We like to think of this list of the best books of 2024 as the anti-algorithm, a collection of highly specific, highly individual, and somewhat eclectic books that we just absolutely love. At a moment when the very act of curation threatens to be overwhelmed by whatever cookies you’ve unflinchingly accepted to track your cursor and your clicks, we hope this list serves as a counterweight: a reminder of a beloved author, an introduction to something new, a detour into the unexpected. We will be updating this list of the best books of 2024 throughout the year, and we hope to see you back here again.
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
Another study of class and money arrives in Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It. Set on a college campus, with a chorus of voices filling out the multi-strand narrative, the novel depicts a group of University of Arkansas students, professors, and administrators. Campuses are not just centres of academic inquiry and nighttime misadventures, the novel shows, but intersections for people of vastly different resources. Reid, whose first novel probed the sometimes sticky relationship between a nanny and a mother, masterfully captures the quiet misalignments that stem from a varying sense of what’s at stake. This is a somewhat old-fashioned novel of manners that acutely captures the modern moment. – Chloe Schama
Published 30 January by Bloomsbury
Change by Édouard Louis
Change, by the French writer Édouard Louis (The End of Eddy, Who Killed My Father), is a work of autofiction that reads a bit like the confessions of a madman: a breathless account of Louis’s hard-won transformation from Eddy Bellegueule, a lonely and beleaguered little boy from northern France, into a celebrated author and public intellectual. What makes it so unsettling? There’s the bracing directness of Louis’s prose, translated into English by John Lambert; the fitful structure, crammed with self-conscious annotations and swift shifts in form; the unsparing examination of poverty and extreme privilege in modern France (and, when you squint your eyes, sort of everywhere else, too); the rendering of an appetite for better, different, more that can no longer reasonably be satisfied. Here, self-invention is an act of brutal violence with no discernible survivors. – Marley Marius
Published 8 February by Penguin Books
Splinters: A Memoir by Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison’s memoir tells the story of the end of her marriage, but it is also an account of motherhood and the way that a life-transforming event can cause a woman to feel as though a part of herself has fractured. Jamison, known and beloved for her clarion voice and her unflinching perception, has not shied away from self-interrogation in the past, but her new book is a particularly cutting account of her own decisions, motives, and desires. It is also an exceptional read, guiding her reader through her thrilling and bitter and fulfilling affairs of the heart. – CS
Published 22 February by Granta Books
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley
Over the course of a few short months, Sloane Crosley’s apartment was burgled and her best friend died. This coincidence becomes the backbone of a stunning investigation into the nature of loss that is Grief Is for People, an ambitious book lightened by strains of acerbic comedy. Crosley, who is perhaps best known for her effervescent essay collection I Was Told There’d Be Cake, hasn’t abandoned her spritely wit, but she is looking more critically at what matters here. A quixotic hunt to reclaim stolen jewellery is intertwined with the equally insurmountable task of better understanding the friend she has lost – a prominent figure in the publishing industry. The loving and complex tribute Crosley has paid to him here will no doubt offer a bittersweet balm to many. – CS
Published 29 February by Serpent’s Tail
Private Equity by Carrie Sun
Carrie Sun is the kind of epic overachiever that in a previous era might have been tapped for a prestigious PhD program or funnelled into clandestine training for the CIA. The late-stage capitalism equivalent is a position as the personal and professional assistant to the wildly successful CEO of a private equity fund, which Sun documents in her memoir Private Equity. At 29, she sees the opportunity as an even more promising path than the one she had carved out as a financial analyst, but the extreme responsibilities of the position soon took their toll. Sun writes clearly about the demands and privileges of the job, though this isn’t a tell-all about abuses in the industry, but rather a more probing inquiry into what we deem success and the values underpinning it. – CS
Published 29 February by Bloomsbury
Clear by Carys Davies
On a remote island off the coast of Scotland, a lone tenant – insulated by distance and his own rare dialect from 19th-century society – is preventing the landowner from turning the property over to more profitable uses. A minister is engaged to convince the tenant to leave. But not long after he arrives on the island, he suffers a terrible accident and is forced to recuperate under the care of the very man he’s been sent to evict. This strange premise is the backdrop for the surprisingly gripping novel from Welsh novelist Carys Davies, Clear, which feels a bit like a thriller set against a history lesson rendered fantastically vivid. Eventually, the minister’s wife sets off for the remote island to find her husband, and her arrival disrupts the powerful intimacy that has arisen between the tenant and the minister, raising questions of belonging, ownership, and how we forge the bonds between people and place that are really durable. – CS
Published 7 March by Granta Books
Memory Piece by Lisa Ko
The follow-up to 2017’s National Book Award finalist The Leavers, Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece is a moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New York’s art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades. The novel follows three friends from mallbound suburban New Jersey teens into adulthood, as they forge their own paths in a rapidly changing world. Chafing against the assumptions projected on them as Asian-American women and resisting the stifling expectations of their immigrant parents, they yearn for freedom – from the demands of race, gender, and family—while grasping at the expansive futures they once imagined. —Lisa Wong Macabasco
Published 21 March by Dialogue Books
Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman
The events in Adelle Waldman’s fleet-footed novel, Help Wanted, take place at a box store of declining fortunes in Upstate New York – a setting that in Waldman’s steady hands proves to be a crucible of ambition and survival. We are with Movement, the corporatised name given to the employees who show up at 4 am to unload trucks full of household goods and move them to the retail floor. Waldman is unsentimental about her low-wage protagonists, investing them with foibles as well as everyday heroism, and she’s mesmerising on the details of their work, the mechanical belts, the “throwing” of boxes, the meticulous unpacking. A single paragraph on the difficulty of untangling bras has thrilling specificity. In their petty and casually unempathetic supervisor, Meredith, the novel finds its engine of suspense, a middle-management villain whose team comes to believe must be promoted to be vanquished. – Taylor Antrim
