Books Coming Out This Winter That We Can’t Wait to Read

Publication Date: January 2, 2018

Buy it: $27, amazon.com

Adolescence is at the heart of this compelling new book by Sam Graham-Felsen. Narrated by one of the most original voices you’ll read this year, it’s a story about race, privilege, and friendship, as well as growing up and growing into awareness about the inequalities of the world we inhabit.

Publication Date: January 2, 2018

Buy it: $14.99, amazon.com

We’re especially excited about this debut novel from Southern Living Travel Editor Valerie Fraser Luesse. It’s set in Glory, Alabama, during the 1960s in the wake of a disappearance that ultimately forces a young man and the small town in which he lives to confront issues surrounding class, race, and social change.

Publication Date: January 2, 2018

Buy it: $27, amazon.com

Rachel Joyce’s The Music Shop is filled with—you guessed it—music. It’s a charming, poignant story about a record store with a proprietor named Frank who can pinpoint the exact music any given customer needs and whose life is forever changed when a woman named Ilse Brauchmann faints nearby.

Publication Date: January 9, 2018

Buy it: $26, amazon.com

The ramifications of a crime committed in a small New York town in 1982 reverberate through the decades, finally catching up with three friends who are still haunted by it in this smart, taut thriller with plenty of twists for fans of suspense.

Publication Date: January 9, 2018

Buy it: $28, amazon.com

Set in New Orleans in 1918, Nathaniel Rich’s King Zeno is historical fiction with a dose of crime. In it, three characters—detective William Bastrop, jazz musician Isadore Zeno, and widow Beatrice Vizzini—are thrown off course and into danger by a succession of literal ax murders.

Publication Date: January 9, 2018

Buy it: $26, amazon.com

Kelly Corrigan’s story-essays identify and examine the phrases that life requires of us—phrases we all learn and use and adapt, phrases that comfort and connect us, phrases that are powerful and hard—with stories that nourish, surprise, and of course, entertain. You’ll want to read them over and over again.

Publication Date: January 9, 2018

Buy it: $27, amazon.com

The Afterlives follows the aftermath of a death—sort of. It introduces Jim Byrd, a man who is revived moments after dying from a heart attack at age thirty. He, along with his wife, Annie, becomes tangled in the questions that arise after such an experience. Told with sharp humor and big questions, it will make you laugh while simultaneously urging you think deeply about technology, loss, faith, and life.

Publication Date: January 9, 2018

Buy it: $26.95, amazon.com

In this moving novel, hundreds of Sri Lankan refugees make a dangerous voyage to seek asylum in Canada. The threat of deportation soon follows their arrival, sparking questions about compassion and humanity and identity—identity, in all its transformative complexities.

Publication Date: January 9, 2018

Buy it: $26, amazon.com

The Immortalists is a moving novel about the deep bonds of family, specifically a family of four siblings whose lives and choices are informed by one very significant event: They all receive prophecies from a traveling psychic that reveal the day each sibling will die. The directions of their lives spin out differently across the decades, illuminating and challenging notions about destiny and choice.

Publication Date: January 9, 2018

Buy it: $27, amazon.com

Once you read Gregory Blake Smith’s The Maze at Windermere, you’ll understand why Richard Russo calls it “a dazzling high-wire act.” It’s a labyrinthine, layered novel that spans three centuries while following the exploits and experiences of a compelling cast of characters—a Gilded Age bachelor, an American Revolution-era British officer, and a young Quaker orphan among them.

Publication Date: January 9, 2018

Buy it: $26.99, amazon.com

Set within the cogs of corporate America, This Could Hurt tells the story of five colleagues struggling with professional tumult, uncertainty, and ambition. Jillian Medoff unfolds these characters’ daily lives, the hours spent at the office, with precision and a strong dose of humanity.

Publication Date: January 9, 2018

Buy it: $25.95, amazon.com

The second novel of Ali Smith’s planned seasonal series delves into the coldest season with brisk energy, a lively freedom that rises from the page in dialogue with the concerns of the present day as it skips like a stone on water across boundaries of genre and subject.

Publication Date: January 16, 2018

Buy it: $26, amazon.com

Everything Here Is Beautiful is Mira T. Lee’s exciting debut about two sisters, Miranda and Lucia, the unpredictable changes of their lives, and the necessary sacrifices and important gifts that sisterhood brings.

Publication Date: January 16, 2018

Buy it: $28, amazon.com

Two Hollywood legends propel the narrative of this vibrant new novel by Melanie Benjamin. It’s the story of screenwriter Frances Marion and famed actress Mary Pickford, two women in show business who forge a friendship and develop a professional relationship that catalyzes a revolution in the earliest days of motion pictures.

Publication Date: January 16, 2018

Buy it: $28, amazon.com

This two-part book promises to be mind-blowingly good—the first section is an adventure in which three characters set out to track down a missing masterpiece that, legend has it, reveals the secrets of the universe. The second part is that fabled missing masterpiece.

Publication Date: January 16, 2018

Buy it: $27, amazon.com

Twenty-five years after his lauded story collection, Jesus’ Son, captured imaginations, there’s new book on the horizon from late writer and National Book Award-winner Denis Johnson. It’s easy to get lost in Johnson’s prose; it’s mysterious and arresting, ordinary and poetic, in the sky and in the dirt, facing up to big questions while noticing the smallest details—a must-read when it’s released in January.

