The First Time I Saw Him
by Laura Dave
Owen is back! Five years after his disappearance activated the smash page-turner “The Last Thing He Told Me,” the tech exec with a shady past makes contact with his wife, Hannah, and her stepdaughter, Bailey. In staccato bursts of dialogue and description, the plot hurtles from there: Hannah and Bailey hit the road, while we flash back to learn how Owen may (or may not) have run afoul of the law. Jennifer Garner starred in the Apple TV+ mini-series based on the first book; Season 2, based on the sequel, starts in February.
Scribner, Jan. 6
Watching Over Her
by Jean-Baptiste Andrea; translated by Frank Wynne
After selling more than a million copies in France and taking home its top literary prize, Andrea’s novel arrives stateside. This richly populated tale follows a young sculptor whose disadvantages (poverty, dwarfism, lack of family) hardly limit his ambitions as both an artist and the “cosmic twin” of another fiercely intelligent outsider, the defiant daughter of an Italian nobleman.
Simon & Schuster, Jan. 6
The Spy in the Archive
by Gordon Corera
Corera’s real-life thriller tells the story of Vasili Mitrokhin, a K.G.B. archivist turned dissident, who used his unusual access to classified documents to expose state secrets. While the race to extricate the increasingly imperiled Mitrokhin from the Soviet Union is exciting, it’s Corera’s treatment of one man’s internal journey that really raises the stakes.
Pegasus, Jan. 6
American Reich
by Eric Lichtblau
Back home from college for winter break in 2018, Blaze Bernstein knew the guy asking him on a date had been a neo-Nazi when they were in high school in Orange County, Calif., together, but he was nevertheless intrigued. Lichtblau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times journalist, illuminates the awful tragedy of their meet up and shows how Orange County became a seedbed for white supremacy.
Little, Brown, Jan. 6
Advance Britannia
by Alan Allport
In the typical story of World War II, American legions came to the rescue of the British, who couldn’t wait for the help. Not so fast, writes Allport, a historian at Syracuse University, in this second volume of a two-part portrait of the British end of the fighting. His vivid chronicle immerses readers in the sorry state of the remaining British colonies and follows Prime Minister Winston Churchill as he struggles to keep American weapons flowing — even as he sees the danger of what U.S. involvement will mean for the fate of his country’s empire.
Knopf, Jan. 6
The School of Night
by Karl Ove Knausgaard; translated by Martin Aitken
The fourth novel in Knausgaard’s Morning Star series continues his foray into the metaphysical (and macabre). With echoes of “Doctor Faustus,” the story concerns a young photographer in 1985 London whose ambition and self-regard lead him into a devil’s bargain for success. The costs, of course, are high and inevitable.
Penguin Press, Jan. 13
This Is Where the Serpent Lives
by Daniyal Mueenuddin
In his first novel, Mueenuddin weaves a sweeping tale of class conflict and ambition in Pakistan, focusing on members of a wealthy clan and those who serve them. Some are strivers who find that corruption, violence, tragedy and even love often get in the way of their dreams. Others occupy powerful perches already and are disinclined to share them.
Knopf, Jan. 13
The Hitch
by Sara Levine
If only Queen Elizabeth were still around to read Levine’s second novel, the oddball tale of a 6-year-old boy who insists he’s being inhabited by the soul of a recently deceased corgi. Narrating the story, and frantically trying to set things right, is the boy’s aunt, a yogurt mogul with boundary issues who agreed to play parent for one brief week. An emergency exorcism wasn’t on the calendar.
Roxane Gay Books, Jan. 13
We Would Have Told Each Other Everything
by Judith Hermann; translated by Katy Derbyshire
Two years after leaving psychoanalysis, the narrator of this autofictional work bumps into her ex-therapist on the street in Berlin, and the pair decide to head to a bar. From there the novel steps back in time, recalling the narrator’s unconventional childhood (born in 1970, she grew up in a foreboding, dread-inflected atmosphere), her friendships and how these early memories continue to influence her writing. “The family is not the only monstrous thing that happens to you,” she writes. “In the end, everything is monstrous.”
FSG Originals, Jan. 13
Strangers
by Belle Burden
In 2023, Burden went viral with a Modern Love essay entitled “Was I Married to a Stranger?” Here, she explores the full heart-shock of that episode — the sudden disintegration of a long and largely joyful marriage, undone weeks into the pandemic by the revelation that her husband had not only been unfaithful but also seemed to wish to vanish almost entirely from their shared life, which included three young children.
Dial Press, Jan. 13
The Mattering Instinct
by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Forget the sex drive, the death drive, the biological imperative to survive and reproduce. According to the philosopher and novelist Goldstein, what really sets humans apart from other species is our desire to matter. Drawing on thinkers from Descartes and Wittgenstein to William James, “The Mattering Instinct” makes a provocative case that an instinctual belief that we are deserving of attention, from ourselves and others, motivates our behavior — for good and, sometimes, ill.
Liveright, Jan. 13
Nothing Random
by Gayle Feldman
Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House who published everyone from Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Dr. Seuss, was as legendary a wit and bon vivant as he was a literary figure. Feldman’s comprehensive biography paints a vivid portrait of the man, 20th-century New York and the golden age of American publishing.
