17 Books You Can’t Put Down Once You Start

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” So begins Eugenides’s bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning, Oprah’s Book Club selection —and the book only gains momentum from there. Part medical mystery, part intergenerational epic, part Forest Gump-ian tromp through 20th-century history, the 550-page novel will take you a weekend to read (trust us), and a paragraph to understand why it deserves all its accolades and then some. —C.B.

Another book that will pull you in from the first sentence ( “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation”) and not let you go till the last, Tartt’s incandescent debut drags you into the fold of an ominous clique of classics students at a Vermont liberal arts college whose quest for intellectual transcendence pulls them towards physical violence and their moral breaking points. A brilliant bacchanalia of 1980s campus nostalgia, biting class criticism, dazzling writing, and electric characters—complete with a good old-fashioned murder-mystery plot. —C.B.

Cline’s debut novel has a lot in common with the story of Charles Manson and the young women who quickly became his devotees. Set in the summer of the late ’60s, not long before the violent killing of actress Sharon Tate, the fictional Evie becomes enchanted with Suzanne, an enigmatic personality she discovers in a Los Angeles park. Evie’s infatuation soon has her following Suzanne into a cult led by the Manson-esque Russell, who has his members doing his murderous bidding. It’s up to Evie if she’ll be able to go through with all that is asked of her, and readers will be ravenous to find out for themselves. —T.B.

Everything about this 2005 bestseller is startlingly original, including, above all, its form: a letter to Osama Bin Laden from a young mother who lost both her husband and her son in a fictional terrorist attack he orchestrated. While she starts the letter with a clear agenda— to make the militant leader love her son enough that he will “stop making boy-shaped holes in the world”— in revealing her four-year-old in all his humanity and fullness, she must also reveal herself, a self-described “infidel” held hostage by private terrors and compulsions. In her disarmingly funny letter, she lays herself bare for her child’s murderer. In her grief, she uncovers secrets about the circumstances of the attack that throw her already teetering world completely off its axis. —C.B.

Environmental collapse is one of those topics that many of us turn to fiction to avoid thinking about, but this National Book Award finalist weaves a story so compelling that you won’t want to look away. Set in the alarmingly near future, the novel focuses on a gaggle of children spending the summer at a multi-family lakeside rental mansion that is soon besotted by a storm straight out of the Old Testament. While their parents “cope” mostly by anesthetizing themselves with booze, adultery, and all-too-familiar excuses for their collective inaction, their hilariously precocious children roll their eyes, take inventory of their supplies, and get to the belated work of survival. Damning without ever feeling scolding, this book will make you see our planet, and the generations who will inherit it, with fresh eyes and renewed energy. —C.B.

From the Nobel laureate and master of the hyperreal comes a gorgeously written novel that poses a question as old as Greek myths: What does it mean to be human? Klara, an Artificial Friend, smiles and nods to customers in the Manager’s store while tracking each day by the sun’s arc. When a mother and daughter adopt Klara, a Pandora’s box of repressed emotion springs open, fleshing out Ishiguro’s themes of resilience and vulnerability in our mad, mad world. —M.H.

Human communication, no matter how wrapped up it gets in technology, remains a miracle, and nowhere more so than in this luminous story of a blind girl living in St. Mâlo, France, and a young German whose Wehrmacht unit marches to that port. Marie-Laure, whose loving father has crafted a model town for her to learn from, knows that he’s also left a valuable diamond, or perhaps one of its copies, somewhere inside. As Werner Pfennig, an electronics savant, experiences the savagery of combat, his views change, and he helps Marie-Laure defeat a Nazi bent on ruining anything he wants for gain. It’s a real– forgive us!—gem of a book. —B.P.

Slimani was so enthralled with the true tale of Yoselyn Ortega, the New York City nanny who murdered two children under her care in 2012, that she turned it into this award-winning bestseller. The French Moroccan author moved the story to her own home of Paris and focused her lens on the relationship between the grieving mother and the “perfect nanny” she regrettably trusted with her young son and daughter. —T.B.

