Most anticipated fiction of 2024

We’re gearing up for another year of fiction with so much to offer, from sweeping historical epics to ominous speculative visions that we kind of hope aren’t prophetic. Read on for the highlights.
Available 1/16/2024

The Curse of Pietro Houdini boasts a little bit of everything—a truly fascinating setting; rich, quirky characters; tragedy, suspense, warmth and humor. Derek B. Miller has shown the range of his talents in six previous novels, but this may be his masterpiece.

Available 1/23/2024

It’s a special gift when a favorite poet writes a novel. Martyr! is Kaveh Akbar’s fiction debut, after poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell. It tells the story of Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian American poet recovering from addiction who, following the deaths of his parents, has become fixated on the idea of martyrdom.

Available 1/30/2024

Come and Get It is a return to the uncomfortable-yet-fascinating social commentary that made Kiley Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age, so engrossing (and a bestseller, too!). When a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas begins paying a resident assistant to let her listen in on the conversations of a wealthy group of students, using their gossip as writing material, everyone ends up in murky moral territory.

Available 2/13/2024

The stunning, evocative cover of this historical novel is reason enough to add it to your TBR: a lone woman in red walks through winter wilderness, reflected in a frozen pond as a snow-white fox. Of course, readers of The Night Tiger would be eagerly awaiting Yangsze Choo’s next book even if the cover were a paper bag. This epic adventure set in Manchuria at the very end of the Qing Dynasty promises to bring together mystery and legend to vibrant effect.

Available 2/27/2024

This remarkable novel is both a prequel and a sequel to Tommy Orange’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, There There, picking up with his unforgettable characters Orvil Red Feather and Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield. Beginning in 1864 with the Sand Creek Massacre, Orange takes readers back in time to tell the stories of these characters’ ancestors, before sweeping forward to 2018 and the aftermath of the tragic shooting at the heart of There There.

Available 2/27/2024

Kirsten Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the very first chapter of King Nyx. This is a scary good book.

Available 3/05/2024

Though told with humor and a light touch, Anita de Monte Laughs Last doesn’t shy away from serious issues: the erasure of women from the art history canon and the racism often faced by first generation students of color at Ivy League colleges.

Available 3/05/2024

Cristina Henriquez’s polyvocal novel is a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. It’s easy to imagine, in these snippets of lives, just how many more love stories, deaths, migrations, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the canal’s construction.

Available 3/05/2024

In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation, and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.

Available 3/12/2024

Colombian literary icon and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014, after a long career of groundbreaking novels and short stories. Published for the first time this spring, his novella Until August follows a married woman who travels to a Caribbean island each August to spend one night with a new lover.

Available 3/19/2024

Percival Everett’s visionary and necessary reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James, is a standout in an era of retellings. Everett matches Mark Twain in voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while deeply engaging with what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people.

Available 3/19/2024

Téa Obreht’s latest novel, The Morningside, soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own.

Available 3/19/2024

If you love Louise Kennedy (Trespasses, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac), Anna Burns (Milkman) and Claire Keegan (Small Things Like These, So Late in the Day) as much as we do, you’ll want to check out Wild Houses. Debut novelist Colin Barrett is the author of two much lauded short story collections. He writes hilarious, piercing and inventive tales often set in fictional Irish towns like Ballina, where Wild Houses’ protagonist, quiet, exceedingly tall Dev Hendrick, is dragged into the kidnapping of a drug dealer’s teenage brother.

Available 4/02/2024

It’s in moments of earnest wonder that Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is most compelling, like the brief but glorious clearing of a tempestuous sky.

Available 4/02/2024

As in her debut novel, West, Carys Davies writes exquisitely of the wilderness in Clear, telling the tale of two men who connect on a nearly uninhabited Scottish island during the Highland Clearances of the 1800s, when many rural Scots were forcibly evicted from their land.

Available 4/02/2024

Magical and multifaceted, Julia Alvarez’s meditation on creativity, culture and aging, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is a triumph.

Available 4/23/2024

A Pulitzer Prize winner for her novel A Thousand Acres, author Jane Smiley crafts literary delights, from her moving historical Last Hundred Years trilogy to her wonderful, animal-led adventure, Perestroika in Paris. Lucky features Jodie Rattler, a folk musician from St. Louis who, through some blend of fate, chance and hard work, becomes a national star.

Available 4/30/2024

In Rachel Khong’s multigenerational saga, Real Americans, science and philosophy sit cheek by jowl with history and elements of magic.

Available 5/07/2024

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club brings to life a historical moment, just after WWI, when both everything and nothing had changed for women in England—plus a summer’s worth of fresh seaside descriptions and romantic entanglements.

Available 5/07/2024

Long Island revisits Eilis Lacey more than 20 years after the events of Colm Toíbín’s 2009 novel, Brooklyn, which introduced readers to this self-possessed, elusive young woman.

Available 5/14/2024

With thrilling, adventurous sentences, and a profound understanding of the soul, Claire Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine.

Available 5/21/2024

Like every novel from the author of Crazy Rich Asians, Lies and Weddings is chock-full of scheming characters and breathtakingly lavish scenes.

Available 6/04/2024

Morgan Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with Fire Exit, a beautifully written novel that is sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against all odds.

Available 6/04/2024

David Wroblewski’s second novel, Familiaris, leaps back two generations from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle to follow John Sawtelle and his wife Mary as they develop the first generations of an amazingly sensitive breed of dogs.

Available 6/18/2024

Wrestling with grief over the loss of his son and with the inheritance of a former plantation, the narrator of John Vercher’s Devil Is Fine embarks on a mystical, profound journey into an unraveling identity.

Available 6/18/2024

Akwaeke Emezi’s sixth novel for adults, Little Rot, hurtles toward devastation, but even as you anticipate the horrors ahead, the escapist thriller-style pacing will keep you pushing on.

Available 6/25/2024

In Julia Phillips’ latest, sisters Sam and Elena spend their days working and caring for their dying mother on an island in the Pacific Northwest—until the arrival of a bear upends their equilibrium.

Available 7/09/2024

Part political thriller, part sci-fi, Mateo Askaripour’s second novel, This Great Hemisphere, revels in the dystopian details of a world where invisible citizens live under the control of the visible Dominant Population.

Available 7/16/2024

The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic fiction and her more fantastical work alike.

Most anticipated by genre

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