The 10 Best Books of 2024
The staff of The New York Times Book Review choose the year’s top fiction and nonfiction.
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Here they are — the 10 Best Books of 2024.
At the Book Review, we spend all year getting ready for this moment. We begin debating our annual best-of list in the spring, going to the mat for what we love. By fall, we’re preparing for rhetorical slugfests.
Ultimately, we aim to pick the books that made lasting impressions: the stories that imprinted on our hearts and psyches, the examining of lives that deepened what we thought we already knew.
We delve into each of these books on a special edition of the Book Review podcast, and we break down three picks in a handy video. For even more great books, take a spin through all 100 Notable Books of 2024, or even this list, which features every book we’ve anointed the best since 2000.
Fiction
All Fours
By Miranda July
July’s second novel, which follows a married mother and artist who derails a solo cross-country road trip by checking into a motel close to home and starting an affair with a younger rental-car worker, was the year’s literary conversation piece, dubbed “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40” and “the first great perimenopause novel” in just two of many articles that wrestled with its themes. Sexually frank and laced with the novelist’s loopy humor, the book ends up posing that most universal question: What would you risk to change your life? Read our review.
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