The Books I’m Looking Forward To in 2024

Every year when I put together this list, I contemplate the entire mini-industry of “most anticipated” things—not just books but films, TV shows, games, music, etc.—that has sprung up in the last decade, and with which we are inundated at every turning of the year. We live with a constant firehose of content, which these days seems detached from any sort of regular schedule—gone, for example, are the days when you knew you’d be getting 20-26 episodes of a television series every year between September and May. So as overwhelmed as we are, it often feels useful to know what’s coming, even if we’re never going to be able to read, watch, play, or listen to all of the things we’re interested in, and even if—dare to whisper it!—it doesn’t actually matter whether we read a book in the year it was published, or ten years after.

I say all this, of course, as a complete hypocrite, because my reading has only become more current and more attached to the publication schedule as the years have gone by. In the last year, I’ve gotten more active in using ARC sites like NetGalley and Edelweiss, and as a result my reading has been pretty of the moment. And, to be clear, I enjoy that. I like feeling that I have my finger on the pulse of the publishing world. When it comes to the fields of science fiction and fantasy, I like knowing that I’ve gotten a comprehensive look at what’s being published, especially as we enter award season and I start thinking about what I’m going to nominate for the Hugos.

At the same time, one of the things these lists make clear is that there will always be more books to read, films to watch, albums to listen to, than you have time for. And that there’s no point in getting upset about this. This list, then, is not my reading list for 2024, but a list of books that have caught my attention, and which I think some of you will be interested in as well. Maybe I’ll read them this year, or next year, or in the 2050s, or never. In the meantime, we can just be happy that all these books are coming, and that we will never have a shortage of things to read.

As usual, I begin this list with some late 2023 publications that didn’t make it onto last year’s post because I wasn’t aware of them:

• The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu – I’ve spoken several times about my admiration for Basu’s The City Inside (published as Chosen Spirits in India). So a new novel from him, which similarly combines an Indian setting and cyberpunk elements, was sure to catch my eye.
• A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand – “Official” sequels to classic novels are a dangerous proposition, and the Shirley Jackson estate’s choice of Elizabeth Hand as the author of a follow-up to The Haunting of Hill House is something of a double-edged sword—one might argue that Hand has already written her Hill House sequel with the masterful Wylding Hall. That said, Hand is still a must-read for me, and the subject matter is compelling, so I’m looking forward to her take on the material.
• Out There Screaming, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams – Peele’s movies have almost single-handedly created the marketing category (and academic discipline) of Black Horror, so a themed anthology from him, along with experienced anthology wrangler Adams, makes a lot of sense. Contributors include N.K. Jemisin, Tochi Onyebuchi, Ezra Claytan Daniels, and many other promising names.
• Armed With Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot – The ongoing rediscovery of surrealist author and painter Leonora Carrington continues with this graphic biography from the Talbots. Bryan Talbot has form in creating genre-busting, surrealist graphic works, so the marriage of artist and subject seems especially fortuitous.
• House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky – The extremely prolific Tchaikovsky (who will appear twice more on this very list!) kicks off his list of books I’m looking forward to with a companion volume to City of Last Chances, one of my favorite reads of 2023. Like that novel, this looks to be a New Weird-inflected secondary world fantasy with strong lashings of politics.

And now, the books I’m looking forward to in 2024.

January:

