20 must-read books coming out in March

It’s a tragedy to waste any space that could be dedicated to this book by mentioning American Dirt, but for the sake of radical honesty: This is the book you should read if you’re considering reading American Dirt (or to make up for it if you did read it). Elena and Mauro fall in love as teenagers in a guerrilla-controlled Bogotá and eventually make their way to Texas, where a series of small decisions and non-decisions lead them to overstay their visas. Mauro is eventually sent back to Colombia with their oldest daughter, and the book traces each family member’s separate lives as they try to make their way back to each other. (March 2)

The Trump administration may be over, but literature’s reactionary boom is still going strong — we’re going to be processing those four years for a long time, and authors are no different. Ali Benjamin’s adult debut is told by Ethan, who moved to the Berkshires with his wife so they could raise their daughter away from the financial and spacial constraints of Brooklyn, and it’s there that his wife, Zo’s, protest fire is lit. She heads up a gang of nasty women, as it were, and becomes increasingly obsessed by the the violence of DJT and his brethren, so much so that it threatens the very fabric of her family. (March 2)

The Ishiguro of Never Let Me Go is back with a sci-fi-adjacent tale of an Artificial Friend (read: nearly sentient robot) named Klara, who is sent to live with a family and be a companion to a preteen girl. Klara narrates the world she encounters through her own very specific lens: a combination of the innocence of a toddler and the heightened intelligence and sensitivity of a mature adult. (March 2)

Four years after his Pulitzer-winning The Sympathizer, Nguyen returns with a sequel. This time, the unnamed double agent and his companion Bon find refuge in Paris, where they immerse themselves in French culture and also get dragged into the drug trade. The narrative web of these novels is not for the faint of heart, but those who dare to enter will be rewarded. (March 2)

This mystery novel is set in Nigeria, where an investigative psychologist is sent to Port Harcourt to search for answers after three university students are tortured and murdered. (March 2)

The debut novel everyone will be talking about this spring is a twisty, spicy tête-à-tête that pits two very determined women against each other — but in a good way. Florence is a young aspiring novelist who gets a gig as a personal assistant to the reclusive, best-selling author Maud Dixon (whose real name is Helen). As she gets wrapped up in Helen’s web, Florence realizes that her path to fame is far more sinister than she thought. (March 2)

The third novel from YA author Choi (Permanent Record) sneaks up on you with its insight and poignancy. When Jayne’s estranged sister, June, gets a dreaded diagnosis, the girls realize how desperately they’ve always needed each other. Though college-age Jayne’s often funny narration vacillates credibly between the conviction that she knows it all and terror that the world is beyond her grasp, her frequent pop culture references and odes to New York can grow tiresome and distracting. But when Choi focuses on her deeply human characters and their complex bonds, the sisters’ tale is undeniable. (March 2) —Mary Sollosi

It’s the female astronaut novel we never knew we needed. Protagonist June, an engineer on a space station, is haunted by the decades-past disappearance of a spacecraft (and its crew) that was using fuel cells invented by her late uncle. She goes in search of his former protégé in hopes they can work together to uncover what went wrong and bring the ship’s crew back home. (March 2)

A wholly different kind of family novel, Coster's second book uses the integration of a North Carolina high school to explore the years-long chain of events set off when a Black and a white student meet. (March 2)

Ottessa Moshfegh kicked off a wave of brisk, occasionally confusing novels that involve themselves with a narrator’s descent into obsession, and Davis’ debut offers a worthy entrée into the genre. N works at a university in the Bay Area and recently lost his estranged father when he is visited by a few mysterious strangers who suggest there may be foul play afoot. But N lives in near isolation, and his version of events is unreliable, to say the least. You may not know what’s happening for most of the book, but you will be very, very intrigued. (March 2)

At long last, Mbue’s sophomore novel arrives. While the thoughtful character-building of Behold the Dreamers remains, Beautiful’s narrative scope is far more ambitious. A village in an unnamed African country is taken over by an oil company, and the children begin getting sick and dying en masse. Told through the eyes of those who live, it sweeps through decades of the village’s attempt to banish the oil company, to claim their rightful profits, to find any sort of recourse for the white men behaving badly. (March 9)

Comparing Irish debut novels to Sally Rooney is already a tired trope, but for better or worse it’s a very good way to get the reader’s attention. Desperation is a relationship story, told from the perspective of an unnamed twenty-something girl who falls hard and fast for Ciaran, a beautiful (but damaged) man she meets at a gallery. Their ups and downs may be more extreme than the more staid couplings, but we’d all be lying to ourselves if we said we don’t recognize the mania of love in its pages. (March 9)

A college reunion. A toxic friend group. Revenge. All the makings of a page-turner are here in Flynn’s book, which kicks off when Ambrosia Wellington receives an invitation to her college’s 10-Year with the (unsigned, of course) note “We need to talk about what we did that night.” (March 9)

The Arsonists’ City — about three generations of the Nasr family — feels revolutionary in its freshness. Mazna Nasr, the novel’s matriarch, grew up in Damascus. She meets Idris, a Beiruti med student, during the early days of the Lebanese civil war, and they marry and seek asylum in California; decades later they reconvene their adult children in present-day Beirut and prepare to sell their ancestral home. The book has all the elements we expect from a family saga, but set against the backdrop of Lebanon’s long, sad history, the narrative stakes are so much higher. (March 9)

A YA thriller set on an Ojibwe reservation, Firekeeper follows 18-year-old Daunis after she witnesses a murder and agrees to go undercover to help the FBI track down a new drug that is ripping through Native communities. (March 16)

The CNN host begins by penning a letter to his nephew in this combination reported book and essay collection about the United States' history of racism, Lemon's experience interviewing politicians and activists, and his own family’s painful history of slavery. (March 16)

This provocative Finnish author enters the fray of American literature (thanks to translation from David Hackston) with a racy, wonderfully weird novel about a therapist's sessions with a sex-obsessed woman. (March 23)

The journalist, who has published books on Seinfeld and Sex and the City, writes about four women who changed the way we watch TV thanks to their innovation, perseverance, and willingness to harness personal strife and use it to create. (March 23)

The multigenerational family saga goes to Miami with Garcia’s exciting, poignant debut. It begins in the cigar factories of 19th-century Cuba, following members of one family as they make their way to America, where they find new opportunities but are also directly exposed to the brutality of a very flawed immigration system. (March 30)

An ebony-skinned girl from Detroit and a flame-haired British folkie come together in the New York music scene of the early 1970s; after two cult albums and a sudden tragedy, their brief moment fades — until a journalist with a deeply personal connection to their past decides to revisit the story. Like Taylor Jenkins Reid’s enormously popular Daisy Jones & the Six, Dawnie Walton’s debut novel uses oral history as the form for her kaleidoscopic tale, though she can hardly be contained by it. The book bursts with fourth-wall breaks and clear-eyed takes on race, sex, and creativity that Walton (a former EW staffer) unfurls in urgent, endlessly readable style. (March 30) —Leah Greenblatt

Hartouni, a prominent real estate entrepreneur, tells his (occasionally shocking) life story of surviving a fatal mountainside car accident, overcoming abuse and sexual assault, and eschewing the traditional life in Iran his family hoped him to have in favor of moving to Los Angeles to live as a proud gay man. (March 9)