The Best Books of Fall 2024

The protagonist of Kushner’s bravura fourth novel feels blisteringly real, but she can’t tell us her real name. “Sadie Smith” is a freelance secret agent hired for an important undercover mission: Her task is to infiltrate the Moulinards, a rural French farming cooperative suspected of sabotaging the government’s plan to construct a “megabasin,” which would support corporate agriculture. Soon enough, she becomes entranced by their mysterious leader, Bruno Lacombe, who lives in a prehistoric cave and communicates only by cryptic emails. Bruno longs to return to “the world before the fall, before class and domination”—namely, the world of the Neanderthals, who existed outside of capitalism. As her mission heats up, Sadie can’t help but wonder: Does Bruno have a point? Where other spy novels focus on operatives solving crises in the line of fire, Creation Lake turns inward, charting Sadie’s existential crisis. Noirish and brainy, it’s yet another unmissable novel from an inimitable talent.

As we embrace new digital experiences, what embodied truths do we lose? That’s the aching question at the center of The Extinction of Experience, a roving investigation of the threat technology poses to our social and cultural norms. Rosen writes about the danger of “mediated” experiences curated by data-hoarding megacorporations—for example, we check the weather on our phones instead of stepping outside to sense the temperature. “In these new worlds, we are users, not individuals,” Rosen writes. “We are meant to prefer these engineered user experiences to human reality.” But don’t mistake this book for a hand-wringing polemic against change; rather, with each disappearing ritual, Rosen highlights the deeper loss to the human psyche, as in the connection she draws between the end of cursive writing instruction and a measurable decline in children’s cognitive skills. Rigorously researched and elegiacally told, The Extinction of Experience is a compelling reminder that “go touch grass” is more than just an Internet punchline—in fact, it’s a human imperative.

“You can’t give back what already belongs to someone,” writes Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle in this powerful history of land theft in Oklahoma, spanning more than two hundred years of atrocities committed against the Five Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole). Blending reportage and historical research into a propulsive narrative that reads like a legal thriller, Nagle traces the connections between key inflection points, from the Trail of Tears to a small-town murder on treaty lands. More than a century later, that murder would lead to McGirt v. Oklahoma, a landmark Supreme Court ruling that reaffirmed Native rights to Oklahoma land. Through the checkered history of this one state, By the Fire We Carry tells a broader story about the ongoing fight for justice and tribal sovereignty among Indigenous Nations. Detailed and impassioned, it’s a gripping corrective to the historical record, and not to be missed.

Lauded as “the first great incel novel,” Rejection opens with a bang: In the first of its several linked stories, titled “The Feminist,” an aggrieved young man details his youth spent “dragging his virginity like a body bag into his 20s.” In the brutal and brilliant character studies that follow, Tulathimutte paints scorching portraits of lonesome outcasts: a depressed woman spiraling over her unrequited crush, a start-up bro seeking his other half, a gay man going to shocking lengths to pursue his convoluted fetish, and more. Flayed open by the author’s scrutiny, these characters blister off the page, all of them electric in their rage, their alienation, their tragicomic grossness. Paired with a deft metafictional coda, their voices coalesce into a unified theory of rejection. Perverse, profane, and profound, Rejection will make your skin crawl.

In his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Overstory, Powers conjured a literary magic trick for trees; now, in Playground, he does the same for oceans. Worlds collide on Makatea, a Pacific atoll once plundered by the French for its natural resources; more than a century later, its remaining eighty-two residents must decide if they will open the island to a “seasteading” pilot, which will launch autonomous floating cities into the ocean. We meet key figures caught up in the epic drama, including Rafi, a poet who raised a family on Makatea; his onetime friend Todd, an AI pioneer with a mysterious connection to the seasteading project; and Evelyne, a nonagenarian diver studying the region’s natural wonders. Will the seasteading project revitalize Makateans’ economic prospects, or will it destroy the island’s gifts? Told on Powers’s characteristically epic scale, Playground will leave you wonderstruck.

