Lie to Me, J.T. Ellison (MIRA)

Lie to Me is a delicious novel. The setup seems simple enough – a novelist has apparently up and left her husband, who is also a writer – but oh boy this is one devilishly convoluted and occasionally downright twisted story. Ethan and Sutton Montclair are not your typical well-to-do couple. They’re recovering from a …

The Novel (1991), James A. Michener (Random House)

This might be the best novel about the art and business of writing. Lukas Yoder has just completed his eighth novel, the final installment in a series of books published over a quarter-century. Now he faces a solid year of edits, rewrites, publicity obligations, and self-criticism. Michener, who followed his Pulitzer-winning first book with a …

All the President’s Men (1974), Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster)

All the President's Men reads like a thriller, and that’s it's greatest strength. It’s got a killer story – the toppling of a crooked American president – and its main characters, Woodward and Bernstein, are perfectly cast: a pair of young, hungry journalists who refuse to quit until they get the story. It's all true, …

The Meg (2018)

I probably don’t need to, but I feel a little sorry for Steve Alten. Here he spends, what, two decades trying to get his giant-prehistoric-shark novel Meg made into a movie, comes close a few times, and then it finally happens, and it turns out to be The Meg, a film that dilutes the novel's …

Wanderers, Chuck Wendig (Del Rey)

  Post-apocalyptic fiction is a robust and frequently magnificent genre. Rather less developed is the genre of pre-apocalyptic fiction: stories set in the period immediately before civilization breaks down and most of humanity is snuffed out. Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers is a brilliantly conceived novel that takes places over the course of several months and ends …

The Real-Town Murders, Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

One of the great joys in reading an Adam Roberts novel is the stuff that goes on in the background, behind the story he’s telling: the interweaving subtexts, subtle linguistic cues, shifting points of view, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em references that hint at the nature of complex world he’s created. The Real-Town Murders is the story of …

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carreyrou (Knopf)

Have you heard about Theranos? It was only a handful of years ago that its founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, convinced people – and by people I mean investors with fistfuls of cash – that the company would soon be manufacturing a machine that would transform the medical industry. Theranos’ machine would make the old …