A new year means a new calendar of books: anticipated debuts, favourite authors returning, new translations. Below, we’ve highlighted some of the most exciting ones on our radar.
Debuts
New voices abound in 2024. In The Ministry of Time, a civil servant finds herself a time-travel liaison for a Victorian polar explorer dropped into the 21st century. The ensuing hijinks of Kaliane Bradley’s debut — discovering Spotify, higher hemlines and over a century of history — make for a delightfully audacious screwball comedy. Conventional time and space also erupt in Nathan Alexander Moore’s supernatural short story collection. Set across multiple worlds, The Rupture Files is populated with vampires, shapeshifters and monsters, and explores with tenderness what makes us human in times of disaster. After a traumatic religious upbringing, a woman seeks refuge on the Isle of Bute, but instead meets a vampire in Genevieve Jagger’s gorgeous and gothic Fragile Animals. The pair begin a strange romance, while memories of past sins are confessed.
With great difficulty, boys become men in England is Mine. Set in East London, Nicolas Padamsee’s striking, state-of-the-nation novel follows two teenagers who drift apart from their real-life peers and become radicalised by the internet. Another debut novel examining masculinity with sensitivity is poet Andrew McMillan’s Pity. Set in an old Yorkshire mining town, the novel traces two brothers who are floundering like their setting; unsure of their inheritance and where the future will take them. Poet Holly Pester releases her first novel, too. In The Lodgers, a woman returns to a small town in England, to live in a new-build overlooking her childhood home. Precarious living, physical and emotional dislocation and the UK’s housing crisis are taken on in a bold, sharp novel.
Meanwhile music critic Ammar Kalia has penned a moving family drama that explores migration, inheritance and loss. A Person is a Prayer tells the story of a family that moves from Kenya and India to England in three days across six decades. The past and present also speak to each other in Niamh Mulvey’s The Amendments. This epic family saga chronicles three generations of women who each fight in their own ways to assert themselves during turbulent moments in modern Irish history. Another much-anticipated Irish debut is Colin Barrett’s raucous Wild Houses, about two unfortunate recluses who are dragged into the surreal and violent underbelly of their small town.
Set over a two-day tournament, eight teenage girl boxers enter the ring in Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot. Each has their own motivation for participating in the violent sport — family frustrations, obsessive perfectionism, pure pleasure — and the narrative collision is thrilling. The cost of ambition is also explored in Hanako Footman’s Mongrel. The narratives of three women, including a concert violinist, become intertwined as they move through the margins of Japanese and British society in an engrossing tale about living in between identities. Finally, in Ela Lee’s Jaded, a successful lawyer’s world is turned upside down after she is assaulted. Race, power and work are interrogated as the carefully constructed facade of a life begins to crumble.
Books in translation
A recent study reported that buyers under the age of 35 account for nearly half of all translated fiction purchases. Clearly there’s a desire for global reading, and thankfully many indie publishers, like Charco Press, Tilted Axis and Honford Star, are devoted to bringing international stories to English-language readers. Bora Chung, the Korean author of the cult favourite Cursed Bunny, returns with more surreal tales. Your Utopia (translated by Anton Hur) glares head-on into the future with acerbic stories about capitalism, tech and power. And another Korean novel, dd’s Umbrella, by Hwang Jungeun (translated by Emily Yae Won) reflects on recent historical events, like the Candlelight Revolution, to explore national attitudes to social minorities, collective grief and power.
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue (translated by Natasha Wimmer) drops us into 1519’s Mexico where the Spanish have recently arrived, and a glorious, colonial revenge story unfolds. Legacies of colonialism are explored in powerful ways in Dark Side of the Skin by Jeferson Tenório (translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato). Set in southern Brazil, a man searches for the truth about his murdered father in the objects he left behind, while also struggling under the racism of Brazilian society.
International Booker winner Lucas Rijneveld returns with My Heavenly Favourite (translated by Michele Hutchison), an unsettling, bold novel about a teenage girl befriending the local vet until their co-dependent relationship threatens to unravel their community. The sacrifices of parenthood are explored in bestselling author Muriel Barbery’s novel One Hour of Fervor (translated by Alison Anderson). A Japanese art dealer and a mysterious Frenchwoman spend ten days together before she disappears, and the aftermath of their affair unravels in poetic ways.
Inspired by a true story, Butter by Asako Yuzuki (translated by Polly Barton) is about a gourmet cook turned serial killer who is convicted of murdering lonely businessmen. Food, gender and violence are explored in this delicious novel. Equally riveting is Boy With A Black Rooster by Stefanie vor Schulte (translated by Alex Roesch). A young boy takes off with his rooster in this surreal fairy tale set in a pseudo-medieval post-apocalyptic land.
Must-reads
Miranda July returns with her first novel in a decade. A queer woman reaches the middle of her life with a nuclear family and heterosexual marriage in All Fours, and decides to embark on a roadtrip to find herself. Expect Miranda’s usual concoction of tender strangeness. The author of Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid, is also back with a new novel. Come and Get It explores grey areas as a university resident assistant begins a relationship with a visiting professor. It’s a tense and illuminating look into power, labour and money.
On a Caribbean island, four women spark a revolution in Monique Roffey’s Passiontide. Roffey explores the history of the Caribbean, gender and violence with spellbinding results. The women of Ghost Pains throw disastrous parties in post-party America in Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ collection of stories. Modern labyrinths of bureaucracy, politics and domestic relations are traversed with paranoid humour in this brilliant work.
Revenge comes calling in the late Katherine Min’s savage, horrible and very funny, The Fetishist. A woman seeks justice for her mother’s death yet her kidnapping ploy doesn’t go quite to plan in this posthumous novel which confronts race, sexuality and complicity. Sex, in all its multifaceted forms of pleasure and disturbance, is the subject of We Are Together Because, Kerry Andrews startling novel about four half-siblings at the end of the world. The unconventional family spend summer days by a pool in France, before strange events encroach on their holiday. It’s an eerie and erotic take on the apocalypse.