Best Books of 2024

For three years running, while considering which books will make up our Atlantic 10 list, we have asked ourselves the same basic questions: Which stories this year brought unexpected clarity to the subjects that most confounded our understanding? Which of them opened up new, enlivening ways of thinking about things we only thought we knew? This effort feels particularly valuable at a moment when the world is changing rapidly and dramatically.

Each of our 10 resulting selections is a triumph of alchemy, deriving insight from fresh combinations of dismay and delight, tragedy and comedy, mourning and hope. Two memoirs vividly focus on specific lives while also displaying the power of history to shape the individual. Sometimes a bracing perspective emerges through formal play, as in a tight epic of a poem about an atrocity. It can come through an adventure story that reimagines an American classic, or from dogged reporting on systemic failures that lead to foreseeable catastrophes. The feature that distinguishes all of these titles—or any book worth cherishing—is the surprising experience of reading them.