We like to think of this list of the best books of 2024 as the anti-algorithm, a collection of specific, individual, and eclectic works that have piqued our interest, offered a romp, or genuinely moved the editors of Vogue. At a moment when the act of curation threatens to be overwhelmed by whatever cookies are tracking your clicks, we hope this list—and lists like it—serve as a counterweight, reacquainting you with an old friend or introducing you to something new.
It should, however, be read with a grain (a dash?) of salt: We read a lot, but we can’t read everything! And while one editor might have a predilection for crime fiction, the other is deep into historical romance. The peril of curation is that it’s an act of exclusion as much as inclusion. There are a few books on this list that some of us loved and others could not finish So consider this a wide-ranging sampling of what Vogue editors believe to be the best books of the year. Happy reading!
Sugar, Baby by Celine Saintclare (January)
Celine Saintclare’s debut novel, Sugar, Baby (Bloomsbury), depicts the glittering world of the young women who make a kind of living by showing up at clubs and restaurants to burnish their associations with youth and beauty. Are these women being taken advantage of—or are they on the ride of their lives? This personable novel, which charts the somewhat inadvertent trajectory of a girl who finds herself enmeshed among a group of more knowing models, to its credit, doesn’t come down on one side of the equation. Instead, it shows the grit alongside the glamor and crafts a very believable story that feels like a document of the moment, when image is a valuable and fleeting currency. —Chloe Schama
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid (January)
Another study of class and money arrives in Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (Putnam). Set on a college campus, with a chorus of voices filling out the multi-strand narrative, the novel depicts a group of University of Arkansas students, professors, and administrators. Campuses are not just centers of academic inquiry and nighttime misadventures, the novel shows, but intersections for people of vastly different resources. Reid, whose first novel probed the sometimes sticky relationship between a nanny and a mother, masterfully captures the quiet misalignments that stem from a varying sense of what’s at stake. This is a somewhat old-fashioned novel of manners that acutely captures the modern moment. —C.S.
Good Material by Dolly Alderton (January)
Dolly Alderton is something of a modern-day Nora Ephron, bringing a fresh and mordant perspective to the eternal struggle between the sexes. Her last novel, Ghosts, had the inscrutable male psyche as the subject of her narrator’s torment; her new novel, Good Material (Knopf), tells the story of a breakup from a tortured male perspective. Its narrator, Andy, is a 35-year-old London comic who has recently been abandoned by his more corporate-minded girlfriend after a years-long relationship and has found himself having to redefine his place in the world among his coupled-up peers. He has the instinct (if not the perspective in his lovelorn state) that—as Ephron would have put it—everything is copy, and the book finds the amusing angle in even the most poignant moments. —C. S.
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (February)
Over the course of a few short months, Sloane Crosley’s apartment was burgled and her best friend died. This coincidence becomes the backbone of a stunning investigation into the nature of loss that is Grief Is For People (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), an ambitious book lightened by strains of acerbic comedy. Crosley, who is perhaps best known for her effervescent essay collection I Was Told There’d Be Cake hasn’t abandoned her spritely wit, but she is looking more critically at what matters here. A quixotic hunt to reclaim stolen jewelry is intertwined with the equally insurmountable task of better understanding the friend she has lost—a prominent figure in the publishing industry. The loving and complex tribute Crosley has paid to him here will no doubt offer a bittersweet balm to many. —C.S.
Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison (February)
Leslie Jamison’s memoir, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story (Little Brown), tells the story of the end of her marriage, but it is also an account of motherhood and the way that a life-transforming event can cause a woman to feel as though a part of herself has fractured. Jamison, known and beloved for her clarion voice and her unflinching perception, has not shied away from self-interrogation in the past, but her new book is a particularly cutting account of her own decisions, motives, and desires. It is also an exceptional read, guiding her reader through her thrilling and bitter and fulfilling affairs of the heart. —C.S.
Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan (February)
Set in the not-so-remote past of the 1990s, Ordinary Human Failings (Little Brown) feels just distant enough to offer a remote landscape, devoid of cell phones and an immediate multicultural perspective that greater connectivity affords. The Green family is at the center of Megan Nolan’s gripping new novel; they’ve settled into insular life on a London housing estate, having haphazardly fled Ireland after the daughter, Carmel, becomes pregnant. Circling this unfortunate family is Tom, a hungry young tabloid reporter, who senses in the Greens just the kind of mess that his readers love to disdain. With her careful and caring novel, Nolan shows how misfortune can start with a few bad decisions and how culpability is entangled in providence and privilege. Her prose is slicing and exacting; this is a book that smarts but also comforts with its precise generosity. — C.S.
