The best books of 2024 so far

WWhat does it really mean to belong? What happens when we can no longer recognize where we came from? And what do we owe to the places that created us? These and other questions drive the best books of the year so far, a crop of novels, memoirs, and essay collections that touch on love, loss, friendship, and more. From Lydia Millet’s exploration of our collapsing planet to Kaveh Akbar’s portrayal of an orphaned son searching for answers about his family’s history, these narratives interrogate deep feelings about the world and how to find a place in it.

Here, the best books of the year so far.

There is always this year, Hanif Abdurraqib

In the book by Hanif Abdurraqib There’s Always Next Year: On Basketball and Ascension, the Ohio native channels his reflections on life through the sport and state that shaped him. Structured into quarters with timestamps and intermissions like a basketball game, the collection of essays moves through reflections on his father’s shooting, a dissection of the legend of LeBron James, and more. Abdurraqib, poet, cultural critic, and National Book Award finalist, offers a complex reflection on home, belonging, and mortality. –Cady Lang

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Martyr!Kaveh Akbar

The protagonist of poet Kaveh Akbar’s devastating debut novel faces a death that shaped him from a young age. When he was just a baby, Cyrus Shams lost his mother in a plane crash in the Persian Gulf. He then moved from Tehran to the US with his father, who worked in the Midwest as a farmer. Now a college graduate and newly sober, Cyrus finds himself drawn to an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, where a painter with terminal cancer spends her remaining days on display. Martyr! explores the connection between these two characters, culminating in a decades-long examination of addiction, art, and belonging. –Annabel Gutterman

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Land of beautyMarie-Helene Bertino

Much like a certain lord and savior, the heroine of Marie-Helene Bertino’s strange and captivating third novel is at once fully human and fully supernatural. Born in 1970s Philadelphia and raised by a penniless single mother, Adina Giorno is also an alien who communicates via fax with extraterrestrial overlords who have sent her to report on Earth society. Land of beauty tells the bittersweet story of his equally contradictory life, a regular existence punctuated by glimpses of the extraordinary. Underlying these paradoxes is the poetic observation that there is nothing more human than the experience of looking at a planet full of incomprehensible people who look just like you and deciding that you must be from outer space. —Judy Berman

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JamesPercival Everett

In James, Percival Everett finds new insight in retelling Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from a different point of view – that of Jim, who is enslaved by one of Huck’s guardians. Everett follows the original’s episodic adventures on the Mississippi River, but stays with Jim as he escapes the plantation to find his wife and son. By reimagining the story through Jim, the author adds to it, conveying depth through keen observation and sharp humor while mining family history to attack American racism and societal expectations. The reader gets an inside look at James as his full and varied self, and how he hides his erudition and humanity to make a welcoming caricature of the white people around him. With Everett’s deft writing, this entertaining and hard-hitting novel is a towering and captivating read. –Merrill Fabry

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Anita de Monte has the last laughXochitl González

It is 1985 when Anita de Monte – the new jewel of the art world – falls from a window and dies after a fight with her husband, the minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. De Monte’s legacy is shrouded and forgotten by time until Raquel Toro, a third-year art history student at Brown University, rediscovers her story in 1998 and follows her own journey navigating class, race, and misogyny in creative spaces. Inspired by the untimely death of real-life Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and her relationship with artist Carl Andre, author Xochitl Gonzalez’s latest novel offers a hilarious, vivid, and moving account of how power manifests not just in art, but also in history – and who ultimately has the last word. —Rachel Sonis

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Coming homeBrittney Griner

Even those who closely followed the news of American basketball star Brittney Griner’s illegal detention in Russia in 2022 will find new insights in her story. In Coming home, a searing memoir co-written with Michelle Burford, Griner takes readers behind the scenes to trace his steps from the airport security screening that resulted in his arrest on drug charges, to his first days in prison and on trial, until his transfer to a remote prison and, finally, his release in a prisoner exchange. Griner’s voice leaps off the page as she transforms an international news story into an intimate and moving story of perseverance. –Lucy Feldman

Read TIME’s excerpt from Brittney Griner’s book Coming home

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ChipsLeslie Jamison

In her hard-hitting memoir, Leslie Jamison traces the cracks in her marriage, which crumbled soon after she gave birth to her daughter. Chips follows the author as she navigates the COVID-19 shutdown while unexpectedly raising a child as a single mother. She also chronicles the tedium of teaching through a computer screen—and dating through one, too—in frank prose, imbuing passages with surprising honesty and exuberant phrasing. –Meg Zukin

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Real AmericansRachel Khong

Rachel Khong broke through in 2017 with her debut novel Goodbye, vitamin, which told the story of a woman who cared for one of her parents after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. In Real Americans, she develops her interest in family history, this time offering a multigenerational tale that traces the lives of a mother, a daughter, and a grandson, from Cultural Revolution-era China to the future San Francisco. Khong never allows her reader to settle too comfortably into any one character’s narrative, gently appealing to a deeper curiosity and compassion for the people in our lives that, she says, we may never fully understand. –I.F.

Read TIME’s profile on Rachel Khong

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The Book of LoveKellyLink

When O Book of Love begins, teenagers Laura, Daniel and Mo have just risen from the dead. Although it’s news to them, the trio mysteriously disappeared almost a year ago, and now they have the opportunity to return to their lives, which are inextricably changed. But the chance to reverse his bad luck is complicated – and made even more complicated by his growing supernatural abilities. Bizarre in the best way, Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link’s debut novel delivers a dizzying tale of grief, love, and possibility as the group tries to adjust to their new normal. –AG

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We love everythingLydia Millet

Lydia Millet’s award-winning fiction is rooted in her deep admiration for nature – and she dissects that passion in her debut memoir, We love everything. With his surprisingly clear voice, Millet moves between moments in his own life and those of the non-humans around us. She is as honest in her reflections on love, motherhood and ambition as she is in capturing the terrifying realities of climate change. Her novel is a love letter to the earth and to all who inhabit it, punctuated by forceful and lyrical prose. –AG

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