Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
The best nonfiction of 2024 had one quality in common: it refused to stay in its lane. The National Book Award went to an anthropologist who spent seven years inside the world of human smuggling and came out with something that reads as much like a novel as a piece of investigative fieldwork. Jonathan Haidt made the argument about adolescent mental health that parents had been feeling but could not name. Salman Rushdie wrote his way through a near-murder. Sloane Crosley wrote about grief the way it actually happens — with humour intact and no resolution available. Hanif Abdurraqib wrote about basketball and found something else entirely. And Zoë Schlanger wrote about plants and changed how you think about what a mind is. Eight books. All of them doing something more than their subject.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Memoir · Investigative · Science · Essays · Published 2024
The Anxious Generation
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the rapid decline in adolescent mental health beginning around 2012 was caused primarily by the arrival of the smartphone and the wholesale shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood. The evidence is global, it affects girls more severely than boys, and it correlates tightly with the adoption of social media platforms. The book proposes four structural reforms and makes the case that individual parental choices are insufficient — that collective action at the institutional level is the only intervention capable of reversing what has happened. It generated serious policy debate in multiple countries and became one of the most widely discussed nonfiction books of the year by a wide margin.
The Anxious Generation is on my bookshelf because it is the clearest articulation available of something that has been obvious and unmeasured for a decade. Haidt’s causal argument has been disputed by researchers who argue the correlation is not proof of causation, and that dispute is worth taking seriously. But the book’s real value is structural: it gives parents, schools, and policymakers a framework for collective action rather than individual guilt, and it does so in prose that does not require a background in social science to follow. I recommend it to anyone with a child, and to anyone who works with young people in any capacity.
→ Read my full thoughts on The Anxious Generation → More psychology books that hold up to scrutiny: my reading listSoldiers and Kings
Jason De León, an anthropologist and MacArthur Fellow, spent seven years embedded with the people who make their living smuggling migrants from Central America and Mexico into the United States — not the cartels at the top of the hierarchy, but the low-level foot soldiers and morally conflicted crew leaders who do the actual work at enormous personal risk for very little pay. The result is unlike any other book about migration: intimate, forensic, and written with the specific authority of someone who was actually there, for years, gaining the kind of trust that most journalists never get close to. It won the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Soldiers and Kings is on this list because it does what only the best narrative nonfiction manages: it takes a subject that has been reduced to a political abstraction and gives it back its human texture. De León is not writing about immigration policy; he is writing about specific people making specific choices inside a system none of them designed and few of them can afford to leave. The book changes the terms of the conversation about migration in the same way that Matthew Desmond’s Evicted changed the terms of the conversation about poverty — not by arguing a position, but by making the reality undeniable. One of the essential American nonfiction books of the decade.
→ More investigative nonfiction at this level: my reading listKnife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
On 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie was stabbed fifteen times on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. He lost the sight of one eye. Knife is his account of the attack, the months of recovery, and the thinking he was forced to do about mortality, about the decades of the fatwa that preceded the attack and shaped his adult life, about his marriage and his writing and what it means to survive something you were not supposed to survive. It is short — under two hundred pages — and written with the precision of a novelist who has paid close attention to language for sixty years. The title refers both to the weapon and to the book itself: writing as the reply that the attacker did not expect him to be able to make.
Knife is on this list because it is one of the most formally honest accounts of surviving violence that I have read — not because Rushdie sentimentalises the experience, but because he refuses to. He is angry. He is frightened. He is grateful. He is not going to pretend any of those responses are simpler than they are. The sections about his wife Eliza, and what the attack did to their relationship in its immediate aftermath, are the most moving pages in the book. He also imagines a conversation with his attacker — the exchange he was never going to get in court — and that section alone justifies the book’s existence.
