Hello, creepy friends! I have curated a list of the most anticipated February releases for you to check out. I have listed them in order of release date. I hope you find something that sparks your fancy! Please, remember to support your local library or independent bookstores when acquiring books. Have a great month!
NOTE: All book links are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I receive a small commission at no added cost to you.
Gliff by Ali Smith
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Genre(s): Literary
Summary from the publisher: From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing
An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world. Add two children. And a horse.
From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data–something easily categorizable and predictable–Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.
The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim, translated by Sean Lin Halbert
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: Mira Books
Genre(s): Science Fiction, Horror, Dystopian
Translated from Korean
Summary from the publisher: The object was a black orb, roughly two meters in diameter. Despite its large size, it made no sound as it moved. Although it wasn’t chasing Jeong-su fast enough to catch him, it was unrelenting and persistent in its pursuit…
One evening in downtown Seoul, Jeong-su is smoking a cigarette outside when he sees something impossible: a huge black orb appears out of nowhere and sucks his neighbor inside. Jeong-su manages to get away, but the terrifying sphere can move through walls, so he’s sure he won’t be able to hide for long.
The orb soon begins consuming every person caught in its path, and no one knows how to stop it. Impervious to bullets and tanks, the orb splits and multiplies, chasing the hapless residents of Seoul out into the country and sparking a global crisis with widespread violence and looting. Jeong-su must rely on his wits as he makes the arduous journey in search of his elderly parents. But the strangest phases of this ever-expanding disaster are yet to come and Jeong-su will be forced to question everything he has taken for granted.
Dryly funny, propulsive and absurd, The Black Orb is terrifyingly prescient about the fragility of human civilization.
The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Genre(s): Literary, Disaster
Translated from Japanese
Summary from the publisher: In the summer of 2020, as Europe is beginning to open back up after the first phase of the pandemic, a young Japanese woman based in the German city of Göttingen is working on a PhD about the iconography of medieval saints. She waits at the train station to meet her old friend from graduate school, Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, but has suddenly reemerged without any explanation.
When Nomiya arrives, the narrator guides him through Göttingen’s scale model of the solar system, talking about her studies, her roommate and their mutual friends. Yet it isn’t long before his spectral presence in the city begins to fray the narrator’s psyche and destabilize the world beyond: eerie discoveries are made in the forest, Pluto begins disappearing and reappearing, and snags run in time’s fabric. The narrative continues to spiral and unfold to include the Japanese physicist Terada Torahiko, mysteriously sprouting teeth, Saint Lucia, all set against the ever-lingering presence of death.
With a literary style reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, Yoko Tawada, and Yu Miri, The Place of Shells is a hypnotic, poetic novel that explores the ebbing and flowing of memory, its physical manifestations, its strange and sudden metaphors, and the overwhelming stranglehold of trauma.
House of Fury by Evelio Rosero, translated by Victor Meadowcroft
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Genre(s): Literary, Black Humor
Translated from Spanish
Summary from the publisher: Taking place entirely on a single evening–Friday, April 10, 1970–in a large Bogotá mansion, House of Fury tells a hair-raising story. Nacho Caiciedo, a magistrate of the Supreme Court of Justice, lives with his wife Alma and their six grown daughters. The Caiciedos have planned an enormous celebration in their home. But before the party has even started, the family is shocked by two pieces of news: their teenage daughter Italia is pregnant, and Alma’s prodigal brother Jesús is expected at any moment. Guests from all levels of Bogotá society arrive, two earthquakes strike, and the party descends into debauchery; Nacho, out in the city streets, searching for Italia, is kidnapped by a ragtag militia, and its troops eventually invade the party and bring more chaos. House of Fury begins as a black comedy and unravels into a grim portent of the conflict that would rage across Colombia for fifty years. As in Rosero’s previous novels, House of Fury is an indelible, fantastical work that with its unforgettable characters and unflinching, poetic, and humane voice, brings to light Colombia’s violent history.
