40+ New 2022 Book Releases to Get Excited About

Hi, hello, long time no see!

It’s been so sad not being able to make time to put out blog posts as regularly as I used to, but I am just currently juggling too many projects, and the blog just slipped under. I will try and schedule it more into my routine in the coming months and the end of the year posts ARE my favorite, so I had to come back to do them. As with last year’s list, it’s gonna be a long one, but it’s a way for both you and me to have a list to check back in with during the year! The list is super lit fic heavy, because that is just what was on my radar, but there are Fantasy and Romance books on it as well (would actually love to hear if there are any from these two genres that I am missing). Also, during 2021, I managed to read like half of my list, so here’s hoping I can do it again!  Now let’s get into it!

The High House by Jessie Greengrass

Release Date: 4th of January
Publisher: Scribner

Goodreads summary: Perched on a sloping hill, set away from a small town by the sea, the High House has a tide pool and a mill, a vegetable garden, and, most importantly, a barn full of supplies. Caro, Pauly, Sally, and Grandy are safe, so far, from the rising water that threatens to destroy the town and that has, perhaps, already destroyed everything else. But for how long?
Caro and her younger half-brother, Pauly, arrive at the High House after her father and stepmother fall victim to a faraway climate disaster—but not before they call and urge Caro to leave London. In their new home, a converted summer house cared for by Grandy and his granddaughter, Sally, the two pairs learn to live together. Yet there are limits to their safety, limits to the supplies, limits to what Grandy—the former village caretaker, a man who knows how to do everything—can teach them as his health fails.
A searing novel that takes on parenthood, sacrifice, love, and survival under the threat of extinction, The High House is a stunning, emotionally precise novel about what can be salvaged at the end of the world.

This is giving Migrations vibe – I love a good climate disaster human story, and a mix of like “the world is dying” narrative and the “we still have to be humans” narrative is one of my favorite things, so I am HYPED.  The cover also slaps.

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

Release Date: 11th of January
Publisher: Doubleday

Goodreads summary: In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances.
These three sections are joined in an enthralling and ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.
To Paradise is a fin de siècle novel of marvellous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara’s understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love – partners, lovers, children, friends, family and even our fellow citizens – and the pain that ensues when we cannot.

Everyone knows and is excited for the new Yanagihara and I am nothing if not a blind trend follower. I love A Little Life, so I am excited for this one, but tentatively because the synopsis isn’t wildly exciting to me. I already have an eARC of it, I am just scared to start it. I do in fact find the font on the cover personally insulting tho.

Wahala by Nikki May

Release Date: 11th of January
Publisher: Custom House

Goodreads summary: Ronke wants happily ever after and 2.2. kids. She’s dating Kayode and wants him to be “the one” (perfect, like her dead father). Her friends think he’s just another in a long line of dodgy Nigerian boyfriends.
Boo has everything Ronke wants—a kind husband, gorgeous child. But she’s frustrated, unfulfilled, plagued by guilt, and desperate to remember who she used to be.
Simi is the golden one with the perfect lifestyle. No one knows she’s crippled by impostor syndrome and tempted to pack it all in each time her boss mentions her “urban vibe.” Her husband thinks they’re trying for a baby. She’s not.
When the high-flying, charismatic Isobel explodes into the group, it seems at first she’s bringing out the best in each woman. (She gets Simi an interview in Hong Kong! Goes jogging with Boo!) But the more Isobel intervenes, the more chaos she sows, and Ronke, Simi, and Boo’s close friendship begins to crack.
A sharp, modern take on friendship, ambition, culture, and betrayal, Wahala (trouble) is an unforgettable novel from a brilliant new voice.

Super excited for this one! Female friendships! Drama! My favorite.

Engines of Empire by R.S. Ford

Release Date: 18th of January
Publisher: Orbit

Goodreads summary: The nation of Torwyn is run on the power of industry, and industry is run by the Guilds. Chief among them are the Hawkspurs, and their responsibility is to keep the gears of the empire turning. It’s exactly why matriarch Rosomon Hawkspur sends each of her heirs to the far reaches of the nation.
Conall, the eldest son, is sent to the distant frontier to earn his stripes in the military. It is here that he faces a threat he could have never seen coming: the first rumblings of revolution.
Tyreta’s sorcerous connection to the magical resource of pyrstone that fuels the empire’s machines makes her a perfect heir–in theory. While Tyreta hopes that she might shirk her responsibilities during her journey one of Torwyn’s most important pyrestone mines, she instead finds the dark horrors of industry that the empire would prefer to keep hidden.
The youngest, Fulren, is a talented artificer, and finds himself acting as consort to a foreign emissary. Soon after, he is framed for a crime he never committed. A crime that could start a war.
As each of the Hawkspurs grapple with the many threats that face the nation within and without, they must finally prove themselves worthy–or their empire will fall apart. 

This is a steampunk Fantasy which I always find intriguing PLUS it’s got all the good traditional Fantasy stuff, like a dynasty, siblings fighting for the throne, multiple PoVs, GUILDS etc. Looking forward to it.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

Release Date: 18th of January
Publisher: William Morrow

Goodreads summary: Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus.
Once unleashed, the Arctic Plague will reshape life on Earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.
From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resiliency of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.