• Exordia by Seth Dickinson – For those of us (well, me) who admired Dickinson’s short fiction and then failed to jump onto the Baru Cormorant bandwagon when it got rolling, this standalone novel seems like a good opportunity to get reacquainted with him. The description sounds like an alien contact technothriller, which is certainly a departure from what Dickinson has been writing in the last decade.
• You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer – Alternate histories in which the Spanish conquest of the New World is averted, or in which colonization happens in the opposite direction, are not a new idea—just recently, we got Laurent Binet’s delightful Civilizations—but it’s a sufficiently big sandbox that more than one author can play in it and come up with something exciting. Mexican author Enrigue’s take on the concept has been gaining accolades, especially for its recreation of the city of Tenochtitlan at its height.
• Termush by Sven Holm, translated by Sylvia Clayton – Mid-century nuclear dystopias were a pretty vibrant subgenre in their day, but at first glance we might wonder why we need this reprint of Danish author Holm’s 1967 novella in 2024. As the introduction by Jeff VanderMeer points out, however, Termush is unique in focusing not on the destruction that follows nuclear war, but on the relatively comfortable and affluent people who get to avoid it, in the titular hotel where the management keeps up the pretense of normal life, even as the world outside disappears. The relevance to our present moment does not, I think, need to be belabored.
• Kinning by Nisi Shawl – In her 2016 novel Everfair, Shawl imagined that the Belgian colonization of the Congo was replaced by a utopian community established by socialists, missionaries, and liberated slaves. The resulting nation was hardly without its flaws and challenges, and nearly a decade later Shawl returns with a sequel that tracks the evolution of Everfair after the first world war.
• Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase – Described as a cyberpunk ghost story with elements of The Handmaid’s Tale and Get Out, Tsamaase’s debut takes place in a world of extreme gendered control of women’s lives and bodies. I haven’t read it yet, but I hope that it will be a rare case of science fiction that engages with the reality (and potential transformation) of pregnancy, a topic on which the genre is too often silent.
• Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley – The prolific, wide-ranging Whiteley is someone whose books I always rush to pick up. After making her name in the novella length, she has now produced a novel about an archivist two hundred years in the future who becomes obsessed with a bit of contemporary internet lore, and with the repeating number 381. The idea that future historians will be baffled by the internet (and stymied by what little remains of it in their time) is not a new one, but to my knowledge Whiteley is the first science fiction author to draw on it for a premise, and I look forward to seeing what she makes of it.

February:

• King Nyx by Kirsten Bakis – It’s been more than a quarter century since Bakis’s debut novel, the international sensation Lives of the Monster Dogs. The fact that she’s returning with a new novel is delightful in itself, but the fact that the novel is described as a Gothic mystery set on a remote island—all things that are precisely my jam—makes it even more enticing.
• Your Utopia by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur – Korean author Chung’s previous collection of slipstreamy, genre-defying short stories, Cursed Bunny, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and National Book Award, and gained a great deal of acclaim for its combination of contemporary Korean life and the uncanny. The only possible reaction to a new collection promising more of the same is “yes, please!”
• The Book of Love by Kelly Link – A novel by Kelly Link! After nearly three decades as one of the most distinctive and imaginative short story writers in American letters (not to mention, one who has influenced an entire generation of writers like Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado), Link is delivering not just a novel, but a veritable brick at more than 600 pages. The subject—teenagers swept up by the supernatural—is very much up Link’s alley, and I look forward to seeing how she puts her distinctive stamp on it in this format.
• In Ascension by Martin MacInnes – Published last year in the UK and already longlisted for the Booker prize there, this novel about a microbiologist investigating the very deep ocean garnered raves from friends of mine who are interested in the intersection of literary and science fiction, and in the burgeoning field of climate change-themed fiction.
• Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay – I mentioned this collection in last year’s roundup, but it’s getting its US publication this year. Which is a great opportunity to say, yet again, that McKay’s Clarke-winning debut The Animals in That Country was a magnificent work of science fiction, and that a collection of her short stories is sure to be s similar delight.
• Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange – Orange shot to fame with There There, a linked story cycle about the lives of Native Americans in the Oakland area. His follow-up is a multigenerational family saga that also connects to the Oakland area and the the experience of urban Indians, while stretching back into the 19th century.
• Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford – Again, UK readers have already had a chance to be wowed by this novel, in which the inimitable Spufford imagines an alternate America in which Native American cities persist into the present day, and sets a hardboiled, Jazz Age mystery in one. The comparisons to Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union have been coming in hard and fast, and only make me more excited to read this book.

March:

• James by Percival Everett – The extremely prolific Everett is riding high at the moment, appearing on Booker and Pulitzer shortlists, and receiving an award-winning adaptation of his 2001 novel Erasure. A retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim seems almost too perfect a choice for a victory lap, and those who know Everett’s barbed wit will be looking forward to what he does with the material.
• Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson – Johnson’s debut, The Space Between Worlds, was an impressive multi-worlds thriller with a strong theme of the class struggle. That preoccupation seems to have persisted in her second novel, which is about a regimented post-apocalypse and the woman who finds herself caught between the haves and have-nots.
• The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones – With breakneck speed, Jones has arrived at the conclusion of his Indian Lake trilogy, in which traumatized, slasher-obsessed final girl Jade Daniels is repeatedly forced to confront monsters and killers straight out of the movies she (no longer really) loves. The self-aware slasher has been a trope since Scream, but Jones has made it his own with this series, and with the troubled but lovable Jade, who will hopefully get the happy ending that so many heroines like her are denied.
• Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi – A new Helen Oyeyemi novel is always an instant buy for me, but this novel, in which a young woman on a bachelorette weekend in Prague finds herself drawn into strangeness, seems to connect with some of her recent obsessions: magic, illusion, and a mitteleuropean settings.
• Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky – Tchaikovsky makes his second appearance on this list with this science fiction novel about a researcher studying the ruins of an alien civilization on a planet whose native life seems interested in altering the human body. The premise reminds me of the recent HBO series Scavengers Reign, and of the entire subgenre of “zone” science fiction that it drew on. I’ll be curious to see what Tchaikovsky makes of that tradition.

