The Best New Book Releases Out March 19, 2024

From the author of Erasure — what the Oscar-winning movie American Fiction is based on — comes a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but from Jim’s point of view. Jim is an enslaved man who learns he’s about to be sold to a white man in New Orleans, and so hides out until he can think of something that’ll keep him with his family. Then there’s Huck Finn, who is trying to escape his own violence. The two embark on their familiar story, this time with Jim’s full humanity on display.

The latest from National Book Award finalist Lisa Ko (The Leavers) follows three teenagers as they journey through life. At first, Ellen Ng, Jackie Ong, and Giselle Chin are united by how different from everyone else in their ’80s high school they are. Once they’re adults, a changing tech and social landscape has them reconsidering where they and their dreams stand — Giselle finds herself in an unfamiliarly elite world as a performance artist, Jackie witnesses in real time the early internet’s shift from being for everyone to being yet another arm of capitalism, and Ellen fights back against increased policing that comes courtesy of gentrification in New York City. Then the narrative moves to the 2040s, where things are considerably worse.

Àbíké-Íyímídé is following up her smash hit Ace of Spades with another dark academia mystery. This time, the protagonist, Sade Hussein, has just started her third year of high school when her boarding school roommate Elizabeth disappears. And, for some reason, people think she was involved. In between studying for classes, becoming close to the most popular girls in school, and trying to find Elizabeth, Sade uncovers dark secrets about what’s been happening to the female students at the prestigious academy.

Satrapi has been doing the damn thing as far as graphic nonfiction is concerned. Here, she returns to the medium with more than 20 artists, journalists, activists, and scholars who’ve come together to tell the story of the feminist uprising happening in Iran that was sparked by Mahsa Amini’s murder in 2022 after the Tehranian religious police arrested her for not wearing the proper headscarf.

Feminist thought leader Judith Butler looks at how gender has become front and center in right-wing issues. They examine how this anti-gender movement works with similarly right-wing exacerbated fears surrounding things like critical race theory and migration to undermine the fight for equality.

When the unnamed narrator of The Tree Doctor returns to California to take care of her dying mother in the early days of the pandemic, the separation from her husband and children — who are back in Hong Kong — and the weight of caring for a loved one makes her dissociate. She becomes transfixed with her mother’s garden and soon starts an affair with an arborist. Meanwhile, she notices parallels between the novel she’s trying to teach remotely — The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki — and life during a pandemic.