Literary Fiction

The Antidote

The gorgeous language and fantastical premises Karen Russell (Orange World and Other Stories, Swamplandia!) employs are always animated by deep feeling and big ideas. The Antidote (only her second novel!), shares that depth and heft: It opens with the April 1935 “Black Sunday” dust storm enveloping the tiny town of Uz, Nebraska. Uz is home to a prairie witch, known as the Antidote, who possesses the ability to store memories that her neighbors would rather not retain themselves. But when the darkness and terror passes, the Antidote discovers that it has blown away all the memories she’d kept for the townspeople along with their topsoil. Russell unspools a story of holding on to community through hardship that’s also an investigation of what has been omitted from American memory, and how we could reclaim it.

We Love You, Bunny

By Mona Awad

Those who read Mona Awad’s funny, freaky Bunny and were left wondering “WTF just happened?!” will be thrilled to hear that Awad is granting us a follow-up. It’s unclear whether the action of We Love You, Bunny will take place before or after Samantha Heather Mackey and the Bunnies’ MFA cohort at Warren University, but for those who can’t get a copy of Bunny in time, the book purports to work as a standalone as well.

Twist

By Colum McCann

The Dublin-born author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin, for which he won the National Book Award, Colum McCann returns to his Irish roots in his eighth novel, Twist, which tells the story of Irish journalist Anthony Fennell’s reportage on the underwater fiber-optic cables that transfer the world’s host of digital information. Repairing these cables to maintain the flow of the vital data they carry requires fast action by engineer divers, one of whom Anthony forms a close connection with as he accompanies a cable repair ship on a mission off the west coast of Africa.

Theft

By Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah (Afterlives) returns with his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. Set at the turn of the 21st century in Tanzania, Theft follows Karim, Fauzia and Badar, three young people lacking support from their families attempting to make their lives in rapidly changing Zanzibar.

Mỹ Documents

By Kevin Nguyen

This dark tale takes place in a contemporary America where the government is forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. High schooler Duncan and first year college student Jen are both detained with their mother, but their journalist half-sibling Ursula remains on the outside and begins reporting on their situation. The author of New Waves, Kevin Ngyuen is a journalist, and he brings a sharp sense of journalistic ethics to this tale, which also reflects the U.S. government’s ongoing detention of immigrants and internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s.

Flashlight

By Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, a story of power and perspective set at a 1980s performing arts high school, won the National Book Award in 2019 for the way it undid and upended narrative expectations. We have high hopes for Flashlight, and we know not to expect a straightforward structure. Beginning with a tragedy befalling a father and his 10-year-old daughter, the book branches out into different family members’ perspectives and peers into Korean, American and Japanese history.

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.

Another Man in the Street

By Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips (The Lost Child) once again explores the impact of the strictures of colonial rule in the Caribbean in the absorbing Another Man in the Street.

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