→ More memoirs written with literary precision: my reading listGrief Is for People
In 2019, two things happened to Sloane Crosley within a month of each other: her apartment was burglarised and a number of irreplaceable objects were stolen, and her closest friend — her mentor, the publicist Russell Perreault — died by suicide. Grief Is for People is her attempt to hold both losses together and understand what connects them: the specific experience of an absence that should not exist, the object that was there and is now not, the person who was there and is now not. Crosley writes about grief the way it actually arrives — with her characteristic wit intact, without resolution, and without the consolations that grief books usually reach for when the material gets too hard.
Grief Is for People is on this list because it is one of the most honest accounts of grief I have read that does not mistake honesty for bleakness. Crosley does not pretend the humour stops when the grief is serious, and she does not use the humour to keep the grief at a distance. Both things are fully present on the same page, which is exactly how grief actually works and almost never how it is written about. The book is also, quietly, one of the best accounts available of what a literary friendship looks like from the inside — what it means to be seen and championed by someone who understood your work before you fully did, and what it costs to lose that.
→ More books that tell the truth about loss: my grief reading listThere’s Always This Year
Hanif Abdurraqib grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, just as a kid named LeBron James was coming up in Akron, an hour away. There’s Always This Year uses basketball — and specifically the mythology around LeBron, and the specific experience of being a Black boy in Ohio watching that mythology form — as the structure for a book that is also about community, about what it means to go home after achieving success, about the particular joy and grief of Black life in America, and about ascension: what it means to rise, and what it costs, and what you leave behind. The book is structured like quarters in a basketball game, written in Abdurraqib’s characteristic voice that moves between lyric essay and reportage without announcing the shift.
There’s Always This Year is on this list because it is one of those books that shows what the essay form can do when a writer has a subject that genuinely cannot be contained by any single genre. Abdurraqib writes about sport the way the best sportswriters write about America — as a lens, not a subject — but with a lyric precision and a willingness to be personal that most sportswriting avoids. He appeared on more major year-end lists than almost any other nonfiction writer of 2024, and the consensus was right. This is a beautiful book.
Splinters
Leslie Jamison — author of The Empathy Exams and one of the most significant American essayists of her generation — writes about the dissolution of her marriage, the early years of single motherhood, and the experience of falling in love again. Splinters is the account of that passage: the grief of a marriage ending, the specific demands and pleasures of raising a child as a primary parent, the way writing both processes experience and inevitably distances you from it. Jamison writes with the same combination of formal rigor and emotional exposure that characterises all her best work, and the result is the most personal and most direct book she has written.
Splinters is on this list because it does something difficult: it is a book about the self that manages not to be self-indulgent, because Jamison is never satisfied with her own account of herself. She examines her own motivations with the same relentlessness she brings to her subjects elsewhere, and the result is a memoir that earns its intimacy. It is also one of the most accurate accounts available of what early single motherhood actually feels like — not the version that has been tidied for public consumption, but the version that includes the exhaustion, the ambivalence, the love that is complete and the life that is very hard at the same time.
→ More literary memoirs: my reading listChallenger
On 28 January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart seventy-three seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members. Higginbotham — whose previous book Midnight in Chernobyl set the standard for narrative nonfiction about technological catastrophe — spends four hundred pages reconstructing how it happened: the engineering decisions, the management failures, the specific culture of NASA in the early 1980s, and the individual people who knew the O-rings were dangerous and could not make anyone listen. The result is both a gripping account of a specific disaster and a study of how institutions suppress the information they most need to act on.
Challenger is on this list because Higginbotham has produced, for the second time, a book that makes a technological disaster into a study of human nature under institutional pressure. The question the book asks — how do organisations create the conditions in which people who know something is wrong cannot say so effectively — is not a question about NASA in 1986. It is a question about every organisation that has ever failed the people inside it. Higginbotham writes without judgment but not without clarity, and the result is one of those rare books that is genuinely impossible to put down and genuinely important to finish.
→ More narrative nonfiction that reads like this: my investigative journalism listThe Light Eaters
Journalist Zoë Schlanger spent three years reporting on a new generation of plant scientists who are challenging the assumption that plants are passive — that they do not sense, respond, remember, or communicate in ways that constitute anything like intelligence. The Light Eaters is the result: a book about what plants actually do, how they do it, and what it means for our understanding of mind if organisms without neurons can behave as though they have one. It appeared on eleven major year-end lists and prompted more genuine philosophical debate than almost any other science book of the year.
