The Award-Winning Books of 2024

"Harvey’s meditative novel portraying life aboard a spacecraft contains on almost every page sentences so gorgeous that you want to put down the book in awe... Orbital is ultimately a thrilling book, filled with marvel at the beauty of creation made palpable in bravura descriptions." —Boston Globe

"A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own."--Chicago Tribune

"A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal." – The Pulitzer Prize committee

"Moore has never before so thoroughly blended the historical and the contemporary, or the real world and the spiritual one, as she does in I Am Homeless." – Maggie Doherty, The New Republic

"A finely reported and intimate account of life under Israeli occupation of the West Bank, told through a portrait of a Palestinian father whose five-year-old son dies in a fiery school bus crash when Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams are delayed by security regulations." - The Pulitzer Prize committee

"Steinberg forces us, with extraordinary pathos at times, to reckon with the humanity of his subjects and not the myths we have constructed around them." – Bongani Kona, The New York Times

"A revelatory portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. that draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of each stage of the civil rights leader’s life, exploring his strengths and weaknesses, including the self-questioning and depression that accompanied his determination." – The Pulitzer Prize committee

"The Civil War comes to New Iberia, Louisiana, the capital of Burke's wondrous fictional empire... [readers] may well agree that it's his most probing examination of the enduring legacy of slavery... A grueling, compassionate demonstration that 'the devil ain't down in a fiery pit. He's right here.'" – Kirkus Reviews

"Erpenbeck... is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have. Clinging to the undercarriage of her sentences, like fugitives, are intimations of Germany’s politics, history and cultural memory... I don’t generally read the books I review twice, but this one I did." — Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Kim Hyesoon's poems create a seething, imaginative under- and over-world where myth and politics, the everyday and the fabulous, bleed into each other." - Sean O'Brien, The Independent