The Best Literary Fiction Books of 2024

What a magnificent, unforgettably moving debut novel. Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s Blessings is a queer coming-of-age tale set primarily in the lead-up to Nigeria’s 2014 Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, and follows a boy named Obiefuna as he begins to discover his sexuality, only to be sent away to boarding school as a consequence. Told from the perspectives of both Obiefuna and his mother, Uzoamaka, Blessings outlines how children and their parents determine the supposedly “right” ways to love—and what results when those children learn to perform in order to survive.

As featured in ELLE editors’s favorite books of 2024: “One of the best books I’ve read in my life, let alone in 2024, Percival Everett’s National Book Award-winning James is a master class in retelling. Taking us inside the mind of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s Jim, James is an adventure that deserves its own slot in the classical canon. It’s as much a testament to Everett’s enormous talent as Mark Twain’s continued relevancy. Reading James, I laughed, cried, and sat transfixed in awe. I cannot—and will not—stop talking about, thinking about, and recommending this book.”

Ghostroots is a haunting, dream-like triumph. After having read ’Pemi Aguda’s short story collection ahead of the National Book Awards this year, I still find myself imagining certain images from her evocative pieces: the dancing masquerades in “Masquerade Season”; the confluence in “The Wonders of the World”; the terrifying tomato seller in “Girlie.” This book was absolutely deserving of its status as an NBA fiction finalist.

Elevating the slice-of-life anecdote into high art, The Anthropologists is a fascinatingly plotless novel, in that it is not marked so much by events as by questions and observations. Turkish author Ayşegül Savaş depicts the everyday comings and goings of expats Asya and Manu as they search for an apartment; film a documentary about a city park; share drinks and conversation with friends; and try to determine the overall shape of their lives. What might their futures look like, particularly in a country that’s not the one they grew up in? What is a life supposed to look like? What is included, in the composite, when describing a “life”? Simple—and all the more lovely for its simplicity—The Anthropologists is an unexpected pleasure.

Lauren Groff called Martyr! “the best novel you’ll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, [and] homesickness,” which captures just how many topics this weird and wonderful novel manages to juice for insight. The book—about a martyr-obsessed son of Iranian immigrants whose journey of self-discovery leads him to the Brooklyn Museum, where a dying woman awaits him—opens with our washed-up protagonist all but certain he’s been visited by the divine...in the form of a flickering lightbulb. Delightfully, things only get more provocative from there.

This gorgeous debut, an intergenerational novel-in-stories following three Palestinian-American families in Baltimore, navigates a tricky balance beam: It’s a zoomed-in family drama that simultaneously captures wide-lens truths about cultural differences; the weight of history; and the myriad manifestations of love.

A charged chronicle of one woman’s trip to her native Jamaica in pursuit of her disconnected relatives, Christina Cooke’s Broughtupsy borrows its title from a Caribbean term addressing good manners and upbringing. Cooke’s protagonist is an LGBTQ woman, increasingly unmoored as she mourns the loss of her brother while digging for a connection to the land—and family—that should feel like her own. This is a deft debut overflowing with emotion.

A risky but inventive formatting choice pays off in Melissa Mogollon’s Oye, told largely through a series of one-sided phone calls (resulting in something akin to an oft-interrupted monologue) by protagonist Luciana, a Florida senior in high school. Luciana’s had her year upended by her Abue, who not only refuses to evacuate in the midst of a hurricane, but has recently received a troubling medical diagnosis. As Luciana cares for her aging grandmother, she relays her Colombian American family’s many dramas to her older sister, Mari, over the phone. The resulting “transcript” is a portrait of love, heartache, and hilarity that transcends its medium.

In an ELLE.com interview with Coco Mellors, freelance writer Caelan McMichael described Mellors’s sophomore novel, Blue Sisters, as a work of “precise emotional telepathy,” probing “addiction, dysfunctional family dynamics, and grief through the perspective of the four Blue sisters: Bonnie, Avery, Lucky, and Nicky.” A year after the youngest, Nicky, dies of an overdose, the remaining sisters—a lawyer, a boxer, and a model—must return to their childhood home in New York to halt its impending sale. Writes McMichael, “Enhancing Mellors’s honest depictions of love, stress, and grief is the authenticity with which she writes, an authenticity born of attention to detail. ”

Within the first few pages of Greta & Valdin, I was already struggling not to laugh aloud in my crowded office. I wanted to tap my colleagues on the shoulders and read lines to them, in the hopes they, too, would cherish Rebecca K. Reilly’s little kernels of humor and truth. The book centers around the titular brother and sister pair, and the urgent family dramas—and hilarious millennial crises—that underscore their winding heartaches in Auckland.

