As the end of the year approaches, everyone’s busy looking back, thinking about best books lists and gift guides, but there are still plenty of exciting new books coming out. Here are some December novels you won’t want to miss.
Casanova 20: Or, Hot World by Davey Davis (Catapult, December 2): An unusual post-pandemic novel that focuses on art, love, and mortality. Adrian is a Casanova figure, a man so beautiful he’s always been desired by everyone he meets—until the Covid-19 vaccine becomes available and he takes his mask off. Suddenly, mysteriously, his appeal is gone. Meanwhile, his best friend, Mark, a painter, learns that he’s dying of the disease that killed his mother and sister. Our starred review calls this “a rare gem of a book—afraid of neither joy nor sorrow and patient enough to find the human heart inside all its gorgeous language.”
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead, December 2): The Nobel Prize winner follows up The Books of Jacob, about an 18th-century messiah figure, and The Empusium, about a tuberculosis sanitorium, with a novel set in small Polish village that our starred review says “seems to contain the entire world within it.” The narrator—a woman who may resemble the author herself—has just moved to the village, and stories about the place accrue, encompassing both past and present. “As a whole, the book is at once simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex than it at first appears,” writes our critic. “An exquisitely constructed, mercurial gem.”
The Living and the Dead by Christoffer Carlsson; translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles (Hogarth, December 2): If you’re a fan of Scandinavian crime fiction, Carlsson is an author to know; this is his third book to be published in the U.S., and our starred review calls it “brooding and brilliant.” In 1999, two teenagers are found dead after a party in a southwestern Swedish town, and the crime is never solved. Twenty years later, a similar crime sets off further detonations in the community. This novel “goes beyond clever plotting to examine Swedish identity, life in a new era, and the ties between living and dying,” according to our review.
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (Summit/Simon & Schuster, December 30): Markovits was born in Texas and now lives in London, but he isn’t as well known here as in the U.K., where this novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tom Layward made a deal with himself 12 years ago when he discovered that his wife was having an affair: He’d stay with her till their kids went to college. Now, as they’re about to take their younger child to start her freshman year, he and his wife have a fight, and she stays home. Tom remembers his vow, drops his daughter off at school, and just keeps driving. Markovits makes Tom a complex character, and “this controlled, quietly moving portrait of a life in decline coasts to a halt in an unexpected place,” according to our starred review.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
