And just like that, 2024 is over. Thank you 2024 for all the memories and the lessons. We’ve successfully completed a 365-day revolution around the sun. As the old adage goes, with every end comes a new beginning. 2024’s conclusion comes with the opening of a new door. We are provided with 12 new chapters with 365 blank pages ]upon which to paint new memories. I hope that we will paint these blank canvasses with memories that we will cherish for a lifetime, may it be with the people we love or all by ourselves.
As has been the tradition in the past few years, I will be kicking off the new year by looking back to the previous year, its hits, and of course, its mishits. It is also an opportunity to take a glimpse of how the coming year is going to shape up. This book wrap-up is a part of a mini-series that will feature the following:
- 2024 Top 20 Favorite Books
- 2024 Book Wrap Up
- 2024 Reading Journey by the Numbers
- 2024 Most Memorable Book Quotes (Part I)
- 2024 Most Memorable Book Quotes (Part II)
- 2024 New Favorite Authors
- 2025 Books I Look Forward To List
- 2025 Top 25 Reading List
- 2025 Beat the Backlist Challenge
This update, however, is forward-looking rather than a wrap-up. Since 2018, I have been crafting a list of new releases I am looking forward to. This is, in part, an effort to explore new works since I have always been a backlist type of reader. Over time, this annual exercise has become a space to explore writers whose works I have not explored before. Ironically, not once have I succeeded in reading all the books I listed in my prior lists. However, I came close – one book short – twice. The most recent was in 2024 when I was not able to obtain a copy of Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s The Tree Doctor. Nevertheless, I enjoy doing this because of the new horizons it allows me to explore. My prior failures are not precluding me from preparing yet another list of 10 books I am looking forward to in 2025. Hopefully, after these failed attempts, I will be able to complete this reading challenge. Without more ado, here are the 10 books I look forward to in 2025.
Oromay by Baalu Girma (translated by David Degusta)
Synopsis: A journalist finds himself embroiled in a disastrous government campaign as well as a sweeping romance in this landmark English translation of Ethiopia’s most famous novel.
An engrossing political thriller and a tale of love and war for readers of John Le Carré and Philip Kerr.
December 1981, Ethiopia. Tsegaye Hailemaryam, a well-known journalist for the state-run media, has just landed in Asmara. He is on assignment as the head of propaganda for the Red Star campaign, a massive effort by the Ethiopian government to end the Eritrean insurgency. There, amid the city’s bars and coffeehouses buzzing with spies and government agents, he juggles the demands of his superiors while trying to reassure his fiancée back home that he’s not straying with Asmara’s famed beauties.
As Tsegaye falls in love with Asmara—and, in spite of his promises, with dazzling, enigmatic local woman Fiammetta—his misgivings about the campaign grow. Tsegaye confronts the horror of war when he is sent with an elite army unit to attack the insurgents’ mountain stronghold. In the aftermath, he encounters betrayals that shake his faith in both the regime and human nature.
Oromay became an instant sensation when first published in 1983 and was swiftly banned for its frank depiction of the regime. The author vanished soon thereafter; the consensus is that he was murdered in retaliation for Oromay. A sweeping and timeless story about power and betrayal in love and war, the novel remains Girma’s masterpiece.
Release date: February 4
The South by Tash Aw
Synopsis: A radiant novel of longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer—about family, desire, and what we inherit—from celebrated author Tash Aw.
When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.
Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the local son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.
Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete.
At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide. It is the first in a quartet of novels that form Tash Aw’s masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change—a reimagined epic for our times.
Release date: February 13
Deviants by Santanu Bhattacharya
Synopsis: Vivaan, a teenager in India’s silicon plateau, has discovered love on his smartphone. Intoxicating, boundary-breaking love. His parents know he is gay, and their support is something Vivaan can count on, but they don’t know what exactly their son gets up to in the online world.
For his uncle, born thirty years earlier, things were very different. Mambro’s life changed forever when he fell for a male classmate at a time, and in a country, where the persecution of gay people was rife under a colonial-era law criminalising homosexuality.
And before that was Mambro’s uncle Sukumar, a young man hopelessly in love with another young man, but forced by social taboos to keep their relationship a secret at all costs. Sukumar would never live the life he yearned for, but his story would ignite and inspire his nephew and grand-nephew after him.
Bold and bracing, intimate and heartbreaking, Deviants examines the histories we inherit and the legacies we leave behind.
Release date: February 13
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
Synopsis: From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most, her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.
The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.
Release date: March 4
Sister Europe by Nell Zink
Synopsis: An irresistible and poignant novel about the upper echelons of Berlin society, a grand literary celebration, and the afterparty that upends the night and carries a group of guests deeper into the city.
Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she’s unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she’s reduced to begging the ancient award-winner to find some attendees at the last minute. Masud invites his old friend Demian, a native Berliner, who in turn invites his two best the troubled innocent Livia, and an American publisher, Toto, who will do anything for a free meal.
But Toto doesn’t come alone. In tow are his much younger internet date—she’s stood him up often enough to be nicknamed “the Flake”—and Demian’s 15-year-old daughter, Nicole. Not to mention the cop who’s been trailing Nicole since she left the red-light district. Presiding over the affair is Naema’s infinitely rich, endlessly disaffected grandson, Prince Radi, whose catastrophic pass at Nicole culminates in an epic midnight food run that changes all their lives.
With sophistication and tenderness, Nell Zink weaves a vividly colored tapestry of a milieu at odds with itself, taking her trademark ambiguity, daring and humor to new heights.
Release date: March 25
Flesh by David Szalay
Synopsis: From Booker Prize finalist David Szalay, a propulsive, hypnotic novel, about a man whose future is derailed by a series of events that he is unable to control.
Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor—a married woman close to his mother’s age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands—as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead.
What follows is a rocky trajectory that sees István emigrate from Hungary to London, where he moves from job to job before finding steady work as a driver for London’s billionaire class. At each juncture, his life is affected by the goodwill or self-interest of strangers. Through it all, István is a calm, detached observer of his own life, and through his eyes we experience a tragic twist on an immigrant “success story,” brightened by moments of sensitivity, softness, and Szalay’s keen observation.
Fast-paced and immersive, Flesh reveals István’s life through intimate moments, with lovers, employers, and family members, charted over the course of decades. As the story unfolds, the tension between what is seen and unseen, what can and cannot be said, hurtles forward until finally—with everything at stake—sudden tragedy again throws life as István knows it in jeopardy. Spare and penetrating, Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.
Release date: April 1
Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt
Synopsis: A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Douglas Stuart in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening.
Set in a remote village in the North of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two sixteen year old boys meet and transform each other’s lives.
In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle at their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him, like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre, drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.
Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.
Release date: April 15
The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien
Synopsis: ‘Why did people, who lived so briefly in this universe, contain so much time?’
Lina and her father have arrived at an enclave called the Sea, a staging-post between migrations, with only a few possessions, among them three volumes from The Great Voyagers encyclopedia series.
In this mysterious and shape-shifting building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, excommunicated for his radical thought; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China, whose brilliance goes unrecognised by the state. Their stories fuse with those of philosophers from previous Baruch Spinoza, Hannah Arendt and the Chinese poet Du Fu. And as Lina’s ailing father becomes less well, he recounts how he and Lina came to reside in the Sea, and what his betrayals cost their family and others.
Exploring the role of fate in history, the migratory nature of humanity and the place of faith in our world, The Book of Records addresses fundamental questions about creativity, and good and evil. A deeply philosophical work of huge originality and heft, it shows a master storyteller writing at the height of her powers.
Release date: May 8
Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan
Synopsis: After a rough tumble and maybe-serious head injury, a disillusioned trans poet falls for a charming corporate lawyer in a love story that grapples with the explosive ghosts of relationships past, romantic and familial, from the Lambda Award-nominated author of Bellies, Nicola Dinan
“Fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife.”
Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. With a lifetime of dysphoria and fuccbois rattling around in her head, Max is plagued with a deep dissatisfaction during what should be the best years of her life. After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.
Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent, a corporate lawyer and hobby baker, whose trad friendship group may as well speak a foreign language, and whose Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. This uncharted territory may have rough terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way she’d long given up on as a foolish fantasy.
Yet Vincent is carrying his own baggage from his gap year in Thailand a decade prior: an explosive entanglement with a mysterious, gorgeous traveler. Voice-driven, warm, and poignant, Disappoint Me is an exploration of millennial angst, race, trans panic, and the allure of bourgeois domesticity that asks if we are defined by our worst mistakes.
Release date: May 27
Ghost Wedding by David Park
Synopsis: For fans of Sebastian Faulks, Donal Ryan and Anne Tyler comes this beautiful novel following two troubled men, separated by nearly a century, bound by the ghosts that haunt an imposing Irish manor
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated George Allenby is still wrestling with his experiences as an officer during the First World War when he is sent by his employers to construct a lake at the Manor House, home of the newly rich Remington family. The construction process raises traumatic memories that he isn’t yet prepared to face, but solace emerges in the unlikely form of Cora, a maid in the grand home.
Almost a century later, Alex and Ellie are planning their wedding in the grounds of the Manor House. But like Allenby before him, Alex is haunted by a secret that threatens to destroy the life he has built. As the day of his wedding approaches, he must decide whether to tell Ellie about the evening he will always regret.
In this masterful portrait of love and betrayal, David Park reveals the many ways the past seeps into the destructive, formidable, but also hopeful, in the many moments of fragile beauty that remain.
Release date: August 4
On top of these ten books, I am also looking forward to the new releases of familiar names. Amongst these comeback works I am looking forward to in 2025 are the following:
- We Do Not Part by Han Kang – January 21
- Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Mar 4
- Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata – April 24
- The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong – May 13
- Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah – May 18
I am fervently hoping that I get to finally complete all the books on my yearly list. How about you fellow readers, what books do you look forward to in 2025? Please share them in the comment box or you can do your own list and tag me. It would be a pleasure to go through your own lists.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 