Our 47 NYTBR "100 Notable Books of 2024"
Every autumn, we look forward to the New York Times Book Review editors’ “100 Notable Books” list of standout fiction, poetry, and nonfiction titles. This year, we are proud to announce that nearly half of the selected titles are published by Penguin Random House. Of the 100 selected titles, 47 are published by our imprints. The entire list is online now and will be published in the December 1 print edition.
A warm congratulations to our authors and their publishing teams! The selection of books reflects the diversity of our authors’ voices and the far-reaching cultural impact of literature. Join us in keeping our fingers crossed as we eagerly await the “10 Best Books” list.
Below, discover speculative fiction, fantasy epic, horror, romantic comedy (and more!) on the fiction and poetry list. Or explore categories such as culinary memoir, tv history, and literary criticism on the nonfiction list.
FICTION & POETRY
ALL FOURS by Miranda July (Riverhead)
The unnamed heroine of July’s gaspingly explicit comic novel plans a cross-country road trip, only to stop 30 minutes from home.
THE BOOK OF LOVE by Kelly Link (Random House)
After three teenagers are brought back from the dead, the magic-wielding band teacher who revived them gives them a series of tasks to stay alive.
THE BRIGHT SWORD: A Novel of King Arthur by Lev Grossman (Viking)
The novel follows a knight who helps lead a ragtag band to rebuild Camelot in the wake of the king’s death.
COLORED TELEVISION by Danzy Senna (Riverhead)
The eternal conflict between making art and selling out gets a fresh take in Senna’s funny, foxy and fleet new novel about a struggling mixed-race couple.
THE EMPUSIUM: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonio Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead)
In 1913, at a health resort in what is now Poland, a shy and sickly student discovers a terrible secret: Every year around the first full moon in November, a man, sometimes two, is torn to pieces in the nearby forest.
FOREST OF NOISE by Mosab Abu Toha (Knopf)
Written in the months since Israel’s invasion of Gaza, these poems conjure memories of orange trees, lost family and brutal airstrikes with palpable grief and uncertainty.
FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry (Berkley)
In this heartfelt and humorous romp, a librarian and a bartender move in together after their respective partners leave them for each other.
THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore (Riverhead)
A pair of missing siblings at an Adirondack summer camp spark a reckoning about the powerful, wealthy and possibly wicked family whose house — and presence — loom over the lakeside idyll.
GODWIN by Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon)
This globe-trotting novel by the author of “Netherland” chronicles the quest of a man named Mark Wolfe to find a mysterious soccer prodigy in West Africa and the unraveling of his workplace back in Pittsburgh.
GOOD MATERIAL by Dolly Alderton (Knopf)
Alderton’s novel, about a 35-year-old struggling to make sense of a breakup, delivers the most delightful aspects of romantic comedy.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Vinson Cunningham (Hogarth)
In this impressive first novel, a Black campaign aide coolly observes as aspiring power players angle to connect with a candidate who more than resembles Barack Obama.
HEADSHOT by Rita Bullwinkel (Viking)
Set at a young women’s boxing tournament in Reno, Nev., this novel centers on eight contestants, and the fights — physical and emotional — they bring to the ring.
THE HUNTER by Tana French (Viking)
French’s moody, mesmerizing thriller — a sequel of sorts to “The Searcher” — paints a rich portrait of a rural community in western Ireland roiling with “unseen things,” where a Chicago cop has decided to retire.
JAMES by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
In this reworking of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River, is the narrator, and he recounts the classic tale in a language that is his own, with surprising details that reveal a far more resourceful, cunning and powerful character than we knew.
LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random House)
Based on a true story, this novel follows a dysfunctional suburban family decades after the father, a prominent businessman, is kidnapped from his driveway.
MARTYR! by Kaveh Akbar (Knopf)
A young Iranian American aspiring poet and recovering addict grieves his parents’ deaths while fantasizing about his own in Akbar’s remarkable first novel, which, haunted by death, also teems with life.
OUR EVENINGS by Alan Hollinghurst (Random House)
Hollinghurst’s latest brings readers deep into the trials and tribulations of Dave Win, an English Burmese actor confronting confusing relationships, his emerging sexuality, racism and England’s changing political climate over the course of his life, all tied together by Hollinghurst’s keen eye and affecting prose.
REBOOT by Justin Taylor (Pantheon)
This satire of modern media and pop culture follows a former child actor who is trying to revive the TV show that made him famous.