April:

• My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two by Emil Ferris – For years I put the second volume of Ferris’s monumental graphic saga in my most anticipated books list, hoping to cargo cult it into existence. At some point that started to feel a bit mean—a work like My Favorite Thing is Monsters doesn’t appear on command. But now, we actually have confirmation that this new volume is coming! (Following, apparently, a legal dispute between Ferris and publisher Fantagraphics.) We will finally be able to find out how the story of monster-obsessed tween Karen Reyes, and her investigation of the death of her neighbor Anka Silverberg, a Holocaust survivor, turns out.
• The Wings on Her Back by Samantha Mills – One of the most decisive winners in last year’s Hugo awards was Mills’s short story “Rabbit Test”, a powerful and timely meditation on the ebbs and flows of female bodily autonomy. It’s hard to guess, from that story, what Mills’s debut novel, a secondary world fantasy about a warrior rebelling against the restrictive state she’s served, will be like, but she’s certainly earned the attention the novel is getting.
• The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar – It’s been nearly a decade since Samatar’s last novel (in the interim, she’s published a short story collection and two works of non-fiction, including last year’s hard-to-categorize Tone, a work of literary philosophy co-written with Kate Zambreno). The plot description for this novella doesn’t reveal much—it’s about an enslaved boy who is suddenly raised to the ranks of the elites—but my excitement for Samatar’s return is nevertheless incalculable.
• The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas – Thomas made a huge splash in the early 00s with The End of Mr. Y, and then seemed to drift in and out of the literary sphere. In the last few years, however, she seems to have returned to regular writing. Her 2019 novel Oligarchy was a sharp examination of the poisonous atmosphere in a girls’ school where shady businessmen park their inconvenient children. Her latest is about a newlywed couple whose Greek honeymoon turns nightmarish, and sounds right up my alley.
• Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell – Another Hugo-nominated short story writer branching into the novel form. Wiswell has made a splash in recent years with stories like “That Story Isn’t the Story” and “D.I.Y.”, and his debut, in which a monster falls in love with the human she’d like to lay her eggs in, tracks with a lot of the themes of those stories. I look forward to seeing what he does with them in a greater length.

May:

• The Default World by Naomi Kanakia – I first knew Naomi as a Strange Horizons reviewer, and then as a short story writer. Her debut novel is about a trans woman who decides to infiltrate a group of privileged San Francisco techies and their shared, palatial house, only to fall under their spell and develop a Great Gatsby-like obsession with them. It’s a very promising premise that I look forward to seeing played out.
• Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru – The third volume in Kunzru’s loosely connected sequence of novels about the intersection of race, class, politics and technology in modern American society (following White Tears and Red Pill), Blue Ruin tells the story of a former artist turned essential worker during COVID, who is invited to join a former schoolmate’s “pod”. Like the Kanakia novel, the potential for Gatsby-like calamity seems high.
• Sufferance by Charles Palliser – Palliser made a huge splash with 1989’s The Quincunx, and since then has been publishing weird, sometimes-historical novels that are always an interesting read. His latest is about a family hiding a child during WWII, and the strains and secrets this act reveals.
• Long Island by Colm Tóibín – This sequel to Tóibín’s Brooklyn rejoins Irish immigrant Eilis twenty years after she chose a life in America, and finds her a crossroads as her comfortable life is shattered by a shocking revelation. Those of you who thought Eilis should have chosen Domhnall Gleeson will get some validation from the premise, but the pleasure of the novel, I’m sure, will be in getting to spend more time with this lovely character.