Publication Date: January 23, 2018

Buy it: $27, amazon.com

This enthralling debut from Athens, Georgia-based writer Xhenet Aliu is a stunning story about a mother, Elsie, and her daughter, Luljeta, which is told in parallel narratives that are as bold and tough as they are extraordinarily sensitive and deeply felt.

Publication Date: January 23, 2018

Buy it: $25, amazon.com­

This novel is as funny as it is sharp. It’s about crises big and small, specifically the dilemmas that befall a midwestern professor whose life in the Iowa heartland is thrown into utter disarray by tornados, in-laws, and one unadvisable affair.

Publication Date: January 23, 2018

Buy it: $27, amazon.com

Winter is the second novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s projected seasonal quartet. It’s a delicate book filled with tender epistles about nature, life, and seasonal change written to his unborn daughter as he waits for her arrival.

Publication Date: January 30, 2018

Buy it: $28.95, amazon.com

Dave Eggers is back with a compelling true story about a young man named Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a son of Yemeni immigrants living in San Francisco, who sets his sights on the coffee business in Yemen. Interwoven with history of the industry, the onset of civil war, and his own journey, this story will captivate—there’s no putting this one down.

Publication Date: January 30, 2018

Buy it: $27, amazon.com

Based on a true story and set against the backdrop of early twentieth-century China, this story brings to life a man called the Baron, a Russian aristocrat and medical commissioner who attempts to fight the spread of a devastating plague in the city of Kharbin in Northern China.

Publication Date: February 6, 2018

Buy it: $26.95, amazon.com

Tayari Jones weaves a moving love story in her new novel, An American Marriage. It’s set in Atlanta, where a wrongful conviction and subsequent imprisonment threaten to tear a marriage—that of newlyweds Celestial and Roy—apart forever. 

Publication Date: February 6, 2018

Buy it: $16, amazon.com

The short stories in Danielle Lazarin’s Back Talk paint portraits of women and girls navigating the world around them, the relationships they nurture, and the surprises they encounter. It’s a collection about figuring things out, bending boundaries, and looking inward to examine what’s true. 

Publication Date: February 6, 2018

Buy it: $25.95, amazon.com

Will Boast retells the myth of Apollo and Daphne in this exciting new novel. It introduces readers to Ollie and Daphne, two young people living in San Francisco, the latter of whom experiences paralysis when overcome with extreme emotion.

Publication Date: February 6, 2018

Buy it: $28, amazon.com

In her latest essay collection, Zadie Smith organizes her thoughts—on social media, libraries, culture, politics, climate change, and so much more—into five categories: In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free. No matter the subject, we're always excited to hear what this ever brilliant writer thinks about it, because it makes us think too.

Publication Date: February 6, 2018

Buy it: $25, amazon.com

An unexpected attachment between a grieving friend and an orphaned Great Dane is at the center of this heartwarming story about friendship lost and found—and the possibility of finding healing in unexpected, sometimes canine, places.

Publication Date: February 6, 2018

Buy it: $28.99, amazon.com

Fans of The Nightingale should pick up Kristin Hannah’s newest release as soon as possible. It’s a story about a family that’s forever changed when their patriarch returns from the Vietnam War and moves them to the Alaskan frontier. In the deepening winter, their family continues to fracture and their survival is tested from within and without.

Publication Date: February 6, 2018

Buy it: $26, amazon.com

The Texas frontier provides the vivid, visceral landscape for this new novel by Elizabeth Crook. In it, a young man named Benjamin narrates the journey upon which his sister embarks, a journey of revenge in which she seeks to track down the panther that attacked her and killed her mother.

Publication Date: February 13, 2018

Buy it: $22.99, amazon.com

A young ranch hand sets out to prove his worth in the boxing ring in this wonderful new novel from Willy Vlautin that asks essential questions about family, destiny, and dreams of the future.

Publication Date: February 13, 2018

Buy it: $16, amazon.com

A grieving man travels from Iceland to a war-torn country armed only with a toolbox and thoughts of suicide in this unforgettable book by Icelandic writer Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir. When the people he meets there ask him again and again to fix what’s broken, his life begins to change.

Publication Date: February 13, 2018

Buy it: $27.95, amazon.com

A wild conceit unfurls into a can’t-put-it-down read in this high-flying thriller from Ned Beauman. The adventure begins with a conflict over an ancient temple in 1930s Honduras; decades later, the CIA gets involved, revealing danger and conspiracy at every turn.

Publication Date: February 13, 2018

Buy it: $23, amazon.com

During a fateful night at a camp in the Pacific Northwest, a group of girls become stranded without signs of rescue. The experience affects each member of the group differently, and the novel follows them over the years as the trauma of the past impacts each life, each friendship, in ways they cannot avoid or outrun.

Publication Date: February 13, 2018

Buy it: $26, amazon.com

Fans of Grey’s Anatomy are sure to enjoy this new release, a novel about friendship, success, and secrets set amid the day-to-day drama of a hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina. It follows the lives of doctors and best friends Zadie Anson and Emma Colley as a figure from their past reenters their lives.

Publication Date: February 20, 2018

Buy it: $28, amazon.com

This lively new biography tells the story of David Fairchild, a world traveler who, in the nineteenth century, transformed American cuisine by importing and introducing exotic foods like kale, mangoes, and avocados, all the while sidestepping trouble when it inevitably found him.

Publication Date: February 20, 2018

Buy it: $27, amazon.com

Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson brings readers a gift for the New Year in the form of this essay collection. In it, she examines the modern political landscape, theology, faith, and beauty, among a vaulting array of subject matter. This collection calls the titular question into bold and humane relief. “What are we doing here?” Read to find out.