Evenings and Weekends by Oisin McKenna (March)
It’s a long, sweltering summer weekend in London, 2019. The cast of Oisin McKenna’s debut novel Evenings and Weekends (HarperCollins) are trying to handle the heatwave, commitments to each other, and their once cast-off and now creeping-back-in desires. Maggie is pregnant, in simmering turmoil as she decides to leave her beloved city to move back to her small English hometown with her boyfriend Ed—who’s hiding his own anxieties and past secrets that happen to interpolate with Maggie’s best friend Phil. Phil is an apathetic office worker who’s in love with his housemate Keith, who has a boyfriend—together they’re throwing a warehouse rave to end them all. Then there’s Phil’s mother Rosaleen, who is figuring out how to tell her son about her cancer diagnosis—if she can get through to him. McKenna, an award-winning spoken word artist and playwright, weaves together a story that slaloms queer identity and housing precarity, pregnancy and politics. It captures the London fug, equal parts energy and claustrophobia, full of rich observations and emotional detail. This is a complex love letter to the city, where chaos reigns but connection to yourself and others grows.—Anna Cafolla
The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan (March)
A young artist and composer wakes up in her New York apartment to a droning sound in her right ear. She’s diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, and the exact cause is unknown. This book of fiction actually began as an essay recording debut author Callahan’s own experiences—like our narrator, she was diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, just prior to the pandemic. The Hearing Test (Catapult) is a pitch-shifting, wry-humored novel that chronicles the year that follows: strange and quick encounters with former lovers and fair-weather friends, doctors, and artists. As complete silence approaches, the narrator seeks meaning and possibilities in other senses and the art of others, observing the world from the outside. Callahan’s cool, all-encompassing prose brings comparisons to Clarice Lispector and Fleur Jaeggy. It’s a work that lets you in on the frequencies of life we often tune out or obscure from sight.— A.C
Mother Doll: A Novel by Katya Apekina (March)
Katya Apekina begins Mother Doll (Abrams) from a point of desperation. Zhenia, a failed actor working as a medical translator, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant with a baby her husband clearly doesn’t want to keep, while her beloved grandmother is slowly dying thousands of miles away. So when our unmoored protagonist receives a call from a stranger named Paul, a psychic medium who claims to have contacted her great-grandmother Irina, a Russian revolutionary seeking absolution, she agrees to come along for the ride. Apekina expertly weaves a tale of how our long-gone ancestors’ actions bleed into subsequent generations. A formally experimental work, Mother Doll peppers this story that spans the Russian Revolution to early Obama-era America with a Greek chorus of dour—and gossipy—Russian ghosts. Apekina’s novel is not only a harrowing examination of generational trauma, but a damn funny one. Filled with sex, revolution, mediumship, and the occasional salient Russian historical figure, Mother Doll is a gripping read from the very first sentence. — Hannah Jackson
One Way Back by Christine Blasey Ford (March)
The long-anticipated memoir from Christine Blasey Ford, One Way Back (St. Martin’s Press), recounts the time in her life before the scientist’s name was emblazoned on T-shirts across America, before she became a kind of poster child for a post-Me Too fealty to the credibility of women, before, in short, she testified that she had been assaulted by a man who was lined up to assume a position on the Supreme Court. Today, in the wake of the overt politicization of the Court, it can be a little hard to conjure a time when such nominations felt impossibly consequential, but this memoir brings you there. It also paints a picture of the woman behind the complicated calculation to come forward with nuance and introspective insight. —C.S.
Change by Édouard Louis (March)
Change (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by the French writer Édouard Louis (The End of Eddy, Who Killed My Father), is a work of autofiction that reads a bit like the confessions of a madman: a breathless account of Louis’s hard-won transformation from Eddy Bellegueule, a lonely and beleaguered little boy from northern France, into a celebrated author and public intellectual. What makes it so unsettling? There’s the bracing directness of Louis’s prose, translated into English by John Lambert; the fitful structure, crammed with self-conscious annotations and swift shifts in form; the unsparing examination of poverty and extreme privilege in modern France (and, when you squint your eyes, sort of everywhere else too); the rendering of an appetite for better, different, more that can no longer reasonably be satisfied. Here, self-invention is an act of brutal violence with no discernible survivors. —Marley Marius
Memory Piece by Lisa Ko (March)
The follow-up to 2017’s National Book Award finalist The Leavers, Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece (Riverhead) is a moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New York’s art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades. The novel follows three friends from mall-bound suburban New Jersey teens into adulthood, as they forge their own paths in a rapidly changing world. Chafing against the assumptions projected on them as Asian American women and resisting the stifling expectations of their immigrant parents, they yearn for freedom—from the demands of race, gender, and family—while grasping at the expansive futures they once imagined. —Lisa Wong Macabasco
Ellipses by Vanessa Lawrence (March)
A wry and winning debut from Vanessa Lawrence, Ellipses (Dutton), charts the course of a mentor-mentee relationship as toxic as it is intoxicating. Lily, a 30-something magazine writer grappling with her role in the endangered ecosystem of prestige print media, slips into the thrall of a lopsided power dynamic with Billie, a cutthroat and self-assured beauty CEO who issues sharp adages from her lacquered thumbs. With the relationship conducted entirely over text, Lily’s life becomes suspended in a digital limbo of an anticipated blue text bubble, the ellipsis of the novel’s name. They meet when Lily is reporting on one of the “disease-oriented galas”—an Alzheimer’s Unforgettable Evening—and we accompany Lily on a roller coaster of self-doubt and eventual self-actualization set against the backdrop of the rise of digital media. Lawrence, who wrote for W and WWD for the better part of two decades, deploys her insider fluency with aplomb, describing the microaggressions of office politics as deftly as nepo-baby influencers turned vegan caterers. —Chloe Malle
Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman (March)
The events in Adelle Waldman’s fleet-footed novel, Help Wanted (Norton), take place at a box store of declining fortunes in upstate New York—a setting that in Waldman’s steady hands proves to be a crucible of ambition and survival. We are with Movement, the corporatized name given to the employees who show up at 4 a.m. to unload trucks full of household goods and move them to the retail floor. Waldman is unsentimental about her low-wage protagonists, investing them with foibles as well as everyday heroism, and she’s mesmerizing on the details of their work, the mechanical belts, the “throwing” of boxes, the meticulous unpacking. A single paragraph on the difficulty of untangling bras has thrilling specificity. In their petty and casually unempathetic supervisor, Meredith, the novel finds its engine of suspense, a middle-management villain whose team comes to believe must be promoted to be vanquished. —Taylor Antrim
Real Americans: A Novel by Rachel Khong (April)
Following up 2017’s acclaimed book Goodbye, Vitamin, Rachel Khong’s Real Americans (Knopf) is a sprawling tale of three generations of one Chinese American family. The ambitious novel traverses cities across Asia and the US over half a century, as decisions made in Mao-era China ripple through to Y2K New York City and the rural Pacific Northwest of the present day. Along the way, with shades of magical realism, it considers destiny, race, and privilege as its three main characters confront how their lives have been shaped by a confluence of biology, world events, their parents’ choices, and pure luck. Ultimately the novel excavates the tricky endeavor of breaking free from preordained destiny. — L.W.M.
