Keeping up with all of the latest must-read books can quickly turn into an overwhelming endeavor -- finish one, add five more to the pile, and the cycle wears on until it's simply too unbearable to pay attention anymore. Here's another solution: Leave the sorting of what's good and what's bad to us, dedicated readers of impeccable taste. We'll be regularly updating this list of the most exciting titles - trending books 2019 - join us on this literary journey, won't you?
1. The Water Cure
Written by: Sophie MackintoshRelease date: January 8
Why it's a great book: During this dystopian era in which feminism, despite all the brazen societal and governmental efforts to quash it, is thriving in the public sphere, the words "feminist dystopia" should be enough to hook any reader on a book. If they're not, consider that Sophie Mackintosh's debut novel also features: a remote island surrounded by barbed wire; three sisters trained to feel no emotions; a Greek chorus (sort of); a gun to make Chekhov warily proud; and lots of literal toxic masculinity (no, really -- it's literal). This harrowing book manages, somehow, to simultaneously walk the line between fairy tale, coming-of-age tale, and morality tale. It does them all with plenty of intensity, and with muscular prose to boot.
2. Dark Constellations
Written by: Pola Oloixarac (Savage Theories)Release date: April 16
Why it's a great book: Her follow-up to 2017's criminally underrated Savage Theories, Dark Constellations confirms once again that Pola Oloixarac is probably the smartest person in whatever room she's in. Known as the brightest literary voice in Argentina today, Oloixarac has the singular ability to connect seemingly unrelated events across centuries as universal truths about the way the world works, down to its biological level. Dark Constellations, translated from Spanish by Roy Kesey, is broken up into three sections, starting with the field log of a young researcher studying strange plants in the Canary Islands in the 1880s, fast-forwarding 100 years later to a mini-biography of Argentina's first huge anarcho-hacker, and ending in a secret technohub in 2024 with an ethically unpalatable DNA and surveillance experiment called the Estromatoliton project. It's a dense, rewarding novel for those open to an intellectual challenge.
3. Trick Mirror
Written by: Jia TolentinoRelease date: August 6
Why it's a great book: It is a truth fairly universally acknowledged that Jia Tolentino, currently a New Yorker staff writer, is the best young reported essayist of her generation, much to the envy of all the other essayists in her generation. Her debut collection from Random House does little to disprove the argument. There are nine essays in them about "self deception," but the only thing Tolentino could possibly be deceiving herself about is how utterly perceptive she truly is as a journalist, and how skilled in presenting those perceptions she is as a writer. Being Jia Tolentino should be illegal. You really shouldn't be able to own a dog this floofy and be this exceptional at everything you do.
4. Normal People
Written by: Sally Rooney (Conversations With Friends)Release date: April 16
Why it's a great book: Sally Rooney's debut novel Conversations With Friends earned her a reputation as a freakishly prodigious writer, but this Man Booker Prize-long-listed follow-up proves she’s a Great Writer, period. It follows the intense, magnetic connection of two young people from different social classes in Ireland over the course of high school and college, and somehow feels utterly modern while giving you the old-fashioned pleasures that are, well, the reason you pick up books to begin with: rich characters you care for so deeply it’s scary, a plot that’ll take precedence over your actual life, and a sense that spending time in Rooney’s brain has made you a smarter, better person.
5. Gingerbread
Written by: Helen Oyeyemi (What is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Boy, Snow, Bird)Release date: March 5
Why it's a great book: Gingerbread is undoubtedly the weirdest book you'll read all year. Helen Oyeyemi's prose pushes and pulls in ways that make every sentence essential; skim too lackadaisically through a paragraph and you probably missed a crucial detail. In this way, Oyeyemi's writing here feels almost refreshingly dangerous while recounting a fantastical, hilarious, and wry story about three generations of Lee women hailing from the nonexistent (according to Google) farmsteaded countryside of Druhástrana, catapulting to Britain, and back. A story within a story (within a story), the novel asks you to trust in its methods -- talking dolls which might also be trees, the suggestion of wealth managing Stormzy, and, of course, the mythic Lee women's gingerbread recipe -- and wholehearted buy-in with few spoilers is absolutely the best approach to this clever reimagined twisting of the Grimm fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel, which is practically unrecognizable in this form. Never without a sinister cloud hanging over it despite its whimsical airiness, Gingerbread is one of the rare finds where the first reading is a head-spinning delight, but a second and third turn would inevitably open the door to the novel's delirious true genius.
