Year-End Lists

The Boston Globe: The Best Books of 2024, published along with lists of favorite picture books, middle grade books, and young adult books

[see also 2025 • 2023 • 2021 • 2020]

Fiction

• Beautyland
  Marie-Helene Bertino
• Catalina
  Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
• Creation Lake
  Rachel Kushner
• The Fetishist
  Katherine Min
• Great Expectations
  Vinson Cunningham
• This Great Hemisphere
  Mateo Askaripour
• Housemates
  Emma Copley Eisenberg
• Hum
  Helen Phillips
• The Hypocrite
  Jo Hamya
• James
  Percival Everett
• Margo's Got Money Troubles
  Rufi Thorpe
• Martyr!
  Kaveh Akbar
• My Friends
  Hisham Matar
• My Parents' Marriage
  Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
• Neighbors and Other Stories
  Diane Oliver
• Obligations to the Wounded

  Stories
  Mubanga Kalimamukwento
• The Road to the Country
  Chigozie Obioma
• Scaffolding
  Lauren Elkin
• This Strange Eventful History
  Claire Messud
• Swift River
  Essie J. Chambers
• A Thousand Times Before
  Asha Thanki
• Untethered
  Angela Jackson-Brown
• Us Fools
  Nora Lange
• Wandering Stars
  Tommy Orange
• Who Will Bury You?

  And Other Stories
  Chido Muchemwa

Nonfiction

• 3 Shades of Blue

  Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool
  James Kaplan
• American Scary

  A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond
  Jeremy Dauber
• The Black Utopians

  Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America
  Aaron Robertson
• The Barn

  The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
  Wright Thompson
• The Black Box

  Writing the Race
  Henry Louis Gates Jr.
• Briefly Perfectly Human

  Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End
  Alua Arthur
• Challenger

  A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
  Adam Higginbotham
• Circle of Hope

  A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church
  Eliza Griswold
• Cue the Sun!

  The Invention of Reality TV
  Emily Nussbaum
• God and the Devil

  The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman
  Peter Cowie
• Grief Is for People
  Sloane Crosley
• I Just Keep Talking

  A Life in Essays
  Nell Irvin Painter
• Imagination

  A Manifesto
  Ruha Benjamin
• I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying

  A Memoir
  Youngmi Mayer
• The Light Eaters

  How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
  Zoë Schlanger
• Missing Persons

  or, My Grandmother's Secrets
  Clair Wills
• The New York Game

  Baseball and the Rise of a New City
  Kevin Baker
• Shakespeare's Sisters

  How Women Wrote the Renaissance
  Ramie Targoff
• Stranger Than Fiction

  Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
  Edwin Frank
• Soldiers and Kings

  Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
  Jason De León
• A Termination
  Honor Moore
• There's Always This Year

  On Basketball and Ascension
  Hanif Abdurraqib
• When the Clock Broke

  Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
  John Ganz
• Whiskey Tender

  A Memoir
  Deborah Jackson Taffa
• The World She Edited

  Katharine S. White at The New Yorker
  Amy Reading