The Best Books of 2024

Each week, our editors and critics recommend the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. (Subscribers to The New Yorker have unlimited access to our definitive list.) Now, as 2024 comes to an end, we’ve chosen a dozen essential reads in nonfiction and a dozen, too, in fiction and poetry. The Essential Reads

The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll (Penguin Press) Nonfiction | It has been tempting to view the C.I.A. as omniscient. Yet Coll’s chastening new book about the events leading up to the Iraq War, in 2003, shows just how often the agency was flying blind. Washington’s failure to foresee Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, in 1990, was just one of what Coll calls a “cascade of errors” that would start several wars and end many lives. Saddam saw spies around every corner. This was reasonable, given the C.I.A.’s history, but Coll indicates that it was exactly the wrong fear. U.S. intelligence had missed Saddam’s Kuwait-invasion preparations, his nuclear program, and his subsequent disarmament. His real problem was not what the C.I.A. knew but what it didn’t. Buy on Amazon or Bookshop Read more: “When the C.I.A. Messes Up,” by Daniel Immerwahr

All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead) Fiction | July’s second novel is a study of crisis—the crisis being how middle age changes sex, marriage, and ambition. The unnamed narrator is a forty-five-year-old in L.A. with a mellow music-producer husband and a precocious seven-year-old. Less than an hour into a solo road trip to New York, she stops at a gas station, where a young man cleans her windshield. Soon the pair has succumbed to a magnetic, earth-shattering attraction, and the narrator has checked into a nearby motel, where she renovates her room in the style of an opulent Parisian hotel. The room becomes a love nest, of a kind, but a terrible deadline looms. The narrator’s putative road trip must end. What will happen when she goes home to face her life? July’s moving, very funny book is at once buoyant about the possibilities of starting over and clear-eyed about its costs. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop Read more: “Miranda July Turns the Lights On,” by Alexandra Schwartz

FROM OUR PAGES The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury) Fiction | A young couple, who live in a city far from both of their home countries and their families, is searching for an apartment to buy. In this subtle and resonant novel, which grew out of a story published in the magazine, Savaş charts the way we sometimes choose—and sometimes drift into—the path to our future. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith (Norton) Nonfiction | In this expansive book, a historian places the earth’s ecological plight in the context of human exploitation. Amrith’s inventory of crucial events begins with the Charter of the Forest of 1217, which granted common people rights to England’s forests. Surveying gold-mining operations in South Africa and oil extraction in Baku, among other enterprises, Amrith recognizes the inseparability of environmental distress and political, economic, and social factors. As he recounts attempts by human beings to squeeze value out of natural resources, he also examines changing attitudes about our relationship to the natural world, which we have long regarded—erroneously, he argues—as separate from, rather than symbiotic with, our species. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland (New Directions) Fiction | This philosophical novel consists of the diary entries of a woman for whom the days have ceased to pass. After a seemingly quotidian afternoon in Paris, the antiquarian bookseller Tara Selter wakes up in her hotel room the next morning only to find the same day happening again. As Tara relives the day—November 18th—she tinkers with variations, considers possible explanations, describes her plight to her husband, and writes. At once a meditation on climate change (because Tara’s calendar never turns, neither does the weather) and an experiment with fictional form, Balle’s novel is also a startling exploration of profound questions about language, human connection, and time. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham (Avid Reader) Nonfiction | This comprehensive history of NASA’s Challenger space shuttle, which exploded shortly after launching on its tenth flight, in 1986, deftly balances a detailed accounting of what led to the disaster with a celebration of the engineers and astronauts who participated in the mission. The most painful passages here show how political maneuvering and cost cutting kneecapped the shuttle program from the very start; in lieu of the fourteen billion dollars it had initially asked for, NASA accepted an offer from Congress of just five and a half billion dollars, what Higginbotham calls “the first of many fatal compromises.” The bureaucratic negligence and ineptitude stands in sharp contrast to the excellence of the crew members, including Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who hoped to become the first “average citizen” in space. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

FROM OUR PAGES The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead) Fiction | In the Polish Nobel Prize winner’s first novel since the epic “Books of Jacob,” Mieczysław Wojnicz, a child in turn-of-the-century Galicia, grows up in a world of men. His mother is dead, and his father and his uncle, who believe that “the blame for both national disasters and educational failures lay with a soft upbringing that encouraged girlishness, mawkishness, and passivity,” force him constantly to prove his manliness—by braving a toad-ridden cellar or eating duck’s blood soup. He is also taken to many mysterious doctor’s appointments. Years later, as a young man, Mieczysław finds himself recovering from tuberculosis at a “health resort” in the mountains, where strange and sinister things begin to happen. Eventually, Mieczysław discovers the truth both about the town he’s in and about himself. An excerpt from the novel first appeared in the magazine. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

