It’s been another outstanding year in genre fiction, with fantastic fantasy, horror, and young adult titles arriving like clockwork every month. But don’t count the good old-fashioned novel out just yet. It’s true, the concept of general fiction is becoming blurrier than ever and often tends to be used as a catch-all for books that don’t fit neatly in a pre-determined genre box. That’s not a bad thing, to be clear—it just means that the things we consider as natural fits for lists like this tend to run the gamut in terms of tone, style, and subject matter.
Our 2024 best novels list is no different, featuring tiles spanning everything from familiar classic retellings to richly imagined science fiction and biting social satire. Here are our picks for the best novels that hit shelves this year.
James by Percival Everett
Reimaginings of classic novels are a staple of the publishing industry. From transposing classic stories into contemporary settings to retelling familiar tales from the point of view of a secondary character, many writers of today are still in active conversation with the works that have come before them. Percival Everett’s James is not the first book to retell the story of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—in fact, a female-focused version of this classic tale is sitting on our YA best-of list this year—-but it is one of the best to ever do it.
Here, Everett turns Huckleberry Finn on its head by reorienting its story around the perspective of Jim, the adult runaway slave who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi and whose existence forces the book’s titular character to confront the evils of slavery. Here called James—Jim is the name that the white people of the story use for him—the story follows his attempts to evade capture and explore his rich interior life, which involves an elaborate code-switching and astute political analysis of the events of Twain’s original. A retelling that feels more like a companion piece in the way it adds needed texture and historical context to familiar characters, it’s a stunner.
Pearl by Siân Hughes
Many of you are likely familiar with the Middle English poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a famous story of a Christmas game and the adventure that followed that was so excellently adapted into a feature film by A24 in 2021. But what you may not know is that the so-called Gawain poet wrote three other poems of a more overtly religious bent—“Patience,” “Cleanness,” and “Pearl”. The poem “Pearl” is particularly notable for its delicate exploration of grief, as its protagonist wrestles with the loss of a child and how to fit such tragedy into god’s plan.
Siân Hughes’s Pearl is about a daughter’s grief over the loss of a mother, but it uses the Middle English poem as a touchpoint for exploring precisely what that means. Neatly inverting the original text (which follows a father mourning the death of his daughter), the story interrogates both the unreliability of memory and the interconnected nature of loss, which often feels as though hit stretches back to the beginning of the world. As Marianne recounts the story of her mother’s disappearance and the person her absence forces her to become, the book comes together in fragments, exploring everything from the truth about her parents’ marriage and her mother’s mental health to her own inability to move past this defining moment of her life. The lyrical prose makes even the most banal descriptions read like the poetry this novel takes its inspiration from.
Le Fay by Sophie Keetch
Sophie Keetch’s Morgan Is My Name is a fierce, furious, and wildly feminist reexamination of the origins of the famous Arthurian sorceress, Morgan Le Fay. A character who is portrayed as a healer, a witch, a temptress, and a monster by turns (depending on who you read), she’s one of the original legend’s most complicated and frequently confusing characters. In her debut novel, Keetch gleefully embraced the challenge of crafting a believable throughline between the many different versions of Morgan’s identity to create a cohesive and compelling whole. And now in its sequel, Le Fay, she sets the (in)famous sorceress on the path toward her destiny—which contains the promise of both greatness and ruin.
In this second installment, the anger that seems to simmer beneath Morgan’s skin turns itself outward: Toward the famous Merlin, whose power she envies and whose scheming she loathes; toward Guinevere, who seeks to control her influence at court and over the king; and even toward Arthur himself, who hews to many of the patriarchal customs Morgan herself despises and drags his feet when it comes to giving her the position on his council she feels is her due. Though she grows increasingly powerful, Morgan also becomes increasingly stubborn—resenting those who refuse to see the world the same way she does, raging at those around her for mistakes she excuses in herself, and making rash choices fueled by little more than her desire to either show up or punish someone else. This Morgan is frequently petty and cruel, occasionally unlikeable, but never fully unsympathetic.
Keech’s commitment to always presenting Morgan (rightly or wrongly) as full-throatedly, unapologetically herself. After centuries of tales that treat her as little more than window dressing to the story of the men around her, it’s a refreshing and necessary change. “Morgan le Fay. It has a certain ring to it,” Morgan herself intones toward the end of the novel. And she’s right. It sure does.
