10 Buzzy Debut Novels We Can't Wait to Read in 2024

You won’t want to miss this vital story of power and art that perfectly speaks to our current cultural moment. Like Happiness deftly explores tricky questions of memory, gender, celebrity, and shifting power dynamics in working relationships. Tatum Vega lives a sunny life in Chile and believes she’s put her destructive past relationship with the author M. Domínguez behind her. But when she receives a call from a reporter asking for comment on assault accusations against Domínguez, Tatum is thrown back into her troubled past. As the old relationship returns to disrupt Tatum’s present, she addresses Domínguez in a letter that confronts and reclaims their turbulent entanglement. “Memorable and incisive, this debut grapples elegantly with the complexity of betrayal” (Kirkus Reviews).

Publication date: March 26, 2024

This dazzling new novel is perfect for Y2K pop music superfans. Honey begins in 1997 and follows Amber Young, a talented singer and performer from a small town who’s whisked away to Los Angeles to join the girl group Cloud9. As superstardom beckons, Amber must navigate the cutthroat and exploitative world of late-’90s and early-2000s fame. Banta’s coming-of-age novel delves into the chaos of celebrity and gives back agency to the teen idol persona, a figure routinely oversexualized and underestimated by tabloid media, the music industry, and the public at large. Radiating raw honesty and new millennium nostalgia, “Honey is a sexy swagger of a debut” (bestselling author Emma Straub).

Publication date: June 25, 2024

Language nerds of the world unite! You won’t want to miss this wildly clever and comedic literary mystery debut by an International Booker Prize–winning translator. The Extinction of Irena Rey centers on eight translators who are summoned to a remote Polish forest to translate the work of world-renowned writer Irena Rey. Upon their arrival, however, the translators discover that Rey is missing. Using their expertise as detectives of information and astute uncoverers of layered meaning, the translators must work through their bitter rivalries, growing isolation, and increasing paranoia to locate their author in the great, dark forest.

Publication date: March 5, 2024

This wholly original work of speculative historical fiction features Saint, a conjuror who destroys plantations in 1830s Arkansas to rescue their enslaved inhabitants and bring them to a magically concealed town called “Ours.” At first, Saint’s insulated town serves as a utopia, allowing its formerly enslaved denizens to flourish without intrusion from outsiders. As time goes by, however, the members of the community begin to wonder whether their enclave is a new kind of imprisonment. A radical reimagining of America’s traumatic past, Ours is a “jewel of a novel” (Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie). 

Publication date: February 20, 2024 

Kelly Link is a literary superstar thanks to her astonishing and award-winning short story collections. The Book of Love is Link’s first novel, and it’s not to be missed. The speculative fiction book centers on three teenagers, Laura, Daniel, and Mo, who magically reappear in their high school classroom a year after vanishing. Before them is their former music teacher, who lays out a series of magical tasks they must perform if they hope to win back their lives. The trio seem up to the challenge, but their surprise return draws the attention of supernatural entities — some of whom have unsavory plans of their own.

Publication date: February 13, 2024

This wondrous fable of friendship, love, and loss will spirit you away. The Other Valley is set in a mysterious valley town with heavily guarded borders. To cross the border to the east is to enter the exact same town, just 20 years in the future; to cross the border in the west is to slip 20 years into the past. Every so often, a council grants mourners permission to embark on the dangerous trek across the valley and through time to visit their dearly departed loved ones. The book opens as Odile Ozanne, a shy teenager vying for a seat on the council, sees something she isn’t supposed to see: the parents of her best friend on a mourning tour from the future.

Publication date: February 27, 2024

Fans of historical fiction books will be riveted by this debut novel based on true events about a Jewish Ukrainian veteran of World War II. When Yefin Shulman dies in 2007, his family discovers a letter to the KGB tucked in his briefcase. The letter contains a confession that changes everything they thought they knew about the man. Spanning the 1940s and Yefin’s harrowing actions as an artillerist on the border between the Soviet Union and Germany to the present-day Russia–Ukraine conflict, Your Presence Is Mandatory powerfully illustrates the terrible price people are forced to pay when caught under the brutality of totalitarianism and war.

Publication date: April 23, 2024

If you love Yellowface or American Fiction, you’re sure to enjoy this biting satire of toothless diversity initiatives and cultural institutions that embrace multiculturalism only when it suits their interests. Victim introduces us to Javier Perez, a self-styled hustler from a long line of hustlers who decides that the key to accessing the ivory tower of academia is by trading on the trauma he knows admissions officers love to see. Four years and many embellishments later, Javier is on the verge of a career breakthrough. But a childhood friend still knows his secrets and could upend the carefully fictionalized life he’s spent years constructing. 

Publication date: March 12, 2024

An important work of feminist fiction in the spirit of Octavia Butler or Margaret Atwood, The Blueprint delivers a scathing critique of America’s treatment of Black women and girls as it envisions an alternate reality for our nation. Solenne Bonet lives in a version of Texas where Black women aren’t allowed to choose what career to pursue, who they can marry, or where they want to live. As she works on a biography of an enslaved concubine in 1800s Louisiana, she finds herself living through an eerily similar relationship with a powerful government official. As Solenne wrestles with what to do, she decides to let Henriette, the subject of her biography, serve as her guide.

Publication date: February 13, 2024

Annie Bot strikingly explores questions of autonomy and intimacy as it unfurls a layered sci-fi love story about a robot girlfriend and the man she’s designed to serve. Annie Bot is constructed to be the perfect partner, meant to satisfy Doug’s every need. She even employs artificial intelligence to learn, grow, and become more realistic for her owner. But with increased humanity comes an uptick in emotional messiness. Doug says he loves Annie’s burgeoning humanity — so why is their relationship getting more troubled the more human Annie becomes? 

Publication date: March 19, 2024