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•   The best literary fiction books to read right now

The best literary fiction books to read right now

Here we share the most exciting new literary fiction and the best literary fiction of all time. .

2023 was a remarkable year for literature and 2024 looks equally unlikely to disappoint. Here, we round up some of the most exciting new literary fiction of 2024, reflect on the best literary books of 2023, and recommend some of the best literary fiction of all time. 

For even more inspiration, don't miss our edit of the best fiction books.  

The best new literary fiction of 2024

Long island, by colm tóibín.

One of the most anticipated titles of the year, Long Island is the sequel to Colm Tóibín’s beloved novel, Brooklyn . The now-married Eilis Fiorello, Tony and their two children live a safe, albeit staid, life on Long Island until a man arrives at their doorstep and everything Eilis knows is brought crashing down around her. Forced to confront the reality of her life and marriage, Eilis is drawn back to her native Ireland and the people she left behind decades ago. A powerful meditation on the nature of home, family and memory, Long Island is a masterpiece whether you have already read Brooklyn, or not. 

by Percival Everett

After escaping his slave owner’s plantation on The Mississippi River in 1861, James holes up on nearby Jackson Island, trying to formulate a plan to ensure his and his family’s freedom. Meeting Huck, a man running from his own troubled past, the pair start a treacherous journey up the river in the hope of salvation. A masterful retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that brings Jim’s story into the spotlight for the first time , Percival Everett’s James is one of 2024’s must-read novels. 

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By anita desai.

Arriving in San Miguel, Mexico, a destination chosen to help her improve her Spanish, from her native India, young student Bonita is anonymous and acutely aware of the possibility of adventure stretching out ahead of her. But, as she sits in a park, silently watching this unfamiliar world go by, she meets a stranger who swears she knew Bonita’s mother as an art student decades before. This woman’s revelation leads Bonita on a journey to learn the truth of who her mother once was; a journey that will change their relationship for good.

by Mariel Franklin

Living in a houseshare, laid off from her job, and utterly unsure what to do next, Mary spends her thirty-second birthday boarding a plane from London to Ibiza to get away from it all. Meeting Tom, a chemist who has created a new drug that he promises will take away all the anxiety that Mary lives with every day, she embarks on a holiday romance that soon turns into something more. But with the drug’s safety being called into question and the pair facing the realities of real life, will their new love survive? Addictive, audacious, and darkly comic, Bonding introduces Mariel Franklin, a new voice in literary fiction.

Anyone's Ghost

By august thompson.

Everything changed the day Theron met Jake. Cool, confident, older, and unspeakably beautiful, Jake turns Theron’s lonely life technicolour, showing him new music, new drugs, and new ways to push himself to the point of no return. Over the next two decades, the pair dance around what they feel for each other, until one day, an unspeakable accident forces them to face the question of what their future holds. A story of love, longing, and how people change, Anyone’s Ghost is a poignant and poetic novel that you won’t be able to stop thinking about.

The Burial Plot

By elizabeth macneal.

When Bonnie, a young woman trying to make her way in Victorian London meets Crawford, a wily trickster with a mysterious past, she instantly falls under his spell. As they swindle the city’s well-healed to make ends meet, Bonnie finds herself in hot water and Crawford promises to make it all go away. Sent to work for a peculiar family in a house full of the ghosts of their past, Bonnie realises that maybe she’s the one who’s been tricked all along. A chilling gothic thriller, The Burial Plot is the newest novel from the bestselling author of The Doll Factory, Elizabeth Macneal.  

The Amendments

By niamh mulvey.

For Nell and Adrienne, the prospect of becoming parents is bittersweet. Adrienne is excited about the start of their new life, whereas, for Nell, their impending parenthood takes her back to a past she has long tried to bury, to finally confront her fractured relationship with her mother. A story of love, freedom, belonging and rebellion told through the stories of three generations of women from the same Irish family, The Amendments is a novel you won’t want to put down. 

My Beloved Life

By amitava kumar.

With his mother bitten by a cobra as she prepared to give birth to him in India, Jadunath Kunwar’s life was remarkable and full of challenges before he was even born. In My Beloved Life Amitava Kumar tells the story of Jadunath’s life, from his birth in 1935 to his death during the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Poetically told through Kunwar and his daughter Jugnu’s experiences, My Beloved Life is a poetically written meditation of the life of one ordinary man living in a country in the midst of unprecedented change. 

‘ This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling. ’ Salman Rushdie on My Beloved Life

by Elizabeth O'Connor

Growing up on an idyllic, albeit dull island off the coast of Wales in the 1930s, Manod dreams of a future full of colour and life but with war looming, her hopes of following her dreams seem too far off to fathom. That is, until the arrival of two anthropologists from the mainland arrive to study the island's secluded community, and Manod sees an opportunity to get off the island and discover the world for herself. As she entangles herself in their complicated relationship, will she get the future she's so desperate for? 

by Nathan Hill

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the 90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, but fast-forward twenty years to married life, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons. Moving from the gritty 90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home renovation hysteria,  Wellness  is a powerfully affecting novel about how we change, grow and age. It is a story of a marriage, middle age, our tech-obsessed health culture, and the bonds that keep people together. 

‘ American storytelling at its era-spanning best . . . An immersive, multi-layered portrait of a marriage, Nathan Hill’s follow-up to The Nix is a work of quiet genius. ’ The Observer

How I Won A Nobel Prize

By julius taranto.

Helen, a graduate student on a quest to save the planet, is one of the best minds of her generation. But when her irreplaceable advisor’s student sex scandal is exposed, she must choose whether to give up on her work or accompany him to RIP, a research institute which grants safe harbour to the disgraced. As Helen settles into life at the institute alongside her partner Hew, she develops a crush on an older novelist, while he is drawn to an increasingly violent protest movement. Julius Taranto’s wickedly satirical and refreshingly irreverent debut , examines the price we are willing to pay for progress and what it means to be a good person.

Where There Was Fire

By john manuel arias.

Set in Costa Rica, 1968, John Manuel Arias’s debut novel  explores the aftermath of a devastating plantation fire that veils a huge scandal and alters Teresa Cepeda Valverde’s family forever. Twenty-seven years later, Teresa and her estranged daughter Lyra are still grappling with the past. Lyra is determined to uncover that night's events, while Teresa is haunted by her lost husband and a resentful spirit. This powerful tale unfolds a mother-daughter journey toward understanding and forgiveness, amid a family mystery rooted in love, betrayal, and greed.

by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus Shams has been grappling with his mother's death ever since her plane was shot down when he was just a baby. Now, newly sober, he embarks on a journey to uncover her true identity and the mysteries attached to her life, triggered by an encounter with a dying artist. As Cyrus pieces together clippings from his mother's life, he is faced with a shocking revelation that shatters his beliefs. Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound,  Martyr!  heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

The World and All That It Holds

By aleksandar hemon.

Rafael Pinto spends his days crushing herbs and tablets at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. While it's a far cry from his poetry-filled student days in Vienna, life feels peaceful. That is until a June day in 1914 when the world explodes and soon, finding himself in the trenches of Galicia, Pinto's fantasies fall flat. As war devours, all he has left is the attention of Osman, a fellow soldier who complements Pinto's introspective, poetic soul. Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches and find themselves entangled with spies and Bolsheviks. In this story of love and war, it is Pinto's love for Osman that will truly survive. 

‘ Alexsandar Hemon's new novel is immense. ... It contains almost as much as its title promises. By turns lyrical and sardonic, it is as emotionally compelling as it is clever. I'll be surprised if I enjoy a novel more this year. ’ Guardian

What You Need From The Night

By laurent petitmangin.

How can a father and son find common ground when everything seems set to break them apart? A father, forced by tragedy to raise his sons alone, releases they are taking two different paths. One plans for university in Paris. The other joins a far-right group. Initially seeking camaraderie, their activities lead him to a violent confrontation. Tense, sharp and ultimately heartbreaking, Laurent Petitmangin's first novel, What You Need From The Night , asks what acts can truly be forgiven.

Now I Am Here

By chidi ebere.

About to make his last stand, a soldier facing certain death at the hands of the enemy writes home to explain how he ended up there, a gentle man gradually transformed into a war criminal, committing acts he wouldn’t have thought himself capable. A profound reflection on how good people can do terrible things, this is a brave, unflinching and thought-provoking debut. 

by James Hynes

This vivid story set at the end of the Roman Empire, follows Sparrow – a boy of no known origin living in a brothel. He spends his days listening to stories told by his beloved ‘mother’ Euterpe, running errands for her lover the cook, and dodging the blows of their brutal overseer. But a hard fate awaits him – one that involves suffering, murder and mayhem. To cope he will create his own identity – Sparrow – who sings without reason and can fly from trouble. This is a book with one of the most powerfully affecting and memorable characters of recent fiction, brought to life through James Hynes' meticulous research and bold imagination. 

‘ Utterly engrossing, vivid, and honest, this coming of age story reaches across millennia to grab us by the throat. ’ Emma Donoghue on Sparrow

by Sarah May

Vanity Fair meets Succession as Becky Sharp works her way up the journalistic greasy pole in nineties tabloid-era London. Scoop after scoop, Becky's downfall looms as she becomes more and more involved in every scandal her newspaper publishes and cares less and less about the lives she ruins in the process. A sharply intelligent and funny interrogation of how far society has really come since Thackeray's nineteenth-century Becky Sharp, just like the stories broken by The Mercury , everyone will be talking about Becky .

by Sarah K Jackson

Five years ago, a toxic microplastics storm killed most of the population. Now Katie, a young mother, must forage and hunt for meat as she attempts to feed her little boy, Harry. At a time when stepping outside could kill you, Harry is kept indoors at all costs. Then, after years without human contact, Katie and Harry are terrified by the unwelcome arrival of another survivor. Katie realises she must undertake a previously unthinkable journey in search of a new life for her son. Perfect for fans of Room, Station Eleven and dystopian fiction in general, this gripping novel explores just how far a mother will go to save her child. 

An Honourable Exit

By eric vuillard.

From the International Booker Prize shortlisted author comes a searing account of a conflict that dealt a fatal blow to French colonialism. 19 October 1950. The war is not going to plan. In Paris, politicians gather to discuss what to do about Indochina. In this gripping and shocking novel, Éric Vuillard exposes the tangled web of politicians, bankers and titans of industry who all had a vested interest in France’s prolonged presence in lands far from Paris. At just 192 pages, what this book lacks in length, it certainly doesn't lack in drama - short, sharp and brutal, An Honourable Exit is a journey behind closed doors to witness how history is really made.

The best literary fiction of 2023

By hernan diaz.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2023

This literary puzzle about money, power, and intimacy challenges the myths shrouding wealth, and the fictions that often pass for history. Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth — all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune?