Space Oddity picks up right where Valente’s smash hit Space Opera left off: Just days after saving Earth by triumphing in the Metagalactic Grand Prix (think interstellar Eurovision), rock star Decibel Jones and his bandmate Mira Wonderful Star set out on their “Contractually Obligated Publicity and Interstellar Diplomacy Tour.” During this madcap tour of the galaxy, they discover an unknown planet and its inhabitants, then sponsor their participation in the Grand Prix as they compete to prove their sentience amid a tense interplanetary showdown. Densely packed with high-concept sci-fi tropes and far-out flights of language, Space Oddity reads like Douglas Adams wrote a concept album for Ziggy Stardust while tripping on acid. This glittery paean to art, love, and found family is a true original.

Sally Rooney mania reached fever pitch with Intermezzo, the author’s wise and winsome fourth novel—and it more than lives up to the hype. Rooney’s newest cast of young lovers features two brothers mourning the death of their father: Peter, a thirty-something Dublin lawyer, and his younger brother, Ivan, a twenty-something competitive-chess prodigy. As the men grieve in their own ways, both are tormented by matters of the heart: Peter is torn between two very different paramours, while Ivan falls for an older woman with a complicated life. As ever, the author shows a profound understanding of the vagaries of the human heart—how we hurt and heal one another in equal measure. A lesser writer might ossify into the stylistic grooves that brought her runaway success, but Rooney keeps pushing her talents forward, experimenting with an immersive stream-of-consciousness perspective in this sadder, deeper, more mature tale. Call it Rooney in her blue period—and we can’t wait to see more.

In this work of profound moral clarity, Coates documents three life-changing journeys: one to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for enslaved Africans before they were forcibly removed to the United States; one to Columbia, South Carolina, where he explores the backlash to 2020’s “racial reckoning”; and finally, to Israel and Palestine, where he makes shattering connections between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the Jim Crow South. In a complex, clear-eyed analysis, Coates argues that the same forms of apartheid, colonialism, and ethnic cleansing oppress both Palestinians and Black Americans. But ultimately, The Message isn’t a book about politics—it’s a book about storytelling. Coates laments his own dalliances with ideological storytelling, and he chastises the mainstream journalism establishment for repeating uncritical narratives about Israel. “We are plagued by a dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world,” he writes. In this arresting volume about the power of the written word, Coates wields his own words with remarkable precision.

Solomon reimagines the haunted-house genre in this poignant exploration of the ghosts that “unexorcisable, go on inside of us”: namely, our parents and our childhoods. Ezri Maxwell never planned to return to their childhood home at 677 Acacia Avenue, where they and their sisters experienced traumatic, unexplainable phenomena as the only Black family in a gated Texas community. When communication from their estranged parents abruptly stops, all three sisters return home to find their parents dead in an apparent murder-suicide—but the Maxwells suspect the dastardly house is the real culprit. In chapters alternating between past and present, Solomon evokes the real-life horrors of racism, abuse, and generational trauma, deftly exploring how a human being can become a quasi-haunted house. Coming on the heels of Sorrowland and The Unkindness of Ghosts, Model Home proves Solomon’s tremendous talent for reinventing genre stories.

Anna Williams-Bonner, the widow of the best-selling novelist at the center of The Plot, takes center stage in Korelitz’s enthralling chaser, The Sequel. After her husband’s supposed suicide, Anna enjoys collecting his royalty checks as a famous literary widow, but when she pens her own runaway bestseller, trouble follows. Soon enough, she begins to receive mysterious excerpts from a novel she never expected to see again—a novel no one can know about. In a twisty-turny quest to contain her secrets, Anna hunts down her anonymous tormentor, but much to her frustration, the dead don’t want to stay buried. Much like The Plot before it, The Sequel revels in lambasting the literary ecosystem, but this time, there’s a winking metafictional glee about sequels as a form. Through the narration of this deliciously nasty antiheroine, Korelitz delivers a ripping good read.