The Women by Kristin Hannah
Author Kristin Hannah has written dozens of excellent female-focused and historical fiction, often managing both at the same time in novels like The Nightingale and The Four Winds. Her latest novel The Women offers a unique perspective on the Vietnam War, re-centering the story around the experiences of women in the Army Nurse Corps, who worked on bases, in field hospitals, and sometimes under fire to save the soldiers on the front lines.
Emotional and poignant in a way that regular readers of Hannah’s fiction will both recognize and adore, her story of a sheltered San Diego debutante who signs up to serve her country and becomes a skilled trauma nurse is compelling from its first pages. As Frankie faces the horror and blood of war, meets a colorful cast of fellow nurses, and rages against the indifference of her countrymen back home, Hannah’s layered characters are some of the best she’s ever written.
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
Busier and more ambitious than her debut novel Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It is low on stakes but heavy on character, a story that’s primarily interested in exploring the dynamics between the various young women at its center and deconstructing how race, class, and sexuality intersect within their college experiences.
Following roughly half a dozen main characters, the book’s overarching plot—and the way these characters’ stories weave in and out of one another’s—can occasionally feel a bit thin. There’s no one particular inciting incident they’re all responding to, some characters are afforded considerably more depth than others, and the book most often feels like a compelling slice of life drama than anything else. But Reid still manages to spin the lives of those at the story’s center—their layered interactions, their messy dreams, even the specifics of speech patterns and accents, into a compelling whole. Her prose is a delicious mix of sympathy and satire, not to mention a timely thematic exploration of ideas about money, privilege, and higher education.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time has one of the most original premises of any title on this list. In the world of her story, the British government has discovered time travel and is testing it by plucking a series of historical figures from history at the moment before their deaths. The story’s unnamed narrator is a minder for one of them, a dashing Arctic explorer named Graham Gore, who was a member of the doomed Franklin expedition who died before his crewmates abandoned their ships and vanished on the ice.
As the pair grow closer—our enigmatic protagonist is meant to help him adjust to all the changes of modern society—romance predictably blossoms, and their offbeat relationship is a delight in every prickly, offbeat scene they share. But, as our narrator begins to close in on the truth about the hidden agenda behind the ministry’s extraction program, things get a lot more complicated. The story offers a unique perspective on race, identity, mortality, and the lingering generational impact of trauma. But it’s perhaps at its most interesting when exploring complex issues of post-colonialism and empire—-our narrator is identified as Cambodian British and Gore, of course, hails from the height of British imperialism, which makes for some prickly, uncomfortable interactions—and the mutability of history. After all, how much of what we accept as history is what happened and not how we’d prefer to remember it?
The Mars House by Natasha Pulley
Natasha Pulley’s The Mars House is a futuristic blend of science fiction and romance that uses its alien setting to explore all too familiar topics that resonate with our contemporary moment, like climate change, immigration, gender ideology, and political corruption. The end result is something strange and wonderful, an utterly unique and gently beautiful love story rooted in a complicated exploration of our need for connection and a place to call home.
Set in a world only a few generations removed from our own, it follows the story of January Stirling, a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, who is forced to flee Earth when London floods and the steadily worsening global climate crisis sends him and many refugees like him to Tharsis, the Chinese colony on Mars. Life on the Red Planet is something of an adjustment—-Martian gravity is considerably weaker than on Earth, meaning that new arrivals have stronger bones and greater physical strength than the Natural residents who are descendants of the planet’s first colonists. Known as Earth-strongers, they’re forced to live in a segregated society that restricts the jobs they can perform and wear metal cages that both weaken them and mark them out as foreigners. But when January ends up in a very public conflict with xenophobic Martian Senator Aubrey Gale, the pair must agree to an arranged marriage to save both their futures.
The thorny political and ethical questions raised within The Mars House—-about immigration, assimilation, and what we owe to those we’ve promised to help—have no easy answers, but Pulley’s willingness to wrestle with perspectives from all sides is welcome, and her characters are all refreshingly three-dimensional. (And don’t be surprised if you end up really rooting for the enemies to husbands to something more relationship at the book’s center.)
