December 6, 2025
We begin to wind down the year with some excellent late-season publications to be added to your TBR pile or gifted for the holidays. For budding and seasoned writers, there is a new fiction craft guide; a Brazilian novelist’s story of Amazonian Indigenous children brought to Germany in the late 19th century; a Gothic thriller set in 1920s South Africa; a prize-winning Polish writer returns with another captivating cast of peculiar characters; and friendship between women explored by some of the top literary minds throughout history.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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House of Day, House of Night
By Olga Tokarczuk
Published by Riverhead
We are introduced to the inhabitants of a remote town in Silesia by a narrator and her husband who arrive knowing nobody. The novel is her portrait of this eccentric village whose residents include a woman who remembers all eras by their unique colors; a man who believes a bird flutters inside his body; a professor whose passions in life are religion and roofs; and a knife-making family who sing psalms all day. Alcoholics, intellectuals, German soldiers, and a strange swaggering man with a chain saw—this Polish Nobel Prize-winner, whose last book reimagined The Magic Mountain, is utterly unique. First published in Poland in 1988, the novel is finally available in the U.S.
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A Long Game
By Elizabeth McCracken
Published by Ecco
McCracken’s latest, subtitled ‘Notes on Writing Fiction,’ is sure to become a classic book on the craft of writing. She knows of what she speaks after numerous novels, story collections, and many well-earned prizes. After 30+ years of teaching, she has seen it all. “A writing life…is a yearslong process of casting away everything you once believed for sure.” You’ll find practical advice enveloped in chatty, welcoming, lively prose making you want to take a class with her—this book is the next best thing. One good piece she dispenses early on: “I believe a first line should deliver some sort of pleasure by being beautiful or mysterious or funny or blunt or cryptic.” As an avid reader, I agree!
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The Jaguar's Roar
By Micheliny Verunschk
Published by Liveright
Translated by Juliana Barbassa
Two German naturalists (based upon real explorers) travel to Brazil in the 1800s, returning with native specimens as well as an Indigenous boy and girl from the Amazon River basin who are then exploited like science experiments. The tale is partially told by a contemporary Brazilian who encounters a photo of the children. The magical mix of styles and idioms has been preserved by the translator in the voices of the girl, her imagined Jaguar guardian, and others. Verunschk uses their story to rescue a little-known piece of Brazilian history and craft an inventive piece of literary fiction about the insidious colonialism of that era.
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Cape Fever
By Nadia Davids
Published by Simon & Schuster
It’s 1920 and Soraya, an illiterate Muslim woman living in the Cape (i.e., Cape Town) is hired as a maid to a rich woman who lives alone in a grand house. Mrs. Hattingh is strict but kind. Soraya is followed by a Gray Woman—these ghostly apparitions have always been a part of her life. It all starts well until…. This novel of psychological suspense has the feel of a Du Maurier and is wonderfully constructed, touching cleverly on class and race as it reveals secrets from both women. Interesting note: the author’s grandmother worked as a personal maid, and Davids has said this novel is her way of settling “an ancestral debt.”
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The Book of Women’s Friendship
By Rachel Cooke
Published by W. W. Norton
More than one hundred writers are included in Rachel Cooke’s delightful anthology celebrating women’s friendships throughout history. Drawing on letters, diaries, poetry, and novels, she divides her entries into themes, including Definitions—Elena Ferrante and Anaïs Nin; Childhood—Hilary Mantel and Charlotte Brontë; Solidarity—Bernardine Evaristo; Goodbyes—Elizabeth Bishop on Marianne Moore; and even Frenemies—Nora Ephron. Other excerpts come from Jane Austen, Dolly Alderton, Nella Larsen, Sigrid Nunez, and Zadie Smith. The book is a great mini-introduction to these women’s work. A wonderful tome to dip into when you want to honor the special bonds women create over a lifetime.