FROM OUR PAGES Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer (Penguin Press) Nonfiction | Blitzer weaves together a series of deeply personal portraits to trace the history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s a complicated tale, spanning the lives of multiple generations of migrants and lawmakers, in both Central America and Washington, D.C. Blitzer doesn’t pretend to offer easy policy solutions; instead, he devotedly and eloquently documents the undeniable cause of what has become a regional quagmire: the individual right and unfailing will to survive. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha (Knopf) Poetry | Shadowed by the spectre of Israeli warplanes, bombs, and drones, the poems in this haunting collection arrive as dispatches from the rubble of Gaza. Abu Toha, a notable Palestinian poet, speaks of the besieged and the dead in a register that veers deftly, often brutally, between the plainspoken and the lyrical: “In Jabalia Camp, a mother collects her daughter’s / flesh in a piggy bank, / hoping to buy her a plot / on a river in a faraway land.” Throughout, he addresses his own family—his deceased brother, whose grave lay in a cemetery “razed by / Israeli bulldozers and tanks”; his late grandfather, whose “oranges / no longer grow / in his weeping groves.” In this penetrating collection, poetry is not a balm; it is an elegy. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano (PublicAffairs) Nonfiction | In the opening pages of Romano’s raucous oral history of the Village Voice, Howard Blum, a former staff writer, declares the paper “a precursor to the internet.” The Voice was founded in 1955, when the persistence of silence and constraint were more plausibly imagined than a world awash in personal truths; in its coverage of everything from City Hall to CBGB to the odd foreign revolution, the Voice demonstrated a radical embrace of the subjective, of lived experience over expertise. In Romano’s book, writers dish on their favorite editors, the paper’s peak era, and when and why it all seemed to go wrong. The story unfolds like the kind of epic, many-roomed party that invokes the spirit of other parties and their immortal ghosts. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop Read more: “How the Village Voice Met Its Moment,” by Michelle Orange

FROM OUR PAGES Health and Safety by Emily Witt (Pantheon) Nonfiction | While chronicling her work as a journalist, her experiments with drugs and altered consciousness in the rave scene, and the cataclysmic events of the pandemic and ensuing lockdown, Witt, a staff writer, hauntingly captures an era in her life and in the life of the nation. Sections about the rise of youth activism, Beto O’Rourke’s Presidential campaign, a gun-rights rally in Virginia, and the return of New York’s club culture originally appeared in the magazine, where the riveting story of the end of a relationship was excerpted. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

FROM OUR PAGES Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Fiction | Two brothers, a one-time chess prodigy in his early twenties and a lawyer in his thirties, are mourning the death of their father and trying to make sense of who they are to each other—and to the women whom they might love. “Intermezzo,” Rooney’s subtle and powerful new novel, was excerpted in the magazine’s summer fiction issue. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

James by Percival Everett (Doubleday) Fiction | Since releasing his début work of fiction, in 1983, Everett has published roughly a novel every other year in addition to dozens of short stories, essays, and articles, plus a children’s book and a half-dozen poetry collections. His fictional protagonists have included ornery cowpokes and professors of esoterica. Much of his work is narrated in the first person, yet his “I” is often a fragmentary and destabilizing affair. In “James,” he retells the story of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved companion Jim. Conferring interiority upon perhaps the most famous fictional emblem of American slavery after Uncle Tom, the book seems to participate in the marketable trope of “writing back” from the margins. But there is no easy way to categorize what Everett is up to with this searching account of a man’s manifold liberation. The novel’s title is the name Jim chooses for himself. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop Read more: “Percival Everett Can’t Say What His Novels Mean,” by Maya Binyam

Knife by Salman Rushdie (Random House) Nonfiction | In August, 2022, more than thirty years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the killing of Salman Rushdie, an assassin came running at him. The man stabbed Rushdie as he was addressing an audience in Chautauqua, New York, and kept on doing so for nearly half a minute. Rushdie’s first thought was “So it’s you.” His second thought was “Why now?” Rushdie’s short masterpiece is a memoir about almost dying, the miracle of surviving, and being reconciled to a threat that could not be forgotten or outrun: “Living was my victory. But the meaning the knife had given my life was my defeat.” Ultimately, his account is an inspiration. “After the angel of death, the angel of life.” Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

LatinoLand by Marie Arana (Simon & Schuster) Nonfiction | An overwhelming amount of cultural production about Latinos—books, news-media coverage, even the National Museum of the American Latino—seems to be perpetually in the act of explaining this minority group. In an effort to move past this continual Latino 101, Arana has produced one of the broadest portrayals available of this vastly diverse population of more than sixty million people, one that deconstructs the most pervasive stereotypes around them. She reminds us that, contrary to popular belief, Latinos are of every skin color, many religions and nationalities, and a multiplicity of languages and partisan affiliations. What then, Arana asks, is this identifying term for? And, for that, she offers a very good answer. That is to say that Latino is primarily a political identity. So Arana narrates the extraordinary work of activists who have fought for decades to build this sense of connectedness as part of their battles for rights and opportunity within the fabric of America, to which, she makes clear, Latinos are essential. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop Read more: “Who Are Latino Americans Today?,” by Graciela Mochkofsky

The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger (Harper) Nonfiction | The contemporary world of botany is divided over the matter of how plants sense the world and whether they can be said to communicate. But research in recent decades has prompted the question that animates Schlanger’s book: Are plants intelligent? Schlanger writes about scientists who are studying how plants change their shape and respond to sound, how they use electricity to convey information, how they send one another chemical signals. Along the way, she becomes a sort of anthropologist of botanists. The book’s focus on the researchers themselves overcomes a challenge inherent to science writing: where to find drama. “The Light Eaters” is a special piece of science writing for the way it solves the genre’s bind; it doesn’t force people or their findings into narrative engines. Instead, the field of botany itself functions like a character, one undergoing a potentially radical change, with all the excitement, discomfort, and uncertainty that transformation brings. The book’s power comes from showing a field in flux and reminding us that ideas have their own life cycles: from crackpot theory to utter embarrassment to real possibility to the stuff of textbooks. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop Read more: “A New Book About Plant Intelligence Highlights the Messiness of Scientific Change,” by Rachel Riederer

Madness by Antonia Hylton (Legacy Lit) Nonfiction | In this haunting book, a Peabody Award-winning journalist traces the history of a segregated asylum. Established in 1911 as the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland, Crownsville Hospital served as a “dumping ground” for Black people deemed unsuitable for everyday American life—many of them people who challenged white supremacy, such as civil-rights protesters and shattered servicemen. Braiding a decade of archival research with oral histories from former patients and caregivers, Hylton anatomizes not only the failures of the asylum, which forced its patients into servitude, but also those of a political leadership and a society that routinely alienated and demonized its most vulnerable. As she assesses the endemic racial violence that led to Crownsville’s existence, the legacy of which still shapes America today, she asks, “How could you not go mad?” Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich (Harper) Fiction | Set in the pinched period after the 2008 financial crisis, this absorbing novel takes place in a sugar-beet farming community in North Dakota’s Red River Valley. Kismet Poe, a young Ojibwe woman, has recently married a brash farmer with a troubled past, even though she loves somebody else. The situation leaves her feeling like a near-hostage, living on her husband’s farm with his controlling mother. Erdrich, who has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, paints a richly textured portrait of her idiosyncratic characters’ lives while exploring such themes as tribal land ownership and environmental degradation. After watching a fine sunset, Kismet confronts the gravity of their community’s main industry: “Pain shot through her at the widening arc of her knowing,” Erdrich writes, as Kismet realizes that everything she and her family do on the farm is “destroying what she had just witnessed, the joinery of creation.” Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss (Graywolf) Poetry | Seuss’s sixth collection is a mock primer for understanding poetry, with its poems titled after devices and forms such as simile, allegory, and ballad—conventions which, in the book, serve as jumping-off points for verse that is at turns freewheeling and disarmingly personal. Her conversational voice and precise images unite dream and memory, bringing her mother and old lovers, shabby housing and dive bars, into her mind’s eye. Particularly striking are poems that trace Seuss’s development, examining her education, the “unscholarliness” of her working-class upbringing, and her early encounters with poetic forebears. Still, personal experience is always presented in service of making something new: “You will mispronounce / words in front of a crowd. It cannot be / avoided. But your poems . . . will be your own.” Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

