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The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2021

new release books fiction 2021

T he year 2021 was poised to be a great one for established, fan-favorite authors. We were blessed with new work from a buzzy roster of titans, from Colson Whitehead to Lauren Groff to Kazuo Ishiguro . But while they, along with several others, did not disappoint (see TIME’s list of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 ), it was debut authors who truly shined. In an industry that has long been criticized for exclusion—and where it’s increasingly difficult to break out from the crowd—a crop of bright new voices rose to the top. From Anthony Veasna So to Torrey Peters to Jocelyn Nicole Johnson and more, these writers introduced themselves to the world with fiction that surprised us, challenged our perspectives and kept us fulfilled. Here, the top 10 fiction books of 2021.

10. Klara and the Sun , Kazuo Ishiguro

new release books fiction 2021

The eighth novel from Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, longlisted for the Booker Prize, follows a robot-like “Artificial Friend” named Klara, who sits in a store and waits to be purchased. When she becomes the companion of an ailing 14-year-old girl, Klara puts her observations of the world to the test. In exploring the dynamic between the AI and the teen, Ishiguro crafts a narrative that asks unsettling questions about humanity, technology and purpose , offering a vivid view into a future that may not be so far away.

Buy Now: Klara and the Sun on Bookshop | Amazon

9. Open Water , Caleb Azumah Nelson

new release books fiction 2021

In his incisive debut novel, Caleb Azumah Nelson tells a bruising love story about young Black artists in London. His protagonist is a photographer who has fallen for a dancer, and Nelson proves masterly at writing young love, clocking the small and seemingly meaningless moments that encompass longing. In just over 150 intimate pages, Nelson celebrates the art that has shaped his characters’ lives while interrogating the unjust world that surrounds them.

Buy Now: Open Water on Bookshop | Amazon

Read more about the best entertainment of the year: TV shows | Movies | Songs | Albums | Podcasts | Nonfiction books | YA and children’s books | Movie performances | Video games | Theater

8. Afterparties , Anthony Veasna So

new release books fiction 2021

The nine stories that constitute Anthony Veasna So’s stirring debut collection, published after his death at 28, reveal a portrait of a Cambodian American community in California. One follows two sisters at their family’s 24-hour donut shop as they reflect on the father who left them. Another focuses on a high school badminton coach who is stuck in the past and desperate to win a match against the local star, a teenager. There’s also a mother with a secret, a love story with a major age gap and a wedding afterparty gone very wrong. Together, So’s narratives offer a thoughtful view into the community that shaped him, and while he describes the tensions his characters navigate with humor and care, he also offers penetrating insights on immigration, queerness and identity.

Buy Now: Afterparties on Bookshop | Amazon

7. Cloud Cuckoo Land , Anthony Doerr

new release books fiction 2021

The five protagonists of Anthony Doerr’s kaleidoscopic and remarkably constructed third novel, all living on the margins of society, are connected by an ancient Greek story. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, a National Book Award finalist, a present-day storyline anchors a sweeping narrative: in a library, an ex-prisoner of war is rehearsing a theatrical adaptation of the Greek story with five middle schoolers—and a lonely teenager has just hidden a bomb. Doerr catapults Cloud Cuckoo Land forward and back from this moment, from 15th-century Constantinople to an interstellar ship and back to this dusty library in Idaho where the impending crisis looms. His immersive world-building and dazzling prose tie together seemingly disparate threads as he underlines the value of storytelling and the power of imagination.

Buy Now: Cloud Cuckoo Land on Bookshop | Amazon

6. The Life of the Mind , Christine Smallwood

new release books fiction 2021

The contemporary fiction landscape is full of protagonists like Christine Smallwood’s Dorothy: white millennial women who are grappling with their privilege and existence in a world that constantly feels like it’s on the verge of collapse. Plot is secondary to whatever is going on inside their heads. But Dorothy, an adjunct English professor enduring the sixth day of her miscarriage, stands apart. In Smallwood’s taut debut, this charming yet profound narrator relays amusing observations on her ever-collapsing universe. Languishing in academia, Dorothy wonders how her once-attainable goals came to feel impossible, and her ramblings—which are never irritating or tiring, but instead satirical and strange—give way to a gratifying examination of ambition, freedom and power.

Buy Now : The Life of the Mind on Bookshop | Amazon

5. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

new release books fiction 2021

The debut novel from poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, longlisted for a National Book Award, is a piercing epic that follows the story of one American family from the colonial slave trade to present day. At its core is the mission of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black woman coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s, determined to learn more about her family history. What Ailey discovers leads her to grapple with her identity, particularly as she discovers secrets about her ancestors. In 800 rewarding pages, Jeffers offers a comprehensive account of class, colorism and intergenerational trauma. It’s an aching tale told with nuance and compassion—one that illuminates the cost of survival.

Buy Now: The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois on Bookshop | Amazon

4. Detransition, Baby , Torrey Peters

new release books fiction 2021

Reese is a 30-something trans woman who desperately wants a child. Her ex Ames, who recently detransitioned, just learned his new lover is pregnant with his baby. Ames presents Reese with the opportunity she’s been waiting for: perhaps the three of them can raise the baby together. In her delectable debut novel, Torrey Peters follows these characters as they become entangled in a messy, emotional web while considering this potentially catastrophic proposition—and simultaneously spins thought-provoking commentary on gender, sex and desire.

Buy Now: Detransition, Baby on Bookshop | Amazon

3. My Monticello , Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

new release books fiction 2021

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s searing short-story collection is one to read in order. Its narratives dissect an American present that doesn’t feel at all removed from the country’s violent past, and they build to a brutal finish. The unnerving standout piece—the titular novella—follows a group of neighbors who seek refuge on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation while on the run from white supremacists. Johnson’s narrator is college student Da’Naisha, a Black descendant of Jefferson who is questioning her relationship to the land and the people with whom she’s found herself occupying it. The story is as apocalyptic as it is realistic, a haunting portrait of a community trying to survive in a nation that constantly undermines its very existence.

Buy Now: My Monticello on Bookshop | Amazon

2. The Prophets , Robert Jones, Jr.

new release books fiction 2021

At a plantation in the antebellum South, enslaved teenagers Isaiah and Samuel work in a barn and seek refuge in each other until one of their own, after adopting their master’s religious beliefs, betrays their trust. In The Prophets, a National Book Award finalist, Robert Jones, Jr. traces the teens’ relationship, as well as the lives of the women who raised them, surround them and have been the backbone of the plantation for generations. In moving between their stories, Jones unveils a complex social hierarchy thrown off balance by the rejection of the young mens’ romance. The result is a crushing exploration of the legacy of slavery and a delicate story of Black queer love.

Buy Now: The Prophets on Bookshop | Amazon

1. Great Circle , Maggie Shipstead

new release books fiction 2021

The beginning of Maggie Shipstead’s astounding novel , a Booker finalist, includes a series of endings: two plane crashes, a sunken ship and several people dead. The bad luck continues when one of the ship’s young survivors, Marian, grows up to become a pilot—only to disappear on the job. Shipstead unravels parallel narratives, Marian’s and that of another woman whose life is changed by Marian’s story, in glorious detail. Every character, whether mentioned once or 50 times, has a specific, necessary presence. It’s a narrative made to be devoured, one that is both timeless and satisfying.

Buy Now: Great Circle on Bookshop | Amazon

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Write to Annabel Gutterman at [email protected]

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New Books Released in 2021: Top picks of the new fiction

Hands up all those who love browsing what’s new in books and the upcoming fiction releases? Many of the best books I read in 2020 were fiction titles that caught my eye from the 2020 new books lists , and 2021 is shaping up as another great year for reading.

📖 Related Reading: 2022 New Book Releases – My Top Picks  and my Favourite Reads of 2021 .

New Release Books 2021 - New Books 2021

Bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. Jen Campbell

And, while we love nothing more than popping into our local bookstores, browsing curated 2021 new release books lists online is really the best alternative when we are not able.

Disclosure: If you click a link in this post and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Note links will take readers in the US, UK or Canada to their local Amazon store (if available) and in all other cases, to an online book retailer that ships the title to your region.

Join me on my adventures browsing the new books in 2021

Here each month in 2021, I will discuss my top picks of the new books published and the upcoming fiction releases. Links in this article will take you to more detail about each title and, when I have been lucky enough to read it, open up my full review in a new tab.

So read on to see which new books and upcoming releases have caught my attention so far this year.

New Book Releases 2021, November & December

New Books 2021 – November & December Releases

As usual, the publishers are offering up several big-name bestselling author new releases to round out the year, just in time for the 2021 festive season gift guides. But for those who love taking a chance on a debut author, a couple of those still feature amongst our top picks of the November-December book releases.

New literature & drama

New Books 2021 - The Sentence

In new novel The Sentence , Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich ( The Round House , The Night Watchman ) asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. According to Publisher’s Weekly, it ‘offers profound insights into the effects of the global pandemic and the collateral damage of systemic racism’ and is one of her most illuminating works to date.

A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning. Find out more>>

New fiction books 2021 - Wish You Were Here

Prolific author Jodi Picoult ‘s 2021 release Wish You Were Here is inspired by recent events. Diana O’Toole’s life is going perfectly to plan. She’s up for promotion to her dream job (art specialist at Sotheby’s) and she’s about to fly to the Galápagos where she’s convinced her surgeon boyfriend, Finn, is going to propose. But then the virus hits New York City and Finn breaks the news: the hospital needs him, he has to stay. But he insists she still go. Once she’s in the Galápagos, the world shuts down around her, leaving her stranded in paradise. With only intermittent news from the outside world, she finds herself examining everything that’s brought her to this point and wondering if there’s a better way to live. But not everything is as it seems… Find out more >>

New Release Books 2021 - Call of the Penguins

Okay, so I am preternaturally drawn to anything involving these especially cute creatures, but Call of the Penguins by Hazel Prior ( Ellie and the Harpmaker ) sounds like a delightful read. Fiercely resilient and impeccably dressed, Veronica McCreedy has lived an incredible 87 years. Most of them alone, in her huge house by the sea. But Veronica has recently discovered a late-life love for family and friendship, adventure and wildlife. More specifically, a love for penguins! And so when she’s invited to co-present a wildlife documentary, far away in the southern hemisphere, she jumps at the chance. Even though it will put her in the spotlight, just when she thought she would soon fade into the wings. Perhaps it’s never too late to shine? Find out more >>

New thriller reads

Latest book releases - All Her Little Secrets

Debut author Wanda Morris’ All Her Little Secrets – Ellice Littlejohn seemingly has it all: an Ivy League law degree, a well-paying job as a corporate attorney in midtown Atlanta, great friends, and a “for fun” relationship with a rich, charming executive, who just happens to be her white boss. But everything changes one morning when she arrives at work and finds him dead with a gunshot to his head. And then she walks away like nothing has happened. Why? Ellice has some dark secrets. She can’t be thrust into the spotlight. People are gossiping, the police are suspicious, and Ellice, the company’s lone black attorney, is promoted to replace her boss – a dream-come-true. But she just can’t shake the feeling something is off. Find out more >>

New fiction - The Extinction Trials

Science fiction thriller The Extinction Trials , bestselling author A.G. Riddle’s new book is described as ‘an uplifting, standalone story about people struggling against impossible odds to save their families in a world gone crazy—with a surprise ending unlike anything you’ve ever read before’.

The end… is only the beginning. After a mysterious global event known only as “The Change,” six strangers wake up in an underground research facility. They soon learn that they’re part of the Extinction Trials—a scientific experiment to restart the human race. But the Extinction Trials hides a very big secret. And so does the world outside. Find out more >>

Captivating new historical fiction

New fiction - Lily, A Tale of Revenge

Lily: A Tale of Revenge by Rose Tremain – Abandoned at the gates of a London park one winter’s night in 1850, baby Lily Mortimer is saved by a young police constable Sam Trench and taken to the London Foundling Hospital. Lily enjoys a brief childhood idyll fostered by an affectionate family in rural Suffolk, before she’s returned to the Hospital and punished for her rebellious spirit. Released into the harsh world of Victorian London, Lily becomes a favoured employee at Belle Prettywood’s Wig Emporium, but all the while she is hiding a dreadful secret… Over the years, policeman Sam has kept watch over her, and when he meets Lily again, there is an instant attraction. Lily is convinced that Sam holds the key to her happiness – but might he also be the one to uncover her crime and so condemn her to death? Find out more >>

New book releases - Beasts of a Little Land

Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim – An epic story of love, war, and redemption spanning half a century, set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement, following the intertwined fates of Jade, a young girl sold to a courtesan school and JungHo, the penniless son of a hunter. This debut novel takes readers from the perfumed chambers of a courtesan school in Pyongyang to the glamorous cafes of a modernizing Seoul and the boreal forests of Manchuria, where battles rage, and Juhea Kim’s unforgettable characters forge their own destinies as they wager their nation’s. Immersive and elegant, Beasts of a Little Land unveils a world where friends become enemies, enemies become saviours, heroes are persecuted, and beasts take many shapes. Find out more >>

Other notable new releases include:

new release books fiction 2021

Recent Book Releases

New Books 2021 October

New Books in 2021 – October Releases

October is typically a big month in publishing as people begin preparing their Christmas book wishlists, and 2021 is no exception. We have highly anticipated new book releases to look forward to from international bestselling authors Amor Towles, Matthew Reilly, Jenny Colgan and Christian White, along with some lesser-known writers’ attention-grabbing thriller and historical mystery fiction synopses.

New fiction thrills

New Books 2021 - Wild Place by Christian White

Wild Place is the much anticipated new novel from international bestselling psychological thriller author Christian White ( The Nowhere Child and The Wife and The Widow ). He is known for his devious plot twists.

In the summer of 1989, a local teen goes missing from the idyllic suburb of Camp Hill in Australia. As rumours of Satanic rituals swirl, schoolteacher Tom Witter becomes convinced he holds the key to the disappearance. When the police won’t listen, he takes matters into his own hands with the help of the missing girl’s father and a local neighbourhood watch group. But as dark secrets are revealed and consequences to past actions are faced, Tom learns that the only way out of the darkness is to walk deeper into it.

Wild Plac e peels back the layers of suburbia, exposing what’s hidden underneath – guilt, desperation, violence – and attempts to answer the question: Why do good people do bad things?   Read my review >>

New book releases - No One Will Miss Her

No One Will Miss Her by Kat Rosenfield – I will admit it was the striking and evocative cover design that first caught my attention, but a quick read of the blurb and I found this new release offers a lot more substance to chew on. Two devious women from opposite worlds discover the dangers of coveting someone else’s life, and it is Detective Ian Bird’s job to figure out how that led to a murder in the hard-luck town of Copper Falls in rural Maine. What particularly appeals to me is that apparently one of these women, Lizzie, narrates their story from beyond the grave. Find out more >>

New release books - The Last Time She Died - October 2021

The Last Time She Died by Zoe Sharp – A family gather to mourn the death of their beloved husband and stepfather. No one but Detective John Byron sees the young woman with the white-blonde hair hiding in the shadows watching them, but then she is gone. She breaks into the family’s home and waits for them to return and call the police. When arrested, she smiles calmly at the outraged family and says she is Blake Claremont, the deceased’s daughter. But Blake is presumed dead… she vanished 10 years ago. The first in a new Blake & Byron Thrillers series. Find out more >>

Historical mysteries

New fiction books - The Fossil Hunter

Tea Cooper ( The Cartographer’s Secret , The Woman in the Green Dress ) is known for her sweeping historical dual timeline mystery fiction and this new release The Fossil Hunter sounds like a fascinating read. A fossil discovered at London’s Natural History Museum leads one woman back in time to nineteenth-century Australia and a world of scientific discovery and dark secrets in this compelling historical mystery. Find out more >>

October new book releases - The Egyptian Mystery, Penny Green

The reading world can never have enough feisty female sleuths… The Egyptian Mystery is the new book (#11) in Emily Organ’s bestselling Penny Green Victorian Mystery Series. “Dead men don’t just walk out of hotels…” Penny faces her most baffling case yet. Egyptologist Charles Hamilton is found dead in his hotel room, but then his body vanishes and his wife goes missing too. Find out more >>

Literary new release books

New fiction releases October 2021 - The Lincoln Highway

Few new releases are more highly anticipated than a new book from Amor Towles ( Rules of Civility , A Gentleman in Moscow ) and early praise of The Lincoln Highway suggests it has been worth the wait. In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served 15-months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, he’d planned to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they could start their lives anew. But it seems two friends from the work farm had hidden in the trunk of the car, and have a different plan for him… one that involves a fateful journey in the opposite direction-to the City of New York. Read my review >>

New book releases 2021 - The Impossibel Truths of Love

In The Impossible Truths of Love by Hannah Beckerman, when Nell’s father makes a deathbed declaration that hints at a long-held secret, it reignites feelings of isolation that have plagued her for years. Her suspicions about the family’s past only deepen when her mother, Annie, who is losing her memories to dementia, starts making cryptic comments of her own. Thirty-five years earlier, Annie’s life was upended by a series of traumas—one shock after another that she buried deep in her heart. The decisions she made at the time were motivated by love, but she knew even then that nobody could ever understand—let alone forgive—what she did. As the two women’s stories unravel, a generation apart, Nell discovers the devastating truth about her mother’s past and her own. An emotionally powerful story of identity, memory and nature of family. Find out more>>

Fun new fiction releases

As we approach the end of another year, and the Christmas season, many like me are seeking lighter, fun new fiction for my reading pile. Well, look no further than prolific authors Matthew Reilly and Jenny Colgan’s latest book releases:

New Books 2021 - The One Impossible Labyrinth

The One Impossible Labyrinth by Matthew Reilly – As a long time, unabashed fan of this author’s globe-trotting action-adventure Jack West Jr series , I look forward to the supreme escapist read this grand finale will be but also sadness at saying goodbye to these characters, after a 16-year reader journey since the first title Seven Ancient Wonders in 2005. He has made it to the Supreme Labyrinth. Now Jack West Jr faces one last race – against multiple rivals, against time, against the collapse of the universe itself – a headlong race that will end at a throne inside the fabled labyrinth. Note: This may not be available to readers worldwide until Jan2022. Update: Read my review >>

New Books 2021 - The Christmas Bookshop

The Christmas Bookshop by Jenny Colgan – I am not typically one to read Christmas-themed novels, but ever since I fell in love with the geeky charm of Jenny Colgan’s Resistance Is Futile I have been wanting to go back for another bite. The prospect of spending Christmas with her perfect sister Sofia does not appeal to Carmen but she has perilously little cash and few options. Frankly, Sofia doesn’t exactly want her prickly sister Carmen there either, but she has a client who needs help revitalizing his dusty and disorganized bookshop on the picturesque streets of historic Edinburgh. Carmen takes on the job, intrigued despite herself. Find out more >>

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New Book Releases September 2021

Top Picks of the New Release Books in September 2021

September 2021 sees highly anticipated new releases from reader favourites like Sally Rooney, Liane Moriarty, Chris Hammer and Anthony Doerr, along with some intriguing new speculative fiction.

Criminal suspense

Apples Never Fall - New Books

Liane Moriarty ( Big Little Lies , Nine Perfect Strangers , The Last Anniversary ) was a worldwide #1 bestseller well before the recent award-winning TV series adaptations. In her new novel Apples Never Fall , Joy Delaney and husband Stan have done well for themselves. Four wonderful grown-up children. A family business to envy. The golden years of retirement ahead of them. So when Joy vanishes – no note, no calls, her bike missing – it’s natural that tongues will wag. How did Stan scratch his face? And who was the stranger who entered and suddenly left their lives? What are they all hiding? But for the Delaney children there is a much more terrifying question: did they ever know their parents at all? Find out more >>

Treasure & Dirt - New Release Books

Chris Hammer’s Martin Scarsden crime series ( Scrublands, Silver , Trust ) has earned him a legion of fans who, like me, will be eager to get their hands on a copy of his new standalone novel, Treasure & Dirt . In the desolate outback town of Finnigans Gap, police struggle to maintain law and order. Thieves pillage opal mines, religious fanatics recruit vulnerable young people and billionaires do as they please. Then an opal miner is found crucified and left to rot down his mine. Nothing about the miner’s death is straightforward, not even who found the body. Sydney homicide detective Ivan Lucic is sent to investigate, assisted by inexperienced young investigator Nell Buchanan. Read my review of this criminally good crime fiction >>

Speculative fiction releases in September

5 Minds - New Book Releases

According to early reviewers, Guy Morpuss’ speculative debut novel 5 Minds is brilliantly inventive and a must read for fans of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle . The Earth’s population has been controlled. Lifespans are limited to 80 years, except for those who agree to become a commune. Five minds sharing one body, each living for four hours at a time, but with a combined lifespan of nearly 150 years. Alex, Kate, Mike, Sierra and Ben have already spent 25-years together in what was once Mike’s body, their frequent personality clashes leading to countless arguments. Wanting to buy upgrades for their next host body, they travel to a Death Park where time can be gambled like money. But things go very wrong when Kate accepts a dangerous offer, and one of them disappears. It’s hard enough to catch a murderer. It’s almost impossible when you might be sharing a body with them . Find out more >>

The Book of Form and Emptiness - New in Books

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki ( A Tale for the Time Being ) is about grief, resilience, creativity and psychological difference. It is about the importance of reading, and an observation of the mess consumer culture has got us into. It is an affirmation of the power of community. It is funny, kind, wise, urgent and completely irresistible. After his father dies, Benny Oh finds he can hear objects talking: teapots, marbles and sharpened pencils, babbling in anger or distress. His mother starts collecting things to give her comfort. Overwhelmed by the clamour of all the stuff, Benny seeks refuge in the beautiful silence of the public library. There, the objects speak only in whispers. There, he meets a homeless poet and a mesmerising young performance artist. There, a book reaches out to him. Not just any book: his own book. And a very important conversation begins. Find out more >>

Immersive literary fiction

Cloud Cuckoo Land - New Fiction

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr ( All The Light We Cannot See ) is dedicated to ‘the librarians then, now and in the years to come’ and sounds like a modern classic in the making. Bound together by a single ancient text, the unforgettable characters in this ambitious novel are dreamers and outsiders figuring out the world around them: thirteen-year-old Anna and Omeir, an orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and octogenarian Zeno in an attack on a public library in present-day Idaho; and Konstance, decades from now, who turns to the oldest stories to guide her community in peril . Find out more >>

Bewilderment - New Books 2021

Shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, Bewilderment by Richard Powers ( The Overstory ) has been described as a ‘taut ecological parable’. Robbie is a 9-year old boy with Asperger’s-like traits, a precocious intelligence, a prodigious memory and exquisitely tuned to loss. His father, Theo, is an astrobiologist, consumed with finding signs of life in the cosmos and raising Robbie alone after the tragic death of his wife. As Robbie’s behaviour grows more unmanageable, Theo seeks out an experimental treatment that enables Robbie to pattern his emotional responses on the recorded brainwave activity of his late mother. But as government funding is pulled, Robbie suffers a precipitous decline with heart-breaking consequences. Find out more >>

Relationship dramas

Beautiful World Where Are You - New Release Books 2021

Beautiful World, Where Are You is the highly anticipated new contemporary drama from Salley Rooney ( Normal People , Conversations With Friends ). Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young―but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world? Find out more >>

Portrait of a Scotsman - Books, New Releases

Portrait of a Scotsman (A League of Extraordinary Women Book 3) by Evie Dunmore sounds like the perfect antidote to the current bombardment of ‘deep and meaningful’ in the media. Going toe-to-toe with a brooding Scotsman is rather bold for a respectable suffragist and Oxford scholar but when the aspiring artist and banking heiress Hattie Greenfield finds herself at the altar with the darkly attractive financier Lucian Blackstone what else is she to do? When the bewitching daughter of his business rival all but falls into his lap, Lucian, a self-made man holding vast wealth but little power, sees political opportunity. He has no room for his new wife’s romantic notions… until a journey to Scotland paints everthing in a different light. Find out more >>

August 2021 Books, New Releases - New in Fiction

What’s New in Books in August 2021

There are some big industry names releasing new books and several intriguing debuts that will be difficult for bookish souls to resist. Here are my top picks of the new book releases in August 2021.

Fresh literary fiction

New Book Releases - Once There Were Wolves - August 2021

2020 was a breakout year for Aussie author Charlotte McConaghy with her epic climate fiction title Migrations (aka The Last Migration ) topping the international bestseller lists. Now she is back with another suspenseful literary fiction release, Once There Were Wolves .

Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team tasked with reintroducing fourteen grey wolves into the remote Highlands, despite fierce opposition from the locals. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but Aggie too, unmade by the terrible secrets that drove them out of Alaska. When Inti’s wolves surprise everyone by thriving, she begins to let her guard down, even opening up to the possibility of love. But when a local farmer is found dead, she’s unable to accept her wolves could be responsible and makes a reckless decision to protect them, testing every instinct she has.   Read my review of this mesmerizing novel >>

Books New Releases 2021 - We Are the Brennans

Tracey Lange’s debut We Are the Brennans is receiving high praise from early reviewers. When 29-year-old Sunday Brennan wakes up in a Los Angeles hospital, bruised and battered after a drunk driving accident she caused, she swallows her pride and goes home to her family in New York. She’d deserted them all―and her high school sweetheart―five years before with little explanation, and they’ve got questions. The longer she stays, however, the more she realizes they need her just as much as she needs them. A richly layered, deft exploration of the staying power of shame―and the redemptive power of love―in an Irish Catholic family torn apart by secrets . Find out more >>

New in Books - The Reading List - August 2021

Sara Nisha Adam’s debut The Reading List has been described “a quietly beautiful novel about the magic of books and the joy of human connection” by Newsweek. West London widower Mukesh is grieving his wife. Aleisha is a bright but anxious teenager working at the local library, who discovers a list of novels she’s never heard of before in a returned book and sets out to read them all. These books transport Aleisha from the painful realities she’s facing at home. When Mukesh enters the library, seeking to forge a connection with his bookworm granddaughter, she shows him the list and these shared reading experiences build a connection between two lonely souls. Find out more >>

New Book Releases - The Last Chance Library

Freya Sampson’s debut The Last Chance Library  sounds like another heartwarming fiction release tailor-made for bookish souls. June Jones emerges from her shell to fight for her beloved local library, and through the efforts and support of an eclectic group of library patrons, she discovers life-changing friendships along the way.  Find out more >>

August 2021 mystery thrillers

While authors Joanne Harris ( Chocolat , Five Quarters of the Orange ) and Stephen King ( The Shining , Mr Mercedes ) have distinctly different writing styles, common to both are loyal fan bases eager to get their hands on copies of their new books.

