We recommend: The best new book releases

Editor’s note: Dive into this wide-ranging list of recent and upcoming book releases, both fiction and nonfiction. We feature Mario Vargas Llosa’s final novel. A new book by reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that dissects Trump’s first year in his second term. A classic by the father of Japanese crime fiction, now available in English. Avni Doshi’s much anticipated new novel, interrogating the institution of marriage, and more. 

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FICTION

Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee 

This Mumbai-based novel is about a man who wakes up one day to find his wife murdered in their bedroom. George Abercrombie is a jagged American star with a deep distaste for the Indian city. His dislike is hardly abated by the skyrise (named Pinnacle) he lives in. But his life is upended with the death of his wife and his sinking dread that he would be considered the prime suspect in the killing. A more pressing detail only makes matters worse: George was drunk and has no memory of the night. 

Forced to piece things together, he finds her phone and computer missing. There is also a domestic worker who knows more than they should. In the midst of all this, everyone in the building is primed as a potential suspect. 

Meet Me in the Garden by Nina Lacour

The story revolves around Odette Honore, the youngest in her Creole family. We meet her in 1944. While she loves her elder sisters dearly, something sets her apart from them and the rest of her community. While her sisters long to be married, to be women with husbands and children, Odette wants to be an artist. And she is in love with a woman. She only confides in her cousin Delphine, who has a secret lover too. 

Fast forward to five years later, Odette is nowhere close to where she thought she would be—she’s a widowed mother living in Los Angeles, no longer as close as she used to be with Delphine. However, when Delphine needs her, she must make a difficult choice. The novel follows Odette over decades, and is a moving tale of love, friendship, and motherhood. Nina Lacour uses her own family history to tell a story built around kinship, desire and migration.

Twilight in Musashino by Seicho Matsumoto

Seicho Matsumoto, regarded as the father of modern Japanese crime fiction, explores more than just mystery in his writing, moving past the regular old thriller to incorporate the social and political context into his novels. 

In Twilight in Musashino, a young flight attendant is found murdered on the banks of a river in Musashino, strangled. In unraveling the crime, the young woman’s ties to the church become clear. The investigation reveals more, though—tying together post-war programs, treachery, and a flawed justice system, Detective Fujisawa is left to try and solve this murder while grappling with more than just one crime. Originally published in 1951 in Japanese, this book is now available in English for the first time.

I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa 

Llosa’s last novel is set in Peru, and in many ways, a farewell letter to the people there. Toño Azpilcueta, the protagonist, is a married man and music critic. He is middle-aged and is convinced that he has discovered the best musician of the country: Lalo Molfino, a young guitarist. He commits his life to write Molfino’s biography, and through that intends to rebuild his career as an academician, and underline the great potency of art in uniting people in Peru. 

Written in 2022, the novel—translated by Adrian Nathan West—carries the final imprint of the author. Llosa was already suffering from a terminal illness by then and his swan song stands as final proof of his undented legacy. 

Bad Queer by Gayathiri Kamalakanthan

This novel, written in verse, follows the very recent debut of the author’s play, Period Parrrty. Bad Queer follows Surya, a young non-binary teenager, as they come of age. However, it may come as a beautiful and much-needed surprise: coming out to their parents and their best friend was not the scary part. What’s scary is the crush they have on Blessing, a boy in drama class.

The book’s unique style sets it apart from a lot of other YA literature, incorporating poetry and illustrations into the act of storytelling. Drawing on a lot of familiar queer experiences of secrecy, anxiety, and learning to love oneself, this book is about friendship and community, and what it means to be who you are despite what culture, tradition, or even institutions will tell you.

For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died by Priya Hajela

While the Partition of India has been extensively studied, it is arguably still not enough, and doesn’t cover everything. Anyone who belongs to a family that experienced the horrors of Partition firsthand would agree.

In this novel, Priya Hajela brings us into the lives of such a family. Beant Kaur is eager to learn the stories of those who came before her—she listens to her grandfather’s retellings of his own past, trying to piece together his memories to understand where her ancestry and belonging lies. She soon realises that history is not so black and white, that it is a living, breathing thing. This is a moving novel rooted in the tradition of oral history, highlighting the complex, entangled history of Partition and confronting its reality.

