New month, new books! Book Light is our Dandelion Chandelier curated list of the most-anticipated new book releases every month, and next up is December 2023. We think the perfect December reading list should capture the elegiac feeling of an ending, or the promise of a beginning. Or both. So, what are the best new book releases of December 2023? Our intrepid team has been exploring and here’s what we found: the best, most anticipated new novels, poetry and essay collections and other fiction and nonfiction books coming out in December 2023.
what are the most anticipated new book releases coming in December 2023?
Wondering what to read in December 2023? We’ve surveyed the landscape, and here’s our take on the best new novels and non-fiction books coming in December 2023. You can pre-order them now if you like.
1. Orbital: A Novel By Samantha Harvey.
The LA Times describes the new novel Orbital as “a story of four astronauts and two cosmonauts making a day’s trip around the Earth (or 16 sunsets’ worth). Each of the men and women on the space station has worries both personal and existential, along with their own perspective on the planet spinning below.” From America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan, each brings a necessary voice to this beautiful meditation on space and our shared humanity.
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2. Flores and Miss Paula: A Novel by Melissa Rivero.
Flores and Miss Paula is “a wry, tender novel about a Peruvian immigrant mother and a millennial daughter who have one final chance to find common ground.”
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3. Meet the Benedettos: A Novel by Katie Cotugno.
The elevator pitch for Meet the Benedettos is nearly irresistible: it’s “The Kardashians meets Pride and Prejudice.” OK . . . go on, tell us more . . . “A few years after a reality TV show skyrocketed them to pop-culture fame, five twentysomething sisters are living together in their parents’ crumbling McMansion, nearly broke and teetering towards rock-bottom . . . The Benedettos’ fortunes finally appear to be brightening when Charlie Bingley, the dashing star of Captain Fantastic, moves into their Los Angeles neighborhood with his friend Will Darcy in tow.”
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4. Welcome Home, Stranger: A Novel by Kate Christensen.
Welcome Home, Stranger sounds like the perfect novel for a season of family gatherings that are sometimes joyful and frequently fraught emotional minefields. Sometimes at the same time. It’s a tale of “grief, love, growing older, and the complications of family that is the story of a fifty-something woman who goes home—reluctantly—to Maine after the death of her mother.”
5. kerry james marshall: the complete prints: 1976–2022
Though best known as a painter, Kerry James Marshall has also produced a vast oeuvre of sketches and drawings that has been seldom seen and rarely documented. Now, in this comprehensive overview, we are treated to the sight of over 200 works. While some have entered prominent museum collections, many exist only in private collections or the artist’s archive and are being shared publicly for the first time in this new volume.
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6. deborah roberts: twenty years of art/work
This is a definitive look at two decades of work by the artist Deborah Roberts offers a comprehensive view of one of today’s most significant social observers. An extensive plate section is accompanied by a heartfelt foreword penned by Dawoud Bey on “the tragic mischaracterization of Black children” – a theme that has been explored consistently in her work throughout the artist’s life.
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7. Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib.
A personal and cultural history of travel from the perspective of a Third World-raised woman of color, “Airplane Mode asks: what does it mean to be a joyous traveler when we live in the ruins of colonialism, capitalism and climate change? Because the conditions of travel have long been dictated by the color of passports and the color of skin.” We cannot wait to read this.
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8. I Didn’t Know I Needed This: The New Rules for Flirting, Feeling, and Finding Yourself by Eli Rallo.
The author of I Didn’t Know I Needed This is a TikTok star (with half a million followers) and a self-appointed relationship advice expert. This new nonfiction book is an “earnest and vulnerable look at what it’s really like to date as a young woman in the modern world of dating apps, rotating rosters, and social media snafus.” For young women and the people who love them, reading this could be helpful in these confusing and fraught times. Like who knew that everyone needs an “eff me sweater” in their wardrobe?
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9. Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of the Velvet Underground by Dylan Jones.
Loaded is a comprehensive history of the Velvet Underground, assembled from interviews with luminaries like Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, David Bowie and many more. For those of us new to this terrain, we learn that “the Velvets were the first major American rock group with a mixed gender line-up. They never smiled in photographs, wore sunglasses indoors, and invented the archetype that would be copied by everyone from Sid Vicious to Bobby Gillespie.”
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10. The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading by Andrew Pettegree.
The Book at War is a fascinating examination of “the various roles that books have played in conflicts throughout the globe. Winston Churchill used a travel guide to plan the invasion of Norway. Lonely families turned to libraries while their loved ones were fighting in the trenches. And during the Cold War both sides used books to spread their visions of how the world should be run.”
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11. Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta–and Then Got Written Out of History by Howell Raines.
The author of Silent Calvary, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, reveals a lost chapter of American history vital to understand. “It was not only soldiers from northern states who helped General William Tecumseh Sherman burn Atlanta to the ground. But also an unsung regiment of 2,066 Alabamian yeoman farmers—including at least one member of the author’s own family.
Called the First Alabama Cavalry, U.S.A., this regiment of mountain Unionists, which included sixteen formerly enslaved Black men, was the point of the spear that Sherman drove through the heart of the Confederacy. The famed general hailed their skills and courage. So why don’t we know anything about them?”
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most anticipated new book releases coming in December 2023
That’s our roundup of the best book releases and the most anticipated new novels, essay collections and other fiction and nonfiction books coming out in December 2023. What’s at the top of your list, dear reader?
