Reading List
Best Books of 2024
Sixteen sunrises in a single day, seen from the International Space Station. A man who has spent his life performing a dialect for white people, finally telling the story in his own words. A woman who sets out to drive from Los Angeles to New York and checks into a motel half an hour from home. A writer who was stabbed on stage and answered with a book called Knife. These are the eight books from 2024 I would put in your hands, in the order I would read them.
Quick answer
Eight books from 2024 are on this list: six novels, including Samantha Harvey’s Booker winner Orbital and Percival Everett’s James, which won the National Book Award in 2024 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2025, plus Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife. Below each one: what it is about, why it made the list, and which one to read first if you only have time for one.
| # | Book | Form | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | OrbitalSamantha Harvey · 2024 | Novel | Amazon |
| 2 | JamesPercival Everett · 2024 | Novel | Amazon |
| 3 | IntermezzoSally Rooney · 2024 | Novel | Amazon |
| 4 | All FoursMiranda July · 2024 | Novel | Amazon |
| 5 | The Anxious GenerationJonathan Haidt · 2024 | Nonfiction | Amazon |
| 6 | KnifeSalman Rushdie · 2024 | Memoir | Amazon |
| 7 | Martyr!Kaveh Akbar · 2024 | Debut novel | Amazon |
| 8 | The God of the WoodsLiz Moore · 2024 | Literary thriller | Amazon |
All eight were first published in 2024.
If you only read one book from 2024
→ Orbital — 136 pages, one afternoon.
The eight books of 2024, in reading order
Six novels, one work of psychology and one memoir.
Novel
Orbital
Six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station complete sixteen orbits of the Earth in a single day. That is the entirety of the novel’s action. What Harvey does with that constraint — 136 pages, one day, the same view repeated with small variations — is extraordinary. One of the crew learns by message that her mother has died; the others watch a typhoon gather over the Philippines from above. Orbital is a meditation on the Earth seen from outside it: on what grief and longing and love feel like when you are suspended above everything that caused them. It won the Booker Prize 2024 by a unanimous decision of the judges, the first novel set in space to win the prize.
Why read it
It earns its brevity. Every sentence is doing work, and the voice — spare, lyrical, precisely observed — reads like a long poem that happens to have characters and a setting. The subject sounds abstract until you are inside it: six people, cut off from everything, trying to understand what everything is for. Read it in one sitting; it takes an afternoon.
Novel
James
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, retold by Jim — the enslaved man Twain made a supporting character in what is supposedly the great American novel of freedom. Everett gives him back his name, James, his interior life, his own language and his own mind. The novel is also about language itself: James and the other enslaved people code-switch deliberately, performing an exaggerated dialect in front of white people as protection, a way of withholding the self, while speaking to each other in precise, educated English. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, won the National Book Award for Fiction in November 2024 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in May 2025.
Why read it
It makes the original strange, and in doing so reveals what was always strange about it. Twain’s novel has always had a Jim problem — a story about freedom that sidelines the person whose freedom is most at stake. Everett addresses it directly and without lecturing. James is not a correction of Huckleberry Finn; it is the book that novel needed alongside it.
Novel
Intermezzo
Two brothers — Peter, a Dublin barrister in his thirties, and Ivan, a chess prodigy in his twenties — are both trying to grieve their father and both failing, in different directions, into relationships that look wrong from the outside and may be right. Rooney’s fourth novel is longer and more formally ambitious than anything she had written before: it alternates between the brothers in two distinct prose styles, Peter’s clipped and fragmentary, Ivan’s slower and more literal, and it is more interested in men than her earlier work.
Why read it
Rooney has always been precise about desire and class; here she adds grief — the specific, paralysing grief of adult children who were not close enough to a parent and now cannot go back — and the combination is more uncomfortable and more moving than Normal People. It is also one of the best recent accounts of two siblings who love each other and cannot say so across the gap of who they have become.
