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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Téa Obreht’s latest novel, The Morningside, soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own.
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.
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.
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.
Magical and multifaceted, Julia Alvarez’s meditation on creativity, culture and aging, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is a triumph.
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.
In Rachel Khong’s multigenerational saga, Real Americans, science and philosophy sit cheek by jowl with history and elements of magic.
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.
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.
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.
Like every novel from the author of Crazy Rich Asians, Lies and Weddings is chock-full of scheming characters and breathtakingly lavish scenes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Zahid Rafiq peers into the inner lives of 11 people living in Kashmir in his debut short story collection, The World With Its Mouth Open.
“Family vacation” takes on a new meaning for grown children without kids of their own—like the couple trying their best to keep both sets of in-laws happy in Weike Wang’s Rental House.
Weike Wang’s excellent dialogue, especially in scenes with in-laws, will make you laugh out loud as her third novel, Rental House, examines what grown children and aging parents owe one another.
Woo Woo tells the story of self-obsessed conceptual artist Sabine Rossi’s brush with a stalker, while deftly sending up that subtype of conceptual art that is, as one critic writes of Sabine’s work, “contrived, boring, and egotistical.”
Private Rites excels as a spooky character study, with clever echoes of King Lear—an overbearing father, three bickering daughters, endlessly howling storms—and an all-too-believable evocation of climate apocalypse.
Juhea Kim’s City of Night Birds reverently celebrates dance, describing ballet technique, culture and history so vividly that they will quickly become meaningful to an unfamiliar reader.
There’s still time to be changed by what you read in 2024. Make the most of it with these potent books of poems.
Sacha Naspini’s The Bishop’s Villa is a gut-wrenching story of survival set in Grosseto, a Catholic diocese in Tuscany which was rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust.
Niall Williams demonstrates his genius for making you laugh out loud while breaking your heart at the same time in Time of the Child, his follow-up to This Is Happiness.
Haruki Murakami’s latest masterwork, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, is a moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways.
The poems in Kelly Caldwell’s debut collection, Letters to Forget, have a thudding, propulsive intensity that is hard to look away from. As much as any poetry can be, they are the living stuff of the world.
Cass Donish’s Your Dazzling Death is an openhearted and devastating collection—proof that love stories do not end, but rather go on changing, even through death.
Bluff is a book that indicts and inquires, offering joy and hope, but not without the sober warning that we are running out of bluffs, out of delusions, out of land and perhaps out of time to right our wrongs.
The poems of Carl Phillips’ Scattered Snows, to the North echo one another, alighting on some philosophical truth and then returning, humbled, to the material world.
In his seventh collection, The Invention of the Darling, poet Li-Young Lee balances the grandest revelations of the universe with the gentle touch of personal memory.