This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Genre: Fiction
When: On sale now
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Daniyal Mueenuddin follows his 2009 short story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, with his debut novel set in contemporary feudal Pakistan.
Why It’s Worth a Look: This Is Where the Serpent Lives follows a dozen characters through the decades as they volley for respect, safety, power, and love between the country’s cities and farmlands. As they do, the moral choices and the advantageous ones brush against each other with delightful tension.
Departure(s) by Julian Barnes
Genre: Autofiction
When: On sale now
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: For his 80th birthday, author Julian Barnes has released what he says will be his last novel, a work of fiction that mostly comes across as nonfiction, with an aging author who comes to terms with his work, what’s left of it, and the health problems that have begun to ail him.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Our narrator spends the book assessing a couple he’s known for decades, whose story he’s longed to pen. He watches them through the years and a few (possibly real) diary entries before finally putting his pen into action.
Vigil by George Saunders
Genre: Fiction
When: January 27
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Booker Prize winner returns with a novel charting the last day of an oil company CEO. Visitors—alive and dead—travel to his bedside for a final reckoning. A long passed soul comes down to Earth to guide him into the afterlife.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Saunders himself spent time on an oil exploration crew in 1980s Sumatra and received a degree in geophysical engineering, making this an interesting return to form for a writer with an eclectic career preceding the one we all know him for.
Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Genre: Autofiction
When: February 3
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize winner Cristina Rivera Garza blends archival research, personal family history, and narrative fiction in this account of how cotton cultivation transformed the regions surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border.
Why It’s Worth a Look: As relationships between Mexico, the U.S., and the immigrants that travel the two are devastated in real time, Rivera Garza looks to the parallel degradation of land misused by our agricultural systems.
Days of Love and Rage by Anand Gopal
Genre: History
When: March 3
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Anand Gopal retells the story of the Syrian Revolution with help from six individuals who sparked a movement watched around the world.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Rather than attempt to match the scale of this movement in his storytelling, Gopal instead drills into the intimate moments of the individuals involved, highlighting their ability to move nations far greater than themselves.
Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue, translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Genre: Historical Fiction
When: March 3
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Publishers bill this book as “part epic, part alt-Western.” It retells the colonization of the Western U.S., this time through the story of hunting down Geronimo, a legendary Apache warrior, and that of a woman fleeing an Apache raid on her late husband’s ranch.
Why It’s Worth a Look: As is often the case with these kinds of expansive retellings, our protagonists are separated only by decades, and from us only by our imagined understanding of frontier times.
Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton
Genre: Fiction
When: March 17
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The author of Butter here turns her attention to the consuming pull of loneliness and ever-messy nature of female friendships. Her protagonist is Eriko, a buttoned-up trader who becomes fixated on a lifestyle blogger, Shoko, before orchestrating a meeting for the pair.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Admiration of course devolves into obsession in this tightly wound piece of work. It’s a story that’s been told before, but still packs a hell of a punch under Yuzuki’s guidance.
Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich
Genre: Short Stories
When: March 24
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich here compiles stories written over two decades with characters ranging from immigrant farmers to grade-school teachers to souls in the afterlife to folk music-inclined thieves.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The book includes a commissioned work of art by Erdrich’s own daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe, marking a singular collaboration between the two.
The Keeper by Tana French
Genre: Thriller
When: March 31
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Tana French is wrapping up her bestselling Cal Hooper trilogy with The Keeper, which sees a young woman go missing in the remote fictional Irish village of Ardnakelty.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The suspected crime tears the village apart at the seams, as old grudges and new rivalries come to light. What is our fearless, retired Chicago detective to do but step in?
London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe
Genre: True Crime
When: April 7
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: One night in 2019, an MI6 surveillance camera in London caught a man pacing back and forth, before jumping into the Thames to his death. Best-selling author Patrick Radden Keefe here outlines the stranger-than-fiction series of events that brought this man to the river.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Following Zac Brettler’s death, his family became aware of the 19-year-old’s alter ego, who had become entangled with the city’s criminal underground. His suicide suddenly seemed suspect despite the Scotland Yard’s resolute reluctance to look any further. Radden Keefe reveals why.
Transcription by Ben Lerner
Genre: Fiction
When: April 7
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Our narrator travels to Rhode Island to conduct the final interview of a renowned artist, Thomas, his 90-year-old mentor and the father of a college pal, Max. Unfortunately, our narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink before they begin, leaving him without a recording device as he heads into this seminal opportunity. He declines to confess this.
Why It’s Worth a Look: It’s every journalist’s worst nightmare, and yet, Lerner’s book still comes as a delightful exploration of mentorship, fatherhood, and a career in the arts, as well as a testament to our growing reliance on technology as a store of cultural memory.
Famesick by Lena Dunham
Genre: Memoir
When: April 14
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Here, Millenial lightning rod Lena Dunham lets readers in on life in the spotlight while dealing with addiction and chronic health issues that leave one feeling like they’re, as she puts it, “towing a wrecked car across town at midnight.”
Why It’s Worth a Look: Dunham goes back to first selling her pilot of Girls, and up through her current projects, based on life in London with her husband. Was the success worth the discomfort it brought? By the end of this tome, Dunham has found her answer.
Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez
Genre: Fiction
When: April 21
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: In the spring of 2007, Alicia Canales Forten is 26 and already too grown and stuffy for her liking. Then, she comes upon Fort Greene in New York, and an ecosystem of young adults living a very different lifestyle.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Bestseller Xochitl Gonzalez returns with a novel that simultaneously explores the perils of growing up and of living as a person of color on the eve of some of the country’s most culturally impactful years.
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