Too. Many. Good. Books.
Among the authors in this month's preview roundup, three have won Pulitzers, one has won a Booker Prize and two are on this year's longlist, and almost all of them have had their work adapted for the screen or expect to soon. One of them, Marlon James, took a more direct route to television by creating his own original HBO miniseries.
Champagne problem, sure, but this spate of major books does present an issue: There's no way this preview list can possibly include all – or even half – of the great new releases that warrant a nod this month. So as you scroll leisurely through the crowded garden of delights below, spare a thought for all the books that, if we lived in a fair and just world, free from the tyranny of word limits, would have appeared in these highlights – among others, books by Sebastian Barry, Patrick DeWitt, John Boyne, Jared Diamond, Amanda Peters, Alice Hoffman … you get it.
Now, let's get into it.
FICTION
Under Story by Chloe Benjamin
Benjamin sure seems to have something against time as we typically know it. Her debut novel troubled good-old metronomic reality with dream logic, and the premise of her sophomore effort, The Immortalists, robbed the future of one of its most jealously guarded secrets, the date of one's death. Now her latest novel — an epic sci-fi love story that already has a screen adaptation in the works, refuses to march in just one direction — introducing a world beyond our own and twisting time into pretzels like an overworked rubber band.
The Disappearers by Marlon James
After a dalliance with high fantasy, the author of A Brief History of Seven Killings makes a highly anticipated return to Jamaica – where, in James' new novel, homophobia is as ubiquitous as oxygen and the frequent lynchings are all but state-sponsored. It's here that a group of gay men gather in 1988 with the shared hope of putting on a play. Those familiar with James' output won't be shocked to learn that this Booker Prize longlister, which spans 17 years, is as brutal as it is beautifully wrought. Woven with harrowing violence, graphic sex and a veritable menagerie of bodily fluids, this epic promises to petrify and transport readers in equal measure.
Switzy by Emma Cline
The second Booker Prize nominee on our list stars an aging executive wrestling with mortality, the past and his own unraveling mind on the journey to a euthanasia clinic in Switzerland, where his final meeting awaits. Cline's previous novel, The Guest, mined material from the rarified world of the wealthy, albeit from an outsider's perspective. Here her vantage point is the apex itself, in an intimate account that, according to Booker judges, speaks "vividly about the trappings of the elite – the private jets, the heirloom watches, all that time spent in the office – as well as their sad social cost in a story that feels immersive, elegiac, and very real."
Taipei Story by R.F. Kuang
Kuang emerges from the underworld, where she set her previous novel, Katabasis, for a new book planted firmly in a particular place and time of life. Lily Chen, the novel's American narrator, is studying in Taiwan the summer after her freshman year in college, in hopes of coming to understand her Chinese ancestry. True to form for Kuang, Lily's formative sojourn promises to be shaped not only by frenemy drama, academic pressure and cultural flux, but also by language and the treacherous art of translation.
Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson
Atkinson has dealt with World War II before, notably in A God in Ruins and Transcription; now the celebrated British author is focusing on its aftermath. Set six years after the violence concluded, her new novel finds both Britain and journalist Harry Flynn, who was a prisoner of war in the Far East, haltingly trying to regain their footing. And what says everything's fine, guys! quite like throwing a party? Thus: the Festival of Britain, which Harry Flynn finds himself helping to organize. Of course, a little merrymaking rarely solves the big problems and sadly, in Harry's case, ends up adding to his considerable load.
Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel
Just in case you thought it was safe to trust the boundaries of the known universe again, Mandel offers this list's second speculative mind-bender. The latest novel from the author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility deposits the reader at an apartment party celebrating a rare window of peace in a bleak near-future in which the U.S. has dissolved in civil war. Don't expect the moment of relief to last long, though. During the festivities, more doors seem to have opened than just that of the Los Angeles apartment, and certain startling impossibilities appear to have let themselves in.
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee
Like her previous novel, Pachinko, a National Book Award finalist that was adapted for prestige TV, Lee's new book represents nearly a decade of labor – and it shows. Every bit as intricate and ambitious as its predecessor, American Hagwon boasts a big cast and a narrative arc that spans much of the '90s and '00s. But at its core is a family of five, whose travels and tribulations take center-stage, and whose experience with the rigors of the titular hagwon – a private tutoring institution common in South Korea – becomes a crucible for the children and a prism through which to understand their complicated relationship with home.