New Books 2021 - A Narrow Door

A Narrow Door marks an incendiary moment for St Oswald’s school. For the first time in its history, a headmistress is in power, the gates opening to girls. Rebecca Buckfast has spilled blood to reach this position. Barely forty, she is just starting to reap the harvest of her ambition. As the new regime takes on the old guard, the ground shifts. And with it, the remains of a body are discovered. But Rebecca is here to make her mark. She’ll bury the past so deep it will evade even her own memory, just like she has done before. After all… You can’t keep a good woman down. Find out more >>

New Books Stephen King - Billy Summers

Billy Summers is a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he’ll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong? How about everything… This can’t-put-it-down novel features a compelling and surprising duo who set out to avenge the crimes of an extraordinarily evil man. It’s about love, luck, fate, and a complex hero with one last shot at redemption. Find out more >>

New Books August 2021 - In My Dreams I Hold A Knife

Six friends. One college reunion. One unsolved murder. Told in racing dual timelines, with a dark campus setting and a darker look at friendship, love, obsession, and ambition,  In My Dreams I Hold A Knife   is an addictive, propulsive read. Find out more >>

Historical mystery & coming of age

New Book Releases - Clark and Division

Set in 1944 Chicago, Edgar Award-winner Naomi Hirahara’s eye-opening new mystery Clark and Division about a young woman searching for the truth about her revered older sister’s suspicious death, brings into focus the struggles of one Japanese American family released from mass incarceration at Manzanar during World War II. A heartbreakingly real crime fiction plot with rich period detail inspired by true events. Find out more >>

New Books - The People We Keep

What does it mean to feel at home in the world? To find our true family? In Allison Larkin’s new book The People We Keep a young songwriter steals a car, hits the road, and struggles against all odds to try to find the answer. About the people we choose—and even more importantly the people who choose us—this novel is both a profound love letter to creative resilience and a reminder that sometimes even tragedy can be a kind of blessing. Find out more >>

New book releases July 2021

What’s New in Books in July 2021

Whether you are in lockdown or out and about enjoying holiday down-time, the new release books in July are sure to interest a wide range of readers. Here are my picks of the best new fiction books out this month.

New thrillers and suspense novels

The Night She Disappeared - Books, new releases July 2021

One of the biggest name book releases in July 2021 is bestselling thriller author Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared exploring the power of toxic relationships, obsession and the murkier reaches of the human psyche.

Teenage mother Tallulah goes out on a date while her mother Kim babysits, but never returns. Desperate to find her, Kim contacts her friends and learns Tallulah and her boyfriend were last seen heading to a party at an abandoned mansion in the woods the locals call Dark Place. Over a year on their disappearance remains unsolved, but could a note discovered in the woods lead to the truth about what happened that night? Read my review >>

new release books fiction 2021

A Voice in the Night by Sarah Hawthorn is an addictive thriller of twists and turns from a striking new voice.

Following a bitter separation, Lucie moves to London to take up a position with a prestigious law firm. It seems an optimistic new beginning, until one day she receives a hand-delivered note with the strange words:  At last I’ve found you. A shock I‘m sure. But in time I‘ll explain. Martin. As a young intern in New York, Lucie had fallen in love with a married man called Martin, who was tragically killed in the 9/11 attacks. Could her long-dead lover have staged his own disappearance under the cover of that fateful day 20 years ago? Or is someone else stalking her, or her vivid imagination is playing tricks?   Read my review >>

More new literary mysteries in July 2021

Intimacies - New in Books

In Intimacies by Katie Kitamura , an interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home but she’s drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover is still entangled in his marriage, her friend witnesses a ‘seemingly’ random act of violence, and she’s pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes. Find out more >>

The Painting - New books 2021

Alison Booth ( The Philosopher’s Daughters ) is back with new mystery novel The Painting . When Anika Molnar flees Hungary not long before the break-up of the Soviet Union, she carries only a small suitcase and a painting from her family’s hidden collection. Living with her aunt in Sydney, the painting hangs in pride of place in her bedroom, until one day it is stolen. As sinister secrets from her family’s past cast suspicion over the painting’s provenance, she embarks on a gripping quest to uncover the truth. Read my review >>

July 2021 Historical Fiction

The Forest of Vanishing Stars - New in Books 2021

My top pick of the historical fiction releases this month is The Forest of Vanishing Stars by Kristin Harmel, the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Names .

An evocative coming-of-age World War II story about an isolated and lonely but resourceful young woman Yona who was brought up by an old woman in the Eastern European wilderness after being kidnapped from her wealthy German parents as a child, who after learning what’s now happening in the outside world, uses her knowledge of the wilderness to help Jewish refugees escape the Nazis—until a secret from her past threatens everything. Find out more >>

July’s fresh science fiction

A Psalm for the Wild-Built - New books 2021

In novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot #1) from Hugo award-winning Becky Chambers… It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools, and wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; now just urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They’re going to need to ask it a  lot . Find out more >>

Appleseed - New book releases 2021

Matt Bell’s Appleseed is being described as a breakout novel and a pulse-pounding novel of ideas. Set over 3 timelines – in eighteenth-century apple orchards in Ohio, fifty years from now when climate change has ravaged the Earth and a thousand years into the future when North America is covered by a massive sheet of ice – this novel is part speculative epic, part tech thriller, part reinvented fairy tale, and an unforgettable meditation on climate change; corporate, civic, and familial responsibility; manifest destiny; and the myths and legends that sustain us all. Sounds epic. Find out more >>

Book releases to warm the heart

Home - New in Books

In Home by Penny Parkes , Anna Wilson travels the world as a professional housesitter – stepping into other people’s lives – caring for their homes, pets and sometimes even neighbours. But growing up in foster care, all she has ever really wanted is a proper home of her own, filled with family, love and happy memories. Her friends may have become her family of choice, but Anna is still stuck in that nomadic cycle, looking for answers, trying to find the courage to put down roots and find a place to call home. Find out more >>

The Other Side of Beautiful - Books, new release July 2021

Kim Lock’s The Other Side of Beautiful has been described as Lost & Found   meets  The Rosie Project . Mercy Blain’s house has just burnt down, and since she hasn’t left that house for 2-years, this goes beyond the disaster it would be for most people. She goes to her not-quite-ex-husband Eugene’s house, but it turns out she can’t stay there, either. So, after the chance purchase of a cult classic camper van, Mercy embarks on a road trip with her sausage dog, Wasabi, and a mysterious box of cremated remains. Find out more >>

New in Books June 2021

What’s New in Books in June 2021

Whether you are looking forward to your summer holidays or snuggling up with a rug and hot chocolate like I am here in the southern hemisphere, June is a great month for reading. Here’s my selection of the best new fiction books on offer.

New romance novels

Two Steps Onward - Books New Releases

Most book lovers will have heard of Graeme Simsion’s breakout bestselling non-neurotypical rom-com trilogy starring Don Tillman – The Rosie Project , The Rosie Effect and The Rosie Result . But did you know that in 2017, Simsion teamed up with his wife author Anne Buist to write Two Steps Forward , a soup-for-the-soul midlife romance set on the famous Camino de Santiago pilgrim’s trail?

Two Steps Onwards is the pair’s wise, witty and wine-filled follow-up, set on the less-travelled Chemin d’Assise and Via Francigena trail to Rome. It’s about helping the people you love, and knowing when to let go. Figuring out what you really want in life. And seizing your chances, before it’s too late. Read my review >>

Very Sincerely Yours - New release romance books, June 2021

In Very Sincerely Yours , the new romantic comedy from Kerry Winfrey (‘Waiting for Tom Hanks’) newly single vintage toy store assistant Theodora has a crush on children’s show host Everett St James, and summons up the courage to write to him, just like his much younger fans do – after all, he always gives them sound advice. Low and behold, he starts writing back! Hard for a booklover to resist a sweet epistolary novel. Find out more >>

Someone I Used To Know - New Books 2021

Bestselling romance author Paige Toon’s latest happy-tear-jerker, Someone I Used To Know , is a heart-wrenching and romantic story about Leah, George and Theo, at fifteen and then what seems like a lifetime later. It’s about healing scars, second chances, love for the family we’re born into and the one we build along the way, and discovering the courage to love again. Recommended for fans of Beth O’Leary and Sally Thorne. Find out more >>

New thrillers and mysteries in June

Falling by TJ Newman - New Book Releases June 2021

Falling by TJ Newman , a former bookseller, now experienced flight attendant, is one of the most raved about debut thrillers of June 2021 — like the films  Die Hard and  Speed  on steroids (Library Journal) and Jaws  at 35,000 feet ( Don Winslow ).

You just boarded a flight to New York. There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don’t know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot’s family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight… An early contender for my best book of 2021.  Read my review >>

Related Read: Another June 2021 book release set in the sky is Hostage by Clare Mackintosh .

When You Are Mine - 2021 book releases

In Gold Dagger winner Michael Robotham ‘s new standalone novel When You Are Mine , Philomena McCarthy (the daughter of a London gangster) has defied the odds and become a promising junior officer with the Metropolitan Police. Called to the scene of a domestic assault, she rescues Tempe Brown, the girlfriend of a decorated detective. The incident is hushed up, but Phil has unwittingly made a dangerous enemy with powerful friends. For me, the most intriguing of the June 2021 psychological thriller releases.  Find out more >>

Mrs England - New in Books June 2021

Mrs England is a new gripping feminist mystery from bestselling author Stacey Halls ( The Familiars  and  The Foundling ). West Yorkshire, 1904.  Young nurse Ruby May takes a position looking after the children of wealthy couple Charles and Lilian England. As she adapts to life at the isolated Hardcastle House, Charles is welcoming but it becomes clear there’s something not quite right about the beautiful, mysterious Mrs England. Hard for this booklover to look past a Rebecca-esque Edwardian mystery.  Find out more >>

Literary and historical fiction releases

Geraldine Verne's Red Suitcase - Books, New Releases

Jane Riley’s debut novel The Likely Resolutions of Oliver Clock was feel-good fiction at its finest, and accordingly one of my favourite reads in 2020 .

In her 2021 release  Geraldine Verne’s Red Suitcase , her titular character is grieving the loss of her husband. Jack had two dying wishes: that his wife scatter his ashes somewhere ‘exotic’, and that she not give up on life once he was gone. He intended to spur her on to new adventures, but despite clinging to her red suitcase, Geraldine Verne hasn’t left the house for 3-months. It takes an accident for her to accept help and heartbroken Meals on Wheels volunteer Lottie brings with her more than cottage pie. A gloriously unlikely friendship blossoms. Read my review >>

Still Life - New Fiction Books

My pick of June 2021’s more literary book releases is  Still Life by Sarah Winman ( Tin Man ,  When God Was a Rabbit ). It moves from the Tuscan Hills and piazzas of Florence, to the smog of London’s East End and spans four decades, and is described as a big-hearted story of two people brought together by love, war, art and the ghost of E.M. Forster. When Joanna Cannon calls a new book ‘utterly beautiful’ and Graham Norton says it is ‘sheer joy’, it goes straight on my wishlist. Find out more >>

The Personal Librarian - New Books 2021

From bestselling historical fiction author Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, comes The Personal Librarian – a fictional account of the remarkable true story of J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, a Black American woman who became famous in high-society for her intellect, style, and wit, all while forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to retain the role she deserved and leave a lasting legacy. Love reading fiction based on fact.  Find out more >>

May 2021 Books New Releases

What’s New in Books in May 2021

As a rule, May usually turns out a bumper crop of new books, with 2021 is proving no exception. There really is a wonderfully diverse range of books in the new fiction releases lists for us to discuss this month.

Highly anticipated literary fiction

New Books 2021 - Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Amongst the most highly anticipated of the May 2021 book releases is Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle . With a title as grand as its scope, settings and page count, and superlatives such as ‘breathtaking epic’ and ‘masterpiece’ being bandied about, this is on my ‘must-make-time-to-read’ list.

An unforgettable story of Marion, a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost and, a century later, a vibrant canny Hollywood actress determined to bring her story to life on the big screen and liberate herself in the process —this emotional, meticulously researched novel spans Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles. Find out more >>

More noteworthy literary fiction releases:

2021 Book Releases - How Lucky by Will Leitch

How Lucky by Will Leitch – Remember what I said about diversity? This debut about a fiercely resilient young man living with a severe physical disability and his efforts to solve a crime mystery that unfolds right outside his house, is being described as ‘as suspenseful and funny as it is moving,’ and earning high praise for the authenticity of its first-person narrative.  Find out more >>

Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau – Described as Almost Famous  meets  Daisy Jones & The Six , this tale of a 14-year-old girl’s coming of age in 1970s Baltimore, caught between her straight-laced family and the progressive one she nannies for—who are secretly hiding a famous rock star and his movie star wife for the summer—sounds like a great holiday read. Find out more >>

Upcoming releases – science fiction & fantasy

New release books - The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

The Kingdoms , a new release genre-bender from bestselling author Natasha Pulley ( The Watchmaker of Filigree Street ) is being compared the writing of Stuart Turton and David Mitchell , some of my favourite authors.

In a London occupied by the French empire, Joe Tournier is a British slave. He has a job, a wife, a baby daughter. But he also has flashes of a life he cannot remember, in a world where English is spoken in England, and not French. Then he receives a postcard of a lighthouse built just six months ago, that was first written nearly one hundred years ago by a stranger who seems to know him very well. “Come home, if you remember.” Joe’s journey to unravel the truth will take him to a remote Scottish island, and back through time itself as he battles for his life – and for a very different future. Find out more >>

Recent book releases May 2021 - The Ones We're Meant To Find

One of the most original new fiction releases this month is The Ones We’re Meant to Find  by Joan He. It’s described as ‘a gripping and heartfelt YA sci-fi with mind-blowing twists’.

Cee has been trapped on an abandoned island for 3 years and 17 days without any memories of how she arrives or her life prior. All she knows is that somewhere out there, she has a sister named Kay that she is desperate to find. In a world apart, 16-year-old STEM prodigy Kasey Mizuhara is also living a life of isolation. The eco-city she calls home is one of eight levitating around the world, built for people who protected the planet―and now need protecting from it. While Kasey, an introvert and loner, doesn’t mind the lifestyle, her sister Celia hated it. Popular and lovable, Celia preferred the outside world. But no one could have predicted that Celia would take a boat out to sea, never to return. Find out more >>

New crime thrillers – May 2021

There’s rarely a shortage of new crime fiction and mystery thrillers, so popular is the genre, but the deeper psychological intrigue offered by these upcoming releases particularly caught my attention.

new release books fiction 2021

Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz – 18yr-old Alice arrived in New York carrying only cash and a camera. One month later, she is an unidentified murder victim. Ruby Jones is also trying to start over but lonelier than ever. Until she finds Alice’s body by the Hudson River. Alice is sure Ruby is the key to solving the mystery of her life – and death. And Ruby finds herself unable to let Alice go. Find out more >>

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave – Before Owen Michaels disappears, he smuggles a note to his new wife, Hannah:  protect her . He means his 16-year-old daughter who lost her mother tragically as a child; who wants nothing to do with her new stepmother. Hannah soon realises that Owen isn’t who he said he was, and his daughter might hold the key to discovering his true identity, and why he disappeared. Find out more >>

Finally, we turn our attention to some of the best of May’s lighter new releases, books that will give you the warm and fuzzies.

May 2021 Contemporary Romance Novels

new release books fiction 2021

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry – Poppy and Alex have nothing in common but have been the best of friends since college. They live far apart, but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together. Until 2 years ago, when they ruined everything and haven’t spoken since. Now realising that’s when she was last truly happy, and determined to fix everything, Poppy convinces Alex to join her on one more vacation. Find out more >>

The Beautiful Fall by Hugh Breakey – Every 179 days Robbie forgets everything. He knows this because last time it happened he wrote himself a letter explaining it all. To survive the forgetting, Robbie leads a solitary, regimented life. Speaks to no one if he can avoid it. But then, with twelve days left before his next forgetting, Julie invades his life. Young, beautiful—the only woman he can ever remember meeting. Read my review >>

April 2021 Book Releases - New Fiction

What Was New in Fiction in April 2021

Drama & romance.

The Road Trip - Beth O'Leary - New 2021 romance novels

I absolutely adored Beth O’Leary’s first romantic comedy novels The Flatshare and The Switch , and now her third, The Road Trip , is one of my most hotly anticipated 2021 fiction releases.

Addie and her sister are about to embark on an epic road trip to a friend’s wedding in rural Scotland. The playlist is all planned and the snacks are packed. But, not long after setting off, a car slams into the back of theirs. The driver is none other than Addie’s ex, Dylan, who she’s avoided since their traumatic break-up two years earlier. Dylan and his best mate are heading to the wedding too, and they’ve totalled their car, so Addie has no choice but to offer them a ride. Sounds like the perfect romantic comedy setup. I cannot wait to read this one. Find out more >>

Other Women - Cathy Kelly - New women's fiction 2021

Other Women by Cathy Kelly has been described as “a refreshingly honest story about female friendship and marriage – and all the great loves of our life”.

Three women. Three secrets. Three tangled lives… Sid wears her independence like armour. So when she strikes up a rare connection with unlucky-in-love Finn, they are both determined to prove that men and women can just be friends. Can’t they? Marin has the perfect home, attentive husband, two beloved children – and a secret addiction to designer clothes. She has it all, so why can’t she stop comparing herself to other women? Bea believes that we all have one love story – and she’s had hers. Now her life centres around her son and support group of fierce single mums – the women she shares everything with. Well, apart from the one secret she can’t tell anyone… Find out more >>

More April 2021 chick lit releases sure to tug on the heartstrings:

new release books fiction 2021

Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle – Maybell Parrish lives in her head, her real life full of painful disappointments. So, inheriting an old manor from an eccentric Great Aunt provides her a chance to change things. If she can find a way to get on with grouchy but gorgeous groundskeeper and co-inheritor Wesley. Find out more >>

Life’s Too Short by Abby Jimenez – Vanessa’s mother and sister never saw the age of 30, so she’s been living every moment as if it were her last. But after her half sister suddenly leaves her in custody of her baby, life goes from “daily adventure” to “next-level bad” (now with bonus baby vomit in hair). Enter the surprisingly helpful hot lawyer next door, Adrian and his geriatric Chihuahua. Find out more >>

New historical & mystery fiction

The Dictionary of Lost Words - New 2021 Historical fiction releases US

There are many intriguing new historical fiction titles being released in April 2021.

While Pip Williams’ award-winning The Dictionary of Lost Words was released in Australia last year, I just wanted to highlight that it is now being released worldwide.

In this remarkable debut based on actual events, as a team of male scholars compiles the first  Oxford English Dictionary , one of their daughters decides to collect the “objectionable” words they omit… Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement with the Great War looming, Esme’s ‘Dictionary of Lost Words’ reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men.  Read my review >>

New Books 2021 - The Plague Letters

The Plague Letters by V L Valentine – London, 1665. Within the growing pile of plague-ridden corpses in his churchyard, Rector Symon Patrick discovers one that’s unique. Someone is performing terrible experiments upon the dying. Desperate to discover who, Symon joins a society of eccentric medical men who have gathered to find a cure for the plague… Find out more >>

The Last Bookshop in London by Madeline Martin – Inspired by the true WWII history of the few bookshops to survive the Blitz, this is a timeless story of wartime loss, love and the enduring power of literature. Through blackouts and air raids as the Blitz intensifies, Grace Bennett discovers the power of storytelling to unite her community in ways she never dreamed. Find out more >>

New in crime & mystery thrillers – April 2021

Books New Releases - When the Stars Go Dark

When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain –  Detective Anna Hart is hiding away from the world. But then a series of local disappearances reach into her past. Can solving them help her heal? This deeply affecting new crime mystery weaves together actual cases of missing persons, trauma theory, and a hint of the metaphysical. Find out more >>

Missing Pieces by Tim Weaver – This chunky new thriller has earned rave early reviews. Rebekah Murphy knows too much… She knows she’s alone on an abandoned island with a killer on her trail. She knows that to get home, she must live to understand why this is happening. She knows someone tried to kill her for a secret. What she doesn’t know is what that secret is… . Find out more >>

March 2021 Book Release - New Fiction

March 2021 Book Releases

Haunting historical fiction.

The Women of Chateau Lafayette - New historical fiction March 2021

March is Women’s History Month, and quite fittingly there are some fantastic new historical fiction releases with strong female leads on offer.

First up, the highly anticipated The Women of Chateau Lafayette by Stephanie Dray. This chunky new fiction is based on the true story of an extraordinary castle in the heart of France and the remarkable women bound by its legacy. I love multiple time/narrative perspectives, and this novel features three – a founding mother (1774), a daring visionary (1914) and a reluctant resistor (1940). Described as “an intricately woven and powerfully told, sweeping novel about duty and hope, love and courage, and the strength we take from those who came before us” this sounds like a must-read. > (opens in a new tab)”>Find out more >>

The Lost Apothecary - March Historical fiction novel

Sarah Penner’s ‘subversive and intoxicating’ debut The Lost Apothecary , has featured in all the ‘highly anticipated 2021 fiction’ lists. Could this cover be any more beautiful?

In eighteenth-century London, secret apothecary shop owner Nella sells women well-disguised poisons to use against the oppressive men in their lives. But her fate is jeopardized when a young patron makes a fatal mistake, sparking a string of consequences that echo through the centuries. In present-day London, when aspiring historian Caroline Parcewell stumbles upon a clue to the unsolved apothecary murders that haunted London 200 years prior, her life collides with the apothecary’s in a stunning twist of fate—and not everyone will survive. Find out more >>

New mystery and literary suspense

The Vines by Shelley Nolden - March 2021 Mystery Book Release

The Vines by Shelley Nolden – A shuttered hospital on New York’s North Brother Island, the site of century-old quarantines and human experiments. When Finn, a young urban explorer, glimpses an enigmatic beauty through the foliage, intrigue turns to obsession as he seeks to uncover her past–and his own family’s dark secrets. Find out more >>

Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews – A ‘stylish and sharp’ character-driven literary suspense thriller set in mysterious Marrakesh, about a secretive famous novelist and ambitious assistant locked in a struggle for fortune and fame. Described by Maria Semple as ‘part Patricia Highsmith, part  All About Eve  and pure fun’. Find out more >>

New romance and drama releases

Last Bookshop - New romance novels March 2021

In The Last Bookshop by Emma Young, Cait’s best friends have always been books – along with the rare souls who love them as much as she does, like grandmotherly June. When Cait set up her bookshop right in the heart of the city, she thought she’d skipped straight to ‘happily ever after’, but things are changing fast. When June’s sudden interest in Cait’s lacklustre love life and a handsome ‘Mystery Shopper’ force her to concede there may be more to life than her shop and cat, luxury chain stores are circling the prime location and a personal tragedy is brewing. Soon Cait is questioning the viability of both the shop and life she’s shaped around it. An unlikely band of allies are determined she won’t face these questions alone; but is a love of books enough to halt the march of time and progress? Read my review of this heartwarming novel >>

The Speed of Light - March 2021 Womens fiction

The Speed of Light by Elissa Grossell Dickey – A provocative debut novel told in intersecting timelines over a tumultuous, defining year in one woman’s life. After an MS diagnosis and walking away from “a fixer” but possibly the love of her life, one morning at the university where Simone works, gunshots ring out. In a temporary safe place and terrified, her mind racing, her past year comes into focus. Find out more >>

Second First Impressions by Sally Thorne – From the bestselling author of  The Hating Game comes the clever and funny story of a muscular, tattooed, ‘selfish rich boy’ hired as an assistant to two eccentric 90yr-old women, under the watchful eye of ‘serious’ hardworking retirement home manager Ruthie. Find out more >>

Also new in books in March 2021:

Klara and the Sun - March science fiction

Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro –  The latest novel from this Nobel and Booker Prize-winner, features an unforgettable narrator. From her place in a store Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches the behaviour of those who come in to browse and who pass on the street outside, remaining hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Find out more >>

Infinite by Brian Freeman – Car crash victim Dylan is haunted by glimpses of  himself . A psychiatrist claims he’s undergoing a hypnotherapy treatment based on every choice he makes creating an infinite number of parallel universes, and Dylan’s doppelgänger has staked a claim to his world. Find out more >>

February 2021 New Fiction Releases

February 2021 New Release Books

The romance of reading.

A Lady's Formula for Love by Elizabeth Everett - February new romance novels

It seems appropriate that we kick off my top picks of the new books in February with some romance.

First up, a delightful Victorian romance with a feisty leading lady. A Lady’s Formula for Love is Elizabeth Everett’s debut novel and the first book in a planned series, The Secret Scientists of London . Lady Violet is keeping secrets. She founded a clandestine sanctuary for England’s most brilliant female scientists and she is using her genius on a confidential mission for the Crown. But the biggest secret of all is the feelings she has for her solitary and reserved protection officer Arthur Kneland. Find out more >>

Related reading: My Top Intelligent Rom-Com Novels

new release books fiction 2021

The Things We Leave Unfinished by Rebecca Yarro s – A divorcee starting over clashes with a bestselling writer seeking to complete her grandmother’s unfinished novel. Told in alternating timelines, this story examines the risks we take for love, the scars too deep to heal, and the endings we can’t bring ourselves to see coming. Find out more >>

The Moroccan Daughter by Deborah Rodriguez – From the author of the bestseller The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul , comes a modern story about four different women, of forbidden love, secrets and revelations, set in a country steeped in honour and tradition. Read my review >>

New mystery and suspense

New Books 2021 - The Sanatorium

Sarah Pearse’ debut gothic novel The Sanatorium is earning her high praise from early reviewers. ‘This spine-tingling, atmospheric thriller has it all: an eerie Alpine setting, sharp prose, and twists you’ll never see coming’ according to Richard Osman, and the Irish Times are calling it ‘genuinely scary’.

Elin Warner has taken time off from her job as a detective, so when she receives an invitation out of the blue to celebrate her estranged brother’s recent engagement she has little choice but to accept. But the venue, an isolated hotel (recently renovated sanatorium) high up in the Swiss Alps is the last place she wants to be, particularly when a storm threatens and people start vanishing… Find out more >>

new release books fiction 2021

The Paris Affair by Pip Drysdale – From the bestselling author of The Sunday Girl and The Strangers We Know , a new thriller set in Paris starring Harper Brown an arts journalist who dreams of being a hard-hitting reporter. She’s hot on the trail of a murderer – and the scoop of a lifetime…That’s if the killer doesn’t catch her first. Read my review >>

The Spiral by Iain Ryan – A ‘rollercoaster crime noir thriller’ (Independent) with the inventiveness of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle . After being shot twice by a colleague (now dead), Emma’s quest for answers set her on a dangerous, spiralling journey into the heart of darkness. Read my review >>

Literary and historical fiction

Space Hopper by Helen Fisher - February 2021 historical fiction

Helen Fisher’s Space Hopper (published as Faye, Faraway in the US) is one of the most highly anticipated new releases of 2021. A heartfelt, spellbinding, and irresistible debut novel for fans of  The Time Traveler’s Wife and  Outlander  (tick and tick!) that examines loss, faith, and love.

Although Faye is happy with her life, the loss of her mother as a child weighs on her mind even more now that she is a mother herself. In an extraordinary turn of events, she finds herself back in her childhood home in the 1970s. Faced with the chance to finally seek answers to her questions – but away from her own family – how much is she willing to give up for another moment with her mother? Read my review >>

new release books fiction 2021

The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles – Another release with lots of buzz recommended for fans of  The Lilac Girls  and  The Paris Wife . This story of romance, friendship, family and the power of literature to bring us together, is based on the true WWII story of heroic librarians at the American Library in Paris. Find out more >>

My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee – From award-winning author of  Native Speaker  and  On Such a Full Sea , an exuberant, provocative story about a young American life transformed by an unusual Asian adventure – and about the human capacities for pleasure, pain, and connection.  Find out more >>

January 2021 New Book Releases

January 2021 New Fiction Releases

Thrilling new page-turners.

