The Best Books of 2024 (So Far)
Fiction | Nonfiction
Every year, we at the Book Review write about hundreds of books. Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the following.
Not all of these books ultimately made it onto our end-of-year, best-of lists (check out our 100 Notable Books and 10 Best Books of 2024 to see what did make the cut). But all of them spoke to us in the moment and will stick with us long after this year has drawn to a close. For more thoughts on what to read next, head to our book recommendation page.
By Betsy Lerner
Written by a veteran literary agent and editor with three previous books of nonfiction to her name, this assured first novel maps the effects of a daughter’s mental illness on her parents and — especially — her younger sister, Amy, the book’s wise, wisecracking and tremblingly self-conscious narrator. Amy watches her volatile sister zip in and out of her family’s life like an erratic hummingbird, sucking the nectar from her loved ones’ palms and then gone as fast as she came.
By Tony Tulathimutte
This collection of linked stories tracks the losers in the great American popularity contest: shoe gazers who are mostly short and unattractive, and cut from the herd. His subject is not fashionable ennui. He is writing about alienation and skin starvation, a longing for the nonexistent touches of friends and the embraces of lovers.
By Lauren Elkin
The first novel by the author of “Art Monsters” and “Flâneuse” is about a grieving Parisian psychoanalyst who wanders the gentrifying streets of Belleville, remodels her kitchen and engages in one long Socratic dialogue with her younger neighbor Clémentine. Elkin’s layered plot involves intertwined love affairs a generation apart, her prose as sensual as it is cerebral.
By Sally Rooney
Two brothers mourn the death of their father while navigating complicated relationships in Rooney’s new novel. One is a lawyer who is dating a college student but can’t seem to let go of his ex-girlfriend; his brother is a 20-something competitive chess player who falls for an older woman. Rooney’s “primary subject is love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it,” wrote our critic, who fell into this book “like a goose-down comforter after a 15-mile hike in the sleet.”
By Richard Powers
The wonders of the ocean and the terrors of A.I. meet in Powers’s new novel, an enchanting entry point to the celebrated author’s work. A pair of brilliant but estranged high school friends are among those gathered on a Polynesian island, trying to decide whether sending floating cities out to sea is an environmental solution or a fool’s errand. The book reminds readers, with a spirit of fun and wonder, why the sea — an alien planet within a planet — is so very worth sustained attention.
By Joseph O’Neill
This globe-trotting novel by the author of “Netherland” chronicles the quest of a man named Mark Wolfe to find a mysterious soccer prodigy in West Africa and the unraveling of his workplace back in Pittsburgh. Mark shares narratorial duties with his colleague Lakesha Williams, who speaks first in “Godwin” and also gets the last word. Their stories build into a study of greed, labor and ambition that our critic called “populous, lively and intellectually challenging.”
By Rachel Kushner
An American agent infiltrates a commune of French environmentalists in Kushner’s philosophical rendition of the spy novel, which blends pointed comic observation with earnestness in vinaigrette harmony. You know from this book’s opening paragraphs that you are in the hands of a major writer, one with a gift for almost effortless intellectual penetration.
By Danzy Senna
The eternal conflict between making art and selling out gets a fresh take in Senna’s funny, foxy and fleet new novel about a struggling mixed-race couple — she’s a writer, he’s a painter — in Los Angeles. The jokes are good, the punches land, and the dialogue is tart: You often feel you’re listening in on a three-bottles-into-it dinner party.
By Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Brodesser-Akner’s sprawling yet nimble sophomore novel is a fictionalized account of a real kidnapping. When the Fletcher family patriarch is snatched from his driveway in the suburbs of New York in the 1980s, the effects of his abduction echo through the lives of his three children — even into their adulthood. (Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.)
By Miranda July
The unnamed heroine of July’s gaspingly explicit comic novel plans a cross-country road trip, only to stop 30 minutes from home. There she lavishly redecorates a motel room and begins an odd but passionate affair with a younger man who works at a rental-car agency.
By Lev Grossman
Grossman, who is best known for his Magicians series, is at the top of his game with this take on the myth of King Arthur, which resoundingly earns its place among the best of Arthurian tales. The novel follows a knight who helps lead a ragtag band to rebuild Excalibur in the wake of the king’s death.
By Percival Everett
In this reworking of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River, is the narrator, and he recounts the classic tale in a language that is his own, with surprising details that reveal a far more resourceful, cunning and powerful character than we knew.
By Dolly Alderton
Alderton’s novel, about a 35-year-old struggling to make sense of a breakup, delivers the most delightful aspects of romantic comedy — snappy dialogue, realistic relationship dynamics, funny meet-cutes and misunderstandings — and leaves behind clichéd gender roles and the traditional marriage plot.
By Kaveh Akbar
A young Iranian American aspiring poet and recovering addict grieves his parents’ deaths while fantasizing about his own in Akbar’s remarkable first novel, which, haunted by death, also teems with life — in the inventive beauty of its sentences, the vividness of its characters and the surprising twists of its plot.
By Tana French
For Tana French fans, every one of the thriller writer’s twisty, ingenious books is an event. This one, a sequel to “The Searcher,” once again sees the retired Chicago cop Cal Hooper, a perennial outsider in the Irish west-country hamlet of Ardnakelty, caught up in the crimes — seen and unseen — that eat at the seemingly picturesque village.
By Tommy Orange
This follow-up to Orange’s debut, “There There,” is part prequel and part sequel; it trails the young survivor of a 19th-century massacre of Native Americans, chronicling not just his harsh fate but those of his descendants. In its second half, the novel enters 21st-century Oakland, following the family in the aftermath of a shooting.
