December
Gabrielle Korn, The Shutouts
St. Martin’s, December 3
A follow-up to Korn’s Yours For The Taking, this queer, dystopian odyssey picks up where the last book left off. Moving beyond New York, Korn explores a wider swath of her dystopian American future and expands the saga, jumping between two timelines set in 2040 and 2071. Again the focus is on how climate change has shredded the world, and how individuals and communities navigate the storms, fires, and violence of a remade America. Korn’s writing always sparkles, and her new book is sure to feature the same carefully observed characters and relationships that made Yours For The Taking such a stand-out novel. –JF
Julia Armfield, Private Rites
Flatiron, December 3
As an Our Wives Under the Sea evangelist, I was absolutely foaming at the mouth for Private Rites. Great news: This book fucks. It’s gay and eerie and vibey and weird. Above all, It Is Wet (Julia Armfield? Writing a Wet Book? It’s more likely than you think). In a world reshaped by climate change, three somewhat estranged sisters come back together when their very estranged father dies. As they sift through their father’s legacy, they begin to understand that something larger and more malevolent is at work in their family. Drink it up, baby! –MC
Weike Wang, Rental House
Riverhead, December 3
Wang’s excellent previous novels Chemistry and Joan is Okay both brilliantly explored what happens when things – a life, a career – don’t go as planned. Now, Wang tackles marriage. Rental House is the portrait of Keru and Nate’s marriage in two vacation rentals that take place several years apart. First, in a beach house on Cape Cod, then in a bungalow in the Catskills, the couple entertain friends, their in-laws, and their giant sheepdog Mantou and must navigate how to make their marriage work. –EF
Ella Baxter, Woo Woo
Catapult, December 3
The New Animal author returns with another sure-to-be strange, sure-to-be-gripping novel, this time diving into the art world and the life of a conceptual artist hoping she’s about to break out… but grappling with TikTok, stalkers, a chef husband, and of course her various conceptual alter egos from over the years. A new form of art monster rises over the horizon… –DB
Christopher Bollen, Havoc
Harper, December 3
This book was so effed up!!! And soooooo good. Like, so good I wanna study this in a literature class and highlight the crap out of it. Christopher Bollen has been a growing figure in the literary suspense world for a while, but this book should cement his place as one of the very best. In Havoc, an old woman who likes to travel and likes even more to meddle finally meets her match: an 8-year-old boy staying in the same Luxor hotel. As the two engage in increasingly violent games of one-upmanship, Bollen’s narrator’s emotional defenses begin to crumble, and she must finally come to terms with her own dark secrets. Bollen is particularly skilled at exploring the gap between who we want to be, and who we really are. –MO
Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer, No Place to Bury the Dead
HarperVia, December 10
A mother flees an unnamed Latin American country, traveling hundreds of kilometers carrying her ailing husband and her babies, who have tragically died on the journey. Seeking a resting place for them, she buries her children in a surreal, borderland cemetery caught in a land dispute with a powerful landowner. The lines between life and death are hazy in this place, and violence is never far. This book, which won the 2023 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, is a tale of migration that combines magical realism with Westerns. The Michalski Prize committee praised Borgo for “the virtuosity of a prose that is at once allegorical, luminous and serious, leading us to meet female characters so strong they live beyond the page.” –JF
Lily Tuck, The Rest is Memory
Liveright, December 10
The latest novel by National Book Award-winning Lily Tuck was inspired by one of Wilhelm Brasse’s famous photographs, depicting a 14-year-old Catholic Polish girl named Czeslawa Kwoka, who was killed at Auschwitz in 1943. Little else about her is known, but despite—and also because of—the scant facts, “Lily Tuck has made an extraordinary and disturbingly brilliant novel, one that can stand with the best of W.G. Sebald or Patrick Modiano,” writes Michael Gorra, “and The Zone of Interest too, as a testament to what we must always remember.” –ET
Omar Khalifa, tr. Barbara Romaine, The Sand-Catcher
Coffee House, December
Billed as a Palestinian Citizen Kane, Omar Khalifah’s debut novel is the story of four young journalists at a Jordanian newspaper tasked with interviewing one of the last witnesses of the 1948 Nakba—but the interview is harder to land than any of them expect. A timely new translation and hopefully one we’ll be reading at the same time as we can celebrate a safe and free Palestine. –DB