An expansive and painful novel of companionship, violence, and exile, Hisham Matar’s My Friends follows Khaled, a young Libyan man studying in Scotland, whose life is forever changed when he and his friend, Mustafa, decide to attend a protest in London—one that soon spirals into bloodshed. Matar uses this real-life event, which took place in 1984, to illuminate the vast, interconnected impacts of such political brutality. Khaled and Mustafa, injured in the shooting, recuperate in Europe but cannot return to school or to Libya. Khaled recounts the ensuing decades of exile to the reader, including his friendship with the writer Hosam Zowa, whose short story first set Khaled on a course to study literature abroad. As the Arab Spring begins, all three friends must decide whether to stay in London or travel to Libya—together or separately. This is a heartbreaking but ultimately beautiful book.

The celebrated Dolly Alderton (of Everything I Know About Love) returned this year with Good Material, a novel built around a predictably catastrophic romance. Sparkling with Alderton’s well-known wit, Good Material follows the lovesick Andy as he attempts to piece together why his relationship with the once-so-adoring Jen fell apart. But, of course, Jen has her own thoughts on that.

Describing Yael van der Wooden’s The Safekeep in a piece for ELLE.com, freelance writer Nicole Young called the novel “at once a gothic horror set in the Dutch countryside; an almost claustrophobic romance between two deeply flawed women; a treatise on displacement and the aftermath of genocide; and a poetic rumination on what is lost when we refuse to acknowledge the truths simmering beneath our everyday lives.”

A book in an intense, boundary-pushing conversation with The Handmaid’s Tale, Rae Giana Rashad’s work of dystopian fiction drops the reader into an alternate United States, where a young Black Texan has her life determined by an algorithm: She will become the concubine of a white government official. As she commits the experiences of one of her ancestors to paper, Rashad’s protagonist finds courage in their story—and starts searching for the means to break free in her own present-day. Inventive, ferocious, and laser-focused, The Blueprint promises to skewer the hypocrisies that already punctuate our reality.

As featured in ELLE editors’s favorite books of 2024: “What end-of-2024 books list would be complete without one of the biggest—if not the biggest—literary events of the year? Mercifully, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo wasn’t simply a marketing behemoth; it’s also an excellent novel. I sat aloud reading passages to my husband in the kitchen as I paged through Rooney’s latest, which tracks brothers Peter and Ivan through their respective romantic lives (and chess matches! Don’t forget the chess matches!). As poignant and well-observed as we’ve come to expect from Rooney, Intermezzo makes a strong case that the Irish author has many more hits left to offer us.”

Ever since I read (and was blown away by) Godshot in 2020, I’ve been a loyal Chelsea Bieker fan, and Madwoman is the riveting Bieker novel I’ve been waiting for. This literary suspense introduces readers to Clove, a mother who’s gone to great lengths—and employed great lies—to create a comfortable, palatable world far from the one she grew up in. But a letter from her own mother, written in a California prison, threatens to bring a history of abuse back to the forefront. “The world is not made for us,” Bieker’s narrator tells us of mothers, “but this thing I’m starting to understand, transforming from felt to known, it’s about the energy of violence. The way violence shrinks women, makes us feel lucky for things that aren’t lucky.”

“Ambitious” would be a trite term for Vanessa Chan’s outstanding debut, a historical novel that thrums with the commingling tensions of its backdrop: the lead-up to the WWII Japanese invasion of what is now Malaysia. Chan writes her characters—particularly the conflicted protagonist, Cecily Alcantara, a former espionage asset to the Japanese Imperial Army—with a precision that neither flinches from the brutality of war nor ignores the humanity within. This is a book with real staying power.

As featured in ELLE’s best books of summer 2024: “In tightly wrought prose and quick chapters—most no more than two or three pages—Yasmin Zaher unfurls an astute account of a wealthy Palestinian woman’s spiral in New York City. As she stares into the vast divide between luxury and poverty, power and personhood, identity and homeland, she finds herself losing her grip on reality. To retain some control, she obsesses over cleanliness; drapes herself in Alexander McQueen and Brunello Cucinelli; and resells Birkin bags with an unhoused man while her inheritance drips into her bank balance slowly. Finally, she begins to break. This is a magnetic debut.”

Beginning with the electric line, “There’s a night—I think this is the middle of June—when we lock you in the house,” Julie Myerson’s Nonfiction hurls the reader into a devastating conflict between the narrator (an author herself) and her only child. As this child—the “you” to whom the book is addressed—wrestles with their destructive behaviors, the author confronts her own role in this emotional maelstrom, and what it might mean for her to confront her relationship with her mother. Challenging and entrancing in equal measure, Nonfiction is a short but gutting feat of love.

In my humble opinion, there’s nothing that hits like a deft work of magical realism, and Ours by Phillip B. Williams is precisely that sort of story. Set in the mid-19th century and spanning four decades, the book follows a mysterious woman with even more mysterious abilities, which she uses to free the enslaved across Arkansas and shuttle them to a magically hidden community in Missouri—called Ours. But this insulation from the outside world creates its own questions, conflicts, and threats.