The Limits by Nell Freudenberger (April)
The action in Nell Freudenberger’s busy and intelligent fourth novel, The Limits (Knopf), travels from Tahiti to East Hampton, charting a map of at-odds desire and teenage derangement along the way. We have Nathalie, a French marine biologist studying the catastrophic climate effects on coral in French Polynesia. Her ex-husband is Stephen, a Manhattan cardiologist overwhelmed by COVID, newly married to Kate, who is pregnant and ill at ease in Stephen’s well-cosseted life. Connecting these two worlds is Pia, Nathalie, and Stephen’s 15-year-old daughter, who arrives in New York from Tahiti for high school, longing to attach to someone and not sure how. Pia’s hothouse disaffection makes the idea of political action—a homemade bomb, an act of sabotage—irresistible. In Freudenberger’s worldly, sophisticated storytelling, characters who are essentially good fumble and cause accidents everywhere they go.—T.A.
Clear by Carys Davies (April)
On a remote island off the coast of Scotland, a lone tenant—insulated by distance and his own rare dialect from 19th-century society—is preventing the landowner from turning the property over to more profitable uses. A minister is engaged to convince the tenant to leave. But not long after he arrives on the island, he suffers a terrible accident and is forced to recuperate under the care of the very man he’s been sent to evict. This strange premise is the backdrop for the surprisingly gripping novel from Welsh novelist Carys Davies, Clear (Scribner), which feels a bit like a thriller set against a history lesson rendered fantastically vivid. Eventually, the minister’s wife sets off for the remote island to find her husband, and her arrival disrupts the powerful intimacy that has arisen between the tenant and the minister, raising questions of belonging, ownership, and how we forge the bonds between people and place that are really durable. —C.S.
On the Tobacco Coast by Christopher Tilghman (April)
A faded estate on Maryland’s Chesapeake shore, packed with family members for a Fourth of July weekend and haunted by its history, provides the backdrop for Christopher Tilghman’s elegant, boisterous, and moving new novel, On the Tobacco Coast (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Mason’s Retreat is the name of this farm and ancestral seat, tumbledown in haute WASP fashion, a place of brackish marsh air, oyster shells, and drawers jammed with mismatched cutlery. Tilghman has now written four acclaimed novels located amid this landscape, exploring rich themes of race, class, and privilege along the way. Tobacco Coast is the first set in the present, and it teems with convincing characters: Kate and Harry, the owners grappling with mortality; their three grown children warring with respective partners; a pair of French cousins; a clutch of aged neighbors. Tilghman ranges through them—the inner life of a Vassar coed is as accessible to him as that of a 96-year-old Chesapeake matron—as they assemble for a gloriously described meal where buried conflict and sublimated pain inevitably intrude. —T.A.
Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy O’Sullivan, America’s Most Mysterious War Photographer by Robert Sullivan (April)
This singular book by the longtime Vogue contributor—ostensibly about the latter-day work of the Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan—isn’t a biography, traditional or otherwise, nor a study, nor an argument. Yes, Sullivan attempts to limn “what’s going on” in O’Sullivan’s photographs—which, over the course of Double Exposure (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), emerge more and more as his Rosebud or Rosetta Stone—while exploring essential notions about one’s sense of place. The wonder of this book, though, is embedded in its DNA: It’s a survey, in the most glorious of definitions—a digressive, discursive, road-tripping wunderkammer between covers exploring our warring notions of the American West as a glass-half-full tabula rasa for our hopes, dreams, and ambitions; and as a lost battlefield still pockmarked with scars, warning signs, curses, and signs of struggle. But it’s Sullivan’s presence in this book—his thoughts and theories; his madcap and occasionally haunting personal stories; his riffs and asides and his dry-lightning humor and, most spectacularly, his virtuosic renderings of various signposts in the natural world that he searches for, stumbles upon, misses, and finds himself gobsmacked by—that give the book its propulsion, its poignance, and its vernacular grace. Double Exposure is the best book I’ve read about America—its history, falsehoods, missed opportunities, wonder, madness, innocence, and glory—in many, many years. —Corey Seymour
Butcher: A Novel by Joyce Carol Oates (May)
This gripping historical novel might reasonably be deemed unapproachable for its subject matter—it concerns a demented 19th century gynecologist—if the reader wasn’t in such capable hands. Joyce Carol Oates—86! and as dazzlingly productive as ever—has based her story on on historical facts: a disgraced Pennsylvania doctor, here named Silas Aloysius Weir, who is posted to the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics where he begins experimental treatments that he is sure will rescue his reputation and make his name. His operations on the asylum’s indigent women are conceived out of selfish careerism and creepy perversities—and they lead to a violent revolt. Oates empathetically ranges among her characters and doesn’t veil any of the gruesomeness of her story, but rather describes Weir’s experiments with matter of fact evenness, heightening the horror. Bravura storytelling, if not for the faint of heart. —TA
Exhibit: A Novel by R.O. Kwon (May)
Exhibit (Riverhead), R.O. Kwon’s follow-up novel to the 2018 bestseller The Incendiaries, is a provocative tale of female desire centered on three Korean women seeking artistic, sexual, and personal freedom beyond society’s prescriptions: Jin, a photographer at a crossroads in her work and marriage to her loving husband; Lidija, the injured world-class ballerina to whom she becomes in thrall; and the ghost of a kisaeng, or courtesan, whose curse Jin may have summoned. Indulging in transgressive cravings, they must contend with the strictures of religion, family, and history before eventually confronting how far they’ll go and what they’ll sacrifice to seize the lives they long for. It’s about sex, yes, but also embracing and honoring the body’s yearnings and the creativity that can flow freely from impulses unbound. — L.W.M.
All Fours by Miranda July (May)
Miranda July’s All Fours (Riverhead) begins as a droll and deadpan account of a Los Angeles creative adrift in her 40s—semi-famous, married, one child, between projects—embarking on a two-week driving trip across America to prove to herself (and to her husband) that she can be adventurous. About 15 minutes out of town, she parks the car at a rundown motel and begins an odyssey of a different kind, one that involves sex, interior design, and bouts of self-abnegation. This is a frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expect. July has already perfected a kind of haute, hip whimsy in film and fiction; the bravery of All Fours is nothing short of riveting. —T.A.
Worry by Alexandra Tanner (March)
Adrift in her personal and professional life, 28-year-old Jules has traded her stable relationship and bright-eyed post-MFA aspirations for doom-scrolling on Mormon mommy blogger accounts. Jules is in for a rude awakening when her hive-riddled, therapy-speaking younger sister Poppy makes a sudden move to New York, crashing with her while she halfheartedly searches for an apartment. Worry (Simon & Schuster) paints a chaotic, riotously funny portrait of two neurotic sisters-turned-roommates inching toward a breaking point in their relationship. Set post-2016 election and pre-Covid, Tanner captures the zeitgeist of the late 2010s—from MLM schemes to a dog named Amy Klobuchar—without making them feel stale. Worry is a pressure cooker of a sisterhood story, interwoven with mommy issues galore, and heaps of Jewish humor. –H.J.
Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna (May)
Kathleen Hanna may not be a household name within mainstream America, but for the past 30 years, she has been a figurehead in what was once called the alternative music scene, first in the ’90s as the frontwoman of Bikini Kill (the feminist punk band from Olympia, Washington, that coined the term riot grrrl) and later Le Tigre, an electronic pop band whose songs were danceable and politically driven. In her memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk (Ecco), Hanna offers short vignettes describing her difficult upbringing, the heady early days of her bands, and the swirl of other musicians who surrounded her. (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a phrase she wrote on Kurt Cobain’s wall one night.) Together, the anecdotes capture the life of a young woman trying to navigate a sexist culture while simultaneously finding her creative voice. There is an equal sense that Rebel Girl was written as a sort of road map for a new generation to pick up their own instruments and rock the world. —Laia Garcia-Furtado
Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski (May)
Alina Grabowski’s Women and Children First (SJP Lit) is a novel built from interlocking stories, each chapter told from the perspective of a different woman living in a down-at-the-heels coastal New England town. In less capable hands, such rapid shifts might have a disorienting effect, but the book spins an entrancing web, the stories channeling the spirit of Mary Gaitskill and subtly building to reveal more and more about the town’s inhabitants. They include a teenage loner who has begun an affair with one of the teachers at her school; the PTA president, whose overbearing energies are an attempt to divert attention from the disarray in her own home; and the mother of a local teen who has died an untimely death. The cause of that death is the nominal mystery of Women and Children First, but the book is more about the secrets we keep and the lies we tell to remain hidden from one another. —C.S
The Winner by Teddy Wayne (May)
Teddy Wayne’s The Winner (Harper) has an irresistible premise: A handsome, young-looking tennis teacher and recent law-school graduate moves to an upscale, secluded settlement off the coast of Massachusetts where a handful of masters of the universe are waiting out the pandemic. He’s been offered a guest cottage in exchange for making himself available for on-demand instruction. Tennis is only part of the deal, however. One of the more stir-crazy residents quickly seduces him, and he enters into a transactional but highly enjoyable relationship with this older woman, all while slowly falling for her daughter—and aiming to keep the two women ignorant of his awkward position between them. After a slew of novels that placed the pandemic front and center, it is a welcome relief to read something that treats it as fabric for the plot—constructing a page-turning story of sex, power, and money. —C.S.