By Rita Bullwinkel
Set at a women’s boxing tournament in Reno, Nev., this novel centers on eight contestants, and the fights — physical and emotional — they bring to the ring. As our critic wrote: This story’s impact “lasts a long time, like a sharp fist to your shoulder.”
By Marie-Helene Bertino
In 1970s Philadelphia, an alien girl sent to Earth before she’s born communicates with her fellow life-forms via fax as she helps gather intel about whether our planet is habitable. This funny-sad novel follows the girl and her single mother as they find the means to persevere.
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Nonfiction
By Ina Garten
Garten’s gift has been to make everything look effortless: the recipes in her 13 cookbooks; the glorious array of salads and cupcakes in her former food store, Barefoot Contessa; the many occasions when she’s advised viewers to substitute store-bought items for homemade on the Food Network. In this memoir, however, she shows how much luck and labor it took to achieve the success that she clearly enjoys.
By David Greenberg
Panoramic and richly insightful, this biography tells the full story of the civil rights hero who became a long-serving U.S. representative and a moral force in America. It sets a new standard by giving Lewis’s post-civil-rights story the depth of attention it deserves — and showing how this mild-mannered seminarian submerged his pacifist tendencies enough to succeed in the bare-knuckled world of electoral politics.
By Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez
This brisk, lively chronicle of the rise and fall of Victoria’s Secret, the global retail empire built on sweet-nothing bits of lace and rayon, is a book about bras in the same way that “Citizen Kane” is a movie about a sled — which is to say, not at all. In chatty but precise prose, Sherman and Fernandez unfurl the kind of forensic, thoroughly sourced narrative more often found in the business pages of a newspaper, albeit one that makes clear the ongoing role that sexism, racism and sizeism played in the company’s undoing.
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By Max Boot
Boot, a historian and foreign policy analyst, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan. But in this measured, comprehensive biography of the 40th president, he explores the legacy of the Reagan years to ask whether they paved the way for Donald J. Trump, whose presidency led Boot to abandon his habitual embrace of the right.
By Emily Witt
Witt’s haunting new memoir braids together several narrative strands: the music and drugs of Bushwick’s underground party scene, her increasingly erratic boyfriend and her work as a journalist during the Trump years. She is, by turns, disdainful, cleareyed, playful, serious, adventurous and terrified as she chronicles the breakdown of her relationship, as well as the larger societal ruptures of 2020.
By Connie Chung
In her frank and entertaining new memoir, Chung recounts how she transformed from the devastatingly shy 10th child of Chinese immigrants into the first Asian American, and second woman, to anchor a major weekday news program. The TV newscaster writes breezily and with irreverent humor about the scoops, the internal politics and the pure hustle that eventually got her to the top, while also reflecting on the sexism and heartbreak that have shaped her groundbreaking career.
By Orlando Whitfield
Studded with blue-chip names, multi-million-dollar paintings, private jets and bottles of Dom Pérignon ’08, this tantalizing glimpse by a former dealer into the art world’s most rarefied stratum doubles as a cautionary tale about a strange and tortuous friendship and a largely unregulated industry where hubris, greed and fraud abound.
By Brenda Wineapple
A century ago, a Tennessee teacher broke the law when he taught the theory of evolution in a high school classroom. The tale of the ensuing courtroom drama, nicknamed the Scopes Monkey Trial, is usually told as an epic confrontation between faith and science, with the past on one side and the future on the other. Wineapple frames it much more interestingly as a conflict between political visions that remain very much alive in the present.
By Emily Nussbaum
From “Queen for a Day” to “The Real World,” “Survivor” and “The Apprentice,” it’s all here in Nussbaum’s passionate, exquisitely told origin story of reality TV. With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail, the New Yorker staff writer outlines how such shows united high and low art into a potent pop-culture concoction that we love to hate, hate to love and just can’t quit.
By John Ganz
For this account of America in the 1990s, Ganz ditches the familiar narrative about a decade of relative peace and prosperity for a disturbing tale of populists, nativists and demagogues, who, acting on the margins of U.S. politics, helped shatter the post-Cold War consensus and usher in antidemocratic forces that plague the country today.
By Salman Rushdie
In his candid, plain-spoken and gripping new memoir, Rushdie recalls the attempted assassination he survived in 2022 during a presentation about keeping the world’s writers safe from harm. His attacker had piranhic energy. He also had a knife. Rushdie lost an eye, but he has slowly recovered thanks to the attentive care of doctors and the wife he celebrates here.
By Jonathan Blitzer
This urgent and propulsive account of Latin American politics and immigration makes a persuasive case for a direct line from U.S. foreign policy in Central America to the current migrant crisis.
By Hampton Sides
By the time he made his third Pacific voyage, the British explorer James Cook had maybe begun to lose it a little. The scientific aims of his first two trips had shifted into something darker. According to our reviewer, the historian Hampton Sides “isn’t just interested in retelling an adventure tale. He also wants to present it from a 21st-century point of view. ‘The Wide Wide Sea’ fits neatly into a growing genre that includes David Grann’s ‘The Wager’ and Candice Millard’s ‘River of the Gods,’ in which famous expeditions, once told as swashbuckling stories of adventure, are recast within the tragic history of colonialism.”
By Adam Shatz
This absorbing biography of the Black psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon highlights a side of him that’s often eclipsed by his image as a zealous partisan — that of the caring doctor, who ran a secret clinic for Algerian rebels.
By Alexandra Fuller
In her fifth memoir, Fuller describes the sudden death of her 21-year-old son. Devastating as this elegant and honest account may be — it’s certainly not for the faint of heart — it also leaves the reader with a sense of having known a lovely and lively young man.
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