The 15 most-anticipated books of 2022

(trans. by Ann Goldstein; March 15, Europa Editions)Part memoir, part craft book, Elena Ferrante’s new nonfiction collection promises to be a writer’s origin story. In four essays, the Italian author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life Of Adults revisits her first childhood experiments with narrative, her earliest attempts at writing a novel, the unique challenges faced by women writers, and how Ferrante was influenced by the work of Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, María Guerra, and Dante. In The Margins looks like an intimate self-portrait and an essential read for Ferrantephiles.

(April 19, Harper Voyager)Janelle Monáe is arguably the most influential Afrofuturist of the century so far, in large part due to Dirty Computer, her Grammy-nominated 2018 album. The Memory Librarian is a short-story collection inspired by that album, set in a dystopian future where “whether human, A.I., or other, your life and sentience was dictated by those who’d convinced themselves they had the right to decide your fate.” Monáe collaborated with a team of writers on her first work of prose, including Yohanca Delgado, Eve L. Ewing, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, and Sheree Renée Thomas.

(trans. by Tiina Nunnally; April 19, Picador)Long one of Denmark’s most famous writers, the late Tove Ditlevsen won international acclaim in 2021 thanks to a new translation of The Copenhagen Trilogy, an unflinching memoir that was one of our . The Faces is a novel set in Ditlevsen’s native Copenhagen about a children’s book author named Lise who sees faces and hears voices that aren’t really there, and then, well, things get worse. Expect another haunting look at the costs of being human.

(trans. by Sam Bett, David Boyd; May 3, Europa Editions) Japanese literary sensation Mieko Kawakami is back with her third novel in three years to be published in English. All The Lovers In The Night centers on an isolated copy editor in her mid-30s named Fuyuko who one day sees her lackluster reflection in a Tokyo store window and decides to change her life. The experience leads Fuyuko to remember painful experiences from her past, and according to the jacket copy, “her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale.” Kawakami’s novel Heaven, named one of , portrayed both the brutality and kindness that children are capable of, and we expect no less of a complex story in this latest book.

(May 3, Riverhead)Hernan Diaz follows his magnificent debut, In The Distance, with another historical novel that appears to have a strikingly different tone. Gone is the austere landscape of the American West and in its place is the decadence of 1920s New York. Described as an homage to Edith Wharton, the multiperspective novel is interested in the capital, excess, and upward mobility of a tycoon and his aristocratic wife. If Diaz’s previous work is any indication, Trust will end up being stranger and more critical of America’s foundational myths rather than a fawning depiction of the razzle dazzle of the Jazz Age.

(May 24, Penguin)Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot, is one of the best works of fiction published in the 21st century. Her new novel, Either/Or, picks up where The Idiot left off. Her main character, Selin, is beginning her second year at Harvard, and she’ll have to reckon with the unanswered questions lingering from her freshman year. Batuman has an extremely keen sense for what makes characters engaging and renders it all in supernaturally observant and funny prose.

(trans. by Michael Hofmann; June 14, Penguin)Werner Herzog—the visionary filmmaker, opera director, and Star Wars character actor—has written a novel. His name on the cover is reason enough to anticipate The Twilight World, but here’s the true-story premise: Near the end of World War II, in 1944, a Japanese soldier stationed in the Philippines, Hiroo Onoda, was ordered to defend a small island until his army returned. Onoda defended the island for almost three decades after the end of the war, which sounds exactly like a Werner Herzog movie.