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud (May)
Claire Messud has transformed three generations of her family’s story into a tour de force in This Strange Eventful History (W.W. Norton & Company). Spanning 70 years, this novel of tremendous scope and piercing intimacy—Messud’s best since 2006’s The Emperor’s Children—begins in 1940 Algeria and traces the Cassar family, pieds-noirs displaced by Algerian independence, as they move across the world, stopping in France, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and the US. All around them are the upheavals of the 20th century, but though Messud is working on a grand canvas, her skill is in miniature. History is dazzling in its fine-tuned character studies: François Cassar, striving and painfully dignified as he forges a middle-class life as an executive for a French steel corporation; François’s spinster sister, stuck in a family apartment in Toulon, France, concealing the damage of lost love; François’s Canadian wife, Barbara, who is as magnetic as she is resentful; their two daughters (one, an aspiring novelist, a stand-in for the author); and even more characters and family members, all beautifully realized. This is a pointillist novel, profound in its portrayal of strains, bonds, and heartbreak.—T.A.
Wives Like Us by Plum Sykes (May)
Plum Sykes’s delectable new novel, Wives Like Us (Harper Collins), bears a strong resemblance to the Austen-era novels of the 19th century, although it’s no longer a fortune of ten thousand pounds that makes a country gentleman a desired catch but a fortune of innumerable sums (and potentially unspeakable provenance). The silly, lovable heroines at the heart of this satire are mostly paired up anyway—but what’s to stop them from hunting for husband number two? Sykes sets the modern-day measures of social influence (Instagram followers, bikini-line start-ups, glam teams at one’s beck and call) against the traditional Cotswold landscape of manor houses and horse stables, and the result is a delightful mash-up: a loving portrait of a social milieu that recognizes the value of tradition but is also perpetually chasing what’s new. —C.S.
When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion by Julie Satow (June)
In Julie Satow’s When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion, three women are spotlighted for their profound impact on the 20th-century fashion industry: Hortense Odlum (president of Bonwit Teller from 1934 to 1940), Dorothy Shaver (president of Lord & Taylor from 1945 to 1959), and Geraldine Stutz (president of Henri Bendel from 1957 to 1986). The books looks at the fallacy that women only ascended to commerce and retail leadership roles recently, and Satow, a journalist whose first book told the history of the vaunted Plaza Hotel, tells this story admirably, uncovering a generation of women who broke the mold and perhaps never received their due. — Lilah Ramzi
Ask Me Again by Clare Sestanovich (June)
When Eva and Jamie meet in the emergency room at 16, the two have no idea how the chance encounter will change each others’ lives over the multi-year plot of Ask Me Again (Penguin Random House). In this anthropological excavation of a coming-of-age story, Clare Sestanovich weaves Eva’s linear path with Jamie’s disorderly approach. Ask Me Again is a sprawling novel riddled with modern benchmarks, from the Occupy movement to an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stand-in—all of which shape Eva and Jamie’s malleable world views. A masterful and exacting writer, Sestanovich isn’t afraid to ask life’s big questions, even—and especially—when she doesn’t know the answers. —H.J.
Godwin by Joseph O’Neill (June)
Back in 2008 Joseph O’Neill’s captivating novel Netherland examined crisis and identity through the lens of cricket. Nearly 15 years later, in the absorbing, picaresque Godwin (Pantheon) O’Neill has taken another sport as his subject–soccer–and used it to study brotherhood, migration, and a kind of late-capitalist striving that lends his storytelling a tint of desperation. The title character is an African boy caught on video playing soccer in a village stadium whose preternatural talent kicks off a race to find him and cash in. Godwin, original and headlong, is populated by scurrilous would-be soccer scouts and a washed-up French sports agent–and also a hero, Mark Wolfe, who flees a Pittsburgh technical writing co-op, riven by power struggles, to join the hunt. —T.A.
Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy (June)
Claire Kilroy’s spare, searing account of new motherhood, Soldier Sailor (Scribner), has a certain flat affect, the tone of her writing mimicking the shapeless dimensions of early parenting when the act of raising a child is both thrilling and mind-numbing. Kilroy’s novel is a story, told by a mother, Soldier, to her son, Sailor. The child has ended her life as she knew it and reinvented it: As Sailor tells it, there is something akin to electricity in her connection with her child. But the relationship also imprisons her, and the book is a reckoning with what she’s lost as much as what she’s gained. Sailor’s father is on the periphery, an almost cartoonishly inept partner who feels simultaneously extremely believable. The book includes a strong critique of persistent gender roles, but men are not thoroughly the enemy here. In fact it is a chance encounter with an old (male) friend that frees the narrator from her submerged state and allows her to see and appreciate the beautiful contours of her life. —C.S.
Death in the Air by Ram Murali (June)
Ram Murali’s debut novel, Death in the Air (Harper Collins) is set in an exclusive Indian retreat bearing an uncanny resemblance to certain high-end spas touting regional expertise in, say, traditional Ayurvedic principles, while simultaneously cashing in on them. But more than a satire of wellness pilgrims (and the big business catering to them), it’s an old-fashioned mystery in the model of Agatha Christie. Murali’s cast of characters are hopelessly adrift despite all their shiny tethers to the material world. A frothy, fun, truly escapist read—offering perspective on a certain echelon that feels both hyperbolic and cuttingly real at the same time. —C.S.
