Are you looking for an exciting new thriller? How about a riveting speculative fiction novel? Or are you looking for a thought-inspiring poetry collection? There are several up-and-coming writers whose books you need to be on the look-out for in 2020.
Check out our top four picks for emerging authors. While each of these authors writes in different styles and genres, they all have something in common: themes that will make you contemplate the world around you.
Lisa Jewell
If you’re looking for the next big name in thrillers, look no further than British author Lisa Jewell. She has published many fantastic novels, starting with 1996’s Ralph’s Party, which was written as part of a dare and launched her career as an author.
Her most recent novel, The Family Upstairs, paints an eerie portrait of two families ravaged by a cult-like leader looking for social status and gives the reader an unreliable first-person narrator.
Celeste Ng
If you’ve scrolled through Hulu lately, you’ve probably seen the title Little Fires Everywhere come up. This runaway-hit show is based on a novel of the same name by Celeste Ng. This novel rich with discourse on race and class issues stemming from the 1990’s into our contemporary world.
Ng’s other novel, Everything I Never Told You, provides a profoundly heartfelt look at family structure and how it crumbles beneath the weight of grief and the exposure of long-held secrets.
Source: ShutterstockNeal Stephenson
Now is perhaps the best time to snuggle up with a lengthy speculative fiction novel. And no one does it better than Neal Stephenson.
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell is a mesh of Phillip K. Dick and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Stephenson drafts an all-too-realistic future in which technology makes the human brain immortal, echoing Mary Shelley’s questioning of “How far is too far for science?”
Tracy K. Smith
Shake up your reading list with some poetry by Tracy K. Smith. You might not know her name, but in 2017, she was named the U.S. poet laureate. Her poetry grapples with themes of cultural and gender identity, family, popular culture, nature, and grief.
Her memoir, Ordinary Light, tells Smith’s own coming-of-age tale in conjunction with her family ties, race, and religion. Published in 2015, it made it onto multiple ‘best book of the year’ lists, including Oprah.com and The New York Times.
