The best books of 2024

This list is part of the best books of 2024.

Join 2,415 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2024

Book cover of My Brilliant Friend

Amy Cox Hall ❤️ loved this book because...

Ferrante's writing is masterful. Her treatment of girlhood resonated with such truth and insight. A beautiful story to treasure and reread with endless delight.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Writing 🥈 Originality
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Elena Ferrante , Ann Goldstein (translator) ,

Why should I read it?

28 authors picked My Brilliant Friend as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

OVER 5 MILLION COPIES SOLD IN ENGLISH WORLDWIDE

OVER 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD IN THE UK

OVER 14 MILLION COPIES OF THE NEAPOLITAN QUARTET SOLD WORLDWIDE

NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES

GUARDIAN 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY

58 WEEKS ON THE BOOKSELLER'S TOP 20 ORIGINAL FICTION BESTSELLERS LIST

SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2015

43 INTERNATIONAL RIGHTS DEALS

Now in B-format Paperback

From one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, comes this ravishing and generous-hearted novel about a friendship that lasts a lifetime. The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor but…


When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

My 2nd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of All Fours

Amy Cox Hall 👍 liked this book because...

Miranda July's All Fours is a thought-provoking book that pushed me to reconsider my own assumptions around partnership, motherhood, ambition, truth and sexuality. A challenging book that excels when pushing boundaries.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Outlook 🥈 Thoughts
  • Writing style

    👍 Liked it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Miranda July ,

Why should I read it?

32 authors picked All Fours as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The New York Times bestselling author returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and surprising novel about a woman upending her life

“A frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expect….the bravery of All Fours is nothing short of riveting.”—Vogue

“A novel that presses into that tender bruise about the anxiety of aging, of what it means to have a female body that is aging, and wanting the freedom to live a fuller life…Deeply funny and achingly true.” —LA Times
 
“All Fours possessed me.…


My 3rd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of Traveling with Sugar

Amy Cox Hall 👍 liked this book because...

An ethnography of the best kind - immersive, well considered, deeply researched, and thought-provoking. Sparked meaningful conversations about histories and how they are lived in the present and what it means for bodies and landscapes.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Teach 🥈 Originality
  • Writing style

    👍 Liked it
  • Pace

    🐕 Good, steady pace

By Amy Moran-Thomas ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Traveling with Sugar as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction "sugar"-or, as some say in Belize, "traveling with sugar." A decade in the making, this book unfolds as a series of cronicas-a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those "still fighting it" as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, these individuals…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

The Taste of Nostalgia

By Amy Cox Hall ,

Book cover of The Taste of Nostalgia

What is my book about?

From the late 1940s to the mid 1960s, Peru’s rapid industrialization and anti-communist authoritarianism coincided with the rise of mass-produced cookbooks, the first televised cooking shows, glossy lifestyle magazines, and imported domestic appliances and foodstuffs. Amy Cox Hall’s The Taste of Nostalgia uses taste as a thematic and analytic thread to examine the ways that women, race, and the kitchen were foundational to Peruvian longings for modernity, both during the Cold War and today.

Drawing on interviews, personal stories, media images, and archival and ethnographic research, Cox Hall considers how elite, European-descended women and the urban home were central to Peru’s modernizing project and finds that all women who labored within the deeply racialized and gendered world of food helped set the stage for a Peruvian food nationalism that is now global in the twenty-first century. Cox Hall skillfully connects how the sometimes-unsavory tastes of the past are served again in today’s profitable and pervasive gastronostalgia that helps sell Peru and its cuisine both at home and abroad.

Book cover of My Brilliant Friend
Book cover of All Fours
Book cover of Traveling with Sugar

Share your top 3 reads of 2025!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,210

readers submitted
so far, will you?