10 best books of 2024 - The Washington Post 1/12/24, 9:58 AM

Books Book Reviews Fiction Nonfiction Summer reading

The 10 best books of 2024

The year’s best fiction and nonfiction, as selected by the staff of The Washington
Post’s Book World.

6 min 39

By Washington Post Editors and Reviewers

November 22, 2024 at 8:27 a.m. EST

FICTION

‘Colored Television’ by Danzy Senna

Senna’s shrewd comedy is about a biracial woman named Jane Gibson who is struggling to sell her ambitious
second novel. So she holds her nose and turns to the glowing embrace of television, pitching a comedy about a
“kooky but lovable” biracial family. Senna keeps her story from getting clotted with bits of didactic wisdom or social
reproof. Even when Jane really wants to sell out and cash in, she never abandons her sense of irony or her
determination to resist being the tragic star of somebody else’s tale. It’s an exceptionally assured novel about a
culture constantly swirling between denigrating racial identity and fetishizing it. (Book World review.)

‘James’ by Percival Everett

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Everett’s sly response to “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” both honors and interrogates Mark Twain’s classic,
along with the nation that reveres it. Told from the perspective of the enslaved James, this is a book haunted by a
little boy’s innocence but no longer corralled by it. Instead of an ambling tale told drifting down a river, it’s the
story of a man racing against chaos to retrieve his family. “James” leans in hard on its thriller elements and gathers
speed and terror like a swelling storm. Its conclusion is equally shocking and exhilarating. (Book World review.)

‘My Friends’ by Hisham Matar

On April 17, 1984, an angry demonstration swelled outside the Libyan Embassy in London. Outraged by Moammar
Gaddafi’s murderous reign back home, dozens of Libyan students chanted slogans against the dictator. Suddenly,
from the embassy’s windows, shots were fired into the crowd. A British police officer was killed, and 10
demonstrators were wounded. In “My Friends,” a Libyan man named Khaled who was present at that fateful
moment describes how he came to spend his adult life in England, pining for home. Part historical fiction, part
cultural reflection, this is a story about the way exile calcifies the heart into an organ of brittle longing. (Book World
review.)

‘Playground’ by Richard Powers

Powers delivers a mind-blowing reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet reconceived by artificial
intelligence. Although “Playground” is not as mammoth as his Pulitzer-winning opus, “The Overstory,” it follows a
similarly fragmented structure. But any confusion on the reader’s part eventually melts into wonderment. The
story, far too complex to summarize here, involves a world-famous tech genius, an estranged friendship, a
pioneering oceanographer and the thinly populated island of Makatea, an atoll in French Polynesia. The
Washington Post’s critic Ron Charles wrote, “I can’t think of another novel that treats the Earth’s plight with such
an expansive and disorienting vision.” (Book World review.)

‘This Strange Eventful History’ by Claire Messud

Messud’s latest novel was inspired by a 1,500-page memoir written by her paternal grandfather, who was born in
what was once French Algeria. After a lifetime of reflection, Messud has imagined how three generations of a
fictionalized family, the Cassars, rode the geopolitical waves from World War II into the 21st century. Regardless of
how much it may draw from biographical details, the story grips our interest because of how expertly Messud
shapes these incidents for dramatic effect. This is a novel of cavernous depth and relentless exploration, making us
realize how much we know and how little we confess about our own families. (Book World review.)

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NONFICTION

‘The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World’ by Atossa

Araxia Abrahamian
Abrahamian explores “special economic zones,” the “fractured atlas” of places that help the international rich bend
globalization to their advantage, often by making it possible to do business within a country without being
subjected to its laws. In the hands of a lesser writer, such material could be tedious. But Abrahamian populates her
book with sharply drawn characters, engaging debates and briskly told history. We have created a form of
globalization, she argues, that allows money to hop the globe seamlessly while keeping people stuck in place. (Book
World review.)

‘I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition’ by Lucy

Sante
Since childhood, the writer Lucy Sante — formerly Luc Sante — knew she was transgender. This memoir is a two-
tier narrative, bouncing between her experience of her transition in 2021 and the details of her entire life. An
acclaimed writer of essays on art and culture as well as the cult classic “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New
York,” Sante here writes about the sometimes paralyzing cost of trying to live two different lives: as a man or a
woman, but also as a human being and a writer. This memoir, which also includes substantial sections about
Sante’s upbringing and creative life, is a funny and warm joy to read. (Book World review.)

‘Question 7’ by Richard Flanagan

Flanagan, a Booker Prize-winning novelist, has produced a kind of philosophical fantasia, a highly original weaving
together of a half-dozen essayistic narratives about the sad, wondrous world we live in. From memories of the
author’s childhood in a poor and extended Catholic family in Tasmania to an account of how Leo Szilard, father of
the atomic bomb, discovered the kernel for his speculations about nuclear chain reactions in H.G. Wells’s novel
“The World Set Free,” Flanagan keeps readers enchanted while boldly wrestling with the social, political and moral
complexities of modern history. (Book World review.)

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‘V13: Chronicle of a Trial’ by Emmanuel Carrère, translated

by John Lambert
Coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 killed 130 people. Starting in September 2021, a trial
weighed the guilt of 20 men accused of participating in those attacks. The inimitable French journalist, memoirist
and novelist Emmanuel Carrère attended the proceedings nearly every day of their 10-month duration to write
weekly dispatches for a magazine. This book-length account reveals the full convolutions of suffering. Carrère was
left, he writes, with “a unique experience of horror, pity, proximity and presence.” So, too, is everyone fortunate
enough to read his extraordinary and generous book. (Book World review.)

‘When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How

America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s’ by John Ganz
Ganz revisits the era of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot to find the roots of our current moment. He argues that the
1992 presidential election cycle was a circus — and a warning that the establishment ignored at its peril. Perhaps
most recognizable, enduring and damning was a new political style, a brazen commitment to courting scandal and
spectacle. Many of Ganz’s flashy subjects thrived in the spotlight: They were performers first and politicians second.
This is a work of narrative history built with sharp character studies and deft exercises in political critique. (Book
World review.)

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