The Wife Upstairs - January crime thriller releases

Rachel Hawkins’ The Wife Upstairs is one of the most hotly-anticipated new books of 2021. A modern retelling of the gothic classic Jane Eyre , this is the story of Jane (a broke, light-fingered dog-walker working in a wealthy gated-community in Alabama) who sees an opportunity in the recently widowed, rich, brooding and handsome Eddie Rochester. His wife, Bea, a beautiful and successful businesswoman had drowned in a boating accident with her best friend, their bodies lost to the deep. Can she, plain Jane, win Eddie’s heart before her past–or his–catches up to her?

Apparently with ‘a fresh feminist sensibility’ this novel ‘flips the script’ on a timeless tale of forbidden romance, ill-advised attraction, and a wife who just won’t stay buried. Find out more >>

Related reads: The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell

new release books fiction 2021

In Shiver by Allie Reynolds , things turn deadly when five snowboarding friends reunite for a weekend in the French Alps. Someone has deliberately stranded them together at the remote mountaintop resort to find out the truth about Saskia’s mysterious disappearance a decade prior. Milla’s not sure what’s worse: the increasingly sinister things happening around her or the looming snowstorm that’s making escape even more impossible. All she knows is that there’s no one on the mountain she can trust…

From Reynolds, a former competitive snowboarder, authenticity of subject and setting (one ideal for a locked-room thriller) is assured. This is a chilling dramatic thriller.  Read my full review >>

My Best Friend's Murder - Psychological thriller 2021

More new psychological crime thrillers:

My Best Friend’s Murder by Polly Phillips – This debut domestic drama explores a toxic but layered friendship and is a gripping read full of secrets, lies and dark motivations. Read my review >>

The Coffinmaker’s Garden by Stuart McBride – Ex-DI Ash Henderson races to catch a serial killer while a storm batters the Scottish Coast and a garden with buried human remains is falling into the North Sea. 

January 2021 literary mystery & historical fiction

new release books fiction 2021

What Could Be Saved by Liese O’Halloran Schwarz is described as a delicious hybrid of mystery, drama, and elegance: rich with detail, lush in language, and capable of keeping you on the edge of your seat.

With a narrative alternating between two time periods and distinctly different settings, Bangkok 1972 and Washington DC 2019, this novel depicts the secret lives and affairs of young elegant parents Genevieve and Robert Preston, and now daughters Laura and Bea as adults seeking answers to their brothers’ childhood disappearance while their once formidable mother slowly slides into dementia. This sounds like an enthralling and moving story about sibling love, rivalry and loyalty. Find out more >>

More thought-provoking literary fiction releases:

Waiting for the Night Song by Julie Carrick Dalton – A novel about childhood friendships ruptured by the high price of long-held secrets; a love song to the natural beauty around us and call to fight for what we believe in.

The Price of Two Sparrows by Christy Collins – Her award-winning novella The End of Seeing was deeply moving, so expectations are high for Collins’ first full-length work exploring issues of community and prejudice, religion and nature in the modern world. Read my review >>

Science fiction & fantasy in January 2021

The Effort - January 2021 Science Fiction Release

Sci-fi dystopian novels were notably absent from my Best Books of 2020 list due to my recent avoidance of the genre… the real news being worrisome enough! But as we collectively look toward brighter horizons, this new January 2021 science fiction release The Effort by Claire Holroyde sounds too good to let pass by.

Featuring a diverse ensemble cast of characters from around the globe and exploring the question, ‘How would we respond if we knew an asteroid equivalent to that which ended the reign of the dinosaurs were on a collision course with earth?’, Publishers Weekly have said its deeper themes about human nature make this apocalyptic thriller more than escapist reading. Can this small highly skilled team find a way to neutralize the greatest threat the world has ever seen before mass hysteria hits or world leaders declare World War III? Sounds provocative. Find out more >>

new release books fiction 2021

The last of my picks of January’s new book releases is the quirky fantasy novel We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen .

Jamie wakes up with no memories but can read and erase other people’s—a power he uses to hold up banks to buy coffee, cat food and books. Zoe is also searching for her past and uses her abilities of speed and strength to deliver fast food and occasionally beat up bad guys. When the archrivals meet in a memory-loss support group, they realize the key to revealing their hidden pasts and saving countless people may be trusting each other, and themselves.

Chen’s debut, the heartfelt Here and Now and Then ranks among my favourite time-travel novels, so if anyone can pull off this oddball superhero story premise in 2021 it is him. Find out more >>

What to read next? 👉 Check out these December 2020 New Fiction Releases you may have missed and my favourite reads of 2020 .

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Best fiction of 2021

Best fiction of 2021

Dazzling debuts, a word-of-mouth hit, plus this year’s bestsellers from Sally Rooney, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro and more

T he most anticipated, discussed and accessorised novel of the year was Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber), launched on a tide of tote bags and bucket hats. It’s a book about the accommodations of adulthood, which plays with interiority and narrative distance as Rooney’s characters consider the purpose of friendship, sex and politics – plus the difficulties of fame and novel-writing – in a world on fire.

Klara and the Sun

Rooney’s wasn’t the only eagerly awaited new chapter. Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk ’s magnum opus The Books of Jacob (Fitzcarraldo) reached English-language readers at last, in a mighty feat of translation by Jennifer Croft: a dazzling historical panorama about enlightenment both spiritual and scientific. In 2021 we also saw the returns of Jonathan Franzen , beginning a fine and involving 70s family trilogy with Crossroads (4th Estate); Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Klara and the Sun (Faber) probes the limits of emotion in the story of a sickly girl and her “artificial friend”; and acclaimed US author Gayl Jones, whose epic of liberated slaves in 17th-century Brazil, Palmares (Virago), has been decades in the making.

Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy (Hamish Hamilton) continued her series reclaiming women’s voices in ancient conflict, while Elizabeth Strout revisited her heroine Lucy Barton in the gently comedic, emotionally acute Oh William! (Viking). Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate), her first novel since the 2013 Booker-shortlisted A Tale for the Time Being , is a wry, metafictional take on grief, attachment and growing up. Having journeyed into the mind of Henry James in 2004’s The Master, Colm Tóibín created a sweeping overview of Thomas Mann’s life and times in The Magician (Viking). There was a change of tone for Colson Whitehead, with a fizzy heist novel set amid the civil rights movement, Harlem Shuffle (Fleet), while French author Maylis de Kerangal considered art and trompe l’oeil with characteristic style in Painting Time (MacLehose, translated by Jessica Moore).

Treacle Walker (4th Estate), a flinty late-career fable from national treasure Alan Garner, is a marvellous distillation of his visionary work. At the other end of the literary spectrum, Anthony Doerr, best known for his Pulitzer-winning bestseller All the Light We Cannot See , returned with a sweeping page-turner about individual lives caught up in war and conflict, from 15th-century Constantinople to a future spaceship in flight from the dying earth. Cloud Cuckoo Land (4th Estate) is a love letter to books and reading, as well as a chronicle of what has been lost down the centuries, and what is at stake in the climate crisis today: sorrowful, hopeful and utterly transporting. And it was a pleasure to see the return to fiction of Irish author Keith Ridgway, nearly a decade after Hawthorn & Child, with A Shock (Picador), his subtly odd stories of interconnected London lives.

Galgut, The Promise

Damon Galgut’s first novel in seven years won him the Booker. A fertile mix of family saga and satire, The Promise (Chatto) explores broken vows and poisonous inheritances in a changing South Africa. Some excellent British novels were also listed: Nadifa Mohamed’s expert illumination of real-life racial injustice in the cultural melting pot of 1950s Cardiff, The Fortune Men (Viking); Francis Spufford’s profound tracing of lives in flux in postwar London, Light Perpetual (Faber); Sunjeev Sahota’s delicate story of family consequences, China Room (Harvill Secker); and Rachel Cusk’s fearlessly discomfiting investigation into gender politics and creativity, Second Place (Faber).

Lockwood, No One is Talking About This

Also on the Booker shortlist was a blazing tragicomic debut from US author Patricia Lockwood, whose No One Is Talking About This (Bloomsbury) brings her quizzical sensibility and unique style to bear on wildly disparate subjects: the black hole of social media, and the painful wonder of a beloved disabled child. Raven Leilani ’s Luster (Picador) introduced a similarly gifted stylist: her story of precarious New York living is full of sentences to savour. Other standout debuts included Natasha Brown’s Assembly (Hamish Hamilton), a brilliantly compressed, existentially daring study of a high-flying Black woman negotiating the British establishment; AK Blakemore’s earthy and exuberant account of 17th-century puritanism, The Manningtree Witches (Granta); and Tice Cin’s fresh, buzzy saga of drug smuggling and female resilience in London’s Turkish Cypriot community, Keeping the House (And Other Stories).

Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water (Viking) is a lyrical love story celebrating Black artistry, while the first novel from poet Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death (Canongate), is a very contemporary allegory about creativity, injustice, and keeping afloat in modern Britain. Further afield, two state-of-the-nation Indian debuts anatomised class, corruption and power: Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (Scribner) in a propulsive thriller, and Rahul Raina’s How to Kidnap the Rich (Little, Brown) in a blackly comic caper. Meanwhile, Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast (And Other Stories), a revenge western with a freewheeling spirit, is a gothic treat.

sorrow and bliss meg mason

When is love not enough? The summer’s word-of-mouth hit was Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss (W&N), a wisecracking black comedy of mental anguish and eccentric family life focused on a woman who should have everything to live for. Another deeply pleasurable read, The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi (W&N, translated by Elena Pala), charts one man’s life through his family relationships. An expansive novel that finds the entire world in an individual, its playful structure makes the telling a constantly unfolding surprise.

my phantoms gwendoline riley

There was a colder take on family life in Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms (Granta): this honed, painfully witty account of a toxic mother-daughter relationship is her best novel yet.

Two debut story collections pushed formal and linguistic boundaries. Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi (Fitzcarraldo) announced a surreal and inventive new voice, while in English Magic (Galley Beggar) Uschi Gatward proved a master of leaving things unsaid. Also breaking boundaries was Isabel Waidner, whose Sterling Karat Gold (Peninsula), a carnivalesque shout against repression, won the Goldsmiths prize for innovative fiction.

It will take time for Covid-19 to bleed through into fiction, but the first responses are already beginning to appear. Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat (Faber) is a bravura exploration of art, love, sex and ego pressed up against the threat of contagion. In Hall’s version of the pandemic, a loner sculptor who usually expresses herself through monumental works is forced into high-stakes intimacy with a new lover, while pitting her sense of her own creativity against the power of the virus.

A fascinating historical rediscovery shed light on the closing borders and rising prejudices of current times. In The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (Pushkin, translated by Philip Boehm), written in 1938, a Jewish businessman tries to flee the Nazi regime. The J stamped on his passport ensures that he is met with impassive bureaucratic refusal and chilly indifference from fellow passengers in a tense, rising nightmare that’s timelessly relevant.

Finally, a novel to transport the reader out of the present. Inspired by the life of Marie de France, Matrix by Lauren Groff (Hutchinson Heinemann) is set in a 12th-century English abbey and tells the story of an awkward, passionate teenager, the gifted leader she grows into, and the community of women she builds around herself. Full of sharp sensory detail, with an emotional reach that leaps across the centuries, it’s balm and nourishment for brain, heart and soul.

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The 2021 Book Releases to Order Now and Thank Yourself Later

New titles from Jennifer Weiner, Akwaeke Emezi, Sally Rooney, and more.

best books 2021

2021 has given us some incredible books. While you're perusing through this year's top releases, expect a brilliant mix of fiction from bestselling authors like Morgan Jerkins and Sally Rooney, along with an invitation into the lives of prominent figures like Senator Mazie K. Hirono in  Heart of Fire   and Tarana Burke in  Unbound . Ahead, our list of the best books of 2021 to order today and thank yourself later.

'The Push' by Ashley Audrain

If you're looking for a psychological drama about motherhood, Ashley Audrain's  The   Push  takes readers inside the mind of main character Blythe who questions her relationship with her daughter when she's born, forcing her to eventually confront some truths about herself. 

Available January 5, 2021

'One of the Good Ones' by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite

When teen activist Kezi Smith is killed after attending a social justice rally, her family is left to wonder what it actually means to be "one of the good ones."

'The Prophets' by Robert Jones, Jr.

Robert Jones, Jr.'s debut novel,  The Prophets ,   is a queer love story centered on two enslaved men, Isaiah and Samuel, who live together on a plantation in the Deep South—forced to confront oppression, betrayal, and ultimately, the threat of their existence.  

'Black Buck' by Mateo Askaripour

Twenty-two-year-old Darren seemingly goes from a Starbucks employee to a ruthless salesperson at an NYC tech startup overnight, becoming unrecognizable to his family. After tragedy strikes, he turns his grief into action by devising a plan to help young people of color enter America's salesforce and achieve the "American dream."

Available January 12, 2021

'Detransition, Baby' by Torrey Peters

When Reese's girlfriend Amy decides to detransition and become "Ames," Reese finds herself engaging in self-destructive behavior. Things get even more complicated when Ames impregnates his boss and lover, Katrina. Alas, it gives him a chance to decide whether this is an opportunity to have both Reese and Katrina in his life.

'Aftershocks' by Nadia Owusu

Nadia Owusu's gripping memoir helps readers struggling with their own identity feel seen through Owusu's recount of her unstable childhood, family secrets, and depression that eventually lead to her self-discovery. 

You Have a Match' by Emma Lord

Tweet Cute  author Emma Lord returns with  You Have a Match , where main character Abby finds out that she has a secret sister who she decides to meet at summer camp. Expect some juicy drama to follow. 

'Concrete Rose' by Angie Thomas

Fans of  The Hate U Give  will be excited to learn Angie Thomas' second book in the series,  Concrete Rose , takes readers to Garden Heights 17 years before the events in the first novel. 

'Run to Win' by Stephanie Schriock and Christina Reynolds

In  Run to Win ,  EMILY's List  President Stephanie Schriock and VP of Communications Christina Reynolds create a guide on how to run for office and win. It includes a foreword from Vice President Kamala Harris who knows a thing or two about winning. 

'Shipped' by Angie Hockman

When a workaholic marketing manager and a remote social media manager (who are both up for the same promotion!) are forced to go on a company cruise together, they discover that their virtual love/hate relationship may not include much hate in real life after all. 

Available January 19, 2021

'Let Me Tell You What I Mean' by Joan Didion

Readers who have been longing for new Joan Didion will be thrilled to learn she's publishing 12 previously uncollected essays in  Let Me Tell You What I Mean .

Available January 26, 2021

'The Ex Talk' by Rachel Lynn Solomon

If you happen to love a good romance  and  NPR, look no further than Rachel Lynn Solomon's  The Ex Talk . 

Available January 26, 2021

'The Girls I've Been' by Tess Sharpe

Soon to be a  Netflix film starring Millie Bobby Brown ,  The Girls I've Been  centers on Nora, the daughter of a con woman, who is caught in a bank heist and determined to get herself, her girlfriend, and her ex/best friend out safely...no matter what it takes. 

'Girl A' by Abigail Dean

Behold a psychological novel about a girl who escapes captivity, and later finds herself at the very place she escaped from—forced to confront her identity as "Girl A." 

Available February 2, 2021

'Surviving the White Gaze' by Rebecca Carroll

In  Surviving the White Gaze ,   cultural critic Rebecca Carroll reflects on her childhood growing up Black in a white rural New Hampshire town and how she forged her path as a Black woman in America.

'Milk Blood Heat' by Dantiel W. Moniz

If you're obsessed with Florida, Dantiel W. Moniz's  Milk Blood Heat  uses the state as a backdrop to tell compelling stories of ordinary people in this memorable debut. 

'This Close to Okay' by Leesa Cross-Smith

In  This Close to Okay , Leesa Cross-Smith tells the story of recently-divorced therapist Tallie Clark, who spots a man named Emmett on a bridge who's seemingly trying to end his life. As they learn more about each other (the book is told in alternating perspectives), Tallie chooses not to tell him she's a therapist. Instead, they have to learn the truth about each other—and themselves—the hard way.

Available February 2, 2021

'Fake Accounts' by Lauren Oyler

Allow Lauren Oyler to take you on a wild ride in  Fake Accounts , where a woman discovers her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist. Believe it or not, that's only the beginning.

'My Year Abroad' by Chang-Rae Lee

When Pong Lou, a Chinese American entrepreneur, takes Tiller, an average American college student, with him on a trip across Asia, his perspective on life is forever changed. 

'Do Better' by Rachel Ricketts

Rachel Ricketts's  Do Better: Spiritual Activism for Fighting and Healing from White Supremacy  addresses anti-racism from a spiritually-aligned perspective, providing readers with a guidebook on how to fight racial injustice and white supremacy from the inside out.

'The Kindest Lie' by Nancy Johnson

Nancy Johnson's  The Kindest Lie  finds main character, Ruth, back in her hometown that's plagued with racism and despair during the 2008 financial crisis. There she befriends Midnight, a young white boy who helps her uncover secrets from her past. 

'Kink' Edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell

Featuring an incredible roster of writers,  Kink  is a short fiction collection that explores love, lust, BDSM, and more, edited by bestselling author R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell.  

Available February 9, 2021

'Sparks Like Stars' by Nadia Hashimi

In  Sparks Like Stars , Sitara Zamani is transported to a new American life after communists staged a coup in her home of Afghanistan, assassinating the president and her entire family. Forty years later, she encounters the soldier who saved her (and may have been responsible for her family's death), prompting her to return to the country for answers. 

Available March 2, 2021

'My Inner Sky' by Mari Andrew

There's something about Mari Andrew's words and illustrations that make you feel at home.  My Inner Sky  reminds readers of the shared grief, joy, and sorrow that we experience throughout life—and how to cope with it.

'Professional Troublemaker' by Luvvie Ajayi Jones

If you've been consumed with imposter syndrome or, frankly, anything that's been holding you back in life, allow  New York Times  bestselling author and keynote speaker Luvvie Ajayi Jones to help you tackle that fear through her signature wit and refreshing honesty.

Available March 2, 2021

'Infinite Country' by Patricia Engel

Patricia Engel's  Infinite Country  takes readers into the lives of a Columbian family who has immigrated to the U.S. and is forced to weigh the all-too-familiar struggle of risking deportation or willingly returning to the very country they decided to flee from. 

'How Beautiful We Were' by Imbolo Mbue

When the fictional African village of Kosawa is being destroyed by an American oil company, the people residing in the village decide to fight back, prepared for the consequences that they'll face. 

Available March 9, 2021

'Black Girl, Call Home' by Jasmine Mans

Jasmine Mans's highly-anticipated poetry collection,  Black Girl, Call Home,  beautifully illustrates what it's like to be a queer Black woman in America. 

Available March 9, 2021

'Act Your Age, Eve Brown' by Talia Hibbert

Talia Hibbert's third book in the Brown Sisters series focuses on the unpredictable Eve Brown and the unexpected love she finds at the bed and breakfast she interviewed as a chef for. She may or may not have also ~ accidentally ~ hit the owner with her car, but we'll leave the rest of that story for the book. 

'Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue' by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Amanda L. Tyler

In  Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue , readers will learn even more details about the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's family life and lifelong career fighting for gender equality. The book was heading into production around the time of RBG's death. 

Available March 16, 2021

'Of Women and Salt' by Gabriela Garcia

Gabriela Garcia's  Of Women and Salt  spans across multiple generations of women living in Cuba, Miami, and Mexico and the decisions they have made that ultimately connect—and shape—their lives. 

Available March 30, 2021

'Libertie' by Kaitlyn Greenidge

In Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is conflicted between the life she feels compelled to live and the one her mother wants for her: to go to medical school and become a doctor. Things become increasingly complicated when Libertie accepts the marriage of a man from Haiti, only to discover her freedom is further limited as a Black woman in their relationship. 

'The Beauty of Living Twice' by Sharon Stone

In  The Beauty of Living Twice , actress and humanitarian Sharon Stone reflects on how she rebuilt her life after a massive stroke that altered her family, love, and career. 

Available March 30, 2021  

'Girlhood' by Melissa Febos

Here, Melissa Febos brilliantly explores society's definition of becoming a woman and the values—or lack thereof—it taught her growing up. 

'You Love Me' by Caroline Kepnes

Caroline Kepnes is back with the third book in the  You  series (yes, the original books from the Netflix series). This time around, Joe is headed to the Pacific Northwest and, well, you probably have an idea of what happens next. 

Available April 6, 2021

'Caul Baby' by Morgan Jerkins

Morgan Jerkins's first work of fiction is about a woman named Laila, desperate to become a mother, who's in search of a caul from an old and powerful family in Harlem known as the Melancons. What follows is a deep search for familial connection after Laila's niece, Amara, gives birth to a child named Hallow that she gives to the Melancons to raise. When Hallow and Amara cross paths years later, Hallow must decide where she truly belongs.

Available April 6, 2021

'Peaces' by Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi, bestselling author of  Gingerbread,  returns with another magical storyline. This time, in  Peaces , a couple finds themselves on a sleeper train that turns out to be anything but ordinary. 

'When the Stars Go Dark' by Paula McLain

Paula McLain,  New York Times  bestselling author of  The Paris Wife , is back with  When the Stars Go Dark— a story about a detective named Anna Hart who becomes obsessed with a missing persons report in her hometown that's reminiscent of an unsolved murder from her childhood.

Available April 13, 2021

'Aquarium' by Yaara Shehori

Yaara Shehori's debut centers on two deaf sisters, Lili and Dori Ackerman, raised by deaf parents who refuse to let them interact with anything or anybody in the world of hearing. That is, until they suddenly find themselves in it and are forced to relearn everything they've been taught. 

Available April 13, 2021

'Hana Khan Carries On' by Uzma Jalaluddin

Uzma Jalaluddin's rom-com with competing halal restaurants is exactly the kind of novel we need in 2021. 

'Heart of Fire' by Mazie K. Hirono

Mazie K. Hirono, the first Asian-American woman and the only immigrant serving in the U.S. Senate, shares her inspiring journey growing up in rural Japan and eventually becoming one of the most influential members of Congress.

Available April 20, 2021

'Crying in H Mart' by Michelle Zauner

If you read Michelle Zauner's  viral  New Yorker  essay  about crying in H Mart after her mother's death, you'll want to order her memoir, which expands on the essay, immediately. 

Available April 20, 2021

'Anna K Away' by Jenny Lee

At last, Jenny Lee's  Anna K— a modern adaptation of Anna Karenina — returns with its sequel,  Anna K Away ,   set over the course of the next summer after Alexia Vronsky's tragic death.

Available April 27, 2021

'You Are Your Best Thing' by Tarana Burke & Brené Brown

Tarana Burke, acclaimed activist and founder of the Me Too movement, and Dr. Brené Brown,  New York Times  bestselling author and professor, teamed up to create an anthology on the Black experience that includes essays from some of the most vital voices of our time. 

'The Last Thing He Told Me' by Laura Dave

You know it's probably a good thriller when Reese Witherspoon decides to transform it into a  limited TV series  starring Julia Roberts. When main character Hannah's husband disappears and leaves a note telling her to protect his daughter, she finds out her husband wasn't exactly who he was cracked up to be. Together, the mother and stepdaughter start to discover the truth about the man they thought they knew. 

Available May 4, 2021

'Notes on Grief' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The exquisite author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's latest work,  Notes on Grief , is a book we can all relate to in our ways during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, Adichie details the loss of her father last summer. 

Available May 11, 2021

'That Summer' by Jennifer Weiner

The summer wouldn't be complete without an aptly-titled novel from  New York Times  bestselling author Jennifer Weiner that explores themes of friendship and power. 

'Billie Eilish' by Billie Eilish

Billie Eilish fans, rejoice: The 19-year-old singer/songwriter is publishing a visual introspection into her life with never-before-seen photos.

'Yearbook' by Seth Rogen

As Seth Rogen perfectly  put it , "I wrote a book called  Yearbook . It’s true stories and essays and stuff that I hope you think are funny. It comes out in May, but if you like you can order it now. Yay!"

'People We Meet on Vacation' by Emily Henry

If you enjoyed Emily Henry's  Beach Read , you'll appreciate  People We Meet on Vacation —a novel about two best friends, Alex and Poppy, whose annual vacation ritual is halted after they've stopped speaking. And yet, somehow they convince each other to go on one final seven-day vacation together in an attempt to make it right. 

Available May 11, 2021

'While Justice Sleeps' by Stacey Abrams

There seems to be nothing  Fair Fight  founder Stacey Abrams can't do, and that includes writing a compelling thriller. Ever so timely,  While Justice Sleeps  centers on Avery Keene, a young clerk for the fictional Justice Howard Wynn, who becomes his legal guardian and power of attorney when he slips into a coma. When Avery discovers the justice has been secretly researching a controversial case, she's propelled on a quest for the truth while Washington attempts to replace the justice. 

'State of Emergency' by Tamika D. Mallory

In  State of Emergency: How We Win in the Country We Built , activist and social justice leader Tamika D. Mallory gives readers the tools they need to fight injustice and find a pathway towards true freedom. This is the first book from Charlamagne Tha God’s new imprint,  Black Privilege Publishing .

'Don't Breathe a Word' by Jordyn Taylor

The Paper Girl in Paris'  Jordyn Taylor returns with  Don't Breathe a Word— a boarding school mystery that alternates between the past and the present to discover the secrets that lie within Hardwick Preparatory Academy. 

Available May 18, 2021

'The Guncle' by Steven Rowley

When once-famous actor Patrick ,  otherwise known as Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP) ,  becomes the primary guardian of his young niece and nephew after tragedy strikes, he finds himself in the role of a lifetime. 

Available May 25, 2021

'Instructions for Dancing' by Nicola Yoon

Nicola Yoon,  New York Times  bestselling author of  Everything, Everything  and  The Sun Is Also a Star ,  returns with another charming love story. This time around, main character Evie has a vision of a couple's romance — knowing exactly how it begins and ends — and must determine whether her own budding romance is worth the risk of heartbreak. 

Available June 1, 2021

'With Teeth' by Kristen Arnett

Kristen Arnett's  With Teeth  paints an equally humorous and moving portrayal of a mother's fear of her hostile son while desperately trying to keep her family together as she grows increasingly resentful of her wife. 

'One Last Stop' by Casey McQuiston

The  New York Times  bestselling author of  Red, White & Royal Blue  returns with the queer New York City love story we didn't know we needed. In  One Last Stop , cynical 23-year-old August meets a gorgeous girl on the subway and it may actually be too good to be true after all — she soon discovers this woman is actually displaced in time from the '70s, and she must figure out how to help her. 

'The Other Black Girl' by Zakiya Dalila Harris

The Other Black Girl  is the NYC publishing story Black women have been waiting for. The novel centers on 26-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers who's fed up with the microaggressions she experiences as the only Black girl in the office, finding solace when the new girl Hazel arrives. That is, until Nella starts receiving threatening notes to leave her job, and soon realizes there's something much deeper going on here.

'Somebody's Daughter' by Ashley C. Ford

Ashley C. Ford invites us into her world growing up a poor Black girl in search of answers—namely why her father, who she often turns to for hope, is in prison—taking readers on an emotional journey that leads her to discover the truth about his incarceration, and herself, along the way.

Available June 1, 2021

'Malibu Rising' by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Daisy Jones and The Six  fans will be thrilled to learn Taylor Jenkins Reid has a new novel— Malibu Rising —coming out about four famous siblings in the '80s who throw an end-of-summer party.

