32 Books We Can’t Wait to Read: February 2025
Fiction
The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole — February 4 (Tin House Books)
“The Edge of Water is a beautifully realized epic tale following the lives of three generations of women across two continents. Bankole expertly explores tenderness and heartache without sentimentality. This is a stunning addition to the canon of diasporic tales.” — Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of The American Daughters
Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith — February 4 (Bloomsbury Publishing)
“Olivia Wolfgang-Smith writes with gusto, confidence and humor, and it’s a magical combination. Vivian Lesperance is a delightful, brilliant woman vying to enter a society that has no room for her, and I rooted for Vivian every step of the way. But it’s the love story that beats at the heart of this novel that won me completely: Squire and Oscar forever and ever.” — Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful and Dear Edward
God-Disease by an chang joon — February 4 (Sarabande Books)
Imagine a space where cities and municipalities are delineated only by letters: a place in flux, a freewheeling confluence that does not commit to being American, Korean, or even Korean American. This is where God-Disease takes place. Strange things happen here. Identities warp and shift; sometimes they vanish altogether. In the titular story, a museum insect curator returns to her birth town, J Municipality, feeling empty and searching for answers to her mother’s absence; was it insanity that plagued her, or was it shin-byeong—god-disease? Equal parts Southern Korean Gothic and slipstream, the collection is a meditation on language, identity, and names, and how deceptively fragile they can all be.
Soft Core by Brittany Newell — February 4 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“Soft Core is a beautiful fever dream, a slippery, captivating pleasure, a love story stuffed inside a wadded nylon stocking. It’s a novel that wants to get close to you. It wants to bite your neck; it’s the actual promise of a hickey. I can't remember the last book I read that was even half as tender. I ate it up.” — Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things
You, From Below by Em J Parsley — February 4 (Split/Lip Press)
“Weaves Appalachian landscape and lore with magical realism, guiding readers on an urgent journey up a treacherous mountain path where they will meet characters both curious and disturbing. With intimate knowledge of the region, Parsley crafts a world where disaster and wonder coexist, blurring the lines between history and myth. Lovely, lush, and haunting.” — Alisa Alering, author of Smothermoss
Take It Personally by Claire Hopple — February 4 (Stalking Horse Press)
In Take It Personally, Tori, the lead singer of a local rock band, takes on an amateur private investigator job where she spies on a famous diarist. Are the published diaries authentic or fabricated? As she uncovers the mystery alongside her psychic roommate, her investigation is complicated by their nudist neighbor disappearing, the neighborhood watch morphing into a secret society, and her band getting booked on a national tour. This vulnerable yet absurdly comic novel explores themes of alienation within a community and the pursuit of a job that gives you real feedback.
Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford — February 11 (Scribner Book Company)
“To read Krystelle Bamford’s astonishing debut is to be perpetually conflicted, like the child cousins it follows, between tearing at breakneck speed through the forest of its gorgeous pages to find out what will happen next, and deliberating with delirious languor, stopping to pick up, turn over, and marvel at each wryly glorious description, each exquisite joke. Idle Grounds left me like a kid with a dreadful yet delicious secret who tells everyone, I know something you don’t know!—but I can’t tell; you’ll have to find out for yourself.” — Rachel Lyon, author of Fruit of the Dead
Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield — February 11 (W. W. Norton & Company)
“Sharp and atmospheric eco-horror that slices into the gruesome strangeness of industrialized agriculture. With Maggie Sarsfield's compelling cast and heady, urgent prose, Beta Vulgaris is a fever dream hungry to consume you.” — Kathryn Harlan, author of Fruiting Bodies
Covert Joy: Selected Stories by Clarice Lispector — February 11 (New Directions Publishing Company)
This radiant selection of Clarice Lispector’s best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as “The Smallest Woman in the World,” “Love,” “Family Ties,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” Lispector’s luminous regard for life’s small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume. Covert Joy offers the particular bliss a book can bring that she expresses in the title story.
A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama (translated by Jesse Kirkwood) — February 11 (Other Press)
When her mother emigrates to China for work, 20-year-old Chizu moves in with 71-year-old Ginko, an eccentric distant relative, taking a room in her ramshackle Tokyo home, with its two resident cats and the persistent rattle of passing trains. Living their lives in imperfect symmetry, they establish an uneasy alliance, stress tested by Chizu's flashes of youthful spite. As the four seasons pass, Chizu navigates a series of tedious part-time jobs and unsatisfying relationships, before eventually finding her feet and salvaging a fierce independence from her solitude. A Perfect Day to Be Alone is a moving, microscopic examination of loneliness and heartbreak. With flashes of deadpan humor and a keen eye for poignant detail, Aoyama chronicles the painful process of breaking free from the moorings of youth.
