The 15 Best Books of 2024

The year 2024 leaves us with shelves loaded with great titles, featuring monumental or intimate stories, moments of real-life terror and others only in paranormal settings, bloody dystopias or new visions of already told events. Here follows a list, surely incomplete, of the best books of the year; or at least some of the essentials. Note: do not miss 'The Call: A Return'.

Patrick Radden Keefe signs books that are genuine journalistic investigations, but could easily pass for novels. His pages slip through the fingers while the mind tries to reconcile with the idea that they are real events. His new book details human trafficking from China to the United States and how a woman became a millionaire at the expense of her compatriots. As in his previous successes, 'Say Nothing' and 'Empire of Pain', Keefe exposes the facts in a raw and direct manner, in a clear reportage tone, opening eyes to a hidden reality, simply accepted by the fact of always having been there.

'Biography of X' is a literary trompe-l'oeil. It is presented as the biography of a multidisciplinary artist written by her widow; but both are fictitious. C.M. tries to unravel X's past in a dystopian U.S. where a liberal North has separated from an ultraconservative South. Gradually, C.M. discovers that her wife hid too many layers. The dystopia imagined by Catherine Lacey merely serves as an excuse to connect with the reader and play with the boundary between reality and the imagined. Where the 'author' becomes the protagonist of a love story she believed real but was based on fiction.

It is always curious to approach relatively unknown moments of great historical events. Marianne Wiggins combines in her pages the Californian water war (the struggle of Californian ranchers and farmers with the city of Los Angeles for the precious resource) and the internment in North American concentration camps of Japanese-American citizens after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Under the motto "you cannot save what you do not love," Wilkins delves into human resentment, individual and collective, irrational fear of differences, and the dichotomy between love and duty.

David Uclés and 'The Peninsula of Empty Houses' has been quite a surprise in a theme common in Spanish literature: the Civil War. However, the novelty comes from telling our history through the mythical prism of what we now know as 'magical realism'. Built around an invented town, Jándula, a particular Macondo described with touches of García Márquez and García Lorca. 'The Peninsula of Empty Houses' has become one of the literary and publishing phenomena of the year. Conceived as "a total novel about the Civil War," it follows the life of the Ardento family in the fictional country of Iberia between 1936 and 1939 through the beginning, development, and end of the war. From superstition to darkness in a novel that can be described as immense.

With 'A Sunny Place for Shady People', Mariana Enríquez immerses us in the world of terror. Its pages are structured in twelve horror stories where evil does not have to find its origin in supernatural planes, but in the everyday streets of the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. Enríquez defines herself as a continuator of the most classic genre of terror with gothic tints and at the same time dares with new dimensions. Her endings do not leave one at ease.

The talent of the master Stephen King, without meaning to belittle his novels, comes to life when he dedicates his pen to short stories. 'If You Like the Darkness' is quite a statement of intent. Twelve tales or short novels where terror alternates with surprise, curiosity, luck, or mortality on pages where the question of what would I do in a similar situation resonates; no matter how paranormal the situation in question may be. Special mention deserves 'Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream' or 'Rattlesnakes', the sequel to his mythical 'Cujo'.

With 'The Call: A Portrait' we might be talking about the book of the year. The pages of Leia Guerreiro narrate the life of Silvia Labayru, a survivor of rapes and tortures in the repression of the Argentine dictatorship. It is not a text that indulges in easy sensationalism. In an example of brilliant journalism, its author unravels the protagonist's life through her conversations with her and the people around her. It does not constitute a direct judgment, but cold, direct, shocking facts, such as the repudiation of survivors for the simple fact of having survived. What must they have done to achieve it? "Then, over a certain period, we dedicated ourselves to reconstructing the things that happened, and the things that had to happen for those things to happen, and the things that stopped happening because those things happened," Leia repeats several times. But she does not talk only about what happened, but about who had to go through it.

Colson Whitehead, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, returns with 'Criminal Manifesto' to his character Ray Carney, who debuted in 'Harlem Shuffle'. It might be discussed whether his latest novel deserves to be part of this list, but, analyzed the two together, the answer is yes. Carney is a reformed fence, good in halves, and his vicissitudes take us to a New York of the 70s and its musical pulse. Carney desperately needs tickets for the Jackson 5 for his daughter. The virtue of Whitehead lies in his characters. From the abused secretary to the compassionate thug or the visionary filmmakers. They may seem like stereotypes, but you breathe and live with them as you walk the streets of Harlem.

'The Missing' is a novel about what is right and what is wrong, about justifications and regrets. In the 1920s in the U.S., a girl disappears in a large department store in New Orleans. The manager is fired and will only be reinstated if he manages to find her. What initially appears to be a typical noir novel becomes a story of hope in the face of adversity, of the human capacity to justify the inadmissible. The novel, set in the swamps around the Mississippi, exudes high doses of violence and lacks a defined hero to admire surrounded by secondary characters, perhaps with few paragraphs but equally thrilling.

After seven years, one of the great American authors, Dennis Lehane, has returned to bookstores. 'Knockout Blow' takes us to the Boston of the 70s with racial disintegration. The murder of a black teenager along with the disappearance of another young girl will lead a desperate mother with an included Irish mafia. The best critique of Lehane is that one greatly enjoys his books, and if we add his dialogues, the tension or a devilish pace, we get one of the novels of the year.

This year one of the most powerful signatures of the Spanish literary scene returned to bookstores, the writer from Extremadura, Luis Landero. Tito Gil, once a famous actor, returns to his town with the idea of a last collective work that avoids the depopulation of the municipality, a swan song interwoven with personal lives and linked with Landero's precise and unmistakable style where the everyday reaches unsuspected heights. 'The Last Function' brings us an ode to theater, to apparently empty towns but full of life, and to a love story sprinkled with a cast of secondary characters.

'The Island of the Sleeping Woman' reminds us of those classics to which its author frequently alludes and that one imagines in a privileged place in his library: 'The Black Corsair', 'Captain Blood', or 'Treasure Island'. A story of modern corsairs (a commando assigned to sink Republican ships in the midst of the Civil War), the emblematic Greek waters, and tough men and femme fatales come together in a Revertian cocktail that works like few of his previous works. 'The Island of the Sleeping Woman' recalls a Captain Alatriste with torpedoes instead of swords.

In 1980, a gas explosion in a school killed 50 children in a Basque town. Fernando Aramburu weaves the memories of the families of the victims to compose a narrative of memories, nostalgias, and guilt. The author himself dialogues with the reader at the beginning of some chapters to place him in the difficulty of narrating the loss of a child or a grandchild. Aramburu moves but achieves the difficult balance of not falling into easy tears and even making the madness of grandfather Nicasio become sanity.

'The League of Prisoners' is a risky recommendation. We are talking about a dystopian novel in a future U.S. where prisoners voluntarily face death televised to the whole world. A gladiator combat as a 'reality' where you can pay for almost everything and continuously streamed. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, 32 years old, has marked territory with this book. Before he signed the dark tales of 'Friday Black' (Libros del Asteroide), now he collects an acidic critique of racism, the penitentiary system, and the possibility of redemption even from the most terrible crimes.

When one thinks of historical novels, the reader usually goes back at least a few centuries. Not so with Kristin Hannah, who signs a tale about the lost American generation in the jungles of Vietnam. It is a 'Born on the Fourth of July' from a female perspective. Frankie McGrath, a 20-year-old nurse, volunteers for Vietnam eager to continue her family's patriotic tradition. She will soon discover that war is not as they tell it and that returning home will be even more complicated for women than for soldiers. An alternative and enlightening vision of one of the darkest episodes of the U.S.