The Best Literary Fiction & Nonfiction Books of 2024

As the year comes to a close, we like to put together a collection of the best books of the year (according to us). Our collection of 130+ titles span the full range of genres and categories. Over the next few weeks, we'll be taking a closer look at some of these titles with a focus on specific genres. This edition features the best in literature, fiction, and nonfiction. 

Literature & Fiction

The Women by Kristin Hannah
This historical fiction novel racked up ten weeks at the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and was featured on Goodreads' list of the Top 60 Books of the last 5 years. The moving coming-of-age story follows twenty-year-old Frankie as she joins the U.S. Army Nurse Corps and follows her brother to Vietnam.

James by Percival Everett
This critical darling won the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. The brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is both harrowing and darkly humorous. Experience the story through the eyes of Jim who has just learned that he is to be sold away from his wife and daughter.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
Argus, North Dakota is a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. From the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author comes a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning.

Swan Song by Elin Hilderbrand
In the finale to the bestselling Nantucket series, Chief of Police Ed Kapenash is about to retire and Blond Sharon is going through a divorce. When a $22 million summer home is purchased by the mysterious Richardsons, the community is swept up in a propulsive medley of glittering gatherings and sun-soaked drama.

All Fours by Miranda July
In this strange, hilarious, and sexy National Book Award finalist, a middle-aged artist announces her plan to drive across the country. But thirty minutes after driving away from her husband and child, she spontaneously leaves the highway, checks herself into a motel, and embarks on an entirely different kind of journey.

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig
When retired math teacher Grace inherits a run-down house on a Mediterranean island from a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. From the author of The Midnight Library, this is a story about the life-changing power of a new beginning.

Mind Games by Nora Roberts
Twelve-year-old Thea wasn't with her parents when they were murdered. But the psychic ability passed down from her grandmother meant that she bore witness to their grisly deaths. Years later, Thea is thriving and her parents' killer is behind bars. But her lasting psychic connection with him puts her in danger.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
This propulsive page-turner, named a Notable Book by The New York Times and The Washington Post, is packed with dark humor. The story follows a secret agent, a seductive woman who is sent to infiltrate an anarchist collective in France. At first, her handlers want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. But in the wake of their father's death, both brothers find themselves at a new interlude in life. It is a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life can hold without breaking.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss. An addict and a poet, his obsession with martyrs propels him on a remarkable odyssey to uncover a family secret and leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Good Material by Dolly Alderton
Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can't work out why she stopped. Now he's without a home, still waiting for his stand-up career to take off, and wondering why everyone else seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking. This is a sharply funny and exquisitely relatable love story with two endings.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
This follow-up to the award-winning There There is part prequel and part sequel. The novel traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a portrait of generational trauma is by turns, both shattering and wondrous.

Table for Two by Amor Towles
The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow returns with a collection of short fiction including six stories set in New York City around the year of 2000. Also included is a novella set in the Golden Age of Hollywood and continuing the story of one of a beloved character from The Rules of Civility.

Long Island by Colm Tóibín
This novel returns to the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn. Now in her forties, Irish immigrant Eilis Lacey is married to Tony Fiorello and living amidst his sprawling Italian family on Long Island. One day when Tony is at work, an Irishman comes to her door and tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony's child.

The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James
Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez in this mesmerizing western infused with elements of magical realism. It's 1895 and Antonio Sonoro is the latest in a long line of ruthless men. When he sets off for Texas to rob a train, he encounters a mysterious figure who has come to collect a cosmic debt.

Nonfiction

The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan
Tracking the natural beauty that surrounds us, this gorgeous, witty account maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches. With boundless charm, the bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club charts her foray into birding and the natural wonders of the world.

The Demon Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson
Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, this is a gripping account of the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a period marked by errors and miscommunications, egos and ambitions, tragedies and betrayals.

Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health by Casey Means, MD
According to holistic physician Dr. Means, nearly every health problem we face can be explained by how well the cells in our body create and use energy. Weaving together cutting-edge research, personal stories, and groundbreaking data, she offers a bold new vision for optimizing our health now and in the future.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply. In this generation-defining investigation, social psychologist Haidt lays out the facts and issues a clear call to action.

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger
It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. This "masterpiece of science writing" offers a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world.

There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Adurraqib
The author's lifelong love of the game infuses his lyrical, historical, and emotional reflection on basketball, life, and home. Filled with intimate, personal storytelling and brimming with joy, pain, outrage, and hope, this book is a clarion call  to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass returns with a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most?

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing
In 2020, Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk. The work prompted a question: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, an exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens.

The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Hook by Hampton Sides
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook set off on his third voyage. Two-and-a-half years later, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. This thrilling account of the lionized explorer's last journey chronicles how Cook, who was known for his respect of Indigenous peoples, came to that fatal moment.

The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss
Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. This charming chronicle—essentially a love letter—draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer an engaging history of the cherished institution.

Challenger: An American Tragedy by Adam Higginbotham
On January 28, 1986, America watched as the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board, including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. This riveting, minute-by-minute account of the disaster won the 2024 Kirkus Nonfiction Prize.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Communication by Charles Duhigg
Supercommunicators are people who understand that true connection relies on understanding the hidden layers beneath a conversation. From the author of The Power of Habit comes this fascinating exploration of the nature of conversation—and how we can all learn to be effective communicators.

War by Bob Woodward
In this intimate and sweeping account of one of the most tumultuous periods in presidential politics and American history, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner tells the revelatory, behind-the-scenes story of three wars—Ukraine, the Middle East and the struggle for the American Presidency.

Confronting the Presidents: No Spin Assessments from Washington to Biden by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard
This clear-eyed and authoritative book assesses the lasting impacts of each of the U.S. presidents From Washington to Biden—their lives, policies, foibles, and their legacies. Some of these legacies continue today, some are justly forgotten, and some have changed as America has changed.

Several of these books were included in the just published New York Times list of the 10 Best Books of 2024, including novels, James, All Fours, Martyr!, Good Material, and nonfiction title, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Hook.

Upcoming editions of The Best Books of 2024 will focus on kids' & YA, romance & horror, and mystery & sci-fi/fantasy. Let us know if we missed any of your favorite reads from the past year. And be sure to check out our full collection for categories like memoir, cookbooks, and book-to-screen.

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Read more by Ashly Moore Sheldon