Aardvark Book Club is a monthly book subscription box (in both the U.S. & Canada) in which members choose up to 3 hardcover books. In addition to past months’ selections, Aardvark provides 4-5 newly published books to choose from each month. You can also discuss the books with other members in the Aardvark app.
As the end of the month approaches, Aardvark Book Club starts posting hints for their upcoming month’s selection. While the type of hints changes from month-to-month, they remain fun to follow along with. I typically make guesses as to what books they will be in my Instagram stories, but I thought I would also share them here.
I had a few guesses as to which January releases Aardvark will choose. I think Here in Avalon sounded like a good fit for Aardvark. When I added The Fetishist by Katherine Min to my most anticipated list, I thought it seemed like an Aardvark selection as well. But it can be difficult to predict which month a book shows up. I could also see Womb City as an Aardvark pick.
I update this post as each new hint becomes available. While I had identified most of these books after hint #2, one of the books (#5) was unclear until hint #3.
Book # 1
Hint 1.1: Carousel Horse
Hint 2.1: Culty
I was really hoping that the first two hints here belonged to Here in Avalon by Tara Isabella Burton. Sadly, the third hint makes it clear that the book is Where You End.
Where You End
Abbott Kahler
From bestselling nonfiction author Abbott Kahler comes a spellbinding fiction debut: an unusual form of amnesia upends the lives of identical twins, forcing them to face the indelible, dangerous shadow of the past.
When Kat Bird wakes up from a coma, she sees her mirror image: Jude, her twin sister. Jude’s face and name are the only memories Kat has from before her accident. As Kat tries to make sense of things, she believes Jude will provide all the answers to her most pressing questions:
Who am I?
Where am I?
What actually happened?
Amid this tragedy, Jude sees an irresistible opportunity: she can give her sister a brand-new past, one worlds away from the lives they actually led. She spins tales of an idyllic childhood, exotic travels, and a bright future.
But if everything was so perfect, who are the mysterious people following Kat? And what explains her uncontrollable flashes of violent anger, which begin to jeopardize a sweet new romance?
Duped by the one person she trusted, Kat must try to untangle fact from fiction. Yet as she pulls at the threads of Jude’s elaborate tapestry, she has no idea of the catastrophe she’s inviting. At stake is not just the twins’ relationship, but their very survival.
Intensely creepy and beautifully written, Abbott Kahler’s Where You End is an unforgettable tale of intrigue, revenge, and the quest for redemption.
Publication Date: January 16
Publisher: Henry Holt & Co.
Book # 2
Hint 1.2: Wolf
Hint 2.5: Alpha
The Fake Mate
Lana Ferguson
Mackenzie Carter has had some very bad dates lately. Model train experts, mansplainers, guys weirdly obsessed with her tail—she hasn’t had a successful date in months. Only a year out of residency, her grandmother’s obsession with Mackenzie finding the perfect mate to settle down with threatens to drive Mackenzie barking mad. Out of options, it feels like a small thing to tell her grandmother that she’s met someone. That is, until she blurts out the name of the first man she sees and the last man she would ever date: Noah Taylor, the big bad wolf of Denver General.
Noah Taylor, interventional cardiologist and all around grump, has spent his entire life hiding what he is. With outdated stigmas surrounding unmated alphas that have people wondering if they still howl at the moon, Noah has been careful to keep his designation under wraps. It’s worked for years, until an anonymous tip has everything coming to light. Noah is left with two options: come clean to the board and risk his career—or find himself a mate. The chatty, overly friendly ER doctor asking him to be her fake boyfriend on the same day he’s called to meet the board has to be kismet, right?
Mackenzie will keep her grandmother off her back, and Noah will get a chance to prove he can continue to work without a real mate—a mutually beneficial business transaction, they both rationalize. But when the fake-mate act turns into a very real friends-with-benefits arrangement, lines start to blur, and they quickly realize love is a whole different kind of animal.
