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I don’t know if I’m just late to the party, but I’ve been noticing some great cookbook releases lately. Just this week, there’s the Nigerian Chop Chop by Ozoz Sokoh, the Pakistani Zareen’s Pakistani Kitchen: Recipes from a Well-Fed Childhood by Umair Khan and Zareen Khan, and the Mexican Comida Casera by Dora Ramírez. I love learning about different cuisines and even about how certain dishes came to be based on environment and availability. Food, like language, is one of my favorite ways to learn about cultures outside of my own, and it feels like we’re in a mini-golden age of cookbooks.
We’ve also just been having an excellent last few weeks in general, new releases-wise. In addition to this week’s featured books, there’s the punkish Indigenous horror mystery The Haunting of Room 904 by Erika T. Wurth, the next in the Secret Staircase mystery series, The Library Game by Gigi Pandian, and the reimagining of the story of ancient Greek god Dionysus that is The Hymn to Dionysus by Natasha Pulley.
And, if you’re down for what I suspect will be quite a few tears, there’s the partially 1976/partially 1926-set graphic novel The Girl Who Flew Away by Lee Dean, and the dark fairytale-esque YA novel-in-verse The House No One Sees by Adina King.
The rest of this week’s notable new releases are by Nobel Prize winners, look at the world’s most deadly infectious disease, and even have Indigenous revenge.
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
This is Abdulrazak Gurnah’s first novel since his 2021 Nobel Prize win. In it, three young people — Karim, Fauzia, and Badar — come of age in Tanzania at the turn of the 21st century. Karim has returned home from college with new confidence, and Fauzia sees in him a chance for escape. Together, they help Badar see a life outside of poverty, even if he’s still uncertain about his future. Though they are together, they’ll have to determine what their ever-changing world has in store for each of them.
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
Back in the day, John Green had me (secretly) crying in a New York City subway car subway about a girl with a terminal illness, and now, his latest nonfiction book is on a potentially terminal illness that has plagued us for millennia. This account of the curable disease, which is also the most deadly of the infectious variety since it kills 1.5 million people a year, is both full of scientific and social history, as it is personal. In 2019, Green met a young tuberculosis patient named Henry at the Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, and the two became fast friends. Ever since, Green has advocated for better awareness and equity concerning treatment of a disease that is so deadly yet totally treatable.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
New Stephen Graham Jones is always cause for celebration, and his latest offers up his usual Indigenous-centered horror. This time, it largely takes place out west, in 1912. It’s also full of sweet, sweet revenge.
The diary of a Lutheran pastor from 1912 is found a hundred years after it was written, and what is in it is almost unbelievable. The pastor recorded his interviews with a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, who can not seem to die, and who has a taste for blood. Good Stab is connected to a slow massacre that traces all the way back to the very real Marias Massacre, in which 217 Blackfeet people were killed by the U.S. Army.
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
This promises a cozy, A Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple experience, which sounds like the perfect alternative to doom scrolling. It takes place on the HMS Fairweather, a luxury interstellar passenger liner where guests are able to be granted new bodies, rest between lifetimes, and have their minds carefully preserved in glass in a mind library. Yeah, it’s extra, and so is the predicament Dorothy Gentleman — one of the ship’s detectives — finds herself in. She wakes up not only in a new body but just as someone else is found murdered. What’s more, she soon realizes that bodies and minds are being deleted. Though she quickly gathers a cast of possible suspects — which includes her chaotic nephew and the ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy currently has — she finds she may have to think bigger in order to really get to the bottom of things.
O Sinners! by Nicole Cuffy
This cult-centered book has three perspectives: Faruq Zaidi’s, a young journalist; Odo’s, the Black infantryman who served during the Vietnam War and who leads The Nameless cult; and a documentary script that lays out the circumstances surrounding The Nameless beefing with a Texas fundamentalist church. But let’s focus on Faruq for a minute. After his father dies, he buries himself in his work by becoming enmeshed in a cult called The Nameless. The cult is led by the aforementioned Odo, and though Faruq is skeptical and the new teachings he encounters (like how “there is no god but The Nameless,” for example) are at odds with his atheist beliefs, he finds Odo’s pull increasingly harder to resist.
Wildcat Dome by Yūko Tsushima, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
Tsushima is considered one of the most important Japanese writers of her time, and in this posthumously translated release, her characters reunite in the wake of current chaos and long-standing trauma. The grief from the sudden death of Mitch’s brother drove Mitch and Yonko apart, which is a shame since they were once inseparable as children raised in an orphanage outside of Tokyo. By the time the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe happens, it’s been a year since they last spoke. While the incident drives them back to each other, there is this thing that lingers in the air. A tragedy they both witnessed years ago and that they’ve kept secret their entire lives. The thing is, try as they might to keep silent, trauma and history can be cyclical.
Other Book Riot New Releases Resources:
- All the Books, our weekly new book releases podcast, where Liberty and a cast of co-hosts talk about eight books out that week that we’ve read and loved.
- The New Books Newsletter, where we send you an email of the books out this week that are getting buzz.
- Finally, if you want the real inside scoop on new releases, you have to check out Book Riot’s New Release Index! That’s where I find 90% of new releases, and you can filter by trending books, Rioters’ picks, and even LGBTQ new releases!
