Paperback Books of the Year, 2024
By East Gate Bookshop, Totnes
Paperback Books of the Year, 2024
By East Gate Bookshop, Totnes
Are you looking for a good book to curl up with? Something to entertain or inform; something to challenge you or enlighten you, or maybe all of those; then look no further than our selection of the best paperbacks published in 2024. The books are selected from what we've enjoyed reading and feedback from our customers over the last twelve months.
Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World
Helen Czerski
£10.99 £10.44A deep dive into the essential engine that drives our world. Czerski brings the oceans alive with illuminating stories of this most complex system.
Orbital
Samantha Harvey
£9.99 £9.49A team of astronauts in the ISS collect data and conduct experiments, but mostly they observe and contemplate their silent blue planet and home.
Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens
David Mitchell
£10.99 £10.44Comedian, Mitchell proves to be a skilled historian, telling stories that are fascinating and fun in this irresistible Horrible Histories for grownups.
Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet
Hannah Ritchie
£10.99 £10.44Bombarded by doomsday headlines?! This book will transform how you see our environmental problems and shows how we can solve them.
Happy Place
Emily Henry
£9.99 £9.49How can you pretend to be in love, and get away with it, in front of the people who know you best. Tender and bittersweet, rom-com perfection.
Soldier Sailor: 'Intense, furious, moving and often extremely funny.' DAVID NICHOLLS
Claire Kilroy
£9.99 £9.49Kilroy creates an unforgettable heroine, whose fierce love for her son clashes with her identity: her marriage strains and she struggles with life.
Went to London, Took the Dog: The Diary of a 60-Year-Old Runaway
Nina Stibbe
£10.99 £10.44Nina’s comic voice shines through in this tale of changing life at sixty, leaving Cornwall and married life behind, and heading back to London.
Yellowface
Rebecca F Kuang
£9.99 £9.49When failed writer, June witnesses her rival accidental death, she sees her opportunity and takes it. Jealousy, success, and who gets to tell the story.
Kairos: Winner of the International Booker Prize
Jenny (Y) Erpenbeck
£9.99 £9.49The GDR is crumbling, and so too are familiar certainties and loyalties in this tale of love and betray set against huge changes in mainland Europe.
Good Material
Dolly Alderton
£9.99 £9.49A sharply funny, beautifully observed and exquisitely readable story of growing up, heartbreak and friendship, and how to survive both.
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
Naomi Klein
£10.99 £10.44This is a book for our age, for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole and wonders why our politics has become so broken.
The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life)
George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison
£12.99 £12.34Neoliberalism: an ideology that preys on every aspect of our lives, Conceived and propagated for the sole benefit of the powerful few.
Geomancer: In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen: An epic fantasy adventure from an award-winning author
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
£7.99 £7.59Destined to be a children's classic, this brave and exciting tale of adventure and magic is an epic new fantasy for readers young and old.
Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials
Marion Gibson
£10.99 £10.44Thought-provoking and timely, Gibson uses thirteen significant trials to tell the global history of witchcraft, witch-hunts and weaponising fear.
Late Light: WINNER OF THE 2024 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING
Michael Malay
£10.99 £10.44Malay’s prize-winning debut is a rich blend of memoir, nature writing, and a meditation on being and belonging, from a vibrant new voice.
August Blue
Deborah Levy
£9.99 £9.49An erstwhile child prodigy, now in her 30s, Elsa begins a journey across Europe to seek ways to lose an old story and create a new one.
Close to Home
Michael Magee
£9.99 £9.49Magee deliver a taut and intense debut dealing with masculinity, poverty and class following Sean’s return to Belfast after been away at University.
Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
Cat Bohannon
£12.99 £12.34A sweeping revision of human life and history, Eve is an urgent corrective for a world that has focused on the masculine for too long.
In Memoriam
Alice Winn
£9.99 £9.49An epic, unforgettable love story between two soldiers in the First World War. A breath-taking debut that will smash your heart to smithereens.
Mary: or, the Birth of Frankenstein
Anne Eekhout
£9.99 £9.49Darkness falls and storms rages and a group of friends gather. This beguiling and convincing portrait of Mary Shelley woos like a fairytale.
Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect
Benjamin Stevenson
£9.99 £9.49Ben takes the scenario of Murder on the Orient Express and creates a clever, funny and gloriously inventive murder mystery of his own.
Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape
Henry Dimbleby and Jemima Lewis
£10.99 £10.44Food systems are no longer simply a means of sustenance. They are the most successful, most innovative and most destructive industries on earth.
Red Smoking Mirror: 'The love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin’ Joanna Pocock
Nick Hunt
£9.99 £9.49A skilful, richly written reimagining of an alternate history. A story of love and fate, of how cultures co-operate and clash and people are forged.
Death on the Lusitania
R. L. Graham
£9.99 £9.49A classic locked-room mystery and an entertaining page-turner that expertly weaves fact and fiction aboard the ill-fated Lusitania.
