New years are about renewals, and few know more about starting fresh than Hanif Kureishi. In 2022, the British Pakistani author and filmmaker broke his neck in a fall, leaving him largely paralyzed. Since then, Kureishi, who’s 70, has undergone spinal surgery and rehabilitation and struggles with constant pain. Through it all, he’s retained his dark sense of humor. It’s on full display in his forthcoming memoir, Shattered (Ecco, Feb. 4). If he’s not on his mattress, he writes, “I have a tremendous pain in the arse.…I can tell you that a pain in the arse is a pain in the arse.” Despite his suffering, Kureishi has moments of optimism, which he cherishes. As our starred review puts it, his condition “affords him the opportunity to meet and empathize with new people.”

There are other new beginnings that one can read about this spring. Like Kureishi, the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell nearly died; she suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015 that robbed her of the ability to speak and play the guitar. Now 81, she’s recovered remarkably well, relearning her lost abilities. Paul Lisicky celebrates the power of her artistry in Song So Wild and Blue: A Life With the Music of Joni Mitchell (HarperOne, Feb. 25). A lifelong admirer of the musician, Lisicky writes that “Joni’s songs saved my life.” In the words of our starred review, “Hers was ‘the music of loneliness’ yet ‘layered with happiness and hope,’ a particularly resonant message for a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality. Even after he turned to fiction and had received recognition for his writing, Lisicky found inspiration in Mitchell’s work. He wanted, he writes, ‘to give to others what Joni had given to me…a chart as to how one lives a life.’”

Another notable book about music that’s out early this year is Jon Savage’s The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream (Liveright/Norton Feb. 4). Our starred review calls the work “a keenly intelligent, comprehensive survey of some of the bravest artists in history.”

One sure sign of spring’s arrival is baseball. John W. Miller pays homage to an old-school talent in The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball (Avid Reader Press, March 4). Our starred review describes it as “an illuminating, entertaining biography of a mercurial tactician who changed the national pastime.”

Care more for basketball? Mike Sielski takes an inspired approach to the sport in Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk (St. Martin’s Press, Feb. 11). Our review notes that this “suitably vibrant history” describes how racial prejudice was behind a longtime ban of the dunk.

What exactly helps all those athletes excel at what they do? Michael Joseph Gross has some answers in Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives (Dutton, March 11). “An engagingly learned look at the human body,” says our review; this just might be the book for those looking to keep that perennial promise to get in shape.

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.