Book Reviews

Summary Abraham Verghese spent twelve years writing The Covenant of Water, and the novel carries the weight of that devotion on every page. It is a big book in every sense: 736 pages, three generations, more than fifty years, a cast of characters whose names and relationships you will eventually keep straight because Verghese earns…

Summary Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart began as a 2018 essay in The New Yorker and grew into one of the most talked-about memoirs of recent years. It is a book about grief and Korean food and the particular texture of a mother-daughter relationship between a Korean immigrant mother and a biracial daughter raised…

Summary Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel arrived in 2011 with the force of a conjuring trick: it seemed to materialize from nothing fully formed, a world so complete and sensory that readers have spent years trying to find their way back into it. The Night Circus is the kind of novel that gets pressed into hands…

Summary Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel about video games that is not really about video games. It is about friendship, creativity, grief, jealousy, and the particular intimacy of making something with another person across decades. It spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list after its July…