New year, new books!
As the year is off to a great start, it is also time to look for new books releasing in 2019. With contributions from iconic writers such as Elizabeth Gilbert, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and Amitav Ghosh, a booklover's 2019 certainly looks promising. If your new year resolution is to read more books, this list will keep you going for a while. Without further ado, here are seven much anticipated books by some of the most iconic writers which are to be released in 2019:
1. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (To be released in September 2019)
Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, a sequel to her hugely popular and iconic dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, is perhaps the most anticipated release of 2019. Due to be released in September, this book is supposedly set 15 years after the conclusion of The Handmaid’s Tale. It will also be narrated from the point of view of 3 characters. While announcing the news on Twitter, the author said “Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.”
2. The Fate of Butterflies by Nayantara Sahgal (to be released in February 2019)
What happens when a country’s rulers attempt to wipe out sections of its history, and marginalize a community? This novel by the iconic writer, journalist and activist, who returned her Sahitya Akademi Award in 2015 in protest, speaks to the contemporary moment in India, and promises to be a great read.
3. A Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison (to be released in February 2019)
Spanning four decades, and structured in three parts (introduced by a prayer for the victims of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King, and a eulogy for James Baldwin), these essays, speeches, and meditations speak to the sweep of American history as well as the present political moment. Morrison also revisits three of her novels—The Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved—alongside her Nobel speech, and relays a gathering of ideas “with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence”.
4. The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters by Balli Kaur Jaswal (to be released in June 2019)
If you haven’t yet read Balli Kaur Jaswal’s first much loved novel, this is definitely the time to do so. Her second book, to be released in the coming June, has been described as a “delightful, moving and life-affirming” novel about three sisters who have been instructed by their dying mother to visit the Golden Temple and carry out her last rites. For in search of a literary dose of laughter, this is it.
5. My Seditious Heart by Arundhati Roy (to be released in June 2019)
Arundhati Roy needs no introduction. Her newest book, to be released in June, is a collection of political essays spanning over 2 decades. According to Penguin, “Radical and readable, they speak always in defence of the collective, of the individual and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military and governmental elites.” This book has been twenty years in the making, and reportedly well worth the wait.
6. Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh (to be released in June 2019)
Gun Island forms Ghosh’s highly anticipated return to fiction, following his recent Jnanpith Award win. The novel purportedly has a global reach. Readers can expect a wide-ranging cast of characters and settings that vary from the Sunderbans to Los Angeles and Venice. It is a story “about a world in which creatures and beings of every kind have been torn loose from their accustomed homes by the catastrophic processes of displacement”.
7. City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert (to be released in June 2019)
Fans of the international bestseller Eat Pray Love have cause to rejoice. Gilbert’s new novel is a “glittering coming-of-age epic stitched across the fabric of a lost New York” in the summer of 1940. Meet the protagonist seamstress Vivian Morris, who discovers that the city demands that “one must live many lives”, and who herself “means to drink the heady cocktail of life itself to the last drop”.
Have you hit add to cart yet? Remember that pre releases are often available for discounted prices.
Happy reading.