We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most
Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be
helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time
around). Here’s what we’re looking out for this month. Let us know what
you’re looking forward to in the comments!
Want to know about the books you might have missed? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Millions keep churning out great books coverage? Then sign up to be a member today.
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi: Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, published when she was only 26, told a sweeping story of the descendants of two half-sisters, one who marries the British governor of a coastal slave castle in what is now Ghana, the other held captive in the dungeons below. For her follow-up, Gyasi narrows her scope to one Ghanaian family in Alabama, where Gyasi herself was raised. “At once a vivid evocation of the immigrant experience and a sharp delineation of an individual’s inner struggle, the novel brilliantly succeeds on both counts,” wrote Publishers Weekly in a starred review. (Michael)
Sisters by Daisy Johnson: Last time it was Oedipus Rex reimagined; this time it’s a modern gothic thriller. After the success of her debut novel, Everything Under, Johnson, the youngest author to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is back with her second novel. Two sisters, July and September, were born just 10 months apart and share an unusually strong bond. But after something terrible happens at school, they’re driven to move with their mother across the country to an abandoned home near the shore. Dread creeps in, the walls have a life of their own, and the bond between the sisters begins to change in strange ways. (Kaulie)
Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell: We see goofy smiles in the bumper and headlights of a car, stern visages in the front door and windows of a house, faces in the markings on a piece of burnt toast. Few things are as simultaneously prosaic and mysterious as the human face, and Serpell examines the literary, cultural, mythological, and biological nature of that very window to the soul. From the disfigured face of John “The Elephant Man” Merrick to the contemporary politics of the emoticon, Serpell provides insight on her eponymous subject across several speculative essays. (Ed Simon)
Daddy by Emma Cline: Cline follows her bestselling and critically acclaimed debut novel, The Girls, with this collection of 10 stories, which, the jacket copy says, portray “moments when the ordinary is disturbed, when daily life buckles, revealing the perversity and violence pulsing under the surface.” The collection includes “Marion” from The Paris Review, and for which Cline won the magazine’s esteemed Plimpton Prize. If you got sucked into Cline’s fictionalization of Harvey Weinstein in her story “White Noise,” featured in The New Yorker’s summer fiction, then this collection is for you—and for me. (Edan)
What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez: The follow-up to Nunez’s National Book Award-winning novel, The Friend, is a novel about a woman who has a series of encounters with an ex, an Airbnb owner, a friend from her youth, and others. When one makes an extraordinary request, it draws the narrator into a transformation. According to the publisher, it’s a story about the meaning of life and death and the value of companionship. (Claire Cameron)
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein): A long-awaited novel from elusive genius Ferrante, another work set in Naples. According to Il Libraio, “As you read, a vast panorama of characters slowly unfolds…a diverse and dynamic tableau of humanity. Once again, Elena Ferrante has not created a mere story but an entire world.” (Lydia)
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine: In Just Us, Rankine blends poems, essays, scholarship, images, and fact-checked notes as she examines, questions, and disrupts whiteness. Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, “With Just Us, Claudia Rankine offers further proof that she is one of our essential thinkers about race, difference, politics, and the United States of America. Written with humility and humor, criticism and compassion, Just Us asks difficult questions and begins necessary conversations.” A starred Kirkus review states that Rankine’s newest work “should move, challenge, and transform every reader who encounters it.” (Zoë)
Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas by Roberto Lovato: The veteran journalist and co-founder of #DignidadLiteraria writes a combination of memoir and reportage, exploring his upbringing in California and connecting the threads of his experience with the ongoing American project of destabilization and depredation in El Salvador and elsewhere in Latin America. Héctor Tobar raves “There has never been a book about the Latinx experience quite like Roberto Lovato’s Unforgetting. Here is a voice that is outraged, philosophical, thoughtful, blunt, emotional, and, above all, fiercely independent. In this illuminating and insightful memoir, Lovato journeys into the underworlds of the fraught history of El Salvador, and his own California upbringing, and finds injustice, resistance, and hope.” (Lydia)
The Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa Veselka: Two broke half-sisters are reunited to claim their estranged father’s inheritance, but instead of money they get something else, something stranger. In its pursuit, Veselka expertly lays bare the realities of poverty, work ethic, and what it means to get by in this country today. (Nick M.)
