Up & Coming Books of 2020

By Elly Murray

Hey there! Are you looking for some interesting new reads in the coming year? Look no further; we’ve gone ahead and picked out some of our favorites for you. This list of 10 books coming out this year includes powerful stories of historical fiction, memoirs that challenge the society we live in, a few books for younger readers, and books suited to many other interests.
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Read on for descriptions of each book, as well as where you can pre-order them, and when they’ll be available at Foggy Pine Books. In addition, several of these books can be used to check off your 2020 Reading Challenge!

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1. Docile by K.M. Szpara

“Docile is a science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power, a challenging tour de force that at turns seduces and startles. To be a Docile is to be kept, body and soul, for the uses of the owner of your contract. To be a Docile is to forget, to disappear, to hide inside your body from the horrors of your service. To be a Docile is to sell yourself to pay your parents’ debts and buy your children’s future.”

Elisha, a young farmer, must become a Docile to provide a better future for his sister. However, he’s going to do it without the aid of Dociline, the drug that makes Dociles blissfully unaware of their pain and surroundings. The same drug that permanently damaged his mother after years of use. What he doesn’t bank on is becoming the Docile of Alexander Bishop III, whose family created Dociline.

K.M. Szpara is a queer and trans author who has already recieved Hugo and Nebula nominations for “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” a novelette about a gay trans man who gets bitten by a vampire. Docile is his debut novel and it promises to be a riveting book. Bonus: Mary loved this book & highly recommends you give it a read!

Pre-order online or purchase in-store on March 3rd.

2020 Reading Challenge:

14. A book with a one word title
or
22. A book by a trans-gender/non-binary author

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2. The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

Pre-order online or purchase in-store on March 3rd.

2020 Reading Challenge

24. A historical fiction

“Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress.

It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a ‘termination’ that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans ‘for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run’?”

Louise Erdrich is an American author who writes stories featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. The Night Watchmen is based on the life of Erdrich’s grandfather, as well as a few other characters central to the story.

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3. The Lonely Heart of Maybelle Lane by Kate O'Shaughnessy

“Eleven-year-old Maybelle Lane collects sounds. She records the Louisiana crickets chirping, Momma strumming her guitar, their broken trailer door squeaking. But the crown jewel of her collection is a sound she didn't collect herself: an old recording of her daddy's warm-sunshine laugh, saved on an old phone's voicemail. It's the only thing she has of his, and the only thing she knows about him.

Until the day she hears that laugh--his laugh--pouring out of the car radio. Going against Momma's wishes, Maybelle starts listening to her radio DJ daddy's new show, drinking in every word like a plant leaning toward the sun. When he announces he'll be the judge of a singing contest in Nashville, she signs up. What better way to meet than to stand before him and sing with all her heart?”
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Kate O’Shaughnessy’s debut novel promises to be a heart-wrenching, spectacular read about the difference between blood relatives and the family you choose for yourself.

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​Pre-order online or purchase in store on March 3rd.

2020 Reading Challenge

7. A middle-grade novel
or
20. A book with a coming of age story

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4. The Story of More by Hope Jahren

Pre-order online or purchase in store on March 3rd.

“Hope Jahren is an award-winning geobiologist, a brilliant writer, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. The Story of More is her impassioned open letter to humanity as we stand at the crossroads of survival and extinction. Jahren celebrates the long history of our enterprising spirit--which has tamed wild crops, cured diseases, and sent us to the moon--but also shows how that spirit has created excesses that are quickly warming our planet to dangerous levels.

In short, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions--from electric power to large-scale farming and automobiles--that, even as they help us, release untenable amounts of carbon dioxide. She explains the current and projected consequences of greenhouse gases--from superstorms to rising sea levels--and the science-based tools that could help us fight back.”

In a time where everyone is throwing out random information about climate change, some true and some false, Jahren provides an uncompromised guide to understanding just what is going on in our world, and what we can do about it. 

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5. Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit

“A landmark memoir from the author of Men Explain Things to Me: an electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent.

In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Fransisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy.”

This pivotal memoir examines the voicelessness and abuse that women are forced to struggle through every day, as well as Solnit’s own experiences with that sort of helplessness. She recounts how she was liberated and became a voice for women’s rights.

Pre-order online or purchase in-store March 10th.

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6. Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Pre-order online or purchase in-store on March 10th.

