January can feel like the forgotten month of the publishing world, when everyone takes a deep breath and settles down to read the books they bought from holiday roundups and “Best of” lists. But the books never stop, and there are plenty of tempting new ones coming out this month.
If you’re looking for action, Adam Plantinga’s debut thriller, The Ascent (Grand Central, Jan. 2), is the book for you. Kurt Argento is a former Detroit cop who ends up in a Missouri jail—it’s a long story having to do with a corrupt sheriff. When the computerized lock system goes on the fritz, he has to help a group of terrified visitors escape through six floors of mayhem. “A meat-and-potatoes thriller, sure—but they’re delicious meat and potatoes,” according to our starred review.
If you’re looking for an epic Swedish poem—OK, you probably didn’t know this was something you were looking for, but give it a try. Ædnan by Linnea Axelsson, translated by Saskia Vogel (Knopf, Jan. 9), begins in 1913, as a boundary is forming between Norway and Sweden that impedes the movement of the reindeer-herding Sámi community. Two generations later, Sámi children have been sent to government boarding schools, as happened to Indigenous communities in this country, too. Our starred review calls this “a sharp-edged tale in verse of colonial suppression, resistance, and survival.”
If you’re in the mood for gorgeous prose, try Held, by Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels, which our starred review calls “a poetic exploration of the liminal spaces and invisible forces in our lives.” We meet John, a wounded British soldier during World War I, and then move across time and space to examine the threads weaving various characters through the generations. “What is consistent throughout the interwoven lives of the photographers, hat makers, artists, war correspondents, and international crisis workers presented here is the persistent examination of what forces brought them to their destinations.”
If you like your crime with a side of self-consciousness, check out Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson (Mariner, Jan. 30). The annual Australian Mystery Writers’ Festival is taking place on that long-distance train, and our narrator, Ernest Cunningham, is one of the authors, though he’s having trouble writing his new book. Until murders start happening, and he starts writing about them. “No, it’s not for everyone,” says our starred review. “But if you want to read a supercharged meta-pastiche like this, this is exactly the one to read.”
If you like your fiction Kafkaesque, try Hard by a Great Forest, a debut novel by Leo Vardiashvili (Riverhead, Jan. 30). When Saba Sulidze-Donauri’s father disappears in the mountains of Georgia, his native country, and then Saba’s older brother disappears while looking for him, Saba naturally goes after them, finding “himself in a world full of menace where the borders of the real and surreal blur.” Our starred review calls it an “unforgettable aria to a lost homeland, full of anger, sorrow, and longing.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