No One Knows: Stories by Osamu Dazai, Translated by Ralph McCarthy
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Genre(s): Literary, Short Stories
Translated from Japanese
Summary from the publisher: No one really understands how we suffer. One day, when we’re adults, we may come to recall this suffering, this misery, as silly and laughable, but how are we to get through the long, hateful period until then? No one bothers to teach us that.
Osamu Dazai was a master raconteur who plumbed–in an addictive, easy style–the absurd complexities of life in a society whose expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one’s individual ideals on the altar of conformity. The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. In “Lantern,” a young woman, in love with a well-born but impoverished student, shoplifts a bathing suit for him–and ends up in the local newspaper indicted as a crazed, degenerate communist. In “Chiyojo,” a high-school girl shows early promise as a writer, but as her uncle and mother relentlessly push her to pursue a literary career, she must ask herself: is this what I really want? Or am I supposed to fulfill their own frustrated ambitions? In “Shame,” a young reader writes a fan letter to a writer she admires, only to find out, upon visiting him, that he’s a bourgeoise sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays, and decides (in true Dazai style): “Novelists are human trash. No, they’re worse than that; they’re demons. . . They write nothing but lies.”
This collection of 14 tales–a half-dozen of which have never before appeared in English–is based on a Japanese collection of, as Dazai described them, “soliloquies by female narrators.” No One Knows includes the quietly brilliant long story “Schoolgirl” and shows the fiction of this 20th-century genius in a fresh light.
Adam and Eve in Paradise by Eça de Queirós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Genre(s): Literary
Translated from Portuguese
Summary from the publisher: Gloriously translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Adam and Eve in Paradise by Eça de Queirósis not the rosy prelapsarian tale of your childhood Bible: yellow-eyed Adam is a slope-browed Neanderthal all alone and panicked, and Paradise is abominable (seethingly alive with vicious insects and roving primordial carnivores). Luckily for Adam, Eve appears: “O wonder, there before Adam, as if it were both him and not him, was another Being very similar to him, only more slender and covered with a more silken down, and who was regarding him with wide, lustrous, liquid eyes… And slowly, gently rubbing its bare knees together, the whole of this silken, tender Being was offering itself up in astonished, lascivious submission. It was Eve… It was you, O Venerable Mother!”
But still we must pity poor Adam and Eve: “Our Parents’ tireless, desperate efforts were devoted entirely to surviving in the midst of a Nature that was ceaselessly, furiously plotting their destruction. And Adam and Eve spent those days–which Semitic texts celebrate as delightful–always trembling, always whimpering, always fleeing!”
Eça de Queirós’s pleasure in the glories of language and his delight in skewering all complacencies are richly palpable, leaving the reader smiling and sighing: Ahhh, those Genesiac days…
Junie by Erin Crosby Eckstine
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Genre(s): Historical Fiction, Literary
Summary from the publisher: A young girl must face a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost, navigating truths about love, friendship, and power as the Civil War looms.
Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie.
When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act–one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests’ coachman, and their friendship soon becomes something more. Yet as long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored.
With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life. As she grapples with an increasingly unfamiliar world in which she has little control, she is forced to ask herself: When we choose love and liberation, what must we leave behind?
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Genre(s): Horror, Thriller, Black Humor
Summary from the publisher: Grim Wolds, England: Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect governess–she’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But long, listless days spent within the estate’s dreary confines come with an intimate knowledge of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family–Mr. Pounds can’t keep his eyes off Winifred’s chest, and Mrs. Pounds takes a sickly pleasure in punishing Winifred for her husband’s wandering gaze. Compounded with her disdain for the entitled Pounds children, Winifred finds herself struggling at every turn to stifle the violent compulsions of her past. French tutoring and needlework are one way to pass the time, as is admiring the ugly portraits in the gallery . . . and creeping across the moonlit lawns. . . .