Novel
All Fours
A successful artist in her mid-forties, married, with a young child, sets out to drive alone from Los Angeles to New York. She gets about half an hour from home, checks into a motel in Monrovia, and stays for weeks. She pays to have the room redecorated. She becomes fixated on a younger man she cannot have. She realises she is in perimenopause. The novel is about desire, about a body changing in ways that feel like loss and also like clarification, and about the freedoms available to a woman who has built the life that was supposed to make her happy.
Why read it
July writes female desire and midlife without ironic distance and without a redemptive arc or a cautionary lesson. The narrator is difficult, obsessive and often wrong about herself, and July gives all of that the same serious attention as the sympathetic moments. It answers the question of what happens to an inner life once the outer life is complete with more honesty than comfort.
Nonfiction · Psychology
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the sharp decline in adolescent mental health that began around 2012 was driven by the move from a play-based childhood to a phone-based one: smartphones and social media arriving at the same moment that children lost unsupervised time outdoors. He presents the pattern as international and more severe for girls than for boys, and he proposes four collective norms — no smartphones before high school, no social media before sixteen, phone-free schools, and far more independence and free play — arguing that individual parents cannot make those changes alone. Published in March 2024, it set off policy debates about phones in schools in several countries.
The Anxious Generation is on this list not because it is without controversy — some of Haidt’s causal claims have been disputed by researchers — but because it asks the right question at the right scale. The decline in adolescent mental health is not in dispute; the argument is about causes. It is readable without sacrificing the evidence, and it gives parents and policymakers something to do with the anxiety it produces.
— Lisanne
Memoir
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
On 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State and stabbed repeatedly in the neck, face, chest and hand. He lost the sight in his right eye. Knife is his account of the attack, the recovery, and the thinking he was forced to do in the months afterwards: about mortality, about the decades under the fatwa that preceded it, about his marriage to the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and about what it means to survive something you were not supposed to survive. The title refers both to the weapon and to language itself, which Rushdie treats as his own instrument of reply.
Why read it
Rushdie refuses to be sentimental about what happened. He is angry, frightened, grateful to be alive, and unwilling to pretend any of those responses is simpler than it is. The pages about Eliza and what the attack did to their life together are the most moving in the book, and the chapter in which he imagines the conversation with his attacker that a courtroom would never give him is reason enough to read it.
Debut novel
Martyr!
Cyrus Shams is an Iranian-American poet in recovery from drink and drugs who has decided to write a book about martyrs — people whose deaths meant something. His mother was killed in 1988 when the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf; his father, who raised him in Indiana, has since died too. The search takes Cyrus to the Brooklyn Museum, where a dying Iranian artist, Orkideh, is spending her last days in conversation with visitors as her final work. Akbar is an acclaimed poet, and the novel reads like one: dense, funny, formally adventurous, and entirely itself.
Why read it
It refuses to separate the aesthetic from the emotional: Cyrus is not trying to understand his grief and then write about it; the writing is the understanding. It is also one of the most convincing portraits of recovery in recent fiction — not the transformation story, but the daily, grinding, often absurd work of staying in a world that does not feel like enough.
Literary thriller
The God of the Woods
In August 1975, thirteen-year-old Barbara Van Laar disappears from Camp Emerson, the summer camp in the Adirondacks that her wealthy family owns. It is not the first time a Van Laar child has vanished from that land: fourteen years earlier her older brother, Bear, walked into the woods and was never found. Moore moves across timelines and narrators — a camp counselor, a young investigator, the family’s staff — to reconstruct both disappearances, and in doing so reconstructs how money buys not just comfort but protection: which children get searched for, and which disappearances get managed. It is Moore’s fifth novel and spent months on the New York Times bestseller list.
Why read it
It uses the machinery of the genre — the missing child, the unreliable witness, the slowly assembled truth — to deliver something the genre usually avoids: a serious reckoning with class and with the way powerful families protect themselves at everyone else’s expense. The pace never feels manipulative, and it earns its revelations.
