This mesmerizing debut novel, set in the 1980s Lake District in England, charts the evolving relationship between neurodivergent Sunday Forrester and her headstrong adolescent daughter, Dolly, after a glamorous woman from London moves in next door. Both the Kent-based author and her heroine have autism, and in the story, Sunday uses a book of Sicilian proverbs and another of 1950s etiquette to navigate life and keep her world in order. The tale of burgeoning friendship was longlisted for the Booker Prize. (Dec. 5)

In the titular novella that leads five short stories written over the past 20 years, the 83-year-old South African-born Nobel Prize winner applies his early, spare literary style to reworking Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova, the 13th-century Italian poet’s account of falling in love, from a distance, with Beatrice. In Coetzee’s novel, a visiting Polish pianist attempts to seduce Beatriz, a banker’s wife in Barcelona, body and (less successfully) soul. (Dec. 5)

This lyrical coming-of-age story is steeped in magical realism and fuses mystical elements with Igbo mythology. The Nigerian-raised British author showcases the alternating viewpoints of school friends Treasure and Ozoemena, and their various interactions with the spirit world (the latter has a second life as a protective leopard, for example). It’s an immersive feminist take on West African folklore that looks at questions of legacy. (Dec. 5)

Aspiring 30-year-old pastry chef Sadie has been fired, dumped and has to give up her apartment, so when a fortune teller at a New Year’s Eve party asks her for one wish, she wants to relive her terrible year to try to set things right. The question is whether the outspoken young woman can – or should – stifle her principles in the course of the do-over. Hindsight and red flags are 20/20, and this deceptively breezy read from the American author is thick with compelling, thought-provoking themes – like being a woman in a man’s world. (Dec. 5)

These short stories, written before the Irish writer’s debut novel Trespasses won her acclaim last year at the age of 55, are superb and shattering tales about vulnerable, exhausted, resigned and mostly female protagonists enduring various kinds of impoverishment. Kennedy’s gem-like quality of being able to breathe “moving, terrible life into each story” is one that Irish Canadian author Emma Donoghue likens to Alice Munro. (Dec. 5)

When we meet 16-year-old Delphine, it’s 1945 and she’s only just survived the Second World War. After her alcoholic mother dies by suicide, the determined young woman flees Paris in search of Ernest Hemingway. Her mother has convinced her she is the American author’s illegitimate daughter, and the aspiring writer’s pilgrimage alights in Harlem as well as Havana. The New York-based wunderkind’s followup to the 2021 breakout, Fifty Words for Rain, not only reveals facets of the famed writer’s backstory, it illuminates the trauma of toxic parental relationships and universal yearning for identity, even as Delphine finds herself witness to historical events, Forrest Gump-style. (Dec. 5)

After winning the Booker Prize this week, the Limerick-born author’s tale – told without paragraph breaks – imagines an alternate, dystopian Dublin descending into totalitarianism, and affirms Ireland’s literary dominance. As a mother of four tries to keep her family intact (her trade unionist husband has been disappeared by a newly established secret police), her wrenching choices as a would-be refugee will recall the violence in Ukraine, Syria and other war-torn countries. (Dec. 12)

The lives of eight strangers converge at a run-down hostel on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Each is there for their own reasons – either running away from the past or toward a fresh start – and a series of conversations gradually reveal the backstory of each character. The thriller’s character development gains momentum in the second half as the connections between the characters are revealed, in the new novel from a London-based freelance journalist who writes about celebrities. (Dec. 19)

Psychological suspense novels are so often about a long-buried secret that they’ve become easy to spot. Cue the idyllic Greek countryside circa 2003, where 13-year-old Sofie helps her parents, who are the caretakers for a wealthy family’s holiday home; that story runs in parallel to a present-day timeline of the picture-perfect married life of Julia, the grown-up daughter of that wealthy family. Cue that not all is as it seems. And here’s where the Bristol, England-based physician-turned-bestselling writer offers a twist: it’s less about what or who than a vivid character study of the reckoning, revenge and eventual rebirth of those involved. (Dec. 26)

When thriller queens Lucy Foley and Lisa Jewell say a novel is gripping, who are we to argue? In Two Dead Wives, a woman who went missing early in the pandemic is revealed to be a bigamist, and her two husbands are suspects until her body is found. Enter DCI Clements to solve the case, and connect it to a faraway elderly man caring for his daughter. The English author’s new domestic suspense novel is a tonic, ideally for that Boxing Day exhale moment when the last of your visiting family has left. (Dec. 26)