Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the First Half of 2024

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

There are some absolutely excellent books releasing this year, and I’m really excited to see where else the year takes us. I’ve tried to not have too much overlap with yesterday’s #5OnMyTBR post, but there are some which are on both posts.

Top Ten Most Anticipated Books
Releasing in the First Half of 2024

To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang

Genre: Fantasy
Age: Adult
Release Date: April 16th, 2024

Heroes die, cowards live. Daughter of a conquered world, Ruying hates the invaders who descended from the heavens long before she was born and defeated the magic of her people with technologies unlike anything her world had ever seen.

Blessed by Death, born with the ability to pull the life right out of mortal bodies, Ruying shouldn’t have to fear these foreign invaders, but she does. Especially because she wants to keep herself and her family safe.

When Ruying’s Gift is discovered by an enemy prince, he offers her an impossible deal: If she becomes his private assassin and eliminates his political rivals—whose deaths he swears would be for the good of both their worlds and would protect her people from further brutalization—her family will never starve or suffer harm again. But to accept this bargain, she must use the powers she has always feared, powers that will shave years off her own existence.

Can Ruying trust this prince, whose promises of a better world make her heart ache and whose smiles make her pulse beat faster? Are the evils of this agreement really in the service of a much greater good? Or will she betray her entire nation by protecting those she loves the most?

The Poisons We Drink by Bethany Baptiste

Genre: Urban Fantasy
Age: YA
Release Date: March 5th, 2024

In a country divided between humans and witchers, Venus Stoneheart hustles as a brewer making illegal love potions to support her family.

Love potions is a dangerous business. Brewing has painful, debilitating side effects, and getting caught means death or a prison sentence. But what Venus is most afraid of is the dark, sentient magic within her.

Then an enemy’s iron bullet kills her mother, Venus’s life implodes. Keeping her reckless little sister Janus safe is now her responsibility. When the powerful Grand Witcher, the ruthless head of her coven, offers Venus the chance to punish her mother’s killer, she has to pay a steep price for revenge. The cost? Brew poisonous potions to enslave D.C.’s most influential politicians.

As Venus crawls deeper into the corrupt underbelly of her city, the line between magic and power blurs, and it’s hard to tell who to trust…Herself included.

Mean Girl Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss by Kim Hong Nguyen

Genre: Non-Fiction – Feminism
Age: Adult
Release Date: January 9th, 2024

White feminists performing to maintain privilege Mean girl feminism encourages girls and women to be sassy, sarcastic, and ironic as feminist performance. Yet it coopts its affect, form, and content from racial oppression and protest while aiming meanness toward people in marginalized groups. Kim Hong Nguyen’s feminist media study examines four types of white mean girl feminism prominent in North American popular the bitch, the mean girl, the power couple, and the global mother. White feminists mime the anger, disempowerment, and resistance felt by people of color and other marginalized groups. Their performance allows them to pursue and claim a special place within established power structures, present as intellectually superior, substitute nonpolitical playacting for a politics of solidarity and community, and position themselves as better, more enlightened masters than patriarchy. But, as Nguyen shows, the racialized meanness found across pop culture opens possibilities for building an intersectional feminist politics that rejects performative civility in favor of turning anger into liberation.

Say You’ll Be My Jaan by Naina Kumar

Genre: Contemporary Romance
Age: Adult
Release Date: January 16th, 2024

Meghna has tried everything when it comes to dating: blind dates, apps, attempting to drum up conversations with strangers at bars (ew). Everything except arranged marriage.

But then Seth, her best friend and the-one-who-got-away asks her to be his “best man” and suddenly her parent’s taste doesn’t seem so bad . . . Which is how she meets the grumpy but handsome Karthik, who has seen enough of his parents’ relationship to know marriage is not for him.

Turns out, Meghna and Karthik are a match made in heaven (if not the match their parents think they are making) – and a deal is struck. They will be fake-engaged for three months. That way Karthik will get out of the absurd number of arranged set-ups his mother has planned and Meghna will have a date to the wedding from her worst nightmares. But what will happen when the wedding is over? And might they find that what they thought the other was faking could be real after all?

The Bone Hunters by Joanne Burn

Genre: Historical
Age: Adult
Release Date: February 8th, 2024

When Ada Winters finds the fossilised remains of an unrecognisable creature up on the cliffs, she believes she has found the answer to her scientific ambitions and her family’s financial struggles. Meanwhile, Doctor Edwin Moyle has come to Dorset in search of the discovery that will bring him fame and fortune, and instead finds a strange young woman who seems to hold the key to everything he seeks. But what is the creature that Edwin and Ada are about to unearth? And will it bring them greatness or destruction?

