the book show

“Alphabetical Diaries” by Sheila Heti contains a decade’s worth of thoughts, arranged in alphabetical order. The book is a chronicle of the self, of the fundamentals and idiosyncrasies of human experience, that plays out thrillingly in the space that Heti has staked out between life and art, reality and fiction.

“The Bee Sting,” a novel by Paul Murray, is about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person at the end of the world.

The winner of the Booker Prize 2023, “Prophet Song” by Paul Lynch, presents a terrifying and shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.

Best-selling author of “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien, is on The Book Show this week to discuss his first new novel in two decades. “America Fantastica” is a propulsive caper chock full of O’Brien’s commentary on the state of American politics and culture.

As a prolific novelist of books for adults and kids, Carl Hiaasen has a subject: Florida. It is his beat. In “Wrecker,” Hiaasen’s new novel for Young Readers, Valdez Jones VIII needs to deal with smugglers, grave robbers, and pooping iguanas -- just as soon as he finishes Zoom school.

Ann Patchett is the author of nine novels, including “Bel Canto,” “State of Wonder,” “Commonwealth” and “The Dutch House,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest, “Tom Lake,” is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born.

“Day” is the first novel in a decade from Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham. It’s a family saga set in New York City before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and takes place on three separate days in April, one each in the years 2019-2021.

CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent and New York Times best-selling author Jake Tapper’s third thriller, “All the Demons Are Here,” brings readers to the 1970s underground world of cults, celebrities, tabloid journalism, serial killers, disco, and UFOs.

National Book Award-winning author Alice McDermott’s latest, “Absolution,” is the riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War. American women and wives have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in “Absolution” they take center stage.

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels including “A Thousand Acres,” which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and the “Last Hundred Years Trilogy.” Her latest, “A Dangerous Business,” tells the remarkable story of the California gold rush and a pair of sex-worker sleuths who track down the culprit behind a series of disappearances.