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Best of 2024 Lists & Awards

Washington Post selects its 10 best books of 2024.

Alice Loxton’s Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives (Macmillan) is Blackwell’s Book of the Year, The Bookseller reports.

Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (Farrar) is Foyles Book of the Year.

The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation—and the Other 99% by Conor Niland (Sandycove) wins the William Hill Sports Book Award.

Lexington: The Extraordinary Life and Turbulent Times of America’s Legendary Racehorse by Kim Wickens (Ballantine) wins the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award for books about horse racing, Shelf Awareness reports.

Winners are announced for the James Berry Poetry Prize for emerging poets of color.

The shortlist is announced for The Bookseller’s Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.

Page to Screen

November 22

Out of My Mind, based on the novel by Sharon M. Draper. Disney+. Reviews | Trailer

Wicked, Part 1, based on the novel by Gregory Maguire. Universal. Reviews | Trailer

November 27

Queer, based on the novella by William S. Burroughs. A24. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

LA Times reviews Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank (Farrar): “Then, too, there is the sheer hubris of defining key features of a century’s worth of novels, a century during which their numbers were increasing, but Frank is aware of this as well. He freely admits his book isn’t—and indeed can’t be—comprehensive, and that the works he’s chosen to explore are limited, focused especially on major European languages, and that taken together, they don’t constitute a particular or recognizable literary tradition.”

The Millions reviews Flow Violento: A Scott Hulet Omnibus by Scott Hulet (The Surfer’s Journal): “Equal parts T.S. Eliot, Hunter S. Thompson, and Jon Krakauer, Hulet stirs in wit, jazz-improvisational style, and a gift for aphorism (‘Shoals are generally discovered by their victims’; ‘There’s something comforting about seeing a pirate at rest’) that has become manna to the waterman faithful.”

The Guardian reviews the audiobook of You Are Here by David Nicholls (HarperAudio): “It’s a structure that lends itself nicely to a dual narration: Gentleman Jack’s Lydia Leonard crackles as the witty, self-effacing Marnie while Lee Ingleby moves between wariness and affability as Michael.”

LitHub gathers the best-reviewed books of the week.

Briefly Noted

NYT has a feature on Palestinian poets Mosab Abu Toha, author of Forest of Noise (Knopf; LJ starred review), and Najwan Darwish, author of No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems, 2014–2024, tr. by Kareem James Abu-Zeid (Yale Univ.).

LitHub talks to Marc Haber, author of Lesser Ruins (Coffee House), about “distractions, literary digressions, and the possibilities of fiction.”

Tracy Chevalier, author of The Glassmaker (Viking), shares “The Books of My Life” with The Guardian.

In CrimeReads, Megan Abbott, author of Beware the Woman (Putnam), talks about Denis Johnson’s 1983 novel Angels (Harper Perennial).

NYT lists “6 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

CrimeReads identifies 10 of the most original murders in mystery.

USA Today gathers books to help readers understand Latino voters’ shift towards Trump.

Microsoft launches 8080 Books, a publishing imprint that aims to produce books more quickly than traditional publishing, The Guardian reports.

Spencer Lawton Jr., the DA in the case at the center of John Berendt’s true crime bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, has died at 81; NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

Today, NPR’s Fresh Air will interview Scott Eyman, author of Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided (S. & S.; LJ starred review).

James S.A. Corey’s new series “The Captive’s War” is being adapted by for screen by the team behind The Expanse TV show, Reactor reports.

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