New year brings fresh batch of books to look forward to reading
Making a list of “books to look forward to” is a hopeless task; there will be hundreds and hundreds of books out in the new year, each of them potentially thrilling to somebody. But here’s a representative list of just a few that caught my eye. Here’s hoping all of us find plenty of good reading in 2023!
‘Age of Vice,’ by Deepti Kapoor (Riverhead Books):
A ton of buzz surrounds this novel. Taking place in contemporary New Delhi, it’s both crime drama and family saga, with a wealthy, corrupt family at its center.
‘Spare,’ by Prince Harry (Random House, Jan. 10):
Like everyone won’t be talking about this memoir? Let’s hope Harry hasn’t blurted everything out in his Netflix series already.
‘Pat in the City: My Life of Fashion, Style, and Breaking All the Rules,’ by Patricia Field (Dey Street Books, Feb. 14):
Now in her 70s, the influential costume designer behind “Sex and the City” and “The Devil Wears Prada” looks back on a lifetime of style.
‘Chain-Gang All-Stars,’ by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Pantheon, April 4):
This dystopian novel examines the American prison system through the lens of a profit-raising program in which two female gladiators must fight for their freedom.
‘A Living Remedy,’ by Nicole Chung (Ecco, April 4):
The author of the elegant memoir “All You Can Ever Know” returns with a second book,
writing about the illness and death of her adoptive parents during the pandemic, and about class, inequality and grief.
‘Romantic Comedy,’ by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House, April 4):
The slyly funny Sittenfeld here spins a love story involving a late-night TV sketch writer and a pop star.
‘The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder,’ by David Grann (Doubleday, April 18):
I couldn’t put down Grann’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Now he’s back with another potentially mesmerizing nonfiction saga — an 18th-century tale of shipwreck and survival.
‘Small Mercies,’ by Dennis Lehane (Harper, April 25):
Lehane, whose mesmerizing crime novels have inspired numerous movies, returns with a stand-alone thriller set in 1974 in Boston, where a young woman has gone missing and a young man is found dead.
‘The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece,’ by Tom Hanks, illustrated by R. Sikoryak (Knopf, May 9): This novel is about the making of a superhero film and the comic books that inspired it — and includes a bookwithin-the-book bonus of three comics created by Oscar-winning actor Hanks.
‘Yellowface,’ by R.F. Kuang (William Morrow, May 16):
A new-author sensation isn’t who she says she is — or the race she implies that she is — in this highly anticipated, timely novel.
‘King: A Life,’ by Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 16):
Eig writes the first new major biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in decades — and the first to include recently declassified FBI files.
‘Sing Her Down,’ by Ivy Pochoda (MCD, May 23):
Pochoda’s latest is described as a feminist Western thriller, in which two unexpectedly freed cellmates pursue each other — and the truth about their crimes.
‘Crook Manifesto,’ by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, July 18):
Whitehead’s terrific 2021 heist novel, “Harlem Shuffle,” was the first of a trilogy. The second, set in the early 1970s, continues the story of furniture store owner Ray Carney, who’s determined to stay on the straight and narrow — but it’s not easy.
‘Family Lore,’ by Elizabeth Acevedo (Ecco, Aug. 1):
Acevedo, who won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature with her novel “The Poet X,” here makes her debut in fiction for adults with a family saga of Dominican American sisters, one of whom has the gift of knowing when people will die.