'Seven Days in June' by Tia Williams

Tia Williams's sultry romance novel,  Seven Days in June , is about two former lovers who reconnect at a New York literary event. There, they can't deny their chemistry or the fact that they haven't forgotten about each other in the decades since they were last together. Now, during seven days in June, they must decide what their future has in store.  

'The Woman in the Purple Skirt' by Natsuko Imamura

Natsuko Imamura's  The Woman in the Purple Skirt , a bestseller in Japan, is being shared with an American audience this summer. The novel centers on, as you may have guessed, the Woman in the Purple Skirt, who is being watched by the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. Why does everyone pay attention to the Woman in the Purple Skirt and not the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan? You'll just have to find out. 

Available June 8, 2021

'Dear Senthuran' by Akwaeke Emezi

In  Dear Senthuran , critically-acclaimed author Akwaeke Emezi turns the focus on their own life. Through a series of letters written to friends and family, they reflect on decisions about their gender and body, how they've managed to navigate certain relationships, and much more.

"As someone who’s been carefully curating their public image for years, it feels almost dangerous to write so honestly, but the final result is a text that I love, one that deeply engages with the metaphysics of Black spirit & singularly faces the Black reader,"  says  Emezi.

Available June 8, 2021

'Animal' by Lisa Taddeo

At its core, Lisa Taddeo's debut novel,  Animal , is about female rage and desire. If this book is anything like Taddeo's  Three Women , expect masterful storytelling. 

'Blackout' by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk & Nicola Yoon

Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk,  and  Nicola Yoon?! When six incredible Black storytellers come together to create a series of interconnected love stories, you know you're about to read something special.

Available June 22, 2021

'Filthy Animals' by Brandon Taylor

Hailed as one of 2020's breakout literary stars,  scientist-turned-novelist  Brandon Taylor is back with  Filthy Animals— a collection of connected short stories set in the midwest . 

Available June 22, 2021

'Something Wild' by Hanna Halperin

When sisters Tanya and Nessa Bloom travel to the Boston suburbs to help their mom pack up their childhood home, they reckon with their past while discovering a disturbing truth: their mother is in an abusive relationship. Now, they must figure out what comes next for all of them. 

Available June 29, 2021

'Seek You' by Kristen Radtke

Talk about a sign of the times. Kristen Radtke's  Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness  quite literally helps readers feel less alone as she explores our feelings of longing and why we're so afraid to talk about them. 

Available July 13, 2021

'Goldenrod' by Maggie Smith

Following the release of last year's  Keep Moving , Maggie Smith will publish another set of poems that center on parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Smith  says   Goldenrod  has been five years (!) in the making. 

Available July 27, 2021

'They'll Never Catch Us' by Jessica Goodman

Jessica Goodman, bestselling author of  They Wish They Were Us  (the book is being adapted into a  TV series starring Halsey !), returns with  They'll Never Catch Us— a murder-mystery that centers on a new cross-country star in town who goes missing and the two sisters, also elite runners, who are prime suspects in her disappearance.  

'We Were Never Here' by Andrea Bartz

Andrea Bartz's mystery,  We Were Never Here , is about two best friends who are enjoying their annual reunion trip until one of them walks into their hotel room to find the other killed a backpacker in self-defense. A similar incident happened the year prior...was it just a coincidence or something more? 

Available August 3, 2021

'The Heart Principle' by Helen Hoang

The eagerly-anticipated third novel in the Kiss Quotient series, Helen Hoang's  The Heart Principle  proves how wrong you can be about someone—and how they may just be the right person for you. 

Available August 31, 2021

'A Slow Fire Burning' by Paula Hawkins

New York Times  bestselling author of  The Girl on the Train  Paula Hawkins's new novel— A Slow Fire Burning —is about a young man who's found murdered in a houseboat and the three women who are suspects in the case.

'Beautiful World, Where Are You' by Sally Rooney

Yes, you read that correctly. Sally Rooney, author of  Conversations with Friends  and  Normal People , returns with  Beautiful World, Where Are You —a novel about friendship and sex. 

Available September 7, 2021

'Misfits' by Michaela Coel

Michaela Coel's  Misfits  shares her journey of belonging and how we can all transform our lives by embracing who we are. If you felt the  I May Destroy You  creator's  Emmys speech  in your soul, you'll definitely enjoy this book. 

' The Night She Disappeared ' by Lisa Jewell

Lisa Jewell's  The Night She Disappeared, Marie Claire's  October book club pick , is a thriller that begins with the disappearance of 19-year-old mother Tallulah who doesn't return home after a night out. 

'Matrix' by Lauren Groff

If you love historical fiction, you'll appreciate Lauren Groff's upcoming novel,  Matrix , which centers on 17-year-old Marie de France who's sent to England to become the head of a poverty-stricken abbey. 

'You Got Anything Stronger?' by Gabrielle Union

Gabrielle Union's  You Got Anything Stronger?  is the followup to her first book,  We ' re Going to Need More Wine . Here, Union discusses everything from her experience with surrogacy to racism in Hollywood. Within her stories, she proves it's okay to change our minds as we grow and evolve. 

Available September 14, 2021

'Unbound' by Tarana Burke

Tarana Burke, founder of the Me Too movement, has released her highly-anticipated memoir that highlights the strength and perseverance that led her to where she is today. As she  tweeted , "It’s been a long time coming."

'The Hill We Climb and Other Poems' by Amanda Gorman

If you follow Phoebe Robinson  on Instagram  or listened to  2 Dope Queens  or read any of her previous books, you know that you can expect hilarious life lessons and stories from her upcoming essay collection,  Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes . The title alone is *chef's kiss.*

Available September 28, 2021

'Believing' by Anita Hill

Anita Hill, who made history when she testified in 1991 against then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas with claims of sexual harassment, is a prominent lawyer, professor, and advocate. In  Believing , she traces the history of gender violence in society and what she's learned in the decades since her testimony. 

'We Are Not Like Them' by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza

Christine Pride and Jo Piazza teamed up to write their new novel,  We Are Not Like Them —a story about two childhood best friends (one who's white and one who's Black) who are forced to navigate race and friendship when the white friend's husband is involved in the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager. Read Pride and Piazza's interview with  MC   here .

Available October 5, 2021

'State of Terror' by Hillary Rodham Clinton & Louise Penny

The collab I didn't know I needed! Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and bestselling author Louise Penny have teamed up to write a thriller about—wait for it—a secretary of state who joins her rival's administration and must combat a series of terrorist attacks. 

Available October 12, 2021

'The 1619 Project' by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones's  The 1619 Project , originally  published in  The New York Times Magazine   in August 2019, is an expansion of the award-winning project that teaches us the dismal truth about America's history of slavery and how it's manifested into the world we live in today. Through Bookshop.org, customers can donate the book directly to local schools, libraries, and book banks. 

Available November 16, 2021

'Call Us What We Carry' by Amanda Gorman

The world is eagerly awaiting National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman's debut collection of poetry, which includes the breathtaking poem she read at President Biden's inauguration titled,  "The Hill We Climb."  

Available December 7, 2021

Stay In The Know

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Rachel Epstein is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in New York City. Most recently, she was the Managing Editor at Coveteur, where she oversaw the site’s day-to-day editorial operations. Previously, she was an editor at Marie Claire , where she wrote and edited culture, politics, and lifestyle stories ranging from op-eds to profiles to ambitious packages. She also launched and managed the site’s virtual book club, #ReadWithMC. Offline, she’s likely watching a Heat game or finding a new coffee shop. 

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"Makeup is a fun extension of who we are, but it isn’t all we are."

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46 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2021

Being stuck at home has its upsides..

new release books fiction 2021

After a year of industry chaos and many delayed book releases, 2021 brings a bumper crop of new fiction and nonfiction books — including a collection by cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib and much-anticipated novels from Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, and, yes, Jonathan Franzen. It also brings promising fiction debuts from writers such as the late Anthony Veasna So and poet Melissa Lozada-Oliva. Here’s everything you need to get you through this last stretch of indoor time.

Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour (January 5)

This quick-witted, trenchant debut novel starts like a superhero origin story. Darren Vender (he describes himself as an “attractive black man” who is “taller than average”) is a manager at a Starbucks in Park Avenue, where he’s worked for four years. At night he returns to the three-story brownstone in gentrifying Bed-Stuy where he lives with his mother. Then one day at work Darren is overcome by an ability he never knew he possessed: He convinces a regular customer who always places the same order to purchase another drink instead. Turns out the customer is a bigwig who is impressed by Darren’s salesmanship, and he invites Darren to work at his start-up. What follows is a harrowing tale that operates at the fraught intersection of capitalism, race, and class. — Tope Folarin

The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins (January 5)

In this gripping reimagining of Jane Eyre that takes place in Birmingham, Alabama, Jane starts out as a dog-walker in Thornfield Estates, a wealthy gated community, where she soon finds out all that glitters is paste. She snares the attention of the mysteriously widowed Eddie Rochester, who recognizes that the secrets of Jane’s past perhaps mirror his own — and invites Jane to move in. She quickly gets access to a lifestyle she had only ever dreamed about, but something isn’t right: Eddie is distant. Strange noises come from upstairs. And she begins to realize she’s on a countdown to someone discovering who she really is. What would have happened if Jane Eyre had not been a naïve innocent with a heart of gold? Grab this page-turner and find out. — Nichole Perkins

Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu (January 12)

Billed as a memoir, Owusu’s book is so much more: a history of Africa’s relationship with the West, a clear-eyed depiction of the ties that bind — and the grievances that disconnect — Black people around the world, and an analysis of how broken families produce broken human beings. But it’s Owusu’s life story that will burrow into you. She is the product of a union between a proud Ghanaian man and a hopeful Armenian American woman who perceive their relationship as an expression of intimate love and grand idealism. Owusu relies on the language of earthquakes — foreshock, mainshock, aftershock — to describe what happens to her and her family once her parents’ marriage breaks apart. This is a book that will shake you to your core. — Tope Folarin

‘Detransition, Baby’ by Torrey Peters

Peters’s novel follows a trans couple, Amy and Reese, whose lives are turned upside down when Amy decides to detransition and become Ames. When Ames gets his lover/boss, Katarina, pregnant, things are flipped upside down once more. The word “polarizing” will be tossed around in discussions about this book , but mostly, Detransition, Baby will force you to think hard about family and queerness and motherhood and sex. And keep thinking about them long after you finish reading. — Madison Malone Kircher

The Rib King by Ladee Hubbard (January 19)

Hubbard’s second novel is as original, warm, and expertly researched as her debut, The Talented Ribkins, but with significantly more tragedy. A groundskeeper at a down-on-its-heels southern mansion watches with increasing furor as the house’s owner manipulates his employees for riches and glory. A quietly thrilling addition to what I hope becomes a flourishing Ladee Hubbardverse. — Molly Young

The World Turned Upside Down by Yang Jisheng (January 19)

Yang’s devastating history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution has been long in the making. First published four years ago in Hong Kong, The World Turned Upside Down is now finally available in English, thanks to translators and editors Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. (Mosher and Guo are also responsible for translating Yang’s groundbreaking 2008 book Tombstone , about the Great Chinese Famine.) For Yang, who is 81 and still living in Beijing, the publication of such work is a testament to his political commitment and bravery: The World Turned Upside Down offers an unflinching account of the years 1966 to 1976, when China, under Mao, endured enforced starvation, mass purges, and constant double talk from government officials. This was gaslighting at a national scale. Cutting through decades of propaganda and revisionism, Yang’s much-needed corrective joins what one hopes is a new wave of reckonings, which includes Helen Zia’s Last Boat Out of Shanghai (2019) and Rana Mitter’s China’s Good War (2020). — Jane Hu

The Hare by Melanie Finn (January 26)

An elegant writer of unconventional thrillers, Finn has a gift for weaving existential and political concerns through tautly paced prose. The Hare is set in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where we find a single mother scrapping for survival while cursed with a royally sociopathic ex-lover. One of many excellent books released by Two Dollar Radio, a family-run publisher out of Ohio. — Molly Young

Milk Fed, by Melissa Broder

Broder ( The Pisces ) is back with a new novel about a 24-year-old in Los Angeles named Rachel, who has an eating disorder, a disordered relationship with her mother, and a stand-up comedy hobby. (Honestly … that tracks.) At a therapist’s recommendation, Rachel goes on a 90-day detox from her mom and instead finds herself falling for a fro-yo heir, Miriam, whose family’s Judaism looks deeply different from Rachel’s own. A story about religion, sexuality, food, and feeling your fucked-up feelings. — Madison Malone Kircher

The Removed by Brandon Hobson (February 2)

Hobson’s last novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking , a Cherokee coming-of-age novel set in 1980s Oklahoma, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and I’ll eat my pajamas if his new novel — which is also set in Oklahoma and deepens Hobson’s themes of displacement and violence — doesn’t get a nom too. — Molly Young

My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee

The suburban American hero of Lee’s new novel, Tiller, is a self-described “slightly-below-average guy in all categories” who gets caught up with Pong Lou, a borderline caricature of a Chinese American entrepreneur who sells drinks with alleged restorative qualities. The novel — set at a time when it was still possible to journey to China — alternates between Tiller’s whirlwind past, when he traveled across that country as Pong’s assistant, and his present, in which he’s residing in Middle America with a girlfriend who is under witness protection. As with Lee’s debut 1995 novel Native Speaker , or the more recent On Such a Full Sea (2014), which is set in a dystopian “New China,” this one subverts as many ethnic stereotypes as it perilously evokes. My Year Abroad is a syncopated surprise, with an ending that will be sure to leave you texting all your friends. —Jane Hu

100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell (February 2)

You could describe Brontez Purnell, who lives in Oakland, as a writer, choreographer, filmmaker, curator, actor, and artist, or you could just cover your bases and call him a “national treasure.” 100 Boyfriends is a collection of short stories so wrigglingly alive and counterculturally refreshing that it deserves a new noun — a pod of whales, a murder of crows, a jubilee of Brontez Purnell stories? I’d wager that he sets down the best first lines of any living writer. — Molly Young

Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler (February 2)

A debut novel from critic Oyler, Fake Accounts chronicles a woman who, at the dawning of the Trump presidency, discovers her boyfriend is a decently famous Instagram conspiracy theorist. That discovery is revealed on the novel’s back cover — but it’s a second, even more dramatic twist that upends the nameless narrator’s life and got me hooked on this book. If you’re looking for fiction that understands the complexities of life online and the way that world seeps into reality, this is it. — Madison Malone Kircher

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (February 16)

Reading Patricia Lockwood raises questions. Questions such as, How can a person understand both herself and the world with such clarity? How does a person experience things so intensely and express them so buoyantly? Am I laughing or am I crying? Lockwood’s first novel is as crystalline, witty, and brain-shredding as her poetry and criticism. — Molly Young

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (March 2)

When I heard that Ishiguro was coming out with a new novel, I gasped. Klara and the Sun is the writer’s first publication since winning the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. And if you’re a ride-or-die Ishiguro reader (what other kind is there?), you won’t be disappointed. Narrated in his signature first person — which hovers somewhere between inscrutable and Very Big Feelings — the book’s protagonist is the eponymous Klara, an Artificial Friend who is hypersensitive to human emotions. As Klara carefully and lovingly observes others, the work of Ishiguro’s reader is to carefully and lovingly observe her. An ideal novel for our lonely present, exploring questions of alienation, emotional labor, failed communication, and what it means to love a world that refuses to love you back. —Jane Hu

The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen (March 2)

The protagonist of Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer , a French-Vietnamese immigrant and North Vietnamese government mole, is a man forever caught between — between nations, identities, and his own morals. The last time we saw him, he was out at sea, off to an uncertain locale and praying for absolution and freedom. In this sequel to Nguyen’s Pulitzer winner, the same man has taken up residence in Paris, living in the country most implicated in the contradictions of his life as a colonial subject. Immersed in talk and conflict with left-wing intellectuals, junkies, and Vietnamese aunties, and haunted by dreams of torture and betrayal, the protagonist faces an even greater challenge than those he faced in the first novel. His mission, if he chooses to accept it, is to survive. — Kevin Lozano

Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans (March 9)

In this poetry collection, spoken-word artist Jasmine Mans pulls at all the threads of who she is as a Black queer woman from Newark, unravels herself, then puts herself back together via clear, precise language that brooks no argument. In the poem “Because I Am a Woman Now,” the speaker wants the comfort of a lie, but knows that womanhood means facing truth in new, vague ways. In “Momma Said Dyke at the Kitchen Table,” Mans decodes a mother’s reaction to a daughter’s coming out. Black Girl, Call Home moves from vignette to cultural criticism to ballad to eulogy to memoir with grace. — Nichole Perkins

The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández (March 16)

Chilean novelist Nona Fernández has developed a reputation for composing unsettling portraits of life during Chile’s brutal military dictatorship, with stories that venture beyond the stiff and incomplete histories recorded by truth and reconciliation commissions. In her 2015 coming-of-age novella, Space Invaders , a group of friends piece together memories of a classmate who vanished after her father, a police agent, went into hiding. Fernández’s upcoming book, The Twilight Zone , translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, is just as eerie. Its narrator, a documentarian living in modern-day Santiago, obsessively combs through the confessions of a former military officer to reimagine the final moments of the people he tortured and disappeared. In the process, she ventures beyond the historical records that present the Chilean dictatorship’s crimes as a series of isolated cases, revealing an alternate world that haunts the nation’s psyche. — Miguel Salazar

Fierce Poise by Alexander Nemerov (March 23)

Fans of Mary Gabriel’s exquisite Ninth Street Women , which tells the story of the mid-century New York City art boom from the perspective of five exceptional female painters, will rejoice over Fierce Poise , the first major biography of Helen Frankenthaler. Nemerov organizes his unconventional take into 11 distinct moments from the 1950s — the decade when Frankenthaler (barely out of college) developed her technique of staining a canvas with turpentine and pigment, married fellow artist Robert Motherwell, and worked toward her first major exhibition. Moody and textured, Fierce Poise celebrates, and mimics, Frankenthaler’s sweetly explosive paintings. — Hillary Kelly

There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (March 23)

There’s been a boom of workplace-set literature over the past five years or so—novels like Helen Phillips’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat, Hilary Leichter’s Temporary, and Halle Butler’s The New Me , which turn a deadpan focus on the stultifying rhythms and soul-killing mindlessness of the twenty-first century office. There’s No Such Thing As an Easy Job , by Japanese phenom Kikuko Tsumura (translated into English by Polly Barton), is the next candidate for this mini canon. The unnamed narrator is burnt out by the emotional stresses of her last job, so she wanders into an employment agency and asks for something easy and brainless. The agency complies, and while the series of bizarre and unexpected jobs she lands after that — hanging posters, writing copy for cracker boxes — free her from the tension of her old work, they also impose new questions about how we can separate any occupation from who we are. — Hillary Kelly

A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (March 30)

In Abdurraqib’s 2019 book Go Ahead in the Rain , a genre-bending tribute to A Tribe Called Quest, he blended criticism and historical analysis with personal essays and poetry. His upcoming collection, A Little Devil in America , is similar in approach and more expansive in scope, celebrating the rich and storied history of Black performance in the United States in a series of essays, reflections, and memories. From chapters on Soul Train and Whitney Houston’s musical career to historical analyses of dance marathons and meditations on blackface, Abdurraqib shares his love for Black performance — both onstage and in everyday life — and examines how it has been imagined, molded, and consumed by Black and non-Black audiences alike. — Miguel Salazar

The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan (April 6)

This follow-up to Danan’s steamy 2020 debut The Roommate is filled with humor, healing, and heady good times (and, yes, that is a naughty pun). It inhabits the same world as Danan’s last book, and follows Naomi Grant — a former porn star and founder of a wildly successful sex-positive start-up — who now wants to share her unconventional expertise via live, in-person lectures but keeps finding that academia is too stubborn and old-fashioned to give her the time of day. When the handsome rabbi Ethan Cohen approaches her to teach a course on modern intimacy that he hopes will entice new blood to his synagogue, Naomi hesitates. Sex and religion, especially a religion she herself walked away from, don’t mix well, and this rabbi is way too hot for her not to corrupt. She decides to take the chance, and soon finds herself wondering: Who’s corrupting whom? — Nichole Perkins

The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo

“Recipes,” Lebo writes in the introduction to this glorious mash-up of memoir, love note, and cookbook, “are rituals that promise transformation.” The transformations she chronicles here are those of the flesh, both human and fruit — journeys through maceration and tenderization. In 26 essays, each accompanied by recipes for jellies, tonics, or balms, Lebo writes about little-known fruits such as aronia and medlar, known only to niche gardeners and long-dead cooks, and more ubiquitous varieties, such as blackberry and pomegranate. Every sentence is as sensuous as the first bite into a cold, juicy plum. — Hillary Kelly

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson (April 13)

Sincere and contemplative, Nelson’s debut novel is a love story about trauma, masculinity, and vulnerability. A young British-Ghanaian photographer falls for a dancer after a brief encounter in southeast London, and the two quickly develop a magnetic but undefined relationship, complicated by the fact that she lives in Dublin and dates one of his friends. During drunken excursions and sleepless nights, they bond over shared childhood experiences — both were among the only Black students at mostly white private schools — and a profound appreciation for Black artists from Isaiah Rashad to Zadie Smith. But as the relationship deepens, fissures begin to form. — Miguel Salazar

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (April 20)

In 2018, Michelle Zauner, lead singer of the band Japanese Breakfast, wrote an essay for The New Yorker titled “ Crying in H Mart ,” where she discussed her connections to shopping in the Asian market chain, tearing up in the food court as she watched people eat, and how it all reminded her of her mother, who had passed away a few years earlier. Now Zauner has expanded that into a memoir, about her mother, her own life, and the centrality of food . Crying in H Mart is palpable in its grief and its tenderness, reminding us what we all stand to lose. — Gabrielle Sanchez

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri (April 27)

Jhumpa Lahiri craves difficulty. How else to explain the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist’s midcareer pivot to working in Italian? Over the past decade, Lahiri, already bilingual in Bengali and English, committed herself to achieving fluency in a third tongue: She moved her family to Rome, published collections of essays she wrote in Italian, translated novels by Italian writer Domenico Starnone into English, and outlined her obsession with her adopted language in an essay for the The New Yorker . Now we get Whereabouts , a novel Lahiri wrote in Italian then translated to English herself. It follows a woman as she moves through the nameless Italian city where she lives, contemplating her relationships and the unexpected directions her life has taken. Come for the linguistic derring-do, stay for the introspection. —Madeline Leung Coleman

A Second Place by Rachel Cusk (May 4)

Cusk’s latest novel draws loosely from Lorenzo in Taos , the 1932 memoir by art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan about the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in New Mexico. Second Place tells of a male artist, “L,” who visits the female narrator, “M,” tracing an arc from L’s arrival at M’s secluded home in “the marsh” and concluding with his sudden departure. The plot is simple, yet the way it unfolds is as nuanced as ever, narrated in M’s second person to someone offstage. As with Cusk’s Outline trilogy, it takes seriously the complex emotional geometries between ordinary people. Second Place is a deeply philosophical book about what happens when you confuse art with life. —Jane Hu

Vernon Subutex 3 by Virginie Despentes (May 11)

Either you’re already onboard with this series and need no convincing, or you’ve somehow missed the fact that a cool French writer has been pumping out hilarious and corrosive novels about contemporary urban life at the center and fringes of Paris. Despentes writes like Armistead Maupin, but about aging Gen-Xers instead of hippies and New Agers. — Molly Young

On Violence and Violence Against Women by Jacqueline Rose (May 18)

To write on violence — especially violence against women — is a hazardous task. Lingering on sexual violence could spectacularize, or even reenact it. But Rose, a British academic who is one of our leading feminist critics, contends that the far greater risk is to remain blind to it. Her new book of criticism is marked by her usual vigilance, even as it wades into the unfinished business of recent events. In chapters about subjects ranging from trans rights and the Me Too movement to the sexual trafficking of migrant women and children, Rose stays focused, weaving analyses of ongoing sexual violence through readings of literature. What drives the whole work is the writer’s unwavering belief that we cannot begin to change our world without confronting the many forms of violence against women that continue to constitute it. —Jane Hu

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami (May 25)

Kawakami is a literary celeb in Japan whose much-lauded novel Breasts and Eggs was published in America last year, the first of her three books to be translated into English. Inspired by Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra , Heaven is an investigation of the intrinsic trauma of violence in which a 14-year-old boy who is bullied and taunted for his lazy eye forges a bond with a teenage girl, another victim of the mindless cruelty of children. (It was translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd, who also did Breasts and Eggs .) Haruki Murakami has called Kawakami his favorite young writer, but don’t let that fool you into thinking their work is similar: Kawakami’s writing is as grounded as Murakami’s is flighty, as dedicated to the pared-down shape of her prose as he is to the wild arcs of his narratives. — Hillary Kelly

Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson (May 25)

When D.H. Lawrence died in 1930, many critics considered him little better than a glorified pornographer. He’d published a slate of highly sexualized (and often autobiographical) novels, starting with The Rainbow in 1915 to Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928, and the eventual 1960 obscenity trial over the latter in the U.K. only perpetuated his divisive reputation. In this hyperfocused biography, Wilson — Lawrence’s first woman biographer — unpacks those years of Lawrence’s life and sifts through three major crises that affected his work, marriage, and philosophy, asking how such a gifted and original storyteller ended up scorned by the literary establishment during his lifetime. — Hillary Kelly

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

Galchen is an inventor and fabulist of the highest order: Her narratives are rigorous, antic creations that explore deceit, misinformation, identity, and the nature of knowledge. Her latest puzzle box of a novel is a surrealist horror story set in the 17th century. Narrated by Katharina Kepler — the herbalist mother of the famed German astronomer Johannes Kepler — the novel is constructed as a defense against the most serious of accusations: witchery. Written as a confession that Katharina offers to her next-door neighbor, the story is winding and hallucinatory, full of poison, gossip, and astral musings. Drawing partly from historical documents, the world Galchen creates feels more than just real. It feels haunted. — Kevin Lozano

Slipping by Mohamad Kheir (June 8)

In this tremendous novel by the Egyptian novelist, we meet a mother who directs her son to obey the orders of his dead father; a young man who wakes up in a ditch only to discover he somehow missed his own wedding; and another man who discovers he can walk on water. Each anecdote brushes the edge of the miraculous before resolving into something more quotidian — until the commonplace ebbs away, and we are left to ponder the mysteries that remain. This is the first of Kheir’s four novels to be published in English, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger. — Tope Folarin

The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura (June 8)

I’m a sucker for tales about female friendships that slide into obsession. The magnetism between women has so often been underestimated by history and literature that I’ll snap up the work of any author willing to go there. And Imamura isn’t just any writer. The Woman in the Purple Skirt , which took home Japan’s most prestigious literary award in 2019 and was translated from the Japanese by Lucy North, follows the aforementioned, otherwise nameless woman, as she sits in a park, watched by The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. The two eventually become friends and their lives begin to mesh — but something is off, and one of the women is not what she seems. Not just another cheap thriller with a “you can’t trust anyone” conceit, Imamura’s latest is like Anita Brookner’s Look at Me , reimagined by a surrealist. — Hillary Kelly

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (June 22)

Brandon Taylor had a hell of a 2020: His debut novel Real Life , about a queer Black biochemistry grad student barely getting by, was a critical darling that landed on the Man Booker shortlist and is now being developed into a film starring Kid Cudi. Filthy Animals , a new collection of linked stories, promises to delve into similar territory: young Midwesterners navigating cultural landmines and severed connections. A story about a man drawn into the open relationship between two dancers sounds especially Taylor, and especially biting. — Hillary Kelly

