Best Books of 2024: Essential Fiction, Fantasy, and Nonfiction

2024 was a strong year across every major genre. Brandon Sanderson concluded his fourteen-year Stormlight Archive arc. Kristin Hannah delivered her most ambitious historical novel. Sally Rooney broke her four-year silence. Nobel Prize winner Han Kang published her most formally adventurous work. And in fantasy romance, Sarah J. Maas and Emily Henry maintained their positions as the dominant names in popular fiction.

This guide covers the year’s essential reads — organised by genre — with a note on what distinguishes each from the rest of the year’s releases.

Best Fiction of 2024

Wind and Truth — Brandon Sanderson

The conclusion to the first arc of the Stormlight Archive — a five-book, fourteen-year project — arrived in November 2024. At 1,330 pages it is the longest Stormlight novel and the most consequential. Sanderson resolves the central conflict established in The Way of Kings, delivers the payoffs his readers have been waiting for since 2010, and positions the second arc (Books 6–10) as a new story in the same world. For the 5 million readers who have followed the series, this is the year’s unmissable book.

The Women — Kristin Hannah

Hannah’s most ambitious novel follows Frankie McGrath, a young woman who enlists as an army nurse during the Vietnam War after her brother ships out. The novel traces Frankie’s experience in-country, her return to an America that doesn’t know how to receive her, and the decades-long struggle for recognition that Vietnam-era women veterans fought. Hannah is at her most controlled and most politically engaged here. The Women is better than The Nightingale — a harder and more honest book.

James — Percival Everett

Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel retells The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim — enslaved, strategic, and possessed of an inner life that Twain’s novel denied him. Everett is one of the most technically accomplished American novelists working today, and James uses its intertextual conceit to say something genuinely new about race, performance, and the literature of freedom. Literary fiction of the year.

We Do Not Part — Han Kang

Han Kang’s novel — published months before she won the Nobel Prize in Literature — is set partly in the present, where a woman searches for her hospitalised friend’s bird, and partly in the 1940s, during the Jeju massacre that killed tens of thousands of Korean civilians. Kang’s prose, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, is her most formally experimental: sequences of near-poetry interspersed with documentary detail. Essential for readers following the Nobel laureate’s work.

Intermezzo — Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney’s fourth novel follows two grieving brothers — Adam, a 22-year-old chess prodigy, and Peter, a 32-year-old Dublin lawyer — and the women in their lives in the year after their father’s death. Rooney’s prose is as precise as ever; the structural ambition is higher than Normal People or Beautiful World. Some readers found it colder than her previous work; others considered it her most technically accomplished. The year’s most anticipated Irish literary novel.

Best Fantasy and Genre Fiction of 2024

House of Flame and Shadow — Sarah J. Maas

The third and final volume of the Crescent City series arrived in January 2024 as the year’s most anticipated fantasy release. Maas completes her multi-series Crescent City–Throne of Glass–ACOTAR crossover, delivering on years of setup. The payoffs for long-time Maas readers are substantial. New readers should not start here — but existing Maas fans will consider this essential.

The Last Murder at the End of the World — Stuart Turton

Stuart Turton (The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle) returns with an island mystery set in a post-collapse future: 122 survivors on a fortified island protected from a deadly fog, one murder, and a clock ticking down to civilisation’s end. A locked-room mystery with genuine science fiction ambitions. The best genre-crossover thriller of the year.

The Housemaid’s Child — Freida McFadden

The third Housemaid novel — a series that became one of the defining thriller successes of the 2020s — follows a new housemaid, a new house, and a new set of secrets. McFadden continues to deliver exactly what her readers want: propulsive, twist-heavy domestic suspense with an unreliable-narrator structure.

Best Romance of 2024

Funny Story — Emily Henry

Daphne has been left by her fiancé for his childhood best friend. Miles’s girlfriend has just left him for the same person. Practical solution: move in together. Emily Henry’s fourth novel is her warmest and most internally consistent, delivering the slow-burn enemies-to-flatmates-to-lovers dynamic with the wit and emotional intelligence that has made her the defining voice in contemporary romance.

Just for the Summer — Abby Jimenez

Abby Jimenez’s (Part of Your World) fourth novel introduces the “curse” concept: two unlucky-in-love people who keep accidentally helping each other move on. Funny, warm, and fast-reading — exactly the contemporary romance formula executed at its best.

Best Nonfiction of 2024

The Anxious Generation — Jonathan Haidt

Haidt’s follow-up to The Coddling of the American Mind makes the case that the smartphone-driven rewiring of childhood — specifically the shift from phone-free play to phone-based life around 2012 — is the primary driver of the adolescent mental health crisis. Whether or not you accept the full thesis, the data Haidt marshals is serious and the policy proposals (no smartphones before 14, no social media before 16) are worth engaging with. The year’s most consequential popular nonfiction.

Supercommunicators — Charles Duhigg

Duhigg (The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better) turns his attention to the science of conversation — why some people make every discussion feel like a genuine exchange while others talk past each other. The book identifies the different types of conversations (practical, emotional, social) and explains why miscommunication happens when people are in different modes without knowing it.

Good Energy — Dr. Casey Means

The year’s most talked-about health book makes a metabolic case for chronic disease: that most of the dominant conditions of modern life — obesity, anxiety, depression, infertility — share a root cause in disrupted cellular energy metabolism. Means, a Stanford-trained surgeon who left medicine to address root causes, writes with genuine scientific rigour and appropriate acknowledgement of what isn’t yet proven.