The Best Nonfiction of 2024

2024 was chock-full of auspicious debuts and sparkling returns from nonfiction’s heavy hitters. Journalists unearthed unreported histories and dug deeper into stories we thought we knew, while scientists and memoirists challenged us to look more closely at ourselves and our environments. Here are the 15 nonfiction books that floored us.

A Fatal Inheritance

By Lawrence Ingrassia

A Fatal Inheritance recounts the discovery of how cancer can be passed down through genes, providing a compassionate look at families forever changed.

Biography, Literature

Carson McCullers

By Mary V. Dearborn

The absorbing Carson McCullers is the first to paint a full portrait of the author, showing acclaimed biographer Mary V. Dearborn at the height of her powers.

American History, History

Challenger

By Adam Higginbotham

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

Free the Land

Audrea Lim’s magnificent, provocative Free the Land illuminates how American ideas about land ownership contribute to social injustice.

Grief Is for People

By Sloane Crosley

Novelist, essayist, humorist and critic Sloane Crosley shows a remarkable willingness to face the dark questions that follow a suicide.

American History, Black History, History

Madness

By Antonia Hylton

Antonia Hylton’s Madness offers an unsparing reckoning with history as it excavates an infamous mental hospital for Black patients.

Animals, Nature

Meet the Neighbors

By Brandon Keim

Brandon Keim’s awe-inspiring Meet the Neighbors exhorts us to consider that all animals, from dolphins to salamanders, are just as capable of thinking and feeling as we are.

Food & Drink, Memoir

Slow Noodles

By Chantha Nguon

In her memoir, Slow Noodles, Cambodian writer Chantha Nguon survives the terror of the Khmer Rouge and keeps her family recipes intact.

Biography, Literature

Survival Is a Promise

By Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Audre Lorde gets her flowers in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise, a masterful, poetic biography of the literar and feminist icon.

The Age of Magical Overthinking

By Amanda Montell

Amanda Montell explores our cultural and cognitive biases and their perilous consequences in the funny, compassionate The Age of Magical Overthinking.

American History, History

The Barn

By Wright Thompson

Wright Thompson reckons with the culture of the Mississippi Delta and the murder of Emmett Till in his brilliant, probing history, The Barn.

Biography, LGBTQ

The Other Olympians

By Michael Waters

The Other Olympians doggedly chronicles the lives of pioneering trans athletes and the historically fraught 1936 Olympic Games.

The Slow Road North

By Rosie Schaap

The Slow Road North is Rosie Schaap’s magnificent love letter to Northern Ireland, the region that offered her solace and community while she was reeling from grief.

The Unclaimed

By Stefan Timmermans, By Pamela Prickett

Gripping and groundbreaking, The Unclaimed investigates the Americans who are abandoned in death and what they tell us about how we treat the living.

There’s Always This Year

By Hanif Abdurraqib

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

Previous Best Nonfiction lists

Recent starred nonfiction

The Loves of My Life

By Edmund White

Novelist, biographer, playwright, essayist and queer icon Edmund White (The Humble Lover, A Saint From Texas) has spent his long career writing about love and sex in a way that shatters taboos and elevates the value of pleasure. His dishy new memoir, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, explores these themes during different […]

Art, Lifestyles

Magnum America

By Magnum Photos, Peter van Agtmael

Flipping through any given section of the exceptional photography tome Magnum America is like watching history pass before your eyes.

Lost Found Kept

By Deborah Derrickson Kossmann

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann reckons with family trauma and her mother’s hoarding disorder in her piercing, empathetic debut memoir, Lost Found Kept.

American History, History

A Man on Fire

By Douglas R. Egerton

Douglas R. Egerton’s magnificent, exhaustively researched and beautifully written A Man on Fire charts the extraordinary life of multitalented abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

American History, Black History, History

In Open Contempt

By Irvin Weathersby Jr.

Irvin Weathersby Jr.’s indispensable In Open Contempt examines how we bear witness to sites and perpetrators of racial trauma.

African History of Africa, An

By Zeinab Badawi

Zeinab Badawi’s incredible An African History of Africa should be studied in every school across the West.

Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old

By Brooke Shields, Rachel Bertsche

In her refreshing new memoir, Brooke Shields shares how she learned to embrace the maturity, wisdom and experience that comes with age.

Religion & Spirituality

Aflame

By Pico Iyer

With luminous prose and gentle, compassionate wisdoms, Pico Iyer contemplates life’s challenges from a Benedictine monastery.

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