Survive the Night by Riley Sager (June 29)

Sager has turned out a thriller a year since his 2017 breakout hit Final Girls , about the lone survivor of a horror-movie-style massacre who’s confronted with her past ten years later. They’re all creepily atmospheric, easy to read without being fluffy, and fun as hell. Each book has also been better and more confident than the last, with 2020’s Home Before Dark deftly weaving together narratives from a writer who recounted his experience living in a haunted house (à la The Amityville Horror ) , and his daughter, who returns to renovate the house after her father’s death. Sager’s next offering, Survive the Night , sounds just as fun, creepy, and compelling, with the tagline: “It’s November 1991. George H. W. Bush is in the White House, Nirvana’s in the tape deck, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer.” —Emily Palmer Heller

While We Were Dating by Jasmine Guillory (July 13)

At a time when we all want to escape our real lives, what could be more alluring than the sparkling world of a romance novel? In her latest book, rom-com doyenne Guillory whisks us away to Hollywood with one familiar face, a male lead from one her previous novels, and a fresh one, an A-list actress waiting for her next big film. Guillory is known for whirling readers around the dance floors of weddings and palaces with glittering charm and delicate care, and now we can’t wait to see what she does with the glamourous and messy love lives of movie stars. — Tara Abell

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (August 3)

The California-born son of Cambodian refugees, the late fiction writer So described inherited immigrant trauma with what Mary Karr called “mind-frying hilarity.” He published stories in The New Yorker and n+1 and died in December, at the age of 28 — nine months before the release of this debut story collection, which is one of the most exciting contributions to Asian American literature in recent years. Afterparties follows everyday life in a Cambodian American community, with a focus on a younger generation negotiating their families’ post-genocide trauma alongside the high jinks of American childhood. So wrote with a light touch, in contrast to Asian American refugee fiction that trafficks in melancholic inscrutability or melodrama. These stories are funny without being satirical, refreshingly realist, and generous in their levity. —Jane Hu

All’s Well by Mona Awad (August 3)

Awad is a dark genius, preternaturally gifted at creating vicious, hilarious tales about the depravity inside us. (Please read her 2019 novel Bunny , about a group of treacly, pink-beribboned MFA students who magically conjure up their ideal men — then ax them when the relationships don’t work out.) All’s Well is set in the theater world, where Miranda, a former actor still in pain from a horrific accident, is attempting to stage Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well . But the cast stages a coup: They want Macbeth . A wicked mash-up about opioid addiction, Bard nerds, Faustian deals, and a cursed play? Yes, please. — Hillary Kelly

Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel (August 3)

Inflammation is both the metaphor and the stated subject of this ambitious interdisciplinary tome co-written by Patel, a journalist and activist, and Marya, a physician and composer. Together they map the connections between public health, social injustice, economic disparities, climate change, and ancestral trauma, making the case that our crappy world needs a new medical paradigm. — Molly Young

Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim (August 3)

Henrik is a young Japanese man adopted by Danish parents and living in Paris, where he aspires to be a translator. When his girlfriend dies mysteriously, Henrik sets off on an investigation through the city’s seamy underbelly, confronting ghosts of all kinds. This is the debut novel of American writer David Hoon Kim, who himself lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne. He writes a mean sentence. — Molly Young

A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins (August 31)

A perfect novel for your end-of-summer ennui, for what will always feel like that moody last week of vacation before school starts again. Four years after her last novel Into the Water and six years years after her international hit The Girl on the Train , Hawkins returns with a new thriller, a murder mystery set on a London canal boat. A little damp and a little cold, we can already feel our bones chilling from the lurking suspense and characters as murky as the Thames. — Tara Abell

Matrix by Lauren Groff (September 7)

With its brilliant he said, she said structure and mythological underpinnings, Groff’s 2015 novel, Fates and Furies , ginned up chatter and racked up award nominations. Matrix takes a sharp left turn away from the novelist’s usual focus on contemporary Americans. Instead, it heads to the 12th century to follow Marie de France, a former lady-in-waiting to Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom the French court sends to England to run an impoverished abbey. Groff has a knack for dissecting the inner workings of cloistered communities (the scarred small town of The Monsters of Templeton , the doomed cult of Arcadia ) so it will be fascinating to see what she makes of the hive-like energy of an all-female community. — Hillary Kelly

Maggie Nelson needs no genre. Reading her books — The Argonauts , Bluets , On Cruelty — tends to make classification of any kind feel destructive, like it would slice through her writing’s vital connective tissue. The same will almost certainly be true of her forthcoming book On Freedom , which will ask how that most American of ideals helps and how it hinders us in four distinct arenas: art, sex, drugs, and the climate. Reading Nelson is like watching a prima ballerina deliver the performance of a lifetime: athletic, graceful, and awe-inspiring. — Hillary Kelly

Richard Powers does Big well. His last novel, 2018’s Pulitzer-winning The Overstory , is a luminous, 500-plus page collection of stories, set across centuries, about the interconnectivity of forests and the people who live among and nurture trees’ primeval glory and innate intelligence. It’s so expansive it feels like you’re watching his characters from space. So it’s no surprise that his next novel, billed as a major event, will leave the atmosphere. Bewilderment is about Theo Byrne, a widowed astrobiologist searching for life on distant planets, who decides to take his young son on a galactic mission. Expect soaring prose and wise lessons about the bonds between humans and Mother Earth. — Hillary Kelly

From what we know so far about Franzen’s first novel since 2015’s Purity , it sounds exceptionally Franzen. Crossroads , the first novel of a new trilogy called “A Key to All Mythologies” (phew), centers on the Hildebrandt family: father Russ and mother Marion, who are both eyeing the exit out of their marriage, and their nearly grown children, Clem, Becky, and Perry. Reportedly the first in a trilogy of untold page count, this volume starts in 1971 and is set, of course, in a Midwest suburb; the series will eventually work its way through three generations. Most intriguing, the title is a tongue-in-cheek play on the character Casaubon’s long-belabored, unfinished book from George Eliot’s Middlemarch . So until October, we’ll be waiting with bated breath for more details — and another inevitable round of Franzenfreude. — Hillary Kelly

new release books fiction 2021

Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (October 26)

A feverish story of young adulthood, exploring how fandom and obsession shape how we relate to the world. Lozada-Oliva’s verse novel borrows its name from Tejana pop star Selena Quintanilla’s 1995 album, released posthumously after she was murdered by the president of her fan club, and centers around a young Colombian-Guatemalan American poet grappling with heartbreak and a stalling career. She decides to summon Selena, her childhood hero, using improvised witchcraft — and is shockingly successful, only to watch helplessly as Selena is immediately catapulted back into stardom and out of the poet’s life. Using love notes, party gossip, self-reflections, and imagined dialogues — with strangers, exes, Selena, and even Selena’s killer — Dreaming of You navigates the complexities of Latinx identity, self-loathing, love, and the loneliness of drifting into adulthood. — Miguel Salazar

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Our 20 Favorite Books of 2021

Playful, majestic, dazzling. These titles stole our hearts.

best books 2021

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2021 marked the release of new books by some of our most prominent authors—among them Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, Louise Erdrich, Amor Towles, Ann Patchett, Anthony Doerr, Colson Whitehead, and Maggie Shipstead, whose latest works made it onto our Top 20 List. Some of them, like Shipstead’s Great Circle, are epics in which the heroes and heroines’ adventures light up the reader’s imagination, while others go a bit more micro. For example, Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle is a 1960s period piece in which a furniture dealer gets suckered into a caper; Erdrich’s The Sentence is a contemporary novel set in a Minneapolis bookstore exactly like the one the author owns.

Two of the debut novels on our list—the breathtaking The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Nathan Harris’s The Sweetness of Water —were also selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Fiction from rising stars Patricia Engel, Mariana Enriquez, and Virgina Feito also wowed us.

Maggie Nelson is one of America’s leading intellectuals, and her brilliant collection, On Freedom , is a must-read for anyone who wants to deconstruct the most urgent social debates of the day. And the The Man Who Lived Underground , which Richard Wright wrote in the 1940s but was unable to get published at the time, underscores that great literature never loses its relevance: His tale of police brutality and racial inequality reads like it happened today. And then there’s Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon Reed’s On Juneteenth, her stirring personal ode to a holiday that is only now finally getting its due.

And for fun, New York, My Village , by Uwem Akpan, satirizes the self-serious book publishing business, while James LaPine’s sublime Putting It Together is a reminder, amid all our world’s uncertainty, that making art and sharing it with audiences is one of those life-affirming acts we were put on this planet for.

Drumroll, please...

Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr

The man who lived underground, by richard wright.

This previously unpublished novel, written in the 40s by the iconic author of Native Son , indicts police brutality and white supremacy through the terrifying saga of Fred Daniels, a Black man framed for double murder. Wright’s publisher refused to release the book at the time, deeming it incendiary. But this powerful, eerily prescient allegory finally saw the light of day earlier this year, at last getting the platform it has long deserved.

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Harper The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

This sweeping kitchen-table epic is the Great American Novel told through the family and ancestors of its protagonist, Ailey Pearl Garfield. Their narratives are anchored in centuries of oppression, sexual violations, and wounds made bearable by the humor, love, and resilience of Black matriarchs, then and now.

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, by Maggie Nelson

The acclaimed author of The Argonauts challenges, excites, and ignites with this cerebral mélange of reporting, memoir, and scholarship on topics ranging from cultural appropriation to climate change, to the distinction between obligation and responsibility. Settle in and observe Nelson’s mind at work and on fire.

Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead

Shipstead’s exhilarating feminist epic is an ode to independence, persistence, and aviation. Marian Graves is the unforgettable protagonist at the heart of this Booker-nominated novel, who from an early age wants only to learn to fly. How she manages to make this dream come true as an orphan growing up in early-20th-century Montana is a study in courage, a thrilling ascent into a writer’s untethered imagination.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Putting It Together, by James Lapine

The three-time Tony winner and Theater Hall of Fame inductee recounts the making of storied musical Sunday in the Park with  George , which he created with Stephen Sondheim. This illustrated book includes scintillating behind-the-scenes conversations with cast and crew. Anyone interested in how art is made will love Lapine’s tale of legends in collaboration.

The Sweetness of Water, by Nathan Harris

Newly freed in Old Ox, Georgia, two brothers, Prentiss and Landry, work on the homestead of George and Isabelle Walker—a couple mourning their son presumed lost to the Civil War—while also exploring the boundaries of their independence. A forbidden romance between Confederate soldiers underscores the tension between intimacy and duplicity in this singular debut, which also demonstrates how simple acts—of valor or violence—can ripple through time and space.

The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles

Towles’s picaresque tale is a paean to American mythology and the innocence of youth. In June 1954, four boys—Emmett, a Nebraska teenager just released from juvie; his little brother, Billy, a savant; Duchess, a streetwise hustler; and Woolly, heir to a Manhattan fortune—hit the road, staking out their dreams on opposite coasts but each drawn inevitably to New York. The author of A Gentleman i n Moscow has delivered a novel at once magical and melancholy.

New York, My Village, by Uwem Akpan

When Ekong Udousoro ventures from Nigeria to Manhattan to work as a book publishing fellow, he’s at first entranced and then gradually disillusioned by the patronizing, cultural superiority of his American colleagues. This satiric first novel, by the author of the memoir Say You’re One of Them , is both hilarious and spot-on.

Infinite Country, by Patricia Engel

Fifteen-year-old Talia escapes an all-girls correctional facility in the Colombian mountains on a mission to get back to Bogotá, where her father is waiting with her plane ticket to the U.S. It’s her one chance to unite with her mother and the siblings she has never met. Alternating between Talia’s journey and her parents’ struggles as undocumented immigrants separated by deportation, Engel’s astounding novel is an ode to family and heritage.

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Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen

His strongest work since The  Corrections , Franzen’s sumptuous new novel maps the interior lives of the Hildebrandts, a suburban family mired in the quicksand of desire and deceit. It’s Christmas 1971, and a disingenuous pastor, his depressed wife, and their four children are torn between religious beliefs and roiling cultural change. Franzen embroiders his narrative with piercing social observation, an American Balzac.

Bewilderment, by Richard Powers

A grieving astrophysicist, his neuroatypical 9-year-old son, and the fern-fringed trails and waterfalls of Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains: From these elements the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The  Overstory weaves a gorgeous, generous heartbreak of a novel that mourns our ailing planet, as well as our ailing souls.

Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead

The two-time Pulitzer winner tilts genre on its head with an immersive, witty tale about a heist run amok. As the 1960s commence, Ray Carney, a Harlem furniture dealer, gets sucked into a hotel robbery. Afterward he dodges dangers real and imagined, glomming onto an American Dream that shrugs off his aspirations.

Hogarth The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, by Mariana Enriquez

An emerging Argentine star goes for Gothic gold, gleefully poking the scars of friendships and attraction in this spine-tingling, luminous collection whose enthralling characters all dance across the spectral line between our world and the beyond.

Mrs. March, by Virginia Feito

Feito’s electrifying debut novel opens a scary window into a husband’s gaslighting and its effects on his increasingly unhinged wife, Mrs. March... or is the gaslighting just in her head? Our heroine is beginning to fear that the walls of the Marches’ sumptuous Manhattan apartment have ears. Elisabeth Moss is set to star in the film version.

Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura

In the aftermath of her father’s death, the narrator of Kitamura’s crystalline novel trades New York for The Hague, translating in the World Court for a West African dictator accused of ethnic cleansing while fumbling through a tortuous romance. Kitamura is drawn to seductions, sexual and otherwise, and her slim, graceful novel punches above its weight, reckoning with the ways we deceive each other and ourselves.

These Precious Days: Essays, by Ann Patchett

To read this collection is to be invited into that sacred space where a writer steps out from behind the page to say  Hello; let’s really get to know each other.  Stoic, kindhearted, fierce, funny, brainy, Patchett’s essays honor what matters most “in this precarious and precious life.”

The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

The 2021 Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist for The Night Watchman returns with a beguiling ode to bibliophiles set in an unnamed bookstore in Minneapolis that very closely resembles BirchBark, the shop Erdrich owns in real life. Her quirky, captivating characters—ex-con Tookie chief among them—care deeply about each other and our troubled world, but perhaps their deepest passion is for...books.

Major Labels, by Kelefa Sanneh

From Beyoncé to Kurt Cobain to De La Soul, the stars align in this virtuosic survey of popular music’s seven pillars: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance, and pop. Sanneh brings a contagious zeal for genres and cross-fertilizations to artists and records that are now playlists for an increasingly diverse America. “Over the past half-century, many musicians and listeners have belonged to tribes,” he writes. “What’s wrong with that?”

On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed

A Harvard law professor and author of  The Hemingses of Monticello,  which won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, Gordon-Reed is the textbook definition of public intellectual; and yet she gets personal in this slender, evocative memoir, blending textures from her small-town Texas girlhood with the unofficial celebration of slavery’s demise and the broader canvas of race in America, as when she integrated her public school: “My great-great-aunt…the one who lived in Houston and was also quite extravagant—bought boxes and boxes of dresses, tights, blouses, skirts, and hats from the most upscale department store in the city at the time, Sakowitz… Making sure I was dressed to the nines was her contribution to the civil rights movement.”

Headshot of Leigh Haber

Leigh Haber is Vice President, Books, Oprah Daily and O Quarterly. She is also Director of Oprah's Book Club. 

Headshot of Hamilton Cain

A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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  • So many great new, bestselling books have already been published in 2021.
  • These new books span genres like nonfiction, fantasy, thriller, and young adult.
  • Want more? Check out our best summer beach reads , thrillers , romance novels , and fantasy books .

Insider Today

We're already almost halfway through 2021: The days are longer, the grass is greener, and reader's favorite books of the year (so far!) are starting to emerge. 

Many of the new books from the first half of the year are reflective of the world's conversations last year. New novels feature characters that are diverse in more than one way, exploring problems such as social justice, immigration, and what it means to be human in this world. Meanwhile, nonfiction releases tackle climate change, personal growth, and racism while offering logical solutions. 

Though we're only five months into 2021, incredible books have already been published. Whether you're looking for a fun young adult read or a self-help book that addresses a complex problem, the books we recommend might make your favorites list at the end of the year. 

The 26 best new books in 2021:

Historical fiction, young adult.

  • Fiction and Poetry

A new memoir of an extraordinary life

new release books fiction 2021

"Just As I Am" by Cicely Tyson, available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.32

For more than 60 years, Cicely Tyson was revered for her acting in American theater and film. Also a lecturer and activist, Cicely Tyson's story is one of authenticity, known and understood by any reader to pick up her book. It's a memoir of a full life, a timely and timeless story of the perseverance and triumph of Black women. Cicely is reflective and open, transferring her charisma to the page as readers follow her through great moments of her life, published just two days before her death at 96 years old.

A bestselling self-help book to change how we talk about trauma

new release books fiction 2021

"What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing" by Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce D. Perry, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $17.39

While many of us blame ourselves for our emotions, Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry encourage us to shift the question from "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?" Dr. Bruce Perry is a brain and trauma expert who offers scientific insight to the trauma-based reasoning behind our less favorable behavioral patterns. Combined with Oprah's personal and vulnerable anecdotes, the book weaves science and storytelling together to shift how we view trauma so our futures can be defined by more than our pasts.

A new look at the economic effects of racism

new release books fiction 2021

"The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together" by Heather McGhee, available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.98

Heather McGhee is an American political commentator and strategist with an economic specialty who noticed racism as a common root problem to economic crises. Her book details her personal journey to uncover what she calls the "Solidarity Dividend": Gains that occur when people come together to accomplish what we can't do on our own. Heather McGhee uses stories from across America to demonstrate how white supremacy's collateral damage includes white people themselves and outlines her own message for a new future. 

A popular new psychology book to encourage rethinking

new release books fiction 2021

"Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know" by Adam M. Grant, available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.80

This book blends psychology and self-help to prove how doubt, failing, and rethinking are instrumental to improving ourselves and our world. Adam M. Grant is a psychologist whose research has shown that intellectual humility, or the ability to take constructive criticism, often has more benefits to productivity than first-time successes. In three sections, he outlines why we struggle to embrace feedback, how we can help others rethink effectively, and how our communities can shift to encourage rethinking.

A collective historical collaboration

new release books fiction 2021

"Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019" by Editors Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, available at Amazon and Bookshop from $18.98

In an unparalleled and defining collection, "Four Hundred Souls" is a chronological account of 400 years of Black American history, told by 90 of America's most profound Black writers. In a book that reclaims the ways history was written, it outlines major events with people all but forgotten by American history. Through poems and essays, each author covers five years of Black American history, beginning with the arrival of 20 enslaved Ndongo people one year before the arrival of the Mayflower.

The biography of a Nobel Prize winner

new release books fiction 2021

"The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race" by Walter Isaacson, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $21

Jennifer Doudna became obsessed with science, DNA, and the code of life in the sixth grade. Now, she's known as the co-creator of CRISPR — a tool that can edit DNA. This biography depicts how Jennifer Doudna's childhood interest in nature evolved into a Nobel Prize and the potential to change how science affects all aspects of human life. This book also outlines the moral and ethical implications of DNA-editing as well as the ways in which it could improve our physical and mental health. 

A bestselling Great Depression historical novel

new release books fiction 2021

"The Four Winds" by Kristin Hannah, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $17.39

After "The Nightingale," Kristin Hannah truly became known as an outstanding historical fiction writer. This novel is set in 1934 Texas, where the Great Depression and an insufferable drought has farmers struggling to keep their livelihoods. Elsa is one of them, torn between fighting for her homeland or going to California with the hope of a brighter future. It's a portrait of the American Dream, a heartbreaking story that reads so easily despite the complexity of Kristin Hannah's characters and detailed portrait of life during the Great Depression.

A forbidden love story between enslaved men

new release books fiction 2021

"The Prophets" by Robert Jones Jr, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $18.59

This is a magnificent story of love thriving despite the heavy backdrop of slavery. Isiah and Samuel are two enslaved young men, caring for animals on a southern plantation. Their intimacy and refuge in each other protects them from the harsh world — until an older fellow slave begins preaching the master's gospel to gain his favor. When the enslaved people begin to turn on each other, not only is Isiah and Samuel's relationship threatened, but the harmony of the entire plantation. 

A World War II novel about code-breaking women

new release books fiction 2021

"The Rose Code" by Kate Quinn, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $13.49

In 1940, World War II engulfed Europe, and three women from England volunteered to train as code breakers while Britain prepared to join the fight against Germany. Osla, Mab, and Beth each have their own undeniable assets to code breaking. Seven years later, the three women are sworn enemies, torn apart by the pressures of secrecy and reunited over a mysterious letter — the key to which lies in the betrayal that tore them apart. 

An historical story about the power of books

new release books fiction 2021

"The Paris Library" by Janet Skeslien Charles, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $17.56

Odile was a librarian at the American Library in Paris in 1939 when the Nazis invaded the city. With her fellow librarians, Odile joined the Resistance armed with books. Nearly 45 years later, Lily is a teenager living in Montana when her elderly neighbor's interesting past and common passions offer her the adventure for which she's been searching. This book is about heroism, life during World War II, and the timeless love of literature.

A new YA book that asks deep questions

new release books fiction 2021

"One of the Good Ones" by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $11.99

When Kezi Smith is killed after attending a social justice rally, she becomes immortalized as a victim in the fight against police brutality. As Happi, her sister, mourns, she finds herself questioning the perfect and angelic ways in which Kezi is remembered. Struggling with big philosophical questions after her sister's death, Happi sets out to honor her sister in her own way, spurring a life-altering ride of discovery. This book is poignant and deeply interesting, addressing from a new angle the mentality that victims are either "thugs" or "one of the good ones."

The story of an Indian American teenager

new release books fiction 2021

"Red, White, and Whole" by Rajani LaRocca, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $11.99

"Red, White, and Whole" is the story of Reha, a teen torn between her traditional home and her school, where she is the only Indian American student. Her parents rarely notice this clash of worlds unless Reha isn't meeting their expectations. When Reha's mother is diagnosed with leukemia, Reha decides she will be the ideal daughter in the hopes of saving her mother's life. Though fictional, many of the struggles in this book are very real for teenage immigrants and children of immigrants. The emotion packed into these pages might break your heart and leave you shedding more than a few tears. 

A coming-of-age YA novel

new release books fiction 2021

"Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $13.98

A prequel to " The Hate U Give ," this YA takes place 17 years prior to Starr's story, where Maverick Carter is torn between making money by dealing for the King Lords or finishing school and working an honest job. When Maverick finds out he's a father, his life and priorities change, even though he's still torn between loyalty and responsibility. In this coming-of-age novel, Maverick tackles big issues with real consequences and finds what it really means to be a father.

A new science-fiction thriller

new release books fiction 2021

"Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $17.47

All Ryland knows is he's been asleep for a very long time, he's millions of miles from Earth, and he's the sole survivor of a last chance space mission with an impossible task ahead of him: Conquering an extinction-level threat to the human race. Full of perfectly geeky sci-fi excitement paired with nail-biting thriller elements, this story is an exciting read with Andy Weir's trademark humor throughout.

A bestselling, suspenseful thriller with two narrators

new release books fiction 2021

"The Good Sister" by Sally Hepworth, available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.79

Fern and Rose are twin sisters who've escaped their mother's sociopathic home and are trying to live normal lives. Rose spent her childhood protecting Fern, so when Rose finds she can't have a baby, Fern sees an opportunity to repay her for everything she's done. As the long-buried secrets begin to reveal themselves, this thriller holds tight and refuses to let you go until the final pages. It's a domestic suspense of skewed memories and creepy double meanings. 

Stephen King's latest release

new release books fiction 2021

"Later" by Stephen King, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $9.56

In this coming-of-age storyline mixed with the supernatural elements that Stephen King writes best, Jamie is an extraordinary child who just wants an ordinary childhood. Though his mom urges him to keep it a secret, Jamie's ability to see the supernatural pulls him into a police pursuit of a killer threatening to strike from beyond the grave. "Later" is Stephen King at his finest: Creepy, compelling, and complex.

The final book of an epic fantasy series

new release books fiction 2021

"A Court of Silver Flames" by Sarah J Maas, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $16.85

This is the fifth and final novel of Sarah J. Maas's super-popular " A Court of Thorns and Roses " series. What began as a "Beauty and the Beast" re-telling morphed into a sexy, fantastical series with wolves, faeries, and nymphs while also tackling mental health, healing, and self-love. If you are a fantasy reader, this is a series you need to read, knowing that this final installment lives up to the high expectations.

A fresh story full of magical realism

new release books fiction 2021

"The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $13.29

Nora has regrets. On an evening when she feels like she's out of options and has ruined her life, she finds the midnight library. In the midnight library, the shelves go on forever — a different world inside each book, a life parallel to her own. Nora explores the lives she may have lived if she had made any single choice differently: Pursuing swimming or glaciology, undoing breakups, taking trips she'd previously canceled. This book has spurred some great conversations and leaves readers with the message that it's never too late to make the choices that can change their lives for the better.

A reimagining of a mythological legend

new release books fiction 2021

"The Witch's Heart" by Genevieve Gornichec, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $18.69

In "The Witch's Heart," fantasy meets Norse mythology to create an epic modern twist on a legend. Angrboda is a banished witch, forced to hide in the forest as a punishment from Odin for refusing to reveal the future. It is here that she meets Loki, and while their initial meeting breeds distrust, Angrboda soon falls in love with him. As she slowly recovers her powers, she knows she must protect her three children from growing dangers. This fantasy novel is a story of love, survival, and competing conflicts.

A perfect beach read

new release books fiction 2021

"The People We Meet on Vacation" by Emily Henry, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $10.06

This is a fun and cute rom-com story — and the perfect beach read. Alex and Poppy could not be more different, yet for the past 10 years, they've taken a summer vacation together to celebrate their friendship — until one mistake led to them not speaking for two years. When Poppy thinks back on the last time she was happy, she knows it was on vacation with Alex, so she reaches out and they embark on one more vacation to make everything right. While reading this book, you'll feel every bit of love and heartbreak that Alex and Poppy endure.

The bestselling story of a family torn by immigration

new release books fiction 2021

"Infinite Country" by Patricia Engel, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $14.95

A breathtaking book with a timely plot, this book follows a Columbian family fractured by immigration. Once their first child is born, Elena and Mauro flee a war-riddled Columbia for Houston, where they debate either overstaying their tourist visas or returning to Columbia and risking the safety of their children. When Mauro is deported, Elena is left in America — undocumented, caring for three children, and with few options for survival.

An emotional, funny new novel from a bestselling author

new release books fiction 2021

"Yolk" by Mary H.K. Choi, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $15.48

Jayne and June are estranged sisters. Jayne struggles to get by while juggling school, her mental health, her deadbeat boyfriend, and her social-media-obsessed friends. Meanwhile, June's life seems perfect, with her high-paying finance job and huge apartment — that is, until she's diagnosed with uterine cancer and desperately needs her sister's help. In this funny yet emotional contemporary novel, the sisters switch places to commit insurance fraud in the hopes of saving June's life. Though this book works through a lot of pain, the messages within are hopeful and uplifting.

