Gliff
By Ali Smith
Briar and Rose, the teenage siblings at the center of Smith’s latest novel, may have fairy-tale names, but their world is a sinister version of our own, where citizens deemed undesirable are labeled “Unverifiables.” Squatting in an abandoned house, the siblings must navigate this digitally advanced surveillance state’s cruelties alone, discovering, in Smith’s characteristically brainy tale — the first in a two-book series — small means of resistance and hope.
Source Code
By Bill Gates
The title promises the origin story of a programming whiz, but Gates’s memoir — the first of a projected three — incorporates plenty of analog detail along with the digital as he retraces a Seattle boyhood steeped in hiking, camping, competitive card-playing (under the tutelage of a grandmother who’d intuitively mastered “probabilities, decision trees and game theory”) and his auspicious friendships with a posse of preternaturally gifted young men who saw the future of computing in a lumbering 1960s mainframe.
Isola
By Allegra Goodman
A 16th-century French noblewoman and her lover are abandoned on a Canadian island in Goodman’s historical novel. Orphaned at the age of 3, the woman is the heir to a fortune — until she is cheated of her inheritance by her cruel guardian and marooned. With grim prospects in an Arctic climate, she and her partner must find ways to survive the winter and hold out hope for rescue.
Memorial Days
By Geraldine Brooks
Brooks and her husband, Tony Horwitz, had been reporters in war zones, but nothing prepared her for his sudden death, at just 60, after three decades together. Four years later, she journeyed to a remote island near Tasmania “to do the unfinished work of grieving.” This memoir is her report back, at once a spare accounting of tragic detail and an appreciation of the healing properties of solitude.
Cleavage
By Jennifer Finney Boylan
In her latest memoir, Boylan opens up about aging, parenthood and marriage — and the differences between coming out as trans in 2000 and today, with gender on the front lines of political debate. Boylan has a unique perspective, having navigated the world in two genders, and she augments her own experience with a big-picture examination of what it means to be who you are.
Soft Core
By Brittany Newell
Mordant and sharp-eyed, Ruth is a stripper new to the scene who coolly observes the neon-lit club where she works, and the gentrifying San Francisco where she plays, in Newell’s second novel. The author, a Bay Area professional dominatrix, serves up insider details — the ground rules of the dressing room are especially rich — and stirs in a mystery: Why does Ruth (stage name Baby) keep seeing her missing ex-boyfriend all over town?
The Bones Beneath My Skin
By TJ Klune
Everything in Nate’s life is going wrong — his parents are dead, his journalism career in shambles — when he arrives at his family’s old vacation cabin hoping to escape. Instead, he is greeted by a strange little girl and a wounded man who holds him at gunpoint. After forming a begrudging alliance with the intruders, Nate finds himself caught up in a web of car chases, government conspiracies and alien encounters, all wrapped around a heartwarming story of love and found family set in the 1990s.
Rogues and Scholars
By James Stourton
This rollicking history of the modern London art market takes us from World War II to the present day, charting the shift from a business of decorous private transactions to the glitz, hype and rivalry we know today. Stourton, a longtime director at Sotheby’s UK, brings an insider’s authority to this story of big money, bigger egos and great art.
Shattered
By Hanif Kureishi
The British writer Kureishi fell and injured himself in 2022 while in Rome; when he came to, he was almost completely paralyzed. This memoir tracks his grueling, humiliating and eventually inspiring recovery in wide-ranging dispatches, which are filled with dark humor and musings on his past and on life’s many unpredictable events.
Stone Yard Devotional
By Charlotte Wood
Wood’s Booker Prize-nominated novel is finally coming to the United States this month. The book follows an unnamed woman who absconds from her life to live at a remote convent in Australia. Once there, a series of dramas — including a plague of mice, the return of a beloved nun’s remains after her tragic death and the appearance of a former classmate — all unsettle her understanding of peace and grace.
