14 of the Best Books to Read This February
From Colum McCann's Apeirogon to Jenny Offill's latest, you'll fall for these.
Temi Oyeyola
This Friday is Valentine's Day—the perfect time to fall head over heels with a brand new book (or 14 of them). Some highlights? Colum McCann's new novel, Apeirogon, illuminates both sides of the Israel-Palestine divide. Christopher Bollen's thrill-ride, A Beautiful Crime, is a Patricia Highsmith-esque page-turner set in the Floating City—Venice, Italy. The Chronology of Water author Lidia Yuknavitch returns with a polychromatic short story collection, Verge, while Jenny Offill's latest, Weather, is a pithy and poignant examination of our political and personal anxieties. And in between, we have everything from a Watergate prosecutor's gripping memoir to a sumptuous mystery about murder in a Caribbean paradise. Below are some of our favorites reads of February—fiction and nonfiction—that'll leave you swooning.
1 Apeirogon by Colum McCann
Like his 2009 National Book Award-winning opus, Let the Great World Spin, and 2013's TransAtlantic, Colum McCann's grand and exhilarating novel Apeirogon is filled with symphonic sentences that sing of the human cost of an impossibly complex situation: in this case, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Read the full review here.
2 A Beautiful Crime by Christopher Bollen
Nick and Clay, the antiheroes of Christopher Bollen's diabolical, entrancing fourth novel, A Beautiful Crime, are a pair of hustlers in love, fleeing New York for Venice armed with a crafty get-rich-quick scheme that is illegal and almost certainly doomed. Read the full review here.
3 Race Against Time by Jerry Mitchell
"The arc of the moral universe is long," Martin Luther King Jr. once remarked, "but it bends toward justice." Dogged journalists like Jerry Mitchell have more than a little to do with that. Mitchell's exacting and nail-bitingly exciting Race Against Time chronicles a 30-year career spent prying back open and helping to solve some of the most infamous cold cases of the civil rights era. Read the full review here.
4 Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein
In the aftermath of Donald Trump's 2016 victory, journalist Ezra Klein sought out political scientists, anticipating they'd be as stunned by the outcome as Klein and other pundits had been. "Reality had ruptured," he felt. "We were owed answers." But those feelings weren't borne out by the data. What emerges in Klein's eye-opening Why We're Polarized is that trend lines had remained shockingly stable for decades. Read the full review here.
5 Verge: Stories by Lidia Yuknavitch
In spellbinding stories by turns light and dark, allegorical and realist, Yuknavitch experiments with plots involving illegal organ harvesting and transplanting the 15th-century artist Hieronymus Bosch to the present, where he conducts a torrid tryst with a gorgeous man.
6 Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick
In sparkling, fine-cut prose, the extraordinary critic offers an ode to the authors who remain her touchstones—among them D.H. Lawrence, Marguerite Duras, and Thomas Hardy.
7 Weather by Jenny Offill
The author of the genre-shattering Dept. of Speculation returns with another work of sardonic fiction, this one about a middle-aged librarian whose anxieties over climate change and whether her brother will relapse into drug addiction expose many of our culture's raw nerves.
8 The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President by Jill Wine-Banks
The MSNBC legal analyst's vivid memoir re-creates her role as the only female attorney appointed to the Watergate prosecution team, where she forged a case for the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon.
9 Real Life by Brandon Taylor
A blistering and tender campus novel (think Wonder Boys meets Dear White People) centered on a Black biochemistry grad student trying to balance the rigors of academia and a tempestuous affair with a supposedly straight white man.
10 I Know You Know Who I Am: Stories by Peter Kispert
The stories in Kispert's wryly scathing debut—including one in which a man hires an actor to pose as an old friend to show his current partner he isn't a sad loner—reveal how we so often make others complicit in our self-deceptions.
11 Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin
On a family vacation to the Caribbean island of Saint X ("a lovely nowhere"), an 18-year-old American is found murdered, sparking a media frenzy. Schaitkin's pulse pounder of a novel picks up two decades later, when the victim's younger sister crosses paths with a lead suspect.
12 The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
If you thought there was no more to be learned about the great prime minister who steered Britain through World War II, think again. Here, the celebrated author of The Devil in the White City transmutes familiar history and new scholarship into an enthralling page-turner.
13 The Regrets by Amy Bonnaffons
A girl encounters a ghost on a Brooklyn bus and falls head over heels in this witty update of the Bridget Jones–esque rom-com in which soul mates bond via "perfect consonance, zero conversation."
14 The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams
Set at an all-girls school in 1870s Massachusetts—designed to teach its increasingly unruly pupils to be "true partners to their husbands and true mothers to their children"—Beams's first novel is a meticulously crafted suspense tale seething with feminist fury.
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