8 Heartbreaking New Books You Can't Miss

These are the novels you need to add to your TBR list if you’re seeking for a gripping, emotional story. This collection of 8 heartbreaking new books speaks to all sides of the human experience and includes tales that examine love, sorrow, family, self-discovery, and more.

The Hero of This Book

Elizabeth McCracken

Ten months after her mother’s death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book takes a trip to London. The city was a favorite of her mother’s, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother’s life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future: Back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed.

The narrator, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary—her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties.

Release Date: October 4, 2022

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Someday, Maybe

Onyi Nwabineli

Here are three things you should know about my husband: He was the great love of my life despite his penchant for going incommunicado. He was, as far as I and everyone else could tell, perfectly happy. Which is significant because…

On New Year’s Eve, he died.

And here is one thing you should know about me:

I found him.

Bonus fact: No. I am not okay.

Release Date: November 1, 2022

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A Country You Can Leave

Asale Angel-Ajani

When sixteen-year-old Lara and her fiery mother, Yevgenia, find themselves homeless again, the misnamed Oasis Mobile Estates is all they can afford. In this new community, where residents are down on their luck but rich in humor and escape plans, Lara navigates what it means to be the Black, biracial daughter of a Russian mother and begins to wonder what a life beyond Yevgenia’s orbit—insistence on reading only the right kind of books (Russian), having the right kind of relationships (casual, with lots of sex)—might look like. Lara knows that something else lies.

Release Date: February 21, 2023

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Dinosaurs

Lydia Millet

Over twelve novels and two collections Lydia Millet has emerged as a major American novelist. Hailed as “a writer without limits” (Karen Russell) and “a stone-cold genius” (Jenny Offill), Millet makes fiction that vividly evokes the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction.

Her exquisite new novel is the story of a man named Gil who walks from New York to Arizona to recover from a failed love. After he arrives, new neighbors move into the glass-walled house next door and his life begins to mesh with theirs. In this warmly textured, drily funny.

Release Date: October 11, 2022

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The Queen of Dirt Island

Donal Ryan

The Aylward women of Nenagh, Tipperary, are mad about each other, but you wouldn’t always think it. You’d have to know them to know that—in spite of what the neighbors might say about raised voices and dramatic scenes—their house is a place of peace, filled with love, a refuge from the sadness and cruelty of the world.

Their story begins at an end and ends at a beginning. It involves wives and widows, gunrunners and gougers, sinners and saints. It’s a story of terrible betrayals and fierce loyalties, of isolation and togetherness, of transgression, forgiveness, desire, and love.

Release Date: February 28, 2023

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The Woman Who Climbed Trees

Smriti Ravindra

Exquisitely written, a blend of ghost stories, myths, and song, The Woman Who Climbed Trees is a haunting, deeply felt multi-generational story that illuminates the transitional nature of women’s lives and the feeling of loss they experience, as they give up one home and family to become part of another.

When she marries a man from Nepal, Meena must leave behind her family and home in India and forge a new identity in a strange place. The Woman Who Climbed Trees follows her, the women.

Release Date: February 28, 2023

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The Librarianist

Patrick deWitt

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home.

Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.

Release Date: July 4, 2023

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The Lookback Window

Kyle Dillon Hertz

Growing up in suburban New York, Dylan lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a troubled young man who promised to marry Dylan when he turned eighteen. Years later—long after a police investigation that went nowhere, and after the statute of limitations for the crimes perpetrated against him have run out—the long shadow of Dylan’s trauma still looms over the fragile life in the city he’s managed to build with his fiancé, Moans, who knows little of Dylan’s past.

His continued existence depends upon an all-important mantra.

Release Date: August 1, 2023

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Tags: Literary Fiction