Shorter Books to End Out Your 2024 Reading

I love a good unraveling, and here, that’s exactly what happens to a young Palestinian woman who teaches underprivileged boys in New York. While in pursuit of the famously slippery American Dream^TM, she becomes involved in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags with a houseless person she befriends. But it may be the idea of the Birkin—whose value only increases every year, no matter the state of the world—compared to everything else in her life that leads to that aforementioned unraveling. She feels smothered by the US, and in an attempt to rebalance herself, she overcorrects and becomes obsessed with things like purity and cleanliness, which, unsurprisingly, lead her down a path.

This book just became one of the first ever listed in a longlist for the The National Book Critics Circle Awards. And let me just say, the summary alone has me hype. It tells the story of a revolution, with fabulistic elements, that centers around a healing woman called Sister Deborah.

It’s the 1930s in Rwanda when young Ikirezi—whose many ailments seem untreatable—is sent to be healed by Sister Deborah. Now, the good Sister, with her termite perch beneath a coral tree, had healing hands, yes, but she had something else, too. Folks said she would descend on a cloud, bringing abundant harvests with her, and that women would bare their breasts under her influence, all in the name of liberation. Once Ikirezi grows up, she travels back to her home country after being educated in America to find out who—or what— Sister Deborah really was.

The Singing Hills Cycle series, which The Empress of Salt and Fortune is the first of, is perfect to get into in the last days of the year. I know when I read it years ago, it had me in a vice grip.

This fantastical novella clocks in at 119 pages, and in it, Vo has cleric Chih meet an aging woman named Rabbit who was sold to the emperor for a basket of dye as a child. Rabbit’s world is sent spinning once she befriends the emperor’s new and lonely foreign wife, and the tale she has for Chih could mean ruin for the current empress. Vo is a master of concise yet beautiful prose, and Rabbit’s story had me in my feelings. Whew! Once you get hooked on being in Vo’s world, you can keep reading up to the fifth novella in this series (The Brides of High Hill), which just came out this year.

This collection of stories jumps from different points of view as it tells the story of migration in the American Southwest. The concepts of borders, gods, ghosts, colonization, revenge, and more are explored through deftly interwoven stories.