The Best New Book Releases Out December 10, 2024

A Monsoon Rising (The Hurricane Wars) by Thea Guanzon

Because of spoilers, I don’t usually include sequels in this new release roundups unless they’re mysteries. This is romantasy, but I’m including it because the first book in the series, The Hurricane Wars, did beaucoup numbers last year. And, it takes place in a Southeast Asian-inspired world, and the romance at the heart of it is enemies-to-lovers, which is my favorite (your girl likes a lil spice in her romances, a little Sazón). I will keep it cute on the spoilers, though. What I will tell you is that the first book follows Talasyn, who grew up an orphan during the Hurricane Wars and who counts freedom fighting soldiers as her found family. One day, Prince Alaric sees Talasyn’s rare magic on the battlefield, and a tense union is formed between them against a greater threat. But their union is one that could save their world or doom it forever.

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No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, translated by Elizabeth Bryer

This award-winning book is a surreal combination of thriller, western, and classic tragedy. It also exists in the space between borders—physical land borders, as well as those between life and death. In a country in Latin America, a plague spreads and erases the memories of those it afflicts. Angustias Romero flees, but after her children die, she finds herself in the otherworldly—but still somehow corrupt—town of Mezquitte. It’s in Mezquitte that she meets Visitación Salazar, who runs a cemetery and cares for the dead. Visitación is, at times, her friend and her rival, but they are both united against a brutal landowner, violence, and a border town where reality is blurred.

The Afterlife is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda

Using years of research as well as personal and familial history, PEN Open Book Award-winning Shimoda examines the incarceration of Japanese people during WWII and its resounding consequences. The essays here are layered, personal, and even multi-voiced at times, and they all show the throughlines of different instances of oppression and dispossession carried out by the United States.

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

Here’s another award winner! Here, Armfield has followed up the spooky and sapphic Our Wives Under the Sea with a similarly sapphic speculative retelling of King Lear. In a world where it has been raining for so long that the land has changed and eccentric religions have taken hold, three estranged sisters are brought back together by the death of their father. You’d think they might bond over their shared grief, but you’d be wrong. The girls are not here for each other, and their flimsy bond is made all the more flimsier by a revelation from their father’s will. What’s more, as their lives proceed to unravel, the truth surrounding their mother’s disappearance and the mysterious strangers who have been keeping up with them begin to surface.

Rental House by Weike Wang

Keru and Nate met in college and got hitched. Thing is, their families are…different. Keru comes from a strict Chinese family who are perfection-minded, while Nate’s white family is rural and working class. They not only don’t get his desire for education, they also don’t care for his “foreign” wife. It’s a few years into their marriage when the couple and their sheepdog have in-law visits from both sides at their Cape Cod beach house and their luxury Catskills bungalow. The visits have them thinking on what makes a family and even how to contend with disparate sides.

What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould

I read Gould’s The Dead and the Dark when it first came out years ago, and it was a queer, genuinely unsettling good time, and I think this new YA book by her is going to give similar things. It follows Devin, who wakes up in the night to two men in her bedroom; now she’s from around the way, so she’s ready to tumble, but when she calls out to her foster parents for help, she finds out that they’re in on it. Turns out, they signed her up for this experimental therapy program, and after she’s put into a van and taken deep into some woods in Idaho, she meets other teens who are just as confused as her. They’re told that after undergoing the wilderness program, they’ll be cured of their self-destructive habits and come out on the other side brand new. But there are monsters and uncanny faces that peer at them between trees—the gag, though? Somehow, the monsters might not be the worst things.