3.61 avg rating — 16,299 ratings

"Like the project of the title — an intelligence report that the newly minted C.I.A. operative William “Skip” Sands comes to find both quixotic and useless — the Vietnam-era warfare of Johnson’s rueful, soulful novel lives in shadows, diversions and half-truths. There are no heroes here among the lawless colonels, assassinated priests and faith-stricken NGO nurses; only villainy and vast indifference."

3.66 avg rating — 28,599 ratings

"This elegant double helix of a novel entwines the stories of a fictional modern-day British girl and a real-life 15th-century Italian painter. A more conventional book might have explored the ways the past and present mirror each other, but Smith is after something much more radical. “How to Be Both” is a passionate, dialectical critique of the binaries that define and confine us. Not only male and female, but also real and imaginary, poetry and prose, living and dead. The way to be “both” is to recognize the extent to which everything already is. — A.O. Scott, critic at large for The Times"

3.94 avg rating — 340,602 ratings

"A famed opera singer performs for a Japanese executive’s birthday at a luxe private home in South America; it’s that kind of party. But when a group of young guerrillas swoops in and takes everyone in the house hostage, Patchett’s exquisitely calibrated novel — inspired by a real incident — becomes a piano wire of tension, vibrating on high."

4.30 avg rating — 30,291 ratings

4.40 avg rating — 5,321 ratings

4.31 avg rating — 108,186 ratings

3.79 avg rating — 94,008 ratings

4.06 avg rating — 651,054 ratings

3.86 avg rating — 64,471 ratings

3.92 avg rating — 47,387 ratings