The Best Books of Summer 2024

The visionary writer behind a memorable cricket novel (Netherland) is back on the field with Godwin—but this time, the sport is soccer. O’Neill’s story centers on Mark, a Pittsburgh technical writer floundering after a suspension from work, and his brother Geoff, an unsavory sports agent. Geoff enlists Mark in an international quest to locate Godwin, a young African soccer prodigy with superstar potential; meanwhile, in another narrative strand, Mark’s supervisor, Lakesha, fights to keep her business afloat and be fair to her employees. O’Neill braids the two narratives together with surprising finesse, telling a powerful story about how we treat our fellow man, both within the global macrocosm of commercial sports and within the intimate microcosm of the workplace. Thorny and nuanced, Godwin reminds us that O’Neill is a master of the social novel.

You won’t soon forget the voice of sixteen-year-old Diamond Newberry, the inimitable narrator of this captivating debut. Biracial and mocked for her weight, she feels like an outsider in Swift River, where she’s the only Black person in town. Raised by her white mother and haunted by the unexplained disappearance of her father, Diamond longs to understand her place in a community scarred by poverty and racism. The answers to her questions come in a series of letters from her estranged aunt, who unveils the truth of life in Swift River: This was once a sundown town, and Diamond’s ancestors were driven out of it. Infused with the bright and vulnerable voice of its young narrator, Swift River unspools a poignant coming-of-age story about hard and hopeful truths.

Your steamiest summer read arrives with The Future Was Color, a sexy historical novel set in McCarthy-era Hollywood and beyond. Beginning in 1956, Nathan depicts the life of George Curtis, a gay, Hungarian-born Jewish transplant working as a Hollywood screenwriter. Alongside his friends and lovers, George moves furtively through a world of whistleblowers and police raids, but he also lives exuberantly on the margins, where he parties with starlets and finds lasting romance. Skipping forward and backward in time, from George’s arrival in the United States as a young refugee to a bittersweet conclusion in Paris, The Future Was Color is a moving portrait of queer lives that were otherwise silenced or interrupted by history.

As we head toward the Paris Olympics this summer, Waters reminds us to look to Olympics past for insight about the ongoing tug of war between organized sports and social justice. In this riveting history of trans and gender-nonconforming athletes, the author sets the scene at the 1936 Berlin Games (also known as “Hitler’s Olympics”), where a group of distinguished athletes fought for the right to compete as their true selves. They faced Nazi bureaucrats and invasive sex-testing policies that would endure for decades to come, as Waters illuminates in a sweeping history of twentieth-century sports. While the culture wars light up headlines and trans athletes continue to face discrimination around the world, this immersive account of forgotten histories couldn’t be more timely.

Indiana Jones meets Star Wars meets Nietzsche in this thrilling galactic heist packed with existential thought. Kitasei’s nail-biting story centers on Maya Hoshimoto, once the galaxy’s most notorious art thief, who now lives a quiet life as an Ivy League archivist. When a dead explorer’s journal materializes at the archive—one that promises to lead her to “the grail,” an artifact with the power to open portals to other solar systems—Maya is forced out of retirement. But she isn’t the only one searching for the grail, and if it falls into the wrong hands, interstellar travel could become impossible. Maya’s quest across the stars is a space opera of the highest order, rich in breakneck pacing and memorable alien accomplices, but it’s in the quest for moral clarity that The Stardust Grail really soars. As Maya journeys from planet to planet, Kitasei offers a profound allegory about the dangers of colonization, taking this rousing romp to the next dimension.

In 2008, debut novelist Wroblewski enjoyed runaway success with The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, a doorstopper retelling of Hamlet set in rural Wisconsin. After sixteen quiet years, he returns this summer with Familiaris, a prequel that shares its predecessor’s lofty ambitions and sweeping storytelling. Clocking in at just shy of a thousand pages, this is the story of Edgar Sawtelle’s grandfather John Sawtelle and the five great quests of his life, which span forty fateful years. Mythic in its proportions and riveting in its finely textured portrait of life in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, the Great American Novel vaults Wroblewski into the rarefied company of epic storytellers like Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel García Márquez.

At seventeen, Ciment began a sexual relationship with her drawing teacher, who was forty-seven and married with two teenage children. In 1996, she published a memoir of their unconventional marriage called Half a Life; now, nearly thirty years later, the widowed author throws a stick of dynamite at that book. In her new memoir, Consent, Ciment reconsiders her love story, disassembling the careful mythologies she’s constructed around her early years. In Half a Life, she insisted that she initiated the first kiss; looking back decades later in the pages of Consent, she remembers how her husband pulled her into a kiss when she hung back after class to ask a question about careers in the arts. “Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later?” Ciment writes. “Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?” Unflinching and bravely told, this postmortem of a marriage is one of the gutsiest books of the #MeToo era.

