Discover Well-Read Black Girl Books and the projects reshaping publishing →

The Top 20 books of 2024 as rated by the BookBrowse community.

Top 20 Best Books of 2024

Recommended books found: 20

Each year, BookBrowse subscribers rate their favorite books of the year to choose our Top 20 Best of Year titles. More about how the books are selected.

James

A Novel

by Percival Everett

Hardcover: Mar 2024 | Paperback: Apr 2026

Critics' Consensus:

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. From the "literary icon" (Oprah Daily) and Pulitzer Prize Finalist whose novel Erasure is the ...

The Demon of Unrest

A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

by Erik Larson

Hardcover: Apr 2024 | Paperback: Mar 2026

Critics' Consensus:

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a simmering crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in ...

The Mighty Red

A Novel

by Louise Erdrich

Hardcover: Oct 2024 | Paperback: Nov 2025

Critics' Consensus:

In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people's lives.

The God of the Woods

A Novel

by Liz Moore

Hardcover: Jul 2024 | Paperback: Oct 2025

Critics' Consensus:

When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide.

Model Home

A Novel

by Rivers Solomon

Hardcover: Oct 2024 | Paperback: Sep 2025

Critics' Consensus:

Welcome to Rivers Solomon's dark and wondrous Model Home, a new kind of haunted-house novel.

Small Rain

A Novel

by Garth Greenwell

Hardcover: Sep 2024 | Paperback: Sep 2025

Critics' Consensus:

A medical crisis brings one man close to death―and to love, art, and beauty―in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.

Everything We Never Had

by Randy Ribay

Hardcover: Aug 2024 | Paperback: Aug 2025

Critics' Consensus:

From the author of the National Book Award finalist Patron Saints of Nothing comes an emotionally charged, moving novel about four generations of Filipino American boys grappling with identity, masculinity, and their fraught father-son relationships.

The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern

A Novel

by Lynda Cohen Loigman

Hardcover: Oct 2024 | Paperback: Aug 2025

Critics' Consensus:

It's never too late for new beginnings.

Tell Me Everything

A Novel

by Elizabeth Strout

Hardcover: Sep 2024 | Paperback: Aug 2025

Critics' Consensus:

From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a hopeful, healing novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

The Lion Women of Tehran

by Marjan Kamali

Hardcover: Jul 2024 | Paperback: Jul 2025

Critics' Consensus:

From the nationally bestselling author of the "powerful, heartbreaking" (Shelf Awareness) The Stationery Shop, a heartfelt, epic new novel of friendship, betrayal, and redemption set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.

There Are Rivers in the Sky

A Novel

by Elif Shafak

Hardcover: Aug 2024 | Paperback: Jul 2025

Critics' Consensus:

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign.

The Wide Wide Sea

Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

by Hampton Sides

Hardcover: Apr 2024 | Paperback: May 2025

Critics' Consensus:

From New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides, an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook's death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this ...

The reviewer of each book decides which categories it belongs in - but we're only human, mistakes happen. If you see a book that you think is in the wrong place, tell us!

Recently Viewed

No books viewed yet

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
When No One Else Will
by Amanda Skenandore
1940s Chicago nurse risks everything at an illegal women’s clinic during a high-profile trial of courage and sisterhood.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket
    The Jellyfish Problem
    by Tessa Yang
    A marine biologist rescues a Maine island menaced by a giant glowing jellyfish in this inventive debut.
  • Book Jacket
    Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young
    by Zayd Ayers Dohrn
    Son of Weather Underground radicals recounts life on the run and decades of revolutionary struggle.
  • Book Jacket
    Look What You Made Me Do
    by John Lanchester
    A propulsive tale of intergenerational tension and revenge from the Booker Prize nominee.
Who Said...

I like a thin book because it will steady a table...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Book
Trivia
  • Book Trivia

    Can you name the title?

    Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

Q S, S

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.