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Taiwan Travelogue
by Shuāng-zi Yáng
National Book Award Winner for Translated Literature (2024)
May 1938: Taiwan. Young novelist Aoyama Chizuko is invited to visit the island by the ruling Japanese government, but she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Rather, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and taste as much of its authentic cuisine as possible. Soon, a young Taiwanese woman–who shares the same name–is hired as her interpreter and not only arranges all of Chizuko’s travels, but proves to be an excellent cook as well. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, the two become closer until a heartbreaking separation shatters them apart.
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Let Us Descend
by Jesmyn Ward
Andrew Carnegie Medal Finalist (2024)
NAACP Image Award Nominee (2024)
Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, must turn inward and seek comfort from her memories as she takes the miles-long march from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans, and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Recalling her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother, Annis inscribes Black American grief and joy into the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South.
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Orbital
by Samantha Harvey
Booker Prize Winner (2024)
Ursula K. Le Guin Prize Nominee (2024)
Six astronauts, circling in their spacecraft above earth, are tasked with collecting meteorological data, conducting scientific experiments, and testing the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Circling the earth sixteen times, they watch their silent blue planet, taking in endless shows of spectacular beauty. Yet when news reaches them of the death of a mother, thoughts emerge of returning home. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
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House Gone Quiet: Stories
by Kelsey Norris
Longlisted for Andrew Carnegie Medal (2024)
Sent to a foreign territory to make husbands of their enemies, a group of women contemplates violence. A support network of traumatized joggers discusses the bodies they’ve found on their runs. A town replaces its Confederate monument with a rotating cast of local residents. Slippery but muscular, sly but electric, this stunning debut collection moves from horror to magical realism to satire with total authority. In these stories, characters build and remake their sense of home, be it with one another or within themselves.
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Say Hello to My Little Friend
by Jennine Capó Crucet
Kirkus Prize Fiction Finalist (2024)
When failed Pitbull impersonator Ismael Reyes–Izzy, for short–finds himself at the mercy of a cease-and-desist letter from Pitbull’s legal team and living in his aunt’s garage-turned-efficiency, he decides to flip the script: become a modern-day Tony Montana. Pursuing money, power, and respect, Izzy winds up at the tank that houses Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium. What begins as Izzy’s story turns into a super-saturated fever dream as sprawling and surreal as the Magic City, one as sharp as an iguana’s claws, and as menacing as a killer whale’s teeth. .
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Margo's Got Money Troubles
by Rufi Thorpe
Kirkus Prize Fiction Finalist (2024)
As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. She enrolls at her local junior college, but then--after a brief but unexpected affair with her English professor--she becomes pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger. Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She devises a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and use some of her father’s advice from the world of wrestling: Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?
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Some Desperate Glory
by Emily Tesh
Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel (2024)
Locus Award Nominee for First Novel (2024) All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons indefinitely, she knows she must escape from everything she’s ever known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught--and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.
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God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer
by Joseph Earl Thomas
Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Winner (2024)
Longlisted for Andrew Carnegie Medal (2024)
After a deployment in the Iraq War, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Working as both a MD/PhD student at The University of Pennsylvania and an emergency department tech at a hospital in North Philly, he becomes interested in the Holmesburg Prison Experiments, in which the prison conducted scientific trials on their inmates. Through this curiosity he comes to know his estranged father, who is serving time for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, his best friend Murray, a fellow vet, judges the journey he sets out upon, while simultaneously pushing him towards a ruinous self-discovery. Balancing single fatherhood, his studies, and long shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph's voice delivers a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.
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Creation Lake
by Rachel Kushner
Booker Prize Finalist (2024)
Longlisted for the National Book Award (2024)
The narrator is Sadie Smith–or at least this is the name she gives to her lover and the commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs. Sadie meets Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, in what seems to be an accidental encounter, but–like everyone Sadie targets–she is using him for a purpose. Considering herself to be the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, she is surprised to find herself becoming entranced with Bruno Lacombe, a mysterious mentor who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past–and he is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.
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Glory Be
by Danielle Arceneaux
Edgar Award Winner - Lilian Jackson Braun Memorial Award (2024)
Agatha Award Nominee for Best First Novel (2024) It’s a hot and sticky day in Lafayette, Louisiana, when Glory hears that her best friend—a nun beloved by the community—has been found dead in her apartment. Police declare the mysterious death a suicide, but Glory is convinced that there must be more to the story. With her reluctant daughter, with troubles of her own, in tow, she launches a shadow investigation in a town of oil tycoons, church gossips, and a rumored voodoo priestess. In this first book of a crime series featuring an uncensored amateur sleuth, Glory is determined to make her presence known as the case leads her deep into a web of intrigue she never realized Lafayette could harbor.
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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
by Nathan Thrall
Pulitzer Prize Winner for General Nonfiction (2024)
Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site, but the scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. His quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.
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Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia
by Kate Manne
National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction (2024)
For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger–but she was not. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential. In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of “body reflexivity”—a radical reevaluation of the forces that control and constrain us, and a remaking of the world to accommodate people of every size.
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The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
by Jake Bittle
Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee (2024)
Even as climate change dominates the headlines, many of us still think about it in the future tense—we imagine that as global warming gets worse over the coming decades, millions of people will scatter around the world fleeing famine and rising seas. What we often don’t realize is that the consequences of climate change are already visible. In the last few decades, the U.S. government has moved tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pricing people out of risky areas. The stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move provide a look into how radically climate change will transform our lives.
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Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Women’s Prize for Nonfiction Winner (2024)
Celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein discovered she had a double: she had a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent, but whose name and public persona were so similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: the branding, austerity, and climate profiteering surrounding society through politics, media, and technological innovations. Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein illuminates the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.
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How to Say Babylon
by Safiya Sinclair
Women’s Prize for Nonfiction Finalist (2024)
Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father–a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari–became obsessed with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world. In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. As Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she used her education as the sharp tool to find her voice and break free. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between her and her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence.
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