New Books in 2024: Gift suggestions for World Book Day

After the enormous success of her novel Our Share of Night, in which the Argentine writer intertwines the supernatural with the tight and suffocating terror of a family, Mariana Enríquez returns to the format of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost in the Fire with a new collection of short stories that deal with ghostly apparitions, inexplicable disappearances or persecutory delusions with a voice and atmosphere that have made her a totally unique contemporary author.

With his skill for social and political satire, combining the best of the crime novel genre with a special, chatty, sense of humour, Eduardo Mendoza has become one of the greatest Spanish writers of the last century. All these elements come together in his new novel, in which he follows a group of nine detectives investigating three apparently unrelated cases for the Organisation, a secret government entity created during Franco's regime and buried deep in the bureaucracy of the Spanish democratic era.

With her sharp, fresh and relatable vision of modern youth and everything that comes with it - complex relationships, intense friendships, career anxiety and, in general, a great deal of existential unease - British author Dolly Alderton has become a best-seller. In Good Material, she navigates the turbulence of contemporary love through Andy, a 35-year-old stand-up comedian who, after a devastating break-up with Jen, his girlfriend of four years, must come to terms with the fact that his life is not turning out the way he had hoped.

As the charismatic frontman of Pulp, Jarvis Cocker became one of the leading figures of Britpop and an international music icon. In his biography, Good Pop, Bad Pop, published as a Spanish translation for the first time at the end of last year with the Spanish title “Buen Pop, Mal Pop”, he tells the story his childhood dreams, his tireless creativity and his rise to fame, turning this revision of his career into a chronicle of 20th century pop culture, bearing witness to its transformative nature.

Using the pseudonym Zerocalcare, Italian cartoonist Michele Rech writes graphic novels with a biting, relatable tone, where the past is revisited through the prism of ironic nostalgia. The translation of Tentacles at my Throat, his second book, now arrives in Spain (Spanish title: “Un pulpo en la garganta”) and allows us to delve into an episode from the childhood of Zero, the recurring main character of his work, where circumstances will force him to betray his friends, and the confession of this secret, kept for years, threatens to unveil another, bigger, tragedy.

A young man falls in love with a mysterious girl whom he occasionally meets and who describes a fantasy city in which she believes an alternative version of herself lives. After a sudden and non-negotiable farewell, he must wait years to meet her again, but he will see how her ideas, apparently impossible, seem to come into being around him. This new novel novel by this contemporary master features many of the classic elements of a Murakami story: enigmatic and self-absorbed characters, doomed romances, atmospheres with a character of their own, and the warp and weft of reality entirely infiltrated by the logic of dreams.

Daughter of fellow writer and publisher Esther Tusquets, the founder of the publishing house Lumen, Milena Busquets had the privilege of experiencing literature up close and rubbing shoulders with great intellectuals since she was a child, but she also always felt the pressure of a heavy legacy. A decade after her mother's death, in Ensayo general Busquets recovers formative scenes from her life and registers them with the intention of understanding and forgiving, of embodying experiences of joy and pain, of reconstructing herself in memory in order to build a self that can face the future with greater awareness and will.

In just ten years, Geneva-based writer Joël Dicker has become a colossus of the suspense genre, incredibly prolific and an international bestseller. With a broad cast of characters and a hectic timeline, his latest novel, A Wild Animal, is a story of obsessions, secrets and paranoia, of the evil that beats beneath the surface of all things and has the potential to destroy the apparent calm of conventional reality.

The popular Atlas Six series reaches its final chapter with The Atlas Complex, the third instalment and conclusion to this fantasy saga by American author Olivie Blake. After discovering the dangers of the secretive and powerful Alexandrian Society, the last six wizards chosen to join its ranks will have their loyalty and values tested by the tangible threat of a plan of mass destruction.

Santiago Posteguillo continues in Maldita Roma the towering effort of historical fiction started in I Am Rome. In this saga built around the figure of Julius Caesar, Posteguillo explores corruption and the true price of power, specifically, in this second instalment, through an exiled Caesar, at the height of his political and military talent and with an unquenchable thirst for triumph and conquest.