The Best New Books Coming Out Winter 2019

Fans of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale are likely to love her latest novel, Once Upon a River, a mystery-laced story set along the river Thames that brings to life the mingling of magic and science in the 19th-century imagination. (December 4)

To buy: $28, amazon.com, indiebound.org

In Tom Barbash’s searching new novel, Anton Winter returns to his childhood home, New York City’s The Dakota, in the fall of 1979. He is soon swept up in the personal and professional tumult of his family, the Winters, whose lives are visited by the likes of Johnny Carson and John Lennon. (December 4)

To buy: $26.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

An unexpected meeting on a bridge connects Chinonso, a poultry farmer, and Ndali, the daughter of a wealthy family, in this moving, mythic saga about love and destiny that’s set in Umuahia, Nigeria, traverses the globe, and is narrated by a chi, a guardian spirit. (January 8)

To buy: $28, amazon.com, indiebound.org

In Sarah Moss’ striking new book, Silvie and her family spend two weeks living like their ancestors while participating in an Iron Age reenactment in the north of England. They come to find that their connections to the past run deeper than they’d imagined. (January 8)

To buy: $22, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Laura Sims’ sharp debut novel is a thriller about an unhealthy fixation between neighbors, one that’s propelled by the unnamed narrator’s unraveling as she descends into a vortex of resentment and obsession. (January 8)

To buy: $25, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Lauren Groff calls Mesha Maren’s novel “a shining debut, with a heady admixture of explosive plot and taut, burnished prose.” It’s set in West Virginia and follows the life of Jodi, a woman newly released from a life sentence who attempts to remake her world after spending eighteen years in prison. (January 8)

To buy: $26.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Rabeah Ghaffari’s richly imagined debut novel takes place in 1979, in the shadow of political tumult and a rare eclipse, both of which have significance for one family tending to each other and to their orchard in Naishapur, Iran. (January 8)

To buy: $25, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Filled with adventure and seen through the eyes of twelve-year-old Marwand, Jamil Jan Kochai’s 99 Nights in Logar follows the young boy’s journey across present-day Afghanistan in search of Budabash, the family dog that has escaped. (January 8)

To buy: $25, amazon.com, indiebound.org

The titular character in Susan Conley’s moving new novel Elsey Come Home is a painter, mother, and wife who must embark on a journey through addiction toward recovery and healing in order to find her way back home. (January 15)

To buy: $25.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This smart, wildly imagined social satire sees Hark Morner becoming an unwilling guru of “Mental Archery” (an unexpected combination of mindfulness, mythology, and archery), which begins to catch on, bringing adventure and absurdity Hark’s way. (January 15)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

In Tessa Hadley’s latest novel, the lives of four friends—Alexandr, Christine, Zachary, and Lydia—are forever changed when one of them passes away unexpectedly. The aftermath of grief, pain, and anger leaves its marks on those left behind. (January 15)

To buy: $26.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

The stories in Chris Power’s Mothers are peopled by characters who are all in the midst of a search. They take place around the globe—Sweden, Greece, France, Mexico, Spain, and the U.S., for starters—and they’re anchored by three connected stories about a woman named Eva that begin, end, and center the collection as they drop in on her at different points in her life. (January 15)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

With a publicly decimated career and a neglected family in his wake, ex-TV anchor Ted Grayson finds himself taking a hard look at the life he’s led and the ways in which he can build a better life in this perceptive new book by John Kenney. (January 15)

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

When people in a Southern California college town begin falling asleep—a state from which they can’t be awakened but in which they are dreaming deeply—the community begins to panic. Karen Russell calls this book “frighteningly powerful, beautiful, and uncanny, […] a love story and also a horror story—a symphonic achievement.” (January 15)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Madhuri Vijay’s novel The Far Field centers on a woman named Shalini who, after her mother’s death, ventures forth on a journey across the Indian subcontinent in search of a faraway Himalayan village, the home of her childhood. In the process, she is confronted with political unrest and uneasy histories. (January 15)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

The Orphan of Salt Winds takes place in 1939 in rural England, where a young orphan named Virginia Wrathmell journeys to make her home with her adoptive parents, Clem and Lorna. The secrets of their home, Salt Winds, as well as secrets of the marsh that surrounds it captivate Virginia in this mysterious historical novel about haunted pasts. (January 15)

