With the start of the new year, there are so many new books being anticipated by book lovers. This year features much talked about political movements, such as the issues with gun violence and inflation, as well as new releases from best-selling authors Jenny Odell, Margaret Atwood, and Eleanor Catton.
Here are some of the most anticipated books from 2023 to help get you in the reading mood:
- Bloodbath Nation, Paul Auster
Genre: Nonfiction
Synopsis: In this short, searing book, Auster traces centuries of America’s use and abuse of guns through the colonial prehistory of the Republic, armed conflict against the native population, the forced enslavement of millions, and the mass shootings that dominate the current news cycle. He examines the embattled gun-control and anti-gun-control camps, frames gun violence as a public health issue, and investigates the details of one horrific incident- including the perpetrator’s unchecked purchase of the gun he used and the suffering of a bystander-turned-hero. Filled with haunting photographs by Spencer Ostrander that document the abandoned sites of more than thirty mass shootings, Bloodbath Nation is an unflinching work about guns in America that asks: What kind of society do we want to live in?
- Age of Vice, Deepti Kapoor
Genre: Fiction
Synopsis: Equal parts crime thriller and family saga, transporting readers from the dusty villages of Uttar Pradesh to the urban energy of New Delhi, Age of Vice is an intoxicating novel of gangsters and lovers, false friendships, forbidden romance, and the consequences of corruption. It is binge-worthy entertainment at its literary best.
- The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz
Genre: Nonfiction
Synopsis: With warmth, wisdom, and compelling life stories, The Good Life shows us how we can make our lives happier and more meaningful through our connections to others.
- The Survivalists, Kashana Cauley
Genre: Fiction
Synopsis: For readers of Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, and Zakiya Harris’s The Other Black Girl, The Survivalists is a darkly humorous novel from a smart and relevant new literary voice that’s packed with tension, curiosity, and wit, and unafraid to ask the questions most relevant to a new generation of Americans: Does it make sense to climb the corporate ladder? What exactly are the politics of gun ownership? And in a world where it’s nearly impossible for young people to earn enough money to afford stable housing, what does it take in order to survive?
- Victory City, Salman Rushdie
Genre: Fantasy
Synopsis: Brilliantly styled as a translation of an ancient epic, this is a saga of love, adventure, and myth that is in itself a testament to the power of storytelling.
- Old Babes in the Wood, Margaret Atwood
Genre: Short Stories
Synopsis: Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales, which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastating.
- The Sun Walks Down, Fiona McFarlane
Genre: Historical Fiction
Synopsis: In September 1883, the South Australian town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the whole town is intent on finding him. As they search the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly – newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen – explore their own relationships with the complex landscape unsettling history of the Flinders Ranges.
The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is unfamiliar, multicultural, and noisy with opinions, arguments, longings, and terrors. It’s haunted by many gods – the sun among them, rising and falling on each day that Denny could be found or lost forever.
- Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny Odell
Genre: Nonfiction
Synopsis: Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it–the way we experience time itself–and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can “save” time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside these things, time might also save us.
- Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton
Genre: Fiction
Synopsis: A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
- Above Ground, Clint Smith
Genre: Poetry
Synopsis: Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith’s lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children’s lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up—through the changing world of which we are all a part.
Above Ground is a breathtaking collection that follows Smith’s first award-winning book of poetry, Counting Descent.
