New books coming in December tell tales of the sea, colonialism and midlife

Ah, December! Crammed with holidays and short on sunlight, the month can be a lot to handle even in the best of times.

So perhaps it’s a relief that the publishing calendar all but peters out soon. This week still boasts an interesting melange of highlights, including nonfiction, international fiction and previously unpublished poetry, which you can find below. But there won’t be many other big, notable releases after that, with the exception of one acclaimed novel coming to the U.S. at the end of the month.

So we’re going to round up the rest coming here — and then take a little break. Try not to panic without us. Just take deep breaths, hydrate, peruse the nearly 400(!) Books We Love and find a good nook where you can hide your book backlog from the prying eyes of visiting family.

The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World, by Tilar J. Mazzeo

You could say Mazzeo wrote the book on narrative nonfiction — and not just because she literally did write a guide to the genre last year. Her books have hopscotched from colonial America to fascist Italy, from luxuries like perfume to the horrors of the Holocaust, less concerned with any single era than the promise of a good story, wherever it’s found. Much of her work does have a throughline of sorts, though: a fascination with women whose lives defied the social limitations of their day — like Mary Ann Patten, the eponymous star of Mazzeo’s latest book. When Patten’s husband took ill during a 19th-century voyage around the tip of South America, the young woman stepped into the leadership vacuum, braving insubordination and the cruelty of the elements in this high-seas yarn.

Three Stories of Forgetting, by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, translated by Alison Entrekin

Born to one Portuguese parent and another from Angola, Pereira de Almeida is uniquely positioned to reflect on the brutal legacy of colonialism. With a style that reads “less like traditional fiction than like the transcribed thoughts and questions of the smartest person you know” — as an NPR reviewer described her previous novel, That Hair — Pereira de Almeida here presents a triptych of stories featuring characters warped in one way or another by this violent history, either as its victims or doddering former perpetrators.

Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, by John Berryman

The late great American poet’s original 77 Dream Songs, published in 1964, won a Pulitzer Prize and launched perhaps the defining project of his career — a collection of “near-sonnets” that, across multiple books, ultimately numbered nearly 400 during his lifetime. Now, more than half a century after the troubled alcoholic’s suicide, Only Sing balloons the number of published Dream Songs by roughly 40%, includes an introduction by poet Shane McCrae and generally sheds new light on a work that the American Academy of Poets has called one of the classic books of American poetry.

Cape Fever, by Nadia Davids

When Davids won the 2023 Caine Prize for African Writing, the head of the prize jury described the South African author’s winning short story as “a triumph of language, storytelling and risk-taking.” Now, a decade after the publication of her first novel, Davids’ sophomore effort brings her feel for pace and atmosphere to bear on the gothic tale of a Muslim servant, her British employer and the ghosts — both literal and metaphorical — that haunt their unraveling relationship in an unnamed African city.

The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits

“This novel speaks like a much-loved professor, one whose classes have a terribly long waitlist,” the Booker Prize judges said when they named Markovits’ novel to this year’s shortlist. Markovits is indeed a professor based in London (and a former professional basketball player, fun fact, having played briefly in the German minor leagues). But it’s the professor on the page, protagonist Tom Layward, whose road trip lends shape to this quiet, considered reflection on the complexities of life and love in middle age — published earlier this year in the U.K. and available to American readers at the end of this month.