The Book Review

Imagine, if you will, that for unknown reasons North Korea has just launched a nuclear bomb at the United States. What happens next?

The journalist Annie Jacobsen has imagined exactly that, and spent more than a decade interviewing dozens of experts while mastering the voluminous literature on the subject — some of it declassified only in recent years — for her 2024 book “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” which walks readers through the 72 minutes from launch to global annihilation. In the Book Review last year, Barry Gewen said the book was “gripping,” and declared it essential reading “if you want to understand the complex and disturbing details that go into a civilization-destroying decision.”

This week, Jacobsen visits the podcast to talk about her book and why she wrote it, as well as offering some hope that catastrophe can be avoided. “I wanted to write a book that showed in absolutely appalling detail how horrific nuclear war would be,” she tells the host Gilbert Cruz. “And so when people say to me either ‘I could barely read your book, but I had to read it.’ or ‘I had to read it in one sitting, I was terrified, I was horrified,’ I believe I did my job.”

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Summer is the season for road trips, and also for road trip stories. Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” may be the most famous example in American literature — but there are lots of other great road trip books, so this week the Book Review’s staff critics Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai presented readers with a list of 18 of their favorites. On this episode of the podcast they chat with host Gilbert Cruz about the project, their picks and the top-down, wind blown, carefree appeal of the road trip narrative as a genre.

Books discussed in this episode:

“On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac

“Sing, Unburied, Sing,” by Jesmyn Ward

“Lost Children Archive,” by Valeria Luiselli

“I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home,” by Lorrie Moore

“Tramps Like Us," by Joe Westmoreland

“Driving Mr. Albert,” by Michael Paterniti

“Gypsy: A Memoir," by Gypsy Rose Lee

“The Dog of the South,” by Charles Portis

“All Fours,” by Miranda July

“Hearts,” by Hilma Wolitzer

“The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life,” by John le Carré

“Machine Dreams,” by Jayne Anne Phillips

“Lonesome Dove,” by Larry McMurtry

“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov

“The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck

“The Price of Salt,” by Patricia Highsmith

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

In this month’s installment of the Book Review Book Club, we’re discussing “The Catch,” the debut novel by the poet and memoirist Yrsa Daley-Ward. The book is a psychological thriller that follows semi-estranged twin sisters, Clara and Dempsey, who were babies when their mother was presumed to have drowned in the Thames.

The novel begins decades later, when Clara sees something strange: A woman who looks just like their mother is stealing a watch. Clara believes this is her mother, and wants to welcome her back into her life. Dempsey is less certain, in part because the woman doesn’t seem to have aged a day. She believes the woman is a con artist because it’s simply not possible for her to be their mother … right?

What’s real? What’s not? And what does that mean for the lives of these struggling sisters? Daley-Ward unpacks it all in her deliciously slippery novel. On this episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin talks about “The Catch” with fellow Book Review editors Jennifer Harlan and Sadie Stein.

Other books mentioned in this week’s episode:

“The Other Black Girl,” by Zakiya Dalila Harris

“The Haunting of Hill House,” by Shirley Jackson

“Wish Her Safe at Home,” by Stephen Benatar

“Erasure,” by Percival Everett 

“Playworld,” by Adam Ross 

“The House on the Strand,” by Daphne du Maurier

“Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” by Max Porter

“The Furrows,” by Namwali Serpell

“Dead in Long Beach, California,” by Venita Blackburn

“The Vanishing Half,” by Brit Bennett

“Death Takes Me,” by Cristina Rivera Garza

“Audition,” by Katie Kitamura

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We’re halfway through 2025, and we at the Book Review have already written about hundreds of books. Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the ones that just won’t let us go. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib talk about some of the best books of the year so far.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“King of Ashes,” by S.A. Cosby

“The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann

“A Marriage at Sea,” by Sophie Elmhirst

“Careless People,” by Sarah Wynn-Williams

“Isola,” by Allegra Goodman

“The Catch,” by Yrsa Daley-Ward

“Daughters of the Bamboo Grove,” by Barbara Demick

“The Sisters,” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

“The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” by Stephen Graham Jones

“Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin,” by Sue Prideaux

“Raising Hare,” by Chloe Dalton

“To Smithereens,” by Rosalyn Drexler

“The Fate of the Day,” by Rick Atkinson

“Flesh,” by David Szalay

“Things in Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li

“These Summer Storms,” by Sarah MacLean

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Some time ago, the British journalist Sophie Elmhirst was reporting a story about people who try to escape the land and to live on the water. “I found myself trolling around as you do in these moments, online and on a website devoted to castaway stories and shipwreck stories,” she tells host Gilbert Cruz. “There were lots of photographs and tales of lone wild men who were pitched up on desert islands and had various escapades. And in among all of these was a tiny little black-and-white picture of a man and a woman."

The couple were Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a husband and wife who took to the seas from 1970s England, selling their suburban home to buy a boat and sail to New Zealand. Nine months into the trip, a sperm whale breached under their boat, leaving them stranded on a crude raft with an assortment of salvaged items, luckily including water, canned food, a camera — and a biography of King Richard III. Elmhirst tells the Baileys’ story in her new book, “A Marriage at Sea."

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.