Books to Read by the Fire

Stow away your iPhone and settle in with one of the year’s most ingenious debuts—a genre-bending novel probing friendship, tech culture, and emerging art forms. As kids, Sam and Sadie bond over a shared passion for gaming and the compulsion to shake loose the confines of the physical. Over three tumultuous decades, they become best friends, then business partners, then rivals, forging a platonic relationship more intimate than lovers.

This thoroughly immersive literary mystery follows a rookie reporter on a quest to get justice for her slain sibling. Ky Tran has worked to distance herself from her Vietnamese Australian community. But when her straight-arrow 17-year-old brother, Denny, dies violently, she can’t help being drawn back in. Lien, a former journalist, exposes the conditional nature of the welcome afforded Asian immigrants in ostensibly liberal places.

Collins’s short poems warm the soul. Like koans and haiku, these micro-lyrics roam a range of tone and feeling, from elegies to epiphanies to bone-dry witticisms. In “New York Directions,” for instance, he points the reader toward Bleecker Street, in Greenwich Village, between “Bleek” and “Bleekest.” His formal compression is deft; his insights, arresting.

In her fiercely imagined novel set in London, the author of Brick Lane peels away the illusions we conjure when our core relationships are threatened. Yasmin, daughter of a straitlaced, striving Muslim clan, is engaged to Joe, who hails from an affluent, progressive, narcissistic tribe. As the families attempt a peaceful merger, crisis looms: Joe’s mother once posed nude for a photo as a kind of feminist statement. Culture clashes, political satire, Oedipal conflicts—they’re all here in this romp of a book.

Written as linked essays pre-Covid pandemic, May’s supple memoir limns the season of hygge as she chronicles an unexpected reckoning in the wake of a medical crisis. Hunkered down with husband and son in southeast England, she bridges the outer world with inner reflection, guiding us from geothermal pools in volcanic Iceland to a Sankta Lucia service to the beaches near home. A gorgeously edifying work, glazed with insight.

Mayr marries the spark of same-sex attraction with the glamour of the Orient Express. In 1929, porter Baxter is on duty from Montreal to Vancouver when a mudslide delays the journey; he must cater to increasingly unruly passengers who treat him as invisible. Black and secretly gay, he harbors ambitions for a less subservient life. Mayr evokes the mystique of transcontinental travel and the tumult of lives on the margins in this much-anticipated period novel. All aboard!

In the 1900s, Belle da Costa Greene, daughter of a Black activist, decided to pass for white, assimilating into wealthy New York society. This novelization of her luxuriant, if fraught, career—Edith Wharton’s Gilded Age meets W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Talented Tenth—captivates throughout. An expert reader, Greene managed financier J.P. Morgan’s private library and entered previously inaccessible social circles. But meanwhile, was her secret truly safe?

Looks can be deceiving—in handbags and people. But if you’re a sucker for a subversive long con novel in which the not-so-good guys come out on top, then you’ll find the caper concocted by ex-Stanford classmates Ava Wong and Winnie Fang as delectable as the Birkin bags the pair are faking. Or just settle in for such sumptuous descriptors as [eyes that are] “anime-character huge, with thick double-eyelid folds, expertly contoured in coppery tones, framed by premium lash extensions, soft and full as a fur pelt.”

Nothing delights like a sublime novel cunningly crafted by a writer at the height of her powers. Gil is a wealthy, laconic white guy who, in the wake of a doomed romance, abandons his life in Manhattan for a “castle” in a normie Phoenix neighborhood. A picture-perfect family inhabits the glass house next door, gradually drawing him into the dramas of their lives. Millet’s previous novel, A Children’s Bible, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award; here she metes out, in terse, calibrated prose, a tale of menace and redemption and the wall that separates them like a clear pane.

There’s nothing cozier than a glass of mulled cider paired with a town-and-gown thriller. The trope of the captivating fair-haired girl looms large in this spellbinding British novel reminiscent of Colin Dexter and Agatha Christie. A leading light of suspense fiction delivers all the frissons.

Perrin’s spooky, mesmerizing novel carves away the skin of French society with the adroit technique of a Michelin-star chef. In the late 1980s, Adrien, Étienne, and Nina form a rebellious clique, determined to escape their small town for Paris. Thirty years later, when a car with a corpse is dredged from a local lake, a journalist vows to crack the cold case, ensnaring the estranged threesome. A Continental cousin to Donna Tartt and Tana French, Perrin spins a penetrating tale of our expectations and dreads.

A leading productivity expert helps us ring in 2023 with an elegant, prescriptive plan for a healthier, tranquil path forward. After rebounding from his own burnout, Bailey devised a clear-eyed, concise method that marries science and self-help; he’s equally proficient in probing the roles of serotonin and endorphins while charting concrete steps in chapters titled “The Mindset of More” and “Heights of Stimulation.” Slow down, breathe, and submerge into these pages.

After Jones’s 1975 debut novel, Corregidora, came out, Toni Morrison, Jones’s editor, declared: “No novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this.” Jones became a literary darling, until disappearing from the scene for 21 years. She reemerged last year with the epic Palmares, a Pulitzer finalist, and this fall comes The Birdcatcher, a novel in which a gifted sculptor repeatedly tries to kill her husband, as their friend looks on. Brilliant and incendiary, Jones’s pairing of tragedy with dark humor cuts to the bone.

Why binge Netflix when an atmospheric suspense novel will break your cabin fever? Slocumb’s debut is a savvy exploration of race, class, and family wrapped up in a heist novel. Rayquan is an underdog and an anomaly: A world-class albeit underestimated Black classical violinist from North Carolina, he grew up poor but found a precious musical heirloom in his grandmother’s attic. But just weeks before a career-making contest, his prized instrument goes missing, and most of the prime suspects are relatives. Thus begins a quest for justice that will absorb readers until the proverbial last page.

In her shimmering, lyrical collection of essays, the late poet—winner of both the National Book Award and Pulitzer—transports us outside as we cozy up indoors, recounting walks among woods and hummocks and beaches, gathering herself into the solace of the land and sea around her.