The Economist (January 27, 2024) – In 2023, bestseller lists continued to be populated by medical tomes in the wake of the pandemic and by scientists sounding the alarm about climate change. In 2024 there will be a distinct change of tack, as other topics take the lead.

Artificial intelligence (ai) is one of them. Several books will look at how it might reshape the world: “ai Needs You”, a “humanist manifesto for the age of ai” by Verity Harding, formerly of Google DeepMind; “The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots” by Daniela Rus, director of the ai laboratory at mit; and “Literary Theory for Robots”, an examination of how machine intelligence will influence the way we read, write and think, by Dennis Yi Tenen, a professor of English at Columbia University.

Geopolitics will also dominate publishers’ frontlists. Dale Copeland, a professor of international relations, will chronicle how commerce has shaped America’s foreign policy; Jim Sciutto of cnn will explore “The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China and the Next World War”. Several authors will focus on the war in Europe. Eugene Finkel, who was born in Ukraine, will offer a “deeper history of Russian violence against civilians” in the country; in “Putin and the Return of History” Martin Sixsmith will look back over a thousand years to put the Russian president’s aggression in context. Peter Pomerantsev’s “How to Win an Information War” will apply the perspective of a propagandist during the second world war to the conflict.

For those hoping for a few hours of diversion, there will be plenty of novels to look forward to. Bestselling authors including Percival Everett, Yann Martel, David Nicholls, Kiley Reid, Colm Toibin and Amor Towles will return with new stories in 2024. James Patterson will be completing an unfinished manuscript left behind by Michael Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park”.

An unseen work by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who died in 2014, will also be released. In “En Agosto Nos Vemos” (“Until August”), a novella of fewer than 150 pages, the late Nobel laureate told the tale of a middle-aged woman’s affair. His children opposed its publication but now say it has the author’s trademark “capacity for invention, his poetic language [and] his captivating storytelling”. True or not, García Marquez will probably enjoy a resurgence, as an adaptation of his most celebrated work, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, is also in production at Netflix. If you want a fantastical tale, who better to turn to than the Colombian master of magical realism?