Start your 2022 reading list with 15 of the most anticipated books
Here’s hoping that 2022 brings us ... oh, at this point, I’ll settle for anything halfway decent. But here are 15 much-anticipated books in 2022 that might make the new year bright, in order of planned publication.
‘To Paradise,’ by Hanya Yanagihara (Penguin Random House, Jan. 11):
Seven years after the publication of “A Little Life,” Yanagihara returns with a sprawling novel taking place in three time periods: 1893, 1993 and 2093.
‘Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom,’ by Carl Bernstein (Macmillan, Jan. 11): The journalist and co-author of “All the President’s Men” writes of his roots in journalism, beginning as a 16-year-old copy boy for the Washington, D.C. Evening Star in 1960.
‘You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays,’ by Zora Neale Hurston, edited and with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West (HarperCollins, Jan. 18):
This is the first comprehensive collection of essays and articles by the legendary Harlem Renaissance author of “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” who died in 1960.
‘The Violin Conspiracy,’ by Brendan Slocumb (Anchor, Feb. 1):
Slocumb, a violinist and music teacher, makes his fiction debut with a page-turner of a tale about a Black classical musician whose priceless violin suddenly goes missing.
‘Moon Witch, Spider King,’ by Marlon James (Penguin Random House, Feb. 15):
The sequel to “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” this book continues the author’s
planned Dark Star trilogy, set in a mythical African landscape.
‘Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free,’ by Sarah Weinman (Penguin Random House, Feb. 22):
Tales of wrongful conviction are sadly commonplace, but here’s a rare tale of wrongful exoneration by the author of “The Real Lolita.”
‘Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004-2021,’ by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday, March 1):
In over 50 pieces, the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” examines a variety of topics, ranging from the Trump years to zombies to pandemics to granola.
‘Cover Story,’ by Susan Rigetti (HarperCollins, April 5):
Rigetti’s debut is a clever epistolary novel with an elegant con woman at its center.
‘The Candy House,’ by Jennifer Egan (Simon & Schuster, April 5):
Pulitzer Prize-winner Egan returns with a tale of a tech genius who creates a way to access one’s memory — and that of others.
‘Sea of Tranquility,’ by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf, April 5):
Following up “The Glass Hotel,” Mandel’s latest is a timetravel mystery set partly on Vancouver Island.
‘Finding Me,’ by Viola Davis (HarperCollins, April 26):
Actor Davis has spoken about having grown up in “abject poverty”; here, in her new memoir, she tells the full story of her life.
‘City on Fire,’ by Don Winslow (HarperCollins, April 26):
Postponed from fall 2021, this is the first book in a planned trilogy, a crime saga inspired by Homer’s “The Iliad.”
‘Tracy Flick Can’t Win,’ by Tom Perrotta (Scribner, June 7):
Yes, class president wannabe Tracy Flick — played by Reese Witherspoon in the film “Election” — is back, and she’s middle-aged and working at a high school.
‘Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks,’ by Patrick Radden Keefe (Penguin Random House, June 28):
I’ll read anything Keefe, a New Yorker writer and master of nonfiction, writes. This one, a collection of his New Yorker pieces about criminals and rascals, sounds irresistible.
‘The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir,’ by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Penguin Random House, July 12):
The author of “Fruit of the Drunken Tree” here writes of growing up in Bogota, Colombia in the 1980s and ’90s — inspired by a head injury in her 20s that resulted in not only amnesia but the ability to see ghosts.