Lake Effect
by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
The latest from the best-selling author of “The Nest” and “Good Company” opens on a suburban idyll in Rochester, N.Y., circa 1977: beef wellington on the dinner table, “The Joy of Sex” stashed high on a bookshelf. A love affair between neighbors introduces a wrecking ball, leading to two divorces and a remarriage that reconfigures both their families; the effects of that rift play out over the next several decades.
Ecco, March 3
Now I Surrender
by Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer
Described as “part epic, part alt-Western,” Enrigue’s latest novel reimagines a three-front war between Apaches, Mexico and the United States during the 19th century. It begins with the abduction of a young Mexican woman, then continues through Geronimo’s fateful surrender and into the present.
Riverhead, March 3
A Far-Flung Life
by M.L. Stedman
It’s been 14 years since the release of Stedman’s breakout debut novel, “The Light Between Oceans.” This spring, she returns with another sprawling and unmistakably Australian melodrama. The new book is set on a remote sheep station in the Outback and propelled by a terrible accident that opens the story, triggering several decades of loss, rebirth and family secrets.
Scribner, March 3
The Violet Hour
by James Cahill
In Cahill’s second novel, the lives of a billionaire collector, a New York gallerist and an elusive superstar painter collide with the mysterious death of a young man, whose plunge off a London balcony in the book’s opening pages sets the stage for an exploration of power, class and ambition in the world of blue-chip art.
Pegasus, March 3
Star Shipped
by Cat Sebastian
A beloved stalwart of historical romance, Sebastian turns her attention to this century with her first contemporary novel, about rival co-stars on a science fiction TV show. While the carriages and Rolodexes of her previous work may have been replaced by hot rods and cellphones, her trademarks remain: a tender grumpy-sunshine slow burn, queer joy and oodles of yearning (plus an emotional support dog).
Avon, March 3
The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts
by Kim Fu
Eleanor is a therapist whose life is in free fall. She’s struggling professionally; her mother, who kept her afloat, has just died; and she is generally floundering in a maelstrom of depression. Hoping to fulfill her mother’s dying wish, Eleanor uses her inheritance to buy a new home — but that house soon begins to crumble even as Eleanor’s grief and fraying psyche begin to manifest ghosts.
Tin House, March 3
Days of Love and Rage
by Anand Gopal
Feeling revolutionary this year? Forget Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson: This chronicle of the Syrian Civil War tells the story of a revolution through the experiences of six dissidents and agitators who fought against tyranny in the city of Manbij. Based on 1,000 interviews, Gopal’s epic story immerses readers in the group’s lives as they struggle to advance the democratic experiment in the 21st century.
Simon & Schuster, March 3
You With the Sad Eyes
by Christina Applegate
A working actress since the age of 4, Applegate addresses everything here from her tumultuous childhood in the California hippie enclave of Laurel Canyon and her emergence as a teenage sex symbol on the long-running sitcom “Married … With Children” to her ongoing battle with multiple sclerosis, which cruelly derailed a midlife career resurgence.
Little, Brown, March 3
The Complex
by Karan Mahajan
Mahajan follows the descendants of an Indian politician in his new novel, a sweeping tale of political machinations, family drama, betrayal and social transformation. Among the scions is Laxman Chopra, a hapless businessman and lecher who struts and frets his way onto the national stage by joining the far right. His nephew Sachin hopes to make a life for himself in Michigan with his wife, Gita, whose own dealings with Laxman haunt her for years.
Viking, March 10
Whidbey
by T Kira Madden
Madden’s latest is a literary thriller about a trio of women grappling with the repercussions of abuse: Birdie, who flees to the remote island of Whidbey after the man who sexually assaulted her as a child is released from prison; Linzie, a former reality TV star whose memoir about her own experiences with the same abuser has parallels to Birdie’s story; and Mary Beth, the abuser’s mother. As their stories weave together, “Whidbey” explores how crime echoes into the present, and alters the lives of everyone in its orbit.
Mariner, March 10
Judy Blume
by Mark Oppenheimer
She’s written more than 25 novels, mentored countless other writers, seen her books banned and changed the lives of kids worldwide. Now, at 88, Judy Blume gets a full-dress biography, courtesy of a veteran journalist and chronicler of Jewish American culture. “Is there another contemporary author,” Oppenheimer writes, “who has so collapsed the distance between herself and her readership?”
Putnam, March 10
Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!
by Liza Minnelli
In the annals of showbiz survivors, has there ever been anyone more showbiz, and more a survivor, than Minnelli? This memoir (as told to the singer Michael Feinstein) hits the professional highs (an Oscar, an Emmy and three Tonys), the personal highs (those nights at Studio 54) and plenty of the lows, including four marriages and about as many trips to rehab. Among those making spicy cameos: Halston, Stephen Sondheim and Lady Gaga.
Grand Central, March 10
A Scandal in Königsberg
by Christopher Clark
In 1835, the Prussian city of Königsberg was roiled by a sex scandal, leading to criminal charges against two popular Lutheran preachers who were accused of starting a cult and promoting promiscuity and religious heresy. In this account of a moral panic with echoes of our day, Clark, a noted scholar of German history, pinpoints the factors that fed public outrage and the authorities who manipulated it for political gain.