Eleven thousand years into the future, a sentient artificial intelligence called “the chronicler” narrates its alliance with Ariel, a twelve-year-old boy on a journey to uncover the truth about a much-changed Earth. In this fantasy-inflected sci-fi future, talking animals dominate the food chain, robots and dragons roam the world, and malicious wizards rule villages with an iron grip. When Ariel rejects his destiny by failing to pull an important sword from an important stone, incurring his local wizard’s wrath, he and the chronicler set out to liberate their realm from malevolent forces. Packed with homages to sci-fi and fantasy greats, from Ursula K. Le Guin to C.S. Lewis, this Arthurian acid trip will rattle and delight you.

In this accomplished collection of short stories, ordinary men fall prey to extraordinary happenings. In one otherworldly standout, “Wood Sorrel House,” new parents find themselves at an idyllic woodland cabin with their young toddler, but they can’t remember how they got there or understand why the child doesn’t age. Elsewhere in the collection, in “The New Toe,” a father bathing his infant son discovers that the boy has sprouted a sixth toe. “Trial Run,” set in a Manhattan skyscraper, centers on an office worker trapped with two malevolent colleagues during a blizzard that may or may not be real. Raw and off-kilter but studded with moments of transcendent beauty, these stories offer more questions than answers. With a first book this fantastic, Williams is a writer to watch.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Have you ever felt like everyone around you is thriving but somehow you missed the memo? Then this novel is for you. For thirty-five-year-old Jenny Green, life has been one failure after another ever since she graduated from college. That’s why she doesn’t want to attend her class reunion, but when her successful friends pressure her to show up, she learns that she quite literally missed the memo, “the actual, tangible, Upper-Case Letter thing.” Now Jenny has a second chance to receive the memo, but her career counselor will do her one better: She’ll actually send Jenny back in time to the sites of all her fateful mistakes, inviting her to course-correct onto a wildly successful track. But just how much do our mistakes define who we are? Like Sliding Doors crossed with A Christmas Carol, this winsome and bittersweet novel will get you thinking about the roads not taken in your own life.

In a series of immersive reported vignettes, the Financial Times’ AI editor takes readers around the globe to investigate the technology’s damaging effects on “the global precariat.” In Amsterdam, she highlights a predictive policing program that stigmatizes children as likely criminals; in Kenya, she spotlights data workers lifted out of brutal poverty but still vulnerable to corporate exploitation; in Pittsburgh, she interviews UberEats couriers fighting back against the black-box algorithms that cheat them out of already meager wages. Yet there are also bright spots, particularly a chapter set in rural Indian villages where under-resourced doctors use AI-assisted apps as diagnostic aids in their fight against tuberculosis. Fair-minded but unsparing, Code Dependent is the most lucid reporting yet on a fast-growing human-rights crisis.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

In this poignant memoir, actor and producer Griffin Dunne ruminates on the secrets and tragedies of an American dynasty. As the son of journalist Dominick Dunne, the brother of actress Dominique Dunne (whose shocking murder at age twenty-two often animates the book), and the nephew of Joan Didion, the author grew up at the nexus of fame and power, and the story reflects as much—Hollywood luminaries swim in and out of view, from Dunne’s best friend, Carrie Fisher, to incidental appearances by the likes of Truman Capote, Harrison Ford, and Natalie Wood. But The Friday Afternoon Club isn’t about dishy disclosures; rather, it’s a gutsy portrait of the artist as a young man. From his father’s demons to his mother’s affairs to his sister’s tragic death, Dunne writes with an open heart about the complicated love and grief that bind all families together, famous or not.

If you thought reality television began with The Real World, as the lore often goes, think again. In this engrossing history of the genre, Nussbaum traces its roots back to Candid Camera in the forties, through pioneering (and controversial) seventies and eighties series like An American Family and Cops, and all the way up to today’s overwhelming explosion of programming. Drawing on meticulous research and hundreds of interviews, Cue the Sun! advances a compelling case for why this genre is worthy of serious study. Nussbaum also digs into the medium’s many ethical quandaries, from our reality-show former president to the toxic effects on media, society, and even the genre’s own stars. Whether you’re a Bravo devotee or a Survivor obsessive, there’s something for everyone to love in this revealing peek behind the curtain.

