Karl Ove Knausgaard, Niall Williams, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and more: 21 new books out today!

Hope everyone is staying warm, and staying hopeful and optimistic with those new year’s resolutions—so much possibility exists in the fresh month of January. Time to dive into the stacks by your bedsides, as well as the new books flying off the shelves. We’re starting off the new year with a healthy selection of fiction and nonfiction, hotly anticipated novels by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Daniyal Mueenuddin, as well as a nonfiction treatise on winter by Val McDermid, an encouragement to start playing by your own rules by C. Thi Nguyen, and many others. Enjoy the bounty, and happy reading!

*

Karl Ove Knausgaard, trans. by Martin Aitken, The School of Night
(Penguin Press)

“A remarkable addition to an exciting and disturbing series.”
–Publishers Weekly

Daniyal Mueenuddin, This is Where the Serpent Lives
(Knopf)

“Brutal, funny and brilliantly told … Set to be a standout novel of 2026.”
–The Guardian

Niall Williams, John
(Bloomsbury)

“Powerful and moving … An absorbing and intelligent novel.”
–Times Literary Supplement

Kathleen Boland, Scavengers
(Viking)

“Immensely moving and very funny.”
–Megha Majumdar

Val McDermid, Winter: The Story of a Season
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

“McDermid’s writing is lyrical, often profound, and thoroughly enjoyable.”
–Booklist

C. Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game
(Penguin Press)

“A captivating look at how imperfect measures of success shape society.”
–Publishers Weekly

Madeline Cash, Lost Lambs
(FSG)

“Immersive and propulsive and I never wanted it to end.”
–Leslie Jamison

Maya Shankar, The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans
(Riverhead)

“A rare combination of beautiful storytelling, cognitive science, and wholehearted wisdom.”
–Brené Brown

Deepa Anappara, The Last of Earth
(Random House)

“A riveting novel that takes on the hubris of exploration, the pursuit of immortality, and the abiding nature of love and friendship.”
–Laila Lalami

Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
(Dial Press)

“Burden writes with piercing honesty about what happens when the life you trusted vanishes overnight—and the deeper reckoning that follows when the story you’ve lived no longer holds.”
–Lori Gottlieb

Gayle Feldman, Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built
(Random House)

“A monumental biography.”
–Heather Clark

Jason Burke, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s
(Knopf)

“An authoritative epic about era-defining extremism.”
–Kirkus

Judith Hermann, trans. by Katy Derbyshire, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything
(FSG)

“This book stimulated my mind and touched me to the core.”
–Claire Louise-Bennett

Josiah Hesse, On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right – a Personal History
(Pantheon)

“Readers who’ve wrestled with their faith or finding home will find this inspiring.”
–Publishers Weekly

Andrew Burstein, Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History
(Bloomsbury)

“A nuanced, warts-and-all examination of a complicated Founding Father.”
–Kirkus

Senaa Ahmad, The Age of Calamities
(Holt)

“Exceptional…a debut teeming with strange delights.”
–Kirkus

Ian Frazier, The Snakes That Ate Florida
(FSG)

“A rich smorgasbord from a master of his form.”
–Publishers Weekly

Elisa Shua Dusapin, trans. by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, The Old Fire
(Summit)

“A bewitching meditation on tenderness and violence, intimacy and estrangement.”
–Tess Gunty

Sara Levine, The Hitch
(Roxane Gay Books)

“One of the most wildly comedic and unhinged novels I have ever encountered, while at the same time also being deeply relatable and strangely emotionally accurate.”
–Elizabeth Gilbert

Matthew Rice, Plastic: A Poem
(Soft Skull)

“A book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet.”
–From the publisher

Madeleine Dunnigan, Jean
(W. W. Norton)

“It’s luscious and at the same time spiky, graceful and explosive, magical and brutal.”
–Lillian Fishman