Penguin Press, March 10
In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man
by Tom Junod
Lou Junod, a perpetually tanned, head-turningly handsome, martini-swilling, woman-chasing, red Thunderbird-driving Long Island handbag salesman, commanded such powers of seduction that few were immune to his charms — not even his youngest son, a prizewinning magazine writer. In this bittersweet memoir, that son seeks to unravel the mystery of his larger-than-life dad, a guy who presumed to know “the secret to being a man.”
Doubleday, March 10
Sisters in Yellow
by Mieko Kawakami; translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio
After reading about a kidnapping in the newspaper, a woman reflects on the unsettling friendship she had with an older, mysterious friend of her mother’s, beginning when she was a teenager. She and this woman lived together and started a dive bar, called Lemon, but as their business grew so did the potential for betrayal. Kawakami continues a trend of writing stories about twisted relationships, after novels like “Breasts and Eggs” and “Heaven.”
Knopf, March 17
Stay Alive
by Ian Buruma
How do people get by under authoritarianism? That’s the question that haunts this human-scale chronicle of Berlin during the Third Reich. Through letters, journals and memoirs, Buruma paints the portraits of everyday Berliners who did their best to keep their heads down, conform or compromise when the Nazis took over and dictatorship turned to war and genocide.
Penguin Press, March 17
Chain of Ideas
by Ibram X. Kendi
The author of the acclaimed 2019 treatise “How to Be an Antiracist” is back with another book about the state of Western bigotry. This time his focus is “great replacement theory,” the concept that there is an elite conspiracy to nudge white people in Europe and the United States off the map by encouraging low birthrates and promoting an influx of Black and brown immigrants. Kendi argues that replacement theory animates much of our politics today and traces its evolution from the tirades of a French novelist to halls of power in Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Donald Trump’s America.
One World, March 17
Salt Lakes
by Caroline Tracey
Tracey ventures across continents and millenniums to study the history, geology and future of an incredible natural phenomenon: salt lakes, nearly all of which are in danger of disappearing. From the Aral Sea to the Great Salt Lake in Utah, she takes the reader on a personal and geographical tour of some of the most uncanny and unknown parts of our world.
Norton, March 17
The Beheading Game
by Rebecca Lehmann
Anne Boleyn is dead; long live Anne Boleyn. In Lehmann’s playful revisionist history, Henry VIII’s second wife wakes up in a box after her execution, sews her head back on with a needle and thread and gets down to the business of assuring her daughter Elizabeth’s ascendance to the throne (or, if you want to put a finer point on it, revenge).
Crown, March 24
How Flowers Made Our World
by David George Haskell
We are a floral species, argues the naturalist Haskell, in this wide-ranging celebration of nature’s “beautiful revolutionaries.” The book examines the myriad ways in which flowers have formed the human world, and the remarkable adaptations they have made to it.
Viking, March 24
Darkology
by Rhae Lynn Barnes
This cultural history may begin by focusing on blackface performance on stage and screen, but it broadens out to consider how minstrelsy came to be accepted as lighthearted entertainment on college campuses and within fraternal organizations well into the 20th century. “Amateur minstrelsy was no sideshow,” writes Barnes, a Princeton University historian. “It was at the dark and ever-present center of modern American life.”
Liveright, March 24
A Good Person
by Kirsten King
A misanthropic and possibly alcoholic 20-something marketing manager named Lillian is doing her best to turn a bad situationship into a bona fide relationship when she is abruptly dumped. Days after their ugly breakup, the man in question turns up dead, stabbed outside a bar. Did she manifest his end? King’s debut, with its deeply unreliable narrator and zigzagging plot, evokes a zillennial “Gone Girl.”
Putnam, March 31
The Keeper
by Tana French
In the third and final volume of French’s detective series starring Cal Hooper, a young woman’s drowning brings to light the ugliest secrets of Ardnakelty, Ireland. As the small town grieves, longstanding feuds and rivalries implicate nearly everyone in the search for the truth behind the girl’s death.
Viking, March 31
Son of Nobody
by Yann Martel
A modern-day scholar discovers an alternate telling of the Trojan War — a long-lost Greek epic poem called “The Psoad” that is narrated by a “nobody” named Psoas of Midea. The scholar’s translations of the poem make up the main text of this novel, though the heart of the story lies in his extensive footnotes, where we learn about the academic’s own history and personal drama.
Norton, March 31
Upward Bound
by Woody Brown
Though he doesn’t speak and communicates through a letter board, Brown has an M.F.A. in writing from Columbia University, where he wrote much of this singular debut novel. “I wanted to show readers what it’s like to be constantly underestimated and misunderstood,” he said of the book, a set of interconnected stories that follow the clients and staff of an adult day care center for the disabled in Southern California.
Hogarth, March 31
Kutchinsky’s Egg
by Serena Kutchinsky
When Kutchinsky was a child, her life was turned upside down by her father’s obsession with crafting the world’s largest jeweled egg. Long after her family’s jewelry firm had been ruined and her family decimated by the scope of her father’s fixation, the author returns to the demons that drove him — and the mystery of the missing Argyle Library Egg.
Scribner, March 31
True Color
by Kory Stamper
While working as a dictionary editor, Stamper became fascinated by some of Merriam-Webster’s color descriptions — and by their equally colorful author, I.H. Godlove. Stamper brings us the story not just of one eccentric man’s fascinating life, but of 20th-century color science, aesthetics, industry and psychology in all their vibrant hues.
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