Everything's Fine

By cecilia rabess.

When Jess first meets Josh at their Ivy League college she dislikes him immediately: an entitled guy in chinos, ready to take over the world, unable to accept that life might be easier for him because he's white, while Jess is almost always the only Black woman in their class. But as a tempestuous friendship turns into an electrifying romance that shocks them both, Jess begins to question who she is and what she’s really willing to compromise. Can people really ever just agree to disagree? And more to the point, should they? This hugely funny and deeply moving love story offers no easy answers.

Western Lane

By chetna maroo.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

Exploring themes of grief and sisterhood, this debut coming-of-age story packs a lot of emotion into just 176 pages. Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash for as long as she can remember. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a brutal training regimen. Soon, the game has become her entire world, causing a rift between Gopi and her sisters. But on the court, governed by the rhythms of the sport, she feels alive. This novel beautifully captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty as we follow a young athlete's struggle to transcend herself. 

Young Mungo

By douglas stuart.

Mungo is a Protestant and James is a Catholic, both inhabiting the hyper-masculine world of two Glasgow housing estates, split violently along sectarian lines. The two should be enemies but, finding sanctuary in the doocot James has created for his racing pigeons, they grow closer and closer. Dreaming of escape and under constant threat of discovery, Mungo and James attempt to navigate a dangerous and uncertain future together.

The story behind the Young Mungo cover

Five tuesdays in winter, by lily king.

With Writers & Lovers , Lily King became one of our most acclaimed writers of contemporary fiction. And now, with Five Tuesdays in Winter , she gathers ten of her best short stories. These intimate literary stories tell of a bookseller who is filled with unspoken love for his employee, an abandoned teenage boy nurtured by a pair of housesitting students and a girl whose loss of innocence brings confident power. Romantic, hopeful, raw and occasionally surreal, these stories riff beautifully on the topic of love and romance.

Roman Stories

By jhumpa lahiri.

Inspired by the city she’s lived in for the past two decades, Jhumpa Lahiri's new work of fiction turns her gaze towards those who call Rome home. Weaving each character’s story around a set of steps they encounter daily, and examining how the city is constantly evolving and changing, Lahiri masterfully  illuminates the joys and tragedies of daily life. From a man mourning the person he once was to a couple coming to terms with loss and a family trying to make a new city home, the rich characters she has created will stay with you long after you finish reading. 

by Ashleigh Nugent

Aeon is a mixed-up and mixed-race teenager from a leafy Liverpool suburb, trying to understand the Black identity foisted upon him by his friends and his community. To his growing shame, the only Black people in his life are his dad and his cousin, who he's decided don't count. Desperate to find his Black roots he travels to Jamaica. Mugged, stabbed and arrested, he's beaten unconscious in a detention centre for being the 'White Boy'. And then things really start to go wrong. 

Stone Blind

By natalie haynes.

As the sole mortal in a family of gods, Medusa begins to realize that she is the only one who experiences change, the only one who can be hurt, and the only one who lives with an urgency that her family will never know. Then, when the sea god Poseidon commits an unforgivable act in the temple of Athene, the goddess takes her revenge where she can – and Medusa is changed forever. Writhing snakes replace her hair, and her gaze now turns any living creature to stone. Unable to control her new power, she is condemned to a life of shadows and darkness. Until Perseus embarks upon a quest. At last, Medusa's story is told.

Open Throat

By henry hoke.

A queer mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. The lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma and grappling with the complexities of their own identity. When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city. As they confront a carousel of temptations and threats, the lion takes us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles. Feral and vulnerable, profound and playful,  Open Throat  is a marvel of storytelling that brings the mythic to life.

A Time Outside This Time

A writer called Satya visits a high-profile artists' retreat, and soon finds that the pressures of modern life are hard to shed: the US president pours out vitriol, a virus threatens the world, and the relentless news cycle only makes things worse. Satya realises these pressures can inspire him to write, and he begins to channel presidential tweets, memories from an Indian childhood, and his own experiences as an immigrant into his new novel. A fascinating exploration of memory in a post-truth world, Amitava Kumar's A Time Outside This Time is a beautiful and necessary novel.

Maps of our Spectacular Bodies

By maddie mortimer.

Something is moving in Lia's body, learning her life with gleeful malevolence and spreading through the rungs of her larynx, the bones of her trachea. When a shock diagnosis forever changes Lia's world, boundaries in her life begin to break down as buried secrets emerge. A voice prowling inside of her takes hold of her story, merging the landscape within her body with the one outside. A coming-of-age at the end of life, Maddie Mortimer's compelling debut novel is both heart-breaking and darkly funny, combining wild lyricism with celebrations of the desire, forgiveness and darkness in our bodies. 

‘ Compelling and uplifting . . . undeniably impressive: Mortimer is clearly a talent to watch ’ The Telegraph on Maps of our Spectacular Bodies

Other Women

By emma flint.

Based on a real case from the 1920s, Other Women tells the story of Beatrice, one of the thousands of nameless and invisible unmarried women trying to make lives for themselves after the First World War, and Kate, the wife of the man Beatrice has fallen in love with. When fantasy and obsession turns to murder, two women who should never have met are connected forever.

To Paradise

By hanya yanagihara.

This amazing new novel from the author of A Little Life begins in the nineteenth century, and spans stories of love, family, loss and promised utopia over the following three centuries. In 1893, New York is part of the Free States, and a gentle young member of a privileged family falls for a charismatic and impoverished music teacher. In 1993 Manhattan is being swept by the AIDS epidemic, and a young Hawaiian man with a wealthy older partner must hide his difficult family background. And in 2093 in a world where plague and totalitarian rule is rife, a young woman tries to solve the mystery of her husband's disappearances. 

by Julia May Jonas

The narrator of this provocative and utterly readable novel is a much loved English professor, who finds that her charismatic professor husband is facing a flood of accusations from former students. The couple have long had an understanding about taking lovers, but suddenly life has acquired an uncomfortable edge. And things get even more twisted when the narrator finds herself in the grip of an obsession with Vladimir, a young and feted married novelist who is new to the campus. This explosive, edgy debut traces the tangled contradictions of power and lust.

by Gina Chung

Stuck in a rut, Ro faces the challenges of her thirties: a strained relationship with her mother and a boyfriend who left for a Mars mission. Her days are mundane at the aquarium, and her nights involve consuming sharktinis. With her best friend drifting away and Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus, as her sole connection to her vanished marine biologist father, Ro's world unravels when Dolores is sold to a wealthy investor. On the verge of self-destruction, Ro must confront her past, rediscover her purpose, and embrace the evolving world to heal her childhood scars and rebuild her life.

by André Dao

Anam takes us on a poignant journey from 1930s Hanoi to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne, and Cambridge, exploring memory, inheritance, colonialism, and belonging. The narrator, born into a Vietnamese family in Melbourne, grapples with his grandfather's haunting tale of imprisonment in Chi Hoa prison under the Communist government. Straddling his Australian upbringing and Vietnamese heritage, he faces the impact of his grandfather's death and the birth of his daughter on his own life's trajectory. André Dao artfully weaves fiction and essay, theory and personal experience, revealing forgotten aspects of history and family archives. 

Learned by Heart

By emma donoghue.

In 1805, at a boarding school in York, two fourteen-year-old girls cross paths. Eliza Raine, an orphan with an Indian heritage, feels isolated due to her differences. Anne Lister, a rebellious spirit, defies societal norms for women. Their love story blossoms, creating a profound bond that transcends time and shapes their lives forever. Learned By Heart is the heartbreaking story of the love of two women – Anne Lister, the real-life inspiration behind Gentleman Jack, and her first love, Eliza Raine – from the bestselling author of  Room  and  The Wonder.

The complete guide to Emma Donoghue's books

Briefly, a delicious life, by nell stevens.

It's 1838, and Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and her children are en route to a Mallorcan monastery. They are in recovery from life in Paris, seeking a more simple existence. The unexpected witness of their new life is Blanca, a ghost who has been at the monastery for more than three hundred years, her young life having been cut short. And when George Sand arrives, a lovely woman in a man's clothes, Blanca is in love. Meanwhile, the village is looking suspiciously at the new arrivals, as a difficult winter closes in . . . 

by Hannah Kent

It's 1836 in Prussia, and teenage Hanne is finding the domestic world of womanhood increasingly oppressive. She longs to be out in nature, and finds little companionship with the local girls. Until, that is, she meets kindred spirit Thea. Hanne is from a family of Old Lutherans, whose worship is suppressed and secret. Safe passage to Australia offers liberty from these restrictions. But a long and harsh journey lies ahead, one which will put the girls' close bond to a terrible test.

The House of Fortune

By jessie burton.

A glorious, sweeping story of fate and ambition, The House of Fortune is the sequel to Jessie Burton’s bestseller  The Miniaturist . Amsterdam, 1705. Thea Brandt is about to turn eighteen and she can't wait to become an adult. Walter, her true love, awaits Thea at the city's theatre. But at home on the Herengracht things are tense. Her father Otto and Aunt Nella bicker incessantly and are selling furniture so the family can eat. And, on her birthday, the day her mother Marin died, secrets from Thea's past threaten to eclipse the present. Nella is feeling a prickling sensation in her neck, which recalls the miniaturist who toyed with her life eighteen years ago.

Very Cold People

By sarah manguso.

Growing up on the edge of a wealthy but culturally threadbare New England town, Ruth goes under the radar. Nobody pays her attention, but she watches everything – recording with precision the painful unfurling of her youth and enduring difficult and damaging parenting from the mocking, undermining adults in her life. But as the adults of the book fail to grow up, Ruth gracefully arcs towards maturity in a story that grapples with many of life's ugly truths. 

Concerning My Daughter

By kim hye-jin.

A mother lets her thirty-something daughter – Green – move into her apartment, with dreams that she will find a good job and a good husband to start a family with. But Green arrives with her girlfriend Lane, and her mother finds it hard to be civil. She is similarly unaccepting of her daughter's entanglement in a case of unfair dismissal from her university employers, involving gay colleagues. Yet Green's mother finds that she has her own moral battle to fight, defending the right to care of a dementia patient who has chosen an unconventional life and has no family. Translated from Korean by Jamie Chang, this is a universal tale about ageing, prejudice and love.

‘ An admirably nuanced portrait of prejudice . . . one that boldly takes on the daunting task of humanizing someone whose prejudice has made her cruel. ’ The New York Times on Concerning My Daughter

The Passenger

By cormac mccarthy.

A sunken jet. Nine passengers. A missing body. The Passenger  is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God. The first of two novels published in 2022 by literary great Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger is followed by Stella Maris  –  both are too good to be missed. 

