16 titles you should not miss
Mid-January is when New Year’s resolutions are abandoned and Netflix and lethargy creep into. The book world of 2023 offers more than the chaotic memoirs of one, we promise. exiled ginger prince.
Below you will find 16 of this season’s most fascinating titles, from Indian epics and domestic dramedies to intimate stories about love, loss, or K-pop.
<i>Age of Vice </i> by Deepti Kapoor
Kapoor’s sprawling, mobbed-up thriller — a story of crime, punishment, and class divides set in turn-of-the-millennium New Delhi — feels like the first big novel of the year in nearly every sense: a glossy triangulation of The Godfather, The White Tiger?, and How to get filthy rich in Rising Asia poured across 544 colorful, chaotic pages. (A GMA Book Club pick. It’s currently slated for a series adaptation at FX. (Out now)
<i>The Survivalists </i> by Kashana Cauley
In Cauley’s timely, tart debut, a young Black lawyer is drawn to a group of Brooklyn doomsday preppers. Aretha, an eternally single woman, is on the partner track but alone enough to be ready for Aaron, a coffee entrepreneur with cool charm. When she moves in with Aaron’s survivalist roommates, their meet-cute takes a new turn. (Out now)
<i>Really Good, Actually </i> by Monica Heisey
Jon and Maggie are married at the age of 19. It’s over 608 days later. It’s really good This is not a memoir. Heisey has TV writing credits. Schitt’s Creek, did her own time as a twentysomething divorcée, and that lived experience pulses through It’s really goodThe confident and hilarious debut of her confidence. You will love the masturbating, crying, and post-split Tinder roundelays. But stay for the morbid, messy wit that lightens up almost every page. (Jan. 17)
<i>Love, Pamela </i> by Pamela Anderson
It will be a tell all or a let-some. Until Love Anderson’s publishers are the only ones who know for certain when it will land on shelves. (A Netflix documentary releases the same day.) After keeping her Mona Lisa silence during Hulu’s recent Pam & Tommy juggernaut — and the many spotlight-seared years that preceded it — the actress, Playmate, and canonical blonde has more than earned the chance to share her truths. (Jan. 31)
<i>Big Swiss</i> by Jen Beagin
Ah, yes, another novel about a woman living in a Hudson Valley farmhouse stuffed with bees. She works as a secret transcriptionist at a boho, sex therapist and falls into an affair with Flavia, a Swiss goddess. Beagin (Pretend that I’m dead) may have found the best vehicle yet for her deliciously nihilist whimsy; Killing Eve‘s Jodie Comer He has already signed on as a star in a series for HBO. (Feb. 7)
<i>Victory City </i> by Salman Rushdie
After surviving a near-fatal attempt on his life We were fortunate to have Rushdie last year. Here, the master of magical realism returns to form — comparisons to his Booker Prize-winning 1981 classic Midnight’s Children have been made — with a teeming, richly textured fable about a young girl in 14th-century India anointed by the goddess Pavanti with extraordinary world-building powers. (Feb. 7)
<i>My Last Innocent Year</i> by Daisy Alpert Florin
A college senior reckons with the aftermath of what might have been sexual assault by a fellow student — and tumbles into a love affair with her married professor — against the backdrop of Clinton-Lewinsky-era America in Florin’s resonant, coolly composed debut. (Feb. 14)
<i />Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears </i> by Michael Schulman
Schulman, a staffer for many years at The New Yorker, is perhaps the last great writer for profiles that really penetrate the transparent, impenetrable surface celebrity-industrial. (Yes, that was him. 2021 piece on Succession star Jeremy Strong That was what set the internet ablaze in late 2021. Wars arrives in the sweet spot between the Jan. 24 nominations and the March 12 ceremony — just in time for awards-show junkies to inject this delicious (and meticulously researched) bitchery straight into their veins. (Feb. 21)
<i>I Have Some Questions for You </i> by Rebecca Makkai
After 2018’s stunningly devastating AIDS-era chronicle The Great BelieversMakkai turns toward Serial In her latest, she tells a story about a L.A. professor and podcaster who returns to New Hampshire at 40 to teach a guest class at the boarding school there. She also reveals the truth about her charismatic roommate’s death 20 years ago. (Feb. 21)
<i>Users </i> by Colin Winnette
Every novel with a dystopian interpretation of modern tech culture receives the “Read it, if you saw” recommendation. SeveranceThese days “tag is a common term, but Winnette’s clever, Charlie Kauffman-esque thriller deserves it. When Miles, the chief creative at a virtual reality company, receives what appears to be a series anonymous death threats on creamy stationery, his career spirals. Follow his existential IT nightmare all of the way down. (Feb. 21)
<i>Pineapple Street </i> by Jenny Johnson
Let us now praise purely escapist novels that fizz and pop — like this breezily consumable debut about a wealthy Brooklyn real estate family and the working-class millennial who marries into it, for better or worse. Jackson, an editor at Knopf, has a golden ear for the gilded social stratas of New York money, and all the cocktail benefits and secret codes that come with them. (March 7)
<i />Old Babes in the Wood </i> by Margaret Atwood
The woman who died at 83 is the woman who Handmaid’s Tale The landscape of literature has been forever changed. Later, episodic TV was created. This Old Babe refuses to rest on her late-career laurels. This Old Babe still has books in her — or at least another collection of singular short stories, be they about octopus aliens, the séanced spirit of George Orwell, or seven interlinked tales that trace one couple’s singular marriage across decades. (March 7)
<i>Now You See Us </i> by Balls Kaur Jaswal
The jacket copy proclaims it as “Crazy Rich Asians meets The Help” Three Filipina domestic workers in modern Singapore, all Filipina, are accused of murdering their employer. They join forces to uncover the truth from Jaswal, Reese’s Book Club alumnus (Erotic Stories for Punjabi WidowsThe novel is a lively, breezy read that emphasizes character study and unsolved mystery. (March 7)
<i>Biography of X</i> by Catherine Lacey
If Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife met TÁRIt might look a bit like Lacey’s Biography — an enveloping, surreally tilted exploration of one woman’s attempt to make sense of her late spouse, a towering artist whose core truths remain elusive to her grieving widow even — or perhaps especially — in death. (March 7)
<i>Y/N <i /> by Esther Yi
The title stands not for “Yes/No” but “Your/Name” — a signpost of online fan fiction that Yi’s deeply alienated protagonist, a Korean-American twentysomething living in Berlin, learns when she falls headlong into obsession over a Korean boy-bander named Moon in this piercing, feverish, and frequently astonishing debut. (March 14)
<i>Romantic Comedy<i /> by Curtis Sittenfeld
A comfortably schlubby writer for a late-night sketch show unexpectedly connects with the dreamboat guest host — but can she flip the script on famous-person romances that only seem to favor the ordinary when they have XY chromosomes? That’s Sittenfeld’s simple, adaptable latest. (April 11)
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