The Award-Winning Fiction 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

"Devastating... A spectacular work of historical fiction: thoroughly researched, brimming with outrage and compassion, and full of indelible imagery." —The Guardian

"Reading Martyr! is a delight. Sensual, oneiric and wonderfully strange, Akbar intuits the mind’s talent for distilling meaning from the surreal. His fiction taps his expertise in conjuring an experiential purity — through metaphor and with humor that lands." — The Washington Post

"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 reminder, as if we still needed one, that crime fiction can be great literature. These books are as resonant and finely observed as anything Whitehead has written." —Los Angeles Times

"Perhaps the word 'romantic' has been too thoroughly attenuated to use in praise, but 'Held' may be one of the most romantic books I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the most poetic — not just in sentiment but in form...these sections demand bridging elisions, catching thematic echoes and restitching a chronology that’s been reordered across almost 120 years." – The Washington Post

"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