Happy New Year from the Chicago Review of Books!
Whether your resolution is to read more or you’re simply looking for a good book to start the year off right, there’s a lot to be excited for in the first month of 2025. To help you get in the reading mood, here are 12 books we’re looking forward to this January!
The Favorites
By Layne Fargo
Random House
Start your year off right with a wonderful new novel from Chicago author Layne Fargo! The Favorites follows Katarina and Heath, childhood sweethearts who are bonded by their desire to become champion ice dancers. Ten years after a shocking incident at the Olympic Games brings their partnership to a sudden end, an unauthorized documentary reignites the public obsession with the two athletes and forces them to reckon with what has happened between them. The Favorites combines the emotion of a coming-of-age tale with the sensationalism of the most audacious news headlines, creating a thoroughly intriguing read.
Blob
By Maggie Su
Harper
When Vi Liu—an aimless woman struggling with a recent breakup, big family news, and general dissatisfaction with the way her life has turned out—takes home a strange blob she finds behind a bar, she learns that she is able to craft the perfect man from its formlessness. At parts deeply intimate in the mundanity of life and surreal in its invention, Maggie Su has built an entertaining web of relationships in her debut novel Blob.
Mothers and Sons
By Adam Haslett
Little, Brown and Company
From the author of Imagine Me Gone comes Mothers and Sons, a novel about the shared secrets that bring families together and drive them apart. When Peter, an overworked asylum lawyer in New York City, takes on the case of a young gay man, he begins to confront his family secrets and his estrangement with his mother. Adam Haslett has always had a masterful handle on the complexities and depth of fraught emotions, and his latest is a testament to his writing prowess.
The Life of Herod the Great
By Zora Neale Hurston
Amistad Press
2025 brings us an early gift with a never before published novel from the iconic Zora Neale Hurston. In The Life of Herod the Great, Hurston subverts the traditional perception of Herod the Great from biblical villain into a religious and philosophical man who lived a life of valor and vision. Hurston brings her trademark complexity and care to illuminate this life, creating a pioneering work that we’re lucky to have in the world.
Death of the Author
By Nnedi Okorafor
William Morrow & Company
There is little that the incomparable Nnedi Okorafor hasn’t yet achieved, yet with Death of the Author she delivers a genre–bending masterpiece that perfectly encapsulates what readers love about her writing. The novel follows Zelu, an aspiring novelist whose life is turned upside down when she’s fired from her job as she struggles to publish her far-future epic. Blending the process of writing and the process of being written about, this book-within-a-book is a true literary achievement that only someone as inventive and talented as Okorafor could make a reality.
Too Soon
By Betty Shamieh
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
For lovers of books such as Pachinko and Queenie, it’s time to mark Too Soon on your to-read list. Betty Shamieh’s latest is a captivating family epic that takes our trio of characters from war-torn Jaffa to the pursuit of the American Dream in Detroit and San Francisco and the hustle of post-9/11 New York theater scene, culminating in a final stage show in Palestine in 2012. For a book titled Too Soon, you will certainly not soon forget these powerful voices Shamieh presents to us.
All the Water in the World
By Eiren Caffall
St. Martin’s Press
Chicago author Eiren Caffall is on a literary tear at the moment, as she follows up her 2024 literary memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary with a powerful climate thriller All the Water in the World. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie lives with her family and friends on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History in the ruins of an almost deserted New York City. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north with a book that holds their records of the lost collections. All the Water in the World is sure to take its place as one of the greats of the climate fiction genre.
Save Me, Stranger
By Erika Krouse
Flatiron Books
If Erika Krouse’s debut memoir Tell Me Everything announced her as a writer to know, her short story collection Save Me, Stranger will cement her status as an electric writing talent. Save Me, Stranger explores characters who are at hinge moments in their lives; teetering on the edge of possibility and consequence. From the coldest town on Earth, to a sex shop in Bangkok, and an ice-cream truck in gang territory, Krouse takes her readers on a globetrotting journey of survival and rapidly fading hope.
The Orange Eats Creeps
By Grace Krilanovich
Two Dollar Radio
This 2010 classic from National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree Grace Krilanovich returns as part of Two Dollar Radio’s The New Classics series. The Orange Eats Creeps follows a girl with drug-induced ESP who searches for her disappeared foster sisters along “The Highway That Eats People.” Surreal, chaotic, and unapologetically unrelenting, The Orange Eats Creeps perfectly captures a William Burroughs-esque descent into instability.
Something Rotten
By Andrew Lipstein
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Cecilie is a fed-up New York Times reporter and her husband Reuben is a disgraced former NPR host and grudging stay-at-home dad. When their vacation to Copenhagen begins to turn inside out after Ceicille learns her first love has been diagnosed with a rare, fatal illness, the two begin to question who they can really trust. Thrills and twists abound in Andrew Lipstein’s Something Rotten.
American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest
By Kyle Paoletta
Pantheon
In American Oasis, journalist Kyle Paoletta paints an illuminating and disturbing picture of our future through a cultural exploration of the present day Southwest. Weaving together the stories of immigrants and indigenous populations, Paoletta lays bare the common mythologies of the American west to highlight the region’s dependency on water and the increasing desperation these cities face in the era of advancing climate change.
Homeseeking
By Karissa Chen
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Karissa Chen’s debut is an epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as the world pulls them together and apart. Following two separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history, Homeseeking is a detailed portrait of the Chinese diaspora and the power of love and loyalty against all odds.