Patience. Winifred must have patience, for Christmas is coming, and she has very special gifts planned for the dear souls of Ensor House. Brimming with sardonic wit and culminating in a shocking conclusion, Victorian Psycho plunges readers into the chilling mind of an iconic new literary psychopath.
Soft Core by Brittany Newell
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Genre(s): Literary
Summary from the publisher: A young woman’s madcap search for her missing ex-boyfriend takes her into the sexual underground in Brittany Newell’s savage, tender Soft Core.
Ruth is lost. She’s living in a drafty Victorian with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a ketamine dealer with a lingerie habit, overdosing on television and regretting her master’s degree. When she starts dancing at a strip club, she becomes Baby Blue, seductress of crypto bros, outcasts, and old lovers alike. Plunged into this swirling underworld of beautiful women, fast cash, ungodly hours, and strangers’ secrets, Baby’s grip on reality begins to loosen. She is sure she can handle it–until one autumn morning when Dino disappears without a trace.
Thus begins a nocturnal quest for the one she still loves–through the misty hills of San Francisco; in dive bars and bus depots; at the BDSM dungeon where she takes a part-time gig. Along the way, she meets Simon, a recluse who pays her for increasingly bizarre favors; a philosophizing suicide fetishist named Nobody; and Emeline, the beautiful and balletic new hire who reminds Baby of someone . . .
A brutally funny, propulsive story of power, fantasy, love, and loss, Brittany Newell’sSoft Core is an ode to the heartbroken and unhinged, to those whose appetites lead them astray. It is a hallucinogenic romp about a girl coming undone, whose longing for friendship, romance, and revenge will take her over the edge and back again.
Fearless and Free: A Memoir by Josephine Baker, translated by Anam Zafar & Sophie R. Lewis, introduction by Ijeoma Oluo
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher:
Genre(s):
Translated from French
Summary from the publisher: Published in the US for the first time, Fearless and Free is the memoir of the fabulous, rule-breaking, one-of-a-kind Josephine Baker, the iconic dancer, singer, spy, and Civil Rights activist.
After stealing the spotlight as a teenaged Broadway performer during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Josephine then took Paris by storm, dazzling audiences across the Roaring Twenties. In her famous banana skirt, she enraptured royalty and countless fans–Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso among them. She strolled the streets of Paris with her pet cheetah wearing a diamond collar. With her signature flapper bob and enthralling dance moves, she was one of the most recognizable women in the world.
When World War II broke out, Josephine became a decorated spy for the French Résistance. Her celebrity worked as her cover, as she hid spies in her entourage and secret messages in her costumes as she traveled. She later joined the Civil Rights movement in the US, boycotting segregated concert venues, and speaking at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr.
First published in France in 1949, her memoir will now finally be published in English. At last we can hear Josephine in her own voice: charming, passionate, and brave. Her words are thrilling and intimate, like she’s talking with her friends over after-show drinks in her dressing room. Through her own telling, we come to know a woman who danced to the top of the world and left her unforgettable mark on it.
Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us by Jennifer Finney Boylan
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: Celadon Books
Genre(s): Nonfiction, Gender
Summary from the publisher: What is the difference between men and women? Jennifer Finney Boylan, bestselling author of She’s Not There and co-author of Mad Honey with Jodi Picoult, examines the divisions–as well as the common ground–between the genders, and reflects on her own experiences, both difficult and joyful, as a transgender American.
Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There was the first bestselling work written by a transgender American. Since its publication twenty years ago, she has become the go-to person for insight into the impact of gender on our lives, from the food we eat to the dreams we dream, both for ourselves and for our children. But Cleavage is more than a deep dive into gender identity; it’s also a look at the difference between coming out as trans in 2000–when many people reacted to Boylan’s transition with love–and the present era of blowback and fear.
How does gender affect our sense of self? Our body image? The passage of time? The friends we lose–and keep? Boylan considers her womanhood, reflects on the boys and men who shaped her, and reconceives of herself as a writer, activist, parent, and spouse. With heart-wrenching honesty, she illustrates the feeling of liminality that followed her to adulthood, but demonstrates the redemptive power of love through it all.