Random House, Jan. 13
Fly, Wild Swans
by Jung Chang
Chang’s follow-up to her wildly popular 1991 memoir “Wild Swans,” which has sold some 15 million copies, delves further into her family’s political history within the tumult of 20th-century China, her own 1978 escape to the West via higher education in London and the maternal ties that still bind her to the homeland she left nearly 50 years ago.
Harper, Jan. 13
Half His Age
by Jennette McCurdy
From its title to its cover to its first line and beyond, McCurdy’s follow-up to the blockbuster memoir “I’m Glad My Mom Died” isn’t designed to comfort. Waldo — a jaded teenager subsisting on fast fashion, frozen dinners and bitterness — grows obsessed with Mr. Korgy, her high school creative writing teacher. No matter his “thinning hair and nose pores,” McCurdy (a connoisseur of the ugly detail) writes. “This is someone who has faced, head-on, the disappointing reality of where their life landed, and is willing to be direct and vulnerable about it.”
Ballantine, Jan. 20
Tangerinn
by Emanuela Anechoum; translated by Lucy Rand
Early comparisons to Elena Ferrante and Sally Rooney have certainly not hurt the prospects of this debut novel, which centers on the rocky grieving process of a 30-year-old Italian Moroccan woman who returns home from London to the Calabrian coast to face her emotional inheritance after the death of her semi-estranged father.
Europa, Jan. 20
Crux
by Gabriel Tallent
Nine years after “My Absolute Darling,” Tallent returns with a literary coming-of-age novel about two young people trying to transcend their hardscrabble circumstances. Tamma and Dan are high school seniors grappling with poverty and instability in their Mojave Desert town. They share a passion for rock climbing that they hope will help them escape. But bouldering comes with its own dangers — and all the while, each must confront a series of personal challenges that threaten the lives they dream of.
Riverhead, Jan. 20
Discipline
by Larissa Pham
A debut novelist’s thinly veiled account of her exploitation by an art professor looks like a career maker — until the teacher starts messaging her, and the lines between them get smudged all over again. While “Discipline” sounds like a thriller, Pham makes room for terse reflections on ambition, envy, creative exhaustion and the paintings of Vija Celmins. The book may also leave you wondering: Just what is going on in M.F.A. programs today?
Random House, Jan. 20
The Poet Empress
by Shen Tao
Tao’s fantasy debut follows Wei Yin, a poor village girl in a famine-stricken kingdom who finds herself unexpectedly chosen as the future bride of the realm’s cruel crown prince. Within the palace walls, Wei must navigate deadly rumors, assassination attempts and unspoken magic as she comes into her power and learns just how far she is willing to go to save the ones she loves.
Bramble, Jan. 20
One Aladdin Two Lamps
by Jeanette Winterson
The author of the queer-lit classic “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” and the best-selling memoir “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” creates something of her own literary form in this wide-ranging collection of personal essays, culture war polemic and stray thoughts, all collated within the classic framework of the story of Shahrazad in “One Thousand and One Nights.”
Grove, Jan. 20
Two Women Living Together
by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo; translated by Gene Png
A best seller in South Korea, this double memoir tells the tale of Hana and Sunwoo, platonic friends who, in their 40s, decided to buy a house and live permanently together. It’s a story of two strong personalities (and multiple cats) dealing with the stresses and pleasures of midlife, but it’s also an examination of roads taken and untaken, and of what it means to choose a family.
Ecco, Jan. 20
The Oak and the Larch
by Sophie Pinkham
Russia’s dramatic cultural, sociological and, of course, political shifts have shaped world history. Through it all, its vast forests — still around one-fifth of the world’s woodlands — have borne witness. In this unique biography of a place through its trees, Pinkham studies not merely Russia’s ecological history and future, but the nation’s beating heart.
Norton, Jan. 20
Five Bullets
by Elliot Williams
Two books this month revisit the 1984 shooting on a New York City subway of four unarmed Black teenagers by the white vigilante Bernie Goetz. The first, by Williams, a CNN legal analyst, incorporates interviews with investigators, lawyers, witnesses and Goetz himself to suggest how the case — a media sensation that divided the nation — became a Rorschach test for Americans’ attitudes toward race, crime and justice.
Penguin Press, Jan. 20
Vigil
by George Saunders
An oil executive has one night left to live in Saunders’s new novel, and the ghost who’s sent to visit him before he dies does her best to make him reckon with his sins. This man, however, harbors no regrets and touts his triumphs, despite the visions he is shown of the damage he and his industry have wrought on the world. Is redemption possible? Does it even matter?
Random House, Jan. 27
Fear and Fury
by Heather Ann Thompson
When did white rage become normalized? This is the question that drew Thompson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, to the Bernie Goetz case, which in her deeply researched account becomes a through line to the present: the event that, against a backdrop of growing inequality and racial resentment in the early 1980s, first gave legal cover to white vigilantism, creating a template increasingly embraced on the right today.
Pantheon, Jan. 27
Hated by All the Right People
by Jason Zengerle
When the on-again-off-again Trump ally Tucker Carlson was booted from Fox News two years ago, most observers figured his star had finally fallen. But Carlson proved himself an able chameleon, adapting to the ever more chaotic energies of political podcasting. This will be no surprise to readers of Zengerle’s evenhanded biography of Carlson, which shows how the conservative son of a veteran broadcaster rose out of the respectable print weeklies of early 2000s New York before making the leap to cable news and into the frenetic hearts of the American right.
Crooked Media Reads, Jan. 27
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