The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice by Elizabeth Flock

Genre: Non-Fiction – History
Age: Adult
Release Date: January 9th, 2024

Renowned journalist and author of The Furies Elizabeth Flock investigates what few dare to confront, or even the role and necessity of female-led violence in response to systems built against women. In The Furies , Elizabeth Flock examines how three real-life women have used violence to fight back, and how views of women who defend their lives are often distorted by their depictions in media and pop culture. These three immersive narratives follow Brittany Smith, a young woman from Stevenson, Alabama, who killed a man she said raped her but was denied the protection of the Stand-Your-Ground law; Angoori Dahariya, leader of a gang in Uttar Pradesh, India, dedicated to avenging victims of domestic abuse; and Cicek Mustafa Zibo, a fighter in a thousands-strong all-female militia that battled ISIS in Syria. Each woman chose to use lethal force to gain power, safety, and freedom when the institutions meant to protect them—government, police, courts—utterly failed to do so. Each woman has been criticized for their actions by those who believe that violence is never the answer. Through Flock’s propulsive prose and remarkable research on the ground—embedded with families, communities, and organizations in America, India, and Syria— The Furies examines, with exquisite nuance, whether the fight for women’s safety is fully possible without force. Do these women’s acts of vengeance help or hurt them, and ultimately, all women? Did they create lasting change in entrenched misogynistic and paternalistic systems? And ultimately, what would societies in which women have real power look like? Across mythologies and throughout history, the stories of women’s lives frequently end with their bodies as sites of violence. But there are also celebrated tales of women, real and fictional, who have fought back. The novelistic accounts of these three women provoke questions about how to achieve true gender equality, and offer profound insights in the quest for answers.

A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock

Genre: Horror
Age: Adult
Release Date: March 19th, 2024

It is an unusual thing, to live in a botanical garden. But Simon and Gregor are an unusual pair of gentlemen. Hidden away in their glass sanctuary from the disapproving tattle of Victorian London, they are free to follow their own interests without interference. For Simon, this means long hours in the dark basement workshop, working his taxidermical art. Gregor’s business is exotic plants – lucrative, but harmless enough. Until his latest acquisition, a strange fungus which shows signs of intellect beyond any plant he’s seen, inspires him to attempt a masterwork: true intelligent life from plant matter.

Driven by the glory he’ll earn from the Royal Horticultural Society for such an achievement, Gregor ignores the flaws in his plan: that intelligence cannot be controlled; that plants cannot be reasoned with; and that the only way his plant-beast will flourish is if he uses a recently deceased corpse for the substrate.

The experiment – or Chloe, as she is named – outstrips even Gregor’s expectations, entangling their strange household. But as Gregor’s experiment flourishes, he wilts under the cost of keeping it hidden from jealous eyes. The mycelium grows apace in this sultry greenhouse. But who is cultivating whom?

Told with wit and warmth, this is an extraordinary tale of family, fungus and more than a dash of bloody revenge from an exciting new voice in queer horror.

House of Shades by Lianne Dillsworth

Genre: Historical
Age: Adult
Release Date: May 16th, 2024

In this dark, immersive tale steeped in atmosphere and drama, the author of Theatre of Marvels returns to Victorian London to tell the story of a young Black female doctor’s dangerous quest to find the truth that unearth the secrets of the past.

London, 1833.

Doctress Hester Reeves has been offered a life-changing commission.

But it comes at a price. She must leave behind her husband and their canal-side home in Kings Cross and move to Tall Trees—a dark and foreboding house in Fitzrovia.

If Hester can cure the ailing health of its owner, Gervaise Cherville, she will receive payment that will bring her everything she could dream of.

But on arriving at Tall Trees, Hester quickly discovers that an even bigger task awaits her. Now she must unearth secrets that have lain hidden for decades – including one that will leave Hester’s own life forever changed. . . .

So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole

Genre: Fantasy
Age: Young Adult
Release Date: January 16th, 2024

Faron Vincent can channel the power of the gods. Five years ago, she used her divine magic to liberate her island from its enemies, the dragon-riding Langley Empire. But now, at seventeen, Faron is all powered up with no wars to fight. She’s a legend to her people and a nuisance to her neighbors.

When she’s forced to attend an international peace summit, Faron expects that she will perform tricks like a trained pet and then go home. She doesn’t expect her older sister, Elara, forming an unprecedented bond with an enemy dragon—or the gods claiming the only way to break that bond is to kill her sister.

As Faron’s desperation to find another solution takes her down a dark path, and Elara discovers the shocking secrets at the heart of the Langley Empire, both must make difficult choices that will shape each other’s lives, as well as the fate of their world.

Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf

Genre: Sci-Fi
Age: Adult
Release Date: January 9th, 2024

A washed up star creates a clone tasked with eliminating other clones of herself; a whip-smart and thrilling sci-fi read that’s perfect for fans of Orphan Black, Killing Eve and Keeping it Real by Justina Robson.

Set in a world of the near future, the celebrity elite have access to a technology that allows them to make perfect copies of themselves, known as Portraits. These Portraits exist to fulfil all the various duties that come as the price of fame.

Our protagonist is the thirteenth copy made of the actress known as Lulabelle Rock. Her purpose is very to track down and eliminate her predecessors.

While initially easy, her task is made difficult by the labyrinthine confusion of Bubble City and the unfortunate stirrings of a developing conscience. When she makes the mistake of falling in love with one of her targets, the would-be assassin faces the ultimate question; when you don’t want to kill yourself, what’s the alternative?

What books are you looking forward to in 2024? Are any of these already on your TBR? I think already this year is shaping up to be great for books, and these really do all look like such good reads. Can’t wait to read them!