The North Carolina novelist just won the National Book Award for this surreal novel, about an author and his imaginary friend on a cross-country book tour. The NBA judges call it “a structurally and conceptually daring examination of art, fame, family, and being Black in America.”

A beautiful miscellany in illustrated form that works as a guide to diversifying your reading list, and organizes stacks of suggested books by theme, with profiles spotlighting BIPOC-owned indies and recommendations from leading BIPOC literary influencers.

The modern classic is viewed through the lens of PTSD, with a deep dive into Vonnegut’s journey to transform his experience as a POW who survived the 1945 aerial bombing of Dresden, Germany, into a work of art that wouldn’t glorify war.

“Ice was in the title,” “Lady becomes immortal because of aliens and it gets really philosophical,” and “Looking for a book. It’s red.” This is a witty, illustrated assortment of anecdotes about customer inquiries that long-suffering booksellers swap amongst themselves.

This paranoid literary thriller opens in a Berlin bookshop, where a struggling novelist strikes up an acquaintance with a ghostwriter. Like The Third Man, the 1949 noir film with a screenplay by Graham Greene, the loner in a foreign city is drawn into playing detective, with a bit of cat and mouse.

The acclaimed British memoirist shares how books shaped her, how tastes evolve with life’s milestones, and explores the shape shifting nature of our favourites. With so many good recommendations along the way your to-be-read pile will soon become precarious.

Already a bestselling phenomenon in Japan, this feel-good feline fable about a bookshop in dire straits, a high school student and a quirky talking cat on a quest to liberate neglected books from indifferent owners deserves all the heartwarming kudos. (Dec. 9)

This third literary whodunit featuring detectives Hawthorne and Horowitz (yes, it’s meta-fiction) from the Foyle’s War creator is a locked-room mystery set at a book festival where the fatal stabbing is done with a letter opener. An intricately woven literary plot that’s too clever by half? Or course they’ll love it.

It’s kinda all there in his subtitle. With a mix of memoir and scholarly argument, the Dominican-born academic wades into the debate about a liberal education and the relevance of the Western canon.

A sardonic account of the author’s impulsive purchase of a rundown, used bookstore and 40-year second career as a book dealer in Stillwater, Minn. It’s a dispatch from the last golden age of bookselling, a nearly lost world of estate-sale scores and auctions, bibliomaniacs and epic book thieves, before the Internet changed it all. (Nov. 30)