The Women Could Fly

By megan giddings.

The Women Could Fly  is a speculative feminist novel for our times, set in a time where magic is reality, and single women are monitored in case they turn out to be witches. Josephine Thomas has heard a plethora of theories about her mother's death: that she was abducted, murdered and that she was a witch. This is a concerning accusation, because women who act strangely – especially Black women – can soon find themselves being tried for witchcraft. Facing the prospect of a State-mandated marriage, Jo decides to honour one last request written in her mother's will.

The Exhibitionist

By charlotte mendelson.

Meet the Hanrahan family, gathering for a momentous weekend as famous artist and notorious egoist Ray Hanrahan prepares for a new exhibition of his art – the first in many decades – and one he is sure will burnish his reputation for good. His three children will be there: beautiful Leah, sensitive Patrick, and insecure Jess, the youngest, who has a momentous decision to make..And what of Lucia, Ray’s steadfast and selfless wife? She is an artist, too, but has always had to put her roles as wife and mother first. But Lucia is hiding secrets of her own, and as the weekend unfolds and the exhibition approaches, she must finally make a choice. 

‘ It takes the most ferocious intelligence, skill and a deep reservoir of sadness to write a novel as funny as this. I adored it. ’ Meg Mason on The Exhibitionist

The Dance Tree

By kiran millwood hargrave.

It's 1518 in Strasbourg, and in the intense summer heat a solitary woman starts to dance in the main square. She dances for days without rest, and is joined by hundreds of other women. The city authorities declare a state of emergency, and bring in musicians to play the devil out of the dancing women. Meanwhile pregnant Lisbet, who lives at the edge of the city, is tending to the family's bees. The dancing plague intensifies, as Lisbet is drawn into a net of secret passions and deceptions. Inspired by true events, this is a compelling story of superstition, transformative change and women pushed to their limits.

Disorientation

By elaine hsieh chou.

This raucous and heartwarming satire asks – who gets to tell our stories? And can we change the narrative if we get to write it ourselves?  PhD student Ingrid Yang can't wait to finish her dissertation on major poet Xiao-Wen Chou so she never has to read about ‘Chinese-y’ things again. Then she finds an enigmatic note in the Chou archive, which leads to an explosive discovery and a roller coaster of misadventures. Ingrid's gentle fiancé doesn't look quite the same in the aftermath, as she confronts her troubled relationship with white men and their institutions and, more importantly, herself . . .

Sea of Tranquillity

By emily st. john mandel.

It's 1912, and eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew is on a journey across the Atlantic, having been exiled from society in England. Arriving in British Columbia, he enters a forest, mesmerised by the Canadian wilderness. All is silent, before the notes of a violin reverberate through the air. Two centuries later, and acclaimed author Olive Llewelyn is travelling over the earth, on a break from her home in the second moon colony. At the heart of her bestselling novel, a man plays a violin for spare change in the corridor of an airship terminal, as a forest rises around him. This compelling novel immerses the reader in parallel worlds, and multiple possibilities.

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Our wives under the sea, by julia armfield.

Leah is back from a perilous and troubling deep sea mission, and Miri is delighted to have her wife home. But Leah has carried the undersea trauma into the couple's domestic life, and it is causing a rupture in their relationship. The debut novel from the author of acclaimed short story collection salt slow , Our Wives Under The Sea is a rich meditation on love, loss and the mysteries of the ocean.

The best literary fiction of all time

White noise, by don delillo.

Possibly DeLillo’s funniest book,  White Noise  introduced his work to a wider audience than ever before and established his reputation as a master of postmodern fiction. Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. The novel is a story about his absurd life; a life that is going well enough, until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an 'Airborne Toxic Event' and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear – his own mortality. DeLillo's bestselling story effortlessly combines social satire and metaphysical dilemma, exposing our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism.

Shuggie Bain

Douglas Stuart’s blistering, Booker Prize-winning debut is a heartbreaking story that lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty and the limits of love. Set in a poverty-stricken Glasgow in the early 1980s, Agnes Bain has always dreamed of greater things. But when her husband abandons her she finds herself trapped in a decimated mining town and descends deeper and deeper into drink. Her son Shuggie tries to help her long after her other children have fled, but he too must abandon her to save himself. Shuggie is different and he is picked on by the local children and condemned by adults as 'no’ right’. But he believes that if he tries his hardest he can be like other boys and escape this hopeless place.

Blood Meridian

Written in 1985, Blood Meridian is set in the anarchic world opened up by America’s westward expansion. Through the hostile landscape of the Texas–Mexico border wanders the Kid, a fourteen year-old Tennessean who is quickly swept up in the relentless tide of blood. But the apparent chaos is not without its order: while Americans hunt Indians – collecting scalps as their bloody trophies – they too are stalked as prey. Powerful, mesmerizing and savagely beautiful, Blood Meridian is considered one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century.

The Line of Beauty

By alan hollinghurst.

The Line of Beauty  is Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning masterpiece. In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious Tory MP, his wife Rachel and their children Toby and Catherine. Innocent of politics and money, Nick is swept up into the Feddens’ world and an era of endless possibility, all the while pursuing his own private obsession with beauty. This is a novel that defines a decade, exploring with peerless style a young man's collision with his own desires, and with a world he can never truly belong to. 

Middle Passage

By charles johnson.

Rutherford Calhoun, a puckish rogue and newly freed slave, spends his days around the docks of New Orleans, dodging debt collectors, gangsters, and a woman who seeks to marry him. When the heat from his pursuers overwhelms him, he cons his way onto the next ship leaving the dock: the Republic. Upon boarding, he discovers that he is on an illegal slave ship, looking to capture members of the legendary Allmuseri tribe. The Captain also has a secondary objective: securing a mysterious cargo that possesses an otherworldly power. A blend of allegory, black comedy, naval adventure and supernatural horror,   Middle Passage  is a true modern classic.

The Lamplighters

By emma stonex.

Cornwall, 1972. Three keepers vanish from a remote lighthouse, miles from the shore. The entrance door is locked from the inside. The clocks have stopped. The Principal Keeper’s weather log describes a mighty storm, but the skies have been clear all week. Twenty years later, the women they left behind are still struggling to move on, when they are given the chance to tell their side of the story. Inspired by true events, this enthralling and suspenseful mystery is a beautifully written exploration of love and grief, perception and reality. 

A House for Mr Biswas

By v.s. naipaul.

Written in 1961 and set in post-colonial Trinidad, this is the story of Mr Biswas, a man born into misfortune, and his quest to find a worthy home of his own. A House for Mr Biswas is a multi-faceted read that is all-at-once satisfying, lyrical and humorous.

by Raven Leilani

Raven Leilani is a funny and original new voice in literary fiction. Her razor-sharp yet surprisingly tender debut is an essential novel about what it means to be young now. Edie is messing up her life, and no one seems to care. Then she meets Eric, who is white, middle-aged and comes with a wife who has sort-of-agreed to an open marriage and an adopted black daughter who doesn’t have a single person in her life who can show her how to do her hair. And as if life wasn’t hard enough, Edie finds herself falling head-first into Eric’s family. 

‘ In this cutting, hot-blooded book, the entanglements that unfold are as complicated as they are heartbreaking. ’ New Statesman on Luster

by Jamaica Kincaid

Much loved only child Annie has always had a tranquil life. She and her beautiful mother are intertwined and inseparable. But when Annie turns twelve, her life shifts. She questions authority, makes rebel friends and wonders about the culture assumptions of her island world. And the unconditional love between Annie and her mother takes an adversarial turn. A coming of age classic, narrated with wonderfully candid complexity.

A Little Life

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and celebrated as ‘the great gay novel’ , Hanya Yanagihara’s immensely powerful story of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance has had a visceral impact on many a reader. Willem, Jude, Malcolm and JB meet at college in Massachusetts and form a firm friendship, moving to New York upon graduation. Over the years their friendships deepen and darken as they celebrate successes and face failures, but their greatest challenge is Jude himself – an increasingly broken man scarred by an unspeakable childhood. This is a book that will stay with you long after the last page.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

By toshikazu kawaguchi.

First released in Japan in 2015, this bestseller has since been translated for English audiences. The story takes place in a small basement café in Japan, home to a very special urban legend: visitors can travel back in time. There are strict rules, however; you can only travel back to speak to people who have visited the café itself, you cannot leave your seat while in the past, nothing you do will change the present, and you must return before your coffee gets cold. Each character comes to the café with a new reason to time travel. As many of the patrons discover, you can’t change the present, but you can change yourself.

Breasts and Eggs

By mieko kawakami.

This literary debut, which Haruki Murakami called ‘breathtaking’, is a must-read for fans of contemporary literary fiction. Mieko Kawakami paints a radical picture of contemporary working-class womanhood in Japan as she recounts the heartbreaking stories of three women who must survive in a society where the odds are stacked against them.

‘ I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami’s novella Breasts and Eggs . . . breathtaking . . . Mieko Kawakami is always ceaselessly growing and evolving. ’ Haruki Murakami on Breasts and Eggs

Burial Rites

In northern Iceland, 1829, Agnes Magnúsdóttir is condemned to death for her part in the brutal murder of her lover. Agnes is sent to wait out her final months on the farm of district officer Jón Jónsson, his wife and their two daughters. Horrified to have a convicted murderer in their midst, the family avoid contact with Agnes. Only Tóti, the young assistant priest appointed Agnes’s spiritual guardian, is compelled to try to understand her. As the year progresses and the hardships of rural life force the household to work side by side, Agnes’s story begins to emerge and with it the family’s terrible realization that all is not as they had assumed.

In this episode of Book Break Emma shares her recommendations for the best literary fiction of 2023:

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The best fiction books of 2024, and all time, must reads: 50 best books of all time, our all-time favourite booker prize-winning and nominated novels.

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The best new novels of 2023

The best books coming in 2023, from literary heavyweights to thrilling debuts.

A new year means new starts, and for bookworms, not just new books but a whole tranche of new authors to discover and enjoy. From new titles from established literary heavyweights to debut authors with books that might just change your life, 2023 has plenty to offer in the world of fiction.

Love stories

Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood (January)

A book that will resonate with anyone who has felt they are spinning more than their fair share of plates, this debut from Fran Littlewood will be devoured by those women who have been tempted to give it all up for a moment’s peace. Littlewood is a journalist-turned-author, and the mother of three teenage daughters, who firmly believes that there needs to be change in how we talk about women as they age. Amazing Grace Adams attempts to do that and with aplomb, a novel rooted in motherhood, marriage and female rage that isn’t afraid to delve into the female hormones of adult womanhood. 

Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell (February)

For American author Laura Warrell, writing Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm has been a labour of love. Warrell, who is 51, decided a few years ago to give up on love, having survived a marriage, a divorce, and a string of relationships with men who failed to commit to her. She channeled her experience into her debut novel, a swirling modern classic that brings together a cacophony of women’s voices who all have the same man in common: mixed-race jazz trumpeter Circus Palmer. Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm interrogates love – and its absence – from deep within these decade-spanning relationships, resulting in a book that is varied, insightful and beautiful.

The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams (May) 

Debut author Ore Abgaje-Williams wrote a first draft of The Three of Us during NaNoWriMo, in lockdown, and is set to be one of the annual writing challenge's greatest successes yet: the novel won a six-book auction to get a deal. The Three of Us twists domestic noir into one tight, tense and darkly funny day while exploring an uncomfortably familiar question: what happens when your spouse and your best friend hate one another? The Three of Us has won comparisons to I May Destroy You by Michaela Coel, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer and Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan. 

The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor (June)

Brandon Taylor’s third offering, after the Booker Prize-shortlisted Real Life and bestseller Filthy Animals is The Late Americans , a novel that places the endless intricacies of friendships, lovers and chosen family centre stage. Set in Iowa City around a potent friendship group of dancers, amateur pornographers, poets, landlords, meat-packing workers and mathematicians who occupy the city’s many facets, The Late Americans culminates in a reckoning that will change all of these young people’s lives.

Talking at Night by Claire Daverley (July)

Some love stories are so engrossing you can’t believe they’re not quite real. Claire Daverley’s debut novel is dedicated to Will and Rosie, who met as teenagers and, quite by accident, became one another’s great love story. But when tragedy strikes, obliterating any chance of their being together, the couple are drawn into an existence which neither can inhabit nor escape. Talking at Night is their captivating, heartbreaking tale.

Books you won’t want to put down

The Cloisters by Katy Hays (January)

A must-read for fans of The Secret History , The Cloisters is an intriguing and mysterious novel with murder at its heart. Art historian and author Katy Hays was inspired by a real Tarot deck and the fascinating medieval history of the occult to create this gripping novel of class, academia, secrets and future-telling. You’ll never look at Tarot in the same way again.

I Will Find You by Harlan Coben (March)

International bestselling author Harlan Coben has been a tearaway on Netflix since his show Stay Close launched this summer, but it’s on the page that his stories are the most compelling – and his forthcoming novel is no different. In I Will Find You , the worst tragedy strikes a family of three when their toddler goes missing – and all evidence points to his father, Will, having killed him. So when his sister-in-law arrives five years later with a life-changing bombshell, Will is set on a mission to clear his name – and find his son.

Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson (April)

Book editors often make excellent novelists (think Harriet Evans or Abigail Dean) and Jenny Jackson pours twenty years of experience into Pineapple Street , her debut. Gabrielle Zevin , Emily St. John Mandel, Katherine Heiny and Kevin Kwan are among the stellar names on Jackson's roster (Kwan told the New York Times , “It was like finding out your spouse is an Olympic equestrian”) but the story and style are all hers. This is a glossy family drama about a colossally wealthy family navigating the challenges from the choices each of the now-adult Stockton children have made with family finances. Cord married outsider Sasha without a pre-nup. Darley rebelled against the family wealth to raise her children on a 'normal' budget, and young Georgiana is out of her depth working at a non-profit organisation. This is a beach read only in the sense that you need to be somewhere you can inhale this in one go. No surprise that it's been optioned for a TV series.

The Trial by Rob Rinder (June) 

As fans of Judge Rinder will know, Rob Rinder has seen enough courtroom trials in his career to know that truth can be stranger than fiction. No wonder, then, that his debut novel takes all of the drama he brings to proceedings and boils it down into a powerful thriller. Transporting the reader from the murky world of Chambers to the grandeur of the Old Bailey, Rinder’s character Adam Green, a trainee barrister who doesn’t quite fit in, is one to stick with. 

The Girls of Summer by Katie Bishop (May)

Summer romances are the stuff of many a novel, but debut author and seasoned backpacker Katie Bishop twists this familiar scene on its head in her debut. Don’t let the title fool you: The Girls of Summer tackles dark subjects such as rape, suicide and trafficking through a dual-history narrative – one set in the London of today, the other on a Greek island 16 years ago. When Rachel thinks back on the first love she believed changed her life as an adult, she realises just how far she had fallen. 

Feel-good reads

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman (January)

Children’s and non-fiction author Catherine Newman turns her experienced hand to fiction for this delightful read about long-term friendship and what happens when the unimaginable occurs. Edi and Ash have been best friends for over 40 years, sticking side-by-side through first loves, teenage shenanigans, marriage, loss, fertility troubles, and children. So when Edi is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ash sticks by her then, too. What unfolds is a novel that joyfully celebrates making the best out of life’s littlest things. 

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld (April) 

Ever since she exploded onto the bestseller charts with Prep in 2005, author Curtis Sittenfeld has demonstrated a keen eye for satire and the ability to deliver a razor-sharp line. After nearly two decades of writing brilliant, witty and well-observed novels about high society, Sittenfeld is back with Romantic Comedy , about a loveless TV writer and her unlikely romance with a pop idol. After all, if average-looking men can bag beautiful, successful female dates, why can’t it work the other way around? 

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks (May)

Yes, that Tom Hanks. This isn’t, however, a memoir, but the first novel from the beloved two-time Oscar winner. Hanks made his literary debut in 2017 with a collection of short stories that demonstrated the breadth and depth of the human condition. Now he’s back long-form with a novel that proves Hanks is as serious a writer as he is an actor. The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece spans eight decades as a host of characters come together in an attempt to make Hollywood magic – with the priceless pedigree of an insider’s knowledge.

Go As a River by Shelley Read (April)

A read that’s as transportive as it is beautiful, Go As a River offers a story of female resilience and power against a breathtaking landscape. Five generations of author Shelley Read’s family have lived in the Elk Mountains of the Western Slope of Colorado, and it’s this deep heritage that has inspired the bold story at the heart of her novel. Victoria Nash, her 17-year-old heroine, has her life turned upside down after a chance encounter with a mysterious drifter. When she follows, she risks losing everything she holds most dear.

Historical fiction

The New Life by Tom Crewe (January) 

As an editor at the London Review of Books , Tom Crewe knows a thing or two about what to read. He also knew about what he wanted to write before A New Life came on the scene: “This is the book I knew I wanted to write long before I actually wrote it,” he explains. Crewe’s intention was to “reveal to readers an unfamiliar Victorian England that will surprise and provoke”. A New Life follows two men and the queer relationships they are trying to make a better world for – even if it throws their lives into danger in the process.

Siblings by Brigitte Reimann (February)

Brigitte Reimann was one of East Germany’s most daring authors, whose life imitated that of her fearless fictional heroines. In Siblings , she takes the reader back to 1960, where the border between East and West Germany has closed, and with it relationships within one family. While the young painter Elisabeth sees the GDR as her generation’s chance to build a brave new future, her brother Uli sees it as a place of oppression. Fear and opportunity collide in this groundbreaking classic of post-war East German literature. 

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati (March)

Modern retellings of Greek myths are having a moment, and into the arena enters Clytemnestra , debut novelist Costanza Casati’s passionate and poised retelling of the story of Greek mythology’s most notorious heroine. Casati studied Ancient Greek and Ancient Greek literature in Italy for five years, so she brings deep expertise to Clytemnestra , which is told from the vengeful queen’s perspective. Power, prophecies, hatred and love all combine in this fiery novel.

Secrets of Hartwood Hall by Katie Lumsden (March) 

As those familiar with her YouTube channel, Books and Things, may know, Katie Lumsden has been a fan of Victorian fiction for decades. Now, she’s written her own take on 19th-century gothic: Secrets of Hartwood Hall . A must-read for fans of Dickens, Austen, and the Bronte sisters, Lumsden’s debut is a gripping and full-bloodied manor-house mystery. Young widow Margaret Lennox takes a governess position at the titular hall in 1852, but rather than having the chance to leave her past behind, she finds even more secrets, some of which threaten her very being.

Our Hideous Progeny by C. E. McGill (May) 

C. E. McGill took inspiration from one of the greatest novels of all time for this sumptuous gothic horror story. At its heart is Mary, great-niece of Victor Frankenstein, who knows of her uncle’s disappearance in the Arctic but not much more. Along with her husband, Mary is trying to find fame as a paleontologist, but neither have the connections or cash needed in 1850s London for such a feat. When Mary goes rummaging in some family papers, she discovers what her great-uncle really got up to: but will this knowledge be the couple’s meal ticket, or their demise?

Girl, Goddess, Queen by Bea Fitzgerald (July) 

TikTok star Bea Fitzgerald has won a devoted audience for her Greek myth parody videos over on @chaosonolympus , and now she’s taking to the page with YA novel Girl, Goddess, Queen . Taking the conventional telling of the Persephone story and having an absolute riot with it, Fitzgerald’s debut novel re-imagines one of the best-known myths as a love quest in which Persephone actively pursues Hades. It’s a plan that will shake Mount Olympus to its very core.

Otherworldly stories

Now She Is Witch by Kirsty Logan (Jan)

Kirsty Logan has made a name for herself as a purveyor of chilling stories, and Now She Is Witch is no different. A witch story unlike any other, Logan entwines the narratives of two searingly drawn female characters: Lux and Else, who are united in their mission to avenge a man who wronged them. Fearless, cunning and familiar with the art of poisoning, these are two women not to be underestimated. 

Victory City by Salman Rushdie (February) 

The acclaimed novelist has tackled the epic form for this immersive saga of love, adventure and myth. Set in 14th-century southern India, Victory City recreates the foundations of a utopian society from the mind of one remarkable child: nine-year-old Pampa Kampana. Grief-stricken after witnessing the death of her mother, Pampa becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who challenges her to make the impossible real: a world of gender equality. In her quest, civilisation shifts, with wild consequences. 

This Other Eden by Paul Harding (February) 

Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Harding is back with this extraordinary novel that imagines the final days of a once-thriving racial utopia. This Other Eden tells the stories of the Apple Islanders, a civilisation born of race and science, and in particular Ethan Honey, a man spared destruction because of his artistic skills and fair skin. Harding challenges us to consider mercy and tolerance in this visionary and shimmering novel, as otherworldly as the landscape it imagines.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs (July) 

In Emma Torzs’s world, magic exists – and that’s exactly why it needs to be protected. Ink Blood Sister Scribe is the story of a woman left behind with the heritage and heavy debt of the magic that formed – and destroyed – her family. Joanna Kalotay has been upholding her family’s reputation as the librarians of books capable of doing dark magic, but when her estranged sister returns to the family home, the pair must fix their relationship to stop devastating harm from taking place. 