Loca by Alejandro Heredia — February 11 (Simon & Schuster)
“In this remarkable debut, Alejandro Heredia traces young lives from the streets of Santo Domingo to the streets of the Bronx, capturing the heartbreak of queer youth, a woman’s rebellion against the confines of motherhood, and, above all, the pain and power of friendship that extends across seas, and borders, and the struggle of working people to survive in America. It is the most generously written novel I have read in a very long time, and that generosity is a beautiful thing.” — Adam Haslett, Pulitzer Prize and National Award Book Award finalist for Imagine Me Gone and You Are Not A Stranger Here
Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis-Sharma — February 11 (Atlantic Monthly Press)
“I could not put this down! Once again, Francis-Sharma’s phenomenal prose delivers; here, with exquisite suspense in a revenge story chocked full of thorny characters. This is an unforgiving tale of cat-and-mouse begging us to confront just how far we’d go to take control in a society hell-bent on minimizing our pain. These pages set loose the raging, wicked what-ifs we keep deeply and shamefully hidden inside our basements.” — Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming and Anita de Monte Laughs Last
Mazeltov by Eli Zuzovsky — February 11 (Henry Holt & Company)
“By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Eli Zuzovsky’s brilliantly observed novel offers a kaleidoscopic view of a young queer man’s life, his family and his times, through the lens of his bar mitzvah. Mazeltov is an unforgettable, virtuosic debut.” — Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood — February 11 (Riverhead Books)
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn’t believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident. But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past. Meditative, moving, and finely observed, Stone Yard Devotional is a seminal novel from a writer of rare power, exploring what it means to retreat from the world, the true nature of forgiveness, and the sustained effect of grief on the human soul.
Hungerstone by Kat Dunn — February 18 (Zando)
“Hungerstone writhes ‘like a box of live snakes,’ with the exquisite torment of need. A fever dream of female desire. Kat Dunn brings vital style and a dangerous pulse to queer gothic fiction in this infectious, utterly gorgeous tale of awakening.” — Margot Douaihy, USA Today bestselling author of Scorched Grace and Blessed Water
Nothing Serious by Emily J. Smith — February 18 (William Morrow & Company)
“This is the modern, feminist dating world thriller I've been waiting for. I tore through Nothing Serious over a single weekend. It’s a fast-paced story with characters so fully realized they linger in your mind long after the central mystery has been resolved. Smith paints a fresh and honest portrait of 30-something life that is as hopeful as it is clear-eyed about the trap of ‘having it all.’ I know that this is a novel my friends and I will be referencing for years to come.” — Kate Brody, author of Rabbit Hole
What You Make of Me by Sophie Madeline Dess — February 15 (Penguin Press)
“What You Make of Me is a stunning novel of art, love, memory and death written with exquisite wit and deep feeling. Sophie Madeline Dess has conjured one of the most unique and heartbreaking family narratives in recent memory, and with her rendering of the dynamic between Ava and Demetri, she’s given us a sibling duo for the ages.” — Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and No One Left to Come Looking for You
The Voices of Adriana by Elvira Navarro (translated by Christina MacSweeney) — February 18 (Two Lines Press)
Adriana has become obsessed with her father’s online dating. Recently widowed, he’s on a self-destructive, manic search for a partner to accompany him through his twilight years. At the same time, her life as an isolated grad student feels unreal, and to fill the void of her mother’s death, Adriana begins writing, trying on different voices. She builds worlds from the online profiles of her father's latest flings, that is until more fundamental voices—those of her grandmother and mother—begin calling out to her in the night. The Voices of Adriana, the latest from Spanish writer Elvira Navarro, is an innovative novel about grief and how we might reanimate the voices of those we've lost, not as ghosts, but as living parts of ourselves.
Show Don’t Tell: Stories by Curtis Sittenfeld — February 25 (Random House)
A funny, fiercely intelligent, and moving collection exploring marriage, friendship, fame, and artistic ambition—including a story that revisits the main character from Curtis Sittenfeld's iconic novel Prep—from the New York Times bestselling author of Eligible and Romantic Comedy. In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she's as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis — February 25 (Tiny Reparations Books)
“Impossibly funny whilst darkly probing, Fundamentally is the whole package: a raunchy, irreverent, touching, and daring debut with slicing commentary wrapped in bold, biting humor. It slyly and systematically rejects our swallowed concepts of heroes and who is correct, and posits instead the better question: what is right?” — Parini Shroff, author of The Bandit Queens
The Grand Scheme of Things by Warona Jay — February 25 (Washington Square Press)
“Explosive from the first page, The Grand Scheme of Things gleefully lays bare the lengths artists will go to in order to achieve their dreams, as well as the hypocrisy of gatekeepers who espouse the myth of meritocracy. Never shying away from complexity while also giving readers much to delight in, Warona Jay makes an unforgettable entrance to the world of literature. Layered, hyperaware, and as entertaining as it is incendiary, Jay’s debut is a hit.” — Mateo Askaripour, New York Times bestselling author of Black Buck
True Failure by Alex Higley — February 25 (Coffee House Press)
“If Joy Williams lived in the Chicago suburbs and watched reality television, she might write a novel approaching the manic brilliance of Alex Higley's True Failure. Higley mines the American imaginary and surfaces holding gems of truth, tragedy, and hope. Also—this book is damn funny.” — Miranda Popkey, author of Topics of Conversation
Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker) — February 25 (Hogarth Press)
