A new year means new books are on the way! So many new books. On this week?s episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks with fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin about the upcoming fiction and nonfiction titles they?re most anticipating between now and April.

Here are the books discussed in this week?s episode:

?Vigil,? by George Saunders?Where the Serpent Lives,? by Daniyal Mueenuddin?Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings and the Rebirth of White Rage,? by Heather Ann Thompson?Five Bullets,? by Elliot Williams?Lost Lambs,? by Madeline Cash?Half His Age,? by Jennette McCurdy?A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,? by Michael Pollan?On Morrison,? by Namwali Serpell?Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon,? by Toni Morrison?Clutch,? by Emily Nemens?Murder Bimbo,? by Rebecca Novack?Kin,? by Tayari Jones?Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks,? by Benjamin Hale?Lake Effect,? by Cynthia D?Aprix Sweeney?Now I Surrender,? by Alvaro Enrigue?The Keeper,? by Tana French

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Virginia Evans?s debut novel, ?The Correspondent,? was published last April and became one of the publishing industry?s heartwarming champions of 2025: a slow-burn success story that gathered momentum over the summer and fall and finally topped the New York Times hardcover best-seller list in December. For Evans, who had written and failed to sell seven previous novels, the book?s popularity has felt magical, as she explains to host Gilbert Cruz on this week?s podcast.

?I went on a kind of a brief book tour in the fall, meeting hundreds of people,? Evans says, ?and ? different bookstores were starting to say, this is becoming a thing, we can?t keep it in the store. We keep running out of stock. And then they were going back, reprint after reprint. So then I started to think, oh, it?s getting bigger. But I think, I just didn?t have a context. I still don?t understand publishing. So I thought every step of the way was the mountaintop. I keep getting a new mountaintop.?

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.