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 61 - 80 of 302  There are a total of 302 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The debt trap"
Star rating for The debt trap
Description:
"In 1982, a new executive at Sallie Mae took home the company's financial documents to review. "You've got to be shitting me," he later told the company's CEO. "This place is a gold mine." Over the next four decades, the student loan industry that Sallie Mae and Congress created blew up into a crisis that would submerge a generation of Americans into $1.5 trillion in student debt. In The Debt Trap, Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell tells...
Book cover for "The determined spy"
Star rating for The determined spy
Description:
"An intimate and expertly-researched biography of Frank Wisner, the father of CIA Black Ops, telling the story of his exciting intelligence escapades as well as his lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder"--
Book cover for "The devil three times"
Star rating for The devil three times
Description:
"Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her at their destination, Yetunde finds help in an unexpected form--the Devil himself. The Devil, seeking a way to reenter the pearly gates of heaven, decides to prove himself to an indifferent God by protecting Yetunde and granting her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde...
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 doorman"
Star rating for The doorman
Description:
"Chicky Diaz is everyone's favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York's cultural elite. Up in the penthouse, Emily Longworth has the perfect-looking everything, all except her husband, whom she'd quietly loathed even before the recent revelations about where all the money comes from. But his wealth is immense, their prenup is iron-clad, and Emily can't bring herself...
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 drowned"
Star rating for The drowned
Series:
Quirke mysteries volume 10.
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"1950s, rural Ireland. A loner comes across a mysteriously empty car in a field. Knowing he shouldn't approach but unable to hold back, he soon finds himself embroiled in a troubling missing person case, as a husband claims his wife may have thrown herself into the sea. Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector Strafford, who soon turns to his old ally--the flawed but brilliant pathologist Quirke--a man he is linked to in increasingly...
Book cover for "The dry season"
Star rating for The dry season
Description:
"A wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge In the wake of a disastrous two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break--for three months she would abstain from dating, from relationships, even from casual sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship or another. As she puts it, she could trace a "daisy...
Book cover for "Edgar Allan Poe"
Star rating for Edgar Allan Poe
Description:
"Written by one of the world's leading experts on the life and literature of Edgar Allan Poe, this biography is a rich and rewarding study for the general reader as well as for the seasoned scholar. Richard Kopley combines a biographical narrative of Poe's enduring challenges-including his difficult foster father, his personal losses, his great struggles with depression and alcoholism, and the poverty that dogged his existence-with close readings...
Book cover for "El Cid"
Star rating for El Cid
Author:
Description:
"Exploring the creation of the El Cid legend over the centuries, this masterful and evocative biography peels away the layers of myth to reveal the real-life historical figure. El Cid was perhaps the most famous warrior involved in the indiscriminate fighting--irrespective of religion--on the Iberian Peninsula during the eleventh century. In the centuries after his death, he was transformed into a perfect Christian knight. In modernity, he was seen...
Book cover for "El Dorado Drive"
Star rating for El Dorado Drive
Description:
"When Harper moves in with her sister Pam, she's surprised to find Pam doing so well financially after her messy divorce. After all, Pam's ex-husband wiped their bank accounts, even stole from their kids. But Pam managed to find her way back. Thanks to the Wheel. Twice a month, the women of the Wheel meet. New members bring cash to the party that is pooled together and then gifted to one lucky member. It's all about giving back. Lifting each other...
Book cover for "The elements of Marie Curie"
Star rating for The elements of Marie Curie
Author:
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo's Daughter crafts a luminous chronicle of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many remarkable young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own. "Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name," writes Dava...
Book cover for "Elphie"
Star rating for Elphie
Series:
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"What happened to young Elphaba before her witchy powers took hold in Wicked? Almost 30 years after publication of the original novel, for the first time Gregory Maguire reveals the story of prickly young Elphie, the future Wicked Witch of the West."--
Book cover for "Empire falls"
Star rating for Empire falls
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Notes:
Ranked #1 for the Top Best Books On Life In Small Towns in the Wall Street Journal on July 26-27, 2025.
Description:
Milo Roby tries to hold his family together while working at the Empire Grill in the once-successful logging town of Empire Falls, Maine, with his partner, Mrs. Whiting, who is the heir to a faded logging and textile legacy.
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 "The end is the beginning"
Star rating for The end is the beginning
Description:
"Jill Bialosky, the poet behind the "tender, absorbing, and deeply moving memoir" (Entertainment Weekly) History of a Suicide, returns with a lyrical portrait of her mother's life, told in reverse order from burial to birth. When Iris Yvonne Bialosky died in an assisted care facility on March 29, 2020, it unleashed a torrent of emotions in her daughter, Jill Bialosky. Grief, of course, but also guilt, confusion, and doubt, all of which were compounded...
Book cover for "The enigma of room 622"
Star rating for The enigma of room 622
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"One night in December, a corpse is found in Room 622 of the Hotel Verbier, a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps. A police investigation begins without definite end, and public interest wanes with the passage of time. Years later, the writer Joel Dicker, Switzerland's most famous literary ingenue, arrives at that same hotel to recover from a bad breakup, mourn the death of his longtime publisher, and begin his next novel. Little does Joel know that his...
Book cover for "The escape artist"
Star rating for The escape artist
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz--one of only four who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world--and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them at the end of the railway line. Against all odds, he and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, climbed mountains, crossed rivers and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the...
Book cover for "Every valley"
Star rating for Every valley
Description:
"The epic, dramatic story of the 18th century men and women behind the making of Handel's Messiah, one of the world's most beloved works of classical music, from a New York Times bestselling historian and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. George Frideric Handel's Messiah is arguably the greatest piece of participatory art ever created. Adored by millions, it is performed each year by renowned choirs and orchestras as well as by fans singing...