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 Compass

Christine Lai ❤️ loved this book because...

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Thoughts 🥈 Originality
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐕 Good, steady pace

By Mathias Énard , Charlotte Mandell (translator) ,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of Tramp

Christine Lai ❤️ loved this book because...

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Writing 🥈 Thoughts
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐕 Good, steady pace

By Tomas Espedal ,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

A lyrical travelogue charting Tomas Espedal's journeys to and ruminations around the world, from his native Norway to Istanbul and beyond.

"Why travel?" asks Tomas Espedal in Tramp, "Why not just stay at home, in your room, in your house, in the place you like better than any other, your own place. The familiar house, the requisite rooms in which we have gathered the things we need, a good bed, a desk, a whole pile of books. The windows giving on to the sea and the garden with its apple trees and holly hedge, a beautiful garden, growing wild."

The…


My 3rd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of The Bear and the Paving Stone

Christine Lai ❤️ loved this book because...

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Writing 🥈 Thoughts
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Toshiyuki Horie , Geraint Howells (translator) ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Bear and the Paving Stone as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, three dream-like tales of memory and war

Visiting a friend in the French countryside, a man finds himself cast into the quandaries of historical whim, religious identity, and seeing without sight; a walk along the seashore, upon the anniversary of a death, becomes a reverie on building sandcastles; and an innocent break-in at the ruins of an archbishop's residence takes a turn towards disaster.

In three stories that prove the unavoidable connections of our past, Toshiyuki Horie creates a haunting world of dreams and memories where everyone ends up where they began - whether…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

Landscapes

By Christine Lai ,

Book cover of Landscapes

What is my book about?

Set in a near future fraught with ecological collapse, Landscapes explores memory, preservation, and art as an instrument of collection and renewal.

In the English countryside—decimated by heat and drought—Penelope archives what remains of an estate’s once notable collection. As she catalogues the library’s contents, she keeps a diary of her final months in the dilapidated country house that has been her home for two decades. Out of necessity, Penelope and her partner, Aidan, have sold the house, and its scheduled demolition marks the pressing deadline for completing the archive. But with the demolition also comes the impending return of Aidan’s brother, Julian, at whose hands Penelope suffered during a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before.

Landscapes is an elegiac blend of narrative, essay, and diary that reinvents the pastoral and the country house novel for the age of catastrophe.

Book cover of Compass
Book cover of Tramp
Book cover of The Bear and the Paving Stone

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