More climate disaster books! We love to see it! This is also a collection of linked stories, which I LOVE, so I am really looking forward to this one.

Joan is Okay by Weike Wang

Release Date: 18th of January
Publisher: Random House

Goodreads summary: Joan is a thirtysomething ICU doctor at a busy New York City hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the United States to secure the American dream for their children, Joan is intensely devoted to her work, happily solitary, successful. She does look up sometimes and wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own cultural and social expectations.
Once Joan and her brother, Fang, were established in their careers, her parents moved back to China, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in their homeland. But when Joan’s father suddenly dies and her mother returns to America to reconnect with her children, a series of events sends Joan spiraling out of her comfort zone just as her hospital, her city, and the world are forced to reckon with a health crisis more devastating than anyone could have imagined.
Deceptively spare yet quietly powerful, laced with sharp humor, Joan Is Okay touches on matters that feel deeply resonant: being Chinese-American right now; working in medicine at a high-stakes time; finding one’s voice within a dominant culture; being a woman in a male-dominated workplace; and staying independent within a tight-knit family. But above all, it’s a portrait of one remarkable woman so surprising that you can’t get her out of your head.

I haven’t read Chemistry yet, but I know a lot of people who loved it, and I love the sound of this new novel, so I am excited to check it out.

Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti, translated by Elizabeth Harris

Release Date: 25th of January
Publisher: Riverhead

Goodreads summary: Every family has its own mythology, but in this family none of the myths match up. Claudia’s mother says she met her husband when she stopped him from jumping off a bridge. Her father says it happened when he saved her from an attempted robbery. Both parents are deaf but couldn’t be more different; they can’t even agree on how they met, much less who needed saving.
Into this unlikely yet somehow inevitable union, our narrator is born. She comes of age with her brother in this strange, and increasingly estranged, household split between a small village in southern Italy and New York City. Without even sign language in common – their parents have not bothered to teach them – family communications are chaotic and rife with misinterpretations, by turns hilarious and devastating. An outsider in every way, she longs for a freedom she’s not even sure exists. Only books and punk rock–and a tumultuous relationship–begin to show her the way to create her own mythology, to construct her own version of the story of her life.
Kinetic, formally dazzling, and spectacularly original, this book is a funny and profound portrait of an unconventional family that makes us look anew at how language shapes our understanding of ourselves.

Translated women in fiction! Woohoo! Also, weird family dynamics are my jam. So excited. Plus, you know, the cover is amazing.

Manywhere by Morgan Thomas

Release Date: 25th of January
Publisher: MCD

Goodreads summary: The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas’s subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.
A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.
Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories resound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.

One of several short stories in this list, it focuses on trans and genderqueer people, and weaves realistic and mythical. Sounds absolutely brilliant.

Defenestrate by Renee Branum

Release Date: 25th of January
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Goodreads summary: Marta and her twin brother Nick have always been haunted and fascinated by an ancestral legend that holds that members of their family are doomed to various types of falls. And when their own family collapses in the wake of a revelation and a resulting devastating fight with their Catholic mother, the twins move to Prague, the city in which their “falling curse” began. There, Marta and Nick try to forge a new life for themselves. But their ties to the past and each other prove difficult to disentangle, and when they ultimately return to their midwestern home and Nick falls from a balcony himself, Marta is forced to confront the truths they’ve hidden from each other and themselves.
Ingeniously and unforgettably narrated by Marta as she reflects on all the ways there are to fall–from defenestration in nineteenth century Prague to the pratfalls of her childhood idol Buster Keaton, from falling in love to falling midflight from an airplane–Defenestrate is a deeply original, gorgeous novel about the power of stories and the strange, malleable bonds that hold families together.

Once again, a book focusing on weird family dynamics. I just can’t help it. I also love the idea of a family curse as a narrative tool.

Anonymous Sex edited by Hillary Jordan & Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Release Date: 1st of February
Publisher: Scribner

Goodreads summary: Bestselling novelists Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan present an elegant, international anthology of erotica that explores the diverse spectrum of desire, written by winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN Awards, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Edgar Award, and more. There are stories of sexual obsession and sexual love, of domination and submission. There’s revenge sex, unrequited sex, funny sex, tortured sex, fairy tale sex, and even sex in the afterlife.
While the authors are listed in alphabetical order at the beginning of the book, none of the stories are attributed, providing readers with a glimpse into an uninhibited landscape of sexuality as explored by twenty-seven of today’s finest authors. Featuring Robert Olen Butler, Catherine Chung, Trent Dalton, Heidi W. Durrow, Tony Eprile, Louise Erdrich, Jamie Ford, Julia Glass, Peter Godwin, Hillary Jordan, Rebecca Makkai, Valerie Martin, Dina Nayeri, Chigozie Obioma, Téa Obreht, Helen Oyeyemi, Mary-Louise Parker, Victoria Redel, Jason Reynolds, S.J. Rozan, Meredith Talusan, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Jeet Thayil, Paul Theroux, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Edmund White.