The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden
A book that feels more overtly like traditional historical fiction than author Katherine Arden’s earlier works, The Warm Hands of Ghosts is not always a particularly easy read. It’s a novel that wrestles with loss, connection, family, and the heartbreak of one world painfully giving way to another. It’s also a vivid war novel, delving into the apocalyptic feel of World War I in a way that often feels like a sci-fi story. As flying machines drop bombs from the sky and chemical gases waft through the air and silently choke men to death, soldiers still fight with bayonets, send messages with the help of pigeons, and rely on horses and mules to move munitions.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts follows a wounded combat nurse who learns that her soldier brother has gone missing at the front in Belgium and volunteers to return to the European front to attempt to find him. The siblings’ stories, told across dual timelines, ultimately converge via the appearance of a strange glimmering hotel that exists only on the fringes of the battlefield, where patrons can see their hearts’ desire and forget the horrors of war. But at what cost?
So much of this setting carries a feeling of intense unreality, a sense that’s made all the more poignant by the fact that our current pop culture landscape tends to eschew World War I narratives in favor of those about Europe’s second great war. The end result is a painfully liminal story that feels simultaneously magical and all too real, a tale in which it seems possible to see the ideas of the old world slowly transforming into those of the new right in front of us.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
The latest novel from the author of the (excellent) The Knockout Queen, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is an offbeat story of found family, blood relatives, unconventional career decisions, teen parenthood, and coming into your own. When the titular Margo, a 19-year-old college student, finds that she’s pregnant thanks to an affair with her English professor virtually everyone in her life wants her to have an abortion. She doesn’t. What follows is a story about the struggles of single motherhood, that involves everything from the porn site Only Fans to pro wrestling. It’s hard to explain how much the disparate pieces of this story should not go together, and the fact that Thrope blends them all seamlessly into a warm, rich, and thoroughly affecting whole is a testament to the unexpected power of her writing.
The book is full of memorable characters, but it’s Margo’s estranged father, Jinx, a former pro wrestler who never showed up for his daughter but who reappears in her life in time to help when she needs it most that quietly earns the book’s stealth MVP award. In what is perhaps the most bizarre parental bonding in fiction, he uses lessons from his time in the ring to Margo about the ins and outs of creating an online persona and story that feels authentic for the version of herself she’s selling online. Similarly, the book itself delights in trying on new voices and frequently switching perspectives that place Margo in the position of both character, omniscient narrator, and something in between. A seemingly straightforward story that hides surprising depths.
We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida
We’ll Prescribe You a Cat will likely serve as an introduction to Japanese feel-good fiction for many American readers, and to be honest, I can’t imagine a better genre for us all to get really into over the coming months and years. Given, you know….everything.
One of the coziest, most heartwarming novels released in 2024, We’ll Prescribe You a Cat isn’t a singular story but more a group of interconnected tales about a unique medical practice and the patients its unconventional prescriptions help. Written by Syou Ishida and translated from the Japanese by E. Madison Shimoda, its stories are all connected by the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul, a mysterious office tucked into an old building with a confusing address that can only be found when the person searching for it is genuinely struggling with their lives. And at this clinic, the prescription is always the same: A cat.
The cats involved aren’t magical or anything, but the addition of their presence helps the various protagonists—a burned-out businessman who needs a career change, a middle-aged man who no longer feels relevant in his own life, a young girl struggling with the social pressures of school, and more—change their lives in ways both large and small. Perhaps a cat isn’t the medicine any of these people thought they were going to get, but it turns out that the felines were exactly what they needed.
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
Danzy Senna’s Colored Television is frequently uncomfortable, bitingly funny, and surprisingly of the moment, the sort of story that often feels like eavesdropping on a dinner party filled with the bitchiest sort of attendees offering the sort of sly observations you only wish you’d thought of yourself. A tale of tension between art and commercialism, its story of a struggling artist turned sell-out offers a searing commentary on both the entertainment industry’s willingness to exploit racial identity under the guise of honoring it, and the creatives that power it, forced to chase financial stability to selling pieces of their souls.
When writer Jane’s second novel, an epic fictional history of what she insists on referring to as mulatto people in America, is rejected, she turns to pitching the idea as a TV sitcom about a kooky, Black, and biracial family that she hopes will finally net her the sort of stable career that might lead to housing security. Senna’s biting satire is not just an incisive depiction of race and our cultural obsession with race and identity in America but of creativity and influence in Hollywood. As Jane attempts to figure out which aspects of her identity are easily commodifiable for public consumption, Senna’s novel skewers many of the uncomfortable truths about being a writer in general, and one trying to survive in Los Angeles specifically.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB