There’s still time to get in one more amazing book before your New Year’s celebrations! It’s good to have the classics under your belt, of course — there are plenty of books to read before you die — but it’s also important to stay up-to-date on the latest fiction. Grab one of these books to wrap up your year, and consider adding the rest to your 2022 reading list!
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Goodreads Rating: 3.66 ☆
Awards: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Award, Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Summary: What starts with a question — “Can a dog be twins?” — soon escalates into a viral blog post, becoming an unnamed blogger’s ticket to speaking engagements around the world. She adapts social media as a coping mechanism for climate change, living under a dictator, and avalanching loneliness. Rather tellingly, her thoughts coalesce to no longer just be hers, but ours.
That is, until tragedy strikes back home. When her niece is born with a life-threatening condition, our narrator goes dark in the online world that was once her only light. Instead of keeping up on what’s trending, she begins to spend all of her time with a baby who may not survive infancy. Her situation isn’t lighthearted or relatable enough to translate into memes or tweets — so what can she say about something no one is talking about?
What makes this one so great: Anyone who has ever been addicted to the Internet will find solace in No One is Talking About This. Just about everyone else will enjoy it too — the digital world might brim with inside jokes, but Lockwood’s translation for a wide audience is flawless. However, the truly extraordinary thing about No One is Talking About This is the dynamism in both the plot and the protagonist. Lockwood handles it all with grace, ensuring the reader is not thrown from the story and its singular voice even after the sharp turn of events.
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
Goodreads Rating: 3.47 ☆
Awards: N/A
Summary: After being constantly othered by her white co-workers, Nella Rogers is thrilled to see a new face in the offices of Wagner Publishing: Hazel, a Black woman from Harlem. With Hazel’s arrival, Nella thinks she’ll finally have someone who gets it — someone to support her in her diversity endeavors, help her carry the weight of office racism, and laugh with even when things are tough.
But Nella quickly realizes this isn’t the case. After a series of unfortunate events at work, Hazel becomes the office favorite — and uses her new status to turn their Wagner colleagues against Nella. Will our heroine be able to redeem herself, uncover the sinister forces at work, and ultimately reveal the other Black girl for who (and what) she truly is?
What makes this one so great: The blurb for The Other Black Girl calls it a cross between Get Out and The Stepford Wives, and if that doesn’t get your attention, I don’t know what will. What seems like a straightforward tale of workplace racism transforms into a horror story about two-thirds of the way through, in a genre shift that electrifies an already fresh story.
But even beyond the spectacles of horror and magical realism, author Zakiya Dalila Harris impresses with her ability to weave between the present and past. The action is sprinkled with changing POVs and backstory, but Harris’s smooth prose makes these unconventional tactics work wonders. You’ll be clutching this book in white-knuckled hands as you try to figure out what is really going on — and you’ll never guess what happens next.
Bewilderment by Richard Powers
Goodreads Rating: 4.07 ☆
Awards: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, Oprah’s Book Club.
Summary: Meet Theo Byrne — astrobiologist, widower, and single father to nine-year-old Robin, who just happens to be neurodivergent. In a near-future world where the United States government and science do not agree, Theo must decide whether to put Robin on psychoactive drugs in order to help him regain control over his emotions, or to try an experimental treatment.
The catch? The latter uses recorded patterns derived from Robin’s mother’s brain to grow Robin’s emotional control… and will require both Theo and Robin to revisit her life, and the pain of her death, in the wider but perhaps equally devastating context of the world’s collapse.
What makes this one so great: As expected from Richard Powers, Bewilderment is littered with beautiful imagery of the natural world, and carefully uses science fiction to comment on the current state of the political world. Powers gives us answers to questions we had never thought to ask, such as: What does it really mean to be diagnosed with a mental disorder? Why do we insist on diagnosing people? How does our connection to nature form us, and does that connection extend to the stars? And what happens when we assume tomorrow will be the same as the day before, even when all evidence points to the contrary?
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Goodreads Rating: 4.05 ☆
Awards: Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Summary: Reese wants a baby, but as a trans woman in her late 30s, her chances are rapidly dwindling. Her sinking feeling only grows when her girlfriend, Amy, detransitions and becomes Ames. The relationship does not survive; Reese and Ames go their separate ways.
Yet though their romance is over, Ames does not stop looking for ways to fit into Reese’s life. When Ames discovers that his new girlfriend, Katrina, is pregnant, he calls Reese — she’s the only one he can think of to tell. An unorthodox plan soon emerges, to say the least: Katrina will have the baby and the three of them will raise it together. But can a child really bring Reese and Katrina together into the unconventional family that Ames has always wanted?
What makes this one so great: Trans author Torrey Peters’s debut novel Detransition, Baby has made serious waves in the sea of publishing. Peters shows a few incredibly nuanced and personal experiences of trans characters, while keeping the broader story relatable to countless more. You won’t find this story outside of Detransition, Baby’s pages — and with any luck, it’s a sign of even more original, brilliantly layered own-voices works to come.
Reprieve by James Han Mattson
Goodreads Rating: 3.48 ☆
Awards: N/A
Summary: The challenge: to make it through a full-contact escape room without quitting by yelling the word, “Reprieve!” The setting: Quigley House, a haunted house full of booby traps and terrifying actors. The reward: $60,000.
And in 1997, a diverse band of four nearly becomes the second group in history to win it all — until one of their number is brutally murdered in the final cell of the house. Recounted from the perspectives of the survivors, James Han Mattson’s magnificent novel of social horror slowly reveals what actually happened that fateful night, tackling racism, capitalism, and hateful politics along the way.
What makes this one so great: Korean author James Han Mattson brings us haunting social commentary on the political atmosphere in the United States. The suspense in this novel alone is enough to keep you reading — but that alone wasn’t enough for Mattson.
On top of the scares, Mattson strategically uses characters of different races, genders, and backgrounds to show how we interact with people who don’t look like us out in the real world — and how uncomfortably different our expectations can be from reality. Mattson’s characters are extremely developed and dynamic, and we get glimpses into many eras of their lives to see how they ended up giving testimony during a murder investigation.
Indeed, from race relations to chosen families to the overwhelming void of the Internet, these five books certainly reflect a myriad of contemporary issues. Make sure to get started on these amazing novels (or their audiobook versions) before a whole new batch is released in 2022!
Author Bio
Savannah Cordova is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. In her spare time, she enjoys reading contemporary fiction and writing short stories.