The pseudonymous literary sensation behind Camp Damascus returns with Bury Your Gays, a campy metafictional battle for the soul of horror cinema. Tingle’s protagonist is Misha Byrne, an Oscar-nominated Hollywood screenwriter who’s made a career out of championing queer horror stories. When studio execs demand that he keep his lesbian lead characters closeted or kill them off because the almighty algorithm promises it’ll boost viewership, Misha refuses. A series of terrifying confrontations with spooks dressed as characters he’s written rattles Misha’s confidence, but he writes them off as overzealous stalkers—until people around him start dying mysteriously. Through the trappings of this gory romp, Tingle tells a sensational story about representation and erasure in the age of algorithmic rule.

The summer’s sweatiest novel is State of Paradise, a hot stew of paranoia set in central Florida. Our narrator, a ghostwriter of thriller novels, returns to her home state to find it changed—after an unspecified pandemic, strange long-term side effects linger (for instance, the narrator’s sister’s eyes have changed color); meanwhile, Floridians addicted to a virtual-reality game called Mind’s Eye are disappearing. When the narrator’s sister goes missing as a dangerous summer storm bears down on the town, past, present, and future collide in a surrealist nightmare. The author’s inimitable talents shine in this spiky and sinister Floridian fever dream.

If you think there’s no more blood to wring from the stone from Arthurian legend, think again. In The Bright Sword, Grossman makes well-traversed myths and familiar characters feel brand-new again. This epic fantasy begins when a young knight rides into Camelot to vie for a seat at King Arthur’s Round Table, only to discover that he’s too late: King Arthur and many of his best knights have fallen in battle, leaving a ragtag band of second stringers alone in a power vacuum. Our young hero and these outcasts ride out in search of Arthur’s successor, encountering fairies, witches, angels, giants, and more. Within this episodic quest, Grossman crafts an outstanding metafictive story about the long afterlife of myth. Where previous interpreters have spun yarns of a noble nation peopled by men of valor, Grossman sees legends drunk on their own mythology in the grip of a changing country torn between Christian Rome and pagan traditions. Whether you’re an Arthurian expert or a newbie squire, The Bright Sword proves that one of history’s oldest tales is still bracingly alive.

Like John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver before him, Vlautin excels at telling deeply felt stories about characters who are down on their luck. The Horse is a textbook Vlautin novel in all the best ways: Set on old mining land in rural Nevada, it’s the tale of Al Shaw, a washed-up songwriter struggling with alcoholism after four decades as a touring musician. Al lives on canned soup in a threadbare shack, but when a blind horse wanders onto his property in the depths of winter, he’s reborn through a harrowing choice: He can put the horse out of its misery or walk thirty miles in the snow to save its life. Told in spare prose, unsentimental but sincere, The Horse is a moving paean to the healing power of animals and music—and a damn good yarn, too.

In a near future ravaged by climate change where robots called “hums” walk among us, May loses her job to AI. Unsure when she’ll find work again, she decides to undergo an experimental surgery designed to alter her features just enough to confuse facial-recognition software, to the tune of ten months’ wages. Newly flush with cash, May splurges on a family vacation to the Botanical Gardens (now a lush paradise accessible only to the wealthy), but when her children go missing, she’s forced to place her trust in a hum with questionable motives. The fearsome power of Phillips’s imagination always dazzles, but in this prescient novel, it’s the tender portrait of love and care in an uncertain world that leaves a lasting mark.

The acclaimed author of The Memory Police returns with a bittersweet coming-of-age tale set in suburban Japan. Now middle-aged, Tomoko looks back three decades to 1972, the fateful year she lived with her wealthy aunt’s family in the coastal town of Ashiya. There she becomes tightly bonded to her cousin Mina, an asthmatic tween who writes fantastical stories inspired by the images on matchbooks and rides a pygmy hippopotamus to school every day. Tomoko and Mina share intimacies and obsessions as only young girls can, but their idyll is threatened by adult realizations. Dreamy and whimsical, Mina’s Matchbox traffics in the themes at which Ogawa always excels: memory, identity, and nostalgia.

Remember when crypto was the word on everyone’s lips? (You’d be forgiven for forgetting, now that AI has stolen their breath.) In this explosive investigation, Time’s tech reporter unpacks the breathtaking rise and dizzying fall of this billion-dollar bubble, all in the span of twenty months. Particular attention is paid to FTX and its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, a now-convicted fraudster whose “Jenga tower of insanely risky financial instruments” catalyzed the 2022 crypto crash. But much like Code Dependent, Cryptomania resists getting lost in the weeds of palace intrigue; rather, it pays close heed to lesser-known players affected by FTX’s crash and burn, like day traders screwed out of the gold rush and digital artists whose fortunes went belly up when NFTs did. Whenever the next big “disruptor” comes around to upend an industry, remember this cautionary tale of greed and corruption.