It’s been another year of great books! Riveting and personal fiction titles, as well as non-fiction books on some of today’s most current and pressing issues. As you look for ideas for upcoming events, let our speakers and their books inspire you.
Best Books of 2024
James - Percival Everett
The New York Times‘ “10 Best Books of 2024″ • The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2024” • TIME‘s “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024” • NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love • Vanity Fair‘s “21 Best Books of 2024 to Read Right Now” • Literary Hub‘s “38 Favorite Books of 2024” • Book Riot‘s “Best Books of 2024” • Town and Country‘s “The Best Books of 2024” • New York‘s “The Best Books of 2024”
“It takes a lot of ambition, skill and vision to reinvent one of the most iconic books in American letters, but Everett demonstrates he possesses those virtues in droves in James. The novel is a radical reworking of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, telling the story not from Huck’s perspective, but from the point of view of the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River: Jim (or, as he clarifies, James). From James’s eyes, we see he is no mere sidekick but rather a thinker and a writer who is code-switching as illiterate and fighting desperately for freedom. Everett’s novel is a literary hat trick — a book that highlights the horrors in American history and complicates an American classic, all while also emerging as a work of exquisite originality in its own right” — New York Times
Book of Love - Kelly Link
The New York Times‘ “100 Notable Books of 2024” • TIME‘s “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024” • NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love • Literary Hub‘s “38 Favorite Books of 2024” • Book Riot‘s “Best Books of 2024” • Town and Country‘s “The Best Books of 2024” • New York‘s “The Best Books of 2024”
“Kelly Link speaks to my inner child. This is not to say that her books are childish, only that they are full of open doors… Suffice it to say that The Book of Love is bursting with doors, with ideas, with relationships, with myth, it’s big and satisfying and escapist (in places) and difficult (in places) and wonderful.” — Literary Hub
Wandering Stars - Tommy Orange
The New York Times‘ “100 Notable Books of 2024” • TIME‘s “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024” • Washington Post‘s “50 Notable Works of Fiction from 2024” • NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love • Town and Country‘s “The Best Books of 2024” • New York‘s “The Best Books of 2024”
“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. In its second half, the novel enters 21st-century Oakland, following the family in the aftermath of a shooting.” — New York Times
The Message - Ta-Nehisi Coates
The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2024” • NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love • Vanity Fair‘s “21 Best Books of 2024 to Read Right Now” • Town and Country‘s “The Best Books of 2024”
“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.” — New York Times
The Wide Wide Sea - Hampton Sides
The New York Times‘ “10 Best Books of 2024″ • The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2024” • TIME‘s “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024” • NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love
“I knew a sentence or two about James Cook, but not how famous he was in the 1700s or what he accomplished. This account of his final voyage puts you right on his leaky, smelly, cockroach-infested ship. What proves most dramatic is not his struggle with nature but with other people, the Polynesian islanders who Hampton Sides does much to bring to life. This is a story of exploration but also of empire, with all its dark implications.” — NPR
Great Expectations - Vinson Cunningham
The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2024” • Washington Post‘s “50 Notable Works of Fiction from 2024” • NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love • Town and Country‘s “The Best Books of 2024”
“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.” — New York Times
Great Expectations - Kiley Reid
TIME‘s “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024” • NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love • New York‘s “The Best Books of 2024”
“Light on plot and heavy on character development and social commentary, Come and Get It is the kind of book you put down and immediately want to discuss. But fair warning: If you ever lived in a college dorm in the U.S., this book might inflict a non-negligible amount of PTSD.” — New York
Soldiers and Kings - Jason De León
The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2024” • TIME‘s “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024” • NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love
“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.”—New York Times
Someone Like Us - Dinaw Mengestu
The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2024” • TIME‘s “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024” • Washington Post‘s “50 Notable Works of Fiction from 2024”
“Seeking solace from his floundering marriage, journalist Mamush returns to his Ethiopian mother’s home in the Virginia suburbs only to discover that Samuel, his charming but troubled father figure, has unexpectedly died… In this introspective novel that tackles migration, oppression, and connection, the secrets Mamush uncovers about Samuel’s past—sometimes with the help of the older man’s spirit—force him to wrestle with his own lies.” —TIME
Tell Me Everything - Elizabeth Strout
TIME‘s “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024” • NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love
“Elizabeth Strout loves her characters so much, whether they are chronically lonely and emotionally fragile, like Lucy Barton and Bob Burgess, or curmudgeonly and self-absorbed, like Olive Kitteridge and William Gerhardt, that she keeps checking in on them. In Tell Me Everything, she brings together several beloved protagonists from her earlier novels.”—NPR
Forest of Noise - Mosab Abu Toha
The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2024”
“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. “Even our souls,” writes Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet, ‘get stuck under the rubble.'”—New York Times
Undivided - Hahrie Han
The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2024”
“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.”—New York Times
The Great Divide - Cristina Henríquez
TIME‘s “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024”
“Cristina Henríquez’s fourth novel, The Great Divide, is a historical epic set in Panama amid the construction of the famous canal and the deadly mosquito-borne disease that nearly derailed its completion… Henríquez, whose father was born in Panama, weaves a captivating tale that shows the devastating toll the engineering project had on countless lives.”—TIME
Whoever You Are, Honey - Olivia Gatwood
TIME‘s “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024”
“In this debut novel, Gatwood weaves a captivating and unnerving tale about the potential of technology and the lengths to which some women will go to find themselves.”—TIME
Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All - Chanel Miller
NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love
“Chanel Miller is well known for her New York Times bestselling memoir, Know My Name, which recounts a life-altering sexual assault and its aftermath, including the trial of Brock Turner. Here, Miller finds joy in moving on to a different and far lighter realm of writing. In this debut children’s book, Magnolia Wu is determined to show her new friend, Iris, the great things about living in NYC, and she has the perfect way to do it: an investigation into finding the owners of every missing sock she has collected at her parents’ laundromat. Along the way, Magnolia herself gets an eye-opening peek into her parents’ lives outside their workplace. A thoroughly original take on seeing your immigrant parents anew through the lens of others.”—NPR
A Map of a Future Ruins - Lauren Markham
NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love
“What does it mean to belong? How is identity built, not just on an individual level but on a national or global scale? Lauren Markham explores these questions in a deeply personal and thoroughly reported story that weaves together her family lore with centuries of Greece’s history. A reporter who has covered migration for years, she tells the story of the Moria 6, refugees who were accused of setting fire to the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos in 2020. A Map of Future Ruins is a serious but dreamy read.”—NPR
Real Americans - Rachel Khong
NPR‘s 2024 Books We Love
“In the final third of this novel, a Chinese immigrant notes how she and her American-born roommate eat an apple differently. I attuned so closely to this observation as an American-born Chinese that I immediately shared it with my mother, who immigrated to the U.S. around the same time as the character does in the book. There are many such crystalline moments in this intergenerational saga, which also employs subtle science fiction elements in its portrait of one family’s attempts to obviate the pain of the past and set new narratives into motion.”—NPR