The best books of 2024

This list is part of the best books of 2024.

Join 1,437 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2024

Book cover of Hill of Secrets

Don Futterman ❤️ loved this book because...

While the team of scientists assembled by J. Robert Oppenheimer races to create the atom bomb at Los Alamos, their families find themselves in a sequestered world in the desert, cut off from everyone and everything they know. Vromen invents a brilliant cast of wives, teenage girls, technicians and physicists, who we come to love. The nature of their husbands’ work is strictly secret. Family life outside the labs is intense and conflicted, a world simmering and bubbling as it threatens to boil over. Even casual correspondence is so heavily censored that family members can barely communicate with friends and relatives back home. Oppenheimer and his team members are portrayed with compassion and wit, as all of Vromen’s characters battle their demons while the world is reinvented.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Immersion 🥈 Character(s)
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Galina Vromen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Hill of Secrets as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In a desert outpost, nuclear scientists and their families face the toll of the secrets they keep from the world and from each other in this gripping wartime novel from debut author Galina Vromen.

Los Alamos, 1943. The US Army has gathered scientists to create the world's first nuclear weapon. Their families, abruptly moved to the secret desert base with no explanation, have simple orders: Stand by. Make do. Above all, don't ask questions.

Christine, forced to abandon her art restoration business in New York for her husband's career, struggles to reinvent herself and cope with his increasing aloofness.

Gertie,…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of Devil Makes Three

Don Futterman ❤️ loved this book because...

Ben Fountain’s extraordinary ability to weave together politics with profound character studies is on full display in Devil Makes Three. Fountain sets his tale during the political upheaval in Haiti in 1991 when President Aristide was overthrown. We follow an American expat scuba instructor who soon finds himself out of business and in over his head, and a Haitian grad student who has returned to her family from the US just in time for in the chaotic and violent aftermath of the coup. Each of them must make decisions about how and when to take a stand while navigating politics they only partially grasp. Fountain’s gifts are in telling about such convoluted times with humor and sympathy, while making both of his main characters equally compelling and fully realized.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Character(s) 🥈 Immersion
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Ben Fountain,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Devil Makes Three as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF THE 2024 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE
• WASHINGTON POST BEST FICTION OF 2023 • From the award-winning, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk comes a brilliant and propulsive new novel about greed, power, and American complicity set in Haiti

"An engrossing, psychologically complex and politically astute novel." ―The New York Times

Haiti, 1991. When a violent coup d’état leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, American expat Matt Amaker is forced to abandon his idyllic, beachfront scuba business. With the rise of a brutal military dictatorship…


My 3rd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of My Friends

Don Futterman 👍 liked this book because...

My Friends is a quiet novel about big subjects – friendship, exile and resistance. It takes us back to a crucial moment, when Libyan officials opened fire on anti-Qaddafi protesters from inside the Libyan embassy in London, killing several and wounding others, including the novel’s narrator. This proves the turning point in his life, stranding him in London and cutting him off from his family back home. His friendships with two Libyan expats are put to the test as each responds in dramatically different ways to unfolding events back home and the ultimate collapse of the Qaddafi regime. Matar knows how to tell a story with insight and compassion, resisting the temptation to bombast while keeping us engaged.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Character(s) 🥈 Writing
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐕 Good, steady pace

By Hisham Matar,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked My Friends as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

Adam Unrehearsed

By Don Futterman,

Book cover of Adam Unrehearsed

What is my book about?

Adam Unrehearsed is a National Jewish Book Awards Finalist, a moving and hilarious coming-of-age comedy, that transports readers back to the fraught and exhilarating New York of the early 1970s in a story of friendship, betrayal, death, and acting.
From the moment he’s mugged on the subway home from Yankee Stadium, things go wrong for irrepressible 12-year-old Adam Miller. He faces gangs, anti-Semitism, and practical jokes that go too far. He loses his old friends and makes new ones in surprising places. Hoping to survive until his bar mitzvah, Adam finds solace onstage, where he discovers the power of theater to bridge social divides.
“Comical, lyrical, menacing, gritty, tender… compassionate and propulsive…and it rings true… a sure handed debut…” Colum McCann “Don Futterman has written a classic… hilarious… deeply moving…” Yossi Klein Halevi “Funny, wise, heartbreaking and heart-healing Futterman’s novel reaches across time… to bore into the universalities of youth.” Pamela Schoenewaldt - Historical Novel Society
Adam Unrehearsed could not be more timely. Listen also to my comic autobiographical monologues on my performance podcast, Futterman’s One-Man Show.

Book cover of Hill of Secrets
Book cover of Devil Makes Three
Book cover of My Friends

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