Looking for fiction books to gift? This list is suggestions of new fiction releases, mostly from the past few months. Included in the list are the fiction titles from the New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year. Plus: every end of the year Literati staff are given the difficult task of naming their favorite book from the year. Click here to see the 2022 staff favorite list. Happy holidays and happy book gifting!
From the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to maturity.
* New York Times Top 10 Books of 2022 *
From one of the most celebrated writers of our time comes an “inventive, effervescent” (Oprah Daily) novel about the memory.
* New York Times Top 10 Books of 2022 *
Namwali Serpell’s remarkable new novel captures the uncanny experience of grief, the way the past breaks over the present like waves in the sea. The Furrows is a bold exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a story of mistaken identity, double consciousness, and the wishful—and sometimes willful—longing for reunion with those we’ve lost.
* New York Times Top 10 Books of 2022 *
Exceeding the extraordinary promise of Bennett’s mold-shattering debut, Checkout 19 is a radical affirmation of the power of the imagination and the magic escape those who master it open to us all.
* New York Times Top 10 Books of 2022 *
At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.
* New York Times Top 10 Books of 2022 *
Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.
* 2022 National Book Award Fiction Winner *
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road returns with the first of a two-volume masterpiece: The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.
The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road returns with the second volume of The Passenger series. Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.
A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, Pulitzer Prize-winning Geraldine Brooks braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history.
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club.
Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s a story about the power—and limitations—of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact.
An exuberant, bighearted novel about two teenage misfits who spectacularly collide one fateful summer, and the art they make that changes their lives forever.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns in the eighteenth book in #1 New York Times bestseller Louise Penny's beloved series.
“A luminous and wrenching portrait of a frighteningly possible future," The Light Pirate is a hopeful, sweeping story of survival and resilience spanning one extraordinary woman’s lifetime as she navigates the uncertainty, brutality, and arresting beauty of a rapidly changing world. — Booklist, starred review
"The Means is such a fast-paced, breezy comedic novel that you may find yourself surprised that Fusselman deftly and directly leads you to existential dilemmas and the absurdity of capitalism and striving for more." — The Millions
“Alternatingly heart-pounding and heartbreaking. This collaboration between two best-selling authors seamlessly weaves together Olivia and Lily’s journeys, creating a provocative exploration of the strength that love and acceptance require.” — The Washington Post
From Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street, comes the Shirley Jackson Award-winning novel Little Eve, a heart-pounding tale of faith and family, with a devastating twist.
In this “sinister, jaw-dropping” (Sarah Penner, author of The Lost Apothecary) debut novel, a circle of researchers uncover a mysterious deck of tarot cards and shocking secrets in New York’s famed Met Cloisters.
"Step aside Miss Marple, Eugenia Potter, and Kinsey Millhone—Georgia O'Keeffe is the new sleuth in town! Kathryn Lasky brings the rich imagination of her YA and Juvenile books to Light On Bone, a stunning, suspenseful adult mystery. Vivid prose brushstrokes bring the legendary artist, the Southwest landscape she loved, and a complicated plot with historical and imagined characters to life." — Katherine Hall Page, author of the award-winning Faith Fairchild series
From the bestselling author of Mexican Gothic and Velvet Was the Night comes a lavish historical drama reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Mexico.
"[Shrines of Gaiety] is set during Jazz Age London, in all its fizzy madness and desperation for the new, the better, the hustle. Atkinson simply has a magician's ability to switch readers’ moods within a few paragraphs, and as dark as her stories can get, within them always shines a beacon of humanity.” — Gillian Flynn, author of Dark Places
"This ghost story is a perfect example of new wave horror that will also satisfy fans of classic Stephen King." — Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic
A masterful debut that weaves together the lives of three generations of a Mexican American family bound by love, and a curse.
In nine stories that span the globe, What We Fed to the Manticore takes readers inside the minds of a full cast of animal narrators to understand the triumphs, heartbreaks, and complexities of the creatures that share our world.