Publication Date: December 5
Publisher: Berkley
Book # 3
Hint 1.3: Skeleton Key
Hint 2.4: Haunt
The Djinn Waits A Hundred Years
Shubnum Khan
Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Nearly a century later, it stands in ruins: an isolated boardinghouse for eclectic misfits, seeking solely to disappear into the mansion’s dark corridors. Except for Sana. Unlike the others, she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion: To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects—and to the door at its end, locked for decades.
Behind the door is a bedroom frozen in time and a worn diary that whispers of a dark past: the long-forgotten story of a young woman named Meena, who died there tragically a hundred years ago. Watching Sana from the room’s shadows is a besotted, grieving djinn, an invisible spirit who has haunted the mansion since her mysterious death. Obsessed with Meena’s story, and unaware of the creature that follows her, Sana digs into the past like fingers into a wound, dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone living and dead at Akbar Manzil. Sublime, heart-wrenching, and lyrically stunning, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a haunting, a love story, and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl’s search for belonging.
Publication Date: January 9
Publisher: Viking
Book # 4
Hint 1.5: Purse or bag
Hint 2.3: Sugar
With hint 2.3 being “sugar,” I feel like this book can only be Sugar, Baby, which I am all for reading.
Sugar, Baby
Celine Saintclare
In the vein of Luster and Queenie, an unflinching portrayal of high-paid sex work in the age of the internet-an intoxicating, bold debut from a dazzling new voice.
Sugar, Baby follows Agnes, a mixed-race 21-year-old whose life seems to be heading nowhere. Still living at home, she works as a cleaner and spends all her money in clubs on the weekends searching for distractions from her mundane life. That is until she meets Emily, daughter of one of her cleaning clients, who lives in London and works as a model… and a sugar baby, dating rich older men for money.
Emily’s life is the escape Agnes has been longing for-extravagant tasting menus, champagne on tap, glamorous hotels with unlimited room service, designer gifts from dates who call her beautiful. But this new lifestyle is the last straw for her religious mother Constance.
Kicked out of her family home, Agnes moves in with Emily and the other sugar babies in their fancy London flat and is drawn deeper and deeper into their world. But these women come from money: they possess a safety net Agnes does not. And as she is thrown from one precarious relationship to the next-a married man who wants to show off the glamourous, exotic girl on his arm; a Russian billionaire’s wife who makes Agnes central to a sex party in Miami-she finds herself searching for fulfillment just as desperately as she was before.
A compelling journey of self-discovery that offers sharp commentary on race, beauty, and class, Sugar, Baby is an electric, original, spellbinding novel that will keep readers turning the pages until the very end.
Publication Date: January 9
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Book # 5
Hint 1.4: Magnifying glass
Rabbit Hole
Kate Brody
A twisty debut exploring the dark side of true crime fandom and the blurry lines of female friendship, perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn, My Favorite Murder, and Fleabag
Conspiracy theories from Reddit seduce a disaster-prone woman into an obsession with solving her older sister’s cold-case disappearance.
Ten years ago, Theodora “Teddy” Angstrom’s older sister, Angie, went missing. Her case remains unsolved. Now Teddy’s father, Mark, has killed himself. Unbeknownst to Mark’s family, he had been active in a Reddit community fixated on Angie, and Teddy can’t help but fall down the same rabbit hole.
Teddy’s investigation quickly gets her in hot water with her gun-nut boyfriend, her long-lost half brother, and her colleagues at the prestigious high school where she teaches English. Further complicating matters is Teddy’s growing obsession with Mickey, a charming amateur sleuth who is eerily keen on helping her solve the case.
Bewitched by Mickey, Teddy begins to lose her moral compass. As she struggles to reconcile new information with old memories, her erratic behavior reaches a fever pitch, but she won’t stop until she finds Angie—or destroys herself in the process.
A biting critique of the internet’s voyeurism, Rabbit Hole is an outrageous and heart-wrenching character study of a mind twisted by grief—and a page-turning mystery that’s as addictive as a late-night Reddit binge.
Publication Date: January 2
Publisher: Soho Crime
