Upcoming March book releases
March 2026 book releases: 14 intimate stories that span the world and history
Hello, book friends! March’s line-up of book releases has especially vivid settings. From Norwegian childhood hauntings to Delhi power struggles, Black art in New York to Korean chilsun celebrations at sea to Bermuda, these are stories about how our private lives keep colliding with history, geography, and the people we used to be.
P.S. ICYMI, check out my six tips on how to read more than one book at a time, my book review of Chagos Archipelago by Tom Lutz, and watch out for my interview with the same author.
Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth (trans. Charlotte Barslund) (3 March)
As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange.
It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended.
In Repetition, award-winning novelist Vigdis Hjorth explores through fiction the parts of childhood that chime through the decades.
(Verso Books)
To understand the present and shape the future, we need to understand the past. This applies to both global and personal histories. As adults, we are so different from the children we once were, yet those early years can cast astonishingly long shadows. Repetition promises to explore this tension in a setting we rarely see in fiction: contemporary Norway.
Big Nobody by Alex Kadis (5 March)
For Constance ‘Connie’ Costa, life is just beginning. She dreams of leaving behind her dull, dreary life in ‘70s East London, shaking off her deeply embarrassing Greek-Cypriot community of interfering Aunties and pretend ‘cousins’, and running away with her best mate Vas (fellow misfit; NHS specs; soul of a poet). She is determined to take her rightful place alongside her hero, David Bowie, onstage at Wembley Stadium.
Only one thing stands in her way: her father, The Fat Murderer. No longer content with being an absolute imbecile and general abomination of nature, he has dialled up his campaign to ruin Connie’s life ever since the untimely death of her mother.
If she ever wants to claim the destiny that is rightfully hers, Connie has only one option left: to kill him.
Fizzingly original, disarmingly tender and laugh-out-loud funny, Big Nobody is a coming-of-age story about first love, first grief, and the long, painful journey to feeling like a somebody.
(Hutchinson Heinemann)
I genuinely have no idea what to expect here. Is this going to be a gritty story about someone who will do whatever it takes to succeed, a bit of a thriller, or a dark comedy? Whatever direction it takes, it sounds like it’ll be a wild, memorable ride.
The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski (5 March)
‘We shall be forgotten.’ he said. ‘We shall be lost. They will scrub us away like a set of dirty fingerprints on a plastic kettle.’
The crumbling Gothic mansion of Thornwalk, long-term home of the Gilbert family, is being handed over to a chain of luxury ‘historic’ hotels. Millions will be spent in its restoration. But for every so-called improvement, what will be lost? What value can there possibly be in a threadbare carpet, a tarnished spoon and a thousand empty jam jars?
Before the hotel people arrive, with their clipboards and their skips and their bottles of bleach, Maximus, loyal guardian of the Gilberts’ legacy, invites us on a final tour of the once-stately home, where each room holds a secret. From the bolt on the blue room door to the tiny dents in the bars at the nursery window… these are the keys that will unlock the lives of the five fatherless Gilbert children.
A frustrated romantic, a stubborn traditionalist, a dreamer, a diva and an explorer: The Infamous Gilberts will be cast adrift on the irresistible tides of the twentieth century, buoyed by love, buffeted by loss, and tangled together in an unputdownable story where the lines between eccentricity and madness, cruelty and love become hilariously, heartbreakingly blurred.
(Fig Tree)
When I visit old houses in England, I often find myself wondering about the people who once called them home. This novel seems to linger with those former inhabitants, weaving the old world into a fast‑moving present that refuses to wait for anyone.