Normal Rules Don't Apply
Kate Atkinson
£9.99 £9.49A dazzling, sharply observed and captivating collection of eleven interconnected short stories from one of the best writers working today.
Politics On the Edge
Rory Stewart
£10.99 £10.44Stewart’s story of the challenges, absurdities and realities of political life is a searing, darkly humorous exposé of our broken politics.
Absolutely and Forever
Rose Tremain
£9.99 £9.49With this tale of a young girl’s escape from her stifling 1950s suburban hometown, Tremain perfectly captures the yearning to become ‘yourself’
Tom Lake: The Sunday Times bestseller - a BBC Radio 2 and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick
Ann Patchett
£9.99 £9.49A gentle and tender meditation on young love, married love, and the lives parents lead before their children are born from a master storyteller.
In Ascension: Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2024
Martin MacInnes
£9.99 £9.49A compelling account of the quest for first contact which takes Leigh and a specialised crew on a perilous journey across the breadth of the cosmos
One Moor Time: a tale of four enthusiastic yet misguided attempts to walk the Two Moors Way
Ben Pering
£12.99 £12.34An uplifting tale of mishaps, nature, self-discovery and the very welcome lights of a pub after a long day’s slog along The Two Moors Way.
Prophet Song: WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023
Paul Lynch
£9.99 £9.49Darkly exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating vision of a country falling apart.
Abroad in Japan
Chris Broad
£10.99 £10.44From lush rice fields to the frenetic neon-lit streets of Tokyo, Chris charts a decade of living in Japan and the accompanying chaos and culture-clash
Shy: THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
Max (Author) Porter
£9.99 £9.49The internal monolog of a few strange hours in a teenage boy’s life: a novel about hurt and guilt and the people who are trying to love him.
Old God's Time: The Top Ten Sunday Times Bestseller
Sebastian Barry
£9.99 £9.49Tom’s solitude is interrupted by two former colleagues at his door to ask about a traumatic old case – a case that he never quite came to terms with.
The Wager
David Grann
£10.99 £10.44A beautiful written and extraordinary true story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.
Homecoming: A Sweeping, Intergenerational Epic From the Multi-Million-Copy Bestselling Author
Kate Morton
£9.99 £9.49A beautifully written epic novel spanning generations that leaves you glued to the last page and asks what we would do for those we love.
Held: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
Anne Michaels
£9.99 £9.49Michael’s is at the height of her poetic powers in this dream-like and intensely beautiful novel. Full of mystery, wisdom and compassion.
The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey
Tim Hannigan
£10.99 £10.44Tim explores Cornwall on foot, from the woodlands of the Tamar Valley to the remote western region of Penwith, searching for the ‘real’ Cornwall
How to Read a Tree: The Sunday Times Bestseller
Tristan Gooley
£12.99 £12.34Natural navigator Gooley shares decades of knowledge and wisdom that will ensure you never look at trees in the same way ever again.
Diva
Daisy Goodwin
£9.99 £9.49A vivid re-imagining of the scandalous love affair between celebrated opera singer, Maria Callas and one of the richest men in the world.
The Figurine: The perfect book to gift this Christmas from the Sunday Times bestselling author
Victoria Hislop
£9.99 £9.49Hislop’s love and passion for Greece shines through and her incredible storytelling abilities are in a abundance in this compelling page-turner.
The Secret Hours: The Instant Sunday Times Bestselling Thriller from the Author of Slow Horses
Mick Herron
£9.99 £9.49A powerful stand-alone spy thriller from author of the acclaimed Slough House series. Herron is a contemporary master of the genre.
Faebound
Saara El-Arifi
£9.99 £9.49Glorious fantasy, with a mysterious world of elves, fae, and compelling romance, all infused throughout with legends and non-stop plot twists
Butter
ASAKO YUZUKI
£14.99 £14.24Inspired by a true story; this compelling and original Japanese bestseller brings to life Manako Kajii: gourmet cook, seducer and serial killer.
Godkiller
Hannah Kaner
£9.99 £9.49Kaner’s delivers a vividly imagined fantasy debut, within a classic landscape of gods, quests, vengeance, mythology and magic.
Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?
Chris van Tulleken
£10.99 £10.44We are in an 'age of eating' where most of our calories come from UPFs - industrially processed and designed and marketed to be addictive.
The Fraud
Zadie Smith
£9.99 £9.49An extraordinary book: Smith’s skilful and ambitious novel, links the rich and the poor, the free and the enslaved, and the farcical and the tragic.
The Wren, The Wren: The Booker Prize-winning author
Anne Enright
£9.99 £9.49Nell sets out into the world, but her family history hard to escape. A poignant tale of love that unites, and the acts that threaten to undo us.
The Bee Sting
Paul Murray
£9.99 £9.49A boisterous riot of a book; funny and tragic in equal measures. Hopes, dreams and desires are fulfilled and squashed in this immersive novel.
Food for Life: Your Guide to the New Science of Eating Well
Tim Spector
£12.99 £12.34The question of what to eat in the age of ultra-processed food has never seemed more complicated; Tim Spector offers clear answers.