The Best New Book Releases Out November 28, 2023

Okorafor, ever in her Africanfuturist bag, continues The Desert Magician’s Duology, which started with 2007’s Shadow Speaker — though I don’t think you need to have read the first to read this one. In Niger in 2077, desert magician and rain bringer Dikéogu Obidimkpa feels as if he’s losing his mind. And he very well might be. Which makes his journey to save the earth — a journey he went on with shadow speaker Ejii Ubaid years ago that he now realizes never quite finished — all the more complicated. When the two reunite, he’s more powerful than ever, but both rainmaker and shadow speaker have changed, and he doesn’t know if he can hold on to his sanity.

Ms. Sutanto deals in bangers, okay? And this YA shout-out to You’ve Got Mail features a famous gamer girl who uses a secret online identity to keep the male dusties away. She’s so tight-lipped about it that even her sweet online bestie, whose username is Sourdawg, doesn’t know. Which…is fine because that’s online, not IRL. Except that she transfers to the fancy school he goes to, and now that she realizes her feelings are a little deeper than she initially thought, she’s not sure how he’ll react to her secret.

This 2023 National Book Award finalist was initially released in 1982 and went on to become a Surinamese queer lit classic. When Noenka tries to divorce her abusive husband of nine days, and he refuses, she leaves her coastal hometown for the capital. Thoroughly unmoored, she finds heated romances but is plagued by the past and society’s expectations. Through Roemer’s rich, descriptive, and, at times, dreamy language, we see Noenka as she tries to understand herself in a world of religious judgment and lingering colonialism.

I read The Crimson Petal and the White years ago and remember it giving me a little turbulence (the good kind). I would never think the author of that book would write a philosophical book on music, but I’m not mad. With fresh eyes (ears?), Faber looks at how we relate to music, asking both “How do we listen to music?” as well as “Why do we listen to music?” By considering everything that goes into our perception of music — like biology, illness, age, etc. — Faber challenges how music gets classified as “good” or “bad.”

Gem Echols is that enby — someone known to be many people’s queer awakening. But underneath the Georgia Seminole teen’s endearing exterior lies a bundle of nerves and anxiety that only their bestie, trans kid Enzo, understands. But Enzo is miles away in Brooklyn, and Gem’s life just got extra wild. An odd girl named Willa Mae shows up and saves Gem from someone calling themselves the goddess of Death; what’s more, Willa Mae says she and Gem are old companions, and she knows about the visions that haunt Gem. She tells Gem that they are a reincarnated god, and their past trifling ways will have many more gods coming after them.