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 241 - 260 of 302  There are a total of 302 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The secret history of the Five Eyes"
Star rating for The secret history of the Five Eyes
Description:
"This is the definitive account of the Western worlds most powerful--but least known--intelligence alliance, which remains central to the defense of the free world in a dangerously uncertain time."-- "This is the definitive account of the Western worlds most powerful--but least known--intelligence alliance, which remains central to the defense of the free world in a dangerously uncertain time."--
Book cover for "Secret identity"
Star rating for Secret identity
Average Rating:
1 stars
Description:
"It's 1975 and the comic book industry is struggling, but Carmen Valdez doesn't care. She's an assistant at Triumph Comics, which doesn't have the creative zeal of Marvel nor the buttoned-up efficiency of DC, but it doesn't matter. Carmen is tantalizingly close to fulfilling her dream of writing a superhero book. That dream is nearly a reality when one of the Triumph writers enlists her help to create a new character, which they call 'The Lethal Lynx,'...
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...
Book cover for "The Seven Wonders of the ancient world"
Star rating for The Seven Wonders of the ancient world
Description:
"For millennia, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World have been known for their aesthetic sublimity, ingenious engineering, and sheer, audacious magnitude: The Great Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis, the Statue of Zeus, the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse at Alexandria. Echoing down time, each of these persists in our imagination as an emblem of the glory of antiquity,...
Book cover for "Shock values"
Star rating for Shock values
Description:
"How inflation fears shaped American society, then and now. For most of its history, the United States has benefited from price stability-a steady relationship between supply and demand, characterized by prices that don't inflate or deflate in unpredictable fashion. Across these long stretches, the US economy became famously free-market: prices did the job of stabilizing the economy so the government didn't have to. In this sweeping and revelatory...
Book cover for "Shots heard round the world"
Star rating for Shots heard round the world
Description:
"From acclaimed historian John Ferling, a major, global reappraisal of the Revolutionary War on its 250th Anniversary."--Provided by publisher.

247. Slaveroad

Book cover for "Slaveroad"
Star rating for Slaveroad
Description:
"John Edgar Wideman's "slaveroad" is a palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates,...
Book cover for "Slavery by another name"
Star rating for Slavery by another name
Average Rating:
5 stars
Book cover for "The slip"
Star rating for The slip
Description:
"Austin, Texas: It's the summer of 1998, and Nathaniel Rothstein has vanished without a trace. His uncle Bob Alexander, who was supposed to be looking after him for the summer, had long thought the boy a bit odd, but Nathaniel appeared to be maturing in his sixteenth year-taking up boxing at Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym and volunteering at the local assisted living center. Until he disappeared, Nathaniel had seemed happier, more confident-tanner, even....
Book cover for "Slow productivity"
Star rating for Slow productivity
Author:
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"The author of Digital Minimalism and Deep Work offers a philosophy for pursuing meaningful accomplishment while avoiding overload. History's most creative and impactful philosophers, scientists, artists, and writers mastered the art of producing valuable work with staying power. In this book, Cal Newport harnesses the wisdom of these traditional knowledge workers to transform modern jobs. Drawing from research on the habits and mindsets of a varied...
Book cover for "The slowworm's song"
Star rating for The slowworm's song
Description:
Summoned to an inquiry in Belfast, asking him to give testimony about his participation in a disastrous event during the Troubles, ailing ex-soldier and recovering alcoholic Stephen Rose, just beginning to build a fragile bond with the adult daughter he barely knows, must finally face the consequences of his actions.
Book cover for "Small mercies"
Star rating for Small mercies
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"One night Mary Pat's teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn't come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances. The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched--asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who...
Book cover for "Smokin' Joe"
Star rating for Smokin' Joe
Description:
A gripping, all-access biography of Joe Frazier, whose rivalry with Muhammad Ali riveted boxing fans and whose legacy as a figure in American sports and society endures.
Book cover for "The song of the lark"
Star rating for The song of the lark
Notes:
Placed at #3 out of 5 Best Books On Classical Music In Fiction by the WSJ on June 22nd, 2025
Book cover for "Sons and daughters"
Star rating for Sons and daughters
Description:
""It is me the prophet laments when he cries out, 'My enemies are the people in my own home.'" The Rabbi ignored his borscht and instead chewed on a crust of bread dipped in salt. "My greatest enemies are my own family." Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen's world, the world of his forefathers, is crumbling before his eyes. And in his own home! His eldest, Bentzion, is off in Bialystok, studying to be a businessman; his daughter Bluma Rivtcha is...
Book cover for "The space between worlds"
Star rating for The space between worlds
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"A multiverse-hopping outsider discovers a secret that threatens her home world and her fragile place in it-a stunning sci-fi debut that's both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging. CARA IS DEAD ON THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FOUR WORLDS. The multiverse business is booming, but there's just one catch: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel...
Book cover for "The speckled beauty"
Star rating for The speckled beauty
Author:
Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Description:
"A memoir and elegy to the author's deceased dog, The Speckled Beauty"--
Book cover for "The Spinach King"
Star rating for The Spinach King
Description:
"They say behind every great fortune there is a great crime. At Seabrook Farms, the troubling American histories of race, immigration, and exploitation arise like weeds from the soil. Great Migration Black laborers struck against the company for better wages in the 1930s, and Japanese Americans helped found a 'global village' on the farm after World War II. Revealing both C. F. and Jack Seabrook's corruption, The Spinach King undermines the 'great...
Book cover for "The stars turned inside out"
Star rating for The stars turned inside out
Author:
Description:
"The discovery of a suspicious death at a famous Swiss physics laboratory sparks a mystery that merges science, philosophy, and the high-stakes race to unlock the fundamental nature of our universe"--
Book cover for "Strangers in the land"
Star rating for Strangers in the land
Author:
Description:
"In 1889, when the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act --a measure barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States that remained in effect for more than fifty years--Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterized the Chinese as a people 'residing apart by themselves.' They were, Field concluded, 'strangers in the land.' Today, there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States, yet this label still...