The Best Books of 2024

by The Economist

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84 books

Readers will never think the same way again about games, horses and spies.

Read more... Read less...

See the source list and commentary at www.economist.com

Biography and memoir

The Editor

How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America

Sara B. Franklin, 2024

Kingmaker

Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue

Sonia Purnell, 2024

Maurice and Maralyn

Shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards Non-Fiction Award 2024

Sophie Elmhirst, 2024

Metamorphoses

In Search of Franz Kafka

Karolina Watroba, 2024

One Way Back

Christine Blasey Ford, 2024

Patriot

Alexei Navalny, 2024

Troubled

A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class

Rob Henderson, 2024

Wild Thing

A Life of Paul Gauguin

Sue Prideaux, 2024

Business, economics and technology

The Afterlife of Data

What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care

Carl Öhman, 2024

The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck

David Spiegelhalter, 2025

Co-Intelligence

Living and Working with AI

Ethan Mollick, 2024

Dark Wire

The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever

Joseph Cox, 2024

An Economist's History of the World

Andrew Leigh, 2024

Money

A Story of Humanity

David McWilliams, 2024

Playing with Reality

How Games Have Shaped Our World

Kelly Clancy, 2024

The Power and the Money

The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry

Tevi Troy, 2024

Slow Productivity

The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

Cal Newport, 2024

The Whole Story

Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism

John Mackey, 2024

Culture and arts

All That Glitters

A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art

Orlando Whitfield, 2024

The Book-Makers

A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives

Adam Smyth, 2024

Cue the Sun!

The Invention of Reality TV

Emily Nussbaum, 2024

Get the Picture

A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See

Bianca Bosker, 2024

Gobsmacked!

The British Invasion of American English

Ben Yagoda, 2024

The Haunted Wood

A History of Childhood Reading

Sam Leith, 2024

Origin Uncertain

Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology

Anatoly Liberman, 2024

Reading Genesis

Marilynne Robinson, 2024

Stranger Than Fiction

Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

Edwin Frank, 2024

Written in Water

The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art

Rochelle Gurstein, 2024

Fiction

Creation Lake

Rachel Kushner, 2024

The Empusium

A Health Resort Horror Story

Olga Tokarczuk, 2024

Fire Exit

Morgan Talty, 2024

Going Home

Tom Lamont, 2025

The Granddaughter

Bernhard Schlink, 2025

The Heart in Winter

Kevin Barry, 2024

Help Wanted: A Novel

Adelle Waldman, 2024

Hum

Helen Phillips, 2024

Intermezzo

Sally Rooney, 2024

James

Percival Everett, 2024

Karla's Choice

A John le Carré Novel

Nick Harkaway, 2024

Long Island

Colm Toibin, 2024

Mania

Lionel Shriver, 2024

Our Evenings

Alan Hollinghurst, 2024

Playground: A Novel

Richard Powers, 2024

The Road to the Country

Chigozie Obioma, 2024

The Safekeep

Yael van der Wouden, 2024

Silence of the Choir

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, 2024

History

The Eastern Front

A History of the First World War

Nick Lloyd, 2024

Every Living Thing

The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

Jason Roberts, 2024

The Forbidden Garden

The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice

Simon Parkin, 2024

The Horse

A Galloping History of Humanity

Timothy C. Winegard, 2024

How the World Made the West

A 4,000 Year History

Josephine Quinn, 2024

Impossible Monsters

Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion

Michael Taylor, 2024

The Invention of Good and Evil

A World History of Morality

Hanno Sauer, 2024

Medieval Horizons

Why the Middle Ages Matter

Ian Mortimer, 2023

Nexus

A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Yuval Noah Harari, 2024

Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires

David Chaffetz, 2024

Reagan: His Life and Legend

Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World

David Van Reybrouck, 2024

Smoke and Ashes

Opium's Hidden Histories

Amitav Ghosh, 2024

Spycraft

Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration

Nadine Akkerman, Pete Langman, 2024

The Siege

A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World

Ben Macintyre, 2024

Venice

The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City

Dennis. Romano, 2023

Why War?

Richard Overy, 2024

The Wide Wide Sea

Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

Hampton Sides, 2024

Politics and current affairs

Autocracy, Inc.

The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

Anne Applebaum, 2024

Born to Rule

The Making and Remaking of the British Elite

Aaron S. Reeves, Professor of Sociology and Social Policy Aaron Reeves, Sam Friedman, 2024

Counter-Intelligence

What the Secret World Can Teach Us about Performance and Creativity

Robert Hannigan, 2024

Failed State

Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It

Sam Freedman, 2025

How Tyrants Fall

And How Nations Survive

Marcel Dirsus, 2024

Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood

Keith J. Hayward, 2024

Our Enemies Will Vanish

The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence

Yaroslav Trofimov, 2024

Twenty Years

Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation

Sune Engel Rasmussen, 2024

World on the Brink

How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century

Dmitri Alperovitch, Garrett M. Graff, 2024

The Year of Living Constitutionally

One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Meaning

A.J. Jacobs, 2024

Science and health

The Anxious Generation

How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

Jonathan Haidt, 2024

The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets

Thomas R. Cech, 2024

The Genetic Book of the Dead

A Darwinian Reverie

Richard Dawkins, 2024

Gray Matters

A Biography of Brain Surgery

Theodore H. Schwartz, 2024

More and More and More

An All-Consuming History of Energy

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, 2024

Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin

Howard Markel, 2024

Reentry

SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age

Eric Berger, 2024

Tits Up: The Top Half of Women's Liberation

Sarah Thornton, 2024

Twelve Trees

The Deep Roots of Our Future

Daniel Lewis, 2024

The Underworld

Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean

Susan Casey, 2023