18 New Books Coming in January
Mercury, by Amy Jo Burns
Burns’s second novel introduces the Josephs, a roofing family in Mercury, Pa., who — along with a young woman in search of her own place in the world — find themselves at an inflection point forged by long-ago choices.
Celadon, Jan. 2
The Storm We Made, by Vanessa Chan
This ambitious and sweeping debut novel explores the fallout of a Malayan woman’s decision to become a spy for Japanese forces during World War II. Seduced by promises of an “Asia for Asians,” she instead helps usher in a brutal occupation with devastating costs for her family.
Marysue Rucci Books, Jan. 2
Ædnan: An Epic, by Linnea Axelsson; translated by Saskia Vogel
Axelsson’s novel in verse, about the challenges confronting two Sámi families during 100 years of colonialism and migration, won Sweden’s top literary prize in 2018. The book opens in the 1910s with an accident among reindeer herders and culminates a century later with a battle over land rights and Indigenous reparations.
Knopf, Jan. 9
The Furies: Women, Vengeance and Justice, by Elizabeth Flock
What happens when women resort to violence to defend themselves? This question propels Flock’s intricately reported account of three women navigating starkly different cultural contexts: a rape victim in Tennessee, a leader of a gang fighting domestic abuse in India and a member of an all-female militia combating ISIS in Syria.
Harper, Jan. 9
My Friends, by Hisham Matar
Matar’s new novel, his first since winning the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir “The Return” in 2017, follows a Libyan man named Khaled who leaves Benghazi to study in the United Kingdom and never returns. Two friendships ground his life: one with another young Libyan who brings Khaled to an anti-Qaddafi demonstration in London, altering their lives forever, and the other with an enigmatic older writer.
Random House, Jan. 9
Swamp Monsters: Trump vs. DeSantis — the Greatest Show on Earth (or at Least in Florida), by Matt Dixon
The NBC News reporter Matt Dixon investigates the sometimes warm, sometimes tense and now outright adversarial relationship between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. With fresh insights from a chorus of mostly anonymous political insiders, he charts DeSantis’s rise from relative obscurity in Congress to the Florida governor’s mansion and into the race for the White House.
Little, Brown, Jan. 9
You Dreamed of Empires, by Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer
A historical novel set in 1519, at the moment the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City), Enrigue’s feverish tale paints a picture of the city in its earlier glory and imagines another outcome for the land and its people.
Riverhead, Jan. 9
The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, by Manjula Martin
Exquisitely attuned to her Northern California landscape, Martin trains her gaze on wilderness ravaged by wildfire, and on her own body, hobbled by a chronic pain condition, teasing out the intricate connections between human beings and the natural world on which they depend.
Pantheon, Jan. 16
More: A Memoir of Open Marriage, by Molly Roden Winter
In this memoir, a Brooklyn mother of two opens up about her open marriage — and her search for growth, fulfillment and a mold-breaking definition of family.
Doubleday, Jan. 16
Cold Crematorium: Reporting From the Land of Auschwitz, by József Debreczeni; translated by Paul Olchváry
This is the first English language edition of a 1950 Holocaust memoir by the Hungarian journalist and poet Debreczeni. Left untranslated and largely forgotten for decades thanks to Cold War politics, it offers a cleareyed view of the Nazi death machine with shades of gallows humor, tragedy and anthropological insight.
St. Martin’s, Jan. 23
Dead in Long Beach, California, by Venita Blackburn
In Blackburn’s latest, an author, grieving her brother, begins impersonating him rather than telling people he died, a ruse that becomes more and more difficult as her sense of reality destabilizes.
MCDxFSG, Jan. 23
Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum, by Antonia Hylton
Combining 10 years of reportage and research, “Madness” traces the 93-year history of one of the country’s last segregated asylums, Maryland’s Crownsville State Hospital. This lacerating indictment of America’s treatment of Black health is also a highly personal work of history giving face and voice to patients, employees and families.
Legacy Lit, Jan. 23
Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar
By turns sardonic, philosophical and tender, Akbar’s entrancing first novel features a young Iranian American recovering drug addict and aspiring poet whose determination to give his life meaning leads him on an unlikely quest toward his family’s complicated past and his own literary future.
Knopf, Jan. 23
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, by Janice Hallett
In this Fleet Street thriller, rival journalists racing to cash in on a true-crime scoop find themselves drawn into a mystery far darker and twistier than they imagined. With her signature collage narrative style — composed of snippets of emails, text messages and newspaper articles — Hallett composes a modern-day epistolary novel.
Atria, Jan. 23
The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, by Adam Shatz
Shatz’s first book is a fittingly nuanced portrait of the Caribbean-born psychiatrist, political theorist and militant whose defense of violence in the name of anticolonial liberation inspired a generation of revolutionaries and whose influence continues to reverberate today.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Jan. 23
The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky, by Simon Shuster
Shuster, a journalist with more than two decades of experience covering Russia and Ukraine, follows Zelensky from the beginning of his presidency to the front lines of Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion and draws a portrait of a man who, like so many politicians today, has used his camera-ready charisma to swing up into the halls of power.
Morrow, Jan. 23
Dear Sister: A Memoir of Secrets, Survival, and Unbreakable Bonds, by Michelle Horton
In 2017, Horton’s sister, Nikki Addimando, was arrested in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., after fatally shooting her boyfriend, who had abused her for years. “Dear Sister” is Horton’s account of the aftermath, and the factors that made it possible for Addimando to keep her secret for so long.
Grand Central, Jan. 30
Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, by Benjamin Stevenson
Like “Murder on the Orient Express,” except this train, barreling through the Australian desert, is full of crime writers.
Mariner, Jan. 30