One of our finest novelists returns with another soulful masterpiece about what it means to belong—to a community, to a way of life, even to oneself. Set against the backdrop of the Great Recession in North Dakota’s Red River Valley, where a rural community lives and dies by the sugar-beet harvest, The Mighty Red locates its characters during a moment of upheaval. High school senior Kismet Poe is torn between two young men, both of whom have pinned their hopes for their futures on her; soon enough, she agrees to a hasty teen marriage with a young farmer hiding a dark secret. Meanwhile, Kismet’s mother, Crystal, who works as a trucker hauling sugar beets for her new son-in-law’s family, has her own problems to solve, as Kismet’s father has run off with the local church’s renovation fund. As is always the case with Erdrich, the sum is bigger than the parts (although the parts are sublime). Through the lives of these struggling but striving people in this singular place, The Mighty Red captures the comedy and tragedy of living in community.

Even the author of Slaveroad isn’t sure what to call it—“poetry, novel, history, fiction, holy writ”—but whatever the book is, it’s essential reading. Wideman meditates on the enduring traumas of slavery by way of the “slaveroad,” which once ran over the Atlantic Ocean, and now metaphorically connects generations of Black Americans across time and space. In a section centered on the past, he inhabits the mind of William Henry Sheppard, a Black missionary from Virginia who traveled across the Atlantic in the late 1800s to convert Africans to Christianity; Wideman imagines him processing the horrors of making the opposite journey. Elsewhere in the book, the author narrates his poignant reunion with his brother, recently released from prison after forty-four years. Told in lyrical fragments, Wideman’s radical vision of the “slaveroad” running through Black life, then and now, is devastating in its resounding truth.

In Shock Induction, Palahniuk plucks a handful of familiar tropes from his cabinet of curiosities (drugs, precocious teens, outrageous sex acts), then blitzes them with an experimental and formally inventive structure. At an average high school, overachievers are succumbing to an apparent suicide epidemic—or so it seems. In reality, these teens are living in their own Truman Show conducted by Greener Pastures, a surveillance corporation that identifies promising young talents beginning at birth, then auctions them off to become executives and heads of state, all with the consent of their parents. Samantha Deel is destined to become the Queen of England, but she’s not willing to give up her own dreams without a fight. Told in a fragmented structure laced with excerpts from classic novels, this satire of meritocracy is a classic Palahniukian parable with new formal tricks up its sleeve.

Two former staffers of America’s most notorious tabloid present a sprawling oral history of life at the New York Post, composed from more than 240 interviews with staffers past and present, media scholars, and even subjects of the paper’s stories. Beginning in the 1970s with the Post’s sale to Rupert Murdoch and sweeping all the way to the present, Paper of Wreckage provides a shrewd analysis of how Murdoch transformed the American media landscape. For those curious about the stories behind the journalism, the book offers a shocking look underneath the hood—for instance, one memorable tale concerns reporter Steve Dunleavy, who pretended to be a grief counselor to score an interview with the mother of a serial killer’s victim (and then maybe slept with her). Bad behavior, dirty dealings, and inside baseball abound in these bawdy pages—buckle up and enjoy the ride.

Read an excerpt about the making of the Post’s infamous headlines here at Esquire.

