Right. That’s the holidays done and dusted. You’ve dealt with your beach reads and the books you got for Christmas, and now you’re ready to tackle new books in 2024. Here are 10 books that might help to ease you back into the new reading year.

Come and Get It, Kiley Reid, Bloomsbury, $32.99
The American novelist’s first novel, the smash hit Such a Fun Age, was about systemic racism, disparities in wealth, opportunity and class, and the relations between the sexes in a story contrasting a young black nanny, Emira, and her white, influencer employer, Alix. It was clever and witty and, indeed, a lot of fun as well (although the title was largely ironic). Four years later she tries her hand at the campus novel, in which she examines ethics, privilege and the sheer difficulty for poorer students to get by. Set in the University of Arkansas, it focuses on the students living in Belgrade, a run-down dorm, and the interactions of struggling student Millie, and a visiting professor and writer, Agatha.

We All Lived in Bondi Then, Georgia Blain, Scribe, $29.99
This collection of nine posthumous stories from the much loved Georgia Blain were written between 2012 and 2015. They revisit concerns close to her life that will be familiar to readers of her fiction, but as novelist and friend Charlotte Wood says in her foreword to the book, “Georgia’s fiction takes the intimate experience of her own life and transforms it, and in doing so reveals new and surprising discoveries for all of us”. Our review will describe the collection as “a powerful and vivid tapestry of life and love and the brutal quirks of human destiny”.

The Shortest History of Economics, Andrew Leigh, Black Inc., (Out February 20)
This is a timely publication given all the focus on the cost of living, tax and inflation. According to Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh, if you think like an economist, it could change your life for the better. “The secret of our discipline is that the most powerful insights come from a handful of big ideas that anyone can comprehend.” This book is all about getting you to understand a social science that “studies how people maximise their wellbeing in the face of scarcity”. The latest in the Shortest Histories series takes us from prehistoric times up to the threats posed by Covid, Artificial Intelligence and climate change.

The Circle, Katherena Vermette, UQP, $24.99
Award-winning Indigenous Canadian poet Katherena Vermette made a big splash with her brilliant first novel, The Break, which was predicated on a mysterious assault and became a gripping picture of intergenerational trauma and abuse in the Metis community. She followed it with The Strangers, continuing the stories of three generations of women. Completing the trilogy with The Circle, Phoenix is released from jail but immediately disappears and there is an eventual coming together for a settling of accounts. “I know I write stories to and with and alongside very devastating issues,” Vermette has said, “but ... my job is to stay in story, to stay with my characters and make it real, rather than didactic.”

In Bad Faith, Dassi Erlich with Ellen Whinnett, Hachette, $34.99
Heavens, what a story. Dassi Erlich was one of the three sisters who for years pursued the former principal of their school, Malka Leifer, for the abuse they suffered at her hands. But this heart-wrenching memoir not only tells that story but also the story of her eye-popping family life and the cruelty and more that she experienced at home. As an upcoming review in this masthead will say, “what is remarkable about Dassi Erlich and her sisters is that somewhere they found the courage to confront what was going on, in their own lives and in other lives”.

Hard By a Great Forest, Leo Vardiashvili, Bloomsbury, $32.99
Saba is on a quest to rescue his father, who, plagued by guilt that he didn’t get his wife out of Georgia in the civil war of the early 1990s, has returned there but gone missing.

Saba has the voices of the dead rattling in his head, and falls in with Nodar, a larger-than-life taxi driver with a gift for baroque phraseology. Meanwhile, animals that have escaped the zoo roam the streets of Tbilisi. The title is from Hansel and Gretel, and the novel is a sort of fairy tale, but is there a happy ending?

Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel, eds., Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston, Chatto & Windus, $34.99. Feb 6
This is fun: one novel written by 36 authors who have contributed on behalf of the Authors Guild of America Foundation. The idea at the core is that each evening during the COVID-19 pandemic a group of New Yorkers living in a “shabby building on the Lower East Side” congregate on the rooftop to tell stories. There’s a framing narrative, written by Douglas Preston, and the whole thing is edited by Margaret Atwood. The characters are many and varied, including Wurly, Eurovision, The Lady With Rings, Vingar and Ramboz, as are the authors, among them Celeste Ng, Atwood herself, Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, Tommy Orange and Meg Wolitzer.