24 for 2024

If you follow any number of book bloggers on any platform I am certain you will have seen some 24 for 2024 posts! For those not in the know, a 24 for 2024 is a list of the 24 books on a TBR (to be read) pile that we really want to check off by the end of the year. We like to hold ourselves accountable, even if we do absolutely nothing to fulfil the goals we set for ourselves (guilty). Being a book blogger I obviously have a 24 for 2024 list, and I thought I might share it with you as they’re a great way to get inspired if you’re stuck on what to pick up next:

1. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
   Genre: Fantasy
   When Zachary Rawlins stumbles across a mysterious book containing details from his own life among its pages, it leads him on a quest unlike any other.
   

2. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
   Genre: Fantasy
   This is the way the world agains for the last time. It starts with the Great Red Rift across the heart of the world’s sole continent. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.
   

3. As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh
   Genre: YA Fiction
   Salama Kassab was a pharmacy student when the cries for freedom broke out in Syria. She still had her parents and her big brother; she still had her home. She had a normal teenager’s life. Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily.
   

4. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
   Genre: Historical/War Fiction
   For Marie-Laure, blind six the age of six, the world is full of mazes. As father and daughter take refuge when the Nazi’s invade Paris, her path draws her closer to Werner, a German orphan, destined for a life of labour until a broken radio fills his future with opportunity an brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth.
   

5. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
   Genre: Thriller/Mystery
   Who are you?
   What have we done to each other?
   These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary when his wife Amy suddenly disappears.
   

6. The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri
   Genre: Literary Fiction
   Nuri is a beekeeper; his wife, Afra, an artist. They live happily in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo - until the unthinkable happens and they are forced to flee.
   

7. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
   Genre: Science Fiction
   In the year 2044, reality is an ugly place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade's devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within this world's digital confines, puzzles that are based on their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them.
   

8. Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
   Genre: Coming-Of-Age/LGBTQ+ fic
   Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds.
   

9. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
   Genre: Magical Realism
   Kafka Tamara runs away from home aged 15, under the shadow of his father’s dark prophecy. Nakata, an aged tracker of cats who never recovered from an odd childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simple life suddenly tuned upside down.
   

10. Heaven by Mieko Kawakami
    Genre: Coming-Of-Age
    Kawakami’s novel is told in the voice of a 14-year-old student who subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy chooses to suffer in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormentors.
    

11. Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
    Genre: Dark/Supernatural Fantasy
    Unlikely Yale University freshman 20-year-old Galaxy "Alex" Stern, is a high school drop out and homicide survivor who can see ghosts. Alex is mysteriously offered a full ride to university following her trauma despite her background and lack of qualifications. She attempts to navigate her new life at the Ivy League while tasked by her benefactor with monitoring the eight Houses of the Veil, secret societies that harbour dark occult magic and power.
    

12. The Fine Print by Lauren Asher
    Genre: Romance
    The first instalment in the smouldering Dreamland Billionaires series finds a theme park mogul falling for his headstrong new employee.
    

13. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
    Genre: Literary Fiction/Tragedy
    When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendships and ambition. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinge day addiction, success, and pride.m. Their greatest challenge is Jude, a terrifyingly talented lawyer, yet an increasingly broken man.
    

14. Seven Days in June by Tia Williams
    Genre: Romance
    When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. They may be pretending that everything is fine now, but they can't deny their chemistry - or the fact that they've been secretly writing to each other in their books ever since.
    

15. Dust Child by Nguyen Phan Que Mai
    Genre: Historical Fiction
    A suspenseful and moving saga about family secrets, hidden trauma, and the overriding power of forgiveness, set during the war and in present-day Việt Nam.
    

16. Penance by Eliza Clark
    Genre: Mystery/Suspense
    Do you know what happened already?
    Did you know her?
    Did you see it on the internet?
    Did you listen to a podcast?
    Did the hosts make jokes?
    Did you see the pictures of the body?
    
    Did you look for them?
    

17. The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
    Genre: Historical Fiction
    Winter, 1561. Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, is taken on an unexpected visit to a country villa by her husband, Alfonso. As they sit down to dinner it occurs to Lucrezia that Alfonso has a sinister purpose in bringing her here. He intends to kill her.
    

18. Kala by Colin Walsh
    Genre: Thriller/Mystery
    In the seaside town of Kinlough, on Ireland's west coast, three old friends are thrown together for the first time in years. They - Helen, Joe and Mush - were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann as their group's white-hot centre. Soon after that summer's peak, Kala disappeared without a trace.
    

19. Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang
    Genre: Satire/Psychological Fiction
    When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song. But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
    

20. The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
    Genre: Historical Fiction
    Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war—including the women of Troy themselves. They await a fair wind for the Aegean. It does not come, because the gods are offended. Camped out in limbo in the shadow of the city they destroyed, the warriors are left company by the women they stole from it. The Women of Troy.
    

21. Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
    Genre: Fantasy
    Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. As Emily gets closer and closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones- the most elusive of all faeries- she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: Who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want?
    

22. My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
    Genre: Psychological Fiction
    2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher.
    2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student. Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past.
    

23. Good Material by Dolly Alderton
    Genre: Contemporary Fiction
    Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can't work out why she stopped. Now he is...

    1. Without a home
    2. Waiting for his stand-up career to take off
    3. Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking
    

24. Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
    Genre: Magical Realism
    Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake-a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she's led-her sisters are surprised. Has Flor forseen her own death, or someone else's? Does she have other motives?