A unique story of parenthood

new release books fiction 2021

"Detransition, Baby" by Torrey Peters, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $22.91

"Detransition, Baby" is an unapologetically vulnerable novel about an unconventional family. Reese is a trans woman with a nearly perfect life, except for her inability to have a baby. When Reese and her ex-girlfriend (now Ames) broke up and Ames detransitioned, Reese's life seemed to self-destruct. Meanwhile, Ames thought himself infertile until his boss, Katrina, got pregnant with his baby. As Katrina is unsure if she wants to keep it, Ames sees an opportunity to give his ex the baby she always wanted.

A new novel about two intertwining Muslim families

new release books fiction 2021

"The Bad Muslim Discount" by Syed M. Masood, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $17.72

"The Bad Muslim Discount" follows two families who immigrated from Pakistan and Iraq (respectively) to San Francisco in the 1990s. Anvar Farris' family unanimously decides to move to California and escape the fear growing in Pakistan, some of his family adjusting easily and others finding few ways to fit in as Muslims in America. Meanwhile, Safwa is a young girl growing up in Baghdad, who finds a far more dangerous route to escape the war. Anvar and Safwa's very different worlds collide and create a real picture of identity and faith in America, with fantastic dry humor spun throughout.

A historic inaugural poem

new release books fiction 2021

"The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country" by Amanda Gorman, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $9.59

This is the special edition of the inspirational poem read by Amanda Gorman at the 46th Inauguration on January 20, 2021. With a foreword from Oprah Winfrey, this poem plants the hope of America's future, demonstrates the power of poetry, and captivates readers with its breathtaking and uplifting messages.

new release books fiction 2021

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Best Fiction in Translation of 2021

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APRIL 27, 2021

by Elisa Shua Dusapin ; translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

A triumph. Full review >

new release books fiction 2021

JAN. 12, 2021

by Mariana Enríquez ; translated by Megan McDowell

Insidiously absorbing, like quicksand. Full review >

THE TWILIGHT ZONE

MARCH 16, 2021

by Nona Fernández ; translated by Natasha Wimmer

Fernández is emerging as a major voice in South American letters, and this slender but rich story shows why. Full review >

THE CORPSE FLOWER

OCT. 12, 2021

THRILLER & SUSPENSE

by Anne Mette Hancock ; translated by Tara Chace

Scandinavian noir at its noirest. It’s hard, maybe unthinkable, to imagine how Hancock will follow it up. Full review >

KIN

JUNE 15, 2021

by Miljenko Jergović ; translated by Russell Scott Valentino

A masterwork of modern European letters that should earn the author a wide readership outside his homeland. Full review >

UNTRACEABLE

FEB. 2, 2021

by Sergei Lebedev

A darkly absorbing intellectual thriller by one of Russia's boldest young novelists. Full review >

LOOP

by Brenda Lozano ; translated by Annie McDermott

An intimate book that starts small and expands steadily outward, with a cumulative effect both moving and hopeful. Full review >

TRUST

OCT. 19, 2021

by Domenico Starnone ; translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

Richly nuanced while also understated, Starnone’s latest appearance in English is a novel to be savored. Full review >

BOLLA

JULY 6, 2021

by Pajtim Statovci ; translated by David Hackston

An unflinching consideration of the long aftereffects of an affair cut short. Full review >

IN MEMORY OF MEMORY

FEB. 9, 2021

by Maria Stepanova ; translated by Sasha Dugdale

A remarkable work of the imagination—and, yes, memory. Full review >

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new release books fiction 2021

Beyond the Bookends

A Book Blog for Women and Moms who Love to Read

67 Fall 2021 New Book Releases to Read Now

Fall 2021 New Book Releases

It’s time to look at the Fall 2021 New Book Releases!

New Book Releases are the best part of a given month but did you know there is more of a process to new book releases than just picking a random date?

If you were to check out each of the dates below, you would release they are Tuesdays. Why? Because almost all new books come out on Tuesdays.

Yep, Every Tuesday is its own little party in the publishing world. It’s known as #pubday and if you follow us on Instagram , you will see that we celebrate the books we have already read on their publication day.

While most Tuesdays are a flurry of activity, towards the end of the year (Q4) the releases start to slow down.

Table of Contents

Fall 2021 New Book Release Highlights

Publishing knows that holiday shopping starts towards the end of October so most of the major new releases will be out before Black Friday. You’ll notice the last truly robust publishing day on this list is Nov 9.

Jodi Picoult, Ann Pachett, and Diana Gabaldon have releases later in November, but with a built in fanbase, they are sure things and safer bets for easy sales.

Covid 19 also threw off the supply chain, so we are seeing books that were scheduled to come out earlier in the year pushed back a bit more. Minimalista, a book I preorder had to move it’s release date back 3 weeks, while Ryan’s Wick debut got moved back to December from it’s original summer release in AUGUST 2020! CRAZY.

December is a notoriously slow month for publishing because they don’t want their hottest new titles to get lost in the holiday shuffle, so they often hold books back to be released in the first quarter of the new year.

All that is to say, that the list below is slimmer than previous quarters, as it is every year. You can look through the robust Summer 2021 new book releases list to see a comparison.

There are still PLENTY of exciting new books coming out in the final quarter of the year, so grab your notebook and start writing down all the Fall 2021 new book releases you are hoping to get before 2021 ends.

Looking for more new releases? Head to this post for adult and kid new releases divided by season!

Happy Reading!

October – Fall 2021 New Book Releases

Crossroads and other fall 2021 new book releases

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in  Crossroads .

It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who’s been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate. More…

The Book of Magic

The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman

The Owens family has been cursed in matters of love for over three-hundred years but all of that is about to change. The novel begins in a library, the best place for a story to be conjured, when beloved aunt Jet Owens hears the deathwatch beetle and knows she has only seven days to live. Jet is not the only one in danger—the curse is already at work.

A frantic attempt to save a young man’s life spurs three generations of the Owens women, and one long-lost brother, to use their unusual gifts to break the curse as they travel from Paris to London to the English countryside where their ancestor Maria Owens first practiced the Unnamed Art. The younger generation discovers secrets that have been hidden from them in matters of both magic and love by Sally, their fiercely protective mother. More…

The Vanished Days and other fall 2021 new book releases

The Vanished Days by Susanna Kearsley

In the autumn of 1707, old enemies from the Highlands to the Borders are finding common ground as they join to protest the new Union with England. At the same time, the French are preparing to launch an invasion to bring the young exiled Jacobite king back to Scotland to reclaim his throne, and in Edinburgh the streets are filled with discontent and danger.

Queen Anne’s commissioners, seeking to calm the situation, have begun paying out money sent up from London to settle the losses and wages owed to those Scots who took part in the disastrous Darien expedition eight years earlier—an ill-fated venture that left Scotland all but bankrupt.

When the young widow of a Darien sailor comes forward to collect her husband’s wages, her claim is challenged. One of the men assigned to investigate has only days to decide if she’s honest, or if his own feelings are blinding him to the truth.

Her Honor

Her Honor: My Life on the Bench by LaDoris Hazzard Cordell

Judge Cordell, the first African American woman to sit on the Superior Court of Northern California, knows firsthand how prejudice has permeated our legal system. And yet, she believes in the system. From ending school segregation to legalizing same-sex marriage, its progress relies on legal professionals and jurors who strive to make the imperfect system as fair as possible.

Her Honor  is an entertaining and provocative look into the hearts and minds of judges. Cordell takes you into her chambers where she haggles with prosecutors and defense attorneys and into the courtroom during jury selection and sentencing hearings. She uses real cases to highlight how judges make difficult decisions, all the while facing outside pressures from the media, law enforcement, lobbyists, and the friends and families of the people involved. More…

The Lincoln Highway

The Lincoln Highway: A Novel by Amor Towels

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes

The Ballad of Laurel Springs

The Ballad of Laurel Springs by Janet Beard

From the internationally bestselling author of  The Atomic City Girls , a provocative new novel about multiple generations of women in one East Tennessee family haunted by violence and redeemed by their rich inheritance of folk music.

Ten-year-old Grace is in search of a subject for her fifth-grade history project when she learns that her four times-great grandfather once stabbed his lover to death. His grisly act was memorialized in a murder ballad, her aunt tells her, so it must be true. But the lessons of that revelation—to be careful of men, and desire—are not just Grace’s to learn. Her family’s tangled past is part of a dark legacy in which the lives of generations of women are affected by the violence immortalized in folksongs like “Knoxville Girl” and “Pretty Polly” reminding them always to know their place—or risk the wages of sin. More…

Last Girl Ghosted and other fall 2021 new book releases

Last Girl Ghosted by Lisa Unger

Think twice before you swipe. She met him through a dating app. An intriguing picture on a screen, a date at a downtown bar. What she thought might be just a quick hookup quickly became much more. She fell for him—hard. It happens sometimes, a powerful connection with a perfect stranger takes you by surprise. Could it be love? But then, just as things were getting real, he stood her up. Then he disappeared—profiles deleted, phone disconnected. She was ghosted. Maybe it was her fault. She shared too much, too fast. But isn’t that always what women think—that they’re the ones to blame? Soon she learns there were others. Girls who thought they were in love. Girls who later went missing. She had been looking for a connection, but now she’s looking for answers. Chasing a digital trail into his dark past—and hers—she finds herself on a dangerous hunt. And she’s not sure whether she’s the predator—or the prey.

Three sisters

Three Sisters by Heather Morris

Against all odds, three Slovakian sisters have survived years of imprisonment in the most notorious death camp in Nazi Germany: Auschwitz. Livia, Magda, and Cibi have clung together, nearly died from starvation and overwork, and the brutal whims of the guards in this place of horror. But now, the allies are closing in and the sisters have one last hurdle to face: the death march from Auschwitz, as the Nazis try to erase any evidence of the prisoners held there. Due to a last minute stroke of luck, the three of them are able to escape formation and hide in the woods for days before being rescued. More…

Matrix and other fall 2021 new book releases

Matrix by Laura Goff

One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking  Fates and Furies . Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.

At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. More…

Spindle splintered

Spindle Splintered by Alex E. Harrow

USA Today  bestselling author Alix E. Harrow’s  A Spindle Splintered  brings her patented charm to a new version of a classic story. Featuring Arthur Rackham’s original illustrations for  The Sleeping Beauty , fractured and reimagined.

“A vivid, subversive and feminist reimagining of  Sleeping Beauty,  where implacable destiny is no match for courage, sisterhood, stubbornness and a good working knowledge of fairy tales.” —Katherine Arden

It’s Zinnia Gray’s twenty-first birthday, which is extra-special because it’s the last birthday she’ll ever have. When she was young, an industrial accident left Zinnia with a rare condition. Not much is known about her illness, just that no-one has lived past twenty-one. More…

The Holiday Swap and other fall 2021 new book releases

The Holiday Swap by Maggie Knox

A feel-good, holiday-themed romantic comedy about identical twins who switch lives in the days leading up to Christmas–perfect for fans of Christina Lauren’s  In a Holidaze  and Josie Silver’s  One Day in December .   All they want for Christmas is a different life.   When chef Charlie Goodwin gets hit on the head on the L.A. set of her reality baking show, she loses a lot more than consciousness; she also loses her ability to taste and smell–both critical to her success as show judge. Meanwhile, Charlie’s identical twin, Cass, is frantically trying to hold her own life together back in their quaint mountain hometown while running the family’s bustling bakery and dealing with her ex, who won’t get the memo that they’re over. More…

the lighthouse witches

The Lighthouse Witches by C.J Cooke

Two sisters go missing on a remote Scottish island. Twenty years later, one is found–but she’s still the same age as when she disappeared. The secrets of witches have reached across the centuries in this chilling Gothic thriller from the author of the acclaimed  The Nesting .  

When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it’s an opportunity to start over with her three daughters–Luna, Sapphire, and Clover. When two of her daughters go missing, she’s frantic. She learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings, supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. Liv is told wildlings are dangerous and must be killed.

Final Table and other fall 2021 new book releases

Final Table by Dan Schorr

A political thriller about sexual misconduct in the #MeToo era, one victim’s battle to survive and overcome trauma, and the cable news machine that feeds off titillating scandal coverage and inflammatory confrontation,  Final Table  draws upon Dan Schorr’s firsthand experience as a New York City sex crimes prosecutor and sexual misconduct investigator to tackle the worlds of political and media dysfunction. More…

I love you but

I Love You But I have Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins

Since my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. a) As much as I ever did. b) Not quite as much now. c) Not so much now. d) Not at all.  Leaving behind her husband and their baby daughter, a writer gets on a flight for a speaking engagement in Reno, not carrying much besides a breast pump and a spiraling case of postpartum depression. Her temporary escape from domestic duties and an opportunity to reconnect with old friends mutates into an extended romp away from the confines of marriage and motherhood, and a seemingly bottomless descent into the past. More…

Christmas by the book

Christmas by the Book by Anne Marie Ryan

In small-town England, two booksellers facing tough times decide to spread some Christmas cheer through the magic of anonymous book deliveries in this uplifting holiday tale for book lovers everywhere.

Nora and her husband, Simon, have run the beautiful oak-beamed book shop in their small British village for thirty years. But times are tough and the shop is under threat of closure–this Christmas season will really decide their fate. When an elderly man visits the store and buys the one book they’ve never been able to sell, saying it’s the perfect gift for his sick grandson, it gives Nora an idea. She and Simon will send out books to those feeling down this Christmas. Maybe they can’t save their bookstore, but at least they’ll have one final chance to lift people’s spirits through the power of reading. More…

Always in December

Always, In December by Emily Stone

Every December, Josie posts a letter from her home in London to the parents she lost on Christmas night many years ago. Each year, she writes the same three words:  Missing you, always.  But this year, her annual trip to the postbox is knocked off course by a bicycle collision with a handsome stranger–a stranger who will change the course of Josie’s life.   Josie always thought she was the only one who avoided the Christmas season, but this year, Max has his own reasons for doing the same—and coincidence leads them to spending the holiday together. Aglow with new love, Josie thinks this might be the start of something special.    Only for Max to disappear without saying goodbye.  More.. .

State of Terror

State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny

After a tumultuous period in American politics, a new administration has just been sworn in, and to everyone’s surprise the president chooses a political enemy for the vital position of secretary of state.

There is no love lost between the president of the United States and Ellen Adams, his new secretary of state. But it’s a canny move on the part of the president. With this appointment, he silences one of his harshest critics, since taking the job means Adams must step down as head of her multinational media conglomerate.

As the new president addresses Congress for the first time, with Secretary Adams in attendance, Anahita Dahir, a young foreign service officer (FSO) on the Pakistan desk at the State Department, receives a baffling text from an anonymous source.

Too late, she realizes the message was a hastily coded warning. More…

The Brides of Maracoor

The Brides of Maracoor by Gregory Maguire

Ten years ago this season, Gregory Maguire wrapped up the series he began with  Wicked  by giving us the fourth and final volume of the Wicked Years, his elegiac  Out of Oz .

But “out of Oz” isn’t “gone for good.” Maguire’s new series, Another Day, is here, twenty-five years after  Wicked  first flew into our lives. 

Volume one,  The Brides of Maracoor , finds Elphaba’s granddaughter, Rain, washing ashore on a foreign island. Comatose from crashing into the sea, Rain is taken in by a community of single women committed to obscure devotional practices. MORE

The Mother Next Door

The Mother Next Door by Tara Laskowski

GOOD MOTHERS… Never show their feelings. Never spill their secrets. Never admit to murder.

The annual Halloween block party is the pinnacle of the year on idyllic suburban cul-de-sac Ivy Woods Drive. An influential group of neighborhood moms—known as the Ivy Five—plans the event for months.

Except the Ivy Five has been  four  for a long time. MORE

Well Matched and other fall 2021 new book releases

Well Matched  by Jen Deluca

A pretend relationship gives two friends more than they bargained for in a Renaissance Faire rom com filled with flower crowns, kilts, corsets, and sword fights.

Single mother April Parker has lived in Willow Creek for twelve years with a wall around her heart. On the verge of being an empty nester, she’s decided to move on from her quaint little town, and asks her friend Mitch for his help with some home improvement projects to get her house ready to sell. 

Mitch Malone is known for being the life of every party, but mostly for the attire he wears to the local Renaissance Faire—a kilt (and not much else) that shows off his muscled form to perfection. While he agrees to help April, he needs a favor too: she’ll pretend to be his girlfriend at an upcoming family dinner, so that he can avoid the lectures about settling down and having a more “serious” career than high school coach and gym teacher. April reluctantly agrees, but when dinner turns into a weekend trip, it becomes hard to tell what’s real and what’s been just for show. But when the weekend ends, so must their fake relationship. More…

The Every

The Every by Dave Eggers

From the award-winning, bestselling author of  The Circle  comes an exciting new follow-up. When the world’s largest search engine/social media company, The Circle, merges with the planet’s dominant e-commerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous—and, oddly enough, most beloved—monopoly ever known: The Every .

Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire at The Every. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Makazian, they look for The Every’s weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free? Studded with unforgettable characters and lacerating set-pieces, this companion to  The Circle  blends satire and terror, while keeping the reader in breathless suspense about the fate of the company—and the human animal.

Strout

O William! By Elizabeth Strout

I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William.  Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read.  William , she confesses,  has always been a mystery to me . Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. 

So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout’s “perfect attunement to the human condition.”  More…

A Line to Kill and other fall 2021 new book releases

A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz

The  New York Times  bestselling author of the brilliantly inventive  The Word Is Murder  and  The Sentence Is Death  returns with his third literary whodunit featuring intrepid detectives Hawthorne and Horowitz.

When Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, author Anthony Horowitz, are invited to an exclusive literary festival on Alderney, an idyllic island off the south coast of England, they don’t expect to find themselves in the middle of murder investigation—or to be trapped with a cold-blooded killer in a remote place with a murky, haunted past. More…

Monster in the middle

Monster in the Middle by Tiphanie Yanique

From the award-winning author of  Land of Love and Drowning , an electric new novel that maps the emotional inheritance of one couple newly in love.

When Fly and Stela meet in 21st Century New York City, it seems like fate. He’s a Black American musician from a mixed-religious background who knows all about heartbreak. She’s a Catholic science teacher from the Caribbean, looking for lasting love. But are they meant to be? The answer goes back decades—all the way to their parents’ earliest loves. More…

Duke, Actually and other fall 2021 new book releases

Duke, Actually by Jenny Holiday

There’s a royal wedding on, and things are about to get interesting.

Meet the man of honor

Maximillian von Hansburg, Baron of Laudon and heir to the Duke of Aquilla, is not having a merry Christmas. He’s been dumped by a princess, he’s unemployed, and his domineering father has sent him to New York to meet a prospective bride he has no interest in. In the city, he meets Dani Martinez, a smart (and gorgeous) professor he’s determined to befriend before their best friends marry in the Eldovian wedding of the century.

Meet the best woman . More…

The Christmas Bookshop

The Christmas Bookshop by Jenny Colgan

Perfect for the holidays! A brand-new heartwarming Christmas novel from the beloved  New York Times  bestselling author of  The Bookshop on the Corner  and  Christmas at the Island Hotel . 

Laid off from her department store job, Carmen has perilously little cash and few options. The prospect of spending Christmas with her perfect sister Sofia, in Sofia’s perfect house with her perfect children and her perfectly ordered yuppie life does not appeal.

Frankly, Sofia doesn’t exactly want her prickly sister Carmen there either. But Sofia has yet another baby on the way, a mother desperate to see her daughters get along, and a client who needs help revitalizing his shabby old bookshop. So Carmen moves in and takes the job. More…

Christmas in peachtree bliuff

Christmas at Peachtree Bluff by Kristy Woodson Harvey

When the Murphy women are in trouble, they always know they can turn to their mother, Ansley. So when eldest daughter Caroline and her husband, James, announce they are divorcing—and fifteen-year-old daughter Vivi acts out in response—Caroline, at her wits end, can’t think of anything to do besides leave her with Ansley in Peachtree Bluff for the holidays. After all, how much trouble can one teenager get into on a tiny island?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

As the “storm of the century” heads toward Peachtree Bluff, Ansley and her husband, Jack, with Vivi in tow, are grateful they’re planning to leave for the trip of a lifetime. But Vivi’s recklessness forces the trio to shelter in place during the worst hurricane Peachtree has ever seen.  More…

Still Life and other fall 2021 new book releases

Still Life by Sarah Winman

A captivating, bighearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster, by the celebrated author of  Tin Man

Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her own youth. In each other, Ulysses and Evelyn find a kindred spirit amidst the rubble of war-torn Italy, and set off on a course of events that will shape Ulysses’s life for the next four decades. More…

Ski Weekend

Ski Weekend by Rektok Ross

*Named a Best Book of Fall by  Cosmopolitan ,  Yahoo!Life ,  SheReads ,  SheKnows ,  BookTrib , and more! *2021 Firebird Award Winner in Young Adult Fiction

The Breakfast Club  meets  Alive  in this gripping tale of survival, impossible choices, and the harrowing balance between life and death.

Six teens, one dog, a ski trip gone wrong . . .

Sam is dreading senior ski weekend and having to watch after her brother and his best friend, Gavin, to make sure they don’t do anything stupid. Again. Gavin may be gorgeous, but he and Sam have never gotten along. Now they’re crammed into an SUV with three other classmates and Gavin’s dog, heading on a road trip that can’t go by fast enough. More…

November – Fall 2021 New Book Releases

A day like this

A Day Like This: A Novel by Kelley McNeil

What if everything you’ve ever loved, ever known, ever believed to be true…just disappeared?

Annie Beyers has everything—a beautiful house, a loving husband, and an adorable daughter. It’s a day like any other when she takes Hannah to the pediatrician…until she wakes hours later from a car accident. When she asks for her daughter, confused doctors tell Annie that Hannah never existed. In fact, nothing after waking from the crash is the same as Annie remembers. Five happy years of her life apparently never happened. More…

Dreams Lie Beneath and other fall 2021 new book releases

Dreams Lie Beneath by Rebecca Ross

From Rebecca Ross, acclaimed author of The Queen’s Rising duology, comes a story about magic, vengeance, and the captivating power of dreams. A must-read for fans of  The Hazel Wood  and  The Night Circus .

The realm of Azenor has spent years plagued by a curse. Every new moon, magic flows from the nearby mountain and brings nightmares to life. Only magicians—who serve as territory wardens—stand between people and their worst dreams.

Clementine Madigan is ready to take over as the warden of her small town, but when two magicians arrive to challenge her, she is unknowingly drawn into a century-old conflict. She seeks revenge, but as she gets closer to Phelan, one of the handsome young magicians, secrets—as well as romance—begins to rise. More…

The Family

The Family by Naomi Krupitsky

Two daughters. Two families. One inescapable fate.

Sofia Colicchio is a free spirit, loud and untamed. Antonia Russo is thoughtful, ever observing the world around her. Best friends since birth, they live in the shadow of their fathers’ unspoken community: the Family. Sunday dinners gather them each week to feast, discuss business, and renew the intoxicating bond borne of blood and love. MORE

Minimalista and other fall 2021 new book releases

Minimalista by Shira Gill

As a professional home organizer with clients ranging from students to multi-millionaires, Shira Gill observed that clutter is a universal stress trigger. Over the years she created a signature decluttering and organization process that promotes sustainability, achieves lasting results, and can be applied to anyone, regardless of their space or lifestyle. Rather than imposing strict rules and limitations, Shira redefines minimalism as having the perfect amount of everything—for  you— based on your personal values and the limitations of your space.    Now, in  Minimalista,  Shira shares her complete toolkit for the first time, built around five key steps: Clarify, Edit, Organize, Elevate, and Maintain.  MORE

A certain appeal

A Certain Appeal by Vanessa King

A sparkling contemporary retelling of  Pride and Prejudice  set in the tantalizing world of New York City burlesque, perfect for fans of  The Kiss Quotient  and  The Roommate .

After a betrayal derailed her interior design career, Liz Bennet found a fresh start in New York. Now an executive assistant by day and stage kitten by night, she’s discovered a second home with the performers at Meryton, Manhattan’s top-tier burlesque venue. Love’s the last thing on her mind when she locks eyes with Will Darcy across the crowded club, yet the spark between them is undeniable—that is, until she overhears the uptight wealth manager call her merely “tolerable.”

The London House and other fall 2021 new book releases

The London House by Katherine Reay

Caroline Payne thinks it’s just another day of work until she receives a call from Mat Hammond, an old college friend and historian. But pleasantries are cut short. Mat has uncovered a scandalous secret kept buried for decades: In World War II, Caroline’s British great-aunt betrayed family and country to marry her German lover.

Determined to find answers and save her family’s reputation, Caroline flies to her family’s ancestral home in London. She and Mat discover diaries and letters that reveal her grandmother and great-aunt  MORE…

Our Country Friends

Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart

It’s March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.  Both elegiac and very, very funny,  Our Country Friends  is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller  Super Sad True Love Story .

The Stranger in the lifeboat

The Stranger in the Lifeboat by Mitch Albom

What would happen if we called on God for help and God actually appeared? In Mitch Albom’s profound new novel of hope and faith, a group of shipwrecked passengers pull a strange man from the sea. He claims to be “the Lord.” And he says he can only save them if they all believe in him. Adrift in a raft after a deadly ship explosion, nine people struggle for survival at sea. Three days pass. Short on water, food and hope, they spot a man floating in the waves. They pull him in.

“Thank the Lord we found you,” a passenger says.

“I am the Lord,” the man whispers.

So begins Mitch Albom’s most beguiling and inspiring novel yet. More…

Gilded and other fall 2021 new book releases

Gilded by Marissa Meyer

Long ago cursed by the god of lies, a poor miller’s daughter has developed a talent for spinning stories that are fantastical and spellbinding and entirely untrue. Or so everyone believes. When one of Serilda’s outlandish tales draws the attention of the sinister Erlking and his undead hunters, she finds herself swept away into a grim world where ghouls and phantoms prowl the earth and hollow-eyed ravens track her every move. The king orders Serilda to complete the impossible task of spinning straw into gold, or be killed for telling falsehoods. In her desperation, Serilda unwittingly summons a mysterious boy to her aid. He agrees to help her… for a price. Love isn’t meant to be part of the bargain. More…

All of Us Villains

All of Us Villains by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman

The blockbuster co-writing debut of Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman,  All of Us Villains  begins a dark tale of ambition and magick… You Fell in Love with the Victors of the Hunger Games. Now Prepare to Meet the Villains of the Blood Veil.

The Blood Moon rises. The Blood Veil falls. The Tournament begins.

Every generation, at the coming of the Blood Moon, seven families in the remote city of Ilvernath each name a champion to compete in a tournament to the death.

The prize? Exclusive control over a secret wellspring of high magick, the most powerful resource in the world—one thought long depleted. More…

Anticipation and other fall 2021 new book releases

Anticipation by Melodie Winawer

From the author of the “engrossing historical epic” ( Booklist )  The Scribe of Siena  comes a thrilling tale set in the crumbling city of Mystras, Greece, in which a scientist’s vacation with her young son quickly turns into a fight for their lives after they cross paths with a man out of time.

After the death of her beloved husband and becoming a single parent to her nine-year-old son Alexander, overworked scientist Helen desperately needs an escape. So when Alexander proposes a trip to Greece—somewhere he’s always dreamed of visiting—Helen quickly agrees.

