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Access our Top 20
Books of 2024!
January is a notoriously dismal month, but it’s also an exciting time for books, when the new year’s first great releases begin to tumble forth. Below are a few of the titles we’re most looking forward to in the early weeks of 2025.
Jan 7, 2025. 368 pages
Published by Harper
Montreal-based author Heather O'Neill broke onto the literary scene when her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals won the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Canada Reads contest in 2007. O’Neill has spoken about how her early education in French-language Quebec literature and its tendencies towards experimentation have influenced her work. Her upcoming novel The Capital of Dreams blends fantasy with dystopia in the story of a fictional war-ravaged country and a teenage girl's quest to save her mother's legacy. Booklist calls it a “feminist fairy tale” that “will appeal to fans of Kelly Link and Karen Russell.” We have a review of this book slated for the first 2025 issue of our digital magazine The BookBrowse Review — don’t miss it!
Jan 14, 2025. 448 pages
Published by William Morrow
In Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, a disabled Nigerian American writer struggling in her career finds success with a story about robots living on a future Earth after the end of human civilization, a sharp departure from her previous work that nevertheless resonates with elements of her life. “While Zelu’s novel imagines a future without human beings on Earth, the near-future world she lives in feels distinctly and promisingly within reach,” Kirkus observes, “...It’s a place where self-driving electric cars make cities more accessible, people with movement disabilities are supported by robotic engineering, and families with deeply held patriarchal customs are brought closer together rather than torn apart when confronting these dynamics.” Okorafor's grounding of the narrative in the world of her fictional author-protagonist may make it appealing to both literary fiction and sci-fi fans. We also plan to cover this book in our first e-zine issue of the year.
Jan 7, 2025. 336 pages
Published by Little Brown & Company
Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons revolves around the estrangement between New York immigration lawyer Peter Fischer and his mother Ann, who grapple with complicated pasts involving tumultuous revelations of queer sexuality. Early reviews give the sense that the story is a literary slow-burn of sorts, a suspenseful family tale that explores the separation between the surface of people's lives and the secrets that lurk beneath. Publishers Weekly calls it “irresistible” and Kirkus refers to it as "a remarkably acute and effective character study."
Jan 21, 2025. 272 pages
Published by Hogarth Books
Han Kang’s We Do Not Part was published in Korea in 2021, and will be her first book to be released in English translation (in this case, by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris) since her 2024 Nobel Prize win. The novel follows a troubled writer, Kyungha, who travels from Seoul to Jeju Island during a snowstorm to care for a friend’s pet bird. During this journey, Kyungha comes to discover how her friend’s family was impacted by the Jeju Massacre of the 1940s, in which the South Korean military, with support from the American government, killed more than 30,000 residents. We Do Not Part has already racked up multiple starred reviews, and Publishers Weekly praises it as “a meticulously rendered portrait of friendship, mother-daughter love, and hope in the face of profound loss.”
Other notable books publishing in January include Costanza Casati's Babylonia and Renée Rosen's Let's Call Her Barbie, both of which will be featured in our online book club.
You can see curated upcoming titles each month using our Books Publishing by Month view. For more upcoming titles we're looking forward to, see our Most Anticipated Books for 2025.
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