What’s your reading mood? Do you want your books to be an escape from the real world -- a literary hug of reassurance? Or would you like to face the darkest, most fearful parts of existence within the safe confines of a page? New releases for March have you covered either way, as they trend towards cozy, but also include titles that take you to the dystopian extremes of climate, diseases and more.
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Coziness has long been a trend in mysteries and this March sees no change in that. Deanna Raybourn’s Kills Well With Others is the follow up to her 2022 hit Killers of a Certain Age, again featuring the quartet of retired assassins on a humorous but deadly spy mission. Elle Cosimano’s mom-slash-detective Finlay Donovan is back in action after a nosy neighbor unearths a body in her rose garden in Finlay Donovan Digs Her Own Grave. Both books appear on shelves March 4.
Coziness also extends to sci-fi in the genre bending Murder by Memory, featuring detective Dorothy Gentleman. Aboard an interstellar ship, Dorothy’s consciousness wakes in a different body, startled to learn that a murder has taken place aboard ship—and that she might be inhabiting the very body that did the deed. Can a satire be cozy? John Scalzi’s latest, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, could be described as such. When the moon suddenly turns into cheese and Earth is threatened by humongous, curd-like meteors, American reaction to the calamity—from bewildered scientists and crazed doomsayers to besieged cheese mongers and an Elon Musk-figure looking to profit on everything—paints a humorous and scathing portrait that humans will always be humans.
Readers unafraid of going to dark places have some good options in both nonfiction and fiction. John Green examines a disease that doesn’t get much attention, but still kills up to a million people a year in Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, while science historian Edna Bonhomme examines historical and current injustices through the lens of disease in A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to Covid-19. Both books are out mid-month.
The scares are fictional but no less searing in this month’s horror offerings. YA author Trang Thanh Tran sets They Bloom at Night in a Louisiana plagued by mysterious and deadly creature; hunting the monster is less scary than the inner terrors that haunt a traumatized sixteen-year-old Noon and her mother. Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians) continues his success of the past few years with Buffalo Hunter Hunter, a vampire story that reaches across generations of atrocities, identity and survival.
March also welcomes the return of authors long-absent from new fiction shelves. Karen Russell releases her first full-length novel since 2011’s Swamplandia with The Antidote, set among the devastating dust storms of the Depression—it’s out March 11. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of 2013’s acclaimed Americanah, releases Dream Count on March 4. Following four African women on either sides of the Atlantic, Booklist has called it ‘magnificently vital’ and Publisher’s Weekly ‘well worth the wait.’ And Suzanne Collins continues her long-running Hunger Games saga with the fifth book in the series, Sunrise on the Reaping, which will be on shelves March 18.
Click on through for the full list and happy reading!