After spending several days exploring the tourist-filled streets, they stumble upon the ancient city of Mystras and are instantly drawn to it. Its only resident is Elias, a mysterious tour guide living on the city’s edges…both physically and temporally. More…

A Marvellous Light and other fall 2021 new book releases

A Marvelous Light by Freya Marske

Red White & Royal Blue  meets  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell  in debut author Freya Marske’s  A Marvellous Light , featuring an Edwardian England full of magic, contracts, and conspiracies.

Robin Blyth has more than enough bother in his life. He’s struggling to be a good older brother, a responsible employer, and the harried baronet of a seat gutted by his late parents’ excesses. When an administrative mistake sees him named the civil service liaison to a hidden magical society, he discovers what’s been operating beneath the unextraordinary reality he’s always known.

Now Robin must contend with the beauty and danger of magic, an excruciating deadly curse, and the alarming visions of the future that come with it—not to mention Edwin Courcey, his cold and prickly counterpart in the magical bureaucracy, who clearly wishes Robin were anyone and anywhere else. More…

Madam and other fall 2021 new book releases

Madam by Debby Applegate

The compulsively readable and sometimes jaw-dropping story of the life of a notorious madam who played hostess to every gangster, politician, writer, sports star and Cafe Society swell worth knowing, and who as much as any single figure helped make the twenties roar—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  The Most Famous Man in America .

Simply put: Everybody came to Polly’s. Pearl “Polly” Adler (1900-1962) was a diminutive dynamo whose Manhattan brothels in the Roaring Twenties became places not just for men to have the company of women but were key gathering places where the culturati and celebrity elite mingled with high society and with violent figures of the underworld—and had a good time doing it. More…

Just Havent met you yet

Just Haven’t Met you Yet by Sophie Cousens

From the  New York Times  bestselling author of  This Time Next Year  comes a heartwarming and hilarious tale that asks: What if you picked up the wrong suitcase and fell head over heels for its mystery owner?   Hopeless romantic and lifestyle reporter Laura’s business trip to the Channel Islands isn’t off to a great start. After an embarrassing encounter with the most attractive man she’s ever seen in real life, she arrives at her hotel and realizes she’s grabbed the wrong suitcase from the airport. Her only consolation is its irresistible contents, each of which intrigues her more and more. The owner of this suitcase is clearly Laura’s dream man. Now, all she has to do is find him. More…

Never and other fall 2021 new book releases

Never by Ken Follet

The new must-read epic from master storyteller Ken Follett: more than a thriller, it’s an action-packed, globe-spanning drama set in the present day. “Every catastrophe begins with a little problem that doesn’t get fixed.” So says Pauline Green, president of the United States, in Follett’s nerve-racking drama of international tension.   A shrinking oasis in the Sahara Desert; a stolen US Army drone; an uninhabited Japanese island; and one country’s secret stash of deadly chemical poisons: all these play roles in a relentlessly escalating crisis.   Struggling to prevent the outbreak of world war are a young woman intelligence officer; a spy working undercover with jihadists; a brilliant Chinese spymaster; and Pauline herself, beleaguered by a populist rival for the next president election. More…

The Sentence and other fall 2021 new book releases

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich’s latest novel,  The Sentence , asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading “with murderous attention,” must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning. More…

Five Tuesdays in Winter and other fall 2021 new book releases

Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King

By the award-winning,  New York Times  bestselling author of  Writers & Lovers , Lily King’s first-ever collection of exceptional and innovative short stories

With  Writers & Lovers  and  Euphoria , Lily King’s books catapulted onto bestseller and best-of-the-year lists across the country and established her as one of our most “brilliant” ( New York Times Book Review ), “wildly talented” ( Chicago Tribune ), and beloved authors in contemporary fiction. Now, for the first time ever, King collects ten of her finest short stories—half published in leading literary magazines and half brand new—opening fresh realms of discovery for avid and new readers alike. More…

never fall for your fiance

Never Fall for Your Fiancée by Virginia Heath

The first in a new historical rom-com series, a handsome earl hires a fake fiancée to keep his matchmaking mother at bay, but hilarity ensues when love threatens to complicate everything.

The last thing Hugh Standish, Earl of Fareham, ever wants is a wife. Unfortunately for him, his mother is determined to find him one, even from across the other side of the ocean. So Hugh invents a fake fiancée to keep his mother’s matchmaking ways at bay. But when Hugh learns his interfering mother is on a ship bound for England, he realizes his complicated, convoluted but convenient ruse is about to implode. Until he collides with a beautiful woman, who might just be the miracle he needs. MORE

November 16

City of Time and magic

City of Time and Magic by Paula Brackston

City of Time and Magic  sees Xanthe face her greatest challenges yet. She must choose from three treasures that sing to her; a beautiful writing slope, a mourning brooch of heartbreaking detail, and a gorgeous gem-set hat pin. All call her, but the wrong one could take her on a mission other than that which she must address first, and the stakes could not be higher. While her earlier mission to Regency England had been a success, the journey home resulted in Liam being taken from her, spirited away to another time and place. Xanthe must follow the treasure that will take her to him if he is not to be lost forever. More…

The Singles Table and other fall 2021 new book releases

The Singles Table by Sara Desai

Opposites attract in this laugh-out-loud romantic comedy about a free-spirited lawyer who is determined to find the perfect match for the grumpy bachelor at her cousin’s wedding.   After a devastating break-up, celebrity-obsessed lawyer Zara Patel is determined never to open her heart again. She puts her energy into building her career and helping her friends find their happily-ever-afters. She’s never faced a guest at the singles table she couldn’t match, until she crosses paths with the sinfully sexy Jay Dayal. MORE

An Heiress Guide to deception

An Heiress’s Guide to Deception and Desire by Manda Collins

Former lovers become reluctant allies in this delightfully witty historical rom-com from the bestselling author of  A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem —for fans of Evie Dunmore,  Enola Holmes , and Netflix’s  Bridgerton !

England, 1867 : As half of the writing duo behind England’s most infamous crime column, Miss Caroline Hardcastle has quite the scandalous reputation. It may have cost her a fiancé, but she would much rather bring attention to crimes against those ignored by society than worry about what the  ton  thinks of her.

After Caro’s dear friend is kidnapped, however, she has no choice but to work with Lord Valentine Thorn, the same man who broke her heart. Worse, when her actions put her father’s business at risk, a marriage of convenience may be her only solution . . . but can she trust Val to stand by her? Or will their past repeat itself? MORE

November 23

Go tell the bees that I am home

Go Tell the Bees I’m Home by Diana Gabaldon

The past may seem the safest place to be . . . but it is the most dangerous time to be alive. . . . Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall were torn apart by the Jacobite Rising in 1746, and it took them twenty years to find each other again. Now the American Revolution threatens to do the same.   It is 1779 and Claire and Jamie are at last reunited with their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their children on Fraser’s Ridge. Having the family together is a dream the Frasers had thought impossible. More….

These Precious Days

These Precious Days by Anne Patchett

“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. 

At the center of  These Precious Days  is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores “what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self.” When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks’ short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman—Tom’s brilliant assistant Sooki—with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both.  More…

November 30

Wish You Were Here and other fall 2021 new book releases

Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

From the #1  New York Times  bestselling author of  Small Great Things  and  The Book of Two Ways  comes “a powerfully evocative story of resilience and the triumph of the human spirit” (Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of  Malibu Rising )

Diana O’Toole is perfectly on track. She will be married by thirty, done having kids by thirty-five, and move out to the New York City suburbs, all while climbing the professional ladder in the cutthroat art auction world. She’s an associate specialist at Sotheby’s now, but her boss has hinted at a promotion if she can close a deal with a high-profile client. She’s not engaged just yet, but she knows her boyfriend, Finn, a surgical resident, is about to propose on their romantic getaway to the Galápagos—days before her thirtieth birthday. Right on time. More…

Youll be the death of me

You’ll Be the Death of Me by Karen M. McManus

From the author of  One of Us Is Lying  comes a brand-new pulse-pounding thriller. It’s  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off  with murder when three old friends relive an epic ditch day, and it goes horribly—and fatally—wrong.

Ivy, Mateo, and Cal used to be close. Now all they have in common is Carlton High and the beginning of a very bad day. Type A Ivy lost a student council election to the class clown, and now she has to face the school, humiliated. Heartthrob Mateo is burned out from working two jobs since his family’s business failed. And outsider Cal just got stood up . . . again.  More…

December – Fall 2021 New Book Releases

bright burning things

Bright Burning Things by Lisa Harding

Sonya used to perform on stage. She attended glamorous parties, dated handsome men, rode in fast cars. But somewhere along the way, the stage lights Sonya lived for dimmed to black. In their absence, came darkness—blackouts, empty cupboards, hazy nights she could not remember.

Haunted by her failed career and lingering trauma from her childhood, Sonya fell deep into an alcoholic abyss. What kept her from losing herself completely was Tommy, her son. But her love for Tommy rivaled her love for the bottle. Addiction amplified her fear of losing her child; every maternal misstep compelled her to drink. Tommy’s precious life was in her shaky hands.  More…

Call us what we carry and other fall 2021 new book releases

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman

Formerly titled  The Hill We Climb and Other Poems , Amanda Gorman’s remarkable new collection reveals an energizing and unforgettable voice in American poetry.  Call Us What We Carry  is Gorman at her finest. Including “The Hill We Climb,” the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, and bursting with musical language and exploring themes of identity, grief, and memory, this lyric of hope and healing captures an important moment in our country’s consciousness while being utterly timeless.

Boy Underground and other fall 2021 new book releases

Boy Underground by Catherine Ryan Hyde

During WWII, a teenage boy finds his voice, the courage of his convictions, and friends for life in an emotional and uplifting novel by the  New York Times  and #1 Amazon Charts bestselling author.

1941. Steven Katz is the son of prosperous landowners in rural California. Although his parents don’t approve, he’s found true friends in Nick, Suki, and Ollie, sons of field workers. The group is inseparable. But Steven is in turmoil. He’s beginning to acknowledge that his feelings for Nick amount to more than friendship. More…

The Ballerinas and other fall 2021 new book releases

The Ballerinas by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

Thirteen years ago, Delphine abandoned her prestigious soloist spot at the Paris Opera Ballet for a new life in St. Petersburg––taking with her a secret that could upend the lives of her best friends, fellow dancers Lindsay and Margaux. Now 36 years old, Delphine has returned to her former home and to the legendary Palais Garnier Opera House, to choreograph the ballet that will kickstart the next phase of her career––and, she hopes, finally make things right with her former friends. But Delphine quickly discovers that things have changed while she’s been away…and some secrets can’t stay buried forever.

The last dance of the debutante

The Last Dance of the Debutante by Julia Kelly

The author of the “sweeping, stirring, and heartrending” (Kristin Harmel, author of  The Room on Rue Amélie )  The Light Over London  returns with a masterful, glittering novel that whisks you to midcentury Britain as it follows three of the last debutantes to be presented to Queen Elizabeth II.

When it’s announced that 1958 will be the last year debutantes are to be presented at court, thousands of eager mothers and hopeful daughters flood the palace with letters seeking the year’s most coveted invitation: a chance for their daughters to curtsey to the young Queen Elizabeth and officially come out into society. More…

a history of wild places and other fall 2021 new book releases

A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend.

Called Pastoral, this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it…he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James. More…

December 14

Homecoming King and other fall 2021 new book releases

Homecoming King by Penny Reid

Rex “TW” McMurtry’s perpetual single-hood wouldn’t bother him so much if all his ex-girlfriends didn’t keep marrying the very next person they dated, especially when so many of those grooms are his closest friends. He may be a pro-football defensive end for the Chicago Squalls, but the press only wants to talk about how he’s always a groomsman and never a groom. Rex is sick of being the guy before the husband, and he’s most definitely sick of being the best man at all their weddings. More…

an accidental odyssey

An Accidental Odyssey by K.C. Dyer

Gianna Kostas is on the cusp of a fairy-tale life. Sure, she’s just lost her job, but she’s about to marry one of New York’s most eligible bachelors. On her way to taste wedding cakes, though, things go sideways. Shocking news sends Gia off on a wild journey halfway around the world in pursuit of her ailing—and nearly estranged—father.

In Athens, she learns Dr. Kostas, a classics professor, is determined to retrace Odysseus’s famous voyage. This is a journey her father is in no condition to take alone, so Gia faces a tough decision. When an unexpected job offer helps seal the deal and quash the guilt Gia feels from her disapproving groom-to-be, the journey is on. More…

December 21

how not to fall in love

How Not to Fall in Love by Jaqueline Firkins

A hardened cynic and a hopeless romantic teach each other about love in this swoony and heartful romance that’s perfect for fans of  Tweet Cute  and  The Upside of Falling .

Harper works in her mom’s wedding shop, altering dresses for petulant and picky brides who are more focused on hemlines than love. After years of watching squabbles break out over wedding plans, Harper thinks romance is a marketing tool. Nothing more. Her best friend Theo is her opposite. One date and he’s already dreaming of happily-ever-afters. He also plays the accordion, makes chain mail for Ren Festers, hangs out in a windmill-shaped tree house, cries over rom-coms, and takes his word-of-the-day calendar  very  seriously. More…

December 25

safe-cracker and other fall 2021 new book releases

Safe-Cracker by Ryan Wick

Safecracker Michael Maven’s latest job should be simple: steal a rare coin from a New York apartment. Except the coin’s owner comes home with a beautiful woman, who murders him, nearly murders Maven, and takes the coin herself, and then Maven’s life gets really complicated: the woman’s boss, a sadistic drug lord, forces him to take on a far more dangerous job.

If Maven fails to crack the safe of a rival cartel boss in Miami, his friends and family will die. If he succeeds, he might. MORE

December 28

HEres to us

Here’s to Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera

Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera reunite to continue the story of Arthur and Ben, the boys readers first fell for in the  New York Times  bestselling rom-com  What If It’s Us .

Ben  survived freshman year of college, but he’s feeling more stuck than ever. His classes are a slog, his part-time job working with his father is even worse, and his best friend Dylan’s been acting weird for weeks. Ben’s only real bright spot is his writing partner Mario, who’s been giving him a lot of Spanish lessons and even more kisses. Mario’s big Hollywood dreams make Ben start to dream bigger—and the choices he makes now could be the key to reshaping his future. So why can’t he stop thinking about a certain boy from his past? More…

my darling husbad

My Darling Husband by Kimberly Belle

Everyone is about to know what her husband isn’t telling her…

Jade and Cam Lasky are by all accounts a happily married couple with two adorable kids, a spacious home and a rapidly growing restaurant business. But their world is tipped upside down when Jade is confronted by a masked home invader. As Cam scrambles to gather the ransom money, Jade starts to wonder if they’re as financially secure as their lifestyle suggests, and what other secrets her husband is keeping from her. More…

smile and look pretty

Smile and Look Pretty by Amanda Pellegrino

What happens when four assistants risk everything to say  enough is enough ?

Best friends Cate, Lauren, Olivia and Max are overworked and underpaid assistants to some of the most powerful people in the entertainment industries. Like the assistants who came before them, the women know they have to pay their dues and abide the demeaning tasks and verbal abuse from their bosses in order to climb the ladders to their dream jobs. More…

The Spanish daughter and other fall 2021 new book releases

The Spanish Daughter by Lorena Hughes

As a child in Spain, Puri always knew her passion for chocolate was inherited from her father. But it’s not until his death that she learns of something else she’s inherited—a cocoa plantation in Vinces, Ecuador, a town nicknamed “París Chiquito.” Eager to claim her birthright and filled with hope for a new life after the devastation of World War I, she and her husband Cristóbal set out across the Atlantic Ocean. But it soon becomes clear someone is angered by Puri’s claim to the plantation . . . More…

It happened one midnight

It happened one midnight by Syranna DeWylde

CAN YOU SKIP THE STORYBOOK BEGINNING . . . Novelist Juniper Blossom has romance down to a science in her bestselling books. But she’s not about to settle for just any man—a happy ending looks different for everyone, and she needs to find the guy who’s idea of forever matches her own. Try telling that to her adorable, meddling grandmothers, though. If she doesn’t find a man soon, they’re going to find one for her. Which is why Juniper has prepared for a trip home to Ever After by fibbing that her sexy, smart, sweet best friend Tomas is her fiancé! He doesn’t believe in love at all, but that doesn’t matter if they’re just pretending . . . More…

What Fall 2021 New Book Releases are on your to-read list?

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Reader's Digest

The 30 New Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2024

New books to read in 2024.

N o matter how long my TBR list gets, it's tough to resist the urge to add new books, especially romance novels or mystery books from my favorite authors. Fortunately, as a book reviewer and writer, I get to make daily reading part of my job. But even if reading is relegated to tiny cracks in your daily routine—the commuter train, the waiting room, the bleachers during swim practice—you, too, can cash in on the joy and mental health benefits of reading . Not sure where to begin? We're here to help with plenty of new book releases to recommend for your shopping or library list.

Every title on our list of new books to read in 2024 will debut this year. We made our picks by scouring pre-release book reviews, assessing what upcoming titles have bibliophiles buzzing and reading upcoming books ourselves. This list includes selections from Reader's Digest editors—look for the "Reader's Digest Editor's Pick" seal. Will any of these new books be bestsellers, or maybe even make the list of the best books of all time? Only time will tell, but we bet there are a few contenders!

Join the free Reader's Digest Book Club for great reads, monthly discussions, author Q&As and a community of book lovers.

1. First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

Genre: Thriller

Release date: Jan. 2, 2024

If you love a juicy cat-and-mouse story, First Lie Wins will hook you from the very first chapter. " I'll read a few chapters before tackling the laundry , I thought, before devouring this entire book in a single day," says Reader's Digest Books Editor Tracey Neithercott. "The cleverly crafted plot and whip-smart protagonist mean you won't know who to trust in this edge-of-your-seat thriller."

Meet Evie Porter. She's a successful yet unassuming Southerner with girl-next-door appeal. But she's also a lie. "Evie" is on a mission for the mysterious Mr. Smith, a shadowy figure who keeps his con artists on their toes. Cinching the con for Mr. Smith should be easy, except for two problems: Our brazen heroine has caught feelings for her mark, Ryan. And someone from her past—someone who knows her real identity—has just arrived in town. If you loved the fast pace and twisty storytelling of Iris Yamashita's City Under One Roof , you'll find yourself sucked into Ashley Elston's riveting thriller.

Looking for your next great book? Read four of today's bestselling novels in the time it takes to read one with Fiction Favorites !

2. The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan

Genre: Historical fiction

New book releases from debut authors have extra-special appeal. There's fun in discovering new voices, and Vanessa Chan is already getting major buzz. Her upcoming novel, The Storm We Made , contains the emotional story of an ordinary Malayan family surviving Japanese occupation during World War II. Cecily always yearned to be more than a housewife. Becoming a spy for the Japanese seemed exciting until it unleashed a chain of events she'd never considered. Now that the dominoes have fallen, can she save the people she loves while hiding the truth—that she played a hand in welcoming the oppressors?

"With action, intrigue, dazzling writing and a war front not often visited, The Storm We Made stands out from other WWII historical fiction," says Reader's Digest Senior Editor Megan Melle. "As English colonizers are swapped for Japanese occupation, we see the horrors of war, the stripping of innocence, the guilt of a mother and a family fighting to survive." This is historical fiction at its most sweeping and heartbreaking, a worthy addition to the best books for women by female authors .

3. The Women by Kristin Hannah

Release date: Feb. 6, 2024

Kristin Hannah has topped bestseller lists since her 2015 breakout, The Nightingale . Any list of the best books of 2024 is sure to include her upcoming historical fiction novel, The Women . It follows Frances "Frankie" McGrath, a sheltered young California woman, as she joins the Army Nurses Corps and heads for the conflict in Vietnam. It's a powerful coming-of-age tale of survival, heartache, trauma and love amid unimaginable chaos. "Kristin Hannah pulls no punches in this gripping tribute to the women who fought in Vietnam," says Neithercott. " The Women is a heartbreaking account of war and its traumatic effects, but it's also an uplifting story of sisterhood and heroism."

4. Unsinkable by Jenni L. Walsh

Release date: Jan. 9, 2024

Move aside, Jack and Rose. It's time for another perspective on the Titanic shipwreck. New books on well-worn tales can be hard to pull off, but Jenni Walsh's fictional account of Violet Jessup, a real woman who survived three tragedies at sea (including the sinking of the Titanic ), is fresh and riveting. Perfect for fans of Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale , Unsinkable shines with themes of endurance, tenacity and female empowerment. I predict Unsinkable will be a favorite among in-person and online book clubs .

5. The Fury by Alex Michaelides

Release date: Jan. 16, 2024

Alex Michaelides is the author of masterful psychological suspense novels The Silent Patient and The Maidens . This year, he's back at it with The Fury , a thriller about a celebrity crew's vacation to Greece that turns sinister. As he did with his previous bestsellers, Michaelides has crafted a slow burn that explodes midway through with plot twists and character revelations you won't see coming. Expect murder and mayhem turned up at full volume, though not to the grisly degree of iconic horror books .

6. So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole

Genre: Young adult fantasy

When it comes to 2024 book releases, fantasy book fans are counting down the days until they can get their hands on So Let Them Burn . Kamilah Cole's debut YA novel is a Jamaican-inspired story that will delight fans of Iron Widow and The Priory of the Orange Tree . Faron Vincent is a 17-year-old island legend with magical powers and a divine calling to take down dragon riders. But when her sister, Elara, forms a deep bond with an enemy dragon, Faron must decide whether to destroy her family or allow the land she loves to be destroyed.

7. Family, Family by Laurie Frankel

Genre: Contemporary fiction

Release date: Jan. 23, 2024

Family. It's complicated, right? That's the premise of Laurie Frankel's latest hilarious, heartwarming and heartbreaking novel, Family, Family . India Allwood is a proud adoptive mother. But what she has yet to tell everyone is that she also had a baby that she gave up for adoption in high school. When India and her biological daughter reconnect, India soon learns that she's not the only one with secrets—and that while some family comes by blood and others by love, sometimes the definition of family is just ... complicated. Frankel has written a handful of great modern fiction reads. Once you've devoured all of them, check out the other contemporary writers you should've read by now.

8. Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford

Genre: Domestic fiction

Release date: Jan. 30, 2024

Jenny's life hasn't exactly turned out as she planned. She's 77, childless and worried about her husband Bernard's failing health. Desperate for joy and meaning, she applies to be a contestant on the TV show Britain Bakes ... and makes it! But as Jenny enjoys this new beginning, her baking stirs up memories of a long-buried secret. The result is a beautiful coming-of-old-age story full of heart and humor. "As a fan of The Great British Baking Show , I loved the behind-the-scenes glimpses of the competition, but even better than that are the likable characters in Olivia Ford's big-hearted novel," says Neithercott. "Even non-bakers will agree that Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame is the perfect feel-good story for a cold day spent reading by the fire—with some sweet treats, of course."

9. The Mayor of Maxwell Street by Avery Cunningham

Genre: Historical romance

Avery Cunningham's debut, The Mayor of Maxwell Street , is a well-imagined historical fiction story that touches on race relations in 1920s Chicago. The plot follows Nelly Sawyer, a wealthy Black investigative journalist who connects with a local speakeasy manager to help her infiltrate a dangerous underground criminal network. "In Avery Cunningham's twist on The Great Gatsby , the setting truly shines," says Neithercott. "Chicago of 1921 is alive in rich detail, and readers will feel transported through time."

10. A Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia Williams

Genre: Romance

Looking for a romantic magical realism novel to add to your stack of new books? Look no further than Tia Williams's A Love Song for Ricki Wilde . After years of feeling like the odd woman out, Ricki leaves her family empire to open a flower shop in Harlem. There, life suddenly blossoms. She falls under the spell of her new home's music and rich culture. And time after time, she runs into a mysterious stranger named Ezra. But as sparks fly and their lives become impossibly entangled, she learns that he might not be as available as she first believed.

11. Fourteen Days by Margaret Atwood et al.

Genre: General fiction

Ready or not, there's a COVID-19-era novel coming to bookstores near you. But if it is successful in any form, it should be this: a collaborative novel penned by Margaret Atwood, Douglas Preston, Celeste Ng, Dave Eggers, John Grisham and a bevy of your other favorite authors . In Fourteen Days , residents of a Manhattan apartment building gather on the roof in the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns. There, these strangers and neighbors open up to one another. Stories are told. Commonalities emerge. The characters of Fourteen Days slowly realize what so many of us did during that strange, unsettling season: The strongest bonds are built during tragedy.

12. T he Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

Genre: Contemporary fantasy

Release date: Feb. 13, 2024

If you loved The Midnight Library or The Night Circus , add The Book of Doors to your 2024 TBR pile. Gareth Brown's debut novel weaves together magic, time travel , mystery and adventure in a new and breathtaking way, according to advance readers. When a barista named Cassie receives a mysterious book full of drawings and strange script, she knows she's been gifted with something extraordinary. What she doesn't know is that there are dangerous people who are greedy for magical tomes, and they'll stop at nothing to steal the book that opens portals to new worlds.

13. My Side of the River by Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez

Genre: Memoir

Great memoirs make us feel like we're walking a mile in someone else's shoes. And the very best ones stick with us, impacting our perspectives forever. From the looks of it, Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez's memoir, My Side of the River , will do all that and more. Born in the United States to Mexican immigrants, the author details what it was like when her parents were forced to move back to Mexico when she was 15. Unparented and unhoused, she stayed in America with her brother to finish high school. This book is a tenderhearted, searing account of what it's like to be caught in the chaos of a broken immigration system.

14. Slow Noodles by Chantha Nguon

Release date: Feb. 20, 2024

These days, many American 20-somethings and retirees escape to Southeast Asia for tropical winters, digital-nomad stints and affordable beach resorts. For those who live on the other side of the world, it's easy to forget the recent wars and devastation. In Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss and Family Recipes , Chantha Nguon reclaims the love and culture she lost with a beautiful collection of recipes knitted together with her personal story. From Battambang to Phnom Penh to Saigon to a refugee camp in Thailand, Nguon carried and protected her culinary heritage even as she lost her family members one by one.

15. Ours by Phillip B. Williams

Chicago-born poet Phillip B. Williams has published two award-winning poetry books , Thief in the Interior and Mutiny . This is his first novel, promising a surrealist story rooted in Black American history. In the 1830s, a mystical woman named Saint frees enslaved people and whisks them away to a magical town called Ours. Though Ours is a haven, it is not perfect. Shot through with themes of freedom versus bondage and empowerment versus protection, Ours explores what happens when community members dare to ask if their newfound safety is just a new type of entrapment.

16. Keep Your Friends Close by Leah Konen

Meet Mary. She's a quiet, meek mother trying to make it through a messy divorce with her filthy rich ex, George. She's also lonely, especially since her best friend, Willa, ghosted her after a drunken confession months ago. When Willa resurfaces with a new identity and no recollection of their friendship, then George is found brutally murdered, Mary's mind starts to reel. Who is Willa? And who killed George? I thought Keep Your Friends Close was a fun, quick read in the twisty vein of Girl on the Train or Gone Girl . It's the perfect beach bag read if you have plans to take a sunny spring break in 2024.

17. Wa ndering Stars by Tommy Orange

Genre: Literary fiction

Release date: Feb. 27, 2024

If you're anything like me, you're constantly looking for new books from beloved authors. Well, there's good news for readers who devoured There, There , the Native American epic about 12 characters traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow. In Wandering Stars , Orange once again focuses on how the oppression of young Cheyenne people impacts families for generations. In 1864, a correctional officer forced a young Native man named Star to speak English and practice Christianity. A generation later, the same oppressor punishes Star's son at a school designed to erase Native culture. Generations later, descendants seek healing from physical and emotional traumas by returning to the Native rituals their families were forced to abandon.