SOMEONE LIKE US by Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf)
Mengestu’s brilliantly slippery novel centers on a journalist who is supposed to spend Christmas with his wife and young son in the Virginia suburb where his Ethiopian immigrant mother lives; instead, he ends up in Chicago investigating the criminal record of the man he assumes is his father.
WANDERING STARS by Tommy Orange (Knopf)
This follow-up to Orange’s debut, “There There,” is part prequel and part sequel; it trails the young survivor of a 19th-century massacre of Native Americans, chronicling not just his harsh fate but also those of his descendants.
WHALE FALL by Elizabeth O’Connor (Pantheon)
Brief, blunt and exquisite, O’Connor’s debut is set in the fall of 1938 on a Welsh island with a population of 47, including the bright, restless 18-year-old Manod.
WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE? by Sophie Kinsella (The Dial Press)
A best-selling author and mother of five wakes up from surgery to remove a brain tumor and needs to be reminded, again and again, how she has arrived at this point. Kinsella’s autobiographical novella is both devastating and, against all odds, devastatingly funny.
YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead)
Moctezuma is fearsome yet depressed, often tripping on magic mushrooms, while the conquistadors grow increasingly anxious.
NONFICTION & MEMIOR
THE ACHILLES TRAP: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll (Penguin Press)
This history stretches from Hussein’s earliest days in power to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, tracking the dictator’s state of mind with the help of 2,000 hours of rarely accessed audio from high-level meetings that Hussein “recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon,” Coll says.
THE ANXIOUS GENERATION: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Press)
In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Haidt took a hard stand against helicopter parenting. In this pugnacious follow-up, he turns to what he sees as technology’s dangers for young people. Haidt, a digital absolutist, cedes no ground on the issue of social media.
BE READY WHEN THE LUCK HAPPENS: A Memoir by Ina Garten (Crown)
Garten’s gift has been to make everything look effortless: the recipes in her 13 cookbooks; the glorious array of salads and cupcakes in her former food store, Barefoot Contessa; the many occasions when she’s advised viewers to substitute store-bought items for homemade on the Food Network. In this memoir, however, she shows how much luck and labor it took to achieve the success that she clearly enjoys.
THE BLACK BOX: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Penguin Press)
In his latest book, the Harvard scholar shows how African American writers have used the written word to shape their reality despite constraints imposed on them from outside, using the metaphor of the box to reflect ordeals withstood and survived since Africans were first brought to this continent.
CUE THE SUN!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum (Random House)
From “Queen for a Day” to “The Real World,” “Survivor” and “The Apprentice,” it’s all here in Nussbaum’s passionate, exquisitely told origin story of reality TV. With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail, the New Yorker staff writer outlines how such shows united high and low art into a potent pop-culture concoction that we love to hate, hate to love and just can’t quit.
DO SOMETHING: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of ’70s New York by Guy Trebay (Knopf)
Trebay is a veteran of the style wars: Prior to joining this paper, he did stints as a handbag designer, a busboy at Max’s Kansas City, a model and a reporter at The Village Voice, chronicling a lost New York that was as gritty as it was glamorous. Trebay knew everyone; this memoir is indeed a who’s who of that vanished Gotham. But more than that, it’s a love letter to a city, a life and a family, and to beauty itself.
EVERY VALLEY: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s “Messiah” by Charles King (Doubleday)
King uses Handel’s “Messiah,” possibly “the greatest piece of participatory art ever created,” as a hub whose spokes radiate outward to a host of key historical forces and personalities that characterize 18th-century Britain.
EVERYONE WHO IS GONE IS HERE: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer (Penguin)
This urgent and propulsive account of Latin American politics and immigration makes a persuasive case for a direct line from U.S. foreign policy in Central America to the current migrant crisis.
HEALTH AND SAFETY: A Breakdown by Emily Witt (Pantheon)
Witt’s boyfriend, Andrew, started behaving erratically when pandemic lockdowns put an end to the underground party scene in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. “Health and Safety” — which braids that scene, Andrew’s breakdown and Witt’s work as a journalist during the first Trump administration — also encompasses a bigger breakdown, one that eroded the boundaries between their subculture and the world at large.
THE HIDDEN GLOBE: How Wealth Hacks the World by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (Riverhead)
A journalist who grew up in Geneva, Abrahamian explores the spread of freeports, free zones and other “extraterritorial domains” of the sort common in her hometown, all created to benefit wealthy people or countries by offering them special perks or exempting them from local laws and regulations.
