Every December, we propose to our clients and friends the list of the best literary novelties of the year. In 2024 we have read a lot and, among the best, we have selected a handful of novels, essays, and collections of stories that are very much worthwhile.
Their authors are Argentine, Israeli, Romanian, British, Irish, French, American or Spanish. We encourage you to approach them and, through their pages, travel to the origin of information networks, to dystopian worlds, to Africa in the era of colonialism, to the conquest of America, or certain tremendously terrifying places.
The 10 most recommended books of the year 2024
1. Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X is an irony, a novel about a possible world that never came to exist. In it, the United States was divided between a South subjected to a religious and patriarchal tyranny in the style of The Handmaid’s Tale and the North, which advanced towards a kind of social democracy in which the rights of minorities were accepted very quickly. The enigmatic “X” referred to in the title lived there, a kind of mix of Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, and David Bowie. After his death, his widow tries to reconstruct his story and realizes an unfortunately universal truth: you never really get to know someone completely, there are always secrets.
2. The Scorpions, by Sara Barquinero
In a year where the “novelón” of hundreds and hundreds of pages has become fashionable again in Spanish literature, the highly ambitious and monumental work of Sara Barquinero stands out in its light (a dark and sinister light). With a complex story of conspiracies in the background that extends across several countries and goes from fascist Italy to our present, with influences from video games, creepypastas, and urban legends, but also from the literature of the popes of postmodernism Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, it deserves to be considered the novel of a generation.
3. Nexus , by Yuval Noah Harari
The essay of the year. Israeli scholar Yuval Noah Harari, who was already amazed with Sapiens, returns with another monumental book, a history of the elusive concept of “information” and how it is transmitted and influences us, from the Paleolithic to the 21st century. Something more relevant than ever in the era of digital surveillance, social media algorithms, and, of course, artificial intelligence.
4. Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney
“The Taylor Swift of contemporary literature,” Irish writer Sally Rooney has published one of the most anticipated books of the year, a story about two Dublin brothers with very different characters who can be seen as two prototypes of the masculinity of our time, involved in complicated romantic relationships.
5. Blackouts, by Justin Torres
A narrative homage to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo in a queer key? It would seem like a rather crazy idea, but the result is this disconcerting and powerful novel with which Justin Torres won the prestigious National Book Award. A young gay man, rootless and disoriented, embarks on a journey to a mysterious place, “The Palace,” a large ruined building on the edge of the desert, inhabited by Juan, an old man he met many years ago… and many ghosts.
6. Learning to Speak, by Hilary Mantel
Unpublished books by Hilary Mantel (1955-2022), consecrated by the spectacular “Cromwell trilogy”, one of the first genuinely immortal literary works to be published in the 21st century, continue to arrive in dribs and drabs. In this case, it is a wonderful collection of autobiographical stories. In them, we acquire the perspective of children and young people from broken families in the north of England, living in the bleak suburbs of poor, industrial cities. We once again appreciate the best qualities of Mantel’s prose: precision, an innate ability to capture significant details, constant intelligence, and a humor that is sometimes very black, sometimes simply devastating.
7. A sunny place for gloomy people, by Mariana Enríquez
After the impressive novel Nuestra parte de Noche, which became a global bestseller, there was undeniable hype to discover the next work by the Argentine Mariana Enríquez. This new collection of horror stories does not disappoint, in which ghosts, curses, and monsters have as a backdrop the endless crisis in Argentina and its consequences of poverty and marginalization.
8. Conquerors, by Éric Vuillard
It seems that we are condemned to the fact that the best artistic visions of a transcendental event in our history, the discovery and conquest of America, come from other latitudes. If we could say that the best film ever made about that period, full of heroic and atrocious episodes, was Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) by the German Werner Herzog, Conquistadores, by the great French author Éric Vuillard, could be a serious candidate for the best novel (non-fiction). It tells us about the conquest of Inca Peru by the small army of Pizarro and Almagro with the precise and ironic tone that we, readers of wonderful books like El Orden del Día, already know, paying equal attention to both the most violent and the tragicomic moments.
9. Theodoros , by Mircea Cărtărescu
There is no doubt that the Romanian Mircea Cărtărescu is one of the best writers working in Europe. This year he returned to bookstores with Theodoros, where he speculates on the fact that a young Wallachian from the Balkans came to the throne of Ethiopia in the 19th century. The result is a story full of magic and brutality, halfway between Borges and an epic poem.
10. If You Like It Dark, by Stephen King
The King of Terror proves that, when it comes to his literature, the years have not passed for him and he has an enviable capacity for reinvention. If You Like Darkness is a formidable collection of short stories and novellas. It contains several stories – “The Dreamers”, “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” and “Answer Man” – worthy of appearing in any anthology of his gigantic work.
Conclusion: the year 2024, is ideal for huge novels and short story anthologies
In conclusion, 2024 has been a year full of high-quality and diverse literary proposals. From chronic to the darkest visions of reality, the narrative and essay books we have chosen invite readers to explore complex and provocative worlds, addressing everything from the history of information to the tragedies of the conquest of America or the exploration of identity. With authors from different parts of the world, the selection reflects both the cultural richness and the universality of human experiences, allowing each work to become a unique window to new literary horizons. Without a doubt, these titles will continue to leave their mark on readers and enrich the global literary panorama.
