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Best Books, Awards & Book News

Amazon selects its best books of 2024; USA Today has coverage.

Kirkus releases its lists of the best books of 2024.

Libro.fm shares its bestselling audiobooks of 2024, along with excerpts; LitHub has coverage.

The shortlist for ALA’s Carnegie Medal is announced.

The longlist has been selected for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, for fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue.

EveryLibrary has a chart tracking how library-related ballot measures fared in last week’s elections; LitHub summarizes.

New Title Bestsellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers | USA Today Bestselling Books

Fiction

Hexed by Emily McIntire (Bloom) grabs No. 4 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Lost and Lassoed by Lyla Sage (Dial) rounds up No. 6 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Under the Oak Tree, Vol. 1 by Suji Kim (Inklore) grows to No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list.

Nonfiction

Turkuaz Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Dough Recipes for Sweet and Savory Bakes by Betül Tunç (Ten Speed) serves up No. 8 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Carson the Magnificent by Bill Zehme (S. & S.; LJ starred review) rises to No. 15 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list.

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Brightly Shining by Ingvild Rishøi, tr. by Caroline Waight (Grove): “Brightly Shining, a new novella from Norwegian writer Ingvild Rishøi, belongs to that contra-Dickens genre that wreathes holiday joy with sorrow. It’s not as perfect as Claire Keegan’s 2021 Christmas novella, Small Things Like These, but perfection makes for an unfair comparison”; and Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music by Rob Sheffield (Dey Street): “Sheffield approaches Swift with a winking sort of affection. He’s less a scholar than an admirer and a fellow music nerd, but few have written about her with such inside-out understanding.”

NYT reviews The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius by Patchen Barss (Basic): “The result is a moving and intimate portrait of a figure who has expanded our understanding of the universe…. Barss embeds the work in the life, taking any chance he can get to link abstract theoretical concepts with things we can see and touch in the visible world”; States of Emergency by Chris Knapp (Unnamed Pr.): “Public and private moments of upheaval are the catastrophes in Chris Knapp’s fantastically dense and omnivorous debut novel”; three new psychological thrillers: The Undercurrent by Sarah Sawyer (Zibby), The Seventh Floor by David McCloskey (Norton), and Death at the Sanatorium by Ragnar Jónasson, tr. by Victoria Cribb (Minotaur: St. Martin’s); and three new works of speculative fiction: The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang (Morrow), The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy (The Feminist Pr. at CUNY), and The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey (Orbit; LJ starred review).

LA Times reviews From Under the Truck: A Memoir by Josh Brolin (Harper): “Instead of a linear narrative of chronological events, Brolin’s account darts backward and forward through the years and resembles a jumbled patchwork of recollections and meditations. In places it is scrappy and disjointed. But there is method in Brolin’s madness because he manages to keep the whole thing hanging together.”

LitHub gathers “5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week.”

Briefly Noted

Ishion Hutchinson, author of School of Instructions: A Poem (Farrar; an LJ Best Book of 2023), shares his “Annotated Nightstand” with LitHub.

Jenny Slate, author of Lifeform (Little, Brown), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

The Guardian interviews Samantha Harvey about her Booker Prize–winning novel Orbital (Atlantic Monthly; LJ starred review).

LitHub talks to the National Book Award finalists.

Katherine Rundell will donate all the royalties from her book Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures (Doubleday) to climate charities, The Guardian reports.

Publishers Weekly shares “a gastronome’s guide to graphic novels.”

Reactor gathers “five books where the real horror is high school.”

CrimeReads finds “five romantasy novels that balance worldbuilding with relationship building” and “seven historical mysteries where political intrigue fuels the plot.”

Authors on Air

NPR’s Short Wave talks to Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, authors of A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (Penguin Pr.).

LitHub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast interviews Maggie Tokuda-Hall, founder of Authors Against Book Bans, on Project 2025’s plans for libraries.

Today, NPR’s Fresh Air will talk to Richard Price, author of Lazarus Man (Farrar).

Shelf Awareness rounds up the schedule for this weekend’s Book TV on C-SPAN 2 at the Texas Book Festival.

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