If you’ve made any New Year’s resolutions, I hope they were about books! There’s plenty of exciting fiction coming out in the next few months, so be sure to block off some reading time on your 2024 calendar.

I’m always excited to see new work from authors who haven’t published in a long time. Kirsten Bakis’ Lives of the Monster Dogs made a splash when it came out late in the 20^th century (1997, to be exact), so anticipation is high for King Nyx (Liveright, Feb. 20). The description in our review is like catnip: “At the home of an eccentric millionaire, a woman discovers out-of-the-ordinary events.” Our review has some reservations, despite calling the book “almost impossible to put down,” so I’m eager to read it and see what I think.

Adelle Waldman’s first novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., was published in this millennium, at least, but 11 years feels like an eternity when you’re waiting for a new book from a favorite author. Her latest, Help Wanted(Norton, March 5), takes place behind the scenes of a big-box store in upstate New York. “The workplace dramedy of the year,” declares our starred review.

Though she’s written nonfiction books in the interim, Marie Mutsuki Mockett hasn’t published a novel since her first, Picking Bone From Ash, in 2009. She returns with The Tree Doctor (Graywolf, March 19), the story of a writer separated from her family by the pandemic as she cares for her elderly mother and rediscovers her body through the ministrations of an arborist known as the Tree Doctor.

Readers who’ve been dying to know what happened after the ending of Tommy Orange’s There There (2018) are in luck—his new novel, Wandering Stars (Knopf, Feb. 27), is the sequel we didn’t know was coming, as well as a sort-of prequel, moving back in time to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. It’s “a searing study of the consequences of a genocide,” according to our starred review.

And then, of course, there are debut novels. Andrés N. Ordorica’s How We Named the Stars (Tin House, Jan. 30) tells the story of a college romance between two young men that “spirals into a border-crossing story of tragic death, family secrets, and unexpected revelations,” according to our starred review. Ours by Phillip B. Williams (Viking, Feb. 20) also gets a starred review, which calls it “a gorgeously written, evocative saga of Black American survival and transcendence, blending elements of fantasy, mythology, and multigenerational history.”

Further down the road are books we haven’t reviewed yet, including Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday, March 19), a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn. American Fiction, a movie based on Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure, was recently released, so he’s sure to be on even more reading lists than usual. Finally, fans of Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin (2017) will be looking forward to Real Americans (Knopf, April 30), an expansive novel covering the last few decades in the lives of Lily Chen; her mother, May, who left China during the Cultural Revolution; and her son, Nick, who grows up without a father. All of them are trying to figure out, as so many of these novels are, just what makes a real American.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.