The Radiance by Ayad Akhtar
"That question – about what is real and what's not real – is at the heart of what we're dealing with every day in our lives," Akhtar told Fresh Air in 2020, after the publication of his previous novel, Homeland Elegies. This uncertainty is also at the heart of Akhtar's writing, which, with its untraceable weave of fiction and memoir, consistently refuses to concede any conclusive answers on that score. Don't expect them from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's third novel either. Here the question of what's real remains as pressing as ever, with the narrator recovering from a hit-and-run and dangerously entangled in campus intrigue.
Ply by Hernan Diaz
Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for his previous novel, which mined American history for a crafty tale set in the Great Depression. This time, Diaz leaps forward to a distant future, centuries after another major crash: that of civilization as we know it. The dwindling population tinkers a life from the remains of bygone eras, and power literally means power, with the electric utility and its cronies in private security being the city's closest thing to a central authority. Which helps explain why the stakes are so high for Diaz's narrator, a "pincher" who steals power from the monopoly – and whose recent innovation is attracting unwanted attention.
The Wreckers by George Makana Clark
The second novel from Clark, a Zimbabwe-born writer with roots across the world, follows the obscure quest of a squirrely man with tricks up his sleeve and business cards to suit any need. He's hunting a number of artifacts linked with a 19th-century line of Portuguese "civilizers," known as such because they righteously tossed in a baptism when enslaving their Angolan victims. Maybe think of it as an Indiana Jones-esque adventure story, wherein the Indy is Angolan, the mission isn't clear, and a caffeinated Tarantino was responsible for the screenplay. It encompasses three continents, two centuries, one lost kingdom and atrocities beyond words. Also, it's got pirates, natural disasters, audacious con jobs and ill-fitting dentures of unpleasant provenance. It's a lot.
NONFICTION
American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark
Undoubtedly Bird's best-known book is American Prometheus, the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that won the historian a Pulitzer Prize and inspired an Oscar-winning blockbuster. Now, Bird and Goldmark, his wife, explore the life of a person less focused on stealing fire from the gods than brazenly setting them himself. The late Cohn already cuts an infamous figure in 20th century American history, having enthusiastically — and effectively — acted as the favorite legal bulldog of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and some of the biggest bosses in organized crime. He is also known to have had a close relationship with the sitting U.S. president. Given Cohn's cartoonishly despicable reputation, you might expect his life to reveal at least some redeeming qualities under the microscope of a disinterested scholar — but you'd be wrong.
The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men by Jon Ronson
Few journalists are more experienced than Ronson at the delicate art of falling down a rabbit hole, having framed most of his previous books around figures on the fringe: psychopaths, amateur superheroes, social media pariahs, outlandish military units; the list goes on. Now he's interested in men whose minds seem to be in turbulent freefall, exploring the stories of subjects whose lives have taken rather bizarre turns lately — including the mysterious proprietor of the castle that graces the book's title — as a lens through which to seek answers to a grander, and more pressing, cultural question: What's up with men lately?
On the Equality of All Things: Lessons on Physics and Philosophy by Carlo Rovelli
Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist can be counted on for a brain-melting moment or two. Time and again, the author of Helgoland and White Holes has managed to take complicated concepts such as quantum mechanics and black holes, which defy everything our senses tell us about the world, and explain them lucidly enough to enable readers to finally grasp their monumental import. The same is true in this slim treatise, which modestly seeks to recalibrate many of our foundational assumptions about the nature of reality and our relationship to it.
Bad Boy For Life: The Rise and Fall of Sean Combs by Cheyenne Roundtree
Roundtree's debut book expands on the reporting she did for 2024's bombshell profile of Combs in Rolling Stone, where she plies her trade as an investigative journalist. Here Roundtree enjoys the elbow room to take in the whole sweep of the rap mogul's rise, near-imperial apogee and ultimate downfall and imprisonment, when whispered allegations of rampant abuse and intimidation finally grew loud enough to catch up with him at last.
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