Literary Hub - Our Most Anticipated Books of the Year

Click here to read this email in your browser.

Lit Hub’s 230 Most Anticipated Books of 2024

Happy New Year, readers. 2023 had its ups and downs (mostly downs), but as always, at least it brought us some very good books. But now that you’ve read all the books last year had to offer (right?), it’s time for a brand new list.

Here are the books Literary Hub editors are most looking forward to (so far!) in the months to come.

Kelly Link, The Book of Love (Random House, February 13)

It’s not so often that a debut novelist is already a MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient and a Pulitzer finalist, but then we’ve been waiting for Kelly Link’s debut novel for a long time now. Lovers of big, immersive literary fantasy (and, of course, of Link) will not be disappointed—this is a nimble, clever, and deeply satisfying novel, in which a handful of teenagers, most of them recently dead, get dragged into an age-old grudge match between mythic creatures of unending (or possibly ending, but no spoilers) power.

All of it is rendered in Link’s trademark winking, personable prose, which tends to deliver something pleasurable on every page. (Very often, in this case, it is a sassy comeback.) So yes, this novel has Big Buffy Energy—that is, sometimes it is fun and ridiculous, sometimes it is a tragedy on an epic scale, but always there is someone looking askance at the goings-on, even while their world is ending. Well, there are worse ways to get through February. 

–Emily Temple, managing editor

Lucas Rijneveld, trans. Michelle Hutchinson, 

My Heavenly Favorite (Graywolf, March 5)

Here comes a novel that wears its debt to Lolita—is it just me, or are we seeing a lot of novels lately that are taking Nabokov’s classic and running with it?—pinned on its chest with abject pride. After winning the International Booker Prize in 2020 with The Discomfort of Evening, Rijneveld returns with a novel narrated by a disgraced veterinarian who falls for the daughter of a farmer in rural Netherlands, a protean girl on the edge of puberty who’d much prefer a boy’s body. 

–Samuel Rutter, contributing editor

Hala Alyan, The Moon That Turns You Back

(Ecco, March 12) 

Palestinian-American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan, a recipient of both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, has been an essential voice in these dark, devastating times. She writes about the complexities of displacement and exile, the nature of home, and the dehumanizing nature of the western gaze (“They like me in a museum. / They like me when I spit my father from my mouth”) with incredible lyricism, beauty, and fury. Her new collection of poetry, The Moon That Turns You Back, “traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war.” 

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks editor-in-chief

Morgan Parker, You Get What You Pay For: Essays
Random House, March 12

I queue up to read Morgan Parker, and you should too. In her debut essay collection, the award-winning author of Magical Negro pursues a personal and cultural history of life as a Black woman in America. Weaving personal narrative with current events and historical context, Parker delivers a must-read account of her own psyche, written with the precision and lyricism of a poet. 

–Eliza Smith, special projects editor

Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

(Coffee House Press, April 24)

The co-founder and editor of Dorothy, a publishing project, Danielle Dutton’s new book is “a haunting landscape of wildflowers, megadams, black holes, violence, fear, virtual reality, abiding strangeness, and indefinable beauty.” This is a book that defies categorization—a collection of stories, literary criticism, an essay on visual art and fiction, and stories-as-essays or essays-as-stories. I still think about Dutton’s novel Margaret the First, which was published almost a decade ago, and anticipate that this is one everyone will be talking about. 

–Emily Firetog, deputy editor

Copyright © 2024 Literary Hub. All rights reserved.

You are receiving this newsletter because you subscribe to one or more of Lit Hub’s newsletters. Unsubscribe | Manage Preferences