13 Fiction Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2024

Amy Jo Burns’s evocative family drama will instantly draw you in — and you’ll want to stay once you discover the intriguing secrets at its heart. Marley West arrives in the blue-collar town of Mercury, Pennsylvania, and soon falls in with the Joseph brothers. It isn’t long before she becomes a wife to one of them and a mother figure to all three. Once an outsider, Marley now finds herself fighting for the survival of her found family and their struggling roofing business. But when shocking truths are unearthed in the attic of the local church, the entire Joseph family — both fraternal and found — finds itself in jeopardy. Early readers and book club groups have raved about Mercury’s finely drawn characters and vivid small-town setting.

Publication date: January 2, 2024

Alex Michaelides, the #1 bestselling author of The Silent Patient and The Maidens, returns this January with a brand-new psychological thriller set on an idyllic Greek island — making it the perfect murder mystery escape from winter. Elliot Chase is our guide in this beguiling narrative, and he details how he became trapped on a private island with an ex-movie star and her closest friends…and how someone wound up dead. There’s just one problem: We have no idea if he’s telling us the truth. Richly atmospheric and packed with plot twists and gasp-out-loud surprises, The Fury will keep you bundled up in your reading chair and tearing through the pages until the last one is turned.

Publication date: January 16, 2024

Amy Tintera’s highly anticipated new thriller is earning rave reviews from big hitters in the literary world: Liane Moriarty hails it as “laugh-out-loud funny, thrilling and twisty,” while horror maestro Stephen King recommends it as “a world-class whodunit.” It’s the perfect new read for suspense fans and true crime obsessives. Listen for the Lie centers on Lucy, who years ago was found wandering the streets of her small Texas town covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood. Lucy’s neighbors were convinced she was a murderer; Lucy herself had no memory of what happened that terrible night. When a hit true crime podcast decides to investigate Savvy’s case, Lucy must leave behind the new life she’s built in Los Angeles and return to the scene of the crime in hopes of solving her best friend’s murder — even if it means revealing herself as the killer.

Publication date: March 5, 2024

In this stirring debut novel, Ursula Villarreal-Moura delivers a timely narrative about class, gender, memory, and power. Like Happiness introduces you to Tatum Vega, who lives happily in sunny Chile with her partner. Her new setup is a world away from her former life in New York City and her troubled, all-consuming relationship with the powerful author M. Domínguez. But when Tatum gets a call from a reporter asking for corroboration on sexual assault accusations against the writer, she’s compelled to revisit this former chapter in search of answers, accountability, and closure. Villarreal-Moura’s absorbing and intimate novel is told in an alternating fashion: One thread follows Tatum in the present day, while the other moves incrementally through a letter that Tatum wrote to Domínguez about their turbulent time together.

Publication date: March 26, 2024

Fans of dark and creepy thrillers will devour this upcoming crime novel by bestselling author Peter Nichols, which centers on a serial killer stalking a coastal Maine town. Granite Harbor begins with a death: A teenager is found brutally murdered at a nearby archaeological site. Former novelist turned detective Alex Brangwen sets out to solve the slaying — his very first murder investigation — and to assuage the fears of the tight-knit Granite Harbor community. For Alex, the case is personal; his daughter was close friends with the victim. When a second body turns up, however, it becomes clear that a sinister force is on the loose. Can Alex and fellow parent Isabel drill through Granite Harbor’s deep-buried secrets and expose the killer before one of their kids becomes the next victim?

Publication date: April 30, 2024

Wandering Stars is a sequel of sorts to Tommy Orange’s Pulitzer Prize–finalist novel There There, which was an intertwining narrative about the lives of 12 Native Americans living in Oakland, California. In his follow-up, Orange vividly traces the stories of his characters into the past and future. Like its predecessor, Orange’s new novel unflinchingly examines the devastation wrought by the United States on Native American communities while simultaneously delivering a beautiful narrative of triumph, resilience, and hope.

