The 10 Most Popular Books on Book Riot in September 2024

This was written about in September because of it’s a finalist for the 2024 National Book Awards! It was linked in this announcement post, and then Erica Ezeifedi recommended it in this list of award-nominated books to read with your book club: “Here, Cornejo Villavicencio, author of The Undocumented Americans, shares another tale illuminating the life of undocumented people living in the United States, this time in fiction form. The eponymous Catalina — she herself undocumented — goes to live with her undocumented grandparents following a tragedy. As she prepares to graduate from Harvard — after having gotten into certain bougie subcultures there — she’s faced with helping her grandparents, and the uncertainty of finding work after graduation as an undocumented person.”

Forgive the meta moment, but many of these clicks on this title came from The 10 Most Popular Books on Book Riot in August 2024. That post was also excerpted in the list of the Most Read Books On Goodreads in August. Here’s how Rachel Brittain describes it in Past Tense, Book Riot’s historical fiction newsletter: “On the banks of the Tigris River, the ancient city of Nineveh becomes the birthplace of an epic story: The Epic of Gilgamesh. Centuries later, the lives of three outsiders — a poor publishing apprentice in 1840s London, a ten-year-old girl losing her hearing in 2014 Turkey, and a divorcée living on a houseboat on the River Thames — are brought together by the rivers they live alongside and the stories that transcend time.”

This is another finalist for the National Book Awards, and Erica recommended it in this list of New, Thought-Provoking Horror to Read With Your Book Club: “The characters of this Lagos-set short story collection seek freedom from the shackles of the past. In 12 deliciously eerie stories, a woman bears an uncanny resemblance to a wicked but deceased grandmother, an architect comes across a house set on vengeance, and a girl gets kidnapped by the local market’s tomato seller.”

Speaking of book awards, this is on the 2024 Book Prize shortlist, which we announced in a news post and discussed twice in our book news newsletter Today in Books. Here’s how Erica recommends it: “The latest by poet and novelist Michaels is both spectral and ethereal. It opens in 1917 as John, a British soldier, lies barely holding onto life on a battlefield in France. As he lies there, memories play on a loop — his coastal childhood, chance pub encounters, and time spent in hot baths with lovers. When he returns home, he’s reunited with his artist wife, Helena, and reopens a photography business. But the past keeps resurfacing, in his own trauma, but in another way as well — he can see faint images of the loved ones of photography subjects. As the narrative continues on — including both fictional and historical figures like the Curies — the thin space between life and death is explored through John and generations of his descendants.”

This is a Book Riot favorite book, so it comes up a lot. Here are a few places where James popped up last month: The 2024 Booker Prize Shortlist is Here, Read These Award-Nominated Books With Your Book Club, 10 Historical Fiction Retellings From Austen to Shakespeare, 12 Book Club Picks For September 2024, and This Week’s Bestselling BIPOC Books. Here’s how Rachel Brittain recommends it: “Percival Everett reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view in this action-packed take on the American classic. When Jim hears he is about to be sold away from his wife and daughter, he hides out on Jackson Island, where he soon runs into young Huck Finn. The two set off on a raft down the Mississippi River on a quest to reach the elusive promise of the Free States. It’s very much like the story you know, but Everett imbues Jim with all the intelligence and agency he always deserved to have.”

This one is a puzzle. The one and only time it’s been mentioned on Book Riot is in a bullet point in the post The Spiciest Books on BookTok in 2024, According to Readers, which was posted in June. That article didn’t get a big spike in traffic in September, so I’m not sure why it’s getting a lot of clicks — it must be that the readers of that post are more motivated to click through than most. This was the #1 book on that list of spiciest books on BookTok, and it’s a mafia romance.