Tehrangeles: A Novel by Porochista Khakpour (June)
Porochista Khakpour brings her irresistible voice to the long-gestating Tehrangeles (Pantheon), a compulsively readable pandemic-set satire about four teen daughters of immigrants, scions of a microwaveable-snack empire, growing up in a McMansion in the affluent LA enclave that’s home to the largest Iranian community of outside of Iran. On the brink of filming a reality show, each girl—and even the family’s sly Persian cat, Pari—harbors a secret that the all-seeing cameras threaten to reveal. Think the Kardashians meet Little Women and Crazy Rich Asians; mentioned on the first page alone are zodiac reassignment, Barbie barre class, angel numbers, and Cavalli Havana sunglasses. It’s an indelible, uproarious snapshot of young womanhood during a period most of us would rather forget. —L.W.M.
The Memo by Rachel Dodes and Lauren Mechling (June)
Do you ever wonder if everyone else somehow got a secret leg up, insider knowledge, or even just a map to navigate the proverbial lay of the land? Such is the premise of Rachel Dodes and Lauren Mechling’s charming new novel, The Memo (Harper Perennial). The hapless heroine, Jenny Green, has been toiling away at her nonprofit job in a non-coastal city while college classmates and peers have been ascending to more prestigious positions. Jenny doesn’t exactly mind where her life has taken her, but she is dogged by that universal preoccupation: what if? A surprise (and somewhat supernatural) encounter allows her to relive certain episodes in her life, and she sets off on a twisting and circuitous adventure to find out just what her life could have been. A modernized Sliding Doors set amid a delightfully specific milieu, this is a paranormal parable with a very relatable heart. —C.S.
The Most by Jessica Anthony (July)
This is a slim, delectable book. Written with incredible economy but without sacrificing any depth or care, The Most (Little, Brown) tells the story of a couple in the 1950s, teetering on the edge of life-altering change. The wife, it seems, has begun to tip over it: On an unseasonably warm autumn day, she goes for a swim and refuses to get out of the pool. That act of protest rends the fabric of her life with her affable but supremely unambitious husband, who has leaned into his disarmingly good looks to coast through his own trials. Anthony writes characters that are both emotionally stunted and believably complex. A stunning gem of a book. — C.S.
More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for “Enough” by Emma Specter (July)
In this brilliant series of essays, Emma Specter braids together her lifelong struggles with body image and binge eating with thorough reportage. Sure, the subject matter is dark, but don’t expect a dour read. More, Please (Harper Collins) is chock-full of the sharp wit and dry humor that Specter regularly employs as Vogue’s culture writer. The book is just as compassionate as it is funny. As they retrace the steps of their eating disorder, Specter is careful to never cast blame, but rather explore how our early lives mold our psyche. Beyond the self-excavation, Specter generously carves out space for the reader to reckon with their own food-related issues, which everyone can surely relate to in some way. —H.J.
Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson (July)
In his electric debut novel, Anyone’s Ghost (Penguin Press), August Thompson explores the intricacies of boyhood and manhood, love and loss, music and silence. During summer spent in pastoral New England, fifteen-year-old Theron David Alden meets Jake, two years older than he but far more comfortable with himself. With shades of André Aciman and Donna Tartt, the book fascinates from its first sentence: “It took three car crashes to kill Jake.” Thompson’s hypnotic prose and addictive plot moves and exhilarates in equal measure. — Ian Malone
Whoever You Are, Honey by Olivia Gatwood (July)
Mitty has spent the last 10 years living in a dilapidated Santa Cruz bungalow with her elderly roommate, Bethel, cursing the tech boom that allows flush startup founders to raze their secluded beachside community. But when one such inventor, Sebastian, and his girlfriend, Lena, move into the glass house next door, Mitty finds herself captivated by the seemingly infallible woman she watches through the window. Through their newfound friendship, Mitty and Lena help—and, at times, force—each other confront uncomfortable truths about their pasts. Set against the backdrop of an AI pioneer’s murder, Whoever You Are, Honey (Penguin Random House) is built on simmering tensions at the precipice of boiling over, marked by a distinct strain of techno-pessimism endemic to someone who grew up during the rise of Silicon Valley. The twin themes of women’s loneliness and desire are the timeless beating hearts of Olivia Gatwood’s debut novel, propped up by of-the-moment ruminations on queerness and artificial intelligence. With Whoever You Are, Honey already optioned by Margot Robbie’s Lucky Chap Productions, we won’t have to wait long to see how Gatwood’s vivid storytelling translates to the screen. —H.J.
Long Island Compromise: A Novel by Taffy Brodeser-Akner (July)
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s follow up to the best-selling Fleishman Is in Trouble is another tale of modern neuroses, told with bombastic appeal. In Long Island Compromise (Random House), Brodesser-Akner allows herself a broader canvas, going as far back as the 17th-century founding of a particular Long Island town in order to mine the pathologies of a particular family. The Fletchers have built their fortune by manufacturing styrofoam—or, polystyrene, as they would have it, a slightly nicer-sounding word—amassing wealth that (appropriately) insulates and poisons the generation that inherits it. The three grandchildren of the factory’s immigrant founder are the extremely unlovable protagonists of this tale of fortune gone sour, and you have to have a strong stomach to tolerate all their poor little rich kid antics. But Brodeser-Akner’s sweep and verve is masterful; there are echoes of Philip Roth here in her examination of American Jewish identity, the promise of America, the thrill of reinvention, the prison of privilege. I can’t think of another living writer better at crafting tales of acute and searing pathos, all while pleasing readers in the process. —C.S.