With Boylan’s trademark humor and poignancy, Cleavage is a sharp, witty, and captivating look at the triumphs and losses of a life lived in two genders. Cleavage provides hope for a future in which we all have the freedom to live joyfully as men, as women, and in the space between us.
Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: Berkley Books
Genre(s): Historical Fiction, Biographical
Summary from the publisher: She found the literary voices that would inspire the world…. The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian.
In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all.
W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Amidst rumors of their tumultuous affair, Jessie is determined to prove herself. She attacks the challenge of discovering young writers with fervor, finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends. Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives…every African American writer in the country wants their work published there.
When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts. She has shaped a generation of literary legends, but as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.
Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Genre(s): Literary, Historical Fiction
Summary from the publisher: A classic in the making: a mesmerizing novel about marriage and ambition, sexuality and secrecy, and the true costs of building an empire.
At the turn of the 20th century, Vivian Lesperance is determined to flee her origins in Utica, New York, and avoid repeating her parents’ dull, limited life. When she meets Oscar Schmidt, a middle manager at a soap company, Vivian finds a partner she can guide to build the life she wants-not least because, more interested in men himself, Oscar will leave Vivian to tend to her own romances with women.
But Vivian’s plans require capital, so the two pair up with Squire Clancey, scion of an old American fortune. Together they found Clancey & Schmidt, a preeminent manufacturer of soap, perfume, and candles. When Oscar and Squire fall in love, the trio form a new kind of partnership.
Vivian reaches the pinnacle of her power building Clancey & Schmidt into an empire of personal care products while operating behind the image of both men. But exposure threatens, and all three partners are made aware of how much they have to lose.
For readers of Hernan Diaz’sTrustand Colm Tóibín’sThe Magician, with echoes of Gustave Flaubert and E.M. Forster,Mutual Interestis a beguiling story of queer romance, empire, and power.
The Bones Beneath My Skin by TJ Klune
Publishing date: 4 February 2025
Publisher: Tor Books
Genre(s): Fantasy
Summary from the publisher: A spine-tingling standalone novel by bestselling author TJ Klune–a supernatural road-trip thriller featuring an extraordinary young girl and her two unlikely protectors on the run from cultists and the government.
There’s nothing more human than a broken heart. In the spring of 1995, Nate Cartwright has lost everything: his parents are dead, his only brother wants nothing to do with him, and he’s been fired from his job as a journalist in Washington, DC.
With nothing left to lose, he returns to his family’s summer cabin outside the small mountain town of Roseland, Oregon, to try and find some sense of direction. The cabin should be empty. It’s not.
Inside is a man named Alex. And with him is an extraordinary ten-year-old girl who calls herself Artemis Darth Vader. Artemis, who isn’t exactly as she appears.
Soon it becomes clear that Nate must make a choice: let himself drown in the memories of his past, or fight for a future he never thought possible. Because the girl is special. And forces are descending upon them who want nothing more than to control her.
Covert Joy: Selected Stories by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson, introduction by Rachel Kushner
Publishing date: 11 February 2025
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Genre(s): Literary, Short Stories
Translated from Portuguese
Summary from the publisher: This radiant selection of Clarice Lispector’s best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as “The Smallest Woman in the World,” “Love,” “Family Ties,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” Lispector’s luminous regard for life’s small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume. Covert Joy offers the particular bliss a book can bring that she expresses in the title story:
Joy would always be covert for me… Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy.I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover
Waiting for the Long Night Moon: Stories by Amanda Peters
Publishing date: 11 February 2025
Publisher: Catapult
Genre(s): Historical Fiction, Literary, Short Stories, Indigenous
Summary from the publisher: In her debut collection of short fiction, Amanda Peters describes the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place–from contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for the right to clean water
In this intimate collection, Amanda Peters melds traditional storytelling with beautiful, spare prose to describe the dignity of the traditional way of life, the humiliations of systemic racism and the resilient power to endure. A young man returns from residential school only to realize he can no longer communicate with his own parents. A grieving mother finds purpose and healing on the front lines as a water protector. And a nervous child dances in her first Mawi’omi. The collection also includes the Indigenous Voices Award-winning and title story “Waiting for the Long Night Moon.”
