Upcoming Book Releases We Can’t Wait to Read

Koschei the Deathless, bound to a mountain lake for millennia, is finally stirring, and his allies want the human lands back. The Night Court has to answer while Prythian is still patching itself together after the Hybern War and its own inner circle is split by betrayals. That's the setup for the first movement of the Valkyrie Cycle, the story Maas has said is meant to be read as one long book.

We like that she is treating books six and seven as a single arc. This volume can end on real fallout instead of a tidy bow, and the wait is short: A Court of Forgotten Melody follows on January 12, 2027.

Arnie Tenderton has spent decades trying to get published, and he has finally written the perfect book. Agent Claudia Conley already rejected him once. So he finds out where she is spending the holidays, alone in the Catskills, and shows up to pitch it again. The book he wants her to read is about her.

Wrobel wrote Darling Rose Gold and The Hitchcock Hotel, and she is good at people who won't take no for an answer. The novel is built around the courses of Christmas dinner, and anyone who has ever queried an agent will read it with a wince.

Starling wrote The Death of Jane Lawrence, and she likes horror that lives in the body. Here the body belongs to Beatrice, a vampire whose job is nursing fledglings through their first years. When she takes on a third, her hunger outgrows her and her anatomy starts to change, so she goes to a mortal OB-GYN for answers and puts her coven's secrecy at risk.

We haven't read vampire fiction about nursing and motherhood before, and Publishers Weekly calls it ruthless about what that does to body and mind. If you think you're done with vampires, try this one.

The trilogy starts with a strong double timeline. In 1695 Niamh McShane dies at thirteen in the madness spreading out of Salem. In 2013 Neve McShane turns thirteen on the same island, unwraps a phone, sneakers and an antique pendant from her aunts, and learns their kitchen magic was never just kitchen magic.

Kirkus compares it to Practical Magic, and Publishers Weekly promises a cliffhanger ending, which is what you want from book one of three. It lands just after spooky season, a good pick for anyone not ready to put the witch books away.

This isn't a Fourth Wing book, and that's part of the appeal. Yarros goes back to the grounded, military-adjacent romance she wrote before the dragons and gives it a castaway premise. Callista Moran's engagement trip goes wrong, and a year and a half on an island pulls her toward Dominic, an ex-army medic, and away from the life she had planned.

The part we're most curious about comes after the rescue. Coming home to a media frenzy as different people is a sharper hook than the island itself, and at 653 pages Yarros has room to take it seriously.

At 896 pages this is the longest Prythian book yet, and it carries the back two-thirds of the Valkyrie Cycle. The Inner Circle scatters across the continent hunting for any edge against Koschei and his allies, old enemies come back, and the alliances that held after the Hybern War start to come apart.

Only eleven weeks separate it from A Court of Splintered Harmony, which is about as close as a major fantasy series gets to a binge release. Pre-order both and you'll never have to sit on a cliffhanger for long.

Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary and then poisoned her with arsenic. Shafak hands the pen back. Her novel tells his story through a nursemaid, an Egyptian dancer and a jealous lover who refuses to be forgotten, and it travels from his childhood home, part house and part hospital, to revolutionary Paris, Istanbul, Cairo and Beirut.

It runs 608 pages, and Siri Hustvedt says she read it in a trance. If There Are Rivers in the Sky was your book club's pick, this is the obvious next one.

Audrain's The Push was one of the most passed-around books about motherhood in years. This one opens with Fiona watching paramedics carry her body out of the house. She stays, watching her husband, her best friend, her sister and her children, every one of them hiding something. Then her teenage daughter finds Fiona's diary.

The advance praise is loud. Clare Leslie Hall calls it The Lovely Bones for a new generation, and Nita Prose and Carley Fortune both blurbed it. A dead narrator is a hard trick to sustain for 400 pages, and Audrain is the right writer to try it.

After the Great Library burns, Eloren goes home to the island town of Dew to become the cheesemonger heiress she never wanted to be. The unicorns won't let her milk them. A monster lives in the cheese caves. And Garyn, her inventor childhood friend, has gotten a lot taller.

