'The Correspondent' Author Virginia Evans On Her Breakout Year
9 January - 40 minsVirginia Evans’s debut novel, “The Correspondent,” was published last April and became one of the publishing industry’s heartwarming champions of 2025: a slow-burn success story that gathered momentum over the summer and fall and finally topped the New York Times hardcover best-seller list in December. For Evans, who had written and failed to sell seven previous novels, the book’s popularity has felt magical, as she explains to host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s podcast.
“I went on a kind of a brief book tour in the fall, meeting hundreds of people,” Evans says, “and … different bookstores were starting to say, this is becoming a thing, we can’t keep it in the store. We keep running out of st...
Series Episodes
Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘What We Can Know’
Ian McEwan’s latest novel, one of the Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2025, is a literary mystery about a scholar’s search for a long-lost poem.
51 mins
27 December 2025 Finished
What Did 2025 Mean for Books?
On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin talks with his Book Review colleagues Alexandra Alter, Tina Jordan and John Maher about the biggest book stories and most significant reading trends of 2025.
47 mins
19 December 2025 Finished
Our Book Critics on Their 2025 in Reading
On this episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks with New York Times Book Review critics Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai about their standout fiction and nonfiction of the past 12 months.
36 mins
12 December 2025 Finished
The 10 Best Books of 2025
In this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz gathers a group of fellow editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year.
1 hour 18 mins
2 December 2025 Finished
Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Hamnet'
In this week's episode, host MJ Franklin leads a discussion about Maggie O'Farrell's "Hamnet" — one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2020, and the source of Chloé Zhao’s new movie of the same name.
1 hour 2 mins
28 November 2025 Finished
