WSJ’s Top Book Recommendations-Cary Regional

Discover the best books of the year, handpicked by the editors of The Wall Street Journal. From thought-provoking nonfiction to engrossing fiction, our Top Book Recommendations offer a curated list of exceptional reads that will inform, inspire, and entertain. Featuring titles from acclaimed authors and emerging voices, our selection spans genres and subjects, ensuring there's something for every reader. Dive into the world of ideas, stories, and perspectives that will change the way you think, feel, and see the world.

Showing 1 - 20 of 53  There are a total of 302 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "33 Place Brugmann"
Star rating for 33 Place Brugmann
Description:
"An extraordinarily accomplished debut novel-a love story, mystery, and philosophical puzzle-told in the singular voices of the residents of a Beaux Arts apartment building in Belgium in 1939. On the eve of the occupation, in the heart of Brussels, life for the residents of eight apartments at 33 Place Brugmann is about to change forever. Art student Charlotte Sauvin, daughter of a prominent architect in apartment 4L, knows all the details of the...
Book cover for "All the frequent troubles of our days"
Star rating for All the frequent troubles of our days
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
Part biography, part political thriller, part scholarly detective story that draws on letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, and other documents, this true story chronicles the life and brutal death of Mildred Harnack, the American leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany.
Book cover for "The anxious generation"
Star rating for The anxious generation
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why? In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children...
Book cover for "Bad blood"
Star rating for Bad blood
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"In 2014 Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup 'unicorn' promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier ... There was just one problem: The technology didn't work. For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When [the author], working at The Wall...
Book cover for "Big sky"
Star rating for Big sky
Series:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside village, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son and an aging Labrador, both at the discretion of his ex-partner Julia. It's picturesque, but there's something darker lurking behind the scenes. Jackson's current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, is fairly standard-issue, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into...
Book cover for "Bletchley riddle"
Star rating for Bletchley riddle
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"This middle grade historical adventure follows two siblings at Bletchley Park, the home of WWII codebreakers, as they try to unravel a mystery surrounding their mother's disappearance."--
Book cover for "The bookseller of Florence"
Star rating for The bookseller of Florence
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Against the ... backdrop of Renaissance Florence, [this book] brings to light an extraordinary story about the city and its culture--that of Vespasiano da Bisticci, the 'king of the world's booksellers,' Florence's most indispensable and prolific merchant of knowledge. His bookshop in the heart of Florence was a gathering place for the city's most prominent poets and philosophers, and it was there that Vespasiano and his team of scribes created beautiful...
Book cover for "Bury your dead"
Star rating for Bury your dead
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
An obsessive historian's quest for the remains of the founder of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, ends in murder. Could a secret buried with Champlain for nearly 400 years be so dreadful that someone would kill to protect it? Although he is supposed to be on leave, Chief Inspector Gamache cannot walk away from a crime that threatens to ignite long-smoldering tensions between the English and the French. Meanwhile, he is receiving disquieting letters from...
Book cover for "The CIA book club"
Star rating for The CIA book club
Description:
"Recounts a covert Cold War operation led by George Minden to smuggle banned literature into Eastern Europe, focusing on the cultural and psychological battle against Soviet censorship and the role underground reading networks played in weakening totalitarian control, especially in Poland"--
Book cover for "Dare to lead"
Star rating for Dare to lead
Average Rating:
3.2 stars
Description:
In her number one New York Times best sellers, Brené Brown has taught what it means to dare greatly, rise strong, and brave the wilderness. Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers, and culture shifters, she's showing listeners how to put those ideas into practice so they can step up and lead.
Book cover for "Dark sacred night"
Star rating for Dark sacred night
Series:
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Detective Renee Ballard is working the graveyard shift again, and returns to Hollywood Station in the early hours only to find that an older man has snuck in and is rifling through old file cabinets.The intruder is none other than legendary LAPD detective Harry Bosch, working a cold case that has gotten under his skin. Ballard kicks him out, but eventually Bosch persuades her to help and she relents. Bosch is investigating the death of fifteen-year-old...
Book cover for "The devils"
Star rating for The devils
Description:
"Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Sacred City, where he is certain a commendation and grand holy assignment awaits him. But his new flock is made up of unrepentant murderers, practitioners of ghastly magic, and outright monsters. The mission he is tasked with will require bloody measures from them all in order to achieve its righteous ends. Elves lurk at our borders and hunger for our flesh, while greedy princes care for nothing but their own...
Book cover for "Don't let him in"
Star rating for Don't let him in
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Nina Swann is intrigued when she received a condolence card from Nick Radcliffe, an old friend of her late husband, who is looking to connect after her husband's unexpected death. Nick is a man of substance and good taste. He has a smile that could melt the coldest heart and a knack for putting others at ease. But to Nina's adult daughter, Ash, Nick seems too slick, too polished, too good to be true. Without telling her mother, Ash begins digging...
Book cover for "The drop"
Star rating for The drop
Series:
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
Harry Bosch has been given three years before he must retire from the LAPD, and he wants cases more fiercely than ever. In one morning, he gets two. DNA from a 1989 rape and murder matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Was he an eight-year-old killer or has something gone terribly wrong in the new Regional Crime Lab? The latter possibility could compromise all of the lab's DNA cases currently in court. Then Bosch and his partner are called to a...
Book cover for "The fate of the day"
Star rating for The fate of the day
Description:
"In the second volume of the ... American Revolution trilogy by the Pulitzer Prize-winning ... author of The British Are Coming, George Washington's army fights on the knife edge between victory and defeat"--
Book cover for "Fever beach"
Star rating for Fever beach
Description:
"'The afternoon of September first, dishwater-gray and rainy, a man named Dale Figgo picked up a hitchhiker on Gus Grissom Boulevard in Tangelo Falls, Florida. The hitchhiker, who reminded Figgo of Danny DeVito, asked for a lift to the interstate. Figgo said he'd take him there after finishing an errand.' Thus begins Fever Beach, with an errand that leads-in pure Hiaasen-style-into the depths of Florida at its most Floridian: a sun-soaked bastion...
Book cover for "Fresh water for flowers"
Star rating for Fresh water for flowers
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Her life is lived to the predictable rhythms of the often funny, always moving confidences that casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues share with her. Violette's routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of Julien Seul--a police chief from out of town--who has come to scatter the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete...
Book cover for "The grapes of wrath"
Star rating for The grapes of wrath
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
Depicts the hardships and suffering endured by the Joads as they journey from Oklahoma to California during the Depression.
Book cover for "Harlem shuffle"
Star rating for Harlem shuffle
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
"'Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked' ... To his customers and neighbors on 125th Street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably-priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from...
Book cover for "Heartwood"
Star rating for Heartwood
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping. At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie,...