The Award-Winning Nonfiction Books of 2024

"For seven years, de León tracked the lives of both migrants crossing the border and the coyotes who shepherded them. He unveils a profoundly intimate account of their world–of the work, the terror, and the human connections made on their treacherous journeys. A National Book Award finalist, Soldiers and Kings seeks to buck the dangerous stereotypes that are often associated with migrants and smugglers, and instead, shows their fully nuanced stories." – TIME

"What Flanagan achieves so well is locating what is intimately human within his grand sweep, whether that be a couple making love in a Swiss forest atop a newspaper, to protect themselves from pine needles, or the portraits of his parents and his maternal grandmother. The attention he pays these people is tender without ever sacrificing the sharpness of his gaze... the writing exerts an irresistible power and carries us with it." – The New York Times

"As a writer and a theorist, Klein is particularly talented at knitting together the sweep of history and the banalities of the present. She’s equally attuned to what doppelgängers can mean in a more transhistorical sense ... The originality and political courage of this book is to turn that into an opening, an entirely different way of thinking about our enemies—and ourselves." —The Nation

"She dispenses the wisdom of a professional chef with none of the ego, delivering cooking fundamentals in a voice that balances self-deprecation, science and just enough cheerleading to guide both the novice and the veteran through complex projects[.]" —The New York Times

"No single volume can adequately depict the gamut of Indigenous cultures, but DuVal‘s comes close, shading in erasures and lending color and nuance to textbook jargon. “Native Nations” belongs on the same shelf as Blackhawk’s magisterial work and Charles Mann’s 1491." —The Minnesota Star Tribune

"Calamities and near misses have molded NASA as much as the giant leaps the agency has taken, and no tragedy is more indelible than the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. Higginbotham’s book is a compelling, exhaustively researched and freshly told chronicle of the tragedy that traces its full arc." —Washington Post

"Award-winning historian Kelley, director of the Center for the Study of the American South and author of Right To Ride, provides a powerful counter to the assumption that the term working class refers only to Whites. Rather, she argues convincingly, Black workers have been the nation's 'most active, most engaged, most informed, and most impassioned working class.' . . . A well-researched, engaging, corrective American history." — Kirkus Reviews

"Sinclair’s deeply personal story of self-love, family pain, cultural traditions and reckoning with post-colonial systems takes a look at the complexity of what it means to grow up Rasta." – Keishel Williams, NPR

"A bracing gut punch of a book, We Were Once a Family is a provocative mix of immersive narrative journalism, rigorous social policy analysis and proud advocacy." - Robert Kolker, The Washington Post

"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