Honestly, this sounds like what Kink should have been if it weren’t so wildly disappointing. I also love the gimmick of the stories being anonymous (sue me), and the list of authors is really exciting. Cannot wait.

Vladimir by Julia May Jones

Release Date: 1st of February
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Goodreads summary: “When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.”
And so we are introduced to our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose charismatic husband at the same small liberal arts college is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extra-marital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both. And when our narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with Vladimir, a celebrated, married young novelist who’s just arrived on campus, their tinder box world comes dangerously close to exploding.
With this bold, edgy, and uncommonly assured debut, author Julia May Jonas takes us into charged territory, where the boundaries of morality bump up against the impulses of the human heart. Propulsive, darkly funny, and wildly entertaining, Vladimir perfectly captures the personal and political minefield of our current moment, exposing the nuances and the grey area between power and desire.

One of the books I am most excited for on the list! I just love messy academics. Also not to be controversial on main, but I love this cover. It’s so TACKY.

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

Release Date: 1st of February
Publisher: New Directions

Goodreads summary:  A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafes and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city’s most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here—is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey? At once a careful reckoning and an elegy, Cold Enough for Snow questions whether any of us speak a common language, which dimensions can contain love, and what claim we have to truly know another’s inner world.

Sounds like a navel-gazey delight to me! 

Quake by Auður Jónsdóttir, translated by Meg Matich

Release Date: 8th of February
Publisher: Dottir Press

Publisher Weekly summary: Jónsdóttir’s powerful story of memory, identity, and the legacy of violence, her English-language debut, chronicles a woman’s recovery from an epileptic seizure. Saga, mother to a three-year-old son named Ívar, wakes from a grand mal seizure with very little memory of her life. After she returns home, where her brother, sister, and parents watch over her, she tries to hide just how much of her memory she’s lost. As small details resurface, such as a vision of the bus shelter where she was waiting with Ívar and had the seizure, any negative memories that arise cause great pain (“Did Ívar chase after the bus?” she wonders, as her mouth fills with the taste of blood). All of this causes her picture of the past to darken with ominous blank spots. She does not know why she and her ex-husband, Bergur, are separated, nor what secrets from her family’s past caused her mother to go missing in the days following her seizure. By telling Saga’s jagged story in intimate narration, Jónsdóttir invites the reader to piece together the haunting memories and tragic realities alongside the main character. By the end, this becomes a gripping quest for the truth of what lies between the surface and what those around Saga have chosen to forget. The limited perspective and acute sense of the narrator’s pain, both ingeniously rendered, make this unforgettable.

More translated women in fiction, this time from Iceland! And exploring themes of memory and the line between fact and fiction which is always on brand for the books I love.

Nobody’s Magic by Destiny O. Birdsong

Release Date: 8th of February
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Goodreads summary: Suzette, a pampered twenty-year‑old, has been sheltered from the outside world since a dangerous childhood encounter. Now, a budding romance with a sweet mechanic allows Suzette to seek independence, which unleashes dark reactions in those closest to her. In discovering her autonomy, Suzette is forced to decide what she is willing to sacrifice in order to make her own way in the world.
Maple is reeling from the unsolved murder of her free‑spirited mother. She flees the media circus and her judgmental grandmother by shutting herself off from the world in a spare room of the motel where she works. One night, at a party, Maple connects with Chad, someone who may understand her pain more than she realizes, and she discovers that the key to her mother’s death may be within her reach.
Agnes is far from home, working yet another mind‑numbing job. She attracts the interest of a lonely security guard and army veteran who’s looking for a traditional life for himself and his young son. He’s convinced that she wields a certain “magic,” but Agnes soon unleashes a power within herself that will shock them both and send her on a trip to confront not only her family and her past, but also herself.
This novel, told in three parts, is a searing meditation on grief, female strength, and self‑discovery set against a backdrop of complicated social and racial histories. Nobody’s Magic is a testament to the power of family—the ones you’re born in and the ones you choose. And in these three narratives, among the yearning and loss, each of these women may find a seed of hope for the future.

This is a novel in three parts, exploring the lives of three Black women with albinism in Louisiana. Sounds super character focused, with an exploration of broder social issues and racial history, so I am super excited to get to it.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors

Release Date: 8th of February
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Goodreads summary: Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank’s life is full of all the excesses Cleo’s lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a Green Card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives, and the lives of those close to them, in ways they never could’ve predicted.
Each compulsively readable chapter explores the lives of Cleo, Frank, and an unforgettable cast of their closest friends and family as they grow up and grow older. Whether it’s Cleo’s best friend struggling to embrace his gender queerness in the wake of Cleo’s marriage, or Frank’s financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates to support herself after being cut off, or Cleo and Frank themselves as they discover the trials of marriage and mental illness, each character is as absorbing, and painfully relatable, as the last.

This is described as a mix between Conversations With Friends and Modern Lovers, and this is basically my favorite type of book and definitely one of the most exciting for me on this list. 

Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You by Ariel Delgado Dixon

Release Date: 15th of February
Publisher: Random House

Goodreads summary: A young woman thinks she has escaped her past only to discover that she’s been hovering on its edges all along: She and her younger sister bide their time in a dilapidated warehouse in a desolate town north of New York City; their parents settled there with dreams of starting an art commune. But after the girls’ father vanishes, all traces of stability disappear for the family, and the girls retreat into strange worlds of their own mythmaking and isolation.
As the sisters both try to survive their increasingly dark and dangerous adolescences, they break apart and reunite repeatedly, orbiting each other like planets. Both endure stints at the Veld Center, a wilderness camp where troubled teenage girls are sent as a last resort, and both emerge more deeply warped by the harsh outdoor survival experiences they must endure and the attempts by staff to break them down psychologically.
With a mesmerizing voice and uncanny storytelling style, this is a remarkable debut about two women who must struggle to understand the bonds that link them and how their traumatic history will shape who they choose to become as adults.

This is like a literary psychological thriller, and it’s basically on this list because CJ Reads recommended it, and we stan her.

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

Release Date: 15th of February
Publisher: FSG

Goodreads summary: Here we are, just living in the first draft of Creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.
In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.

This sounds so bizarre. Can’t wait. I actually haven’t read from Heti before, but her books come highly recommended and this just passes the vibe check for some reason.

The Last Exit by Max Gladstone

Release Date: 22th of February
Publisher: Tor

Goodreads summary: Ten years ago, Zelda led a band of merry adventurers whose knacks let them travel to alternate realities and battle the black rot that threatened to unmake each world. Zelda was the warrior; Ish could locate people anywhere; Ramon always knew what path to take; Sarah could turn catastrophe aside. Keeping them all connected: Sal, Zelda’s lover and the group’s heart.
Until their final, failed mission, when Sal was lost. When they all fell apart.
Ten years on, Ish, Ramon, and Sarah are happy and successful. Zelda is alone, always traveling, destroying rot throughout the US.
When it boils through the crack in the Liberty Bell, the rot gives Zelda proof that Sal is alive, trapped somewhere in the alts.
Zelda’s getting the band back together—plus Sal’s young cousin June, who has a knack none of them have ever seen before.
As relationships rekindle, the friends begin to believe they can find Sal and heal all the worlds. It’s not going to be easy, but they’ve faced worse before.
But things have changed, out there in the alts. And in everyone’s hearts.
Fresh from winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Max Gladstone weaves elements of American myth–the muscle car, the open road, the white-hatted cowboy–into a deeply emotional tale where his characters must find their own truths if they are to survive.

This for some reason is giving American Gods vibes, so it’s just calling me. It’s not really my kind of book, but I love the idea of alternate realities and this group of adventurers reuniting.

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by

Release Date: 1st of March
Publisher: New Directions

Goodreads summary: Out of the impoverished coal regions of Ukraine known as the Donbass, where Russian secret military intervention coexists with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets’s captivating collection of stories emerge from the ruins of a war, still being waged on and off, ever since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Through a series of unexpected encounters, we are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous women: a florist, a cosmetologist, card players, readers of horoscopes, the unemployed, and a witch who catches newborns with a mitt. One refugee tries unsuccessfully to leave her broken umbrella behind as if it were a sick relative; a private caregiver in a disputed zone saves her elderly charge from the angel of death; a woman sits down on International Women’s Day and can no longer stand up; a soldier decides to marry war. Belorusets threads these tales of ebullient survival with a mix of humor, verisimilitude, the undramatic, and a profound Gogolian irony. She also weaves in twenty-three photographs that, in lyrical and historical counterpoint, form their own remarkable visual narrative.

Another short story collection, following the lives of women in Donbass, Ukraine. Sounds brilliant.

Scattered All Over Earth by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani

Release Date: 1st of March
Publisher: New Directions

Goodreads summary: Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.”
As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm.
With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.

OH LOOK more translated fiction. This sounds really bizarre and brilliant, it’s a trilogy so more to come, and hopefully it dives into language, which I always love.

The World Cannot Give by Tara Isabella Burton

Release Date: 8th of March
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Goodreads summary: When shy, sensitive Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan’s Academy in Maine, she dreams that life there will echo her favorite novel, All Before Them, the sole surviving piece of writing by Byronic “prep school prophet” (and St. Dunstan’s alum) Sebastian Webster, who died at nineteen, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She soon finds the intensity she is looking for among the insular, Webster-worshipping members of the school’s chapel choir, which is presided over by the charismatic, neurotic, overachiever Virginia Strauss. Virginia is as fanatical about her newfound Christian faith as she is about the miles she runs every morning before dawn. She expects nothing short of perfection from herself—and from the members of the choir.
Virginia inducts the besotted Laura into a world of transcendent music and arcane ritual, illicit cliff-diving and midnight crypt visits: a world that, like Webster’s novels, finally seems to Laura to be full of meaning. But when a new school chaplain challenges Virginia’s hold on the “family” she has created, and Virginia’s efforts to wield her power become increasingly dangerous, Laura must decide how far she will let her devotion to Virginia go.
The World Cannot Give is a shocking meditation on the power, and danger, of wanting more from the world.

