The 15 most-anticipated books of 2022

You can read any book, from any year, anytime you want. Publicity cycles in publishing, feverish and insistent, have a way of making people forget this. There’s the sense that if a new book is not read right now, it never will be. Then again, there is something satisfying in reading the new thing when it is still new, when other readers may be picking it up the same time you are.

If that’s something you’re into, rest assured that there are plenty of new books for you to read this New Year. There are novels from literary heavyweights like Marlon James, Sheila Heti, and Ottessa Moshfegh; works in translation from some of the world’s best authors writing in non-English languages; as well as books from a few filmmakers and musicians making their first foray into literature. What’s great about these books, besides them being written by exceptional or otherwise interesting writers, is you can read them in 2022. Or in 2023 or 2024…

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

(January 11, Doubleday) From the author of A Little Life comes another hefty years-spanning novel of high drama. To Paradise begins in an alternative New York in 1893, where, as with the rest of the United States, people are allowed to love whoever they please. Then it’s 1993 and the AIDS epidemic is ravaging Manhattan. Finally, in 2093, plagues and totalitarian rule have fallen upon the country. Yanagihara’s A Little Life was a runaway bestseller that also drew criticism for its melodramatic depiction of the lives of gay men, so it should be interesting, to say the least, to see how she treats the material here.