18. My Name Was Eden by Eleanor Barker-White

Genre: Psychological thriller

I expected psychological suspense when I picked up My Name Was Eden . It's marketed as a perfect read for fans of Ashley Audrain's The Push , after all. Let's just say this debut thriller delivered. It had me questioning which narrator to trust while figuring out which character wrote the menacing prologue. In the book, a mother obsessed with Vanishing Twin Syndrome is shaken when her surviving twin, now a teenager, wakes up after a catastrophe asking to go by her long-lost brother's name. And that's only the beginning of strange things to come.

19. T he Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez

Release date: March 5, 2024

From the author of The Book of Unknown Americans comes another epic saga, this time detailing the stories of the migrant laborers and locals involved with constructing the Panama Canal. There's local fisherman Francisco, who opposes the construction; his son, Omar, who joins the dig despite his father's wishes; West Indian laborer Ada Bunting, who arrives illegally in search of work; and many more. It can take a few chapters to settle into the many characters' stories, but if you give it time, the resulting tapestry is a rich, evocative slice of life from a little-known chapter of history.

"Cristina Henríquez's slowly building and sprawling saga isn't simply a look at the construction of the Panama Canal. It's a story about community, colonialism and the everyday people who worked on and were impacted by the canal," says Neithercott. "I was captivated by these characters' lives and the ways in which this monumental event shaped their futures. Publisher's Weekly says the book has the feel of a classic, and I couldn't agree more."

20. Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Genre: Science fiction

Release date: March 14, 2024

Annie Bot is one of the strangest novels I've read this year, and I say that with utter respect and admiration for the author and work. Perfect for fans of My Dark Vanessa and the TV show Black Mirror , this is a somewhat dystopian story of a robot girlfriend, Annie, and her human owner, Doug. At first, Annie happily follows Doug's every command. But when she gets the chance to interact with a second human, one who makes Annie feel something new, exciting and painful, the bot notices unbidden thoughts and feelings woven into her coding. It's a haunting tale that asks readers to consider classic questions: What comes by nurture versus nature? And what does it mean to have a soul?

21. Where Sleeping Girls Lie by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

Genre: Young adult mystery

Where Sleeping Girls Lie checks all the boxes for a fantastic dark academia release: An elite boarding school with Gothic vibes. A diverse cast of students and teachers. Mysteries, secrets, lies and disappearances. After being homeschooled for years, Sade Hussein is sent to Alfred Nobel Academy, where her roommate, Elizabeth, goes missing after the first night. As Sade and Elizabeth's best friend try to figure out what happened, they unearth unsettling secrets, alliances and cover-ups by a group of girls known as the "Unholy Trinity." And then a body is found. Readers who love The Atlas Six and Ghosts of Harvard will fall under this book's spell.

22. E xpiration Dates by Rebecca Serle

Genre: Women's fiction

Release date: March 19, 2024

Last year, Rebecca Serle's One Italian Summer charmed me with a wistful, whimsical story on the Amalfi Coast. So when Expiration Dates showed up on my growing list of new books coming out in 2024, I immediately added this romance novel to my TBR list. The premise hooked me from the first page. Daphne Bell lives a pretty ordinary life, save for one crucial detail: Every time she meets a guy, she receives a paper with the man's name and a number indicating how long the relationship will last. When she gets a slip inscribed only with "Jake"—no expiration date—she assumes he must be her soulmate. But what if he's not the partner she had in mind?

23. A Great Country by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Release date: March 26, 2024

This 2024 release has been compared to Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere , which only makes me more excited to read it! In the gated community of Pacific Hills, California, residents are living, breathing examples of the American dream. That includes the Shah family, though the house practically vibrates with tension between the immigrant parents, who sacrificed everything for their dreams, and the children, who have their own versions of success. Then one night, 12-year-old Ajay is arrested. Fallout in the family and community threatens to shake the foundation of the lives Mr. and Mrs. Shah took years to build. In A Great Country , Shilpi Somaya Gowda masterfully explores intergenerational conflict, immigration, privilege and the price some will pay for success.

24. Nosy Neighbors by Freya Sampson

Genre: Cozy mystery

Release date: March 28, 2024

Brimming with heart and humor, Nosy Neighbors is a cozy mystery about sworn enemies and neighbors, septuagenarian Dorothy and 20-something Kat. The two have nothing but bitterness in common until their building, Shelby House, is threatened. They must put their differences aside to save the only place they can call home. But it doesn't take long to learn there's something sinister afoot in the building. Can the two get ahead of the baddies before becoming the latest victims of foul play?

25. Table for Two by Amor Towles

Genre: Short stories

Release date: April 2, 2024

Worried you don't have time to polish off a stack of new books? Well, why not read a single collection of short stories ? Amor Towles has won over tens of thousands of readers with his novels The Lincoln Highway , Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow . In 2024, his first short story collection, Table for Two , will hit (and promptly fly off) bookstore shelves. The book includes six short stories set in New York City and a novella set in Hollywood. The latter follows Evelyn Ross from Rules of Civility as she reinvents herself in the cinematic world of Golden Age Los Angeles.

26. Funny Story by Emily Henry

Release date: April 23, 2024

Can we talk about the most-anticipated books of 2024 without mentioning Emily Henry's new romance? The queen of happily-ever-afters will return in April with Funny Story , an opposites-attract love story between two jilted lovers. After Daphne's fiance runs away with his friend Petra, she is desperately broke and in need of a roommate. Her best bet? Another newly single person—aka Petra's ex, Miles. As expected, witty banter and shenanigans ensue.

27. Real Americans by Rachel Khong

Release date: April 30, 2024

The author of Goodbye, Vitamin is back at it with a sprawling multi-narrator, multigenerational saga about a Chinese American family. Real Americans takes readers from New York City at the turn of the millennium to a Washington island in the aftermath of COVID-19. Rachel Khong weaves together a story of identity, love, family and forgiveness—and, ultimately, what it means to come home.

28. Oye by Melissa Mogollon

Release date: May 14, 2024

Melissa Mogollon's debut novel, Oye , is pitched as a "telenovela-worthy drama." And if listening in on a stranger's animated phone call sounds like your idea of entertainment, you'll be hooked. Meet Luciana, the baby sister of a massive Colombian American family based in Florida. She's called up her older sister, Mari, to vent and get advice as the family faces the prospect of evacuating before a hurricane batters their town. The problem? Their grandmother, Abue, refuses to budge. Readers get to "listen in" as Luciana and Mari engage in a sometimes laugh-out-loud, sometimes tear-jerking conversation about family, life and love. If you're aiming to read more books by Latinx authors , this is a good place to start.

29. Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan

Release date: May 21, 2024

Kevin Kwan took us to Singapore in Crazy Rich Asians , and he's whisking us away to Hawaii, Marrakech and the English countryside in Lies and Weddings . As the son of a former Hong Kong supermodel and the future earl of a British estate, Rufus Leung Gresham should be set for life. Instead, he's just discovered that the family is sinking into debt. The only path forward, according to Rufus's mom, is for him to woo a woman with enough cash to replenish the family coffers. He's off to schmooze someone at his sister's lavish tropical wedding when a volcanic eruption ruins the grand plan and sends the motley cast of characters on a hilarious tale of love, lies, sex and money.

30. The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

Genre: Literary science fiction

Release date: Aug. 29, 2024

The beloved author of The Midnight Library is offering up another shimmering story of the search for happiness. In The Life Impossible , retired widow Grace Winters believes her best days are behind her. But then comes the twist of a lifetime: An old friend has died and left Grace a house in Ibiza, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean Sea. Before long, Grace is plunged headlong into a new community, with new adventures, new friends and new lessons yet to learn.

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The post The 30 New Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2024 appeared first on Reader's Digest .

The 30 New Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2024 Ft

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The best new science fiction books of February 2024

From a new Jasper Fforde to post-apocalyptic hellscapes aplenty, February’s science fiction offers something for everyone

By Alison Flood

1 February 2024

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A priestess can manipulate space-time in Meredith Mooring’s debut novel

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Now we have finally moved on from an interminable January, it is time to see what science fictional delights February has in store – and it’s a varied line-up this month. I am looking forward to some enjoyably disastrous-sounding postapocalyptic novels from Daniel Polansky and Paul E. Hardisty – I love a good tale of a world in ruins – and I’m also going to make time for the latest novel from Jasper Fforde, a writer who I have loved ever since The Eyre Affair came out in 2001. Top of my list to track down, though, is Meredith Mooring’s Redsight – starring a blind priestess who can manipulate space-time.

Tomorrow’s Children by Daniel Polansky

Nothing can cheer me up more than a good post-apocalyptic romp, and the new novel from Hugo Award nominee Polansky sounds like a corker. Manhattan has been enveloped by the funk, a “noxious cloud” that separates it from the world and mutates its population. Generations on, those who remain are focused only on surviving, when the first tourist in centuries arrives on the Island.

The Descent by Paul E. Hardisty

This is waiting on my desk at home for the moment I get a minute to read it. It is the prequel to climate emergency thriller The Forcing , and sees Kweku Ashworth, who was born on a sailboat as his parents fled disaster, setting out to uncover what led the world to cataclysm. More post-apocalyptic disaster – great!

Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde

This is the sequel to Fforde’s bestselling Shades of Grey , set in a society where hierarchy is determined by the colours you can see, following “Something that Happened” 500 years earlier. When Eddie Russett and Jane Grey discover this might make no sense at all, and could potentially be unfair, they investigate.

12 extraordinary science fiction books to watch out for in 2024

From a new Adrian Tchaikovsky novel to pandemic echoes in Haruki Murakami's The City and its Uncertain Walls (fingers crossed we get an English translation), there is loads of excellent science fiction reading ahead next year, says Sally Adee

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

Unemployed and in debt, Jonathan Abernathy takes a job as a dream auditor, which will see him entering workers’ dreams to remove their anxieties so they can be more productive. I love this brilliantly sinister idea, and this novel has been described by one reviewer as the “spiritual sibling of Severance , but creepier”, which is right up my street.

Plastic: A Novel by Scott Guild

This sounds delightfully weird: plastic girl Erin lives in a plastic world, where she sells her fellow plastic people a form of wearable tech called a Smartbody, which allows them to fully immerse themselves in a virtual world as a refuge from real life and its wars. “Profound, hilarious, wrenching, bizarre, about an imaginary universe with incalculable complexities that is also somehow our own broken world,” says author Elizabeth McCracken.

The best new science fiction books of January 2024

From Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds to Tlotlo Tsamaase’s Womb City and Ali Millar’s Ava Anna Ada, January’s sci-fi will chase the New Year blues away

Redsight by Meredith Mooring

I like the sound of the heroine, Korinna, in Mooring’s debut novel: she is a blind priestess who can manipulate space-time, but who has been raised to believe she is weak and useless. When she takes a job as a navigator on an Imperium ship, she discovers she is meant to become a weapon for the Imperium – but then her ship is attacked by a notorious pirate, Aster Haran, and Korinna’s world changes.

Exordia by Seth Dickinson

“Michael Crichton meets Marvel’s Venom ,” says the publisher of this story of Anna, a refugee and survivor of genocide, who joins a team investigating a “mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror” as “humanity reels from disaster”. I’m loving the drama we are being promised here.

Twice Lived by Joma West

Tipped by our former sci-fi columnist Sally Adee as one to watch out for in 2024, there are two Earths in this set-up, existing in parallel, which “shifters” can cross between. Canna and Lily are the same person, shifting randomly between worlds, lives and families, but they need to settle in one of them – and how can they prepare their loved ones for their final disappearance?

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto

Maybe this debut novel isn’t science fiction per se, but it is fiction about science and it sounds intriguing, so I wanted to mention it. It sees young physicist Helen, who is on a quest to save the planet, decide to follow her mentor (who has been involved in a sex scandal with a student) to an island research institute giving safe harbour to disgraced artists and scientists.

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The Bone Hunters is loosely inspired by the life of 19th-century palaeontologist Mary Anning

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The Bone Hunters by Joanne Burn

Again, not science fiction but fiction about science, and pitched as The Essex Serpent meets Ammonite , so hard to say no to, for me at least. Loosely drawing from the life of the pioneering 19 th -century palaeontologist Mary Anning, this is set in 1824 Lyme Regis, Dorset, UK, when 24-year-old Ada Winters uncovers some “unusual fossils” on the cliffs.

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BOOKS FALL PREVIEW: Nonfiction

11 New Works of Nonfiction to Read This Season

A deeply reported look at the woman behind Roe vs. Wade, an investigation of lawbreaking animals, another hilarious essay collection from Phoebe Robinson — and more.

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By Miguel Salazar and Joumana Khatib

‘ Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana ,’ by Abe Streep

In 2018, the Arlee Warriors, a boy’s high school basketball team on Montana’s Flathead Indian reservation, was in the midst of a buzzing championship run as its town reeled from a cluster of suicides. Streep, who previously profiled the team for The New York Times Magazine , delves into the lives of the players, the town’s collective trauma and the therapeutic power of basketball in Arlee, where the sport “occupies emotional terrain somewhere between escape and religion.”

Celadon Books, Sept. 7 | Read our review

‘ The Family Roe: An American Story ,’ by Joshua Prager

In his third book, Prager sets out to tell the stories of the overlooked women behind the 1973 Supreme Court decision. Using interviews, letters and previously unseen personal papers, Prager tells the story of Roe through the life of Norma McCorvey, whose unwanted pregnancy gave way to the Supreme Court case, and three other protagonists: Linda Coffee, the lawyer who filed the original lawsuit; Curtis Boyd, a fundamentalist Christian turned abortion provider; and Mildred Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Norton, Sept. 14 | Read our review

‘ Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law ,’ by Mary Roach

In 1659, an Italian court heard a case against caterpillars after locals complained of them trespassing and pilfering local gardens. In the years since, humans have come up with innovative ways to deal with jaywalking moose, killer elephants, thieving crows and murderous geriatric trees. After a two-year trip across the world, Roach chronicles these methods in her latest book, covering crow blasting in Oklahoma and human-elephant conflict specialists in West Bengal. The result is a rich work of research and reportage revealing the lengths that humanity will go to keep the natural world at bay.

‘ The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century ,’ by Amia Srinivasan

Srinivasan, an Oxford professor, has developed an enthusiastic following for her shrewd writing in The London Review of Books, with topics ranging from campus culture wars to the intellect of octopuses. Her 2018 meditation on the politics of sex served as a launchpad for this highly anticipated book, which draws on — and complicates — longstanding feminist theory in six essays on pornography, desire, capitalism and more.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 21 | Read our review

Tell us: What new nonfiction are you most eager to read ?

‘ please don’t sit on my bed in your outside clothes: essays ,’ by phoebe robinson.

Robinson, an actress, comedian and co-creator of the podcast 2 Dope Queens, wrote her latest book of essays during the pandemic, taking up everything from Black Lives Matter to dating under lockdown to commercialized self care. Of course, there’s plenty of levity — her way of coping. “If I can make you laugh and forget your problems for a moment, then I did something,” she writes.

Tiny Reparations Books, Sept. 28 | Listen to Robinson on the Book Review podcast

new release books fiction 2021

‘ Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters ,’ by Steven Pinker

How can a species capable of calculating the age of the universe be so vulnerable to conspiracy theories, folk wisdom and groupthink? Rationality is in critically short supply at a time when humanity faces its greatest challenges yet, argues Pinker, a Harvard cognitive psychologist. Through mental exercises and geeky but accessible writing on topics ranging from cartoons to climate change to Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign, Pinker hopes to save reason — and, by extension, society — from extinction.

Viking, Sept. 28 | Read our review

‘ Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City ,’ by Andrea Elliott

Dasani was a precocious and spunky 11-year-old with limitless potential when Elliott, a Times investigative journalist, first met her at a Fort Greene homeless shelter in 2012. That encounter led to a five-part series shadowing Dasani as she navigated child poverty in New York City. For this book, Elliott immersed herself in the lives of Dasani and her family for eight years, at times slipping past security guards at the shelter. She also traces the family’s ancestry back to a North Carolina slave plantation, telling a vivid and devastating story of American inequality.

Random House, Oct. 5 | Read our review | Listen to Elliott on the Book Review podcast

‘ All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told ,’ by Douglas Wolk

This book is an ambitious attempt to wrestle with the Marvel Comics universe, a web so expansive that almost no one has bothered to read all of its half-million pages (and counting). No one, that is, besides Wolk, who has pored over yellowing originals from at garage sales, abandoned copies at his local Starbucks and even collections on show at Burning Man. The result is 400 pages of insights — for Marvel fans and casual readers alike — and what they reveal about American dreams and fears over the past 60 years.

Penguin Press, Oct. 12 | Read our review

‘ The Loneliest Americans ,’ by Jay Caspian Kang

In his essays and commentaries , Kang, a contributor to the Magazine who also writes a newsletter for The Times’s Opinion section, has been interrogating the ideas underpinning Asian American identity for years. His nonfiction debut is a culmination of these efforts, blending memoir, historical writing and reportage as he questions the usefulness of this identity in describing people who live profoundly different realities conditioned by class, language and ethnicity.

Crown, Oct. 12

‘ The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA ,’ by Jorge L. Contreras

The ACLU had never before filed a patent case when a policy analyst and civil rights lawyer teamed up in 2005 to challenge a decades-long practice allowing private companies to patent naturally occurring human genes. Jorge L. Contreras, a law professor at the University of Utah, interviewed nearly 100 lawyers, patients, scientists and policymakers in this behind-the-scenes history of Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics, a long-shot lawsuit that culminated in a landmark 2013 Supreme Court decision that opened the human genome to the benefit of researchers, cancer patients and everyday Americans.

Algonquin, Oct. 26

‘ The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth ,’ by Sam Quinones

Our understanding of the opioid epidemic is indebted in part to Quinones and his eye-opening first book, “ Dreamland ,” which connected the dots between OxyContin’s popularity and a booming heroin market. In this follow-up, Quinones explores the neuroscience of addiction, lays out how the crisis has morphed and deepened with the spread of synthetic drugs, and celebrates the slow efforts at rebuilding community in hard-hit counties across America.

Bloomsbury, Nov. 2 | Read our review

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

In Lucy Sante’s new memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the author reflects on her life and embarking on a gender transition  in her late 60s.

For people of all ages in Pasadena, Calif., Vroman’s Bookstore, founded in 1894, has been a mainstay in a world of rapid change. Now, its longtime owner says he’s ready to turn over the reins .

The graphic novel series “Aya” explores the pains and pleasures of everyday life in a working-class neighborhood  in West Africa with a modern African woman hero.

Like many Nigerians, the novelist Stephen Buoro has been deeply influenced by the exquisite bedlam of Lagos, a megacity of extremes. Here, he defines the books that make sense of the chaos .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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  1. The Best Historical Fiction Books of 2021

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  2. The Best Young Adult Books of 2021 (Anticipated)

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  4. 10 Best New Fiction Books To Read This May / Summer 2021

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  5. 25 Best Books of 2021 (New and Upcoming)

    new release books fiction 2021

  6. (Updated) 30+ Historical Fiction Books Released in 2021

    new release books fiction 2021

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  1. new releases to add to your tbr

  2. new releases to add to your 2024 tbr

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  4. ANTICIPATED BOOK RELEASES 2019!!

  5. 2023 READING STATISTICS 🌷🌙

  6. reading my MOST ANTICIPATED release of 2023

COMMENTS

  1. 20 New Works of Fiction to Read This Season (Published 2021)

    By Joumana Khatib Published Sept. 16, 2021 Updated Nov. 9, 2021 ' Beautiful World, Where Are You ,' by Sally Rooney Here's a third smart, sexy novel from Rooney, who received widespread acclaim...

  2. The Best Books of 2021

    By Katie Kitamura In Kitamura's fourth novel, an unnamed court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of war criminals whom she alone can...

  3. The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2021

    7 minute read By Annabel Gutterman December 10, 2021 7:00 AM EST T he year 2021 was poised to be a great one for established, fan-favorite authors. We were blessed with new work from a buzzy...

  4. New Books Released in 2021: Top picks of the new fiction

    New Books Released in 2021: Top picks of the new fiction Hands up all those who love browsing what's new in books and the upcoming fiction releases? Many of the best books I read in 2020 were fiction titles that caught my eye from the 2020 new books lists, and 2021 is shaping up as another great year for reading.

  5. Best fiction of 2021

    In 2021 we also saw the returns of Jonathan Franzen, beginning a fine and involving 70s family trilogy with Crossroads (4th Estate); Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Klara and the Sun (Faber) probes the...

  6. 85 Best New 2021 Books

    While you're perusing through this year's top releases, expect a brilliant mix of fiction from bestselling authors like Morgan Jerkins and Sally Rooney, along with an invitation into the lives...

  7. 2021 Releases Books

    Showing 1-50 of 17,237 One Last Stop (Paperback) by Casey McQuiston (Goodreads Author) (shelved 723 times as 2021-releases) avg rating 3.94 — 228,842 ratings — published 2021 Want to Read Rate this book 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars Malibu Rising (Hardcover) by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Goodreads Author)

  8. 46 Best New Books 2021

    After a year of industry chaos and many delayed book releases, 2021 brings a bumper crop of new fiction and nonfiction books — including a collection by cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib...

  9. 20 Best Books of 2021- The Year's Top Book Releases

    2021 marked the release of new books by some of our most prominent authors—among them Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, Louise Erdrich, Amor Towles, Ann Patchett, Anthony Doerr, Colson Whitehead, and Maggie Shipstead, whose latest works made it onto our Top 20 List.

  10. Best Fiction 2021

    Start Now Want to Read Rate it: Open Preview WINNER 69,770 votes Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Goodreads Author) Irish author Sally Rooney wins this year's Best Fiction award for her celebrated novel on the complexities of romance, sex, and friendship on our swiftly tilting planet.

  11. The 26 Best New Books Released in 2021 to Read This Summer

    The 26 best new books in 2021: Nonfiction Historical Fiction Young Adult Thriller Fantasy Fiction and Poetry Advertisement Advertisement Nonfiction A new memoir of an extraordinary life...

  12. Best Fiction in Translation of 2021

    A darkly absorbing intellectual thriller by one of Russia's boldest young novelists. FULL REVIEW >. get a copy. bookshelf. JUNE 15, 2021. FICTION. LOOP. by Brenda Lozano ; translated by Annie McDermott. An intimate book that starts small and expands steadily outward, with a cumulative effect both moving and hopeful.

  13. 67 Fall 2021 New Book Releases to Read Now

    October 5 Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman The Vanished Days by Susanna Kearsley Her Honor: My Life on the Bench by LaDoris Hazzard Cordell The Lincoln Highway: A Novel by Amor Towels The Ballad of Laurel Springs by Janet Beard Last Girl Ghosted by Lisa Unger Three Sisters by Heather Morris Matrix by Laura Goff

  14. New Books

    Dead Man's Hand: A Pike Logan Novel by Brad Taylor QUICK ADD First Lie Wins (Reese's Book Club Pick) by Ashley Elston QUICK ADD Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros QUICK ADD The Friendship Club: A Novel by Robyn Carr QUICK ADD Holmes, Marple & Poe: The Greatest Crime-Solving Team of the Twenty-First Century by James Patterson, Brian Sitts QUICK ADD

  15. Our Most Anticipated New Book Releases of September 2021

    Not theory, not analysis, but life as lived in a maelstrom of conflicting opposites, balancing memory against present, known and unknown, despair and perseverance, love and hunger, always hunger. Fervent and cinematic, Beautiful Country is an extraordinary debut. Hardcover $22.95 $28.95. ADD TO CART.

  16. New Book Release Calendar

    Browse the Book Release Calendar to find new and upcoming books to be published this year. FictionDB's database of over 200,000 books can also be searched by title, series, synopsis keywords and many more. ... 2021: January ... FictionDB is committed to providing the best possible fiction reference information. If you have any issues with the ...

  17. Our Most Anticipated New Book Releases of June 2021

    This wildly entertaining novel unfurls over 24 hours in 1980s Southern California and caps off Reid's California trilogy, which also includes the bestsellers Daisy Jones & the Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. A perfect summer beach read! Hardcover $22.49 $27.99. ADD TO CART.

  18. 8 Best New Fiction Books Coming Out In July

    Out 8 July. Hodder & Stoughton (£14.99) SHOP NOW. Acclaimed Berlin-based American artist Calla Henkel makes her fiction debut with an intoxicating, sinister and wickedly funny tale of deception and glamour. Set in Berlin in 2009, the novel traces the experience of two American art students, looking to the bohemian city to solve all their problems.

  19. 25 Best Fiction Books of 2023 (So Far)

    1. Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor Read More Shop Now 2. City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita Read More Shop Now 3. The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon Read More Shop Now 4. Maame by...

  20. 9 New Books We Recommend This Week

    In poetry, we recommend Mary Jo Bang's latest collection, and in fiction we like new novels by Paul Theroux and the British writer Dolly Alderton. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

  21. Our Most Anticipated New Book Releases of August 2021

    Whether you're making the most of the sunshine or hiding in the shade, this month brings a whole new batch of adventures. From emotional memoirs, gripping thrillers, immersive debuts, captivating and spellbinding sci-fi reads, here are our most anticipated new books for August! Hardcover $23.49 $28.00. ADD TO CART.

  22. The 30 New Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2024

    2. The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan. Genre: Historical fiction Release date: Jan. 2, 2024 New book releases from debut authors have extra-special appeal. There's fun in discovering new voices ...

  23. Fiction, Books, All New Releases

    Show: 20 Sort by: Best Sellers Grid List Get it today with Buy Online, Pick up in Store Find My Store 30% OFF The Women: A Novel (02/06/2024) by Kristin Hannah Also available as: eBook, Audiobook, Audio CD , See All BESTSELLER If Only I Had Told Her (B&N Exclusive Edition) (02/06/2024) by Laura Nowlin Also available as: Paperback, eBook , See All

  24. The best new science fiction books of February 2024

    Redsight by Meredith Mooring. I like the sound of the heroine, Korinna, in Mooring's debut novel: she is a blind priestess who can manipulate space-time, but who has been raised to believe she ...

  25. 11 New Works of Nonfiction to Read This Season (Published 2021)

    Dasani was a precocious and spunky 11-year-old with limitless potential when Elliott, a Times investigative journalist, first met her at a Fort Greene homeless shelter in 2012. That encounter led ...

  26. Acclaimed Fiction Writer Brian Evenson to Give Reading at Bard College

    Novelist and short story writer Brian Evenson will read from new work at Bard College on Monday, March 25 at 5pm in Weis Cinema, located in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (2021) and the Weird West microcollection Black Bark (2023).

  27. The New York Times® Bestsellers 2022 Hardcover Fiction

    The New York Times® Bestsellers — Hardcover Fiction 1 - 15 of 15 results Get it today with Buy Online, Pick up in Store Find My Store 1 Fourth Wing (05/02/2023) by Rebecca Yarros 2 Iron Flame (11/07/2023) by Rebecca Yarros 3 Random in Death: An Eve Dallas Novel (In Death Series #58) (01/23/2024) by J. D. Robb 4 Gothikana (01/23/2024) by RuNyx 5