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 23  There are a total of 302 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Bleak House"
Star rating for Bleak House
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Notes:
Top 5 Best Book On Courtroom Drama. This book was ranked #2 on the WSJ on May 18th, 2025.
Description:
Textual notes and a Dickens chronology accompany this satire of Victorian society built around an interminable suit at the Court of Chancery.
Book cover for "Brightly shining"
Star rating for Brightly shining
Description:
"Beautifully told with humor and tenderness, a Norwegian Christmas tale of sisterhood, financial hardship, and far-off dreams, acclaimed by reviewers and beloved by readers across Europe, where it has been a bestseller. Christmas is just around the corner, and Ronja and Melissa's dreamer of a father is out of work again. When ten-year-old Ronja hears about a job selling Christmas trees near where the family lives in central Oslo, she thinks it might...
Book cover for "The café with no name"
Star rating for The café with no name
Description:
"Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner café in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived. The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now...
Book cover for "Chilean poet"
Star rating for Chilean poet
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"The internationally acclaimed author, heralded as one of the most important writers of his generation, returns with the most substantial work of his career: an emotionally captivating, very funny novel about fathers and sons, ambition and failure, and the many forms of family."-- After a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla. Though their desire for each other is still intact, much has...
Book cover for "A complicated kindness"
Star rating for A complicated kindness
Average Rating:
4 stars
Notes:
Ranked #3 as Best Book on Life In Small Towns in the WSJ on July 25-26th, 2025.
Description:
Doomed to work at the Happy Family Farm, a chicken slaughterhouse in a town run by a Mennonite community, sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel nevertheless manages to bear witness to the dissolution of her family with a dark, sly wit.
Book cover for "The enchanted April"
Star rating for The enchanted April
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
Escaping dreary London for the sunshine of Italy,four very different women take up an offer advertised in the Times for a small medieval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be let furnished for the month of April.As each blossoms in the warmth of the Italian spring, quite unexpected changes occur.
Book cover for "Flashlight"
Star rating for Flashlight
Description:
"A thrilling, globe-spanning novel on memory, identity, and what it means to be in a family (and to lose one), from the award-winning author of Trust Exercise. One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves...
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 "Good company"
Star rating for Good company
Average Rating:
3.2 stars
Description:
"A warm, incisive new novel about the enduring bonds of marriage and friendship from Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of the instant New York Times bestseller The Nest"--
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 "Homeland elegies"
Star rating for Homeland elegies
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
Book cover for "The hunter"
Star rating for The hunter
Author:
Series:
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"It's a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die. Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He's found it, more or less: he's built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he's gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places....
Book cover for "I'll come to you"
Star rating for I'll come to you
Description:
"A modern and classic story of family, I'll Come to You chronicles intersecting lives over the course of one year-1995-anchored by the anticipation and arrival of a child. With empathy, insight, and humor, Rebecca Kauffman explores overlapping narratives involving a couple whose struggle to become pregnant has both softened and hardened them, a woman whose husband of forty years has left her for reasons he's unwilling to share and the man who is now...
Book cover for "In this mountain"
Star rating for In this mountain
Series:
Mitford years volume 7.
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
Restless with his retirement, Father Tim, accompanied by Cynthia, gears up for a year-long ministry across the state line, but a series of events sends shock waves throughout the town of Mitford and through Father Tim's faith.
Book cover for "The limits"
Star rating for The limits
Description:
"A novel set in French Polynesia and New York City about three characters--a fifteen-year-old girl toggling between her mother, a marine biologist studying coral reefs on an island off the coast of Tahiti, and her father, a surgeon in Manhattan--who undergo massive transformation over the course of a single year"--
Book cover for "My Ántonia"
Star rating for My Ántonia
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation of the immigrant A New York lawyer remembers his boyhood in Nebraska and his friendship with a pioneer Bohemian girl. A novel set in Nebraska about pioneering Bohemian farmers & of the courageous heroine, Antonia. First published in 1918. In Willa Cather's...
Book cover for "Parallel Lines"
Star rating for Parallel Lines
Description:
"It's the summer, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him grappling with his fragile grip on reality and his persistent hunger to connect with the biological mother who abandoned him as a child. His therapist, Martin, is facing challenges of his own, including his adopted daughter's tenuous relationship with her own biological mother--a predicament that makes Sebastian's struggle feel uncannily proximate to her own. Olivia...
Book cover for "The queen of Dirt Island"
Star rating for The queen of Dirt Island
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"You'll never truly understand love until you've read Donal Ryan: a searing, jubilant story about four generations of women and the fierce devotion that binds them together The Aylward women of Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland, are mad about each other, but you wouldn't always think it. You'd have to know them to know that-in spite of what the neighbors might say about raised voices and dramatic scenes-their house is a place of peace, filled with...
Book cover for "Red Dog Farm"
Star rating for Red Dog Farm
Description:
"Growing up on his family's cattle farm in western Iceland, young Orri has gained an appreciation for the beauty found in everyday things: the cavorting of a newborn calf, the return of birdsong after a long winter, the steadfast love of a good (or tolerably good) farm dog. But the outer world still beckons, so Orri leaves his no-nonsense Lithuanian Jewish mother and his taciturn father, Pabbi, to attend university in Reykjavík. Pabbi is no stranger...
Book cover for "Seven steeples"
Star rating for Seven steeples
Author:
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"A couple, Bell and Sigh, move into a remote house in the Irish countryside with their dogs. Both solitary with misanthropic tendencies, they leave the conventional lives stretched out before them to build another ... They make a promise to climb the mountain, but--over the course of the next seven years--it remains unclimbed. We move through the seasons with Bell and Sigh as they come to understand more about the small world around them, and as their...