The Ultimate Best Books of 2024 List

Reading All the Lists So You Don’t Have To Since 2017

December 17, 2024

The end of the year is approaching, the universe is expanding, and the internet is updating—right now, it is mostly updating its Best Of lists. Therefore, per Literary Hub tradition, I now present to you the Ultimate List, otherwise known as the List of Lists—in which I read all the Best Of lists and count which books are recommended most.

In all the time I’ve done this, I’ve never seen a book run away with this list like Percival Everett’s James has this year: it was recommended a full dozen more times than the next most popular books. (It also won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Award, and was a finalist for the Booker—and with good reason.)

Overall, this year, I processed 69 lists from 39 outlets, which collectively recommended more than 1,200 individual books (RIP my spreadsheet). As always, these are probably not all the lists, but all universes have to end sometime. Anyway, 90 of those books made it onto 5 or more lists, and I have collated these for you here, in descending order of frequency.

33 lists:

Percival Everett, James

21 lists:

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Miranda July, All Fours

20 lists:

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

17 lists:

Hanif Abdurraqib, There’s Always This Year

16 lists:

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake
Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

13 lists:

Sloane Crosley, Grief is for People
Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Danzy Senna, Colored Television

12 lists:

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time
Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot
Colm Tóibín, Long Island
Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

11 lists:

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise
Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings
Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars
Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters
Yael Van Der Wouden, The Safekeep

10 lists:

Garth Greenwell, Small Rain

9 lists:

Jonathan Blitzer, Everyone Who is Gone is Here
Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red
Adam Higginbotham, Challenger
Richard Powers, Playground
Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea
Wright Thompson, The Barn
Yasmin Zaher, The Coin

8 lists:

Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations
Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation
Hisham Matar, My Friends
Alexei Navalny, Patriot
Ayşegül Savaş, The Anthropologists

7 lists:

Steve Coll, The Achilles Trap
Carys Davies, Clear
Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword
Emily Henry, Funny Story
Kelly Link, The Book of Love
Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History
Lucy Sante, I Heard Her Call My Name
Danez Smith, Bluff
Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Empusium

6 lists:

‘Pemi Aguda, Ghostroots
Rumaan Alam, Entitlement
Lili Anolik, Didion and Babitz
Leigh Bardugo, The Familiar
Colin Barrett, Wild Houses
Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland
Max Boot, Reagan
Bianca Bosker, Get the Picture
Craig Brown, Q: A Voyage Around the Queen
Mariana Enriquez, A Sunny Place for Shady People
Alison Espach, The Wedding People
Alexandra Fuller, Fi
Holly Gramazio, The Husbands
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise
Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits
Dinaw Mengestu, Someone Like Us
Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!
Deborah Jackson Taffa, Whiskey Tender
Morgan Talty, Fire Exit
Chris Whitaker, All the Colors of the Dark

5 lists:

Dolly Alderton, Good Material
Connie Chung, Connie
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message
Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey
Jason De León, Soldiers and Kings
Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing is Monsters (Book 2)
John Ganz, When the Clock Broke
Ina Garten, Be Ready When the Luck Happens
Xochitl Gonzalez, Anita de Monte Laughs Last
Jo Hamya, The Hypocrite
Kristin Hannah, The Women
Tessa Hulls, Feeding Ghosts
Fady Joudah, […]
Rachel Khong, Real Americans
Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel
Yulin Kuang, How to End a Love Story
Catherine Newman, Sandwich
Yoko Ogawa, tr. Stephen Snyder, Mina’s Matchbox
Diane Oliver, Neighbors and Other Stories
Richard Osman, We Solve Murders
Sarah Perry, Enlightenment
Kiley Reid, Come and Get It
Rebecca K. Reilly, Greta & Valdin
Aaron Robertson, The Black Utopians
Cat Sebastian, You Should Be So Lucky
Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz
Rufi Thorpe, Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Mosab Abu Toha, Forest of Noise

List of Lists Surveyed:

Emily Temple

Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020. You can buy it here.

https://www.emilytemple.net/

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The Ultimate Best Books of 2024 List

Reading All the Lists So You Don’t Have To Since 2017

Emily Temple

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