My Friends by Hisham Matar (Random House) Fiction | In April of 1984, a demonstration outside the Libyan Embassy in St. James’s Square, in London, brought supporters of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and his “popular revolution” up against protesters in opposition. The demonstration had barely begun when shots were fired from the Embassy’s windows. Eleven protesters were injured, and a policewoman was killed: all the spokes of Matar’s lingering, melancholy new novel connect to this transforming event. “My Friends” is narrated by a Libyan exile named Khaled Abd al Hady, who has lived in London for thirty-two years. One evening, in 2016, Khaled decides to walk home from St. Pancras station, where he has seen off an old friend who is heading for Paris, and he is drawn to return to the square because he was one of the demonstrators outside the Embassy back in 1984, alongside two Libyan men who would become his closest friends. As he walks, Khaled reprises the history of their intense triangular friendship, the undulations of their lives, and the shape and weight of their exile. Khaled himself maintains a mysterious inertia that turns Matar’s narrative into a deep and detailed exploration not so much of abandonment as of self-abandonment: the story of a man split in two, one who cannot quite tell the story that would make the parts cohere again. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop Read more: “Hisham Matar’s Latest Novel Explores a Divided Soul,” by James Wood

FROM OUR PAGES Patriot by Alexei Navalny (Knopf) Nonfiction | In 2020, the Russian opposition leader and anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny was poisoned at the hands of the F.S.B. During his recovery, Navalny began writing his memoir, “Patriot”; he continued to keep a diary after he was arrested and imprisoned in the “special regime” colony known as Polar Wolf, north of the Arctic Circle. Writing throughout his captivity, until his death in February, 2024, he recounts his political career, details the harsh conditions of his confinement, and implores the Russian people to “not lose the will to resist.” The book was excerpted in the magazine. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop

Reagan by Max Boot (Liveright) Nonfiction | A movement conservative turned Never Trumper, Boot set out to explore where the G.O.P. went wrong by writing a biography of Ronald Reagan, and the result is a definitive one. Boot idolized Reagan while growing up, but his book is not a defense of Reagan as the Last Good Republican. It takes up Reagan’s hostility to civil rights and Medicare, and deems him complicit in the “hard-right turn” that “helped set the G.O.P.—and the country—on the path” to Donald Trump. And yet Boot sees a redeeming quality as well: Reagan could relax his ideology. He was an anti-tax crusader who oversaw large tax hikes, an opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment who appointed the first female Supreme Court Justice, and a diehard anti-Communist who made peace with Moscow. He had relinquished “the dogmas of a lifetime,” Boot writes. This biography carries a pointed message for conservatives: Reagan achieved greatness, Boot argues, by abandoning his ideology. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop Read more: “What if Ronald Reagan’s Presidency Never Really Ended?,” by Daniel Immerwahr

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (HarperCollins) Fiction | In this collection of linked short stories, the author of 2016’s “Private Citizens” gives loserdom its own rancid carnival. Tulathimutte understands the project—both his own and that of his characters—with diagnostic, comprehensive hyper-precision; as you behold his parade of marketplace failure and personal pathology, he’s ten steps ahead of any reaction you could muster. Thus, you simply surrender to the sick pleasure of watching humiliating people humiliate themselves, as when a clammy self-styled feminist ally gets shut down by a girl and goes, “Grrr, friend-zoned again!” while shaking his fists at the ceiling, then creates a dating profile that includes the line “Unshakably serious about consent. Abortion’s #1 fan.” These are two of the mildest things to happen in this incredibly depraved book. Buy on Amazon | Bookshop Read more: “A Story Collection About People Who Just Can’t Hang,” by Jia Tolentino

The Silence of the Choir by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa) Fiction | In this ambitious novel by a winner of the Goncourt Prize, seventy-two African asylum seekers arrive in a fictional town in rural Sicily after a harrowing journey, only to find themselves at the center of an ideological battle that splinters the community. Sarr moves adroitly between the viewpoints of a wide cast of characters—refugees, politicians, advocacy workers, xenophobic vigilantes, a priest, an eminent poet—while probing the complexities of Europe’s debate over asylum. Ultimately, the novel suggests that it is not only members of the far right, “obsessed with their phobia,” who deserve excoriation but also those more sympathetic to migrants’ plights who nonetheless “reduce a refugee to a walking tragedy.” Buy on Amazon | Bookshop View our definitive list of the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books of 2024.