This is also one of my most anticipated releases, with one of my favorite settings – a prep school. It’s giving dark(ish) academia vibes, and I cannot wait.

Disorientation by Elaine Hseih Chou

Release Date: 22nd of March
Publisher: Penguin Press

Goodreads summary: 29-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang is desperate to finish her dissertation on the late canonical poet, Xiao-Wen Chou, and never read about “Chinese-y” things again. But after four years of painstaking research, she has nothing but anxiety and stomach pain to show for her efforts. When she accidentally stumbles upon a strange and curious note in the Chou archives, she convinces herself it’s her ticket out of academic hell.

But Ingrid’s in much deeper than she thinks. Her clumsy exploits to unravel the note’s message lead to an explosive discovery, one that upends her entire life and the lives of those around her. With her trusty friend Eunice Kim by her side and her rival Vivian Vo hot on her tail, together they set off a rollercoaster of mishaps and misadventures, from campus protests and OTC drug hallucinations, to book burnings and a movement that stinks of “Yellow Peril” propaganda.
In the aftermath, nothing looks quite the same to Ingrid—including her gentle and doting fiancé, Stephen Greene. When he embarks on a book tour with the “super kawaii” Japanese author he’s translated, doubts and insecurities creep in. At the same time, she finds herself drawn to the cool and aloof Alex Kim (even though she swears he’s not her type). As the events Ingrid instigated keep spiraling, she’ll have to confront her sticky relationship to white men and white institutions—and most of all, herself.
An uproarious and bighearted satire, alive with sharp edges, immense warmth, and a cast of unforgettable characters, Disorientation is both a blistering send-up of white supremacy in academia, and a profound reckoning of a Taiwanese American woman’s complicity and unspoken rage. In this electrifying debut novel from a provocative new voice, Chou asks who gets to tell our stories—and how the story changes when we finally tell it ourselves

Who doesn’t love explorations of the mess and disaster that is academia? I know I do.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

Release Date: 5th of April
Publisher: Scribner

Goodreads summary: It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.
In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,” those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House.
Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game.​ Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.

I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad so I am super excited for this one.

Out There by Kate Folk

Release Date: 5th of April
Publisher: Random House

Goodreads summary: With a focus on the weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience, Kate Folk’s debut collection is perfectly pitched to the madness of our current moment. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the setting of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing Earth’s remaining inhabitants to decide with whom they want to spend eternity. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by “blots,” preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection.
Prescient and wildly imaginative, Out There depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together they herald an exciting new arrival in the tradition of speculative literary fiction.

Another short story collection, this time of the speculative literary fiction genre, and it sounds amazing, I love the sound of these stories.

All the Shinning People by Kathy Friedman

Release Date: 5th of April
Publisher: Anansi Press

Publisher summary: All the Shining People explores migration, diaspora, and belonging within Toronto’s Jewish South African community, as individuals come to terms with the oppressive hierarchies that separate, and the connections that bind. Seeking a place to belong, the book’s characters — including a life-drawing model searching the streets for her lover; a woman confronting secrets from her past in the new South Africa; and a man grappling with the legacy of his father, a former political prisoner — crave authentic relationships that replicate the lost feeling of home. With its focus on family, culture, and identity, All the Shining People captures the experiences of immigrants and outsiders with honesty, subtlety, and deep sympathy. 

Yup, you guessed it, another short story collection. I love the vibe of the stories, and this exploration of home and identity, really looking forward to it.

To Marry and to Meddle by Martha Waters

Release Date: 5th of March
Publisher: Atria

Goodreads summary: Lady Emily Turner has been a debutante for six seasons now and should have long settled into a suitable marriage. However, due to her father’s large debts, her only suitor is the persistent and odious owner of her father’s favorite gambling house. Meanwhile, Lord Julian Belfry, the second son of a marquess, has scandalized society as an actor and owner of a theater—the kind of establishment where men take their mistresses, but not their wives. When their lives intersect at a house party, Lord Julian hatches a plan to benefit them both.
With a marriage of convenience, Emily will use her society connections to promote the theater to a more respectable clientele and Julian will take her out from under the shadows of her father’s unsavory associates. But they soon realize they have very different plans for their marriage—Julian wants Emily to remain a society wife, while Emily discovers an interest in the theater. But when a fleeing actress, murderous kitten, and meddlesome friends enter the fray, Emily and Julian will have to confront the fact that their marriage of convenience comes with rather inconvenient feelings.

This is the third book in a series where I loved the first and disliked the second, so i am tentatively excited for it.

The Odyssey by Lara Williams

Release Date: 21st of April
Publisher: Zando

Goodreads summary: Ingrid works on a gargantuan luxury cruise liner where she spends her days reorganizing the gift shop shelves and waiting for long-term guests to drop dead in the aisles. On her days off, she disembarks from the ship, wasting the hours aimlessly following tourists around, drinking the local alcohol, and buying clothes she never intends to wear again. It’s not a bad life. At least, it distracts her from thinking about the other life–the other person–she left behind five years ago.
That is, until the day she is selected by the ship’s enigmatic captain and (ill-informed) wabi sabi devotee, Keith, for his mentorship program. Encouraging her to reflect on past mistakes and her desperation to remain lost at sea, Keith pushes Ingrid further than she ever thought possible. But as her friendships and professional life onboard steadily fall apart, Ingrid must ask herself: how do you know when you have gone too far?
Utterly original, mischievous, and thought-provoking, The Odyssey is a merciless takedown of consumer capitalism and our anxious, ill-fated quests to find something to believe in. It’s a voyage that will lead our heroine all the way home, though she will do almost anything to avoid getting there

Take down of consumer capitalism by way of Otessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney and Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. THE PERFECT BLEND. Super excited (but I hate the cover).

Elektra by Jennifer Saint

Release Date: 28th of April
Publisher: Wildfire

Goodreads summary: The House of Atreus is cursed. A bloodline tainted by a generational cycle of violence and vengeance. This is the story of three women, their fates inextricably tied to this curse, and the fickle nature of men and gods.
Clytemnestra
The sister of Helen, wife of Agamemnon – her hopes of averting the curse are dashed when her sister is taken to Troy by the feckless Paris. Her husband raises a great army against them, and determines to win, whatever the cost.
Cassandra
Princess of Troy, and cursed by Apollo to see the future but never to be believed when she speaks of it. She is powerless in her knowledge that the city will fall.
Elektra
The youngest daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, Elektra is horrified by the bloodletting of her kin. But, can she escape the curse, or is her own destiny also bound by violence?

I still haven’t read Ariadne, but I love Greek myth retellings and I am so so excited for this one.

Book of Night by Holly Black

Release Date: 3rd of May
Publisher: Tor

Goodreads summary: In Charlie Hall’s world, shadows can be altered, for entertainment and cosmetic preferences—but also to increase power and influence. You can alter someone’s feelings—and memories—but manipulating shadows has a cost, with the potential to take hours or days from your life. Your shadow holds all the parts of you that you want to keep hidden—a second self, standing just to your left, walking behind you into lit rooms. And sometimes, it has a life of its own.
Charlie is a low-level con artist, working as a bartender while trying to distance herself from the powerful and dangerous underground world of shadow trading. She gets by doing odd jobs for her patrons and the naive new money in her town at the edge of the Berkshires. But when a terrible figure from her past returns, Charlie’s present life is thrown into chaos, and her future seems at best, unclear—and at worst, non-existent. Determined to survive, Charlie throws herself into a maelstrom of secrets and murder, setting her against a cast of doppelgangers, mercurial billionaires, shadow thieves, and her own sister—all desperate to control the magic of the shadows.

This is Holly Black’s adult fantasy debut! Exciting! Secret socities and thieves! HYPED. I’ve only read The Cruel Prince series by Holly Black, but I quite enjoyed it, I really like her characters, so hopefully I love this.

Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman

Release Date: 3rd of May
Publisher: Penguin

Goodreads summary: If sex is a truth-teller, Eve–a young, queer woman in Brooklyn–is looking for answers. On an evening when she is feeling particularly impulsive, she posts some nude photos of herself online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia, the charismatic Nathan–and soon the three begin a relationship that disturbs Eve as much as it delights her. As each act of the affair unfolds, Eve is left to ask: to whom is she responsible? And to what extent do our desires determine who we are?
In the way that only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. As incisive as it is exhilarating, this novel asks us to face our ideas about desire and power: what sex means to us, the forces that shape it, and how we find–or lose–ourselves in intimacy. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, it might be the most thought-provoking book you read all year.

Another recommendation by way of CJ Reads! I think this will be a big buzz book, and I am excited to check it out.

She Is Haunted by Paige Clark

Release Date: 17th of May
Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Goodreads summary: A mother cuts her daughter’s hair because her own hair starts falling out. A woman leaves her boyfriend because he reminds her of a corpse. A woman undergoes brain surgery to try and live more comfortably in higher temperatures. A widow attempts to physically transform into her husband so that she does not have to grieve.
The characters that populate She is Haunted search for recognition and connection, and, more than anything else, small moments of empathy—offering piercing insights into transnational Asian identity and intergenerational trauma and grief, the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships, the inexplicable oddities of female friendship, and the love of a good dog.

More short stories, in a similar vein to other collections – toeing the line between fantastical and realistic. Sounds really great.