“In writing about Mexican violence, misogyny, natural disasters, pandemics, art and literature, resistance, about Mexican women, US Latinx, and about herself, Cristina Rivera Garza writes about the universal conditions of our world today. She does so with prose unmatched for its sharp intelligence, poetry, clarity, empathy, liveliness, passion. She is a genius, ‘our’ necessary voice.” — Francisco Goldman, author of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle
Non-Fiction & Poetry
Reading the Waves: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch — February 4 (Riverhead Books)
“Reading the Waves is electrifying. In it, Lidia Yuknavitch interrogates memory, both as an act and a concept—remembering becomes a process of re-membering, of revivifying and reassembling a moment, a story, or a body. Yuknavitch invites us to dive deep into the waters of grief and imagination, love and violence, then guides us back up to the surface where we breathe a little freer and can see both the possibilities of the past and future horizons anew. Yuknavitch is a literary renegade, exploding the borders of genre and radically reimagining the stories we carry as acts of resistance.” — Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms
Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover by Sarah Perry — February 4 (Mariner Books)
“Though I would read Sarah Perry write about doorknobs, how lucky for us that she turns her precise, searching and funny voice to the subject of candy. What Perry has created here is nothing less than a wholly original exploration of how we eat, love, and experience pleasure now.” — Emma Copley Eisenberg, nationally bestselling author of Housemates
Immemorial by Lauren Markham — February 4 (Transit Books)
“In this brilliant, timely meditation, Markham explores how the stories we tell about borders and who belongs can harden our hearts or help to open them. The threads she follows weave a tapestry as moving as it is illuminating.” – Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark and A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Fragments of Wasted Devotion by Mia Arias Tsang — February 6 (Quilted Press)
“Fragments of Wasted Devotion is a prismatic ode to desire and self-betrayal. Mia Arias Tsang has written a book for the heartbroken, the rapturous, the lovers who never don’t love a little too much—she’s written a book for all of us. The perfect read for after that thing that you’re in, which you don’t really know what to call, finally comes to an end. Read this while you’re waiting for them to respond to your text.” — Isle McElroy, author of People Collide
Anchored by Katy Goforth — February 11 (Belle Point Press)
In this debut hybrid collection, a comforting voice winds through a web of memory. Part fiction, part memoir, Anchored gathers a chorus of Southern neighbors from pockets of rural America. Throughout these stories of potlucks, heartbreaks, and family bonds, Katy Goforth weaves an enchanted thread that reminds us how the people who shape us continue to share in the things that keep us home.
Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal (translated by Elisabeth Lauffer) — February 11 (New Vessel Press)
How do power and beauty join forces to determine who is considered ugly? What role does that ugliness play in fomenting hatred? Moshtari Hilal, an Afghan-born author and artist who lives in Germany, has written a touching, intimate, and highly political book. Dense body hair, crooked teeth, and big noses: Hilal uses a broad cultural lens to question norms of appearance—ostensibly her own, but in fact everyone’s. She writes about beauty salons in Kabul as a backdrop to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Darwin's theory of evolution, Kim Kardashian, and a utopian place in the shadow of her nose. With a profound mix of essay, poetry, her own drawings, and cultural and social history of the body, Hilal explores notions of repulsion and attraction, taking the reader into the most personal of realms to put self-image to the test. Why are we afraid of ugliness?
Cosmic Tantrum: Poems by Sarah Lyn Rogers — February 15 (Curbstone Press)
“Too much of this world's currency / is shame,” writes Sarah Lyn Rogers, in Cosmic Tantrum, which frees childhood of its innocence to indict the false motives of conditional love. Flipping the language of business, fairy tale, and dissolution, Rogers rewrites girlhood to offer a refuge from domesticity. Shifting form and address to reason with Kafka, Charlie Brown, Little Edie in Grey Gardens, and the ghosts that haunt survival, Cosmic Tantrum summons mischief to banish harm.” — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art
No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce by Haley Mlotek — February 18 (Viking)
“Haley Mlotek’s No Fault is a book about life escaping the story built to contain it. A history of heterosexual love, marriage, and divorce that’s suspicious of clean answers, a winsome and poignant recounting of her own romantic formation and deformation, No Fault is a cool and bracing corrective against those many over-certain stories of marriage’s dissolution that still dominate the form. Mlotek, as always, is a master of elegant destabilization; her sentences are enigmatic, opalescent, so precise as to feel like long-lost aphorisms. We're lucky to have her on this subject—a writer who can work in the gap between the known and the unknown, the intimate and the public, the way our lives are always forged in material context and the unreachable particularities of the human heart.” — Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad — February 25 (Knopf Publishing Group)
“I can't think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. Doom and gloom and unspeakable horror abound and overwhelm these days, but it remains important to understand what we already know is happening now and how it will be understood in the future. It helps when we feel helpless to give our time and attention, our hearts and consideration to a voice like this, a book like this, from our particular time and for it. There is so much power in language here, where it is difficult to find words, such heart in a world that feels has lost its way. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it. I honestly don't know how you could.” — Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars
