New books we’re excited to read in January 2025

It’s a new year and loads of new books are heading our way. Here is a varied selection of only 12 of the many titles that will be in the bookshops during January.

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again
Caroline Darian
Bonnier, $32.99
If you’re not familiar with the name Caroline Darian, you would certainly know of her mother, the courageous French woman Gisèle Pelicot who was drugged and raped by her husband and scores of other men and then confronted them in a successful prosecution. Darian writes about how in November 2020 the police told the family of her father’s crimes. But when pictures were also discovered of Darian sleeping, naked and possibly drugged, she wondered whether she too had been raped. As she asked in court, “How do you rebuild from the ashes?”

Unfinished Business
Shankari Chandran
Ultimo Press, $34.99
It’s less than two years since Shankari Chandran won the Miles Franklin for her third novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens. Unfinished Business, her fourth, was originally released as an audiobook by Audible last February; now it’s in print. It’s a thriller set in Sri Lanka towards the end of the island’s ghastly civil war that had led to many thousands of deaths. A CIA agent returns to the country to investigate the murder of a journalist. Ellie’s previous mission went pear-shaped, and now it seems she’s not being encouraged to discover the truth.

Sonnets for a Missing Key
Percival Everett
Red Hen Press, $29.99
Here comes the prolific Percival Everett − more than 20 novels since the early ’80s − again. Last year he gave us James, his brilliant reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. But this is poetry – in fact his sixth collection. Sonnets for a Missing Key bounces off Chopin’s Preludes and the piano work of Art Tatum. Each poem is titled by a key such as D Major or B Minor. This is from A Minor: “Even the plants die only/ after death, brittleness and brown, clinging to that former condition.”

Gunnawah
Ronni Salt
Hachette, $32.99
Ronni Salt is a pen name for a witty and incisive political and environmental commentator on various social media sites. She is based in rural Australia and so it’s not surprising that her first novel is set in an eponymous town in the Riverina where local farm girl Adelaide Hoffman has joined the local newspaper. (It’s set in 1974 so there were still lots of them around.) Investigating local irrigation leads to a much bigger story of marijuana, the need for regular and large amounts of water to make it grow, the mafia and murder.

Panic
Catherine Jinks
Text, $34.99
Catherine Jinks released her first book in 1991, since when this prolific, award-winning writer of fiction for young adults has also produced a number of gripping crime novels. In Panic, Bronte has committed a faux pas on social media and is desperate to get away to where she won’t be recognised. But the job she takes − looking after a woman with dementia whose daughter runs a wellness retreat − leads her into a world that is very different from the one she anticipated. She hopes there might be yoga, but it turns out there’s a whole lot more – and it’s considerably more dangerous.

The Hidden Hand
Stella Rimington
Bloomsbury, $32.99
Stella Rimington was the first female director-general of MI5, the British internal security service. Since retiring in 1996, she has written a fascinating memoir, Open Secret, and turned herself into an author of espionage novels that ooze authenticity. Her serial character, Liz Carlyle, has appeared in 10 novels, but The Hidden Hand is the second to feature Manon Tyler, a CIA agent now brought into an Oxford college to investigate the activities of an old friend, Ai Ming, and the threat of international espionage in universities.

Bill’s Secrets: Class, War and Ambition
Belinda Probert
Upswell, $29.99
When Belinda Probert’s father, Bill, died, the funeral in south-west France was sparsely attended − he had no living relatives other than his children. But a letter from an unknown cousin revealed a different figure from the hero father they knew who had worked in intelligence during the war. Establishment figure Bill had actually been Roy, a working-class lad from poverty-stricken Wales who had simply vanished from his family. Probert cites Hilary Mantel: “As soon as we die, we enter into fiction … When we remember … we don’t reproduce the past, we create it.”

Icon, Libertine, Leader: The Life and Presidency of John F. Kennedy
Mark White
Bloomsbury, $49.99
January 9
If you believe some estimates, more than 40,000 books have been written about the late President John F. Kennedy, so does the world really need another one? Mark White, a British academic, clearly thinks it does. He has eight books about the modern US presidency under his belt, including Kennedy: A Cultural History of an American Icon, and now approaches JFK through the lens of his policymaking and his private life, and ponders what might have been had the president not taken that ride in Dallas in November 1963.

Hope: The Autobiography
Pope Francis
Viking, $36.99
January 14
If Pope John XII had written his autobiography it wouldn’t have included his demise in the 10th century at the hands of a husband who found him in bed with his wife. Be assured, Pope Francis’ autobiography won’t contain anything like that. Written for posthumous publication, it is being released early for this Jubilee Year of Hope. Like the Harry Potter books, it’s been tightly embargoed, but in the first papal autobiography Francis discusses his early life, events during his papacy, controversies within the Catholic Church, wider political matters and his own enthusiasms, such as tango and football. He is Argentinian, after all.

Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause
Naomi Watts
Penguin, $36.99
January 21
Actor Naomi Watts was only 36 and hoping to start a family when she learnt she was approaching early menopause. Yes, she went on to have two children “naturally”, as she told a Sydney audience in 2023, but her experience of full menopause after the birth of her second child prompted her to campaign for greater awareness. Here, she blends scientific research, advice and significant personal experience in an attempt to remove stigma and ignorance. Watts wants her generation to be the last generation to feel shame about menopause.

Onyx Storm
Rebecca Yarros
Piatkus, $34.99
January 21
The popularity of Rebecca Yarros’ earlier two books, Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, means booksellers are anticipating huge sales for the latest instalment in the American writer’s Empyrean fantasy series and so are staging special events to mark its launch. Petite dragon rider Violet Sorrengail is again battling to survive against the odds. And what about her relationship with Xaden Riorson? When we last met them, she was defending Basgiah War College against the Wyvern and Venin but shockingly Xaden had been transformed into a Venin − and that’s apparently incurable. Fans are salivating at the prospect of more.

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Confessions
Catherine Airey
Viking, $34.99
January 28
That famous William Faulkner line “the past is not dead. It is not even past” is particularly apposite to Irish writer Catherine Airey’s first novel, which focuses on three generations of Irish women in different eras. In post-9/11 New York, Cora Brady’s father has vanished, her mother has died, and she gets a chance of a new life in Ireland; 25 years earlier Roisin and her sister Maire fall in with a sort of commune in tiny Burtonport in Donegal; and in 2018 Lyca Brady unveils some confronting family secrets. Airey has said she wants to speak to the loneliness of the immigrant.

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