Casualties of Truth
By Lauren Francis-Sharma
A brutal history lesson in the guise of a thriller, Francis-Sharma’s third novel, about the horrific legacies of South African apartheid, jumps back and forth between 1996 Johannesburg and 2018 Washington, D.C., where the wife in a wealthy Black “power couple” encounters a shadowy figure from her past. Beneath the tightly plotted narrative, the author explores the nature and function of amnesty and human rights.
Booster Shots
By Adam Ratner
Ratner, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist, has written a must-read on one of the major crises of our time: vaccine skepticism. Focusing on the history of measles, Ratner combines patient narrative and scientific research to examine the successful fight against this deadly childhood disease, the decreasing trust in government that has led to its preventable resurgence, and how we can — and must — correct course.
Three Days in June
By Anne Tyler
How do divorced, socially awkward parents navigate their daughter’s wedding weekend? Ask Anne Tyler. Her latest novel unfolds in the lead-up to the nuptials of Gail and Max Baines’s only child. The pair approach the celebration as outsiders while puzzling over an 11th-hour bombshell that might derail the whole affair. Throw in a homeless cat and an exclusive spa day and you have the blueprint for a short, bittersweet Tyler original.
Lorne
By Susan Morrison
“Saturday Night Live” turns 50 this year, making it one of the longest-running shows on network television. But the man who created and still produces it, 80-year-old Lorne Michaels, whose distinctive brand of deadpan conceptual humor revolutionized American comedy, remains an elusive figure. For this panoramic biography, Morrison, the articles editor for The New Yorker, interviewed hundreds of writers and stars, along with Michaels himself, yielding an enthralling portrait of this country’s pre-eminent maestro of funny.
Nesting
By Roisín O’Donnell
A mother of two young daughters (with a third child on the way) tries to escape a violent household in this Irish novelist’s debut. Though he’s the breadwinner of the family, Ciara’s husband has taken away far more than he’s provided: her financial and physical autonomy, her children’s safety, her ability to trust herself. The novel deftly portrays an insidious aspect of domestic abuse: It’s one thing to decide to leave, and it’s another to maintain the strength to stay away.
Nothing Serious
By Emily J. Smith
By many measures, old college friends Edie and Peter seem destined to end up together. But this debut rom-com keeps putting obstacles in their way: behaving like siblings, crummy online dates, the dazzle of tech money, anxiety about middle age — and a mysterious death.
Crush
By Ada Calhoun
A polyamory tale for Generation X, Calhoun’s autobiographical debut novel is about an unnamed Brooklyn writer who receives permission, even encouragement, from her husband to kiss other men. Discovering new aspects of pleasure and desire in middle age, she spends the rest of the book trying not to cheat on him with a hot, nerdy professor with whom she exchanges obscure and protracted emails about unconsummated love and Nietzsche.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
By Omar El Akkad
In this bracing memoir and manifesto, El Akkad examines the American and European responses to the Hamas-led massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent devastation in Gaza, while looking back on his own life as a war correspondent and Arab immigrant in the West. With precision and passion, he compels readers to close the emotional distance between “us” and “them” and to consider the immense suffering of civilians with renewed urgency.
Death Takes Me
By Cristina Rivera Garza; translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker
In 2024, Rivera Garza won a Pulitzer Prize for her memoir about her sister’s murder. Now she returns to the subject of femicide from a new angle: a novel about a professor who is roped into a police investigation after a series of men are castrated and murdered. At the scene of each crime are feminist poems, each issuing warnings and raising questions of justice, violence and retribution.
Air-Borne
By Carl Zimmer
What is in the air we breathe? That is the question Zimmer, an award-winning New York Times science writer, sets out to answer in this brisk, lyrical tour of aerobiology — from germ warfare and the identification of airborne viruses to the proliferation of Covid and lifesaving discoveries that lend color and shape to the invisible.
The post 20 Books Coming in February appeared first on New York Times.