Family Album by Gabriela Aleman, translated by Dick Cluster and Mary Ellen Fieweger

Release Date: 17th of May
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

Goodreads summary: Alemán is known for her spirited and sardonic take on the fatefully interconnected—and often highly compromised—forces at work in present-day South America, and particularly in Ecuador. In this collection of eight hugely entertaining short stories, she teases tropes of hardboiled detective fiction, satire, and adventure narratives to recast the discussion of national identity. A muddy brew of pop-culture and pop-folklore yields intriguing, lesser-known episodes of contemporary Ecuadorian history, along with a rich cast of unforgettable characters whose intimate stories open up onto a vista of Ecuador’s place on the world stage.
From a pair of deep-sea divers using Robinson Crusoe’s map of a shipwreck to locate sunken treasure in the Galapagos Archipelago, to a night with the husband of Ecuador’s most infamous expat, Lorena Bobbit, this series of cracked “family portraits” provides a cast of picaresque heroes and anti-heroes in stories that sneak up on a reader before they know what’s happened: they’ve learned a great deal about a country whose more well known exports—soccer, coffee and cocoa—mask an intriguing national story that’s ripe for the telling.

More translated fiction AND more short stories! I love the sound of these. 

Night Crawling by Leila Mottley

Release Date: 24th of May
Publisher: Knopf

Goodreads summary: SALVAGE THE BONES meets AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE, based on the 2015 Oakland Police Department rape scandal. Seventeen-year-old Kiara’s world explodes when her name surfaces in a police officer’s suicide note, exposing her as a key witness in a police rape case. Kiara must decide if she is willing to testify in the grand jury case that could leave her family vulnerable to police retaliation and endanger everyone she loves.

I do not know a lot about this one, but I do think it sounds really great and will probably be really powerful.

The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach

Release Date: 14th of June
Publisher: Gallery Books

Goodreads summary: A ship rolls through the fog, its doomed crew fallen victim to an engineered plague. Yat Jyn-Hok—disgraced cop, former thief, long lost love to a flame-haired street girl—stumbles across its deadly trail, but powerful men will do anything to keep it secret.
They kill Yat.
It doesn’t stick.
An ancient intelligence reanimates her, and sends her out to enact its monstrous designs. She has her own plans: to find her lost love, and solve her own murder before the plague tears the city to pieces. But what are the golden threads she sees running through the city walls? What does her inhuman saviour want from her? Why can’t she die?
Set in Hainak Kuay Vitraj—where lost gods live in the cracks in the sidewalk, where the miracle of alchemical botany makes flesh as malleable as clay—The Dawnhounds.

This is like a Urban Fantasy/Sci Fi mix, and the premise sounds really intriguing, so I am looking forward to it.

Dele Weds Destiny by Tomi Obaro

Release Date: 26th of June
Publisher: Knopf

Goodreads summary: Funmi, Enitan, and Zainab first meet at university in Nigeria, and became friends for life despite their differences. Funmi is beautiful, brash, and determined; Enitan is homely and eager, seeking escape from her single mother’s smothering and needy love; Zainab is elegant and reserved, raised by her father’s first two wives after her mother’s death in childbirth. Their friendship is complicated but enduring, and over the course of the novel, the reader learns about their loves and losses. How Funmi stole Zainab’s boyfriend and became pregnant, only to have an abortion and lose the boyfriend to police violence. How Enitan was seduced by an American Peace Corps volunteer, the only one who ever really saw her, but is culturally so different from him–a Connecticut WASP–that raising their daughter together put them at odds. How Zainab fell in love with her teacher, a friend of her father’s, and ruptured her relationship with her father to have him.
Now, some thirty years later, the three women are reunited for the first time, in Lagos. The occasion: Funmi’s daughter, Destiny, is getting married. Enitan brings her American daughter, Remi. Zainab travels by bus, nervously leaving her ailing husband in the care of their son. Funmi, hosting the weekend of elaborate festivities with her wealthy husband, wants everything to go perfectly. But as the big day approaches, it becomes clear that something is not right. As the novel builds powerfully toward the big event, the complexities of the mothers’ friendship—and the private wisdom each has earned—come to bear on a riveting, heartrending moment of decision. Dele Weds Destiny is a sensational debut from a dazzling new voice in contemporary fiction.

Yes, there is a theme of stories focusing on three women, exploring race and class on this list, because I just love those kinds of stories. I am really excited for it.

Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe

Release Date: 28th of June
Publisher: Doubleday

Goodreads summary: Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the “worst of the worst,” among other bravura works of literary journalism.

This is a collection of Radden Keefe’s works compiled together and I cannot wait. We love one man and that man is Patrick Radden Keefe.

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Release Date: 5th of July
Publisher: Grove Press

Goodreads summary: In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader’s interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In “A First-Rate Material”, Nana and Naoki are happily engaged, but Naoki can’t stand the conventional use of deceased people’s bodies for clothing, accessories, and furniture, and a disagreement around this threatens to derail their perfect wedding day. “Lovers on the Breeze” is told from the perspective of a curtain in a child’s bedroom that jealously watches the young girl Naoko as she has her first kiss with a boy from her class and does its best to stop her. “Eating the City” explores the strange norms around food and foraging, while “Hatchling” closes the collection with an extraordinary depiction of the fractured personality of someone who tries too hard to fit in.

Sayaka Murata has a short story collection coming out in English! I loved Convenience Store Woman, so I am super excited for this one.

