In times like these, we need books—for comfort, for challenge, for escape, for revelation. Here are some of the books I most enjoyed in 2024. I hope you’ll find some inspiration for your own reading adventures.

Fiction

The All-True Adventures and Travel of Lidie Newton by Jane Smiley
I loved this entertaining tale of a young woman in Quincy, Illinois in the 1850s who likes to walk, swim and read but hates all the womanly arts. She marries an abolitionist and travels with him to Kansas, where a terrible conflict is brewing about whether the territory, not yet a state, will be slave-holding or free. Lidia and her husband stake a claim in the prairie and get involved in the town, determined that Kansas will reject slavery no matter the cost, which turns out to be dizzyingly steep. Lidia finds herself passing as a boy and hiding out on a plantation as she schemes to avenge her terrible loss. She is such a quirky, sharp-edged character, her first-person narration so vivid and textured, that I felt immersed in the daily life of the pre-Civil War west.

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
Unusual novel about a girl born to a struggling single mother who grows up to be a perpetual outsider and observer. Such characters are legion, but this one is rare: she’s an alien whose “superiors” have sent her to earth to assess whether the planet and its human inhabitants would make a good home for their own people, whose planet is dying. She communicates with them via fax in the night and becomes a literary sensation on earth when her faxes, tart insights about human nature and the particularities of life in New York City, are published in book form.

James: A Novel by Percival Everett
This novel featuring a determined, educated, code-switching Black enslaved man who escapes on a raft on the Mississippi with a local white boy named Huck Finn has won all the honors and doesn’t need any accolades from me. Still one of my top books of 2024.

Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel by Anthony Marra
In mid-century Hollywood, Mercury Pictures is a second-rate studio led by Artie Feldman, whose terrible taste is balanced out by his willingness to hire refugees and exiles from the devastated Europe of WWII and the blacklist of McCarthyism. That the studio functions at all is a testament to his assistant, Maria Lagana, an immigrant from Italy whose father has been confined to a tiny Italian town by Mussolini’s fascists. This brilliant novel zooms in to focus on seemingly minor characters, such as the German woman who builds scale models for the studio and a Black woodworker she meets one day, and creates a world out of their compact stories. In the end, what Mercury Pictures presents is a tale of fascism – in warring countries, on the screen, in the streets of America – and the role of love, art, and simple human connection as its only defense.

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty
A collection of quiet but powerful short stories about the life of a boy, then man, on the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation in Maine. Each story plunges deep like an expert diver who barely ripples the surface of the water. Highly recommend.

North Woods: A Novel by Daniel Mason
Imagine a house in the woods in Massachusetts. Imagine all the people who have lived in that house from Colonial times to today. Now imagine you can tell some of their stories – illicit lovers, murderous abolitionists, obsessive apple growers, mothers and sons – in vibrant, dazzling detail, in language that reflects their own time and voice and reveals the unseen connections between generations, between what we know and can’t know. That’s this novel.

Old Crimes and Other Stories by Jill McCorkle
Potent and beautifully crafted short stories by novelist who is also a master of the short form. Some of the stories pivot in surprising directions that nonetheless make perfect emotional sense. Brief as some of them are, each of these stories is a meal that will stay with you.

One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon
A young Black family moves from Los Angeles to a wealthy, all-Black suburb called Liberty. But Jasmyn, a public defender with a six-year-old son and another baby on the way, finds herself uncomfortable there, surrounded by affluence and people who seem to wear their Blackness on the outside, without the sense of kinship, community, and collective action that Jasmyn treasures. Even her husband Kingston seems more drawn to the town’s Wellness Center than to the Black Lives Matter chapter Jasmyn is trying to launch. Her unease grows as the only two friends she’s made in Liberty return from vacation shorn of both their natural hairstyles and their political consciousness. Is there something in the water in Liberty? Or is it even more sinister? The tension twists into horror as Jasmyn and her family reckon with the gifts and costs of being Black in America. Book groups, start your engines.

The Postcard by Anne Berest
A Jewish woman in contemporary France receives a postcard that includes a list of four names: her relatives who were murdered in Auschwitz. No signature, no other message. Was it a threat, a prank, a cry for help? Years later, the woman’s daughter decides to track down the answer. She engages her often-reluctant mother, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, in a hunt through the history of their family, their village, and their nation to finally discover—through faded letters and government archives, through slammed doors and shamed confessions—what it truly means to be Jewish and French.

Still Life: A Novel by Sarah Winman
Loved this joyous and gorgeously written novel about a group of friends from London’s working-class East End who create an unlikely family and ultimately a community, first in London and then in Florence, based on loyalty and the love of art and beauty. Two major characters, a young British soldier and an art historian in her 60s, meet in Italy during WWII and never again for decades, but the connection they spark shapes both of their lives in surprising ways. This is an eventful novel rich with complex, loveable characters, queer perspectives, and a passion for the beauty it is still within our power to create and preserve.

