William Boyd’s The Romantic(Knopf, Aug.) follows County Cork–born adventurer Cashel Greville Ross across continents, ever haunted by his one true love. In Lisa See’s Lady Tan’s Circle of Women(Scribner, Jun.), an arranged marriage threatens the aspirations of a young woman trained by her grandmother to be a physician in 15th-century China. In Salman Rushdie’s Victory City(Random, Feb.), a goddess speaks through a nine-year-old girl in 1300s India to found a city where women and men are equal. Three titles-Jennifer Saint’s Atalanta(Flatiron, May), Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra(Sourcebooks Landmark, Mar.), and Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind, about the Medusa (Harper, Feb.)-reveal how popular feminist retellings of Greek mythology have become. Alice McDermott’s Absolution(Farrar, Nov.) portrays women impacted by the Vietnam War. Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray’s The First Ladies(Berkley, Jun.) vivifies the relationship between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. In Charles Frazier’s The Trackers(Ecco, Apr.), a New Deal assignment has Val Welch painting post-office murals in Dawes, WY, where his involvement with a wealthy ranching couple spells trouble. In Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch(Knopf, Sept.), a mother and daughter seek refuge after the Civil War in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. Nancy Horan’s House of Lincoln(Sourcebooks Landmark, Jun.) presents the aspiring president’s Springfield, IL, household through the eyes of a Portuguese immigrant housemaid. Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds(Riverhead, Sept.) follows a servant girl who abandons a U.S. & S., Jul.).ĭaniel Mason’s North Woods(Random, Sept.) chronicles the families inhabiting a New England home over centuries. Wild Game author Adrienne Brodeur plumbs the scratchy bonds between two Cape Cod siblings in Little Monsters(Avid Reader: S. H Is for Hawk author Helen Macdonald joins with Black Irish musician Sin Blaché to write the speculative Prophet(Grove, Aug.), with two intelligence officers trying to grasp how memories are being weaponized. In Hang the Moon(Scribner, Mar.), the second novel from Glass Castle author Jeannette Walls, a feisty young woman returns to her Prohibition-era hometown years after being thrown out by her family. In debuter Eleanor Shearer’s River Sing Me Home(Berkley, Jan.), a Barbados woman searches for the children taken from her when she was enslaved. Debuter Kevin Jared Hosein’s Hungry Ghosts(Ecco, Feb.) is family drama set in 1940s Trinidad as British and U.S. Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World(Soho, May) expertly compresses two centuries of India’s history-and its future possibilities-into four sometimes fantastical sections and a coda. Ben Fountain’s Devil Makes Three(Flatiron, Sept.) reveals power plays both local and regional as Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide falls in a coup d’état. soldier returns to Vietnam decades after the war, even as the scorned son of a Black U.S. In Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s Dust Child(Algonquin: Workman, Mar.), a U.S. Leila Aboulela’s River Spirit (Grove, Mar.) limns an orphan’s coming of age during Sudan’s 1880s fight for independence. Click here for a downloadable spreadsheet of titles (based on currently available publisher information). The aim is to capture top titles and top trends, and the authors here-literary stars, scholars, and experts-are generally best-selling, award-winning, and/or award-nominated or worthy of being so, perhaps in the coming year. In our fourth annual books preview, LJ presents 400+ titles in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
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