The Light Eaters is on this list because it is the kind of science writing that does not merely inform — it disorients, in the best possible way. Schlanger is a careful reporter and she does not overclaim: the science is genuinely contested, and she presents the debate honestly. But she also understands that the interesting question is not whether plants are conscious in the way humans are conscious, but whether our definition of mind has been too narrow all along, and whether that narrowness says more about us than about the plants. You finish it and cannot look at a garden or a forest in the same way afterwards.
Where to begin with the best nonfiction of 2024
If you want the book that changed the public conversation about adolescence and mental health
→ The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. The argument you have been having with yourself about smartphones, made structural and actionable. On my bookshelf.
If you want the National Book Award winner — investigative, intimate, impossible to dismiss
→ Soldiers and Kings by Jason De León. Seven years inside the world of human smuggling. The book that gives the migration debate back its human texture.
If you want the memoir that proves grief and wit are not opposites
→ Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley. A burglary, a suicide, and the specific experience of losing someone who understood your work before you did.
If you want narrative nonfiction that reads like a thriller and functions as institutional analysis
→ Challenger by Adam Higginbotham. How NASA created the conditions in which people who knew something was wrong could not make anyone listen. Impossible to put down.
If you want the science book that changes what you see when you look at a tree
→ The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger. Plant intelligence, contested science, and the question of whether our definition of mind has been too narrow all along.
Frequently asked questions about the best nonfiction books of 2024
What were the best nonfiction books of 2024?
The National Book Award for Nonfiction 2024 went to Soldiers and Kings by Jason De León — an anthropologist’s seven-year investigation into the world of human smuggling. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation was the most widely discussed nonfiction of the year. Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife, Sloane Crosley’s Grief Is for People, Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year, Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger, and Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters complete the essential 2024 nonfiction list.
What is Soldiers and Kings about?
Soldiers and Kings follows the low-level foot soldiers and crew leaders who make their living smuggling migrants across the US–Mexico border — not the cartels at the top, but the people doing the actual work at enormous personal risk. De León, a UCLA anthropologist and MacArthur Fellow, spent seven years gaining the kind of trust and access that most journalists never get close to. The book won the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction and has been described as a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction that changes the terms of the conversation about migration.
What is The Anxious Generation about and is Haidt right?
The Anxious Generation argues that the rapid deterioration of adolescent mental health from around 2012 was caused primarily by smartphones and social media, and that collective institutional action is required to reverse it — not individual parental choices. The causal argument has been disputed by researchers who consider the evidence correlational rather than conclusive. Haidt’s case is strong and carefully built; it is the clearest articulation of the most widely held hypothesis about the adolescent mental health crisis, and it is worth reading whether or not you end up fully persuaded.
What is Knife by Salman Rushdie about?
Knife is Rushdie’s memoir of the stabbing attack he survived in August 2022, when he was attacked on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York and lost the sight of one eye. The book covers the attack itself, the recovery, and the thinking he did about mortality, about the decades of the fatwa that preceded it, about his marriage and his writing. At under two hundred pages it is short, precise, and written with the attention to language that has defined his career. The title refers both to the weapon and to the book: words as the reply his attacker did not expect him to be able to make.
What is Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley about?
Grief Is for People is a memoir about two losses that hit Crosley within a month of each other in 2019: a burglary that took irreplaceable objects, and the suicide of her closest friend, the publicist Russell Perreault. The book holds both losses together and examines what connects them — the specific experience of an absence that should not exist. Crosley writes about grief with her characteristic wit intact and without the consolations most grief books reach for. It is one of the most honest and formally precise memoirs published in 2024.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“Migration is way more complicated than the nonsense being offered up about border walls. All of us as Americans are implicated in this story.” — Jason De León
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books from every year that stay with you long after the last page.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations