The Best New Book Releases Out September 24, 2024

After reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Tokarczuk’s books and I go together real bad. Here, she’s set her glittering and thrilling prose to a sanitarium in 1913 Poland. Mieczysław is a young man suffering from tuberculosis who arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, where he will gather every day with other residents to discuss class, war, and the inherent value of women. But strange things are happening while Guesthousers do all this pontificating—something is watching them. And as Mieczysław investigates what’s going on, he realizes it may be too late. I am so ready for the humor, folklore, and horror this promises.

All her life, Sarita has been watched over by a guardian angel—or, at least, what she thinks is an angel—who she calls Angelo. But then, one day, Angelo kills someone she cares about, and suddenly, the darkness that’s been hidden in her shadows starts to come forth. She’ll have to embrace it if she’s to win against hell’s minions.

When was the last time you read a romance novel set in Việt Nam? Right, me neither, which is partially why Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour sounds like so much fun. But let’s rewind a bit and get into Evie, who has just been fired from a poetry professorship by her secret boyfriend—which makes me want to hold her hand gently while I tell her some things. In any case, for a second, it seems like things are kind of looking up when her Auntie Hảo leaves her a memory-filled row house in San Francisco. But there’s a catch: to actually inherit it, she’ll have to go on a matchmaking tour in her family’s native Việt Nam. That’s where Adam comes in. He’s busting his you-know-what in order to prove himself as the CMO of his sister’s matchmaking business and joins the inaugural tour. It’s there that he meets Evie, and his grumpy uptightness is countered by her chaotic whimsy. As they keep getting thrown together in places like the busy streets of Hồ Chí Minh City and against the backdrop of the beautiful waterfalls in Đà Lạt, animosity turns into something sweeter.

In my opinion, too much of Western European culture situates humanity as being fundamentally disconnected from its environment, and here, Amrith bridges that gap. He looks at the last 500 years, honing in on how humans have shaped the world around us, and how that world has shaped us back. Agricultural innovations have fed billions, just as they have allowed us to exploit physical resources and other human beings. Imperialism is juxtaposed with the environment, as genocide is with ecocide. This is a vital addition to human historical texts and to climate nonfiction.

Okay, so part of me felt physically repulsed by the general Christmas theme—I only just saw the first Halloween decorations of the year—but I have to say that the “Knives Out gets a holiday rom-com twist in this rivals-to-lovers romance-mystery” description lowered my blood pressure a bit.

In this locked-room mystery, the Queen of cozy mysteries, Maggie Chase, is not feeling thriller writer Ethan Wyatt, and he’s not too hot on her himself. But they both get an odd invitation to a Christmas house party from a reclusive fan. When they get to the English estate, they find out they were invited by thee most powerful author in the world, the Duchess of Death, Eleanor Ashley. Then Eleanor disappears, seemingly from a locked room, and as time goes on, Maggie isn’t sure if Eleanor is really in danger or if this is some elaborate ruse. What’s more, is Ethan trustworthy, or is he her competition? Or, more confusingly, is he someone she wants to be with?