The best of this year’s fiction features characters who, like so many, feel like they don’t belong anywhere, even when they’re with the people they love. Some are foreigners in their cities, others feel like foreigners in their own bodies. Three recently came back from the dead. One is even a clandestine alien living in Philadelphia, observing life as it unfolds around her. As these lonely characters navigate worlds brought to life by authors like Kelly Link, Kaveh Akbar, and Percival Everett, their stories push us to consider our relationships to the places we hold dear and the communities we surround ourselves with. Taken together, these books offer a reminder: even outsiders are never truly alone.
Here, the best fiction books of 2024.
10. The Coin, Yasmin Zaher
In The Coin, a stylish Palestinian schoolteacher navigates a cramped New York City, where she’s obsessing over the large inheritance she can’t access due to her brother’s controlling hands. As chaos swirls around her, she vies for control, attempting to cleanse herself of the many ways American culture is taking a toll on her. This presents itself in varied forms, including bathing in boiling water and even breaking down to her students. Soon, Yasmin Zaher’s anxious protagonist becomes addicted to purging herself of filth as she detaches from reality. With biting humor and incisive prose, Zaher presents a dizzying portrait of a woman on the edge.
Buy Now: The Coin on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes& Noble
9. The Anthropologists, Ayşegül Savas
Is there a plot in Ayşegül Savas’ The Anthropologists? Technically, yes, but it’s not really the point. Asya, a documentarian, and her husband Manu are looking for a new home in an unnamed city. Meanwhile, Asya has decided that a local park will be the focus of her next film. These projects move the book forward, but what makes this slim novel sing are the intricately drawn ways the couple spends their time with the people around them, whether neighbors, friends, or family members. As Asya and Manu view apartments and imagine different futures for themselves, Savas crafts a remarkable narrative about the ordinary moments that fill our lives.
Buy Now: The Anthropologists on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
8. Ghostroots, ’Pemi Aguda
Across the 12 short stories in her debut collection, ’Pemi Aguda asks how we can move forward while being reminded of the past. These stories, all set in the author’s native Lagos, explore the collision between myth, memory, and reality. Characters are combatting ghosts of all shapes and sizes, which keep popping up in the most unexpected places. In “Manifest,” a woman is horrified when she finds her daughter’s face is being overtaken by that of her deceased, abusive mother. In “The Hollow,” an architect is tasked with remodeling a home that keeps changing due to the spirits trapped within its walls. Ghostroots brims with an unsettling energy as Aguda twists her narratives in amusing and unpredictable directions.
Buy Now: Ghostroots on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
7. The Book of Love, Kelly Link
In Kelly Link’s debut novel, three teenagers are resurrected from the dead and given the chance to return to their lives—but they can’t all stay for good. The trio is tasked with completing magical tasks in order to earn a place back in their sleepy Massachusetts town. In surreal, joyful, and at times devastating turns, they reckon with old wounds and come to better appreciate the people they’ve left behind. The Book of Love is funny and whimsical as its characters harness fantastical powers, yet it’s also grounded in one of life’s ultimate truths: everyone eventually runs out of time, even if we can escape the inevitable for a little while.
Buy Now: The Book of Love on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
6. Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar
Stumbling through his days as a hospital actor, Cyrus Shams travels to the Brooklyn Museum, where a terminally ill artist has put herself on display for her final exhibit. Cyrus, recently sober and obsessed with death, has lived a life punctuated by loss, beginning as a baby when his mother perished in a plane crash. Now, he finds himself drawn to the cancer-ridden painter and her morbid exhibit. Kaveh Akbar pulls these seemingly disparate characters closer together in a wrenching narrative that is both a multi-generational family saga and a portrait of a young man attempting to make sense of life.
Buy Now: Martyr! on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
5. All Fours, Miranda July
Filmmaker and writer Miranda July’s second novel explores the reawakening of a 45-year-old artist caught between her desires and the realities of aging. All Fours begins as the unnamed woman leaves her child and husband in Los Angeles and hits the road on a planned cross-country drive to New York City. But less than an hour outside of town, she pulls off the freeway and into a motel, where an unexpected love affair with a younger man steers her thrillingly off course. Their steamy time together propels the protagonist down a path that forces her to reconsider her relationships with intimacy, sexuality, and the rules of marriage. July writes with a ferocious electricity as the woman becomes obsessed with her new love and upends her life, all while inhabiting a body that is changing in ways she’s only just beginning to understand.
Buy Now: All Fours on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
4. Fire Exit, Morgan Talty
For years, Charles Lamosway has kept a watchful eye over his daughter, who lives on the nearby Penobscot Reservation and has no idea her father is a white man. She’s being raised by her mother and stepfather, the latter of whom Elizabeth believes is her biological parent. Charles catches glimpses of Elizabeth’s life from his porch across the river and yearns to know her. But then she stops showing up. After weeks go by with no sightings of his daughter, Charles decides to take matters into his own hands, embarking on a quest that forces him to confront his complicated past as well as the life he never got to live. Told in exacting prose, Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit is a haunting book about heritage and the meaning of family.
Buy Now: Fire Exit on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
3. Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino
Marie-Helene Bertino’s inventive novel begins when an unusually small and jaundiced baby named Adina Giorno is born in Philadelphia. Raised by a single mother, her childhood is marked by the usual things (going to school, making friends) as well as an uncanny ability to communicate with extraterrestrial life via a fax machine (though she keeps that part of herself secret). As Adina grows, she reports on the human life she observes with a clarity that is often hilarious: “Upon encountering real problems, human beings compare their lives to riding a roller coaster, even though they invented roller coasters to be fun things to do on their days off.” Through Adina’s watchful eyes and intense desire to understand the world, Bertino unveils a sweet and strange exploration of what it means to be human.
Buy Now: Beautyland on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
2. We Were the Universe, Kimberly King Parsons
Leaving her young daughter and husband in Texas, 20-something Kit goes on a retreat with her best friend in Montana. The getaway is fun, at first, until a drunken night goes awry. Kimberly King Parsons’ overwhelmed protagonist is suddenly reminded of the loss that formed the gaping hole inside her chest, the one she’s always stepping around to just survive each day: the death of her beloved sister Julie. When she returns, Kit feels Julie’s presence everywhere, and her reality begins to warp as old memories of a shared adolescence marked by acid trips and band practice begin to feel real again. In this novel about the shape-shifting nature of love, Parsons captures Kit’s grief in aching and honest terms.
Buy Now: We Were the Universe on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
1. James, Percival Everett
Percival Everett’s reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the most acclaimed—and widely read—books of the year, and for good reason. James, which won a National Book Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is a sweeping story centering on Jim, the enslaved sidekick in Mark Twain’s classic adventure tale. Everett sends both Huck Finn and his friend, reintroduced as James, down the Mississippi River as he pokes holes in the 1884 novel and paints the original protagonist’s companion as a perceptive observer of danger, humanity, and language. As he journeys toward an unknowable future, James wrestles with a gnawing loneliness that only grows in his increasingly fraught world. In giving a beloved character the agency he so deserves, Everett presents his most propulsive novel to date.
Buy Now: James on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
