Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Fiction Books of 2024
2024 was an unusually strong year for literary fiction. The Booker went to a 136-page novel set entirely in orbit, told with the precision and quiet of a long poem. The Pulitzer went to a retelling of Huckleberry Finn that gave its most important character back his mind. Sally Rooney returned with the novel that confirmed she is not a writer of a single register. Miranda July wrote the book about female desire and midlife that nobody else was willing to write without irony. And three debuts arrived that read like the work of writers already several books in. Eight novels. I read all of them. These are the ones that held up.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 novels · Literary Fiction · Published 2024
Orbital
Six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station complete sixteen orbits of the Earth over the course of a single day. That is the novel’s entire action. Harvey does not use that constraint as a gimmick — she uses it as a lens, stripping away everything except the essential: what does the Earth look like from outside it, and what do grief, love, and longing feel like when you are suspended two hundred and fifty miles above everything that caused them? Orbital won the Booker Prize 2024 by unanimous decision, the first book set in space to take the prize. At 136 pages it was the shortest title on the shortlist. The chair of judges called it “a small, strange, beautiful and mighty book,” and that is as accurate a description as any.
Orbital earns its place at the top of this list because it does something most literary fiction no longer attempts: it takes beauty seriously as a subject. Harvey is not writing about beauty as decoration or compensation; she is writing about it as a form of knowledge, the thing the astronauts have access to that the people below them do not, and the novel asks what that knowledge is worth and what it costs to leave behind. Read it in one sitting — it takes two hours — and notice how long it stays with you afterwards. That ratio is the test of whether a novel has done its work, and Orbital passes it easily.
James
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, retold from the perspective of Jim — the enslaved man Twain made a supporting character in what is commonly called the great American novel of freedom. Everett restores him his full name, James, and his full interior life: his own thinking, his own language, his own understanding of every situation Twain placed him in but never let him narrate. The novel also turns on language as its central subject: James and the other enslaved people code-switch deliberately, performing an exaggerated dialect in front of white people as a form of protection — a way of hiding the self in plain sight. Everett appeared on the Booker 2024 shortlist and won the Pulitzer Prize. It appeared on more critical year-end lists than any other novel published in 2024.
James does what the best literary retellings do: it makes the original strange, and in doing so reveals what was always strange about it. Twain’s novel has a Jim problem — the uncomfortable relationship between a story about freedom and the way it treats the person whose freedom is most at stake. Everett addresses that problem directly, without didacticism and without softening anything. James is not a corrective; it is the book Twain’s novel needed alongside it, and it changes how you read the original without reducing either text to the other. One of the essential American novels of the decade.
→ More fiction at this level: my best fiction books of all time list
Intermezzo
Two brothers — Peter, a Dublin lawyer 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 the arms of women who are wrong for them in ways that may also be right. Rooney’s fourth novel is longer and formally more ambitious than anything she has written before: it shifts between the brothers in prose styles that are distinct from each other, and it is more interested in men than her earlier work has been. The result is her most emotionally demanding novel, and the one that answered, definitively, the critics who had argued she was a writer of a single register.
Intermezzo is on this list because it shows Rooney doing what only writers who are genuinely developing do: it extends her range in a direction that was not predictable from where she started. She 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 their father and now cannot go back to repair that — and the combination produces something more uncomfortable and more moving than her earlier work. It is also one of the most accurate accounts available in recent fiction of how two siblings can love each other across a gap they cannot close.
All Fours
A successful artist in her mid-forties, married with a young child, sets out to drive from Los Angeles to New York. She gets twenty miles and checks into a motel. She stays for a month. She redecorates the room obsessively. She develops a fixation on a younger man she cannot have. She goes through perimenopause. The novel is about desire, about the body changing in ways that feel simultaneously like loss and clarification, about the specific predicament of a woman who has built the life that was supposed to satisfy her and finds it does not. It appeared on virtually every major year-end list of 2024 and generated more serious critical debate than almost any other novel of the year.
All Fours is the novel about female desire and midlife that almost no one else had the nerve to write the way July writes it — without ironic distance, without a redemptive arc, without the safety of a lesson. The narrator is difficult, obsessive, and frequently wrong about herself, and July gives all of that the same serious attention she gives to the novel’s more sympathetic moments. It is a book about what happens to a woman’s inner life when the outer structure of her life is complete, and it refuses every comfortable answer that question invites.
→ More fiction about desire and fixation: my books about obsession list
Martyr!
Cyrus Shafaghi is an Iranian-American poet and recovering addict writing a book about martyrs — people who chose to die for something, or had that choice made for them. His mother died in the crash of Iran Air Flight 655, shot down by a US Navy missile in 1988. His father is alive and unreachable. The novel moves between Cyrus’s present and his research into martyrdom, a gallery installation where a dying artist is exhibiting herself in real time, and the specific way a poet’s mind processes grief and addiction. Akbar is already a celebrated poet, and Martyr! reads like a debut by someone who has spent years thinking about what a novel can do that poetry cannot — and then doing exactly that.
Martyr! is on this list because it refuses to separate the aesthetic from the emotional in the way most fiction does. Cyrus is not trying to understand his grief and then write poetry about it; the poetry is the understanding, and Akbar makes that felt on every page. It is also one of the most honest accounts of what addiction recovery looks like from the inside — not the transformation narrative that recovery memoirs tend toward, but the daily, grinding, often absurd work of staying in the world when the world does not feel like enough. One of the finest debut novels of the decade.
