Rounding off 2025, we’ve got a new edition of Olga Tokarczuk’s early work House of Day, House of Night and a mesmerizing tale from Brazilian author Micheliny Verunschk. Enjoy 5 Incredible New Books for December 2025!
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5 Incredible New Books for December 2025
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk
A young woman settles in Nowa Ruda, a village in Lower Silesia, a few dozen metres from the Czech border. The communist regime has just collapsed, but that is not the only noticeable change: the -surrounding houses, gardens and forests are full of vestiges of the time when the region belonged to another country. Together with her enigmatic neighbour Marta, the narrator accumulates the stories of the hamlet, from the history of its foundation to the lives of its saints, from anecdotes about its wonderfully unique inhabitants to recipes and gossip.
Published in English in its original form for the first time, in a new translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place by Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious novelists at work today.
Television by Lauren Rothery
An aging, A-list movie star lotteries off the entirety of his mega-million blockbuster salary to a member of the general viewing public before taking up with a much younger model. His non-famous best friend (and often lover) looks on impassively, while recollecting their twenty-odd years of unlikely connection. And an aspiring filmmaker, unknown to them both, labors over a script about best friends and lovers while longing for the financial freedom to make great art.
Told in their alternating, intricately linked perspectives, Television is a funny, philosophically astute novel about phenomenal luck, whether windfall or chance encounter. Like Joan Didion’s classic Play It as It Lays, but speaking to a since irrevocably changed Hollywood, it portrays a culture in crisis and the disparities in wealth, beauty, talent, gender, and youth at the heart of contemporary American life. In this glittering but strange new world, lit up by social media and streaming services—what, if not love, can be counted in your favor?
The Jaguar’s Roar by Micheliny Verunschk
In 1817, two German scientists traveled across Brazil and into the Amazon gathering flora and fauna to study and display in Europe. Among the collection they brought to the Bavarian court were two Indigenous children.
The children’s images became widespread, satisfying European curiosity about the distant land they came from. But little was known about the children themselves. Despite the scientists’ detailed records about many of the plant and animal specimens, they only noted the children’s tribes: the girl was a Miranha, and the boy, a Juri. After a few months, the children died in Germany, far from anyone who knew their names.
The Jaguar’s Roar, a spellbinding poetic novel told in many voices, imagines the children’s journey and a modern Brazilian woman’s effort to counter their disappearance from history.
Silent Bones by Val McDermid
The truth is buried just beneath the surface . . .
When torrential rain causes a landslide on a motorway in Scotland, it reveals a crime scene: someone hid a body in the tarmac eleven years before. Journalist Sam Nimmo had been the prime suspect in the murder of his fiancée when he disappeared, and now DCI Karen Pirie and her Historic Cases Unit must find out who buried him, and why.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, new evidence reopens a closed case and the accidental death of a hotel manager starts to look like murder. But what did Tom Jamieson’s book club have to do with his demise – and what will they do to keep their secrets?
Karen and her team begin to untangle a web of lies, one which connects their murder cases with Scotland’s rich and powerful. They will be tested to their limits – and possibly beyond . . .
Dead Ringer by Chris Hauty
Set in present-day, a disgraced former Secret Service office and a Jesuit professor join forces to delve into the mysteries surrounding the events of November 22, 1963. Fixated on deciphering the conspiracies behind the history-changing assassination, they are oblivious to the fact that the cabal is still active—and may face an end as bloody as the carnage in Dealey Plaza. Will they be able to uncover the truth in time? Or will they become two more footnotes in history?
If you enjoyed 5 Incredible New Books for December 2025, check out our Book of the Month for November 2025 The Director by Daniel Kehlmann