The author of a breakout book on white supremacy turns her lens to the Christian Right in Wild Faith, a chilling account of evangelical efforts to hijack American democracy. From its segregationist past to its theocratic present, Lavin highlights the Christian Right’s influence on school boards, statehouses, the Supreme Court, and more. Evangelical religion is destructive at more than just the political level, too—in a gutting chapter on extremist faith in the home, she highlights the corrosive effects of Christian patriarchy, from the subjugation of women to the abuse of children. Wild Faith is a waking nightmare that rolls over you like a steamroller—and hopefully sends you running to the ballot box.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Ten years after the conclusion of his Southern Reach trilogy, VanderMeer returns with a surprise fourth volume that puts the “weird” in “Weird Fiction,” to delightful effect. At once a prequel and a sequel, Absolution shades in some of the previous volumes’ dark corners, but rather than provide answers about Area X, a coastal wilderness colonized by something alien, it poses new questions. In Part One, set two decades before Area X’s formation, a team of government-funded biologists introduce alligators to Florida’s Forgotten Coast, with disastrous consequences. Part Two is a potboiler investigating the ongoing aftermath, still tormenting locals eighteen years later. Part Three contains some of the liveliest writing in the series: Recounting the first expedition into Area X, it’s the story of Lowry, a foul-mouthed self-styled “hero” with his own ulterior motives. Surreal and Lovecraftian, packed with cascading cosmic horrors, Absolution shows a singular mind at work.

Read a profile of the author here at Esquire.

Primal, graphic, and shocking, this is an erotic thriller you won’t soon forget. Rosenfeld is the story of Noa Simon, a thirty-six-year-old filmmaker, and Teddy Rosenfeld, a fifty-five-year-old biotech CEO. When they meet at a wedding reception, Noa immediately knows that she wants Teddy, and they tumble into a debauched bathroom-stall encounter. So begins a tumultuous, ferocious, sexually charged affair, but complications soon follow—Teddy has multiple ex-wives to worry about, as well as children from his marriages, and when Noa is hired at Teddy’s company, their relationship gets even thornier. In these combustive pages, Kessler masterfully excavates obsession, depravity, and difficult people.

The great Haruki Murakami returns with another magical (and magically confounding) novel—a titanic work that’s nothing short of a love letter to magical realism. The story begins with a romance between seventeen-year-old Boku and his sixteen-year-old sweetheart, who confesses that her true self lives on an alternate plane of existence, in an imaginary city with an impossibly tall wall, where she works as a librarian in an archive of dreams. After she disappears, Boku’s life moves on. We find him again at forty-five, now working in a rural library, lovelorn and lonely. To say much else would be to spoil the novel’s labyrinthine pleasures, but rest assured: The line between this world and the shadow world is thin, just like the lines between our real selves and our shadow selves. Murakami fans, you’ll be delighted to discover that all of the author’s trademarks are here: jazz, spaghetti, stylistic deceptions, and more. Whether you’re a devoted reader or a first-timer, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is Murakami at his very best.

If you’re desperate for an escape from your family during the holidays, dive into Rental House for a complete immersion into different families with different problems. Wang’s third novel is a nuanced portrait of a marriage glimpsed through two vacations, five years apart. At Yale, romance blossoms between Keru, a Chinese-American woman born to upwardly mobile immigrant parents, and Nate, a white man born to working-class Appalachians. Years after these college sweethearts marry, they embark on two vacations to the Catskills and Cape Cod, towing both sets of in-laws along for the ride. Each vacation splinters along the faultlines of cultural and class differences, forcing Keru and Nate to ask uncomfortable questions about how their marriage works and how they want to raise a burgeoning family. Sharply observed and compulsively readable, Rental House reminds us that we are all the products of our upbringings, for better or for worse.

Clocking in at just 144 pages, this slim novel will devastate you all in one sitting. In the obituary of Wilhelm Brasse, a Polish photographer imprisoned at Auschwitz and chosen by the Nazis to become the camp’s photographer, Tuck discovered photographs of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Polish Catholic teenager who was imprisoned for three months before she was murdered. In the gaps of this scant history, Tuck conjures a stirring fiction about Czeslawa’s all-too short life, interspersed with informative footnotes about the real-life horrors she endured. Haunting and austere, The Rest Is Memory captures a child’s struggle to understand the unimaginable. It’s nothing short of a literary resurrection, tenderly and unflinchingly observed.