I HEARD HER CALL MY NAME: A Memoir of Transition by Lucy Sante (Penguin Press)
Sante, who for decades has been a leading literary and cultural critic, here traces her late-in-life gender transition, reflecting on a career of seeking truths through writing while hiding an important truth about herself. The book vividly presents New York in the 1970s and documents a transformation both internal and external.
I JUST KEEP TALKING: A Life in Essays by Nell Irvin Painter (Doubleday)
Painter, a historian and author who left academia to attend art school at the age of 64, highlights her original mind and irreverent wit in this collection, with reflections on Black American figures including Sojourner Truth, Martin R. Delany and Clarence Thomas, interspersed with artwork by Painter herself.
KNIFE: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie (Random House)
In this candid, plain-spoken memoir, Rushdie recalls the attempted assassination he survived in 2022 during a presentation about keeping the world’s writers safe from harm. His attacker had piranhic energy. He also had a knife. Rushdie lost an eye, but he has slowly recovered thanks to the attentive care of doctors and the wife he celebrates here.
LOVELY ONE: A Memoir by Ketanji Brown Jackson (Random House)
Crediting the mentors who lifted her up on her path to success, this memoir by the Supreme Court’s newest justice is deeply personal and full of hope, and highlights a fairy-tale marriage to her college boyfriend.
THE MESSAGE by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World)
Fusing a meditation on the political potential of storytelling with intimate accounts of trips to Senegal, where he visits the former slave-trading center Gorée Island; South Carolina, to support a high school instructor under fire for teaching his prize-winning book “Between the World and Me”; and the West Bank, where he witnesses life under the Israeli occupation, Coates decries injustice and the Western media’s complicity in it.
THE NEW YORK GAME: Baseball and the Rise of a New City by Kevin Baker (Knopf)
What makes New York baseball unique, the novelist and historian argues in this insightful, beautifully crafted narrative — which concludes with the end of World War II — is its role as a chronicler of cultural change. Whatever baseball’s roots in cow pastures and small towns, it came of age as an urban game.
PRIVATE REVOLUTIONS: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order by Yuan Yang (Viking)
For six years, Yuan Yang, a journalist, followed four very different young women as they navigated what she calls China’s “new social order” — a country changing dramatically into an industrial superpower. The result is a moving work of reportage that toggles between global and personal.
THE RETURN OF GREAT POWERS: Russia, China, and the Next World War by Jim Sciutto (Dutton)
Sciutto’s absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship takes readers from Ukraine in the days before Russia’s invasion to the Taiwan Strait, where Chinese jets flying overhead raise tensions across the region. The author also shows how the battles are waged not just on the ground and in the air, but also in undersea communication cables, across satellites in outer space and over the growing frontiers of artificial intelligence.
SOLDIERS AND KINGS: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De León (Viking)
A feat of immersive fieldwork, this account by an anthropologist, nearly seven years in the making, shines needed light on the lives of human smugglers, many of them fleeing the same violence and poverty as their clients, who ferry migrants across the southern border.
THE SWANS OF HARLEM: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History by Karen Valby (Pantheon)
For those who believe that the narrative of Black prima ballerinas begins and ends with Misty Copeland, Valby’s rich, prismatic portrait of the five dancers who formed the core of the Dance Theater of Harlem’s inaugural 1969 class offers a joyful and spirited corrective.
THERE’S ALWAYS THIS YEAR by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)
Growing up on the east side of Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib — a cultural critic and poet — was hugely influenced by LeBron James, but basketball was also a more personal utopia for him and his community, “our little slice of streetball heaven.”
UNDIVIDED: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church by Hahrie Han (Knopf)
When Han, a political scientist, learned that a mostly white and broadly conservative Cincinnati megachurch had resolved to fight racial injustice in its community, she decided to follow the story. The result is a sensitive study of admirable intentions, earnest action and the often painful price of real change.
THE WIDE WIDE SEA: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides (Doubleday)
Sides tracks Captain Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait of an explorer reckoning with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power.
A WILDER SHORE: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson by Camille Peri (Viking)
Robert Louis Stevenson’s American wife, Fanny Van de Grift, was a powerful personality in her own right: an individualist who paid no mind to conventional gender roles, and a brave and sometimes reckless adventurer who encouraged Stevenson’s penchant for a wandering life.
And a warm congratulations to our Penguin Random House Publisher Services clients: SMOKE KINGS by Jahmal Mayfield (Melville House), BLACK RIVER by Nilanjana Roy (Pushkin Vertigo), and THE COIN by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult).