20 Books We Can’t Wait to Read: January 2025

Fiction

Voice Like a Hyacinth by Mallory Pearson — January 7 (47north)

Art student Jo Kozak and her fellow classmates and best friends, Caroline, Finch, Amrita, and Saz, are one another’s muses–so close they have their own language and so devoted to the craft that they’ll do anything to keep their inspiration alive. Even if it means naively resorting to the occult to unlock their creativity and to curse their esteemed, if notoriously creepy, professor. They soon learn the horrible price to be paid for such a transgressive ritual. In its violent aftermath, things are changing. To right the wrong they’ve done, these five desperate friends will take their obsession a step too far. When that happens, there may be no turning back.

Playworld by Adam Ross — January 7 (Knopf Publishing Group)

“Playworld is a novel that is a time machine of a kind, if they were ever used to seek revelations. I was reintroduced to an American history I lived through, and so much of what I had never known I’d forgotten, so much of what I was never taught to fear—but perhaps should have been. This was not my story but I saw mine in it—a boy lost in the house of adulthood, trying to learn how to be one of the people he sees around him. Haunting, mesmerizing, provoking—this novel is a triumph.” — Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Homeseeking by Karissa Chen — January 7 (G.P. Putnam Son’s)

“Karissa Chen’s debut novel weaves expertly between present and past, telling the story of childhood sweethearts who meet again late in life and are torn between looking back and moving on. A kaleidoscopic yet intimate view of the Chinese diaspora, Homeseeking explores how identities flex and and transform during war—and which fundamental parts of us remain the same no matter where we find ourselves.” — Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere

Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett — January 7 (Little Brown and Company)

“Mothers and Sons is like sonar in a lake, pinging out everything submerged, the hidden stories, the shames and the joys. There’s nothing else like it. Haslett’s characters feel so real, their choices so hard, their lives so true. He is everything you want in a writer." — Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Less

Sweet Fury by Sash Bischoff — January 7 (Simon & Schuster)

“Sweet Fury is a wildly imaginative, very dark romance of a kind that would have shocked F. Scott Fitzgerald, that icon of the Roaring Twenties. Filled with surprises, unpredictable in its denouement, this audacious first novel is a subversive and highly entertaining exploration of the theme of ‘romance’ itself.” — Joyce Carol Oates

How to Sleep at Night by Elizabeth Harris — January 7 (William Morrow & Company)

“I tore through this timely novel of family, marriage, love and politics. By turns insightful, poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, How To Sleep at Night is a delight.” — J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times Bestselling author of Friends and Strangers

The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan — January 7 (Atria Books)

“I couldn’t stop reading. The Three Lives of Cate Kay is the perfect book for anyone who has ever had to choose between a relationship and the pursuit of a dream. It asks how we balance our public and private selves and whether it is worth keeping secrets in order to advance a career. A delight from beginning to end.” — Tasha Coryell, author of Love Letters to a Serial Killer

Isaac’s Song by Daniel Black — January 14 (Hanover Square Press)

“Isaac’s Song is an absolutely beautiful book. It’s a beautiful song of generational pain and love, a novel that is thrumming with truth and life.” — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, New York Times bestselling author of Chain Gang All Stars

Confessions by Catherine Airey — January 14 (Mariner Books)

“Confessions is a remarkable debut. A complex and compulsive read that unravels the intricate twists and revelations among three generations of women with elegance and urgency.” — Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace

Good Girl by Aria Aber — January 14 (Hogarth Press)

“Good Girl dives heart-first into one of the art’s great crises: that the great searing ecstasies of youth should form us before we have the psychospiritual maturity to articulate them. Usually writing this good is realized through a gauzy patina of recollection, but in Good Girl the bass beat is still full in your chest, the coke drip’s still a numbing bitter in your throat. Aber’s ear is so remarkably good you hardly even notice she’s building this great symphony of textures, mosaics within mosaics.” — Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!