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Make Your Own List

The Best Fiction Books » New Literary Fiction

Notable new novels of summer 2024, recommended by cal flyn.

Another year, another summer stretching out before us... another reading dilemma?  Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a succinct round-up of the novels that should be on your radar in the summer of 2024: highly anticipated works of fiction from well-known literary figures and 'breakout' books that have quickly amassed significant critical attention – to guide you on your way.

Parade: A Novel by Rachel Cusk

Long Island Compromise: A Novel by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Caledonian Road: A Novel by Andrew O'Hagan

All Fours: A Novel by Miranda July

The Hypocrite: A Novel by Jo Hamya

1 Parade: A Novel by Rachel Cusk

2 long island compromise: a novel by taffy brodesser-akner, 3 caledonian road: a novel by andrew o'hagan, 4 all fours: a novel by miranda july, 5 the hypocrite: a novel by jo hamya.

W hat are the novels everyone is talking about in summer 2024?

We also recently spoke to Monica Ali, chair of this year’s jury, about the six novels shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction . Of the winning book, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Sri Lankan civil war story  Brotherless Night , she said: “Once you’ve read this book, you’re never going to forget it. It’s absolutely searing, deeply moving… an utterly compelling piece of storytelling.” One of the shortlisted novels, Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost — which centres on an actor joining a production of Hamlet in the West Bank—was also recently announced the winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award for second novels.

Let me kick off with Rachel Cusk’s latest offering, Parade.  Every new novel by Cusk is a major literary event, although her experiments with form—and her unpicking of what she has previously called the “ underpinnings ” of narrative—are often initially received with bafflement .  Parade is an extended exploration of identity in which multiple individuals, all identified as ‘G’, muse on the creation of art.

Slowly, Cusk has been stripping away the layers of the novel—starting with plot, now character—to reveal its fundamental mechanisms. And so, though Parade is far from a light beach read to throw in your carry-on case as an afterthought, it’s certainly a notable new novel that pushes at the very bounds of what it means to write fiction. (It feels, reflects LitHub , “so much like the next stage in a complex journey the author has been undertaking for decades now.”)

Sounds intimidating. Anything a little cheerier? 

Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s hit first novel, Fleishman Is In Trouble ,  was a sprawling, satirical account of the divorce of two Manhattan urbanites. It’s smart, great fun, and was adapted (by Brodesser-Akner) into an Emmy-nominated television series starring Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg.

All this is to say that her second novel, Long Island Compromise , has been hotly anticipated on both sides of the Atlantic. It unpicks the long lasting consequences of the 1980s kidnapping of a wealthy businessman, as well as—more broadly—the story of his Jewish-American family and their pursuit of financial and social success. “The family epic is my favorite kind of novel, and, as a magazine writer I have learned there is nothing more revelatory of a person than where that person is from,” Brodesser-Akner told  Vanity Fair .  “That idea, plus my fascination with Long Island culture—which to me has always been equal parts romantic, criminal and tragic—gave birth to the family at the center of the book, the Fletchers—the kind of family that is wealthy enough for their money to have bought them security, but also to leave them in danger.”

Great, I love a good, long novel I can get my teeth into. Any other big books you would recommend for my summer vacation read?

Well, it feels like all of London is talking about Andrew O’Hagan’s  Caledonian Road . (All of England, apparently, according to the  Washington Post . ) It is, as the  Guardian describes it , a “state of the nation burlesque” in the Dickensian mould, that is, a social novel with an ensemble cast: “a bold, bullish tale of hubris and corruption, a book simultaneously dazzled and disgusted by the city it depicts.”

It stars the celebrity art historian Campbell Flynn, who has risen swiftly through the social ranks thanks to his great intellect and aristocratic wife (and who bears, one might note, some superficial resemblances to the author himself, the Glasgow-born writer and LRB editor-at-large who has long been a stalwart of the London literati). Flynn is overdue a fall, it seems, and on his way down we meet a great many of his near-neighbours on the Caledonian Road , an Islington street that spans every social class along its mile-and-a-half extent.

Sounds great. What other summer 2024 novels have caught your eye?

I mentioned the filmmaker Miranda July’s exuberant, autofictional All Fours as a forthcoming title in my spring highlights . Well, it’s now out and is shaping up to be something of a literary phenomenon. It’s a midlife crisis novel ( The   New York Times  reviewer hailed it “the first great perimenopause novel”) in which the protagonist, a married artist in her forties, upends her life, departs on a cross-country road trip, but instead holes up in a roadside motel barely 20 miles from home where she embarks on an affair with a much younger man.

Soon the relationship is over, but she keeps the motel room where she interviews friends and loved ones about relationships and ageing. “The narrator of  All Fours is in the process of losing her ability to carry a child,” explains   Vox. “She fears she is losing her ability to attract men. She looks those problems straight in the face. Then she explodes them open with effervescent joy.”

Interesting. And I think you also wanted to mention Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite ?

Thank you, yes. This one jumped out at me: it centres on the relationship between a noted novelist and his playwright daughter, as she presents a new drama written by her about the period they spent together in Sicily a decade earlier. “I had a clear image suddenly of a man in a theatre, watching a play of his life,” says Hamya of the sudden burst of inspiration that became this book, “and I knew that he would disagree with everything that was happening on stage, but he couldn’t leave. I thought about it for hours that night because it was a really interesting formal challenge. Could I write something where both parties were wrong and they were both utterly sympathetic, but the reader would still—especially if they spend time on the internet—feel conscious of wanting to take sides?”

It is, essentially, an extended study of ethical grey areas and the manner by which the sense of moral correctness shifts from generation to generation.  The Hypocrite,  says the i , “confirms [Hamya] as a fine chronicler of modern anxieties. I have rarely underlined so many passages in a book.” Sounds good to me. I think we could all do with a little less moral certainty in life.

Any other honorable mentions, while we’re talking about the notable new novels of summer 2024?

If you’re at all interested in sci-fi, you’ll certainly want to know about the collaboration between Adrian Tchaikowsky ( Children of Time , Alien Clay ) and the Hollywood star (and graphic novelist!) Keanu Reeves. Their first novel together,  The Book of Elsewhere , is based on Reeves’ popular BRZRKR series.

Hot on the heels of the hit Netflix adaptation of his high-concept romance One Day ,  David Nicholls recently released  You Are Here , a witty and tender love story about two jaded divorcees hiking across the north of England.

Kevin Barry ( Night Boat to Tangier ) will publish The Heart in Winter ,  a historical novel set in 1890s Montana; two-time Booker finalist Chigozie Obioma will publish a mystical Biafran war novel, The Road to the Country ;  and the fantasy author and previous Five Books  interviewee Lev Grossman will publish  The Bright Sword , a highly anticipated follow-up to his The Magicians trilogy.

What new novels are you looking forward to reading in summer 2024? Let us know: get in touch via social media.

June 25, 2024

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

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©Nancy Macdonald

Cal Flyn is a writer, journalist, and the deputy editor of Five Books . Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape , her nonfiction book about how nature rebounds in abandoned places, was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the British Academy Book Prize. She writes regular round-ups of the most notable new fiction, which can be found here . Her Five Books interviews with other authors are here .

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30 New Books Critics Think You Should Read Right Now

Nbcc board members review this year’s nbcc award finalists.

Every year, in the weeks leading up to the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the NBCC board members take the time to  review and appreciate  the  thirty finalists , recognized in Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. Needless to say, these thirty books make a pretty good reading list.

This year’s National Book Critics Circle Awards will be held at the New School in New York City on March 21. In the meantime, see what the NBCC’s board members have to say about all of the finalists below:

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Susan Kiyo Ito, I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir (Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press)

Susan Ito’s heart-rending and courageous memoir holds a secret at its core. At nineteen, as a transracial adoptee raised by nisei parents, she sleuths out the identity of her Japanese-American birth mother, defying laws that keep adoption records sealed. Their fraught first meeting is the beginning of decades of emotional ebbs and flows, as Ito’s biological mother cuts off contact with her repeatedly to maintain anonymity and avoid naming the man who fathered her. What sustains Ito: Marriage, motherhood, advocating for adoptees, and writing her own story. I Would Meet You Anywhere illuminates the complexities of identity, family, and belonging.

David Masumoto, with artwork by Patricia Wakida, Secret Harvest: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm (Red Hen Press)

Secret Harvests limns the compounded tragedy of the Japanese internment for one family, when a cognitively disabled member, herself disabled via the racism of inadequate medical care–was separated and “lost” to the family during World War II. David Mas Masumoto uncovers the smallest thread of the story and achieves the seemingly impossible feat of reconnecting the lost family member whose story had been lost to racism but also family shame. In stark, stunning prose combined with Patricia Wakida’s evocative woodcut prints, Secret Harvests manages to take absence and turn it into presence, illuminating the hard-won resilience and joys as well as the darker corners of the author’s family history—and that of our nation as well.

Ahmed Naji, translated by Katharine Halls, Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison (McSweeney’s)

Ahmed Naji’s eloquent, and at times searingly funny, memoir of his time spent in an Egyptian prison, Rotten Evidence , reveals the importance of literature as a form of self-liberation. Naji was convicted of “violating public modesty” after an excerpt from his novel Using Life was published in a journal in Egypt. Naji recounts his experiences in detail, from the mundane daily indignities of incarceration to the camaraderie that develops between prisoners. The memoir is also an erudite literary text as Naji expounds on works of Egyptian literature, the Arabic language itself, and the limits imposed by successions of authoritarian governments. Katharine Halls’s lively translation captures Naji’s distinctive voice, by turns intellectual, enraged, sardonic; Naji comes across as someone who remarkably can always crack wise about his bully jailers and the ignorance of his government’s censors.

Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster)

How to Say Babylon , Safiya Sinclair’s lyric memoir, is intimate, unforgettable and a shining example of why poets should write prose. The Eden of Sinclair’s Jamaican childhood is irrevocably altered under her father’s strict Rastafarian upbringing which first constrains, and then threatens, her life. Her poetic soul is matched by her resilience and perseverance and is the foundation of her courageous expressions of individuality and agency. Sinclair expertly weaves moments both harrowing and idyllic in a way that is candid, yet still generous to even those who have harmed her, which speaks both of her sensitivity and strength, and makes this memoir singular, universal and transporting.

Matthew Zapruder, Story of a Poem: A Memoir (Unnamed Press)

Matthew Zapruder’s Story of a Poem pursues two questions simultaneously: what makes a poem work, and what makes a life matter. If those questions seem to belong to different realms of meaning, it is the quiet brilliance of this book to convince you of their interdependence. The story is of the creation and revision of several poems—messy, developing drafts included—and the equally messy process of understanding a child whose autism diagnosis wrenches the author’s first draft of parenthood into a new shape—all while the air outside darkens with wildfire smoke. It is rare to see the competing calls to creativity and care explored so literally, and with such urgency and tenderness, as they are here.