At times sad, sometimes disturbing but always redemptive, the stories in Waiting for the Long Night Moon will remind you that where there is grief there is also joy, where there is trauma there is resilience and, most importantly, there is power.
The Dollhouse Academy by Margarita Montimore
Publishing date: 11 February 2025
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Genre(s): Thriller
Summary from the publisher: Ivy Gordon is living on borrowed time. For the past eighteen years, she has been the most famous star at the Dollhouse Academy, the elite boarding school and talent incubator that every aspiring performer dreams of attending. But now, at age thirty-four, she is tired of pretending everything is fine. In secret diary entries, Ivy begins to reveal the truth of her life at the Dollhouse: strange medical exams, mysterious supplements, and something unspeakable that’s left Ivy terrified and feeling like a prisoner.
Ramona Halloway and her best friend, Grace Ludlow, grew up idolizing Ivy. Now both twenty-two, neither has made much headway in showbiz until a lucky break grants them entry to the Dollhouse. They’re enchanted by the picturesque campus and the chance to perform alongside their idols. When Ramona begins to receive threatening anonymous messages, it’s easy to dismiss them as a prank from a rival. Her bigger concern is Grace’s skyrocketing success, while Ramona struggles to keep up with the fierce competition. As the messages grow more unsettling, so does life at the Dollhouse. Can Ramona overcome her jealousy and resentment to figure out what’s really going on? Will Ivy finally find her voice, before another young performer follows her catastrophic path?
With dark academia twists and enormous heart, The Dollhouse Academy is a novel about the complexities of friendship, our desire to be seen and understood, and the true cost of making our dreams a reality.
Life Hacks for a Little Alien by Alice Franklin
Publishing date: 11 February 2025
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Genre(s): Coming of Age, Literary
Summary from the publisher: One little girl’s obsession with a mysterious manuscript begins a great adventure in this charming, witty, and profoundly moving debut novel about growing up neurodivergent that will make you “laugh, tear up, and feel hopeful” (Angie Kim, author of Happiness Falls). Perfect for readers of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Remarkably Bright Creatures.
“Climb up here, Little Alien. Sit next to me. I will tell you about life on this planet. I will tell you how it goes.”
Before she thinks of herself as Little Alien, our protagonist is a lonely little girl who doesn’t understand the world the way other children seem to. So when a late-night TV special introduces her to the mysterious Voynich Manuscript–an ancient tome written in an indecipherable language–Little Alien experiences something she hasn’t before: hope. Could there be others like her, who also feel like they’re from another planet?
Convinced the Voynich Manuscript holds the answers she needs, Little Alien and her best (and only) friend Bobby decide they must find this strange book. Where that decision leads them will change everything.
Narrated by an unexpected guide who has arrived to give Little Alien the advice she’ll need to find her way, Life Hacks for a Little Alien is both a coming-of-age adventure and a love letter to language. Alice Franklin will have you swinging from stitches to tears on the uneven path to finding a life that fits, even when you yourself do not.
Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett
Publishing date: 11 February 2025
Publisher: Del Rey Books
Genre(s): Fantasy, Romance
Series: Emily Wilde #3
Summary from the publisher: The third installment in the heartwarming and enchanting Emily Wilde series, about a curmudgeonly scholar of folklore and the fae prince she loves
Emily Wilde has spent her life studying faeries. A renowned dryadologist, she has documented hundreds of species of Folk in her Encyclopaedia of Faeries. Now she is about to embark on her most dangerous academic project yet: studying the inner workings of a faerie realm–as its queen.
