Fiction

The Paris Express

The author of Room also writes some seriously good historical fiction, like 2023’s Learned by Heart, which fictionalized the youth of Anne Lister. The Paris Express, set later in the 19th century, follows a large cast of characters, each with their own reasons for taking a train to Paris—one of whom is an anarchist with a plan to derail the fated trip.

Spent

By Alison Bechdel

Though she’s best known for her graphic memoir Fun Home, which became a musical, and her long-running comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” Alison Bechdel hasn’t stopped making hits: We loved her clever, thoughtful 2021 graphic memoir The Secret to Superhuman Strength, and we’re excited for what she has in store in Spent: A Comic Novel. The subtitle indicates that this may be her most fictionalized endeavor in years, but the characters are recognizable as a version of Bechdel herself, and some familiar figures for “Dykes to Watch Out For” fans.

Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One

By Kristen Arnett

Send in the clowns! Kristen Arnett (With Teeth, Mostly Dead Things) is back and more absurd than ever. Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One follows Cherry Hendricks, a struggling clown for hire who is finding her life to be more a cause for tears than hilarity. Then she meets an older magician, Margot the Magnificent, and becomes both inspired and smitten. If this sounds familiar, you might have recently watched Chappell Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova” music video (or is that just me?), which will certainly get you in the spirit of things.

Send in the clowns! Kristen Arnett (With Teeth, Mostly Dead Things) is back and more absurd than ever. Stop Me if You've Heard This One follows Cherry Hendricks, a struggling clown for hire who is finding her life to be more a cause…

Vanishing World

By Sayaka Murata, Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

In 2018, Sayaka Murata’s first novel to be translated into English, Convenience Store Woman, was a surprise hit, becoming remarkably popular for a book so openly critical of social precepts in a way that was both culturally specific to Japan and also resonant for an American audience and across the globe. Murata took her quietly radical ideas about marriage, sex and conformity and only made them louder in Earthlings. Vanishing World appears to go even further, set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples is taboo.

I’ll Be Right Here

By Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom’s books have always been deeply felt, and her 2022 memoir, In Love, plunged readers deeper than ever, relating her husband’s treatment for early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and the end of his life. Her new novel, I’ll Be Right Here, sounds exceptional: a book that spans decades, celebrating “the lawlessness of love” through the story of four friends living in New York City who forge an enduring bond that transforms them into family.

Disappoint Me

By Nicola Dinan

One of BookPage’s Best Books of 2023, Nicola Dinan’s debut, Bellies, was the real deal—a story of first love and heartbreak written with the exhilarating vulnerability of a Sally Rooney novel. We can’t wait to see what she does with the premise of her sophomore effort: A millennial trans woman begins dating a corporate lawyer in the hope that his highly traditional take on romance will fill the emotional void of her 30s.

The Emperor of Gladness

By Ocean Vuong

It’s been six years since Ocean Vuong’s fiction debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and although fans drank down his 2022 poetry offering, Time Is a Mother, anticipation for a second novel has been feverish and unrelenting. We can hardly believe it’s almost here! The Emperor of Gladness is set in Connecticut, and partially inspired by Vuong’s time spent working as a fast-food server.

Wild Dark Shore

By Charlotte McConaghy

Bestselling Australian author Charlotte McConaghy does a lot of research for her ecologically informed novels: Her first two books to be published in the U.S., Migrations and Once There Were Wolves, required her to investigate Arctic terns and Scotland’s gray wolves. Her latest, Wild Dark Shore, takes a seed bank on an island near Antarctica as its setting, where rising sea levels have driven away all human caretakers except for one man, Dominic Salt, and his children . . . until a mysterious woman named Rowan washes ashore in a storm.

We Do Not Part

By Han Kang, Translated by e. yaewon, Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris

Han Kang’s novels reflect human nature across what she described—in an interview with BookPage about The Vegetarian—as “a spectrum that stretches from holiness to horror.” Han was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for the fierceness with which she “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Her abilities are at their most undeniable and radiant in We Do Not Part, which tells the story of an author haunted by having written a book about the 1980 massacre in Gwangju, Korea, who braves an overpowering snowstorm to do a favor for her friend.