When you hear the word sociopath, you probably imagine someone closer to Patrick Bateman than Patric Gagne: an ax-wielding serial killer, not a dedicated therapist, loving mother, and devoted wife. But, in this fast-paced and candid memoir, Gagne reveals that the truth of sociopathy is far more fascinating than the fictional stereotypes. Even in kindergarten, Gagne realized that she “didn’t feel things the way other kids did.” Empathy, remorse, and fear eluded her. Violence felt good. But Gagne does not want to be at the whim of her hardwired impulses; she wants to live a life of her own design. Her journey to wrest control over her condition includes a PhD in clinical psychology, a slew of potential felonies, a surprising love story, and some instructive insights for anyone living with an unruly brain (or, for that matter, with another person). —C.B.

The Achilles of Homer’s The Iliad wept for days over his comrade Patroclus’s corpse, refusing to let it be buried. Miller, a scholar of classical literature, takes that tiny detail and uses it to re-imagine the hero of the Trojan War as a man in love with his best friend and most faithful ally. This intimate, romantic story reveals more about soldiers, lovers, and queer couples than most of the classic literature combined, yet sticks close to the historical and literary context on which it’s based. Miller’s fresh look at this epic poem has inspired many other fiction writers to write about ancient works, but sometimes we all know that the first entry is the best. —B.P.

In this modern retelling of the myth of Persephone and Demeter, a teenage daughter is lured into an underworld ripe with sex, drugs, and luxury when she accepts a job working on the private island of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company’s CEO—and her single mother will stop at nothing to bring her back to the world of the living. As it alternates between the perspective of mother and daughter, we can indulge in the full thrill of being young, reckless, and newly independent—and the full propulsive terror of being older and knowing better. A white-knuckled ride to hell and back. —C.B.

Edie, the capricious millennial narrator of this strikingly observed debut novel, first encounters her lover—23 years her senior—in the flesh at Six Flags. He’s white, she’s Black, and he and his wife have adopted a Black daughter. What ensues over the next 200-plus pages is indeed a wild ride: an irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that’s blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy. —M.H.

Set in a Pentecostal Puerto Rican community, the winner of the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction pulls readers into the fold of a tight-knit family, forever undone by the loose thread of a missing daughter. Twelve years after her disappearance on the way back from middle-school track practice, Ruthie Ramirez reappears—or at least her family thinks she does—as a contestant on a raunchy reality show. Alternating between the beguiling voices of all four Ramirez women, Jimenez tells an unforgettable story of female violence, vulnerability, and relentless love. —C.B.

The word little in this title may raise an eyebrow when you first encounter this doorstop; then you’re on page 700 before you know it. On one hand, it’s a culturally aware drama about a long friendship among four interesting men; buried inside is an abuse plot that ticks like a bomb beneath all the beautiful bougie scenes of their unfolding lives. —M.W.

Who amongst us hasn’t wished to simply sleep our woes away? In this darkly humorous modern cult classic, Moshfegh arms her (anti?) heroine with the resources to make that fantasy a reality—namely a fat trust fund and a gonzo, script-happy shrink. Feeling… a bit out of sorts, a gorgeous 26-year-old Manhattanite commits to a year of medically induced hibernation, convinced that she will awaken in 2001 a new woman, ready for New York in all its glittering glory. But uninterrupted sleep proves more elusive than she hoped. Enter: stronger pills, longer blackouts, and a raucous and razor-sharp descent into a nightmare of her own making. —C.B.

Widely known as the best thing that ever happened via PowerPoint, Egan’s linked stories (one of which is a slideshow made by a teenage character) whisk us to the world of record exec Benny Salazar and his kleptomaniac assistant Sasha, hopscotching decades and continents. There’s nothing else quite like it. —M.W.

If you were one of the people who had to be begged to read this book because you heard it was about video games, you already know: This is a heartthrob of a novel about a triangle relationship between three of the most delightful weirdos to spring from the pages of the early 21st century. More addictive than Minecraft will ever be! —M.W.