The Best Books We Read in 2024

by The New Yorker

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24 books

Each week, our editors and critics recommend the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Now, as 2024 comes to an end, we’ve chosen a dozen essential reads in nonfiction and a dozen, too, in fiction and poetry.

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

The Achilles Trap

Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq

Steve Coll, 2024

All Fours

Miranda July, 2024

The Anthropologists

Aysegül Savas, 2024

The Burning Earth: A History

Sunil Amrith, 2024

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)

Solvej Balle, 2024

Challenger

A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

Adam Higginbotham, 2024

The Empusium

A Health Resort Horror Story

Olga Tokarczuk, 2024

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

Jonathan Blitzer, 2024

Forest of Noise

Mosab Abu Toha, 2024

The Freaks Came Out to Write

The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture

Tricia Romano, 2024

Health and Safety

Emily Witt, 2024

Intermezzo

Sally Rooney, 2024

James

Percival Everett, 2024

Knife

Meditations After an Attempted Murder

Salman Rushdie, 2024

LatinoLand

A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

Marie Arana, 2024

The Light Eaters

The New Science of Plant Intelligence

Zoë Schlanger, 2024

Madness

Race and Insanity in America

Antonia Hylton, 2024

The Mighty Red

Louise Erdrich, 2024

Modern Poetry

Diane Seuss, 2024

Patriot

Alexei Navalny, 2024

My Friends

Hisham Matar, 2024

Reagan: His Life and Legend

Rejection

Tony Tulathimutte, 2024

Silence of the Choir

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, 2024