6. Underland
Written by: Robert Macfarlane (Landmarks, The Lost Words, The Old Ways)Release date: May 2
Why it's a great book: The latest in MacFarlane's unofficial "series" of books on humanity's relationship with natural phenomena, Underland is a tremendous undertaking often spiritual in its scope, detailing the many ways humans have created our connections with the world underneath the Earth's surface, from swathes of cave paintings within our remotest mountains to webs of grisly catacombs beneath our oldest cities to mines so deep and so silent it's the only place where scientists can listen for the breath of the universe. The winner of 2019's Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize, a UK-based award for nature books, Underland is a true masterpiece of naturalism, one that will have you in complete and total awe of our world.
7. Optic Nerve
Written by: María GainzaRelease date: April 9
Why it's a great book: Maria Gainza's first book translated into English from Spanish (by Thomas Bunstead) is a curiously fascinating piece of autofiction, a genre where a writer mines her own life for inspiration without keeping to the factitical restraints of a memoir. Like Gainza, the protagonist here is an art critic also named María from Argentina, but as the author said in an interview with LitHub, the connections mostly end there, aside from a shared grave fear of flying. The loosely connected chapters are like short essays of sharply written art criticism, bringing in real artists, their lives, and their work as they apply to smaller moments in Maria's life. From thinking about Mark Rothko while her husband is in this hospital making friends with a prostitute, to exploring Gustave Courbet’s seascapes in relation to her strange, aimless cousin, each anecdote deftly draws the unassuming connections from art to life.
8. Sweet Days of Discipline
Written by: Fleur Jaeggy (Proleterka, I Am the Brother of XX)Release date: October 29
Why it's a great book: Technically, New Directions Publishing released Tim Parks' English-language translation of this extraordinarily eerie little Italian-language debut novel from Fleur Jaeggy, the David Lynch of Swiss literature, in 1990. Technically, its reissue doesn't hit shelves until October. Who cares? It's still the finest novel of the year: a boarding school tale set in an all-girls institution in northern Switzerland following the borderline-sociopathic narrator's failed attempts to conquer her beautiful schoolmate body and soul. Jaeggy's prose is sharp-angled and sinister, evoking the sensation of winter wind blowing through the Swiss mountains at night. Plus, it's short. Don't miss it.
9. Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Written by: Marlon James (A History of Seven Killings, John Crow's Devil, The Book of Night Women)Release date: February 5
Why it's a great book: The first novel of Marlon James' new Dark Star Trilogy has been smartly marketed as "an African Game of Thrones" -- only that sells Black Leopard, Red Wolf short on the strength of its incisive prose and its truly magical world-building about the unwieldiness of truth. It wholly makes sense that Michael B. Jordan bought the rights to turn this novel into a movie shortly after its release; it's wrought with striking imagery of typical fantasy staples like witches and giants made new, and a driving plot of shape-shifting mercenaries searching for a murdered child that ends -- or rather, starts -- with the protagonist, Tracker, imprisoned and interrogated over what happened. The rest is an expansive, exciting, exhaustive epic that's only just begun.
10. Star
Written by: Yukio Mishima (Spring Snow, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Golden Colours)Release date: April 30
Why it's a great book: One of Japan's greatest novelists was also one of its strangest and most badass. Following a life of polarizing nationalism, Yukio Mishima killed himself via ritual suicide following an unsuccessful attempt at a coup d'état by the militia he founded and led (the "Tatenokai," or "shield society") to restore the power of the emperor of Japan -- just two years after he lost out on the Nobel Prize in Literature to his contemporary, Yasunari Kawabata. But that wasn't for lack of daring work. Star, translated from Japanese by Sam Bett, is a strange, avant-garde little novella following a young actor whose portrayals of yakuza in a series of successful films has won him a significant following among Japan's women, along with the kind of attention that could drive any person slowly insane. It's a compelling portrait of celebrity meltdown, and especially potent during an era in which a melted-down celebrity is also ruler of the free world. Time for another coup?
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