What book are you most excited about this year? Share your most anticipated book at the 2012 books hashtag on Twitter.
On New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth show today, this GalleyCat editor shared the books he’s looking forward to this year. Our list follows below…
Over at The Millions, you can explore a much longer list of upcoming books. If you want to add your own book to our list, just follow our Facebook Your New or Upcoming Book page.
1. When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays by Marilynne Robinson: “In this new collection she returns to the themes which have preoccupied her work: the role of faith in modern life, the inadequacy of fact, the contradictions inherent in human nature. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded as a modern rhetorical master.”
2. Zona by Geoff Dyer: “In Zona, Geoff Dyer attempts to unlock the mysteries of a film that has haunted him ever since he first saw it thirty years ago: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time.”
3. Home by Toni Morrison: “An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. His home–and himself in it–may no longer be as he remembers it, but Frank is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from, which he’s hated all his life.”
4. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity by Katherine Boo: “a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities. In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.”
5. Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru: “Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a surreal public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. However, the Mojave is a place of strange power, and before Raj reappears inexplicably unharmed—but not unchanged—the fate of this young family will intersect with that of many others, echoing the stories of all those who have traveled before them.”