We Do Not Part by Han Kang (translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris) — January 21 (Hogarth Press)

“A visionary novel about history, trauma, art and its tremendous costs. Han Kang is one of the most powerfully gifted writers in the world. With each work, she transforms her readers, and rewrites the possibilities of the novel as a form.” — Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies

Something Rotten by Andrew Lipstein — January 21 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

“Something Rotten is (characteristically, for this author) an irreverent book; often funny, at times caustic. Andrew Lipstein’s refreshingly frank third novel probes the more discomfiting questions—about marriage and fidelity, fathers and sons, cancel culture and propriety, sex and gender, ambition and motivation—of modern life.” — Rumaan Alam, author of Entitlement

We Could Be Rats by Emily Austin — January 28 (Atria Books)

“We Could Be Rats is achingly true to life — in all its ugly, gorgeous, and stupidly funny complexities. Emily Austin has written a tender exploration of grief, sisterhood, and what it is to be a bit wobbly in a world that demands you get your footing. No one blends humor and existentialism quite like Austin—We Could Be Rats is a must read.” — Haley Jakobson, New York Times Editor’s Choice author of Old Enough

Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su — January 28 (Harper)

“Maggie Su has written an inventive, utterly unique debut. Blob is not only a deliciously creepy, deeply entertaining take on modern relationships, it’s also a moving look at new adulthood, and the inherent vulnerability that comes along with figuring out exactly who you’re meant to be.” — Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light

Non-Fiction & Poetry

The Gloomy Girl Variety Show: A Memoir by Freda Epum — January 14 (Feminist Press)

“The Gloomy Girl Variety Show has everything I could ever want in a book. Dazzling, darkly funny, and fiercely incisive, Freda Epum takes center stage to deliver her profound insights on mental health, diaspora, belonging, and her search for home in a fragmented world. A masterful showman, Epum invites readers in with an honesty and heartfelt vulnerability that lingers long after the final word. These essays blew me away. I love The Gloomy Girl Variety Show, and you will too.” — Edgar Gomez, author of High-Risk Homosexual: A Memoir

Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems by Maria Zoccola — January 14 (Scribner Book Company)

“Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993 brings Helen to life in the twentieth-century American South—Sparta, Tennessee, where she shops at Piggly Wiggly, calls her sister Clytemnestra on the phone (“cly, you remember when it was us and the boys…”), and lists her pregnancy cravings (“pickles. peanut butter off a spoon. that cereal / with the little blue guys on it”). Zoccola’s use of persona and anachronism are transformative, and the formal daring of these poems, including golden shovels from the Iliad, thrilled me. Helen of Troy, 1993 is the most imaginative debut I’ve read in years.” — Maggie Smith, poet and New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood by Sarah Hoover — January 14 (S&s/Simon Element)

“The Motherload is for all the women who wish someone had told them the truth about motherhood. Honest, unapologetic, and brutally funny...it’s about developing the strength to care for yourself and thereby learning to care for another.” — Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter

The Choreic Period: Poems by Latif Askia Ba — January 21 (Milkweed Editions)

Latif Askia Ba—an acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy—honors all the things that arise from our unique choreographies. Meeting each reader with corporeal generosity, these poems create space to practice a radical reclamation of movement and the body. Together. In dialogue. In disability. These poems are percussive and syncopated, utilizing a polylingual braid of French, Spanish, Jamaican, Fulani, and Wolof, reminding the Anglophone reader: “I am not here to accommodate you.” Because these poems are not so much for you as they are with you, an accompaniment rather than an accommodation, something to be rather than something to own. With startling nuance, The Choreic Period encourages us to “relinquish the things that we have. And mark the thing that we do,” all to see and sing the vital “thing that we be.”

elseship: an unrequited affair by Tree Abraham — January 28 (Soft Skull)

“elseship is a kaleidoscopic exploration of all that can exist between two people caught in the middle of friendship and unrequited love. It’s a gorgeous and delicately rendered tapestry of desires—and a bracing examination of what happens when feelings break the boxes and labels meant to neatly contain them.” — Angela Chen, author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White — January 28 (Bloomsbury Publishing)

“Nearly 50 years after the great Edmund White co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex, we get even more joy, more candor, and more of White’s peerless literary stype in a whitty and highly personal memoir devoted to a lifelong love of sex, and of sex and love. Fabulous and inspiring!” — Bill Hayes, author of Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me