Love, If That’s What It Is by Marijke Schermer, translated by Hester Velmans

Release Date: 1st of February
Publisher: World Editions

Goodreads summary: Terri runs off with a lover, abandoning her children and her marriage of twenty years. Her husband, David, is left to take care of their two daughters, who are each falling in love for the first time. These four people start to question their identity outside the nuclear family. What remains of a disintegrated home, and what changes? Marijke Schermer’s Love, If That’s What It Is gives a kaleidoscopic view of a divorce, permitting the reader to enter the heads of not only the spouses, but also of the two daughters and their new lovers. Through several characters, the reader is presented with just as many views on relationships, while Schermer remains impartial and thus confronts readers with their own–perhaps shaky–romantic principles. What is love? With fresh flair and provocative perspectives, Schermer manages to provide an original and versatile answer.

I love these kinds of novels, and this is described as a book for fans of Marriage Story and Elena Ferrante, so I am really looking forward to it. The cover doesn’t pass the vibe check but WHAT CAN YOU DO.

Babel by R.F. Kuang

Release Date: 23rd of August
Publisher: Harper Voyager

Goodreads summary: Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation — also known as Babel.
Babel is the world’s center of translation and, more importantly, of silver-working: the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation through enchanted silver bars, to magical effect. Silver-working has made the British Empire unparalleled in power, and Babel’s research in foreign languages serves the Empire’s quest to colonize everything it encounters.
Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, is a fairytale for Robin; a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge serves power, and for Robin, a Chinese boy raised in Britain, serving Babel inevitably means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to sabotaging the silver-working that supports imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide: Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence? What is he willing to sacrifice to bring Babel down?
Babel — a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of translation as a tool of empire.

I might puke from excitement.

Mother in the Dark by Kayla Maiuri

Release Date: 9th of August
Publisher: Riverhead

Goodreads summary: When Anna’s sister calls with an urgent message, Anna doesn’t return the call. She knows it’s about their mother.
Growing up in working class Boston in an Italian American family, Anna’s childhood was sparse but comfortable–filled with homemade pasta sauce and a close-knit neighborhood. Anna and her sisters are devoted to their mother, orbiting her like the sun, trying to keep up with her loving but mercurial nature as she bounces between tenderness and bitterness.
When their father gets a new job outside the city, the family is tossed unceremoniously into a middle-class suburban existence. Anna’s mother is suddenly adrift, and the darkness lurking inside her expands until it threatens to explode. Her daughters, trapped with her in the new house, isolated, must do everything they can to keep her from unraveling.
Alternating between childhood and a single weekend in Anna’s twenties, in which she receives a shattering call about her mother and threatens to blow up her own precariously constructed new life in New York, Mother in the Dark asks whether we can ever really go back home when the idea of home was so unstable. Whether we can escape that instability or accept that our personalities are built around the defenses we put up. Maiuri is a master at revealing the fragile horrors of domestic family life and how the traumas of the past shape the present and generations of women.
A story about sisterhood, the complications of class, and the chains of inheritance between mothers and daughters, Mother in the Dark delivers an unvarnished portrayal of a young woman consumed by her past and a family teetering on the edge of a knife.

Sisters and mothers! Got a love a story on sisterhood and the exploration of class. Cannot wait.

Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood

Release Date: 23rd of August
Publisher: Berkley

Goodreads summary: No summary yet

I literally ADORED The Love Hypothesis so I am beyond excited for this one. Ali Hazelwood also has three novellas coming out in May and I will literally DIE.

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Release Date: 13th of September
Publisher: Tor Dot Com

Goodreads summary: Her city is under siege.
The zombies are coming back.
And all Nona wants is a birthday party.
In many ways, Nona is like other people. She lives with her family, has a job at her local school, and loves walks on the beach and meeting new dogs. But Nona’s not like other people. Six months ago she woke up in a stranger’s body, and she’s afraid she might have to give it back.
The whole city is falling to pieces. A monstrous blue sphere hangs on the horizon, ready to tear the planet apart. Blood of Eden forces have surrounded the last Cohort facility and wait for the Emperor Undying to come calling. Their leaders want Nona to be the weapon that will save them from the Nine Houses. Nona would prefer to live an ordinary life with the people she loves, with Pyrrha and Camilla and Palamedes, but she also knows that nothing lasts forever.
And each night, Nona dreams of a woman with a skull-painted face…

I am ecstatic about this.

The Luminaries by Susan Dennard

Release Date: later half of 2022
Publisher: Tor

Goodreads summary: In Hemlock Falls, when nightmares rise, only the Luminaries stand between humanity and these monsters bent on devastation. Winnie Wednesday knows the only way to redeem her disgraced family is to pass the Luminary trials, but when she encounters an unknown monster, she realizes she must also protect Hemlock Falls and her heart from a former friend with secrets of his own.

Susan Dennard has a new series coming out! Everyone rejoice!

OMG I cannot believe I did it! 40+ releases to get excited about! Tell me which ones from the list you are most excited about but also some that are not on the list but you cannot wait to read! 

In the meantime, happy reading

 

 

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