The Best Novels of 2024

A staple of 2024 bestseller lists that’s had so much buzz since it came out in late February, this prequel-cum-sequel to the author’s Pulitzer-nominated debut follows the legacies of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a Native American family.

Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, the widely acclaimed new novel from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Overstory and Bewilderment “explores that last wild place we have yet to colonise and interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity” according to the Booker Prize 2024 judges.

Publishers Weekly was delighted by this "boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement" from the sensational millennial Irish author. "This feels like Rooney's most fully realized work, especially as she channels the modernist styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf... Even the author's skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel's forceful currents of feeling."

From Sarah Jessica Parker's "blissfully transportive" reading list to Kaia Gerber and Roxane Gay’s book clubs to the National Book Award shortlist and Obama's summer reading list, this poet’s debut novel was in all the right places this year. It follows the orphaned son of Iranian immigrants on a quest that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. "Incandescent . . . Akbar has created an indelible protagonist, haunted, searching, utterly magnetic,” raved The New York Times Book Review.

Winner of this year's National Book Award (and nominated for nearly ever other word), this action-packed novel reimagines Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of his enslaved sidekick Jim as he embarks down the Mississippi in search of freedom. "Huck Finn' is a masterpiece. This retelling just might be, too," raved The New York Times.

This bestselling author’s highly anticipated sophomore novel is a cutting family saga about a wealthy clan that begins with the father's kidnapping in the 1980s and moves on to their less-than-stellar present day. Oprah Daily was smitten: “As weird as this may sound--Brodesser-Akner has written probably the funniest book ever about generational family trauma."

A struggling biracial novelist at work on “her mulatto War and Peace” sells out to a streaming network in a “superbly ruthless and electric book” that Alta Journal's Anita Felicelli called “one of the best I’ve read about Hollywood.”

Join six men and women from America, Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan orbiting Earth at over seventeen thousand miles per hour in this slender, mesmerizing novel that "satisfies both my lifelong obsession with space travel and my hunger for sentences and paragraphs that demand to be read and reread," raved novelist Mark Haddon in the New Statesman. "A day in the life of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station, that’s all, but my goodness this novel is beautiful."

In the latest from the award-winning author of Cost, a chance meeting between two former lovers rekindles a long-dormant passion. Decades after parting, they’ve built lives with marriages, families, and careers, but their reunion sparks an affair that threatens everything in this "study of the complex joy and pain of late-life love," according to the Washington Post, who called it "a tour de force — unfailingly clear-eyed, and packed with psychological insights — a novel that compels readers to care passionately about the characters."