Published 21 March by Serpent’s Tail
Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna
Kathleen Hanna may not be a household name, but for the past 30 years, she has been a figurehead in what was once called the alternative music scene, first in the ’90s as the frontwoman of Bikini Kill (the feminist punk band from Olympia, Washington, that coined the term riot grrrl) and later Le Tigre, an electronic pop band whose songs were danceable and politically driven. In her memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, Hanna offers short vignettes describing her difficult upbringing, the heady early days of her bands, and the swirl of other musicians who surrounded her. (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a phrase she wrote on Kurt Cobain’s wall one night.) Together, the anecdotes capture the life of a young woman trying to navigate a sexist culture while simultaneously finding her creative voice. There is an equal sense that Rebel Girl was written as a sort of road map for a new generation to pick up their own instruments and rock the world. – Laia Garcia-Furtado
Published 14 May by William Collins
Wives Like Us by Plum Sykes
Plum Sykes’s delectable new novel, Wives Like Us, bears a strong resemblance to the Austen-era novels of the 19th century, although it’s no longer a fortune of ten thousand pounds that makes a country gentleman a desired catch but a fortune of innumerable sums (and potentially unspeakable provenance). The silly, lovable heroines at the heart of this satire are mostly paired up anyway – but what’s to stop them from hunting for husband number two? Sykes sets the modern-day measures of social influence (Instagram followers, bikini line start-ups, glam teams at one’s beck and call) against the traditional Cotswolds landscape of manor houses and horse stables, and the result is a delightful mash-up: a loving portrait of a social milieu that recognises the value of tradition but is also perpetually chasing what’s new. – CS
Published 14 May by Bloomsbury
All Fours by Miranda July
Miranda July’s All Fours begins as a droll and deadpan account of a Los Angeles creative adrift in her forties – semi-famous, married, one child, between projects – embarking on a two-week driving trip across America to prove to herself (and to her husband) that she can be adventurous. About 15 minutes out of town, she parks the car at a rundown motel and begins an odyssey of a different kind, one that involves sex, interior design, and bouts of self-abnegation. This is a frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expect. July has already perfected a kind of haute, hip whimsy in film and fiction; the bravery of All Fours is nothing short of riveting. – TA
Published 16 May by Canongate
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
Claire Messud has transformed three generations of her family’s story into a tour de force in This Strange Eventful History. Spanning 70 years, this novel of tremendous scope and piercing intimacy – Messud’s best since 2006’s The Emperor’s Children – begins in 1940 Algeria and traces the Cassar family, pieds-noirs displaced by Algerian independence, as they move across the world, stopping in France, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and the US. All around them are the upheavals of the 20th century, but though Messud is working on a grand canvas, her skill is in miniature. History is dazzling in its fine-tuned character studies: François Cassar, striving and painfully dignified as he forges a middle-class life as an executive for a French steel corporation; François’s spinster sister, stuck in a family apartment in Toulon, France, concealing the damage of lost love; François’s Canadian wife, Barbara, who is as magnetic as she is resentful; their two daughters (one, an aspiring novelist, a stand-in for the author); and even more characters and family members, all beautifully realised. This is a pointillist novel, profound in its portrayal of strains, bonds, and heartbreak. – TA
Published 23 May by Fleet
A Person is a Prayer by Ammar Kalia
Soulful, funny and daring, this debut from London’s Ammar Kalia is based on his own family’s migration from India to England by way of Kenya. The novel begins with an arranged marriage between Bedi and Sushma, and ends with their three children, Selena, Tara and Rohan, spreading their father’s ashes six decades later. A plaintive and refreshing take on a cross-generational saga, A Person is a Prayer explores the ways in which searching for a conclusive sense of home can so often leave a person stranded. From the rapids of the Ganges to a Hounslow kitchen, Kalia’s prose is transportive, offering a microscopic view of the emotional tissue that binds a family together. – Daniel Rodgers
Published 30 May by Oldcastle Books
The Memo by Rachel Dodes and Lauren Mechling
Do you ever wonder if everyone else somehow got a secret leg up, insider knowledge, or even just a map to navigate the proverbial lay of the land? Such is the premise of Rachel Dodes and Lauren Mechling’s charming new novel, The Memo. The hapless heroine, Jenny Green, has been toiling away at her nonprofit job in a non-coastal city while college classmates and peers have been ascending to more prestigious positions. Jenny doesn’t exactly mind where her life has taken her, but she is dogged by that universal preoccupation: what if? A surprise (and somewhat supernatural) encounter allows her to relive certain episodes in her life, and she sets off on a twisting and circuitous adventure to find out just what her life could have been. A moderniSed Sliding Doors set amid a delightfully specific milieu, this is a paranormal parable with a very relatable heart. – CS
Published 20 June by Dialogue Books
Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski
Alina Grabowski’s Women and Children First is a novel built from interlocking stories, each chapter told from the perspective of a different woman living in a down-at-the-heels coastal New England town. In less capable hands, such rapid shifts might have a disorienting effect, but the book spins an entrancing web, the stories channelling the spirit of Mary Gaitskill and subtly building to reveal more and more about the town’s inhabitants. They include a teenage loner who has begun an affair with one of the teachers at her school; the PTA president, whose overbearing energies are an attempt to divert attention from the disarray in her own home; and the mother of a local teen who has died an untimely death. The cause of that death is the nominal mystery of Women and Children First, but the book is more about the secrets we keep and the lies we tell to remain hidden from one another. – CS
Published 11 July by The Indigo Press
