The Best (New) Books I Read in 2024
It was recently announced that Sarah Jessica Parker will be joining the jury for the 2025 Booker Prize, a preeminent award for literary fiction published in the U.K. and Ireland. Huh, you might say, she’s neither a literary fiction writer nor is she British—and you’d be right! But that’s not what’s stuck in my craw. In reading about the announcement, I learned that jury members have to read roughly 150 novels over seven months. Assuming those are our longest months, that’s going to require three-quarters of a book a day.
To be fair, a lot of eligible novels are delightfully short; this year’s winner, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey—which I was enthusiastically emoting over a few weeks before the Booker announcement—is only 144 pages. But Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellman, which was on the 2019 shortlist, is over one thousand.
All that is to say, reading 150 books in slightly over half a year is a huge task, even if you’re rich enough to contract out all your housework, childcare, personal admin, and pesky tasks like “eating enough to stay alive.” At least, that’s my excuse for reading only about 50 books this year. I still had to work and cook and take care of loved ones. You probably did too—and that work (however much you may value it) won’t stop. So because reading is also, sometimes, my job, please borrow from the fruits of my labor and let me help you wade through the never-ending answers to “What should I read next?” with my favorite new books of 2024.
How to Leave the House, Nathan Newman
Natwest lives in a provincial English town, and after years of toiling away there following high school, he’s finally heading to college tomorrow at the age of 23. But first, he needs to get the package that the postal service allegedly tried to deliver early this morning. As far as narrative devices for getting an idiosyncratic narrator into their idiosyncratic environs, the package is a good one, and its contents are deeply relevant to a young queer man who feels like his life is finally about to start. Natwest is clearly based on Newman in some ways, which makes the novel’s biting Gen Z commentary feel that much more incisive (or maybe it just made me, an admitted millennial, feel less bad about finding it so funny).
Besides being extremely fun and surprisingly endearing, How to Leave the House also features some fascinating side characters whom I'd happily have read about for much longer: a dentist who paints mouths (and whose neighbors-slash-patients are the unknowing subjects of his works); a snarky teenage girl trying to handle the consequences of pretending to be an adult online; and an imam whose love of old films is censored by his uber-devout wife.
Any Person Is the Only Self, Elisa Gabbert
This book of short, beautiful essays loosely centered upon the theme of literary criticism might not have crossed your radar. Or, if it did, it may not have stuck out, and for that, I can only blame the vagaries of marketing, because there’s no succinct way to sum up this lovely book.
One essay opens with Janet Malcolm’s review of Gossip Girl (the books, and one of many, many pieces I had to pause my reading to go track down); two pages later, she’s woven in the memoir by Norman Podhoretz, a literary neoconservative. But even though some (most?) of Gabbert’s references may not be top-of-mind for every reader, her work is not a brag that she’s read more than you, unlike much of contemporary literary criticism. She’s just read a lot, thought about it a lot, and now really wants to share it with whoever will read it.
This book is ultimately for anyone who's ever read, written, or created, or thought about reading, writing, or creating. It’s a beautiful, quiet, approachable book. (And if you're a Sylvia Plath head, take my positive review and double it.)
Devil Is Fine was published in June, so publishing math means it was probably mostly written in 2023 (if not earlier). But its identification of the reactionary swing of the last 18 months made it feel impressively timely when I read it in November—and I strongly suspect that ideological trend will only become more relevant. Vercher’s unnamed narrator is a biracial writing professor whose novel about identity and experience was critically acclaimed in the post-Black Lives Matter publishing frenzy. He’s now facing pressure to publish again, this time about something else, and his university colleagues are masking their racism less and less.
Then his teenage son, Malcolm, dies. And he inherits land from Malcom’s (white) great-grandfather. Upon which the skeleton of an enslaved person is found. That's where the magical realism—and the bureaucracy—kicks in.
Our narrator has clearly been Going Through It for years (if not his whole life), but the trauma of losing his child has broken something in him, loosening his connection to the world and thrusting upon him the ability to see the past. It's at first somewhat jarring for this pretty straightforward novel to take such a turn into the quasi-supernatural, but it becomes clear that what Vercher has actually done is tap into the tailspin that sudden trauma and grief can send a person in to.
Role Play, Clara Drummond (trans. Daniel Hahn)
So much happens in this dark, semi-satirical, stream-of-consciousness novela that I keep forgetting it is just over 100 pages. It takes place within the upper echelons of Brazilian society, where the very-rich do everything they can to compete with the super-rich (from sending their children to elite universities abroad to ignoring sexual misconduct against their kid). Vivian is one of the merely very-rich and makes some half-assed attempts to abandon her milieu for a more middle-class one, but mostly chooses to be very cynical about it and enjoy her proximity to good parties and drugs. She’s somewhat class-conscious and genuinely feels bad about rampant racism in her country, but she isn’t going to do anything about it. You do not like her, per se, but she is a compelling, pithy narrator. The fairly harrowing ending indicates Drummond might be readier to embrace a “burn it all down” ethos than the rest of the book suggests—but it works, and it kept me thinking.
Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, Emmeline Clein
I wrote a full piece about Dead Weight in March, so I’ll direct you there for a lengthier discussion of why you should read it, but the TLDR is: Eating disorders are so much more complicated—and interesting!—than fearmongering discussions in the media let on. Clein is a defender of those seeking comfort in eating disorder chatrooms, and is angry at a system that’s all too quick to write off young women in favor of maximizing profits for health insurance companies. (Sound familiar?)
This is a radicalizing, solidarity-building book by, for, and about people with eating disorders. “I’m trying to find out what might happen if we blame someone other than each other and ourselves for a change,” Clein writes.
Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood
Our nameless narrator—an accidental pattern on this list—is an older woman (either old middle age or young old age; I will not wade into the muddy waters of age discourse) who is obliquely discouraged in her environmentalism work and completely disengaged from her marriage (or, you could ask, is her marriage disengaged from her?), and visits a convent for a solo retreat of some sort. She leaves, but returns shortly thereafter for good, becoming a nun despite being apathetic, at best, about the concept of god.
This was another title on the Booker shortlist this year and, even though it’s already out in the U.K., it doesn’t come out in the U.S. until February 11. So, do future you a favor and pre-order it, and then sometime in the bleak midwinter a package will arrive that you’ll probably have forgotten about, and you’ll have a deeply engaging, somewhat mystical book to get you through.