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…."
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."
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!