Burn by Peter Heller (August)
A secessionist page-turner? Peter Heller’s riveting and closely observed new novel, Burn (Knopf), tells the story of two old friends on a hunting trip who hike out of the woods of northern Maine and into a drastically altered America. A small town is burned to the ground. A nearby bridge has been blown up. And is that artillery fire in the distance? With no cell reception, Jess and Storey must piece together the disquieting truth: Bold talk among local militias has exploded into something far more dangerous, and they are in the middle of it. Heller, as he’s shown in previous, celebrated novels like The Last Ranger and The River, is a literary novelist with a talent for suspense who writes about the natural world as well as anyone. In Burn a pot of campfire coffee is as vividly described as a surprise helicopter attack, and Jess and Storey’s fight for survival exposes their all too human frailties—and the hidden truths that define their friendship. — TA
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (September)
New entertainments from the prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout have become as reliable as the seasons. Her interconnected novels, ten in all, return her readers again and again to the cast of characters she has made as indelible as old friends: Lucy Barton, a successful novelist with a traumatic past; Olive Kitteridge, a flinty Mainer entering her 90s; Bob Burgess, a lawyer with a moral core and a secret longing. They’re all here in Tell Me Everything, a panorama of small town Maine with a spring-load of suspense in the form of a murder accusation against a local man who Bob stands up to defend. It’s hard to capture the addictive, humanist pleasure of Strout’s Hemingway-esque prose and her simple scenes of friendship, family, and marriage. Lucy and Olive trade stories in a nursing home; Lucy and Bob go on daily walks; Bob’s brother and ex-wife endure the death of a wife, a son’s car accident, a relapse into alcoholism. Somehow, all of them find ways to connect, to confess, to heartbreakingly endure. –TA
Colored Television by Danzy Senna (September)
Danzy Senna’s darkly funny new novel, Colored Television (Riverhead), tells the story of Jane, a biracial writer working on the “mulatto War and Peace” and struggling to maintain her family’s precarious, peripatetic middle-class-creative lifestyle. In hopes of a more lucrative career, she turns to glittering Hollywood and teams up with a hotshot young producer to make a prestige-TV biracial comedy for a streaming network. Zany and believably absurd, it explores the all-too-real intersection of class, politics, art, motherhood, and the racial-identity industrial complex. —L.W.M.
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (September)
Some novelists have a mode, others vary widely. Count Rachel Kushner among the latter category, following up her brilliant 2018 novel The Mars Room, which was set partly inside a women’s prison and narrated by an inmate. The new novel, Creation Lake (Scribner), takes place in the dusty backwaters of rural France, where a charismatic leader, Bruno Lacombe, has set up a kind of commune that someone (their identity remains mysterious) wants to disassemble. Whoever sees a threat in the motley counter-culture crew has sent a woman who goes by the name of “Sadie” to infiltrate them. A spook for hire, Sadie is confident in her deceptions, seducing one of the leader’s childhood friends in order to gain insider access. But as the plot unspools, questions of control and coercion, reality and idealism, are layered on top of Kushner’s enveloping noir. “Sadie” has a brash confidence and a manner of moving through the world that is aloof in the extreme—disbanding any allegiances or affections before they can create the faintest of tethers. But Kushner’s plot—at once arid and affecting—asks just how much any human can insulate themselves. —C.S.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (September)
The arrival of a new Sally Rooney novel is always cause for celebration; there is simply no other novelist chronicling the early adulthood of disaffected youth in the 21st century with more care and compassion. But in Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) she broadens her scope and diverts from the casually complex conversational tone for which she has previously been known. This is—don’t let it deter you!—in part a tribute to James Joyce, with rambling protagonists traversing the same Dublin landscapes as many of his heroes. Is the Irish novelist sending a message about the artist as a young woman? If so, there’s nothing objectionably pointed or politcal in Intermezzo, which does take some getting used to if you’re expecting the typical Rooney vernacular, but the book rewards the effort. In another shift, the central characters here are men—a pair of brothers—rather than women, navigating the death of their father and romantic relationships. One of those brothers is a serious chess player, and the game offers a frame for the book as a whole: How much can you plot out and foresee the trajectory of your life, and how much is subject to forces beyond your control?—C.S.
Playground by Richard Powers (September)
The global success of The Overstory in 2018, a grand multigenerational novel about trees and the people who live beneath them, changed the course of Richard Powers’s career. Powers—to that point a respected fiction writer with a bent for science—attained the aura of an eco-prophet, and Playground (Norton), his vivid and ambitious new novel (his 14th), plunges beneath the waves and serves as another warning about and a love letter to the natural world. It’s most vividly set in French Polynesia, on Makatea, a tiny atoll “lost on an endless field of blue” where a small population is confronted with endless trash washing up on shore and a proposal from a shadowy consortium of investors to transform their island into a staging ground for floating cities. Packed with characters, from a French Canadian scuba pioneer to an AI tycoon who sees sea-steading as an escape from his ravaged body, Playground is ravishing in its descriptions of an underwater universe as fragile as it is ancient and unyielding.—T.A.