Infectious Generosity
The head of TED argues that the internet’s habit of rewarding outrage can be turned around, so that generous acts spread as fast as anger. He builds the case on experiments such as TED’s gift of $10,000 each to 200 people in seven countries, who spent most of it on others.
RecommendedRead my full book recommendation for Infectious Generosity →
Who won the big book prizes of 2024
The prizes behind the list, and one date that often gets mixed up.
Booker Prize
Orbital, Samantha Harvey
National Book Award for Fiction
James, Percival Everett
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (awarded 2024)
Night Watch, Jayne Anne Phillips — James won the following year
Women’s Prize for Fiction
Brotherless Night, V. V. Ganeshananthan
Nobel Prize in Literature
Han Kang
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2024
What were the best books of 2024?
The Booker Prize 2024 went to Orbital by Samantha Harvey, a 136-page novel set over one day on the International Space Station. James by Percival Everett, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2024 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2025. Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and Miranda July’s All Fours were among the most discussed novels of the year, and Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation the most debated nonfiction. Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods and Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife complete this list.
Who won the Booker Prize in 2024?
Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize 2024 for Orbital, the first novel set in space to win the prize. It takes place over a single day aboard the International Space Station and follows six astronauts and cosmonauts through sixteen orbits of the Earth. The judges chose it unanimously. Harvey was the first woman to win the Booker Prize since 2019, and the first British author to win since Douglas Stuart took the prize for Shuggie Bain in 2020.
What is James by Percival Everett about?
James retells Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man Twain made a supporting character in his novel about freedom. Everett restores his full name, James, and gives him the interior life the original withholds: his own thoughts, his own language and his own understanding of the danger he is in. James and the other enslaved characters code-switch, performing an exaggerated dialect in front of white people as a form of protection. The novel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2024 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2025.
Is Intermezzo Sally Rooney’s best book?
Many critics consider Intermezzo her most ambitious novel: longer and formally more complex than Normal People or Conversations with Friends, and more interested in grief and in men’s inner lives. It is not the best place to start if you have not read her; Normal People remains the clearest way into her work. If you have read it, Intermezzo is where she extends her range furthest.
What is The Anxious Generation about, and is Haidt right?
The Anxious Generation argues that the decline in adolescent mental health from around 2012 onwards was driven mainly by the shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood, and that reversing it takes collective norms rather than individual parental choices. The decline itself is widely accepted. The causal argument is disputed by some researchers, who say the evidence is correlational. Haidt’s case is carefully built and the clearest statement of the most widely held hypothesis; it is worth reading whether or not you end up fully persuaded.
Footnotes
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey wins the Booker Prize 2024. The Booker Prizes: thebookerprizes.com/media-centre/press-releases/orbital-by-samantha-harvey-wins-the-booker-prize-2024
- 2024 Booker Prize: shortlist and judges. Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Booker_Prize
- Percival Everett wins 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for James. CBC Books: www.cbc.ca/books/percival-everett-wins-2025-pulitzer-prize-for-fiction-for-mark-twain-inspired-novel-james-1.7527455
- James wins the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Washington Post: www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/05/05/2025-pulitzer-prize-books/
More from the shelf
Reading list
Books About Grief
Intermezzo, Martyr! and Knife all circle back to loss. Start here.
Reading list
When Desire Takes Over
If All Fours stayed with you, this list is where to go next.
Reading list
Why We Do What We Do
The psychology books behind The Anxious Generation’s argument.
Reading list
True Crime With Something to Say
For readers who finished The God of the Woods and want more.
From the bookshelf
“I dedicate this to everyone who speaks for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life…”
— Samantha Harvey, Booker Prize acceptance speech, 2024
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books from every year that stay with you long after the last page.
More from recent years
Best Fiction of 2024 · Best Nonfiction of 2024 · Best Books of 2025 · Best Fiction of 2025 · Best Books of 2026 →
