It's not even December, and media outlets have been proclaiming their Best Books recommendations for 2024. I feel a bit sorry for those novels slated to come out next month! (Although to be fair, these may be included in roundups by pre-publication review sources.)
Here are the lists I've come across thus far.
As always, NPR's Books We Love crosses subgenres, age categories, and time periods (even ranging up through the 1980s) to present their annual collage of favorite historical novels: 44 of them. If you prefer to see a list rather than a cover gallery, that's available too.
Writing for The Times (London), critics Nick Rennison and Antonia Senior pick the 10 best historical novels for 2024. This is paywalled, sorry, though if you have Apple News, you can read the article through the app. Some books included here that I haven't seen on other lists are Irish writer Kevin Barry's The Heart in Winter (set in 1890s Montana), Mary Horlock's The Stranger's Companion (1930s on the Channel Island of Sark), Hesse Phillips' Lightborne (Christopher Marlowe), and Rosanna Pike's A Little Trickerie (Tudor times).
The Washington Post (gift link) makes their picks, including Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s 54 Miles, Ashton Lattimore's All We Were Promised, and The Phoenix Crown by Kate Quinn and Janie Chang, which is on NPR's list too.
The top 10 list in The Independent has been out for a few weeks, and is very different from that in the compilation above. Overlapping titles include Robert Harris's Precipice (which I also read and enjoyed, though it wasn't my favorite of his) and Tracy Chevalier's The Glassmaker.
The final round of Readers' Choice Awards at Goodreads is out, with ten books vying for the title (in theory). Voting is only open for the next day and a half. Just because I'm curious how closely popularity will correlate with the ultimate rankings, here they are, listed by the # of reviews posted in the system as of today:
The Women by Kristin Hannah - over 90K reviews
The top 10 list in The Independent has been out for a few weeks, and is very different from that in the compilation above. Overlapping titles include Robert Harris's Precipice (which I also read and enjoyed, though it wasn't my favorite of his) and Tracy Chevalier's The Glassmaker.
The final round of Readers' Choice Awards at Goodreads is out, with ten books vying for the title (in theory). Voting is only open for the next day and a half. Just because I'm curious how closely popularity will correlate with the ultimate rankings, here they are, listed by the # of reviews posted in the system as of today:
The Women by Kristin Hannah - over 90K reviews
The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon - 19,400+ reviews
James by Percival Everett - 13,800+ reviews
The Briar Club by Kate Quinn - 6700+ reviews
By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult - 5300+ reviews
Husbands and Lovers by Beatriz Williams - 4600+ reviews
Anita del Monte Laughs Last by Xóchitl González - 3800+ reviews
The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali - 3600+ reviews
The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali - 3600+ reviews
The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - 1200+ reviews
The Booklover's Library by Madeline Martin - 800+ reviews
Some books with higher #s of reviews were eliminated after the semifinals, so we'll see how this ends up.
Still to come: the New York Times list, which should be out in mid-December, and Library Journal's lists, out in their December issue.
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