Don't turn the calendar just yet. You already know about our favorite books of 2024 and the titles we spent all year looking forward to. But our reviews editors didn't want to let the year end without one last round of recommendations. These seven books might have flown slightly under the radar in a year full of extraordinary works, but they're not to be missed—and our editors will tell you why.
Ways and Means
It’s not unusual for a debut novel to be long and full of ideas, but it’s rare to come across one as fully formed and intensely readable as Lefferts’s. It’s about a finance intern disenchanted by the meritocracy myth who gets into John Grisham-level danger when he starts working for a dark money man during Trump’s first presidential campaign. Added to the atmosphere (and tethered to the plot) are orgies with MAGA gays, trouble at heartland mobile home parks, and more. I love this one, and so does everyone I’ve made read it. —David Varno, literary fiction reviews editor
The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox
Shawl puts a fantastical spin on the Beat generation in a stunning alternate history presented as the diaries of an overlooked Black female poet with the mysterious power to enter a mystical plane beyond reality. Like its heroine, this slim volume is a force to be reckoned with. —Phoebe Cramer, SFF, horror, and romance reviews editor
The Field
Small boys do bad things in the fringes of 1970s suburbia in Lapp's ugly, aching, and—to me at least—grimly hilarious graphic memoir, comprising simple but poignant black-and-white comics vignettes that recall Chester Brown. The flabbergasted, laissez-faire parenting by his erratic mother and the trauma of a larger family breakdown that unfolds in the background are heartbreaking, but it's the intensity of rapid-flash moments of betrayal between children left to their own disorder that kept me turning pages. —Meg Lemke, comics and graphic novels reviews editor
Endless Fall: A Little Chronicle
Leftah, who died in 2008, packs an awful lot into this quietly stunning 80-page memoir: musings on Moroccan independence, an account of his classmate's suicide, poetic considerations of colonialism and gender performance. It's easy to read in an hour or so, but the impact lasts for months. —Conner Reed, mystery and memoir reviews editor
The Art of Dying: Writings 2019–2022
This collection of art criticism from the late New Yorker writer Peter Schjeldahl is worth reading for the dazzling, kinetic prose alone. It’s also a revealing and often moving window into the mind of a lifelong observer who was fueled by a 2019 lung cancer diagnosis to consider anew what it means to see and experience beauty in all its ephemerality and strangeness. —Miriam Grossman, religion and self-help reviews editor
We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance
This is an incredible exposé of a disastrous international “aid” scheme set in motion by Americans with a highly idealized vision of how the world works that blinded them to the predatory nature of micro-loans and “financing.” It’s a fantastic and harrowing example of how American pie-in-the-sky plans for “development” can land in their target destinations with all the tenderness of a meteorite. —Dana Snitzky, history and current affairs reviews editor
Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health
Patients depend on doctors to make informed, dispassionate medical decisions based on the best available evidence, but as Makary makes so disconcertingly clear, they're often swayed by such schoolyard psychological factors as not wanting to admit when they're wrong, even in the face of convincing new evidence. I've been waiting for a while for a book to explore how doctors' personal hang-ups influence healthcare, and Makary more than delivers. —Marc Greenawalt, science and pop culture reviews editor
