Books We Can't Wait to Read: March 2023
Another list of fiction and nonfiction to adding to your TBR pile! What are you looking forward to reading this month?
Fiction
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez — March 7 (Grand Central Publishing)
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is a vivid family portrait, in all its shattered reality, exploring the familial bonds between women and cycles of generational violence, colonialism, race, and silence, replete with snark, resentment, tenderness, and, of course, love.
Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas— March 7 (Tin House)
A magnetic and unforgettable story of desire and its complexities, and a powerful reckoning with memory, loss, and longing, Madelaine Lucas's debut novel, Thirst for Salt, reveals with stunning, sensual immediacy the way the past can hold us in its thrall, shaping who we are and what we love.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton— March 7 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano— March 14 (Dial Press)
An exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott's timeless classic, Little Women, Hello Beautiful is a profoundly moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.
Commitment by Mona Simpson— March 21 (Knopf)
Moving from Berkeley and Los Angeles to New York and back again, this is a story about one family trying to navigate the crisis of their lives, a crisis many know first-hand in their own families or in those of their neighbors. A resonant novel about family and duty and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill, Commitment honors the spirit of fragile, imperfect mothers and the under-chronicled significance of friends, in determining the lives of our children left on their own. With Commitment, Mona Simpson, one of the foremost chroniclers of the American family in our time, has written her most important and unforgettable novel.
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey— March 21 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.
American Mermaid by Julia Langbein — March 21 (Doubleday Books)
A brilliantly funny debut novel that follows a writer lured to Los Angeles to adapt her feminist mermaid novel into a big-budget action film, who believes her heroine has come to life to take revenge for Hollywood's violations.
Sea Change by Gina Chung — March 28 (Vintage)
A novel about a woman tossed overboard by heartbreak and loss, who has to find her way back to stable shores with the help of a giant Pacific octopus.
The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer— March 28 (Catapult)
Telling of the love between sisters who don't always see eye to eye, this extraordinary debut novel is a celebration of the power of stories, asking, What happens to us when our stories are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?
White Cat, Black Dog: Stories by Kelly Link— March 28 (Random House)
Seven ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world, from one of today's finest short story writers--MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow Kelly Link, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble.
Chlorine by Jade Song— March 28 (William Morrow & Company)
In the vein of The Pisces and The Vegetarian, Chlorine is a debut novel that blurs the line between a literary coming-of-age narrative and a dark unsettling horror tale, told from an adult perspective on the trials and tribulations of growing up in a society that puts pressure on young women and their bodies... a powerful, relevant novel of immigration, sapphic longing, and fierce, defiant becoming.
Ada’s Room by Sharon Dodua Otoo, translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi— March 28 (Riverhead Books)
A kaleidoscopic novel spanning generations and continents, that reveals the connections between four women in their struggle for survival.
Nonfiction
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell — March 7 (Random House)
We are living on the wrong clock, and it is destroying us. The New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing offers us different ways to experience time in this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book.
Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough by Dina Nayeri— March 7 (Catapult)
For readers of David Grann, Malcolm Gladwell, and Atul Gawande, Who Gets Believed? is a book as deeply personal as it is profound in its reflections on morals, language, human psychology, and the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.
How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind by Regan Penaluna— March 7 (Grove Press)
In How to Think Like a Woman, Regan Penaluna blends memoir, biography, and criticism to tell the stories of these four women, weaving throughout an alternative history of philosophy as well as her own search for love and truth. Funny, honest, and wickedly intelligent, this is a moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally.
The Teachers: A Year Inside America's Most Vulnerable, Important Profession by Alexandra Robbins — March 14 (Grove Press)
A riveting, must-read, year-in-the-life account of three teachers, combined with reporting that reveals what's really going on behind school doors, by New York Times bestselling author and education expert Alexandra Robbins.
Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness by Nicholas Humphrey— March 14 (MIT Press)
The story of a quest to uncover the evolutionary history of consciousness from one of the world's leading theoretical psychologists.
