Showing posts with label upcoming releases. Show all posts
Showing posts with label upcoming releases. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Can't-Wait Wednesday: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami, Rose of Jericho by Alex Grecian, & The Mesopotamian Riddle by Joshua Hammer

 

Can't-Wait is a weekly meme hosted by Wishful Endings that spotlights exciting upcoming releases that we can't wait to be released! 


The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
Publication: March 4th, 2025

Pantheon
Hardcover. 336 pages.
Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From Goodreads:
"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.
"

I feel like this book will either be hit or miss for me, but I'm really intrigued by the premise! Typically, I'm not huge on stories that focus on dreams, but I'm fascinated by our dreams and how we dream in general, so the idea of an agency that can monitor dreams and has an entire system around them sounds like something interesting to explore, so I'm in to check it out. 


Rose of Jericho by Alex Grecian
Publication: March 11th, 2025

Tor Nightfire
Hardcover. 352 pages.
Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From Goodreads:
"From the New York Times bestselling author of Red Rabbit comes a supernatural horror where ghosts and ghouls are the least of a witch’s problems in nineteenth-century New England.

Something wicked is going on in the village of Ascension. A mother wasting away from cancer is suddenly up and about. A boy trampled by a milk cart walks away from the accident. A hanged man can still speak, broken neck and all.

The dead are not dying.

When Rabbit and Sadie Grace accompany their friend Rose to Ascension to help take care of her ailing cousin, they immediately notice that their new house, Bethany Hall, is occupied by dozens of ghosts. And something is waiting for them in the attic.

The villagers of Ascension are unwelcoming and wary of their weird visitors. As the three women attempt to find out what’s happening in the town, they must be careful not to be found out. But a much larger―and more dangerous―force is galloping straight for them….
"

I really enjoyed  Alex Grecian's Red Rabbit when it came out in 2023 and I've been hoping for something new from him for a while, so I'm excited for this one! I'm extra glad that it's set in the wild world of Red Rabbit and I'm so curious to see what else he does with this world. (I will admit, though, that I'm a little bummed they went in a different direction for the cover art because I really liked the original artwork for Red Rabbit.)


The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer
Publication: March 18th, 2025

Simon & Schuster
Hardcover. 400 pages.
Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From Goodreads:
"It was one of history’s great vanishing acts.

Around 3,400 BCE—as humans were gathering in complex urban settlements—a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For three millennia, wedge shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon and of Persia’s mighty Achaemenid Empire, along with precious minutiae about everyday life in the cradle of civilization. And then…the meaning of the characters was lost.

London, 1857. In an era obsessed with human progress, mysterious palaces emerging from the desert sands had captured the Victorian public’s imagination. Yet Europe’s best philologists struggled to decipher the bizarre inscriptions excavators were digging up.

Enter a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave British military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher this script that would enable them to peek farther back into human history than ever before.

From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, The Mesopotamian Riddle whisks you on a wild adventure through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand our past.
"

As a big fan of languages and as a history nerd-especially an ancient history nerd-this book sounds like it'll be a ton of fun to explore. I can't wait to have a chance to check it out!

Friday, February 21, 2025

Anticipated March 2025 Releases

  

March is just around the corner, and that means a whole slew of new releases! I am looking forward to so many of these, though I am of course most excited for Stephen Graham Jones' The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. I've been fortunate enough to read a couple of these (The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi was fascinating!) so far and it's looking like a great month; I also have ARCs of Let Only Red Flowers Bloom and When the Moon Hits Your Eye that I'm hoping to get started on soon and I can't wait
What March releases are you most looking forward? Let me know below, and be sure to let me know if I missed any of your most anticipated releases on this list as well.
Happy reading!


The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones || March 18th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica || March 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Luminous by Silvia Park || March 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The House No One Sees by Adina King || March 18th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy || March 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi || March 18th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Twist by Colum McCann || March 25th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami || March 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Rose of Jericho by Alex Grecian || March 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Let Only Red Flowers Bloom by Emily Feng || March 18th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar || March 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters || March 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Guatemalan Rhapsody by Jared Lemus || March 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Death is Our Business by John Lechner || March 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Prince Without Sorrow by Maithree Wijesekara || March 18th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer || March 18th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Universality by Natasha Brown || March 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

A History of the World in Six Plagues by Edna Bonhomme || March 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

White Line Fever by KC Jones || March 18th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

When the Moon Hits Your Eyeby John Scalzi || March 25th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran || March 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie || March 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Strange Bedfellows by Ariel Slamet Ries || March 4th -- AmazonBookshop.org

I Am Made of Death by Kelly Andrew || March 4th -- AmazonBookshop.org

A Greek Tragedy: One Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis by Jeanne Carstensen || March 25th -- AmazonBookshop.org

What are your anticipated March releases?

