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Either way, we’ve got the list for you.
This roundup focuses on fiction titles, all by women, all set for release in the first half of this year. We hope you enjoy it and find a book that sticks with you. The kind you can’t put down and can’t stop thinking about once you’re done with it.
Maybe you’ll find solace while reading one of these alone, in the stolen calm moments of a busy day. Or maybe it will be your book club pick, and you’ll share your thoughts with friends over snacks and drinks.
However, and wherever, you find yourself reading these this year, we’d love for you to send us your feedback and pictures, as well as the names of other books you pick up along the way that you’d like to recommend to us.
Happy reading.
‘Topics of Conversation’ by Miranda Popkey
Release date: Jan. 7
In this debut novel by Popkey, we spend 20 years with an unnamed narrator as she careens through life. The reader is privy to her conversations with other women about love, motherhood, sexuality, loneliness, shame and power.
‘Little Gods’ by Meng Jin
Release date: Jan. 14
Su Luan gave birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Seventeen years after that night, her American-raised daughter, Liya, finds herself back in China to perform her mother’s final rites. It’s here, in a country that is strange to her, that Liya confronts who her mother truly was by connecting with people from her past.
‘American Dirt’ by Jeanine Cummins
Release date: Jan. 21
Lydia Quixano Pérez is living a picture-perfect middle-class life in Acapulco. Largely untouched by the drug cartels that are beginning to ravage her hometown, she owns a bookstore she adores and has a loving husband and son. Until one day, when a charming new customer walks in. Events quickly unfold and Lydia finds herself fleeing for the border with her son in tow.
‘The Night Watchman’ by Louise Erdrich
Release date: March 3
Based on the life of Erdich’s grandfather, this novel follows the lives of a community of Native Americans in rural North Dakota who embark on a fight to save their land from the U.S. government.
‘These Ghosts Are Family’ by Maisy Card
Release date: March 3
Card’s debut novel follows the repercussions of Stanford Solomon’s decision to fake his death and steal his best friend’s identity 30 years earlier. From colonial Jamaica to modern-day Harlem, the novel traces the journey that brought Stanford to the end of his life — and an unexpected reunion with the daughter who thought he was dead.
‘Under the Rainbow’ by Celia Laskey
Release date: March 3
When a national nonprofit labels small-town Big Burr, Kan., “the most homophobic town in America,” it sends in a task force of “queer volunteers” for an unusual experiment. Tensions rise quickly, and a community is forced to reckon with what it means to belong.
‘It’s Not All Downhill from Here’ by Terry McMillan
Release date: March 31
Loretha Curry is on a mission to let everyone around her know that, on the cusp of 68, her best days are most certainly not behind her. She has her friends, her beauty empire and a husband she loves. Then, an unexpected loss rocks her worldview.
‘Afterlife’ by Julia Alvarez
Release date: April 7
Alvarez’s first adult novel in almost 15 years centers on Antonia Vega, an immigrant writer who loses her husband suddenly. Then, her sister disappears without a trace. After that, Antonia finds a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep one day, and she’s forced to face a personal and political crisis amid her own grief.
‘The Beauty of Your Face’ by Sahar Mustafah
Release date: April 7
Palestinian American Afaf Rahman is the principal of Nurrideen School for Girls, a Muslim school in the Chicago suburbs. One day, a shooter attacks the school. The terrifying encounter brings Afaf — and the reader — back to her childhood: the racism she faced, her mother’s constant longing to return to Palestine, the community she found in Islam and a family torn apart by tragedy.
‘Death in Her Hands’ by Ottessa Moshfegh
Release date: April 21
“Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” So reads the note that the narrator of Moshfegh’s newest release encounters one day on a walk in the woods. Figuring out what happened quickly balloons into a full-blown obsession. Along the way, the narrator is forced to consider her own dark past, and that nothing is ever exactly as it seems.
‘If I Had Your Face’ by Frances Cha
Release date: April 21
Cha’s debut novel follows the lives of four women who live in the same building in Seoul: Kyuri, who has a hard-won job at a Seoul “room salon,” entertaining businessmen while they drink; Miho, a talented artist who grew up as an orphan and has returned to Seoul after studying art in New York; Ara, a hair stylist who has an obsession with a boy-band pop star; and Wonna, a newlywed who is trying to have a baby she knows she can’t afford.
‘The House of Deep Water’ by Jeni McFarland
Release date: April 21
Linda, Paula and Beth couldn’t wait to escape their hometown in Michigan. When they are each forced to return, their lives collide and they must reconcile what they have been hiding from. McFarland’s debut novel explores what it means to return home.
‘The Vanishing Half’ by Brit Bennett
Release date: June 2
The Vignes sisters are identical twins who ran away from their small, Southern black community at the age of 16. As adults, everything is different about their lives, down to how they identify: One sister is raising her black daughter in the same town the sisters escaped from as teens, and the other is secretly passing for white, with a white husband who knows nothing about her past. Still, their fates remain tied.
And don’t miss these two releases
Check out these collections of short stories by classic authors Zora Neale Hurston and Madeleine L’Engle. If you’re fans of their writing, these posthumous anthologies offer work that hasn’t been widely released until now.
‘Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick’ by Zora Neale Hurston
Release date: Jan. 14
‘The Moment of Tenderness’ by Madeleine L’Engle
Release date: April 21
5 ways to read more on a daily basis
+ Commit to reading at least 10 minutes a day
+ Carry a book with you everywhere you go
+ Set a target number of books you want to read in a month
+ Make a public commitment to help stay accountable
+ Move on from a book you aren’t enjoying