Jonathan Eig, King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In his sweeping biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Jonathan Eig recovers the civil rights leader from “the gray mist of hagiography.” Eig traces the arc of “Little Mike,” son of a Georgia sharecropper, to national prominence as an eloquent advocate for Black rights, as well as a crusader against the Vietnam War and poverty, all the way to Memphis and the Lorraine Motel balcony. Building on more than 200 interviews and recently released FBI files, Eig recently made national news by debunking a famous quotation about Malcolm X attributed to King, tracking fissures in the civil rights movement, and revealing King’s womanizing. With the velocity of a thriller, Eig evokes King in all his complexity, an imperfect but extraordinary man.

Gregg Hecimovich, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of the Bondwoman’s Narrative (Ecco)

The Bondwoman’s Narrative , written in the mid-nineteenth century and believed to be the first novel by a Black woman, caused a sensation when it was authenticated and published by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2002. Until now, however, the author’s identity remained  a mystery. In this compelling new biography, Hecimovich combs through public records, handwritten diaries, almanacs, wills, and slave inventories and invites readers into his search, even the dead ends,  to reveal Crafts as the former Hannah Bond, a child traumatically separated from her enslaved mother, who learned to read and write before escaping to the North and completing the book. Hecimovich convincingly demonstrates that Crafts’ writing was influenced by popular literature, in particular Dickens’ Bleak House , yet stands, sui generis , as what he calls “one of the most powerful imaginative records we have of slavery.”

Yunte Huang, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History (Liveright)

Daughter of the Dragon provides a riveting glimpse into the life of the beguiling actress Anna May Wong, one of Old Hollywood’s most recognizable faces. The book is the triumphant capstone to an ambitious trilogy: here, as in previous installments on Charlie Chan and the original Siamese twins (both NBCC finalists), Huang shines his spotlight upon a single, iconic figure in order to reveal a bigger picture. This dramatic account of Wong’s ascent to silver screen stardom—and subsequent descent into alcoholism and oblivion—thoughtfully illuminates the crucial role played by Asian Americans in the spectacle of modern culture.

Rachel Shteir, Betty Friedan (Yale University Press)

In Betty Friedan , Rachel Shteir investigates the life, work and complex legacy of the trailblazing feminist. While Friedan remains respected for her contributions to early second wave feminism, her resistance to intersectional feminist work leaves her out of sync with contemporary feminist activism. The first biography of Friedan in a generation, drawing on extensive research and interviews with Friedan’s contemporaries, Shteir examines the ways in which Friedan’s early years growing up Jewish in the midwest and living in the shadow of her mother’s thwarted education, shaped her ambition, career trajectory and personal life. The determination that led Friedan to become a forceful national leader also closed her off from compromise and evolution. In this timely, important biography, Shtier makes the case that her impact remained crucial to social change in 20th century America.

Jonny Steinberg, Winnie & Nelson: A Portrait of a Marriage (Knopf)

Jonny Steinberg’s deeply insightful, painstakingly researched Winnie and Nelson: A Portrait of a Marriage unmasks the Mandelas, sliding past their public mythos, and the simpler romantic narrative they told each other, to reveal the emotional labyrinth beneath. Steadily, through newly recovered material about the couple’s conversations – gathered by eavesdropping Afrikaner prison guards – Steinberg reveals how incarceration, torture, infidelity, and time itself, changed both husband and wife and their political stances. We’re left with a strong sense of the horrors they endured during apartheid, and the tenderness that remained between them at the end, even after they had inflictied pain on one another, and enduried so much cruelty and torture. With its exploration of two radically different approaches to apartheid, this beautiful biography speaks movingly to present-day struggles for racial justice.

Nicholas Dames, The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press)

1.) One of the most thrilling things a book of criticism can do is answer a question that you didn’t know you had. 2.) The question in The Chapter is particularly delicious, because you likely accept chaptering as a matter of course, without asking why books are split up. 3.) Nicholas Dames roams wonderfully from the Gospels to, in a particular highlight, George Eliot. He explores time, transitions, and the literal manufacturing of books. 4.) Dames is also a clear, lucid writer. 5.) The critical cliché in this case is true: after reading The Chapter , you will never quite read anything else the same way.

Myriam Gurba, Creep: Accusations and Confessions (Avid Reader Press)

Creep is the very rare book of essays that could easily read as a single full-length study. Across her works to date ( Mean , Dahlia Season ) Myriam Gurba has developed a control over tone that lets her combine all of Creep’s elements—the creeping presence of Richard Ramirez, the itching fear of lice, anti-Mexican racism everywhere, cold Joan Didion beside the hot Los Angeles strawberries, Gurba teaching her high school students that that rape is about geography, not sex—into a coherent portrait in local sensibility. Creep is a tricky book that reads easy.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Naomi Klein has long challenged readers to look at the way we live from a slightly skewed angle in hopes of ultimately making the world more just. In this masterwork of storytelling, reporting, criticism, and analysis, she uses the idea of the twin, or the fun house version of our own world, to explore how truth works—or doesn’t—in today’s political and cultural climate. “It’s tough to live in a moment when so many truths that had been sold as settled suddenly become wobbly,” she writes. In this time of uncertainty we’re lucky to have her be one of our guiding voices.

Grace E. Lavery, Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques (Princeton University Press)

Pleasure and Efficacy provides a groundbreaking study of the idea of gender transition in the modern era. Grace E. Lavery, a literary scholar and prominent activist, marshals a kaleidoscopic array of examples—from pseudonyms to psychoanalysis to The Silence of the Lambs —in support of her claim that sex change is possible. By turns playful and polemical, Lavery unpacks complex theoretical texts with an efficacy that is as astonishing to behold as it is pleasurable to read: a bold affirmation of the trans condition.

Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press)

Deeply researched and refreshingly lucid, Tina Post’s Deadpan arrives as one of the most original and affecting aesthetic surveys in recent memory. Long consigned to the realm of play-it-straight humor, the book recontextualizes the act of withholding to taxonimize its origins and uses—specifically the tact it assumes when intersecting with blackness. Refusing to differentiate between “embodied blackness (or blackness as performed by black people) and symbolic blackness (or blackness in the cultural imaginary),”  the author instead maps the many tributaries connecting the one to the other, illuminating how specimenization, perceived threat, gradients, and the tension between excess and absence evolve and get repurposed by black and white artists alike.

Teju Cole, Tremor (Random House)

In Cole’s triumphant return to fiction, the critic, novelist, and photographer finds new possibilities for autofiction. The book is dense with digressions on art and colonialism from Tunde, the Harvard-photography-professor narrator (one chapter takes the form of a lecture implicating an audience of museum patrons in the legacy of cultural appropriation). But it’s more than a vehicle for ideas. Rather, the story is about what these ideas mean for Tunde as he considers his own degrees of privilege and the exploitative nature of photography while reckoning with memories of growing up in Nigeria and of an old friend whose occasional presence adds to Tremor ’s elegiac and haunting quality.

Daniel Mason, North Woods (Random House)

A house surrounded by an apple orchard in Western Massachusetts provides the setting for Daniel Mason’s ghostly masterpiece. Told in vivid overlapping stories, spanning from the Puritan colonial era to the future, the novel lays bare the poisonous American obsession with property and its deleterious effect on ecological succession. Beauty, humor, and violence surface in the lives of the house’s colorful inhabitants over the years: spinster sisters, ambitious farmers, a painter harboring a secret desire, and a troubled young man, among others. The bold accordion-like structure of North Woods (letters, songs, and poetry are mixed with conventional narration) traces an erosion of humanity even as its players yearn for a better future.

Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home (Knopf)

Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is hilarious and beautifully written, which is no surprise coming from Moore, whose short stories and novels have delighted readers since 1985’s Self-Help . The surprise is in the absolute boldness of this novel—a zombie road trip is interspersed with letters from an innkeeper written just after the Civil War. Even more astounding is the beating heart of the work—amid the chaos and contortion of the plot, this is a tender and poignant examination of grief, loss, and memory. It’s a wonderfully elusive book from a master of form, packing multitudes into just under 200 pages.

Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump, Vengeance Is Mine (Knopf)

At the heart of Marie NDiaye’s hypnotic and ingenious literary thriller is a sensational legal case: Maître Susane is hired to represent a wealthy man’s wife, who has been accused of murdering the couple’s three children. Susane, who has never tried a murder case and is of a working-class background, believes she met Principaux, her client’s husband, decades earlier when she was ten years old. NDiaye, who began publishing her slippery and original fictions three decades ago at 17, entwines subtle mysteries with depictions of harrowing violence. Elliptical and lyrical, Vengeance Is Mine amounts to a disquieting exhumation of the past and its tight, invisible hold on the present.

Justin Torres, Blackouts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Justin Torres radically experiments with the biographical fiction genre to stunning effect. Structured like an exquisite nesting doll of stories, the novel follows the arrival of the young exhausted narrator at the Palace, a convalescent home where he has come to help Juan finish his erasure project involving Sex Variants , a real-life 1941 collection of anonymous interviews with gay and lesbian people. Contributions by queer journalist Jan Gay were uncredited, and Juan and the narrator work together to highlight this unjustly forgotten legacy, as Juan prods the narrator for details of his own clouded past. Blackouts is a tour de force of desire and reclamation.

R oxana Asgarian, We Were Once A Family (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Asgarian draws on her background as a Houston court reporter for her astonishing debut. The book is a meticulous, harrowing, and deeply empathetic investigation of the story behind the deaths of a married white Portland, Ore., lesbian couple and their six Black Texas-born adopted children from a cliffside car crash in Mendocino County, Calif., that was ruled a murder-suicide. Asgarian provides a blistering indictment of the Houston family court, child protection agencies, and adoption agencies that wrest children such as the victims away from their birth families, and of the media’s focus, in looking for answers to explain the crime, on the psychology of the adoptive mothers rather than the structural conditions impacting the children’s birth families.

Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs (Knopf)

You might not expect to be moved by a book whose title refers to a conspiracy theory about how Monster Energy Drinks are actually vehicles for Satan. But Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a clear-eyed and nuanced accounting of the ways in which our modern security state reduces human beings into little more than unending terabytes of data. Kerry Howley interprets such data in a way that is distinctly human and deeply generous; she distills small, telling details from a larger story about conspiracy theorists and whistleblowers and everyone in between, while still allowing her narrative to meander and digress in surprising and revelatory ways.

