In 2013, the Canadian-born New Zealander’s hefty novel The Luminaries – about the 1860s gold rush on the South Island – made her the youngest-ever Booker Prize winner at 28. (She also won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction). This novel is also set on New Zealand’s South Island, but concerns a present-day billionaire tech mogul, guerrilla gardening collective, LSD and a landslide that cuts a town off. It‘s a novel of ideas that’s also an explosive eco-thriller. “I wanted to explore the contemporary political moment without being itself partisan or propagandistic,” Catton said in a statement. (Mar. 7)

It’s fitting that this entertaining debut by an editor at prestigious publisher Knopf (who edited Kevin Kwan and Emily St. John Mandel) earned a rumoured seven-figure book deal. The witty and escapist novel follows three daughters of an elite Brooklyn clan and chronicles the trappings, inner workings and foibles of vast generational wealth. Prenups, privileged lifestyle tedium, zeitgeisty charity galas — it’s a comedy of manners that’s been likened to Edith Wharton and dubbed ‘crazy rich WASPs.’ Deservedly so. (Mar. 7)

An eccentric cast of characters and a baking show host seemingly inspired by British food doyenne Mary Berry drew me to this delicious debut thriller, pitched as Clue or Only Murders in the Building meets British Bake-Off. In the Rhode Island-based writer’s satisfying puzzle mystery, two weeks into filming a competition at a remote Vermont estate, a storm cuts off six bakers and the program host from civilization, and their numbers fatally dwindle. With knowing winks at culinary culture, it’s smart, stylish and pure fun. (Mar. 7)

From the New York City author of Dear Edward (a new Apple TV+ series starring Connie Britton) comes another life-affirming story about four close-knit Italian-American sisters whose bond is broken by a romantic betrayal. The novel looks at loyalty, grief and mental health as it follows the rearrangement of their relationships over several decades, in what Napolitano has said is her “homage to the four sisters and complicated love of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.” (Mar. 14)

Family stories (and the importance of sharing them) are at the heart of the New York writer’s new contemporary novel, my favourite since her 2010 The Three Weissmanns of Westport. When an aspiring 20-something screenwriter weathers the pandemic in Hollywood with his glam 93-year-old grandmother (and her dog), she regales him with stories of fleeing 1939 Vienna and settling in Los Angeles among the creative class of talented Jewish emigrés. It’s a fine yarn. (Mar. 14)

It’s not a spoiler to say the latest from this Ontario-based author is about a charismatic con artist who fakes having cancer to join a support group. Notorious fraudster Anna Delvey comes to mind, but the novel is less interested in the scam than how her vulnerable marks — one freshly divorced, the other grieving the unexpected death of a spouse — pick up the pieces afterwards. Their curiosity (and ours) about what motivates a pathological liar drives this engaging read. (Mar. 21)

Tom, a widowed former police officer, longs for solitude in his quiet retirement in Dalkey, on the coast of the Irish Sea. When old colleagues rope him into helping a cold case investigation (as one appreciative reviewer put it, “Ooh, Sebastian Barry’s skewing a bit police procedural”) about Catholic priests and decades-old secrets, it lays bare that, although his memory is failing, there are emotional demons in his past. Tom is a poignantly unreliable narrator in this gorgeously written reflection on love, grief and the reverberations of trauma by the Irish writer and two-time Booker Prize finalist. (Mar. 23)

Sallie, a privileged young Virginian, takes over the family bootlegging business during Prohibition. She values her independence – from driving a car to staying single – as she navigates feuds between rival bootleggers. The many female characters allow the Virginia-based author to explore the tension between lives shaped by the wishes of dominating men rather than one’s own choices. Period research adds atmospheric detail to the same vivid prose that helped Walls’ 2005 memoir, The Glass Castle, spend eight years on the New York Times bestseller lists. (Mar. 28)

Historical fiction maven Kate Quinn is just one of many lavishing praise on the final instalment in Joshi’s Jaipur Trilogy. The Northern California author (born in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan and raised in the U.S.) of the bestselling Reese’s Book Club pick, The Henna Artist, concludes the sweeping saga in 1970s Paris. It follows Radha (now in her 30s and married with two daughters) as she apprentices with a master perfumer and discovers her calling. As the project takes her to India, the fragrant process and relationships involved are rich with descriptions of scents and food in this unforgettable exploration of cultural heritage and acceptance. (Mar. 28)

The debut novel by the Czech Republic-born American writer – the intergalactic odyssey Spaceman of Bohemia – made such a splash that Isabella Rossellini, Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan are starring in the upcoming Netflix adaptation. His new speculative fiction, about a terminally ill Czech woman’s visit to America in search of her long-lost daughter, is set in an authoritarian near-future obsessed with bioengineering consciousness. With nationalist groups on the rise globally, anti-immigrant sentiment being inflamed and a world influenced by technology and artificial intelligence with every passing day, it’s a timely page-turner that Publishers Weekly calls “ingenious, funny, and chilling.” (Mar. 28)