The 10 Best Books of 2024

Across all categories and genres, these 10 books are standout selections from an excellent reading year.

Featuring songs with vivid characters, bizarre storylines and plenty of humor, Animal Albums from A to Z is the best kind of weird and wonderful.

Challenger proves Adam Higginbotham is a master chronicler of disasters, piercing through politics, power and bureaucracies with laser-sharp focus.

Exposure is equally—if not more—electrifying than Ramona Emerson’s debut, the National Book Award-longlisted Shutter.

How to End a Love Story is a mature, compelling and relatable romance that resists simplifying its characters at every turn.

In her extraordinary fifth novel, Icarus, K. Ancrum performs a confident high-wire act, balancing the weighty manifestations of connection, desire and contradiction.

Percival Everett’s visionary and necessary reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James, is a standout in an era of retellings. Everett matches Mark Twain in voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while deeply engaging with what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people.

Mary Averling bewitches with her debut middle grade novel, The Curse of Eelgrass Bog, which straddles the line between slimy and sweet, concocting a fantasy world that balances snarky demons, magical bogs, concerned witches and awe-inspiring serpents.

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk looses her deft, dark satirical wit on the rigid patriarchal world of pre-World War I Europe. The result is an enchanting, unsettling bildungsroman like nothing you’ve read before.

The author of the marvelous Winterlight trilogy returns to historical fantasy with this haunting tale set during World War I. Former nurse Laura Iven’s parents recently died in an accident, and her brother, Freddie, was declared MIA. But what actually happened to Freddie is far stranger.

Hanif Abdurraqib’s captivating There’s Always This Year is a powerful meditation on place and community.

Best Books by genre

Previous Best Books lists

Recent starred reviews

If you’re a fan of romantic suspense, treat yourself to Shattering Dawn, an expert offering by one of the best authors in the business.

Casa Susanna is a sumptuous volume of photography that chronicles a midcentury trans enclave.

Part oral history, part cultural analysis, Believe is an entertaining and insightful examination of Ted Lasso.

John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.