attention to the love between the two men, and tension builds toward an inevitably violent reckoning.

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

A sweeping epic with brilliantly drawn characters by Shipstead — author of 2014's Astonish Me — focuses on Marian Graves, whose story begins with a near drowning at sea with her infant twin brother, Jaimie. Her life is no less eventful while growing up as an aspiring pilot in Prohibition-era Montana, working as a bootlegger to squirrel money away for flying lessons. As an adult, she's becomes legendary pilot whose story is in the process of being captured on film in modern-day Los Angeles; the book jumps forward to the filming and the young actress who's playing her role.

We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker

This extraordinary heart-rending novel is centered on a terrible accident in a small California town that led to the death of a child and a prison sentence for a teenager. The story is about the fallout 30 years later — including at least one apparent murder — that's shouldered by a tough little 13-year-old named Duchess Day Radley and her younger brother, raised by a troubled single mom, and a police chief who's tragically consumed by the past. Disney’s 20th Television Studios plans to develop it for a TV series.

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

It's hard to believe this moving, beautifully written novel, long-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize, is a debut. The book is set in the American South just after the Civil War, when enslaved people have been emancipated but are still shackled in many ways by racism, not to mention their traumatic pasts. Trouble starts soon after a good-hearted older white man, George, hires two freed brothers to help him farm his land. He and his family draw close to the pair, but the townspeople don't look kindly on the arrangement. Tensions build to a near-apocalyptic climax, and a kind of justice is finally served.

More winners coming very soon in paperback

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (May 18): One of the best works of historical fiction I’ve read in recent years, this story about William Shakespeare’s family (including his son, Hamnet) is so evocative that you can almost smell the freshly baked bread and hear the clopping of horses in 16th-century Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins (June 21): The author of the mega-bestseller The Girl on the Train whipped up another killer page-turner in 2021, this one about the murder of a young man on a London houseboat. Actress Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl) narrates the audiobook.  

Silverview by John le Carré (July 5): This is the final, posthumously published novel by the renowned master of spy fiction (The Man Who Came in From the Cold, among many others). Julian Lawndsley is running a bookstore in a quiet seaside town when a mysterious man shows up at the store. Julian’s simple life soon grows very complicated. When it was released last year, our reviewer Steven Ritterman, an ardent le Carré fan and book collector, gave it the thumbs up, calling it “Less labyrinthine than some of le Carré’s early work, it has all the grand themes of his best novels — love and betrayal, loyalty and morality — fully on display."