47 new books coming out January 14 - 20, 2025

By Kobo • January 14, 2025New eBooks and Audiobooks

There’s something about the romance genre that makes it a perfect catalyst for hybridization. Just look at the Romantasy craze that suddenly made romance fans out of fantasy readers and made dragons suddenly essential to readers who’d previously only wanted a happily-every-after. Baby Dragon Café (the first in a series) by A. T. Qureshi takes things a step further, adding a substantial dose of coziness to Romantasy. It’s the story of a baby dragon-friendly café run by a young woman named Saphira. Unfortunately, Saphira soon finds herself overwhelmed by the need to keep her clientele’s young companions from rendering every object in the café “dark roast.” But if she can spin up another income stream training baby dragons she might be able to keep her café operating and un-incinerated—and local heartthrob Aiden and his disobedient little dragon look like the perfect clients to light this new business’ fire.

Nnedi Okorafor has been writing science fiction stories, novels, and series including Akata Witch, Binti, and The Shadow Speaker for a quarter-century. Her work draws on African traditions and scifi genre conventions to create something new, which she calls Africanfuturism (not to be confused with “afro-futurism,” a movement originating among Black Americans). In her newest book Death of the Author, Okorafor strikes out in a direction new to her, with a story about a young woman named Zelu who chooses a writing career over marriage and anything else her Nigerian family might prefer for her. Yet Zelu’s writing career is unremarkable, landing her a university teaching job and the publication of a handful of competent literary novels and little else. But when she writes a high-flying science fiction novel, originally intending it only for her own entertainment and comfort in the wake of a career catastrophe, the book seems to take hold of Zelu’s life—and possibly the fate of humankind. It’s a book more grounded in contemporary realism than anything else Okorafor has published, and yet still Death of the Author takes chances on a scale that her readers have come to expect, while letting us glimpse a more personal view of this author whose work has never felt more alive.

Just over 10 years ago Pico Iyer’s book The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere made him an international celebrity and talking head on the topic of disconnecting from technology and connecting with one another in pursuit of a more fulfilling kind of life. In Aflame: Learning from Silence, Iyer shares what he learned how valuable it is to make time to be alone when trying to manage disruptive changes in one’s life. Though he’s spent more than his fair share of time in monasteries Iyer isn’t suggesting everyone needs to retreat to a mountaintop to find comfort. Instead, with experiences drawn from other non-monastics, Iyer shares advice for how to find solitude and why it can be counterintuitively beneficial for sustaining and deepening intimate relationships.