January 11, 2025
January usually brings the making (or breaking) of resolutions, and reading more is often on the list. Here are five new titles to entice—from a slender novella that packs surprising power to an epic story set in a reimagined future Nepal. Three of these play with self-reinvention. Whatever your attention span for literature this winter, we hope there is a book below for you.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Rosarita
By ANITA DESAI
Published by SCRIBNER
Bonita is approached by a stranger in San Miguel Allende, Mexico who claims to know her mother when she lived there as an artist. But she knows nothing of this episode in her mother’s life and doubts the veracity of the story. Desai has stated: “Rosarita [is] a kind of… collage of my impressions of the India that I had left and the Mexico that was new to me…. I discovered that I could put my bewilderment into my narrator’s voice… who created this imaginary portrait of the mother who was no longer alive.” It is a superb late-life achievement for this 88-year-old award-winning Indian writer.
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Isaac’s Song
By DANIEL BLACK
Published by HANOVER SQUARE PRESS
“The heart decides who to love—not the head,” says Isaac’s therapist after the death of his estranged father, “discover the pieces of your life you threw away.” He now lives in Chicago after leaving his Missouri roots behind. Yet, amid the ’80s AIDS epidemic and shattering racial events, Isaac will return to his Southern roots to piece together who he was, and who he wants to be. Black’s previous novel (Don’t Cry for Me) explored the father-son relationship from the father’s point of view. This novel is a tender coming-of-age story as Isaac deals with the fallout from his parent’s death. Black’s capacity for deep empathy and open-heartedness is on full display.
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Another Man in the Street
By Caryl Phillips
Published by FSG
Victor has grown up in St. Kitts with big dreams of a different life. His father is a cane cutter but Victor longs to be a writer and leave the West Indian island of his birth for urban sophistication. He arrives in London during the heyday of the ’60s when even the city is reinventing itself. He is now known as Lucky and works as a rent collector for slumlord Peter. They both are attracted to Ruth, the forlorn office secretary and each of the three carry scars from past traumas. Phillips’s haunting story becomes a dramatic exploration of migration and the toll it can take on people who transplant themselves.
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Darkmotherland
By SAMRAT UPADHYAY
Published by SOHO PRESS
Upadhyay, the first Nepalese writer to be published in English, has written a whopping saga that takes place after a giant earthquake (eerily prescient after last week’s tragic quake near the border with Tibet) in Nepal brings a dictator to power. The grand-scale story is rife with fascist politics, family disfunction, a huge cast of characters, and massive political unrest. Upadhyay creates a multilayered dystopian world that has echoes of Trump, looming natural disasters, and an infectious energy that confirms the author’s admiration for the work of Rushdie.
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The Granddaughter
By BERNHARD SCHLINK
Published by HARPER VIA
Schlink’s beautiful novel The Reader is now 25 years old. His latest also investigates post-war Germany. Kaspar is a Berlin bookseller in his ’70s who discovers his beloved wife dead in their bathtub. As the novel unfolds, we learn of her struggles with depression and alcohol, her desire to become a writer, and the fact that she abandoned a baby daughter when she fled East Germany. When Kaspar tracks this woman down, he finds she has a daughter of her own and lives with a Holocaust-denying, Neo-Nazi husband. Schlink’s examination of their dissonant views and Kaspar’s dream of bringing his granddaughter around to his ideals creates a powerful portrait of German society.
