A year of remarkable fiction — a Pulitzer for Percival Everett, a Booker for Samantha Harvey, Sanderson concluding a decade-long arc, and Rooney's long-awaited return. These are the 12 books that defined 2024.
A radical reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from Jim's perspective — a man of intelligence, depth, and survival strategies entirely invisible to Twain's white narrator. Everett's novel is both a literary masterwork and a searing act of reparation, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and establishing itself as an instant American classic.
Six astronauts circle Earth sixteen times in twenty-four hours — and the novel moves with them, using their orbit as a structure for meditation on humanity seen from above. Harvey's Booker Prize winner is the most formally ambitious novel of 2024: spare, beautiful, and quietly devastating in what it reveals about the planet below.
A young woman enlists as an Army nurse in Vietnam and returns to a country that doesn't want to acknowledge she was there. Hannah's most ambitious novel yet — meticulously researched, emotionally shattering, and a long-overdue tribute to the women who served and were erased from the official history of the Vietnam War.
A woman in her mid-forties sets out on a cross-country drive, stops at a motel twenty minutes from home, and never leaves — and from that stillness, one of the strangest and most honest accounts of female desire, ageing, and the body's rebellion against its own diminishment. July at her most boundary-pushing and most essential.
The fifth and final book of the first Stormlight Archive arc — the conclusion of a 1.3-million-word journey that began in 2010. Sanderson delivers on every promise made across the preceding volumes with characteristic generosity, and the Kaladin arc reaches a resolution that readers will be thinking about for years.
Two brothers — a chess prodigy and a Dublin lawyer — each fall into unexpected love after their father's death. Rooney's fourth novel is her warmest and most generous, trading some of the cool detachment of her earlier work for genuine emotional openness. The characterisation of Ivan is her finest yet.
A girl disappears from a Adirondack summer camp in 1975 — and decades earlier, another girl disappeared from the same camp. Lauren Greco's debut weaves between timelines to reveal a family's darkest secrets across generations. One of 2024's most gripping literary thrillers.
A woman is left by her fiancé for his childhood best friend — and ends up becoming roommates with said best friend's ex. Henry's most structurally clever rom-com yet, this is the novel that confirmed her as the definitive voice of contemporary romance and proved she keeps getting better with each book.
The long-awaited sequel to Brooklyn — Eilis Lacey, now middle-aged on Long Island, returns to Enniscorthy when her husband's infidelity forces a crisis. Tóibín writes with the restraint and precision of the original, and the result is a meditation on the choices we made decades ago and the selves we can still become.
A retired maths teacher inherits a cottage on Ibiza from a mysterious friend and discovers something inexplicable in the sea. Haig's magical realism is gentler than literary fiction, warmer than genre fantasy — this is exactly what his readers love, delivered with skill: the idea that the world contains more wonder than we've been led to believe.
The third Empyrean novel — Violet and Xaden's story deepens as the war against the venin escalates and the secrets of the wards are revealed. Yarros demonstrates that Fourth Wing was not a one-off; the series has grown in ambition and emotional complexity with each instalment.
Not to be confused with Everett's novel of the same name, McBride's James is an alternative history of the American West following a Black man searching for his children. McBride writes with the same energy and moral seriousness that made The Good Lord Bird and Deacon King Kong essential American novels.