Best Books of 2024

Orbital

Samantha Harvey · 2024

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. Orbital is a meditation on the Earth seen from outside it: on what it looks like when you remove the noise of being inside 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 unanimous decision, the first book set in space to win the prize, and it is four pages longer than the shortest Booker winner ever. The chair of judges called it “a small, strange, beautiful and mighty book.”

Orbital is on this list because it does what only the best short novels manage: it earns its brevity. Every sentence is doing work. Harvey spent years developing the voice — spare, lyrical, precisely observed — and the result is a book that reads like a long poem that happens to have characters and a setting. The subject sounds abstract until you are inside it, and then it is the most concrete thing you have read in years: six people, cut off from everything, trying to understand what everything is for. Read it in one sitting. It will take you two hours and stay with you considerably longer.

James

Percival Everett · 2024

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, retold from the perspective of Jim — the enslaved man Twain called a supporting character in what is supposedly the great American novel of freedom. Everett restores him: gives him his real name, James, his interior life, his own language and his own mind. The novel is also a story about language itself: James and the other enslaved people in the novel code-switch deliberately, performing an exaggerated dialect in front of white people as a form of protection, a way of withholding the self. Everett appeared on the Booker 2024 shortlist and won the Pulitzer Prize. It was the most widely cited novel of the year on year-end lists, appearing on more best-of compilations than any other title.

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 always had a Jim problem — the uneasy relationship between a story about freedom and the way it treats the person whose freedom is most at stake. Everett addresses that problem directly and without didacticism. James is not a corrective to Huckleberry Finn; it is the book Twain’s novel needed alongside it, and it changes how you think about the original without reducing either text to the other. One of the essential American novels of the decade.

→ More books that change how you think: my nonfiction reading list

Intermezzo

Sally Rooney · 2024

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 more formally ambitious than anything she has written before: it shifts between the two brothers’ perspectives in prose styles that are distinct from each other, and it is more interested in men than her earlier work. The result is her most emotionally demanding novel, and the one that silenced the critics who had begun to argue that she was a writer of a single register.

Intermezzo earned its place on this list because it shows Rooney extending her range in a direction that was not obvious from her earlier work. 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 fix that — and the combination produces a novel that is both more uncomfortable and more moving than Normal People or Conversations with Friends. It is also, quietly, one of the best accounts available in recent fiction of the way two siblings can love each other without being able to communicate that love across the gap of who they have become.

→ More fiction and nonfiction about grief: my books about grief list

All Fours

Miranda July · 2024

A narrator — 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. She develops an obsession with a younger man she cannot have. She goes through perimenopause. The novel is about desire, about the body changing in ways that feel like loss and also clarification, about the specific freedoms available to a woman who has built the life that was supposed to make her happy and is not sure it has. It appeared on virtually every major year-end list of 2024 and provoked more serious critical debate than almost any other novel of the year.

All Fours is on this list because it is the novel about female desire and midlife that almost no one else had the nerve to write in the way July writes it — without ironic distance, without resolution, without the safety of a redemptive arc or a cautionary lesson. The narrator is difficult and obsessive and frequently wrong about herself, and July treats all of that with 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 answers that question with more honesty than comfort.

→ More fiction about desire and fixation: my books about obsession list

The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidt · 2024

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the rapid decline in adolescent mental health that began around 2012 was caused primarily by the arrival of the smartphone and the shift from a phone-based childhood to a play-based one. The evidence is global, affects girls more severely than boys, and 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 became one of the most widely discussed nonfiction books of 2024 and generated serious policy debate in multiple 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 deterioration of adolescent mental health is not a contested data point; the argument is about causation. Haidt’s case is carefully built from a large and varied evidence base, and even readers who push back on specific claims tend to find the overall frame useful. It is also, unusually for a book about psychology and social change, readable: it does not sacrifice clarity for nuance, and it gives parents and policymakers something actionable to do with the anxiety it produces.

→ Read my full thoughts on The Anxious Generation
→ More psychology books that hold up to scrutiny: my reading list

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

Salman Rushdie · 2024

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 recovery, and the thinking he was forced to do in the months afterwards: about mortality, about the decades of the fatwa that preceded this and shaped his adult life, about marriage and 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 spent sixty years paying attention to language. The title refers both to the weapon and to the book itself: words as the instrument of reply.

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 is sentimental about it, but because he refuses to be. He is angry, he is frightened, he is grateful to be alive, and 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 are the most moving pages in the book. He also, at one point, imagines a conversation with his attacker — the conversation he was not going to get in court — and that section alone justifies the book’s existence.

→ More memoirs written with literary precision: my reading list

Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar · 2024

Cyrus Shafaghi is an Iranian-American poet and recovering addict who is 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, into a gallery installation where a dying artist is exhibiting herself in real time, into his own addiction and recovery and the specific way a poet’s mind processes grief. Akbar is already a celebrated poet, and Martyr! is a debut novel that reads like one: dense, lyrical, formally adventurous, and entirely itself.

Martyr! is on this list because it does something most debut novels are too cautious to attempt: it refuses to separate the aesthetic from the emotional. 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. The novel is also one of the most honest accounts I have read of what addiction recovery actually 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 grief list

The God of the Woods

Liz Moore · 2024

In the summer of 1975, a teenage girl disappears from a summer camp in the Adirondacks. It is the second time a child has vanished from this camp — the first, fourteen years earlier, was the daughter of the wealthy family that owns it, and that disappearance was never explained. Moore’s novel moves across multiple timelines and perspectives to reconstruct both disappearances, and in doing so also reconstructs the particular dynamics of American class privilege in the mid-twentieth century: the way money creates not just comfort but protection, the way some disappearances get investigated and others get managed. It was one of the most commercially successful literary debuts of 2024 and appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for months.

The God of the Woods is on this list because it does what the best literary thrillers do: it uses the structure of genre fiction — the disappeared child, the unreliable witness, the slowly assembled truth — as the delivery mechanism for something the genre usually avoids: a serious reckoning with class, privilege, and the specific way powerful families protect themselves at the expense of everyone around them. Moore is a precise and controlled writer, and the novel’s pace never feels manipulative. It earns its revelations. One of the most satisfying reading experiences of the year.

→ More books that go beyond the case: my true crime reading list