Bestiary by K-Ming Chang: How many ways are there to tell a family’s migratory history? Chang, an extremely talented young Taiwanese-American author, offers a wild portrait of three generations of women who have in them tigers, snakes, and birds: the myths of their homeland. While Daughter, the protagonist, explores the buried secrets of her family, she also reveals the family’s fragile yet staunch connection with the U.S. The transformations of those women’s bodies embody their oftentimes painful adaptations to this new homeland. (Jianan Qian)
Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt: Bhatt has published beautiful work here at The Millions, and here she makes her fiction debut with a gorgeous collection of short stories. Set in India and America, in restaurants, offices, yoga studios, home bakeries, upscale homes, and grief-filled shacks, Bhatt brings her characters and settings to life with these gorgeous explorations of class, work, ambition, and so much more, capturing the nuances of life in fiction that glows. (Lydia)
Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land by Toni Jensen: In this memoir Jensen explores her own life and the history of violence in America with the through line of guns: guns carried by her father, guns pointed at her at Standing Rock, guns deployed against indigenous women and in classrooms. Terese Mailhot writes, “Carry explores the static and kinetic energies of the American gun—its ability to impose its terrible will from a locked box on a shelf or the hands of an active shooter. Jensen explores the gun’s tragic impact with heartfelt prose and deep intellect—on politics, on history, on Black and Indigenous bodies, on women’s bodies, and on children behind closed doors. Carry unfurls America’s long rap sheet. It is full of difficult and vital news, delivered right on time.” (Lydia)
These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever: A novel about a relationship between two men in college that spirals into violence, exploring intimacy, desire, and power. Brandon Taylor calls it “an utterly captivating fever dream of a novel whose tone and atmosphere will haunt you long after you finish. More haunting still is the skill with which Micah Nemerever reveals to us the lengths we will go to in order to be known, to be seen, to be understood. A thrilling first novel.” (Lydia)
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar: A hybrid work of fiction and memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, exploring the experience of Muslims in the world after 9/11 and focusing on the travails of one father and son that lead from America to Europe to Afghanistan. Kirkus calls it “A searing work…profound and provocative.” (Lydia)
Ruthie Fear by Maxim Loskutoff: In his expansive first novel, a coming-of-age Western gothic, Loskutoff depicts a wild Montana landscape increasingly tamed by condos and golf courses. The titular character is a magnetic huntress who “devised her own morality based on the behavior of animals she saw from her blind.” Raised by her father in a trailer in the Bitterroot Valley, Ruthie makes her way in a changing world: new money, new buildings, and, most chilling, new creatures—headless monsters called forth by ancient curses or spawned by modern hubris. (Matt S.)
Having and Being Had by Eula Biss: In a follow-up to her acclaimed On Immunity, Biss—who had just bought her first home—explores the precarious relationship between middle/upper-middle class life and 21st-century capitalism. Drawing on literature, history, and economics, Bliss interrogates consumerism, affluence, art, and work through the lens of the home. Jenny Offill says, “Her investigation ranges from the strictly financial to the broadly philosophical as she accounts for her life with disarming honesty and grace.” (Carolyn)
Jack by Marilynne Robinson: Five years after Lila, Robinson—recipient of the National Humanities Medal—returns to the fictional world of Gilead, Iowa, once again. The novel follows the illegal interracial relationship between John Ames Boughton, the white son of Gilead’s minister, and Della Miles, a schoolteacher from a prominent Black family. The book received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, with the latter writing: ” This is a beautiful, superbly crafted meditation on the redemption and transcendence that love affords.” (Carolyn)
Mill Town by Kerri Arsenault: Braiding town documents, interviews, and memoir, writer and critic Arsenault’s debut book explores the history of her hometown of Mexico, Maine. Years after leaving, Arsenault realized her idyllic childhood had come with a steep price: the paper mill that kept the town afloat for generations was also destroying the environment and poisoning the town’s residents. A starred review from Kirkus says, ” Bittersweet memories and a long-buried atrocity combine for a heartfelt, unflinching, striking narrative combination.” (Carolyn)
Three Rings by Daniel Mendelsohn: Acclaimed author, critic, and essayist, Mendelsohn’s newest book explores the lives and careers of three exiled writers (Erich Auerbach, François Fenelón, W.G. Sebald), and how they informed his own writing. In just 112 pages, Mendelsohn uses a nested structure to reveal the ways memory, displacement and history inform our lives and literature. About the slim book, Ayad Akhtar writes: “Part dirge, part memoir, part exegesis, all rhapsody—Mendelsohn’s anatomy of literature’s subtlest pleasures is itself that subtlest of literary pleasures: a masterpiece.” (Carolyn)
Conditional Citizens by Laila Lalami: Weaving history, politics, and her own immigration story, Lalami’s newest book (and first foray into nonfiction) explores the limitations of citizenship in present-day America. “Laila Lalami has given us a clear-eyed, even-handed assessment of this country’s potential—and its limits—through her insightful notion of conditional citizenship,” says Viet Thanh Nguyen. “Her book is a gift to all Americans—if they are willing to receive it.” (Carolyn)
Glossary for the End of Days by Ian Stansel: Blurring speculative and realistic fiction, Stansel’s second essay collection features 11 stories about identity, mortality, politics, and survival. About the collection, poet Maggie Smith says: “What a gorgeous, imaginative, and needed-in-this-moment book.” (Carolyn)
Bonus Links from Our Archive:
—A Year in Reading: Roberto Lovato
—An Imagined Possibility: The Millions Interviews Claudia Rankine
—Elena Ferrante Names the Devil and Slays the Minotaur
—A Year in Reading: Sigrid Nunez
—Look at Your Game, Girl: On Emma Cline’s ‘The Girls’
—A Year in Reading: Namwali Serpell
—Namwali Serpell on a Novel 19 Years in the Making
—The Dark Side of Daisy Johnson
—A Year in Reading: Laila Lalami
—The Story Is Never the Whole Story: The Millions Interviews Daniel Mendelsohn
—Marilynne Robinson’s Singular Vision
—A Year in Reading: Eula Biss
—Ayad Akhtar’s Flesh and Blood
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