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Can't-Wait Wednesday: The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, Motherland by Julia Ioffe, & Luminous by Silvia Park

  

Can't-Wait is a weekly meme hosted by Wishful Endings that spotlights exciting upcoming releases that we can't wait to be released. 


The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, transl. Sarah Moses
Publication: March 4th, 2025

Scribner
Hardcover. 192 pages.
Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From Goodreads:
"The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.
"

I still think Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh is one of the most memorable books I've ever read, but I really didn't care for her short story collection Nineteen Claws and Blackbird. I feel like it's 50/50 whether I'll like this one, but I'm really excited about it nonetheless and am hopeful for another one I like as much as Tender is the Flesh


Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe
Publication: March 4th, 2025/October 21st, 2025

Ecco
Hardcover. 320 pages.
Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From the publisher:
"Award-winning journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy.

In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values?

In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin.

Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women.
"

I've been really enjoying more nonfiction lately, so I'm very curious to learn more about Russia's history/culture through this perspective! Also, I actually think the publication date may have just been pushed back to October because when I planned this post it said March, but it now might be October? Just a head's up!

Luminous by Silvia Park
Publication: March 11th, 2025
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover. 400 pages.
Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From Goodreads:
"A highly anticipated, sweeping debut set in a unified Korea that tells the story of three estranged siblings—two human, one robot—as they collide against the backdrop of a murder investigation to settle old scores and make sense of their shattered childhood, perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries between bionic and organic frequently blur, these robots are decidedly second-class citizens. Jun and Morgan, two siblings estranged for many years, are haunted by the memory of their lost brother, Yoyo, who was warm, sensitive, and very nearly human.

Jun, a war veteran turned detective of the lowly Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul, becomes consumed by an investigation that reconnects him with his sister Morgan, now a prominent robot designer working for a top firm, who is, embarrassingly, dating one of her creations in secret.

On the other side of Seoul in a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through scraps looking for robotic parts that might support her failing body. When she discovers a robot boy named Yoyo among the piles of trash, an unlikely bond is formed since Yoyo is so lifelike, he’s unlike anything she’s seen before.

While Morgan prepares to launch the most advanced robot-boy of her career, Jun’s investigation sparks a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, unearthing deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family. The three siblings must find their way back to each other to reckon with their pasts and the future ahead of them in this poignant and remarkable exploration of what it really means to be human.
"

What a fascinating premise! This idea of a unified Korea in the future and everything else involved just sounds like it will be playing with a lot of interesting ideas and I can't wait to check it out. 

Friday, January 31, 2025

Anticipated February 2025 Releases!

 

February around the corner means a whole new month of new releases! And February is truly packed with a wide array of upcoming titles, so be sure to have a look and let me know which books you're most looking forward to--and be sure to let me know if I've left any out of this list that you're really looking forward to. I've had the opportunity to read a number of these already and it is shaping up to be a great month of books (Grave Empire is a particularly fantastic one!). Happy reading!


Grave Empire by Richard Swan || February 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett || February 11th -- AmazonBookshop.org

Upon a Starlit Tide by Kell Woods || February 18th -- AmazonBookshop.org

The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton || February 25th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Future's Edge by Gareth L. Powell || February 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Hungerstone by Kat Dunn || February 18th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim || February 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Something in the Walls by Daisy Pearce || February 25th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Poorly Made and Other Things by Sam Rebelein || February 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Symbiote by Michael Nayak || February 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Listen to Your Sister by Neena Viel || February 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Gliff by Ali Smith || February 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Otherwhere Post by Emily J. Taylor || February 25th -- AmazonBookshop.org

The Garden by Nick Newman || February 18th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Spirit Collection of Thorne Hall by J. Ann Thomas || February 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Greenteeth by Molly O'Neill || February 25th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Whiteout by R.S. Burnett || February 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Waiting for the Long Night Moon by Amanda Peters || February 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Black Woods, Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey || February 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

After the North Pole by Erling Kagge || February 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Daughter of Daring by Mallory O'Meara || February 18th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Boy by Nicole Galland || February 25th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Dollhouse Academy by Margarite Montimore || February 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Beartooth by Callan Wink || February 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

All Better Now by Neal Shusterman || February 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

Why On Earth: An Alien Invasion Anthology edited by Rosiee Thor & Vania Stoyanova || February 4th -- AmazonBookshop.org

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad || February 25th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

These Vengeful Wishes by Vanessa Montalban || February 4th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker || February 25th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Forest King's Daughter by Elly Blake || February 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Queens of Crime by Marie Benedict || February 11th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

I Am the Cage by Allison Sweet Grant || February 18th -- Amazon | Bookshop.org

What are your anticipated February releases?