March book preview: Montana vampires & dream hotels
My 12 most anticipated books of March 2025.
Apologies for the recent lack of monthly previews; I’ve been hyper-focused on finishing my book since last fall. Speaking of, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls is now set for release on December 9!
Over at Esquire, I picked the 20 most anticipated books of 2025 (though it’s very much focused on the first half of the year). Some of those picks are featured below (as well as my reused blurbs), but I’ve expanded this March list to include more books I’m excited about.
My 12 most anticipated books of March 2025
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom, March 4)
As I said in Esquire: El-Mohtar’s last novel This Is How You Lose the Time War (co-written with Max Gladstone), is one of the only books to ever hit the bestseller lists four years after publication thanks to a viral tweet. Her new book, a concise fantasy adventure called The River Has Roots, is about Esther and Ysabel Hawthorne, two sisters who care for ancient trees in the town of Thistleford, which sits near the borders of Faerie. When one of the sisters gets romantically involved with a Faerie suitor, things take a turn for the worse. El-Mohtar is one of our finest crafters of sentences, and this book features a magic system called Grammar, so The River Has Roots automatically earns a spot on my nightstand.
Primordial by Mai Der Vang (Graywolf, March 4)
I love poetry with a strong sense of place, so I was blown away by Mai Der Vang’s Aftermath back in 2016. I’m eagerly awaiting this new collection, which “addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam.”
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Pantheon, March 4)
Lalami’s (The Other Americans) new novel has one of the best high-concept hooks of the year: a museum archivist is abducted by federal agents and taken to a detention center for observation after an algorithm predicts she will murder her husband in the near-future. During her monthslong stay in the facility, her dreams are monitored for evidence of homicidal intent. It feels like a mix between Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Wim Wender’s Until the End of the World, written in Lalami’s silky and celebrated prose.
The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses (Scribner, March 4)
The Argentine author of Tender Is the Flesh and her translator return with a literary horror novel about a woman trapped in “a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.”
Luminous by Silvia Park (Simon & Schuster, March 11)
Set in a reunified near-future Korea, Luminous follows a human girl who discovers a robot boy in a junkyard. What follows sounds like a mix between Klara and the Sun and Altered Carbon.
The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf, March 11)
Who can forget Karen Russell’s debut novel Swamplandia!, the Florida-set story of alligator wranglers that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction back in 2012? Her new novel focuses on the other side of the country, where dust storms and the Great Depression have devastated a small town called Uz, Nebraska, where a “prairie witch” that can receive and preserve your memories, a camera that can see into the past and the future, and a farm that seems to be supernaturally unaffected by the drought.
Unusual Fragments edited by Sarah Coolidge (Two Lines Press, March 11)
I’m an absolute sucker for the Calico Series of international anthologies in translation from Two Lines Press. Their latest features Japanese short stories “of alienation with surprising humor and imagination.”
Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett (Riverhead, March 18)
Kristen is hilarious and this Orlando-set comedy will put a huge smile on your face every time you read it.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press, March 18)
“I like to write novels that, to me, are broken at the level of conception, and then see if I can pull it off,” Graham Jones told Esquire two years ago. In Mongrels and The Only Good Indians, he took werewolves and ghost stories in exciting new directions. In the Indian Lake trilogy (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Don’t Fear the Reaper, and The Angel of Indian Lake), he subverted our expectations for slasher horror. Now, he’s tackling the vampire mythos from a unique point of view: the lost 1912 diary of a Montana priest that records the life of a Blackfoot man named Good Stab.
Firstborn by Lauren Christensen (Penguin Press, March 18)
Weeks before her wedding, Christensen learned that her first child, a girl named Simone, was dying in the womb. In crystalline prose, this memoir from the editor at The New York Times Book Review asks, “How do we live when everyone who makes up our world will someday be gone?”
Dissolution by Nicholas Binge (Riverhead Books, March 25)
“Binge” is exactly what I did (sorry) over the course of 48 hours with Nicholas’s last novel, Ascension, a suspenseful sci-fi thriller about a mountain that suddenly appears in the Pacific ocean. His new book, Dissolution, is about an elderly woman being interrogated by a stranger about her memories because someone is stealing the memories of her husband. I won’t go further in the plot than that, because putting together what’s happening is one of the novel’s pleasures.
Twist by Colum McCann (Random House, March 25)
I’ve never read McCann but this is about an Irish journalist who embeds with an underwater cable repair ship off the coast of Africa, and that sounds fascinating to me in a Michael Mann industry-exposé kind of way.
Forthcoming in The Frontlist
Behind the book with Amal El-Mohtar, author of The River Has Roots (March 4, Tordotcom), and her cover designer Spencer Fuller.
Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press, March 18)