2020 Reading Challenge

14. A book with a one-word title

“There is a voice of longing inside every woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good mothers, daughters, partners, employees, citizens, and friends. We believe all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives, relationships, and world, and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful. We hide our simmering discontent—even from ourselves. Until we reach our boiling point.

Four years ago, Glennon Doyle—Oprah-endorsed author, renowned activist and humanitarian, wife and mother of three—was speaking at a conference when a woman entered the room. Glennon looked at her and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There. She. Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. Soon she realized that they came to her from within.”

Best-selling author Glennon Doyle has produced yet another impactful book about the power of women to overcome society’s expectations and recognize themselves.

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7. So We Can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith

“From Kentucky to the California desert, these forty-two short stories—some long, some gone in a flash, some told over text and emails—expose the essence of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad behavior, brokenness and fearlessness, and more.

Teenage girls sneak out on a summer night to meet their boyfriends by the train tracks. A woman escapes suffocating grief through a vivid fantasy life. Members of a cult form an unsettling chorus as they extol their passion for the same man. A love story begins over cabbages in a grocery store. A laundress’s life is consumed by obsession for a famous baseball player. Two high school friends kiss all night and binge-watch Winona Ryder movies after the death of a sister.
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Leesa Cross-Smith’s sensuous stories will drench readers in nostalgia for summer nights and sultry days, the intense friendships of teenage girls, and the innate bonds felt between mothers, while holding up the wild hearts of women so they can catch the light.”

Pre-order online or purchase in-store on March 10th.

2020 Reading Challenge

20. A book with a coming of age story

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8. Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Samira Ahmed

​Pre-order online or purchase in-store on April 7th.

2020 Reading Challenge

24. A historical fiction

“It’s August in Paris and 17-year-old Khayyam Maquet—American, French, Indian, Muslim—is at a crossroads. This holiday with her professor parents should be a dream trip for the budding art historian. But her maybe-ex-boyfriend is probably ghosting her, she might have just blown her chance at getting into her dream college, and now all she really wants is to be back home in Chicago figuring out her messy life instead of brooding in the City of Lights.

Two hundred years before Khayyam’s summer of discontent, Leila is struggling to survive and keep her true love hidden from the Pasha who has “gifted” her with favored status in his harem. In the present day—and with the company of a descendant of Alexandre Dumas—Khayyam begins to connect allusions to an enigmatic 19th-century Muslim woman whose path may have intersected with Alexandre Dumas, Eugene Delacroix, and Lord Byron.

Echoing across centuries, Leila and Khayyam’s lives intertwine, and as one woman’s long-forgotten life is uncovered, another’s is transformed.”

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9. Conjure Women by Afia Atakora

“Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother's footsteps as a midwife; and their master's daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom.

Magnificently written, brilliantly researched, richly imagined, Conjure Women moves back and forth in time to tell the haunting story of Rue, Varina, and May Belle, their passions and friendships, and the lengths they will go to save themselves and those they love.”

Afia Atakora’s debut novel is a riveting historical fiction that for once presents the unique point of view of African-American women during the Civil War,  while adding just a hint of magic.

Pre-order online or purchase in-store on April 7th.

2020 Reading Challenge

24. A historical fiction

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10. Bedtime Bonnet by Nancy Redd

Pre-order online or purchase in-store on April 7th.

2020 Reading Challenge

12. A picture book

“In my family, when the sun goes down, our hair goes up!
My brother slips a durag over his locs.
Sis swirls her hair in a wrap around her head.
Daddy covers his black waves with a cap.
Mama gathers her corkscrew curls in a scarf.
I always wear a bonnet over my braids, but tonight I can't find it anywhere!

Bedtime Bonnet gives readers a heartwarming peek into quintessential Black nighttime hair traditions and celebrates the love between all the members of this close-knit, multi-generational family.”
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Nancy Redd is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. Bedtime Bonnet is her first children’s book, and so far it’s been described as “the best children’s book of 2020” by TheGrio. This book is a cozy story of a family’s bedtime rituals, and is a great read for families who enjoyed Hair Love by Matthew A. Cherry. 

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All of these exciting new books at Foggy Pine promise for a year of snuggling cozily into your armchairs with some hot chocolate and a good read. If you'd like any recommendations on books for the 2020 Reading Challenge or just for fun, our booksellers are always happy to help. Remember, all pre-orders are 15% off the list price. And as always, read on!