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
This is a “behind the scenes” novel that reveals the workplace challenges and domestic routines not so different from any company town, except that the workplace is Auschwitz. The book is written from the point of view of three characters—two Nazis and a Jewish inmate—in a lacerating, satiric style that reminded me of Slaughterhouse Five. At one point a woman who is married to and raising two children with the camp commandant literally in the shadow of the crematorium turns to her secret lover and asks, “What are we doing here with these unimaginable ghouls?” As a reader, I sometimes found myself wondering the same thing. Yet I think this is an important book to encounter at this point in U.S. history, when authoritarianism no longer seems like a threat belonging to other countries.

This Strange Eventful History: A Novel by Claire Messud
Remarkable novel that delves into the lives of one family over three generations and 70 years. They are a French family deeply rooted in the French colony of Algeria who find themselves atomized across the world with the upheavals of WWII and the emergence of Algerian independence in 1962. Beginning with Gaston and Lucienne, a couple who adore and rely on each other, we follow the trajectory of their children and grandchildren, each generation seemingly more rootless and discontented as they build their lives in Beirut, Canada, the U.S., and numerous other lands and cultures. Messud does a fantastic job of bringing the reader into the consciousness and hearts of the characters as they face the realities of their time, their own limitations, and the ache for a homeland that no longer exists.

Trust Her: A Novel by Flynn Berry
In this sequel to the novel Northern Spy (which I adored), Northern Irish sisters Tessa and Marian learn that starting new lives with new names in Dublin is not enough to protect them from former comrades in the IRA who know the sisters informed on them. Trapped in the ongoing legacy of the Troubles, the sisters realize they must do the bidding of whoever is holding the biggest gun or else take matters into their own hands.

Winterland by Rae Meadows
In 1970s USSR, a talented young gymnast is chosen to train for the 1980s Olympics, elevating her from her Arctic mining town, so cold you don’t dare smile outdoors or your teeth will crack, to the Soviet system’s most elite and unsparing athletic training program. As Anya grows into a teenager discovering first love and later an adult adapting to the post-Soviet era, her neighbor Vera comes to terms with old age and her ever more demanding memories of the decade she spent in the gulag that killed her husband and son and forced her to decide what survival is worth.

More good reads:

• After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry
• The Berry Pickers: A Novel by Amanda Peters
• The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi
• God of the Woods: A Novel by Liz Moore
• The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
• The Hunter: A Novel by Tana French
• The Storm We Made: A Novel by Vanessa Chan
• A Suffragist’s Guide to the Antarctic by Yi Shun Lai
• The Sunset Crowd: A Novel by Karin Tanabe
• The Vulnerables: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez
• The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason

Nonfiction

American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land by Monica Hesse
In 2012, abandoned houses began to burn down in a remote, rural, and economically depressed town on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The once-sleepy volunteer fire department hustled to call after call throughout the night as houses lit up in various parts of the county. Over several months, dozens of abandoned properties burned as law enforcement officials scrambled to catch the arsonist and neighbors began to eye each other suspiciously. Monica Hesse, a Washington Post journalist, does a fine job of chronicling the social upheaval caused by a season of arson in a county already dwindling due to the loss of industries and opportunity.

From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i by Haunani-Kay Trask
The history of Hawai’i as you’ve never known it, beautifully written in a voice of love and fury by a Native Hawaiian woman who was a scholar, teacher, activist, and founder of the Hawai’i sovereignty movement.

Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic by Emma Goldberg
Interesting account of six medical students who chose to graduate slightly early from medical school and immediately begin to work as doctors in the Covid wards of New York City hospitals in the frantic, frightening spring of 2020, when there was no vaccine or treatment and the dead overflowed the morgues.

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder
The author, an Australian journalist who speaks fluent German, moved to the former East Germany about a decade after the Wall fell. There she met, interviewed, and in some cases befriended a wide range of people who had suffered under or helped to create and enforce what she called “the most perfected surveillance state of all time.” Utterly gripping.

True Gretch: What I’ve Learned about Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between by Gretchen Whitmer
Lively and fun autobiography by the governor of Michigan. I listened to this as an audiobook narrated by Whitmer, and basked in her Midwestern accent.

Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder
Although I am a wife and have a wife, I probably would have skipped Wifedom if I hadn’t read and loved the author’s previous book, Stasiland. And that would have been too bad. Orwell has had a renaissance, thanks to our political era. Funder reveals just how much of his work was enabled, inspired, and arduously supported by his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy—and how hard Orwell and the six male biographers who lionized him worked to erase her from his life story. Even Orwell’s much-vaunted service fighting fascists in Spain is not quite as he describes it; in reality, Eileen did the more extensive, valuable, and dangerous work in Spain, although her name doesn’t even appear in his account of that time. Funder weaves into the book her own struggles with the identity and obligations of wifedom.

More good reads:

• American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden by Katie Rogers
• Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return by Rebecca Mead
• Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure by Julia Flynn Siler
• The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth Rush
• The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides
• The Wives: A Memoir by Simone Gorrindo

Now what?

We already know that 2025 will be a time of stress and chaos. I’ll be looking for immersive reads that pull me deep into the world of a novel or nonfiction book. What do you recommend? What books are you looking forward to reading in the new year? If you’re a writer, do you have a book coming out in 2025? Share your news here.