Welcome to 2025, and get ready for some great books. If you’ve been waiting for a new novel from Alafair Burke—her last two were continuations of the work she did with the late Mary Higgins Clark, and she hasn’t published a solo thriller since Find Me in 2022—you’ll be excited to read The Note (Knopf, Jan. 7). Bonus: The book begins with a weekend in the Hamptons, so no matter where you are, you’ll be able to imagine you’re sitting on the beach—but surely you wouldn’t leave a note on the windshield of an annoying stranger’s car, accusing the owner of cheating on his companion. That’s what Kelsey Ellis does, though, and when the man is reported missing, she and her friends May Hanover and Lauren Berry come under suspicion. “Burke builds an intricate structure of secrets layered within secrets, revealed for maximum suspense,” according to our starred review. (Read our interview with Burke.)
Ready for a story about the survivors of an apocalypse? In her earlier novels, Erika Swyler wrote about both mermaids and astronauts; now, in We Lived on the Horizon (Atria, Jan. 14), she combines fantasy and science to create a far-future society that’s even more stratified than our own, with people known as Saints living in the lap of luxury while everyone else works endlessly to support them. When one of the Saints is killed, Saint Enita Malovia tries to figure out what it means. “Swyler achieves a seemingly impossible amount of sophisticated worldbuilding using an economy of vibrant, graceful prose,” according to our starred review.
Perhaps you’ve been eager to read Han Kang since she became the first South Korean winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in October. Her latest novel, We Do Not Part (translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris; Hogarth, Jan. 21), is a story of friendship and history. Kyungha, the narrator, lives near Seoul, and she gets a text one day from an old friend, Inseon, who’s in the hospital, asking her to travel to Jeju Island to take care of Inseon’s pet bird. Then there’s a snowstorm. “The quiet intricacy of the author’s prose glitters throughout, but nowhere is this so evident as in her descriptions of the snow,” according to our starred review. “This is a mysterious book that resists easy interpretation, but it’s clearly addressing the violent legacies of the past.”
If you’re looking for a debut novel, consider A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner (Crown, Jan. 21). Set in New York during the summer of 1986, when the author was a teenager there herself, it’s inspired by the life of Jennifer Levin, the 18-year-old who was strangled in Central Park by Robert Chambers, a man she’d been dating, whom the tabloids dubbed “the Preppy Killer.” Weiner’s protagonist, Nina Jacobs, is getting ready to leave town for college, and she spends the summer temping by day and hanging out in a bar that doesn’t card underage patrons by night. With its “strong young characters and skin-crawling atmosphere created by creepy men, crimes in the news, porn shops, and overheated adolescent sexuality…this edgy coming-of-age novel succeeds on all counts.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