Dina Nayeri, Who Gets Believed? (Catapult Books)

In Who Gets Believed? , Dina Nayeri ( The Ungrateful Refugee ) collates data from real situations where the stakes of personal credibility are high and their outcomes apparently arbitrary. She connects a refugee whose story is rejected on absurd grounds to her own skepticism, as a Christian child refugee in the United States, of the thrashing antics of the girls around her in church. Nayeri exploits her heterogenous life experience (a management consultancy interlude is among the book’s oblique surprises) to compose a work something like philosophy, one that forces old conceptual questions back into conversation with their crucial roles in daily life.

Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow (W. W. Norton)

In “The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War,” journalist and author Jeff Sharlet takes readers on a chillingly urgent tour of Donald Trump’s America. Sharlet gives us much more than soundbites as he immerses himself in Trump rallies, a men’s rights conference and a prosperity Gospel megachurch, and as he talks in depth with conspiracy theorists, white nationalists and acolytes of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot on Jan. 6, 2021, as she tried to break into the U.S. Capitol, “transformed” after her death, Sharlet writes, into “yet another flag, like a new tarot card in the deck of fascism.”

Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

From the glimmering mosaic of Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes emerges a luminous vision of a mind and life, “ordinary” only in the sense that it contains the matter of her daily reckonings, the memories of an extraordinary mother, the “antiblack notes” that have impinged on her and all Americans’ experience of life, and the lovely counter-notes—the lessons, the art, the courageous voicings—that create a new understanding of the world: “All of our renewed power to refuse the concentric senses of the ruinous.”

Saskia Hamilton, All Souls (Graywolf Press)

In the exquisite and profoundly affecting All Souls , completed just before her death, Saskia Hamilton wonders if writing can be “a form of practice or of preparation for death” and answers with a meditation on all the things that mattered deeply to her: family, memory, art, and literature. What she creates is something surpassingly rare, a kind of auto-elegy that is all the more moving for being devoid of sentimentality and self-pity, a vision of a brilliant mind mulling over the shards of what she knows, trying to see into and past death, not to vanquish it but to capture life, “caught in the far gone far alone glance / of mortality.”

Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi, Phantom Pain Wings (New Directions)

With stunning originality and audacity, Kim Hyesoon creates an alternative imaginative universe that reflects a consciousness battered by and overcoming life’s agonies: the aftereffects of war and dictatorship, the oppressions of a patriarchal society, the death of a father. In Don Mee Choi’s powerful translation of Phantom Pain Wings , the presence of the multi-faceted creature called “bird”—nemesis, inner daemon, doppelganger, muse—reverberates outward until, as with all great poetry, it assumes the fragile, mortal proportions of art itself: “I thought about bird flying freely in the ruins / bird that will fall if I don’t keep writing.”

Romeo Oriogun, The Gathering of Bastards (University of Nebraska Press)

“Perhaps exile is us running through history // I have not to give, even my body is empty of a country.” So begins Romeo Oriogun’s breathtaking The Gathering of Bastards , a multitemporal saga of migration charted against journeys of queerness and subsequent exile. Nigerian-born Oriogun’s poems are rooted between boundaries, engaging with war and dictatorship while employing a lyricism that instills a sense of magical possibility. Despite repeated losses, Oriogun pens an expansive dream of freedom: “Having known that there is no home apart from terror, / I lend my voice to our survival. I demand a wild life.” Through the wild lives of these poems, Oriogun offers readers a profound communion.

Robyn Schiff, Information Desk (Penguin Books)

With a sweep that encompasses the intelligence, eroticism, and callousness of the Western art canon, Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk presents a mundane setting for the epic: the eponymous desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the poet worked in her youth. Yet for all its cataloguing of the indignities of the role, Schiff’s epic poem refuses to stay grounded, taking readers on a whorl through art history, her personal relationships, and the behavior of parasitic wasps. What unites these topics is the symbiotic relationship the subjects have with their muses (or hosts). Like the book itself, these relationships are sometimes beautiful, oftentimes brutal, and alluring in their observation that not all monuments are erected on equal footing.

Charif Shanahan, Trace Evidence (Tin House)

“Dear one: I was trying to enter my own life, I felt outside my own life. I was / Looking, trying to find a door.” In the searching intimacies of Trace Evidence, Charif Shanahan uncovers his own hard-earned definitions of identity amidst the dislocations of a life at the margins–postcolonial, queer, biracial–in order to inhabit life on his own terms. A near-fatal accident in Morocco, the home country of his mother, becomes the focal point for gorgeously frank and delicate lyrics that both query and implore: “Is it possible my function is to hold / All the intricate, interstitial pain / And articulate clarity? / Tie a boat to my wrist, I sprout wings.”

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Best Literary Fiction of 2024 (New & Anticipated)

2024 is shaping up to be a solid year for literary fiction releases. I had the pleasure of reading James recently, which is probably the biggest literary fiction release so far this year and it’s a book I whole-heartedly recommend.

This list of the best New and Anticipated 2024 Literary Fiction Books is based on early reviews and buzz, and of course what I’ve read. I’ll be updating this list as new titles are released or announced, as I read more of these books, etc. — so check back later for more!

Will you be reading any of these titles? Feel free to leave your comments below!

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Interesting to see so many popular established names on this list. I’ve read many of them, but more drawn to the one I haven’t read yet Percival Everest and so I have ordered James although I’d like to try some of his other works. I do enjoy a good Elisabeth Strout so could be tempted by her new one and will certainly be interested to read reviews of some of the other familiar names here.

I read mostly translated fiction and Irish literature, so I’m looking forward to reading Sinead Gleeson’s debut novel Hagstone (her nonfiction essays were excellent) and more fiction by Natalia Ginzburg (Italy).

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The Cliffs , by J. Courtney Sullivan

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10 Must-Read Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books Releasing This July

Hot summer reads..

July’s sci-fi and fantasy novel releases are as hot as the temperatures. Lev Grossman returns with a gorgeous rendering of Arthurian legend, while Peng Shepherd’s latest is an inventive exploration of physics and altered realities. Cozy fantasy romance readers will love new books by Sarah Beth Durst and India Holton, while readers who prefer grittier fantasies won’t be disappointed by a Peter Pan retelling by P.H. Low and a novella based on Yoruban mythology by Tobi Ogundiran. Other books have dragons, witches, magical battles, and so much more.

We’ve tried to find something for every reader in this month’s sci-fi and fantasy roundup. Which ones are you looking forward to reading? If you're looking to save some cash, it might be worth picking up this special early Prime Day three-month free membership of Audible . It's worth almost $35 and nets you a free audiobook every month — well worth considering. Here are the best sci-fi fantasy books to consider in July 2024, or check out our top sci-fi and fantasy picks for June , May , and April if you're interested in even more great reads. It can get a little expensive to buy books.

The Sky on Fire by Jenn Lyons

There can never be too many dragon novels. at least for fantasy fans. This latest addition to dragon lore is an action-packed, fun read. It’s a heist novel about a group of misfits stealing from a dragon’s hoard, but this isn’t just any treasure; it belongs to the regent, Neveranimas.

Anahrod lives in the wild deep, far away from the cloud cities. She’s a mercenary whose best friend is a titan drake named Overbite, who helps her survive the deep’s many dangers. When a ragtag group of outsiders saves her, she reluctantly agrees to aid them on their quest—for pay, of course. Little does she know that she’s the person they seek, and they mean to take her back to the place she vowed never to return to.

See Here for UK - Tor

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

This cozy romantic fantasy is so sweet. Grumpy librarian Kiela flees her war-torn city with crates of spellbooks and her only friend, a sentient houseplant named Caz. Soldiers set fire to the library, and she had to take the books to save them, but it’s illegal to have spellbooks unless you’re an empire-approved magic users.

With nowhere else to go, Kiela and Caz return to the remote island where Kiela was raised, where a lack of magic has caused the village to fall on hard times. She moves into her family’s abandoned, derelict cottage and meets a handsome neighbor who herds merhorses. Kiela decides to help the villagers by using the spellbooks to create magical cures for the dying trees and blocked rivers, but she knows if she draws the empire’s eye, she could be put to death. She hides her spellshop behind the ruse of making jam.

All This & More by Peng Shepherd

A reality TV show, All This & More , uses a physics breakthrough to allow contestants to alter their lives in search of their perfect reality. Anything can be changed, and at the season finale, contestants can choose their perfect life, for real. Season one’s star, Talia, hosts season three after a disastrous second season. 45-year-old divorcee and mother Marsh has been chosen for the third season. Marsh tends to put her own wishes last, but now, after a recent divorce, she’s ready to find something, anything, to help her feel fulfilled. But what changes should she make? The reader gets to decide. However, every reality Marsh chases is haunted by Season two’s mysterious catastrophe.

See Here for UK - William Morrow

These Deathless Shores by P.H. Low

Jordan and Baron were once lost boys—the twins, despite being unrelated. Jordan hid her gender from Peter so she could be accepted, and she and Baron lived happily in Peter’s world, addicted to pixie Dust and going on adventures, until Peter discovers Jordan is a girl and kicks the two out.

The novel opens with an adult Jordan, who has a prosthetic arm, in the fighting rink. She’s desperate to earn enough money to buy more Dust, an addiction she can’t seem to break. But a disastrous fight causes her boss to call in her debts. Meanwhile, Baron is struggling in engineering courses at college. His time as a Lost Boy means he’s woefully behind in education, and his chronic anxiety doesn’t help matters. Baron initially resists when Jordan proposes they try to find the island again. But what else does he have in life? This is a unique, grimdark retelling of the classic tale, humanizing one of the most well-known villains in British literature: Captain Hook.

See Here for UK - Angry Robot

A Rose by Any Other Name by Mary McMyne

This haunting, queer historical fantasy takes place in Elizabethan England and follows the woman who inspired William Shakespeare’s love sonnets.

More than anything, Rose wants to perform music at court, but even though she’s an excellent musician, no one will give her a chance because she’s a woman. Rose is also an expert in astrology and can glimpse into the past, present, and future by charting people’s astrological charts. Her mother is a witch, and when Rose’s father dies, a neighbor accuses her mother of witchcraft and burns down their house.

The family and Rose’s beloved friend, whom she harbors deeper feelings for, flee and find refuge with the sons of a recently deceased family friend. Rose’s mother casts a spell for the eldest son to fall in love with Rose, with disastrous results. Rose refuses to bow to convention and sneaks out to play music at a brothel. She meets William Shakespeare there, and the two begin a turbulent relationship.