The Spellshop books are about as cozy as fantasy gets, and this one adds a fight against a governor taxing small shops out of business, plus a mouse made of cheese. It's a standalone, so you can start here.

Two years after helping Wendell Bambleby win back his throne, Emily Wilde is married to him and still terrible with people. Now a friend has vanished in the Black Forest, and finding him means opening the way into a lost realm she calls Dark Faerie, the one place the Folk themselves fear.

Fawcett tells this one from three points of view: Emily, Wendell and Emily's niece Ariadne. That's a real change for a series built on Emily's dry field notes, and we're curious how her voice holds up sharing the page. The first three books are cozy-fantasy favorites, so expect this one to move fast.

Winn's debut, In Memoriam, was a World War I love story that left readers wrecked. Her follow-up goes back a lot further. Princess Isode plans to marry Sir Palomides, the second-best knight in the world, as soon as he converts. Then Sir Tristram beats him in a tournament, and Tristram wants nothing from her. He wants Palomides' approval, his worship, and a seat at the Round Table.

The publisher calls it wickedly funny, a very different register from In Memoriam. An Arthurian love triangle where the knights care more about each other than about the princess sounds like Winn kept her eye on men who can't say what they feel.

Joshi's Henna Artist trilogy made Jaipur her territory, and this book goes back there. Deepa's mother has disappeared, she and her brother have been left with strict grandparents, and the one thing that feels like freedom is kathak, a classical dance she isn't allowed to learn. Studying it in secret leads her into her mother's past.

Kate Quinn and Kristin Harmel both blurbed it. Book clubs that loved The Henna Artist should put this on the spring list.

Coco draws the marks in. Vic runs the table clean. They have worked bars across the country for years, as close as family, without ever learning each other's real names. Then it's the summer of 1974, Nixon is falling, prices are soaring, and word is out about two women to watch.

Reid has written a Hollywood star, a rock band, a tennis champion and astronauts. A road-trip con novel full of desert highways and dive bars is a new gear for her, and the audiobook cast includes Julia Whelan and Jennifer Beals. This is the spring release we'd bet on.

A Nobel laureate writing a caper is the most fun premise on this list. London, 1938: after a music-hall matinee, Richard Hadley meets Miss Lambert, decides she needs defending, and follows her to a grand country hotel and then onto a train for Scotland. The jacket copy opens with him taking her for a charming jewel thief.

Ishiguro is famous for narrators who misread what's in front of them. A 240-page period entertainment where nothing is quite as it seems sounds like that habit put to playful use.

Samantha has sleepwalked since a trauma in her teens, waking with raw fingertips, bruises and gaps in her memory. She found one thing that makes it stop. When she kills, her nights go quiet, and she only picks men she's sure deserve it.

Then bodies start surfacing that she has no memory of, and a charming stranger walks into her life. McFadden built The Housemaid on twists nobody saw coming, and a narrator who can't trust her own sleep is a premise made for her.

Jane Weber has kept one summer at the bottom of Emerald Lake for nearly seventy years. Her granddaughters find human remains by the water, an officer named Clair Mundy starts digging into the area's history, and locals bring up the woman they say has haunted the lake for generations. Jane knows more than she's saying, starting with a boy she met there in 1955.

It's a big step away from Molly the maid, and Chris Whitaker calls it an epic mystery. We expect it to be one of the spring's big book club picks.

Jordi Stohlquist puts his wife and dog on the evacuation ferry and stays to board up the cottage they bought four months ago. Then a truck pulls up with four armed lobstermen, and after a violent act of self-defense he's in the sea, then on a strange island, then inside the wreck of a ship.

Heller wrote The Dog Stars and The River, and he writes wilderness danger with a poet's ear. At 240 pages this one should go in a single stormy evening.

Aster's Lightlark books made her a BookTok fixture, and Starside was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Stormside finishes the story at 752 pages, a big book even by romantasy standards.

The publisher is keeping the plot quiet so far, so the reason to pre-order is simple. If you read Starside, this is the ending. A deluxe limited edition is listed for the same date.