The new books to keep you captivated this holiday season

In this beguiling and beautifully penned follow-up to her acclaimed bestseller Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi writes a powerful novel about a Ghanaian family living in modern Alabama. It follows their experiences with the hard realities of immigration, promising to be a “searing story of love, loss and redemption, and the myriad ways we try to rebuild our lives from the rubble of our collective past”.

Bestselling author Sigrid Nunez returns with a novel about life, death and connection. The plot centers around a protagonist who realizes that all the people she meets have something in common: the need to talk about themselves. As such, she tries to truly listen and pay attention, while imagining what they are going through. However, when an old friend comes to her with an astounding request, she is drawn into an intense experience of her own.

Whip-smart writer of love and romance Dolly Alderton makes her fiction debut with a funny and tender exploration of the ways we are living now. Successful food writer Nina is in her early thirties when she starts a relationship with the enthralling Max, which is lucky, as life elsewhere seems to have become a nostalgic and constant reminder of time passing – whether it’s through fading friendships or family issues.

The vibrant Instagram trend takes literary form this season, transporting the unique and instantly recognizable aesthetic of Wes Anderson’s movies to the page. Traveling to every continent, the book brings to life the extraordinary stories behind some of the world’s most idiosyncratic and interesting locations. Get ready to fall down a rabbit hole of eccentric allure.

In the year of another election, the former POTUS publishes a deeply personal account in the riveting first volume of his presidential memoirs. The story of his “improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world” begins with his early political education, that historic victory in November 2008 and some landmark moments in his first term as the 44th president of the United States.

Simon Han makes a stunning debut with this novel set in a wealthy suburb of Dallas, where Liang and Patty Cheng have recently immigrated from China. When the couple is finally secure enough in the lives they have built, they decide to have a second child and to send for their first – who has been staying with his grandparents in China – to join them in the US. But when worrying behavior emerges from their young daughter Annabel, the community starts to turn against them, and secrets of the past threaten to emerge.

The long-awaited follow-up from Danielle Evans finally arrives, a whole decade after she made her electric debut with Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. With her characteristically perceptive and incisive dissections, these seven evocative stories zone in on specific moments in her characters’ lives – from love and lust to grief – that speak to wider issues of race, culture and truths of American history.

Following 2011’s Ready Player One (which subsequently inspired the Steven Spielberg blockbuster of the same name), Ernest Cline’s much-anticipated sci-fi sequel lands this winter. Propelling fans into his futuristic virtual universe once again, it is expected to be as exciting and action-packed as the original.

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