Publication date: February 27, 2024

In Memory Piece, Lisa Ko, the award-winning author of The Leavers, conjures a bold future-gazing book about friendship that spans the 1980s to the 2040s. The narrative follows Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng, three lifelong companions originally drawn together by a shared sense of isolation and outsiderdom. As the three come of age, their paths diverge and relink, and they’re forced to grapple with the complications of success and the disillusionment of achieving the goals they thought they wanted. A moving meditation on the vitality of youth, the shifting realities of adulthood, and the darkening mood of our present moment, Memory Piece is sure to captivate. 

Publication date: March 19, 2024

Acclaimed poet Kaveh Akbar’s dazzling debut novel is generating plenty of buzz in the literary world — Tommy Orange calls it “an absolute jewel of a novel.” We can’t wait to crack it open when it hits shelves this January. Martyr! centers on Cyrus Shams, the freshly sober and orphaned son of Iranian immigrants whose obsession with martyrs, artists, and poets leads him on an epic quest to uncover truths about his past and the family he thought he knew.

Publication date: January 23, 2024 

Anita de Monte Laughs Last is the “incandescent” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) new novel from Xochitl Gonzalez, the acclaimed author of Olga Dies Dreaming. It vividly explores how classism, racism, and sexism converge to suppress the art of women of color. Art history student Raquel’s working-class Puerto Rican background puts her at odds with her elite classmates at her Ivy League university until she finds herself climbing the social ladder with the help of her well-connected boyfriend. While writing an uninspiring thesis about a canonical artist, she uncovers the lost work of Anita de Monte, a Cuban American star of the art world whose life was tragically cut short in 1985. This discovery renews Raquel’s passion for art history and inspires her to demand answers. Whose work gets to be studied and celebrated — and whose work is relegated to the shadows?

Publication date: March 5, 2024

Fans of Amor Towles are sure to love his new collection of stories, set for publication this spring. Table for Two includes six witty and incisive short stories that take place in New York City and a noirish novella set during the Golden Age of Hollywood that stars a character from Towles’s The Rules of Civility. The short stories, most of which are set in and around the year 2000, examine the complex inner workings that uphold and undermine contemporary American marriages. The novella goes back to the late 1930s: It follows Evelyn Ross as she transforms herself into “Eve” and seeks out stardom in Los Angeles.

Publication date: April 2, 2024

Percival Everett is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the author of Telephone, Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and more. This March, he returns with James, a brilliant reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that’s told from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s enslaved companion. While the setting and plot points may be familiar to readers of Twain’s classic, Everett’s updated approach gives Jim more agency over his destiny and shows the character in a fresh new light.

Publication date: March 19, 2024

Bestselling fantasy writer Leigh Bardugo is back this April with a transporting historical fiction fantasy tale set in late-16th-century Madrid. The Familiar centers on Luzia Cotado, a servant who secretly uses magic to get through her day-to-day drudgery — until word spreads of her magical talents. It isn’t long before Luiza finds herself under the thumb of the King’s secretary, who’s desperate for any advantage in Spain’s war with England. As Luzia’s profile grows, however, she worries that her Jewish heritage will put her at the mercy of the Spanish Inquisition before she can find a way to outwit her enemies.

Publication date: April 9, 2024

We end our list of the most anticipated fiction books of 2024 with a tale perfect for language nerds like us. The Extinction of Irena Rey is written by Booker Prize–winning translator and Women’s Prize finalist Jennifer Croft. Both thought-provokingly clever and laugh-out-loud funny, it follows eight literary translators on the hunt for an acclaimed and mysterious author named Irena Rey. Rey vanished into the dense Polish forest on the border of Belarus soon after the translators arrived to work on her latest opus. Using their expertise as uncoverers of meaning and unpackers of layered information, the translators must work through their bitter rivalries, growing isolation, and increasing paranoia to locate the author in the great, dark woods.

Publication date: March 5, 2024