Even the most voracious readers live with an inevitable problem: There’s never enough time in a given year to read all the new books coming out, especially when your pile of old books keeps growing. For those of us on the Book World team, January and February are the perfect months to play catch-up, finally making time for some of the gems we missed when they were released last year. Here are a few of our favorite 2022 titles that we got to just a little late.
”The Mosquito Bowl,” by Buzz Bissinger (Harper)
The author of “Friday Night Lights” tells another gripping real-life story, this one revolving around two Marine regiments destined for the gruesome Battle of Okinawa. First, these young men, many of whom had coincidentally been college football superstars, spent Christmas Eve 1944 in the South Pacific locked in a different kind of fight — a game to determine which regiment had the better team. Bissinger takes a close look at a handful of the players, following their journeys from various corners of the United States toward horrors they couldn’t yet imagine. — Stephanie Merry
”Solenoid,” by Mircea Cartarescu, translated by Sean Cotter (Deep Vellum)
”We doubt the world because we dream,” Cartarescu writes in this unplaceable surrealist novel, a book that slides seamlessly between almost-quotidian stories inspired by Cartarescu’s time as a schoolteacher in Romania and tales of cosmic horror. As it sprawls out, it encompasses a dizzying array of topics, from the mysterious Voynich manuscript to the way four-dimensional objects would appear to three-dimensional observers. In Cotter’s translation, Cartarescu’s prose has a slippery elegance, so fluid and unsettling that it always remains readable, even when it’s hard to distinguish reality from hallucination. — Jacob Brogan
”Fellowship Point” by Alice Elliott Dark (Simon & Schuster)
Dark’s rightfully enduring short story “In the Gloaming” (1993) is a master class in compression, packing a novel’s worth of emotion into about 30 pages. “Fellowship Point,” her first novel in 20 years, runs to almost 600 pages. It tells the story of 80-year-old Agnes, a successful but currently blocked writer of children’s books, and her friend since early childhood, Polly. The two women need to protect their family homes on a Maine peninsula from developers. Filled with Dark’s powerful, old-fashioned storytelling, the novel considers themes of enduring friendship (its joys and trials), family complexities and land conservation. — John Williams
”Acting Class,” by Nick Drnaso (Drawn & Quarterly)
In his graphic novels, Drnaso draws in a flat, almost affectless style, as if the narratives were playing out through an opioid haze. His deceptively simple panels and dense but readable page layouts sometimes make it seem as if his characters are slipping into one another, their very identities destabilizing before us. “Acting Class” makes remarkable narrative use of those aesthetic qualities, with its story of a group of strangers and casual acquaintances who set out to find themselves — only to discover that they might be other people altogether. — JB
”Big Truck Little Island,” by Chris Van Dusen (Candlewick)
My kids are too old for picture books, and I certainly am. But every now and again I like to peruse them nostalgically, especially when I come across one by a family-favorite writer like Chris Van Dusen. Like his earlier books, “Big Truck Little Island” features bright illustrations that feel both realistic and fantastical. Here the story is based on a real event that happened in Vinalhaven, a tiny island off the Maine coast: A tractor-trailer got stuck on a small road, blocking local traffic, and drivers found a creative solution to get around the obstacle. There are so many appealing things about this book — the verse, the whimsy, the beautiful images — but perhaps my favorite thing is that its message — think creatively and work together — comes across subtly. Cooperation is as simple as this nifty line: “They quickly decided as friends what to do.” — Nora Krug
”The Rabbit Hutch,” by Tess Gunty (Knopf)
Gunty had the kind of debut that novelists dream of: After a massive outpouring of critical plaudits, “The Rabbit Hutch” won the National Book Award for fiction. Strange but gripping, the novel follows the residents of a dilapidated apartment complex in the run-down town of Vacca Vale, Indiana, focusing particularly on a cerebral young woman whose promising future was derailed by a disastrous relationship. She’s hardly the only one muddling through, though, in this survey of lost souls in search of human connection. — SM
”Below Ambition,” by Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics)
Hanselmann may be the funniest cartoonist working today, writing and illustrating comics that revel in a comedy of cruelty. But where 2021’s pandemic-lockdown-era epic “Crisis Zone” is busy and loud, 2022’s “Below Ambition” is unusually sedate. It follows Hanselmann regulars Megg and Werewolf Jones as they take their awful, awful band, Horse Mania, on the road, dozing off during gigs, starting fights at venues and otherwise making a mess of their lives. Less ostentatiously hilarious than Hanselmann’s other stories (though it’s still occasionally uproarious), it instead sits with the quieter core of sadness that is always the counterweight to his humor. — JB
”Part of Your World,” by Abby Jimenez (Forever)
There’s a curious preponderance of bakers in romance novels. Less common: a professional baker who’s talented at serving up both brownie cupcakes and witty banter. Somehow, between running Nadia Cakes stores in Minnesota and California and appearing on the Food Network, Jimenez managed to publish four novels in as many years. Her most recent, about an overworked ER doctor caught between her parents’ sky-high expectations and a fledgling relationship with a much younger carpenter, is as delectable as anything in a bakery case. — SM
”Wrong Place Wrong Time,” by Gillian McAllister (William Morrow)
In this novel, a mother is shocked when her teenage son stabs a stranger to death. His arrest and forthcoming murder charge send her into despair, until she wakes up to find that it is yesterday morning again, and she still has a chance to fix things. In a reverse-engineered butterfly effect, each time she fails to stop the murder she wakes up earlier than before, always searching for the trigger that set this nightmare into motion. — Becky Meloan
”The It Girl,” by Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout Press)
Ware’s clever plots have been compared to Agatha Christie’s, and “The It Girl” is another psychological thriller that will make even savvy readers uncertain about whodunit. Ten years after her magnetic college roommate was murdered, Hannah Jones is starting to question her recollections. Her testimony put a man behind bars, but when a reporter materializes with fresh evidence, Hannah embarks on her own investigation, putting herself — and her unborn baby — in peril. Braiding together narratives from the past and present, Ware meticulously engineers a story full of red herrings and reversals. — SM