Death at the Sign of the Rook: A Jackson Brodie Book by Kate Atkinson (September)
Though it certainly wouldn’t hurt, one needn’t have read Kate Atkinson’s five (!) prior novels featuring the wry, caddish, more-than-a-little-haunted ex-detective Jackson Brodie to delight in her latest, Death at the Sign of the Rook (Doubleday). A cast of characters including Brodie; a young detective constable by the name of Reggie Chase; the wonderfully batty Lady Milton; the somewhat adrift village vicar, Simon Cate; and the dear but depressive former army man Ben Jennings—as well as a company of actors hired for a murder mystery weekend at Lady Milton’s grand but money-strapped country pile—animate a story that is principally about two seemingly related art thefts, but is more broadly concerned with loss, alienation, and the sometimes-blurry boundaries between facts and fictions. A very British caper, warmly funny and delightfully involving.—M.M.
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (September)
Coco Mellors’s bolt-from-the-blue, best-selling debut, Cleopatra and Frankenstein (2022), was the story of a love affair, but as much about a youthful scene as the people swirling through it. Her new novel, Blue Sisters (Ballantine), continues in a similar, satisfyingly specific vein, world-building while charting the fate of four sisters—all addicts (to drugs or alcohol or love). The family grew up in a tiny, bohemian apartment in New York City and have since scattered and fled: One is a successful lawyer in London, gradually unraveling her life; one is a professional boxer stuck in a career divot; one is a world-famous model, posing since her teens; and the last, a tender and beloved school teacher, has just died from an overdose. This intricate portrait of a family of sisters is deeply nuanced and compelling, a family drama with intimate psychological portraits within it.—C.S.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (September)
A blistering collection of interconnecting short stories, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (Harper Collins) takes a magnifying glass to the mind in the internet age. With a particular focus on romantic disappointment, the collection confronts psychosexual hang-ups, dating, and identity through the eyes of Redditors and group-chat girlies. Tulathimutte is particularly adept at depicting unforced errors that spiral out of control, engendering a poignant empathy for even his most hapless characters. Despite the prominence of digital-age posts and texts, he depicts the timeless sting of rejection—an experience that everyone can surely comprehend.—H.J.
Like Mother Like Mother (October)
Susan Reiger’s Like Mother Like Mother follows an inheritance that begins with a loss. Known to the world as the editorial mastermind behind The Washington Globe (a thinly veiled Post stand-in), Lila Pereira was also once an abandoned daughter growing up in an abusive home. She manages to escape, but carries the suffering with her, and when she becomes a mother, she takes a cooly do-no-harm approach. This mode of childrearing doesn’t satisfy Lila’s journalist daughter (Grace) who wants to investigate what happened to her grandmother in the first place. Though the characters come from humble origins, the novel weaves in and out of the upper echelons of politics and media, and it’s as much the satisfying story of a social milieu as it is a family drama. — CS
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik (November)
The galley to be seen with and posted straight to grid in 2024, Didion & Babitz (Scribner). This is journalist Lili Anolik’s fourth book—she’s the creator of the Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College podcast, and her last book was the essential Babitz biography Hollywood’s Eve. It’s more than a dual biography, but Anolik deftly documents the intertwining story of two literary titans, LA counterculture chroniclers—and at times, raging antagonists—Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. Didion and Babitz died within days of each other in 2021, and shortly after, Anolik obtained boxes of letters Babitz had hidden away. One, addressed to Didion, was so eviscerating it propelled her into her next book. So Anolik brings us on a compelling journey through these parallel lives and diverging sensibilities, souring friendship and rivalry, ardently exposing their desires, ambitions, and shifting psyches. The author makes no attempt to disguise her deep affiliation with Babitz, and remains unromantic about Didion, someone she says “people are inclined to get a little soft in the head” about. “Reader: don’t be a baby,” she warns us in the introduction. A curious figure despite her confessional writing style, Anolik harnesses Babitz’s diaristic letters to unlock Didion in the most intimate, provocative, and entertaining way.—A.C
City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim (November)
The world of Russian ballet is a rarefied one, and Juhea Kim’s escapist second novel City of Night Birds (HarperCollins) takes you deep into the corps of the Mariinski in St Petersburg, onto the vast stage of the Bolshoi in Moscow, and into the highest ranks of the Opéra Nationale in Paris. A trained ballerina turned novelist, Kim writes lush, romantic prose buttressed by vivid detail—the pain in a dancer’s foot, the smell of sweat backstage, the searing heat of blisters soaked in vodka. Our heroine, Natalya, rises from humble Russian beginnings to become a world renowned prima, with a self-confidence and hauteur to match—and her story is packed with drama: love affairs (several), high stakes rivalries, and an accident that spirals her into addiction and self-doubt.— TA
The Collaborators by Michael Idov (November)
What the ever expanding world of espionage fiction needs, it turns out, is a Yale-educated Millennial field operative who dresses in Weezer t-shirts and knows his way around a semi-automatic. So went my thinking after a fleet weekend of reading The Collaborators (Scribner), Michael Idov’s slim, well-paced, deceptively complex novel of American and Russian intelligence. Ari Falk is the young slightly jaded agent who skips from Latvia to Poland to Belarus and falls into an uneasy alliance (and affair) with a Los Angeles actress-heiress who is puzzling out the riddle of her missing father. Idov, also a screenwriter, doesn’t waste time or words in a novel as cool as it is accomplished, that knits together action, tradecraft and quippy dialogue with flair. —Taylor Antrim
