The 12 Best New Books To Look Out For In 2024

How many New Year’s reading resolutions have been thwarted by people getting bogged down in turgid books? The key to reading more sounds so simple, but so often goes wrong – it lies in choosing the right book. Thankfully, we’ve designed a list of the most exciting releases coming in what is already shaping up to be a busy year in the literary world.
From heatwaves, small-town crime thrillers and Mediterranean mysteries to essential British social histories, read on to find out what books everyone will be talking about in 2024.
Fiction

1. Wild Houses
Best For: A crime drama with dark humour
Irish author Colin Barrett has become one of the most acclaimed short story writers around since his 2013 debut collection Young Skins. His long-awaited first novel Wild Houses tells the story of a weekend gone wrong, as two outsiders in the west of Ireland are drawn into a small-town kidnapping.
This has all the thrills of a crime classic paired with the unique wit, subtle characterisations and dark vision of small-town Ireland Barrett has made his signature.
publish date: 25.01.2024

2. Come and Get It
Best For: A sharp take on millennial issues
Kiley Reid burst onto the scene with Such a Fun Age, a sharp funny modern take on race, class and privilege, which earned a Booker Prize longlist selection.
The follow-up has an intriguing premise: A campus novel, it follows Millie Cousins who takes an unusual job from an enigmatic visiting professor and gets caught up in new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue.
publish date: 30.01.2024

3. Headshot
Best For: A formally inventive, unique read
One of the more exciting and original debuts of recent years, Headshot follows eight teenage female boxers as they compete for a national championship in Reno, Nevada.
Featuring almost no dialogue, as they face off against each other we drift in and out of the thoughts of each competitor, with more and more revealed as they progress further into the competition.
Publish date: 28.03.2024

4. The Gentleman From Peru
Best For: Forcing you to book a trip to the Italian coast
A sun-soaked haze of love and longing set in the Mediterranean from the author of Call Me By Your Name, you say? Surely no more convincing is needed.
Aciman’s latest follows a group of college friends holidaying on the Amalfi coast who invite a mysterious older stranger for lunch, which leads to an unexpected life-changing journey. We’ve already pre-ordered.
publish date: 04.04.2024

5. James
Best For: A reworking of a classic from a modern master
A reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James tells the story through the eyes of the enslaved Jim. It both forces us to see the classic in a wholly new light and functions as a singular piece of writing by itself.
Everett was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022 for his novel The Trees, and his previous work Erasure has been turned into the new Oscar-tipped film American Fiction.
publish date: 11.04.2024

6. Evenings & Weekends
Best For: Razor-sharp political commentary on modern life and love
There’s something about a heatwave that makes it such good fodder for a story – maybe it’s the existential link to climate change, maybe it’s the fact it makes us all a bit insane.
This debut from Oisín McKenna follows Maggie, Phil, Ed and Keith, all in their early thirties, during one weekend in the languishing London summer of 2019, the hottest on record. Expect astute political commentary as our protagonists deal with modern issues of money, work, relationships and family.
publish date: 09.05.2024

7. Parade
Best For: A readable yet totally unique style of novel
Centres on the artist, G, and the carousel of lives she interacts with and drifts through, all told with Cusk’s inimitable style of sparse prose and deliberate omission.
Cusk’s Outline trilogy is widely considered a modern masterpiece, and Parade looks like it will continue to explore themes of womanhood and art and challenge readers’ expectations of what a novel can and should be. Not to be missed for all Cusk fans, old and new.
publish date: 06.06.2024

8. Creation Lake
Best For: Think spy-thriller at a COP conference
The ‘eco-thriller’ is a sub-genre surging in popularity – see last year’s Birnam Wood – and this latest entry by Rachel Kushner looks to be another strong contender.
In Creation Lake, undercover agent Sadie Smith is sent to a remote corner in the South of France to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists with a charismatic leader. Here, she aims to propel them into violent action, hoping to provoke the French state to crush them and their dangerous ideas for good – a timely satire on operative meddling.
publish date: 05.09.2024
Non-Fiction

9. Empireworld
Best For: Re-interrogating Britain’s place in the world
Sanghera’s previous work Empireland, which explored how the British Empire’s imperialism shaped modern Britain, was a bestseller and award winner. Now, he has turned his focus outward towards the staggering 2.6 billion people who live in former British colonies. It charts the impact British imperialism has had on the world, and the stark difference between the country’s own view of its imperial past, and the world’s experience.
One of those books that would be, if there was one, firmly placed in the mandatory national reading list.
publish date: 25.01.2024

10. Private Equity
Best For: An insider’s look into the world of finance
Loved Industry? You might enjoy this memoir about working life in the non-stop world of finance and hedge fund management – an environment that pushes the work-life balance ratio to new found levels of disproportion (we’ll let you guess on which side).
It is also part cautionary tale about how easy it can be for work to subsume every other part of your life, and how hard it is to break that trend.
publish date: 29.02.2024

11. Revolutionary Acts
Best For: An exciting social history of powerful radicalism
This social history explores the lives of seven older gay Black British men and finds a spirited community full of courage, charisma and good humour, hungry to tell its past – of nightlife, resistance, political fights, loss, gossip, sex, romance and vulgarity.
Tracing through the social upheaval of the seventies, eighties and nineties, Okundaye creates a portrait of a Britain too often pushed to the sidelines.
publish date: 07.03.2024

12. All The Rage
Best For: A deeper look at fashion, style trends and its place in the world
Another social history, this time unbuttoning the multi-layered, hundred-year-history of women’s lives through fashion and beauty from 1860 to 1960, from popular historian Virginia Nicholson.
For those who love fashion, this holds trends up to the mirror of context, encompassing two world wars and a revolution in women’s rights.
release date: 11.04.2024