Bay City Books: Bay Area booksellers name best titles of 2024

Places We Swim California 

This book dives into more than 50 of California’s best swimming destinations and wilderness areas. With stunning photos and great travel tips, it’s a wonderful travelogue of the state that will make you want to immediately change into your swimming suit and take the plunge! This book was a pleasant surprise when it first arrived in the store and rapidly became a staff and customer favorite.

– Eric Green, co-owner of Mrs. Dalloways

Twenty-Four Seconds from Now…
By Jason Reynolds 

This tenderhearted YA romance showcases the loving relationship between Neon and Aria and the “big step” they’re about to take as a couple. Working backward, the creative story structure introduces us to the main characters and highlights the development of their love for one another. Friends and family members offer advice and counsel to Neon, and it’s this community that adds richness and foundation to the wonderful story of teenage intimacy.

– Carolyn Hutton

Sipsworth
By Simon Van Booy 

I loved this book! A lovely, heartwarming story about the power of companionship especially at the end of one’s life. On the brink of falling into a depression due to her loneliness, the main character finds a new purpose sparked by a relationship she builds with a surprising creature. I couldn’t put it down; I just wanted more of the kind and innocent warmth.

– Jessica Green, co-owner

There’s Always This Year
By Hanif Abdurraqib

Abdurraqib–whether he’s writing about transcendent punk shows of his youth in Ohio, delivering a devastating poem into the world, or laying bare the intricacies of Black performance in America–treats the reader like a best friend. You are along for the ride; Hanif’s stories are the best stories, and you want to hi-five him at every turn of phrase and say, “I see what you did there, I see how you built a universe of emotion out of a series of words, and it was AMAZING.” This new book is about basketball, LeBron, the fashion and kicks, the players, Hanif’s personal story as it relates to the game. But like his other books, this is about something bigger: Black boy/adulthood in America, the trappings of “success,” being witness to the miraculous, the game of LIFE.

– Hannah deBree

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
By James McBride

So! This is what the great American novel looks like! Who knew that James McBride could possibly write a novel as brilliant, entertaining, funny, creatively fresh, and resonant as his bestselling Deacon King Kong? When skeletal remains are found at the bottom of a well in a small town, the disparate citizens – Jewish immigrants and formerly enslaved Blacks – are exposed in all their glorious humanity as long-hidden secrets are brought to light in solving the murder mystery. All of the characters – all of them – are richly detailed, as is the place where they live, love, and struggle. The dialogue is some of the best I’ve ever read and reminds us that – besides being one of the greatest writers of this century – McBride is also a jazz saxophonist. Heaven and Earth Grocery will hold you tight ‘til the very last word on the very last page of this magnificent novel.

The Message
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

In The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts his journeys and experiences in places entwined in extreme injustice: Senegal, North Carolina, and Palestine’s West Bank. Intended to reveal the impact that the media and journalism have on our understanding of our present and our future, Coates is masterful in his observations and his prose. He is fearless in his confrontation of oppression and inspiring in his use of the written word to bring about change. He reflects on the resilience of Black Africans in Dakar, the censorship in Columbia, and the struggles in the West Bank. Toni Morrison compared him favorably to James Baldwin, a lot for any writer to live up to. Coates is definitely up to the challenge.

Lovely One: A Memoir
By Ketanji Jackson-Brown

Celebrity memoirs are frequently (ghost)written in formulated style, shallow “bestsellers” and moneymakers with little longevity in the the literary world. However, Lovely One, written by our first Black female U.S. Supreme Court Justice, is a compelling and intimate story of a fascinating life, full of future promise and accomplishment. Her story will touch your heart and inspire those ambitious dreamers with seemingly impossible goals. She also teaches the importance and necessity of honoring one’s heritage. A really good read!

Reformatory
By Tananarive Due

Reformatory is a page-turner that will grip you from beginning to end. Set in Jim Crow Florida (Due’s home state), it follows Robert, Jr. when he’s sent to a segregated “reform school” that is, at best, a chamber of horrors. As in her previously best-known novel, My Soul to Keep, Due grounds her tale and terror in everyday lives and actual historical events. She will scare the heck out of you. And you’ll love every minute of it!

