Notable Novels of Spring 2025

What are the new novels everyone will be talking about in January 2025?

Great question. I’d like to flag up a few hotly anticipated books set to be released in the next few months.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun) is publishing her first novel in more than a decade. Dream Count tells the story of four women: two Nigerian friends living in the United States, one of their cousins, and one of their housekeepers. Speaking to The Sunday Times, Adichie said: “The writing process was much more difficult than my previous novels because my life was very different. The devastation of losing both my parents in a short time hung like a shadow over the process. I’m a much slower writer now — fiction feels more hard worn and hard fought. And even more precious.” Dream Count is out on 4 March, but available to pre-order now.

There are two new novels by Nobel laureates. First, Han Kang’s We Do Not Part deals—obliquely—with the long shadow of the Jeju massacres, the violent suppression of an island-wide uprising in 1948, during which an estimated 30,000 were killed by government forces. It has been out since 21 January, and feels uncomfortably timely in the wake of South Korea’s former president Yoon Suk Yeol’s impeachment following an attempt to declare martial law. The Boston Globe described it as “a masterpiece”; Slate called it “despairingly beautiful.” (Out now.) Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft follows three young Tanzanians as they come of age; an advance review in Publishers Weekly has declared it “at once culturally specific and emotionally universal.” (Out March 18.)

Not to mention new books by the novelist and playwright Caryl Philips (Another Man in the Street, in which a young West Indian man finds himself working for a slumlord in 1960s Notting Hill) and the creator of The Wire, Richard Price (Lazarus Man, set during the aftermath of the collapse of an East Harlem tenement block).

Any buzzy debuts? 

I’ve heard a lot of people raving about Good Girl by Aria Aber, in which 19-year-old Nila—born in Germany to Afghan parents—attends raves, experiments with art, and grapples with her complicated cultural identity. “I knew that I wanted to write a character like her, who is first of all a wayward Afghan woman, and then someone who can shapeshift and code switch, who can go into different rooms and observe them,” Aber has explained. “I was interested in the innocence but also the slipperiness that youth allows you to inhabit, enact and perform, but that’s also often a little dangerous.” (Out now.)

I find it hard to keep up with fiction in translation. Got any hot tips?

And okay, sure, maybe one Nordic septology is plenty for most people, but if you are willing to put Jon Fosse aside for a moment, why not have a look at Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, a seven-part work of speculative fiction centring on a single, endlessly repeating day: a November 18th that, by the time the first book opens, has already re-run inexplicably 122 times. “Here, the time-loop narrative takes on new and stunning proportions,” reports The New York Times. It won Scandinavia’s biggest literary prize, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, in 2022. The first two books were published in English in the States in November last year and are to released in the UK in April—with swooning endorsements from such literary giants as Karl Ove Knausgård and Hernan Díaz.

What about books that have recently won or been shortlisted for awards?

The National Book Critics Circle shortlists have just been released, so let me quickly mention a couple of the fiction finalists that have been out for a few months, but which I haven’t previously discussed: Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin, a Booker Prize longlistee, in which two half-brothers search for an African teenager they believe could be the next Lionel Messi; and Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, in which a girl believes herself to be alien sent to study humans, and sends dispatches home to her people via fax. A bittersweet heartwarming read that most book clubs will love.

Anything else you’d like to mention while you have the chance?

Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection has been out in the US since September, and will finally make it to the UK in February. It’s a collection of seven loosely linked stories from the author of Private Citizens (“the first great Millennial novel,” according to New York magazine). Expect nihilism, tragicomedy, and provocation after provocation. I liked what Jia Tolentino, writing in The New Yorker, had to say about it: “Not until I picked up Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection did I realize how fun it could be to read a book about a bunch of huge fucking losers.” It is, she added, “a thrill for the sickos among us.”

And finally: Romantasy isn’t my thing, I’m afraid, but the biggest fiction publishing event in commercial terms this season must surely be Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm, the third book in her mega-million-selling Empyrean series. More than 180,000 thousand copies were sold on launch day in the UK alone, reports The Guardian. If you’re intrigued by fantasy romance escapism, then you’ll probably be interested to read our recent round-up of romantasy books to get you started by Francesca Martin.

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