The Best New Book Releases Out January 9, 2024

Bonnie Jo Campbell comes highly recommended by our Chief of Staff — and Book Riot podcast co-host — Rebecca Joines Schinsky. Plus, her latest has been selected as Jenna Bush Hager’s January book club pick. Here, we watch as the descendants of local Michigan swamp healer Hermine “Herself” Zook spend their days. One of Hermine’s grandchildren, Dorothy (also known as Donkey, naturally), is left by her mother, Rose, to grow up wild and so spends her days in nature and in math books, hoping for her parents to return. Soon, change comes to the women and girl children of the swamp in the form of family secrets and violence.

To whet your appetite even more, you can read an excerpt of The Waters here.

In this posthumously released novel that channels Nabokov, shy 23-year-old punk singer Kyoko plots a murder. Her target is the philandering Daniel, a white man with a fetish for Asian women who has left a trail of destruction in his wake. Among those he’s damaged is Emi, Kyoko’s mother, who Kyoko believes died because of Daniel. Then there’s Alma, another Asian woman musician. In her final days of battling multiple sclerosis, she looks back on her relationship with Daniel and wonders about its sincerity. No matter, Daniel has been kidnapped by Kyoko and is going to have to cop to a few things if he wants to live.

Hot Mess Heroine is one of my favorite sub-genres, and this debut promises all the deliciously trifling and raggedy antics that protagonists in books like The Guest, Luster, and Queenie deliver. Mixed-race British girl Agnes is the one who puts the sugar in Sugar, Baby. At 21, she’s a little listless and without direction — she works as a cleaner, still lives at home, and blows all her money during weekend club visits. But then she meets the daughter of a wealthy client, and she’s suddenly thrust into the world of being a sugar baby. Though the lifestyle comes with “champagne on tap,” there’s a huge downside to it. Her super-religious mother has kicked her out, and there’s more danger and emptiness than Agnes first realized.

Apart from being a great book out this week, this is one I’m looking forward to for the entire year. It’s giving Rebecca meets the movie Three Thousand Years of Longing (starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, if you’re unfamiliar). It centers around Sana, who, along with her father, is one of the latest inhabitants of the once-grand Akbar Manzil, an estate off the coast of South Africa. Usually, the estate is a place where people go to forget themselves, even going so far as to ignore the estate’s uncanny qualities — like bones in the garden and mysterious moving figures — but Sana becomes obsessed with the contents of a forgotten room. The room’s pictures, diary, and other artifacts tell Sana of Akbar Manzil’s original owner’s second wife, who died a hundred years ago. She compulsively dives deeper into the woman’s life, but little does she know of the djinn that watches her from the shadows.