Along with her former academic rival–now fiancé–the dashing and mercurial Wendell Bambleby, Emily is immediately thrust into the deadly intrigues of Faerie as the two of them seize the throne of Wendell’s long-lost kingdom, which Emily finds a beautiful nightmare filled with scholarly treasures.
Emily has been obsessed with faerie stories her entire life, but at first she feels as ill-suited to Faerie as she did to the mortal world: How can an unassuming scholar such as herself pass for a queen? Yet there is little time to settle in, for Wendell’s murderous stepmother has placed a deadly curse upon the land before vanishing without a trace. It will take all of Wendell’s magic–and Emily’s knowledge of stories–to unravel the mystery before they lose everything they hold dear.
Hungerstone by Kat Dunn
Publishing date: 18 February 2025
Publisher: Zando
Genre(s): Horror, Fantasy
Summary from the publisher: A compulsive feminist reworking of Carmilla, the queer novella that inspired Dracula.
“Hungerstone is a delicious tribute to the inherent horrors of womanhood and the desperate and exquisite vulgarity of desire. This is everything I dream of in a novel.” –Ava Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning and Lady Macbeth
It’s the height of the industrial revolution and ten years into Lenore’s marriage to steel magnate Henry, their relationship has soured. When Henry’s ambitions take them from London to the remote British moorlands to host a hunting party, a shocking carriage accident brings the mysterious Carmilla into their lives. Carmilla, who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night. Carmilla, who stirs up something deep within Lenore. And before long, girls from the local villages fall sick, consumed by a terrible hunger . . .
As the day of the hunt draws closer, Lenore begins to unravel, questioning the role she has been playing all these years. Torn between regaining her husband’s affection and the cravings Carmilla has awakened, soon Lenore will uncover a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Publishing date: 25 February 2025
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Genre(s): Nonfiction, Memoir
Summary from the publisher: From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values.
On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human–not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.
This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.
Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Robin Myers & Sarah Booker
Publishing date: 25 February 2025
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Genre(s): Literary, Mystery
Translated from Spanish
Summary from the publisher: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.
A city is always a cemetery. A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”
The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.
Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.
Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley
Publishing date: 25 February 2025
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
Genre(s): Literary
Summary from the publisher: Look, the song whispered to me, that day in my living room. Life can be so big.
It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy–who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it–can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night.
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs–and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?
Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.
The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker
Publishing date: 25 February 2025
Publisher: Random House
Genre(s): Literary, Science Fiction
Summary from the publisher: In this spellbinding and provocative novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Miracles, a young mother is struck by sudden and puzzling psychological symptoms that illuminate the mysterious dimensions of the human mind–and of love.
A year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. Three days after her first visit to a psychiatrist, Jane suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.
Are Jane’s strange experiences the result of being overwhelmed by motherhood, or are they manifestations of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago and who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever deeper into the farthest reaches of her mind and cause him to question everything he thinks he knows about so-called reality–including events in his own life.
Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is both a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate and a mesmerizing literary puzzle about the bonds of love–between mother and child, between a man and a woman, and among those we’ve lost but who may still be among us.
The Dark Mirror by Samantha Shannon
Publishing date: 25 February 2025
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Genre(s): Fantasy
Series: Bone Season #5
Summary from the publisher: Everything is about to change. Paige Mahoney is outside the Republic of Scion for the first time in more than a decade-but she has no idea how she got to the free world. Half a year has been wiped from her memory.
Her journey back to the revolution soon takes her to Venice, where the Domino Programme has uncovered evidence of a secret Scion plan. Before Paige can return to London, she must help the network unravel the sinister Operation Ventriloquist, which threatens to bring Europe to its knees in weeks.
And it soon becomes clear that the one person who could recover her memories-Arcturus Mesarthim-might also hold the key to thwarting Scion, allowing the revolution to strike an unprecedented blow . . .
With its intricate worldbuilding, slow burn romance, and “complex, ever evolving, scrappy yet touching” (NPR) heroine, the Bone Season series shows Samantha Shannon at the height of her considerable powers.
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