See Here for UK - Orbit

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

I see reviewers say The Bright Sword is to Arthurian Legend what Grossman’s wildly popular The Magicians series was for The Chronicles of Narnia , but I disagree. Unlike The Magicians , his newest novel is a richly detailed historical fantasy that meanders through character backstories not to subvert the magic behind the legends but to humanize them, showing that becoming a knight of the Round Table is less about physical strength and wealth and more about found family and friendship.

Collum dreams of becoming a knight of the Round Table. An abused bastard of a remote isle, this seems like an absurd wish, but he seizes a chance to escape and makes his way to Camelot nonetheless. When he arrives, the great battle that kills Arthur and Mordred has already happened, and only a handful of knights remain. They’re not the ones people sing praises about, but as they struggle to decide who should be the next king of Britain, their stories unfold, stories of being queer and trans and foreign yet still finding a home at Camelot when no one else would accept them.

See Here for UK - Del Rey

Queen B by Juno Dawson

This super fun prequel to the Her Majesty’s Royal Coven series also gives a queer take on British history, this time during King Henry VIII’s reign. Because it’s a prequel, it works as a stand-alone, so if you haven’t read the other books in the series, you can still enjoy it.

Dawson alternates between two timelines. In the first, Anne Boleyn, not yet queen, is head of a secret royal coven. Grace Fairfax has recently fled an abusive marriage in the North to serve Queen Catherine as one of her ladies in waiting. The coven quickly notices her powers, and she joins them, slowly falling in love with Anne. In the second timeline, Anne has been beheaded, and Grace and the rest of the coven seek the woman who betrayed her. A witch hunter follows their steps.

See Here for UK - HarperVoyager

In the Shadow of the Fall by Tobi Ogundiran

This fantasy novella, the first in a duology, defies its slim format with rich world-building based on Yuroban mythology and well-defined character arcs.

Ashâke has been an acolyte for so long that she’s watched all her peers ascend to priesthood, yet an orisha has never spoken to her. She decides to take matters into her own hands by summoning and trapping an orisha in a forbidden ritual, one which goes horribly wrong. She has placed herself in the midst of a war she understands even less than she does herself.

See Here for UK - Titan Books

The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love by India Holton

Holton’s newest romantic fantasy is an absolute delight, perfect for fans of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries and Holton’s previous Dangerous Damsels series. I could not stop smiling as I read it.

Professor Beth Pickering, ornithologist, often accompanies wealthy fellow bird-lover Hippolyta on adventures to find rare birds. But the handsome Professor Devon Lockley, who also travels with a rich patron, often foils their attempts. Beth is determined to be named Birder of the Year by finding the endangered and magical caladrius bird, but Devon is right on her heels with the same goal.

See Here for UK - Penguin

The Night Ends with Fire by K. X. Song

Meilin longs to flee her abusive father, who declares she'll be engaged to an aging, violent man who has already killed one wife. After she comes to the aid of a prince of the Three Kingdoms, she poses as a man and answers the imperial draft to become a soldier. Before she goes, her stepmother gives her a necklace that belonged to Meilin’s deceased mother, who went mad before her death.

As Meilin trains, she hears a voice prompting her towards violence. She worries she might become like her mother, who also spoke of voices no one else could hear. Then Meilin begins causing things to happen through magic, and her necklace vibrates when she does so. Now Meilin needs to hide not only her gender but also her magical powers. Meanwhile, the more she trains for Sky, the deeper her feelings for him become.

See Here for UK - Hodderscape

Get 3 Months of Kindle Unlimited For Free Before Prime Day

Kindle Unlimited

Prime Day is officially kicking off this year on July 16 and 17 , but there are quite a few early deals available now for Prime members to enjoy. For those who love to dig into a good book, and own a Kindle, you can score 3 months of Kindle Unlimited for free now . This is a fantastic deal, and my favorite from the early Prime Day deals so far.

With it, you gain unlimited access to millions of digital titles, audiobooks, and magazine subscriptions for three months before it goes back up to its monthly price of $11.99/month. With all that time you can spend the rest of the summer reading all of the classics, the latest hits, new bestsellers and so much more. Some of the books you can enjoy with Kindle Unlimited range from incredible comics like TMNT: The Last Ronin and All-Star Superman to absolute classics like The Fellowship Of The Ring. Plus, there's a massive selection of sci-fi fantasy books available via the service. What better way to get started on your Kindle adventure?

Margaret Kingsbury is a freelance writer, editor, and all-around book nerd based in Nashville, TN. Her pieces on books and reading have appeared in Book Riot, BuzzFeed News, School Library Journal, StarTrek.com, Parents, and more. Follow her on Instagram @BabyLibrarians and Twitter and Bluesky @AReaderlyMom

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The best new science fiction books of July 2024

The Matrix star Keanu Reeves’s debut sci-fi novel is out this month, written in collaboration with old hand China Miéville, and we also have new books from Adam Roberts and Aliette de Bodard

By Alison Flood

1 July 2024

Keanu Reeves: a ‘genre-bending pioneer’

See Li/Picture Capital/Alamy

The world of science fiction sees some major celebrity input this month, as Keanu Reeves’s debut novel hits the shelves. We can also look forward to the latest book from one of the UK’s top sci-fi writers, Adam Roberts, and to some quantum fun from Peng Shepherd.

I think I’m most excited about Mateo Askaripour’s This Great Hemisphere , though. It’s a mix of sci-fi and political thriller, and comes highly recommended – just what I need for my holiday reading later in July. I might also pack MJ Wassmer’s Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend , which sees a bunch of holiday-makers going a bit Lord of the Flies when the sun explodes while they are at a luxury resort. Just the ticket to relax with.

The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

This is a collaboration between “two genre-bending pioneers”, according to its publisher, inspired by Keanu Reeves’s BRZRKR comic books. It follows an immortal soldier who wants to be able to die, a “tall lean man … looking at them from below a long fringe of black hair”, who clearly is meant to look exactly like Reeves. A US black-ops group says it can help him with that death wish – if he helps the team out first.

Now, I have read some of this already, because I am a big fan of China Miéville (if you haven’t read Embassytown then rush to get a copy – it’s such a clever and mind-bending piece of sci-fi). And obviously, I’m a big fan of Reeves too, because… Keanu Reeves.

But I had to put the book aside because I found it so flowery that I couldn’t keep going. I may well dip back in, though, because if you can’t have faith in Neo, who can you have faith in? Maybe I just need to get into the zone.

Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts

OK, this one I am definitely up for. Not only does it sound like tons of fun, but Roberts is reliably excellent. This time round, he gives us two starships orbiting a black hole. Both ships’ crews are killed in a single afternoon by Captain Alpha Raine, who says he was commanded to do so by a voice emanating from the black hole. This voice is named, rather enticingly, Mr Modo. Nobody believes Raine, of course, but something seems to be spreading from inside that black hole.

Our writers pick their favourite science fiction books of all time

We asked New Scientist staff to pick their favourite science fiction books. Here are the results, ranging from 19th-century classics to modern day offerings, and from Octavia E. Butler to Iain M. Banks

This Great Hemisphere: A novel by Mateo Askaripour

Set in the future, this novel follows a young woman relegated to second-class citizenship who sets out to find her older brother – someone she had thought was dead, but is now the main suspect in a high-profile murder. Its publisher is comparing it to the work of N. K. Jemisin and Naomi Alderman, and an early review from the book industry site Kirkus called it “a page-turning vision of a future made all too plausible by our volatile present”. I think it sounds really interesting and will definitely be tracking it down.

Toward Eternity: A novel by Anton Hur

This looks super intriguing. It’s set in a near-future world where cancer is being eradicated by a new technological therapy, in which the body’s cells are entirely replaced with “nanites”, robot cells that cure the sick – and, in fact, leave the person almost immortal.

We follow literary researcher Yonghun, who has a lot going on: not only does he create a machine that can think, but he also receives the new nanotherapy. This book promises that it will explore “the nature of intelligence and the unexpected consequences of progress, the meaning of personhood and life, and what we really have to fear from technology and the future” – a lot, for one novel, but I’m willing to give it a go.

The Edge of Solitude is set on a ship heading for Antarctica

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The Edge of Solitude by Katie Hale

This eco-thriller is set during “a time of acute climate crisis”, on a ship heading for Antarctica to hopefully save the region. On board is a disgraced environmental activist, Ivy Cunningham, who is trying to rescue her reputation – but is also starting to question the motives of her fellow passengers, and of the project as a whole.

Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend by MJ Wassmer

Dan Foster, a “professional underachiever”, is taking a holiday on an island resort when the sun explodes. He then has to choose whether to save himself or help his fellow guests as the temperature drops and revolution brews. Apocalypse in paradise? I’m there!

These are the best new science fiction books to read this June 2024

New books from Adrian Tchaikovsky and the late Michael Crichton (with James Patterson) are among the great new sci-fi novels out this month

All This and More by Peng Shepherd

At 45, Marsh isn’t pleased with where her life has ended up, from her career to her marriage to her relationship with her teenage daughter. So when she gets the chance to be the star of the TV game show All This and More , which uses “quantum technology” to let contestants revisit their pasts, she seizes it. But – you guessed it – even when she gets everything she wants, it all seems a little off, and Marsh starts to ask if it is worth it. Another one for my holiday reading, I think – I love a good “looking for happy ever after” story, and the addition of time travel and a sprinkle of quantum fairy dust sounds great.

Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard

This new novella from the author of  The Red Scholar’s Wake  is a space opera with added martial arts. It is set in an area of space known as the Hollows, which is populated by the mysterious, deadly Tanglers. When a Tangler escapes, it must be captured before it can destroy a civilian city. Two juniors from rival clans, both on missions to stop the Tangler, find their feelings for each other growing.

In This Ravishing World by Nina Schuyler

This short story collection will give us a “kaleidoscopic view of the climate crisis”, promises its publisher, moving from a boy trying to bring the natural world back to his urban life to a ballet dancer trying to inhabit the consciousness of a rat (at this stage, it isn’t clear why – but I’m keen to find out).

Gravity Lost is the second in the space-set Ambit’s Run series

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Gravity Lost by L. M. Sagas

This is the second in the Ambit’s Run series from Sagas, following Cascade Failure . It sees the crew of the Ambit, fresh from thwarting the destruction of a planet, trying to jailbreak the man they had just handed over to one of the major powers in the Spiral.

The Icarus Changeling by Timothy Zahn

Agent Gregory Roarke has been tasked with finding a teleportation portal on a far-flung colony world. But the former bounty hunter finds himself up against some better-equipped rivals – and then the murders begin… This is the latest in the series.

Two brilliant new novels from Adrian Tchaikovsky show his range

The prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky has two terrific sci-fi offerings out this year, one the story of a scientist turned prisoner shipped to a faraway planet, the other a light-hearted tale of robotic murder, says Emily H. Wilson

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