June:

• Private Rites by Julia Armfield – There was a mini-trend for diving- and nautical-themed novels in the last few years, of which Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea was probably the most effective and successful. Her follow-up seems to be more explicitly fantastical. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world beset by endless rain, and focuses on three estranged sisters who come together to clear out their recently deceased father’s house.
• Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi – I’m actually a bit behind on the furiously prolific Emezi’s bibliography. I still haven’t read their previous novel, and here they are with a new one. Like much of Emezi’s previous work, Little Rot appears to be about the lives of young, queer, often precariously situated Nigerians, but the premise, in which an encounter at a sex party has reverberations that affect multiple characters’ lives, sound darker than any of their previous work.
• Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera – “Heartwarming!” I quipped when I learned, a few months ago, about the coming publication of this novel. “The author of one of the best books you’ve read this year is also a fast writer!” No sooner have we grappled with the masterfulness of Chandrasekera’s debut, the indescribable Saint of Bright Doors, than he returns with another novel. Rakesfall is a science fiction epic about two souls bound together across multiple timelines.
• Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky – Tchaikovsky again! The third and final appearance of this author on this list (though whether it’s his final 2024 publication only he can say) is a science fiction novel about a server robot who suddenly gets ideas about his station, kills his owner, and runs off into the blasted wasteland.

July:

• Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi – After wowing the science fiction world with some of the best short stories of the 21st century, and the Hugo-winning novel The Windup Girl, Bacigalupi decamped to YA, where he has been happily publishing for more than a decade. In his first novel for adults in years, he delivers an epic fantasy set in a Renaissance Italy-inspired city, and focused on a powerful family grappling for supremacy among the city’s cutthroat elites.
• The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville – Look, I have no idea whether I want to read this novel, but I obviously could not pass up a mention of this team-up. Set in the world of Reeves’s BRZRKR comics, the novel follows an immortal warrior across millennia. But though Reeves’s presence is eye-catching, I’m more interested in Miéville, who hasn’t dipped a toe in fiction since 2016’s The Last Days of New Paris.
• Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías, translated by Heather Cleary – I don’t know much about this book, but the premise—a post-apocalyptic setting beset by a toxic algae bloom, where the only available food is a pink paste of unknown origin—sounds too weird to pass up, and the accolades it received in Trías’s native Uruguay are impressive.

August:

• Time’s Agent by Brenda Peynado – Yet another author on this list whom I know mostly from short fiction, and who is now branching out into the longer form. Peynado’s collection The Rock Eaters was one of my top reads of the last few years. Her new novella imagines a world in which the existence of “pocket universes” offers the possibility of both scientific exploration and capitalistic exploitation.
• Hum by Helen Philips – Philips’s previous novel, The Need, blended maternal horror with core SFnal tropes. Her follow-up seems to burnish her science fiction credentials when it imagines a world where AI is taking over people’s jobs and surveillance is ubiquitous. It also returns to The Need‘s preoccupation with maternal protectiveness, and the terrifying forms that impulse can take.

September:

• Space Oddity by Catherynne M. Valente – I mentioned this book in last year’s roundup, but its publication has been pushed back. The follow-up to Valente’s delightful, Hitchhiker’s Guide-esque, Eurovision-in-space extravaganza Space Opera sees that novel’s heroes once again asked to compete for the Earth’s survival in a meta-galactic talent competition.

December:

• The Dead Man’s Empire by W.P. Wiles – Wiles seemed to come out of nowhere last year to scoop up the Kitschie award with his fantasy novel The Last Blade Priest, a twisty and satisfying tale of a religious order caught up in the collapse of an empire. There was quite a lot of story left to tell when that novel wrapped up, and I’m looking forward to the next installment when it comes out in the winter.

Unknown:

• The Many Lives of Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin – Franklin, a regular New Yorker contributor and author of the masterful Shirley Jackson biography A Rather Haunted Life, has been researching the short life and remarkable afterlife of Anne Frank for years (some of her research has ended up on her substack, such as this fascinating piece on Otto Frank’s influence on his daughter’s legacy and public image). The result of that work is this forthcoming biography from Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, which will hopefully cut through the mythology that has built up around Anne and her diary.
• The Landing by Mary Gentle – This book has been on my anticipated books list a few times now, and each time the publication date gets pushed back. I probably won’t mention it again until I have more concrete information, but in case it makes a difference, I will say that a novel by storied science fiction and fantasy author Gentle, whose plot sounds inspired by both Rendezvous With Rama and The Three-Body Problem, is one that I am very eager to read.
• Alecto the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir – We don’t have a confirmed publication date for the final volume in Muir’s mega-successful Locked Tomb sequence, and it’s possible that it won’t even be this year. Whenever it happens, however, it’s sure to be a major event in the SFF publishing sphere. Though I’ve never been as taken by the Locked Tomb books as some of their fans, I do appreciate all that Muir has accomplished with them, and I’m looking forward to seeing where their twisted, convoluted story ends up.