January 4, 2025
The new year has begun, and the first few months have so many excellent books that it will be hard to pick only five per week. In each you will inhabit lives so fully that, as William Styron says above, it will feel as though you have lived them. The first selection of 2025 features two riveting domestic novels set in New York from authors with dedicated followings; a rescued manuscript from one of the most iconic Black writers of the 20th century; a dark comedy by a prize-winning Polish author delves into generations of a modern Jewish family; and a fascinating true-crime narrative concerning a murder that may have inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
-
.
Mothers and Sons
By ADAM HASLETT
Published by LITTLE BROWN
Haslett’s (Imagine Me Gone) searing new novel concerns a broken family and the secret lying at the heart of their estrangement. Peter is a gay lawyer helping immigrants within an often-broken system. His mother Ann is equally immersed in her work, running a women’s retreat with her longtime lover, Clare. They have both chosen paths that allow them to hide within their work, becoming caretakers of other people while ignoring their own needs. As you are pulled into the emotional centers of these beautifully drawn characters, you will root for the mother and son to forgive each other, and for this fractured family to heal.
-
.
The Life of Herod the Great
By ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Published by AMISTAD
This unfinished manuscript by the great Harlem Renaissance writer Hurston includes commentary by scholar Deborah Plant, who also edited Barracoon. It is a revisionist portrait of Herod, the Jewish King of Judea whose reputation in the Bible is as a villainous tyrant responsible for the deaths of countless male children. Hurston shows Herod in a more favorable light, supported by research revealing him as a beloved king. The author intended it as a companion to Moses, Man of the Mountain, which she wrote in 1939. It is both a stirring piece of historical fiction and an important document that sheds new light on the first century.
.
-
.
Playworld
By ADAM ROSS
Published by KNOPF
Even if you didn’t live through the ’80s in NYC this novel is a perfect snapshot of a certain milieu. Griffin is a 14-year-old high school student on the wrestling team at an elite private school and a successful TV actor (as was Ross). His liberal upbringing allows a certain autonomy beyond his years (all the members of the family share a shrink). He is having a Mrs. Robinson-style affair with a friend of the family that is exciting and slightly confusing yet edifying. Griffin has a lot on his plate! This is an old-school sweeping family novel, a poignant and hilarious coming of age, and a hugely satisfying read.
-
.
Confidential
By NEW PRESS
Published by MIKOŁAJ GRYNBERG
Translated by Sean Gasper Bye
Grynberg is a man of many talents: author, psychologist, photographer. His new novel expands upon a story from his previous collection (I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To). It centers on a Jewish Polish family post-WWII whose members deal with grief in different ways. The grandfather, a doctor who survived the Holocaust, lives only for pleasure while his son, a physicist, cannot bring himself to enter Germany. What Grynberg gently captures is the many ways in which the aftermath of trauma can affect the trajectory of a life. The result is a psychologically acute and wryly humorous portrait of an extended family whose past is impossible to forget.
.
-
.
The Sinners All Bow
By KATE WINKLER DAWSON
Published by G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
January is a perfect time to read a juicy true-crime story with literary associations (see The Furious Hours). The Fall River, MA murder at the core of this one will remind readers of The Scarlet Letter (was the victim the real Hester Prynne?) and inspired the first true-crime book, by Catherine Williams, published in 1833. That groundbreaking publication lured podcaster Dawson to investigate for herself. Thirty-year-old, pregnant Sara Maria Cornell’s body was discovered hanging with a note incriminating the local Methodist minister, who was eventually acquitted at trial. This case captured the imagination of 1800s New England’s staunchly religious citizens and will entice readers today as a paradigm of investigative writing.
