The year may be winding down, but 2025 still has plenty of book releases to look forward to. One of the interesting things about this month is the amount of exciting works in translation coming out, which means if you’re looking to travel the world this December while staying warm under the blankets in your house, we have plenty of options for you in our 12 Must-Reads list.
From all of us at the Chicago Review of Books, happy holidays and even happier reading!
A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature
By Adam Morgan
Atria/One Signal Publishers
Adam Morgan’s spectacular debut explores the life of Margaret C. Anderson, a cultural critic who forever changed Chicago and the literary world. Anderson is best known for publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses in her magazine The Little Review, and her resulting criminal conviction under the United States’s indecency laws, but her life and all its fascinating twists go far beyond her work in shaping the modernist movement. This well-researched and captivating biography traces her life from the page to her three homes in Chicago, New York, and finally Paris, in turn creating an emotional story about a complicated woman who fiercely fought censorship to bring us some of the era’s most important writers.
Television
By Lauren Rothery
Ecco
For lovers of Hollywood and the industry’s darker underbelly, Television is a can’t-miss release this December. Lauren Rothery’s debut follows an aging A-list movie star who decides to lottery off his entire blockbuster salary before taking up with a much younger model, his non-famous best friend, and an aspiring filmmaker. Blisteringly funny and achingly sad, Television interrogates the facade of fame and the decaying culture of celebrity in our society.
The Aquatics
By Osvalde Lewat
Translated by Maren Baudet-Lackner
Coffee House Press
In the fictional African country of Zambuena, Katmé Abbia enjoys a life of privilege and influence through her marriage to a powerful prefect. But as her unhappiness continues to grow, she turns to her childhood friend Samy—a struggling artist and gay man—for comfort. The Aquatics delivers an emotionally raw look into political violence and censorship of queerness. Osvalde Lewat perfectly identifies the absurdity of her situations and characters while never losing their humanity.
Galapagos
By Fátima Vélez
Translated by Hannah Kauders
Astra House
Lorenzo—a painter who doesn’t paint—lives a quiet and uneventful life until he begins losing the nails on his fingers. Thus begins a journey that will take him from Colombia to Paris and finally to the Galápagos Archipelago. This mysterious and lyrical plague novel deconstructs our understanding of illness and the body, while also exploring how we can make art in the face of our own mortality.
House of Day, House of Night
By Olga Tokarczuk
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Riverhead Books
New work from Nobel Prize-winning Olga Tokarczuk has become a staple in our reading diet, so we’re thrilled to see that she’s back with House of Day, House of Night. Set in a remote Polish village, the novel features a strange and delightful cast of characters, including a man who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, another whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet, and a man who died with one leg in Poland and another in Czechia—an in turn becomes an international incident. Few writers are able to create a constellation of myths, rumors, and humanity like Tokarczuk. House of Day, House of Night is more than a welcome addition to her impressive oeuvre.
The Ballad of the Last Guest
By Peter Handke
Translated by Krishna Winston
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
In Peter Handke’s latest, a man returns home from another continent to find his small village absorbed into the outskirts of a large city, creating an unsettling mix of familiarity and foreignness. The Ballad of the Last Guest exudes a spirit of reflectiveness and somberness, highlighting the ways we’ve changed the land and the land changes us in return.
Marayrasu
By Edgardo Rivera Martínez
Translated by Amy Olen
Curbstone Books
December brings us the first English-language collection of short stories from the acclaimed Peruvian author Edgardo Rivera Martínez. This remarkable collection highlights the isolation that comes with trying to find creativity and connection amid harsh economic and political realities. Readers will surely feel the weight of history in Marínez’s powerful stories, as his characters continually persevere in the face of hardship.
The Definitions
By Matt Greene
Henry Holt and Co.
In this exciting dystopian novel, students at a rehabilitation center are treated for a strange illness that strips them of their memories and sense of identity. The students spend their days watching old videos together, trying to conjure memories of their pets, lovers, and favorite pieces of art, while also questioning the strict rules they must live with. The Definitions is utterly haunting in its precision, as Matt Greene sharpens every sentence to near perfection.
Winter Stories
By Ingvild Rishøi
Translated by Diane Oatley
Grove Press
In Winter Stories, Scandinavian legend Ingvild Rishøi creates three evocative portraits of lives on the fringes of society. A young mother in financial trouble tries to steal a pair of underwear in front of her young daughter. A man fresh out of prison struggles to reintegrate. And three siblings run away to seek refuge in a remote cabin. Rishøi proves to be a careful observer of character, as each story in this unforgettable collection highlights the fraughtness of family and survival.
Casanova 20: Or, Hot World
By Davey Davis
Catapult
Adrian has always been known for his beauty. But after years of drifting between affairs who provide him with everything he needs, he realizes that his beauty is beginning to fade. Meanwhile, Adrian’s friend Mark—a world-famous painter—returns home to discover that he’s dying from the same mysterious disease that will soon take his mother and sister. Casanova 20 is an achievement in intimacy and desire, conjuring a tender story about two men loving against all hope in a world that is in equal parts beautiful and cruel.
The Jaguar’s Roar
By Micheliny Verunschk
Translated by Juliana Barbassa
Liveright
In 1817, two German scientists traveled across Brazil and into the Amazon to gather flora and fauna for display in Europe. They also brought to the Bavarian court two Indigenous children. The Jaguar’s Roar is a beautifully lyrical novel that imagines the children’s journey, offering a literary corrective to the history of their disappearance. Micheliny Verunschk’s latest is a startling reminder of literature’s power to bring life to stolen stories and to the people who have had their humanity stripped from them.
Johann Most: Life of a Radical
By Tom Goyens
University of Illinois Press
This illuminating biography retells the life of the famed anarchist Johann Most who inspired a generation of radical revolutionaries, including August Spies of the Haymarket Affair. Tom Goyens expertly traces Most’s ideological journey and the ways in which he shaped evolving views on revolutionary action and social change.
Osvalde Lewat is a woman. The last line in the blurb about ‘The Aquatics’ should say “Osvalde Lewat perfectly identifies the absurdity of her situations…”