The First House by Avni Doshi 

Contrary to pop culture, marriages are not made in heaven. Doshi’s sophomore novel, after her Booker-shortlisted Girl in White Cotton (2019), reiterates this by a careful dissection of marriage. The narrator is an unnamed woman. She lives in the US and is suddenly told by her husband that he wants out. Although there is no visceral love from her end, she found comfort in the familiar structure of the arrangement. In the author’s hands, this rupture of a relationship becomes a segue to explore liberation, from others as much as from one’s self. 

Grief Burns Like Fever by Minakshi Thakur 

Set against the backdrop of Covid-19, Minakshi Thakur’s novel looks at the interconnected lives that lived through the time. There is an ambulance driver entrusted with carrying corpses from the hospital to the crematoriums; a woman struggling in her marriage; another grappling with making sense of her life. In Thakur’s hands, they are treated as living beings, throbbing with pathos, but also instruments that help in understanding what became of us when we had no one else, and yet only each other, to turn to. 

NON FICTION

Regime Change by Maggie Haberman & Jonathan Swan

New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, whose prolific reporting on Donald Trump has received much attention, is back with a new book about the, let’s say, colourful American president, co-authored by Jonathan Swan. Regime Change is a gripping read that investigates the first 14 months of Trump’s second term, laying bare the many ways in which he’s managed to bend—or completely circumvent—the rules with impunity. We get a peek into the comical DOGE days with Elon Musk, the horrific Epstein stuff, the brazen actions by ICE, among controversies in the early days of his second term. In a complimentary review, The New York Times wrote:

Trump will not want to read this book because it shows him, not winning and winning, but gradually losing it as reality has the temerity not to bend itself to his whims. Will anyone whisper in his ear that Haberman and Swan have done what he demanded and told the truth? 

Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story by Brad Tolinski & Chris Gill

Jeff Beck, once of the Yardbirds (replacing Eric Clapton), could do things on the guitar that were barely believable. One of the all-time greats, as widely cited on all manner of lists. And yet somehow never quite the commercial superstar that many of his fellow guitar virtuosos—like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani—would end up becoming. There was, throughout his career, a sense of mystery around him. Now, a comprehensive new biography by Guitar World alumni Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill, brings us within touching distance of this enigmatic artist through 30 hours of original interviews with Beck conducted over several years. 

You Won’t Get Free of It by Rachel Aviv

Rachel Aviv has published this powerful collection of essays that she first reported as a writer at  The New Yorker. The underlying themes: mothers and daughters. Through intimate and sensitive reporting, Aviv tries to bring out the complexity of these relationships through these essays. The title essay, for instance, is about the renowned author Alice Munro, who, it was revealed in 2024, knew about her second husband sexually abusing her daughter Andrea. And choosing to stay quiet. The book is “refreshingly discourse-free, uninterested in winning an argument and determined to tell how it feels to be inside the mother-daughter relationship,” wrote The Guardian. “Having empathy for others ultimately lies with us, but Aviv’s work can only help.”

Sea, Salt And Spice: A History of Mumbai through Food by Meher Mirza

A lot about a city can be understood through its food. In Sea, Salt and Spice, Meher Mirza researches Mumbai when it was still Bombay, an island and home for fishermen and immigrants. Looking at that period, the author stitches together the history of the city through the food it consumed and conserved. The chosen sites of exploration are kitchens of the Kolis, an indigenous social group often regarded as the earliest settlers in the city, to the streets in present-day Mumbai.

The author took four years to write the book and shared in an interview that the daunting bit was her desire “to include the pre-colonial city in her book” given how little material exists from that time. 

Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life in Books by Shanta Gokhale 

Shanta Gokhale has been a writer and translator since 1960. In this unique collection of personal essays, she writes about her lifelong relationship with books, referencing both contemporary writers as well as the classics. She uses these as living texts, which inform the world around them, and reflect the reality of society. Along with addressing the complexities of translation, power, and literature as a tool, Gokhale brings to the table her personal experiences and anecdotes from a life spent reading and writing.

POETRY

Egrets, While War by Tishani Doshi

Doshi’s newest poem collection meditates on the vagaries of loss. There is loss incurred by ageing, by forgetting and mostly, by living. Written just after the pandemic, these poems are punctuated by the price of discord and what it means in a world that, after having recovered from a medical crisis, promised to be kinder and more gentle. But it turned out to be the opposite, as wars continue to rage in various parts, egged on by apathy from the rest. The birds in the title refers to a motif in the collection. Commenting on the intent behind her recent work, Doshi stated, “What does it mean to be alive, to love, to go through grief while wars continue to rage?”