To buy: $16.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Juliet Lapidos’ funny and smart new novel, Talent, follows a graduate student named Anna Brisker as she struggles to find the inspiration she needs to finish her dissertation. When she stumbles upon exactly what she needs in the form of the perfect case study, she becomes entangled in the pages of a literary crime. (January 22)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Reconciling loss and finding a way to hope again is at the heart of Benedict Wells' The End of Loneliness, a moving story about family and finding love that sees Jules Moreau and his two siblings orphaned and becoming strangers in the wake of their grief. (January 29)

To buy: $16, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Poet Carl Phillips’ fourteenth collection takes its title from the jazz standard “Wild Is the Wind” and offers up beautifully meditative contemplations on love, philosophy, history, and mystery. (January 22)

To buy: $23, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Roxane Gay calls Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s vital new novel “an incisive and necessary work of brilliant satire.” It’s set in a beleaguered Southern city of a fictional future in which the father of a biracial son seeks desperate means in order to protect his son from violent racism in America. (January 29)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This colorful Southern family saga follows the Forsters, the founders of the world’s first major soft-drink company, the fictional Panola Cola Company. The novel sweeps through the twentieth century as the Forsters accumulate a fizz of family fortune, moving from their origins in Mississippi to Paris and New York, where later generations attempt to clear history’s hurdles. (February 5)

To buy: $26.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

The first installment in Marlon James’ highly anticipated Dark Star trilogy is Black Leopard, Red Wolf, an epic fantasy with deep roots in African history and myth. It’s a thrilling story about a solitary mercenary named Tracker who is enlisted—alongside a motley cast of characters—to help locate a missing child. (February 5)

To buy: $30, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway is a funny and perceptive tale that follows three generations of a New England family whose livelihood, a candlepin bowling alley, is complicated by questions of inheritance and more than a few long-lived secrets. (February 5)

To buy: $27.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

The Age of Light is based on the true story of the life of Lee Miller, an American model who moved to Paris, turned her eye to photography, and transformed her experience from muse to maker during the mid-20th century. (February 5)

To buy: $28, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This layered, continent-spanning historical novel is about shared pasts, unintended consequences, and the search for meaning. It moves from a mansion to a tenement apartment to a commune as it follows the aftermath of a 1916 explosion set off by renowned glass artist Louis C. Tiffany. (February 5)

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Lauren Wilkinson’s suspenseful spy drama follows Marie Mitchell, a brilliant young FBI agent who is swept up in the machinations of espionage during the Cold War and who must navigate professional orders and personal feelings when she’s sent on a complex mission. (February 12)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Tennessee Williams and his partner, Frank Merlo, are at the heart of Christopher Castellani’s new novel, Leading Men, an immersive story that begins in Italy in 1953 at a party thrown by Truman Capote and swirls through the decade, relationships, and tensions between public and private life. (February 12)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

A family road trip across the United States is at the heart of Valeria Luiselli’s engrossing new novel, which stitches together text, images, and forms to tell a story about one family and the personal and political landscapes through which they move. (February 12)

To buy: $27.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This beautifully written, epic new novel is peopled by characters living in Bangkok, whose lives weave into and out of each others’ stories. Alexander Chee calls it “a bold and tender novel with a simple, ingenious conceit—the stories a house can contain, from a city's colonial past to its antediluvian future. Sudbanthad arrives to us already a masterful innovator of the form—a startlingly original debut." (February 19)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Lindsay Stern’s debut novel is about a couple—logical Ivan, a philosophy professor, and passionate Prue, an academic in biolinguistics—whose placid life encounters a few unexpected bumps that threaten to send them into entirely new directions. (February 19)

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Poet Katie Peterson’s fourth collection is filled with movement—movement through landscapes, emotions, and states of being—that courses with uncommon, illusory lyricism. (February 26)

To buy: $23, amazon.com, indiebound.org

A twenty-six-year-old cleaning lady named Mona struggles with life, love, and a zany cast of characters in this hilarious new novel from Jen Beagin. (February 26)

To buy: $24.51, amazon.com, indiebound.org