→ More fiction about grief and what we carry: my books about love list
The God of the Woods
In the summer of 1975, a teenage girl disappears from a summer camp in the Adirondacks. It is the second disappearance from this camp — the first, fourteen years earlier, was the daughter of the wealthy family that owns it, and it was never explained. Moore moves across multiple timelines and perspectives to reconstruct both cases, and in doing so reconstructs the particular mechanics of American class privilege: how money creates not just comfort but protection, how some disappearances are investigated and others are managed. It was one of the most commercially successful literary debuts of 2024 and spent months on the New York Times bestseller list.
The God of the Woods earns its place on a literary fiction list because it does what the best crime novels do: it uses the disappearance as a mechanism for examining something the genre usually avoids. Moore is not interested in the case as puzzle; she is interested in the social architecture that allows some crimes to go unsolved and some families to remain protected. The novel’s pace never feels manipulative, its revelations are earned, and it is one of the most satisfying reading experiences of the year regardless of whether you come to it for the thriller or for the literary fiction.
→ More books that go beyond the case: my true crime reading list
Creation Lake
Sadie Smith is an American spy — disgraced, freelance, brilliant — deployed to infiltrate a network of French radical farmers in the Dordogne. Her target is a philosopher named Bruno Lacombe who has retreated to an underground cave and communicates with his followers only by email. Kushner’s novel is many things at once: a spy thriller, a philosophical novel, a portrait of European leftism, and a character study of a woman who is entirely in control of everyone around her and entirely unable to stop performing that control. It appeared on sixteen major year-end best-of lists and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024.
Creation Lake is on this list because it is the most formally ambitious spy novel published in years — a genre it uses the way Nabokov used genre, as a frame to put pressure on something else entirely. Kushner is interested in the question of what a person who is only ever performing herself actually is: whether there is a self underneath the performance or whether the performance has become the person. Sadie Smith is one of the most compelling and unsettling protagonists in recent American fiction, and the novel around her is worthy of her.
The Ministry of Time
A Cambodian-British civil servant is assigned to work as a “bridge” for a Victorian Arctic explorer extracted from 1847 and relocated to contemporary London as part of a government time-travel programme. What begins as a bureaucratic comedy of manners between two people separated by a hundred and fifty years of history becomes a novel about colonialism, grief, belonging, and what it means to love someone who was not supposed to exist in your time. Bradley’s debut appeared on twelve major year-end lists and was immediately recognised as one of the most accomplished first novels of the year.
The Ministry of Time earns its place on this list because it does something difficult: it is genuinely funny and genuinely serious about the same material at the same time. Bradley uses the premise — which could easily become whimsy — as a mechanism for thinking carefully about empire, about what British culture has historically taken from other cultures and what it has offered in return, and about the specific loneliness of a person who exists between two worlds without fully belonging to either. It is also one of the best love stories of the year, which it earns rather than assumes.
→ More fiction about belonging and love: my books about love list
Where to begin with the best fiction of 2024
If you want the Booker Prize winner — read in two hours, remembered for years
→ Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Six astronauts, one day, sixteen orbits. The most beautiful novel on this list.
If you want the novel that appeared on more critical lists than any other title of the year
→ James by Percival Everett. Huckleberry Finn told by Jim. The Pulitzer winner. One of the essential American novels of the decade.
If you want Sally Rooney at her most ambitious and most demanding
→ Intermezzo. Two brothers, one dead father, the grief neither of them can access directly. Her best novel.
If you want the debut that reads like its author has been writing for decades
→ Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Grief, addiction, and poetry — refused to be separated from each other. One of the finest debut novels of the decade.
If you want a spy novel that uses the genre the way Nabokov used genre
→ Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. An American spy, French radicals, a philosopher in a cave, and a question about whether any self survives its own performance.
Frequently asked questions about the best fiction books of 2024
What were the best fiction 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 Pulitzer Prize and appeared on more year-end lists than any other novel. Sally Rooney’s fourth novel Intermezzo and Miranda July’s All Fours were the most discussed literary novels of the year. Kaveh Akbar’s debut Martyr!, Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, and Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time complete the essential 2024 fiction 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 completing sixteen orbits of the Earth. At 136 pages it was the shortest book on the shortlist. The judges chose it unanimously. Harvey was the first woman to win the Booker 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 The 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 an interior life the original suppresses: his own thinking, his own language, his own understanding of the situation he is navigating. The novel also plays with language deliberately — James and the other enslaved characters code-switch, performing an exaggerated dialect in front of white people as a form of protection. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 and appeared on more critical year-end lists than any other novel published that year.
Is Intermezzo Sally Rooney’s best book?
Many critics and readers consider Intermezzo her most ambitious work — longer and formally more complex than Normal People or Conversations with Friends, and more interested in grief and in male interiority than her earlier novels. It is not the best starting point if you have not read her: Normal People remains the clearest expression of her central preoccupations. But Intermezzo is where she extends her range most significantly, and it is the novel that confirmed she is not a one-register writer.
What is Orbital by Samantha Harvey about?
Orbital follows six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station over a single day, during which they complete sixteen orbits of the Earth. The novel has almost no conventional plot: it is a meditation on what the Earth looks like from outside it, on grief and longing experienced at a distance from everything that caused them, and on what it means to choose to leave the world in order to look at it. At 136 pages it is the shortest Booker Prize winner since Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore in 1979. It is best read in one sitting.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“I’m not interested in what I know. I’m interested in what I don’t know yet.” — Samantha Harvey, Orbital
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books from every year that stay with you long after the last page.