“Shocking…Achingly poetic…Sharp and beautiful as coral polyps…Armfield exercises an exquisite―even sadistic―sense of suspense." — Ron Charles, The Washington Post
John Grisham returns to Mississippi with the riveting story of two sons of immigrant families who grow up as friends, but ultimately find themselves on opposite sides of the law. Grisham’s trademark twists and turns will keep you tearing through the pages until the stunning conclusion.
Three couples rent a luxury cabin in the woods for a weekend getaway to die for in this chilling locked-room thriller by New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger.
“A quirky, gruesome, utterly original feminist horror experience.” — The New York Times Book Review
Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in First Person Singular all touch beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory — all with a signature Murakami twist.
N.K. Jemisin’s Great Cities Duology, which began with The City We Became and concludes with The World We Make, is a masterpiece of speculative fiction from one of the most important writers of her generation.
With her trademark spare, crystalline prose—a voice infused with “intimate, fragile, desperate humanness” (The Washington Post)—Elizabeth Strout turns her exquisitely tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton through the early days of the pandemic.
Based on a true story, an epic historical novel from the award-winning author of Things in Jars that illuminates the lives of two characters: a girl shipwrecked on an island off Western Australia and, three hundred years later, a boy finding a home with his grandfather on the very same island.
Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.
Switching between the perspectives of Lily and Atlas, It Starts with Us picks up right where the epilogue for the “gripping, pulse-pounding” (Sarah Pekkanen, author of Perfect Neighbors) bestselling phenomenon It Ends with Us left off.
The author of the “swoon-worthy debut” (Harper’s Bazaar) The Charm Offensive returns with a festive romantic comedy about a woman who fakes an engagement with her landlord…only to fall for his sister.
The author of award-winning Hamnet brings the world of Renaissance Italy to jewel-bright life in this unforgettable fictional portrait of the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de' Medici as she makes her way in a troubled court.
A cleverly voiced psychological thriller from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song.
A transporting, irresistible debut novel that takes its heroine, Cristabel Seagrave, from a theatre made of whalebones to covert operations during World War II—a story of love, family, bravery, lost innocence, and self-transformation.
Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for that world or ours.
With sparkling intelligence and rapier wit, John Banville revisits some of his career’s most memorable figures, in a novel as mischievous as it is brilliantly conceived. The Singularities occupies a singular space and will surely be one of his most admired works.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of A Thousand Acres: An amazing “mash-up of a Western, a serial-killer mystery and a feminist-inflected tale of life in a bordello” (The Washington Post).
In New York Times bestselling author Anthony Horowitz’s ingenious fourth literary whodunit following The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, and A Line to Kill, Horowitz becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation — and only one man can prove his innocence: his newly estranged partner in solving crime, Detective Hawthorne.
John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time—among them The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is a bard of alternative families. In The Last Chairlift, readers will once more be in his thrall.
In the follow-up to the “bedazzling, bewitching, and be-wonderful” (New York Times) bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Less: A Novel, the awkward and lovable Arthur Less returns in an unforgettable road trip across America.
A powerful and sweeping novel set over two tumultuous decades in Iraq from the National Book Award-nominated author of The Beekeeper. Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
Colorful, crass, and profound, Toad is Katherine Dunn’s ode to her time as a student at Reed College in the late 1960s. It is filled with the same mordant observations about the darkest aspects of human nature that made Geek Love a cult classic and Dunn a misfit hero. Daring and bizarre, Toad demonstrates her genius for black humor and her ecstatic celebration of the grotesque. Fifty-some years after it was written, Toad is a timely story about the ravages of womanhood and a powerful addition to the canon of feminist fiction.
For readers of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and My Brilliant Friend, Bushra Rehman's Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion is an unforgettable story about female friendship and queer love.
A wealthy family shrouded in scandal; a detective tasked with solving an impossible cold case; and a woman with a dark past collide in Hannah Morrissey's stunning new Black Harbor mystery, The Widowmaker.
To Fill a Yellow House is as vibrant and surprising as the city it is set in and marks the arrival of a bright and bold new talent.