Time of the Child
By Niall Williams

Set in a rural Irish village at Christmastime, this may be the perfect book to pass away a cold winter’s day. When an abandoned baby is brought to the care of the village’s doctor and his adult daughter, it changes their lives in unexpected ways. Williams is one of our great contemporary storytellers; with lyrical prose and deep insight into the characters, Time of the Child runs the gamut of human emotions, but ultimately, leaves the reader believing in the kindness in us all.

Service
By Sarah Gilmartin

Another story set in Ireland, this time in the high-flying pressure cooker of a top-rated Dublin restaurant. Told in three voices, this is a nuanced look at the fallout of the #MeToo movement. When a former waitress is called to testify in the rape trial of the restaurant’s celebrity chef, she revisits the heady days of working in a star-studded restaurant. Hers is but one voice; the chef and his wife each have their own perspectives, ultimately showing how quickly a breach in societal norms can upend one’s life.

Intermezzo
By Sally Rooney

A melancholic story about two brothers grieving the death of their father. One is a successful, charismatic barrister, the other a nerdy competitive chess player. Both have romantic entanglements that raise thought provoking morals questions. A compelling story that explores why people fall in and out of love.

Orbital
By Samantha Harvey

Even though this one came out in 2023, having just won the 2024 Booker Prize is reason enough to put this beautifully crafted meditative novel on a list of this year’s favorites. Orbital follows six astronauts and cosmonauts one the last mission of the international space station. Through their conversations, inner dialogues, and observations, we are treated to a rare opportunity to ponder mankind’s place in the universe.

Martyr!
By Kaveh Akbar

Identity, race, addiction, art– jam-packed with smart, biting, and hilarious dialogue making this debut novel an early front-runner for my 2024 favorite.

– Barbara Forest

Us Fools
By Nora Lange

An intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s.

“Sometimes in America we kill things. Sometimes in America we save things. In other words, we attempt to restore in seconds what we’ve spent years dismantling.” — Nora Lange, Us Fools, page 70. When I took AP US History 15 years ago, my teacher taught me a trick for answering US domestic policy questions on the test– “farmers always lose.” She was right. I did very well on the test. The farmers are still losing, and the rich have only gotten richer.

– Eileen McCormick

Playgirl: The Official History of a Cult Magazine
by Playgirl Magazine

A lively, unbelievably fun (even titillating!) art book that celebrates Playgirl magazine’s 50-year anniversary.

Merry XXXMas!

– Vanessa Martini

There’s Always This Year
By Hanif Abudarraqib

A book that transcends being just a book about sports or just a memoir and instead is something entirely original. You’ll love it even if you don’t like basketball (or Lebron James).

-Matt Faludi

Past Tense: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy
By Sacha Mardou

I’m not usually a big reader of memoirs, let alone therapy memoirs—so go figure that this marks the second year in a row (after last year’s Impossible People by Julia Wertz) that I’ve counted graphic memoirs about mental health among my favorite books of the year. Mardou’s narrative starts off placidly, but (much like her therapy journey) it eventually traverses some pretty intense territory. Her healing process is nonlinear and sometimes messy—but that makes the hopeful resolution all the more hard-won.

Wordhunter
By Stella Sands

I was that kid who actually enjoyed diagramming sentences in school (back when it was still on the curriculum), so I’m more than a little gratified that sentence diagramming is having A Moment (kind of). In addition to Matthew Baker’s ingenious new graphic novel The Sentence, one of the best thrillers I read this year was about an aspiring forensic linguist—yep, that’s a real profession—who applies her brilliant grammar skills to solving the disappearance of two young women. This is a stellar series opener, and a quick read to boot.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
By Anne de Marcken

Ostensibly a zombie story, this slim novel is also a remarkable philosophical meditation on the nature of grief and loss. Accompanied by a dead (but still talkative) crow, the unnamed (and undead) narrator wanders the pages, in search of lost memories and the stories that impose meaning on our lives. A quiet stunner.

Glorious Exploits
By Ferdia Lennon

I confess that I was first drawn to this googly-eyed cover that—much like the novel itself—blends the serious with the silly, the ancient with the modern. Set in Sicily during the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, the novel features two unlikely theater directors and an even more unlikely cast—the Athenian prisoners of war who, thanks to an oral tradition, remember Euripides’s plays word for word. Using modern dialect to surprising (and often hilarious) effect, Lennon’s debut bears witness to the power and limitations of art in times of war.