The Best Reviewed Fiction of 2024
It’s abacus and laurels time here at Book Marks HQ.
We, the industrious and sun-starved Book Marks miners, have spent 12 months chiseling reviews from more than 150 publications—from the Washington Post to the Irish Times, the San Francisco Chronicle to the London Review of Books—all so that we can now tell you, our dear readers, with absolute mathematical certitude, that these are the best reviewed fiction titles of 2024.
Happy reading!
Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
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1. Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
(Viking)
16 Rave
Read an excerpt from Headshot here
“It takes focus and discipline and a certain single-mindedness to become a good prize fighter. It takes those same qualities to write a book as fresh and strong and sinuous as Headshot … Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice … To remark that Bullwinkel is observant about Reno and its casinos would be an understatement … There is no whimsy in Headshot. Instead, there is astringency … The impact of this novel, though, lasts a long time, like a sharp fist to your shoulder. It is so enveloping to read that you feel, at times, that you are writing it in your own mind.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
2. My Friends by Hisham Matar
(Random House)
18 Rave • 1 Positive
“Amid this refined climate of melancholy acceptance arrives the unexpected revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, whose tensions and excitements My Friends captures as well as any novel I have read … Matar weighs these complexities with tremendous sensitivity, and My Friends is not only indispensable for a full understanding of Libyan émigrés but is, more generally, a great novel of exile.”
–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)
3. This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
(W. W. Norton & Company)
22 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an interview with Claire Messud here
“This monumental novel, which is a work of salvage and salvation … Quilted from scraps of memory treasured in the author’s attic for decades … Regardless of how much Messud may have drawn from biographical details, though, this novel grips our interest only because of how expertly she shapes these incidents for dramatic effect … A novel of such cavernous depth, such relentless exploration, that it can’t help but make one realize how much we know and how little we confess about our own families. I strove to withhold judgment, to exercise a little skeptical decorum, but I couldn’t help finishing each chapter in a flush of awe.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
4. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
(Knopf)
16 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Although Akbar has incisive political points to make, he uses martyrdom primarily to think through more metaphysical questions about whether our pain matters, and to whom … The novel itself is almost violently artful, full of sentences that stab, pierce, and slice with their beauty … Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself. It’s tonally nuanced—in command of a dazzling spectrum of frequencies from comedic to tragic—rigorous, and surprising.”
–Katy Waldman (The New Yorker)
5. You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, trans. by Natasha Wimmer
(Riverhead)
13 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an excerpt from You Dreamed of Empires here
“Enrigue presents us with two societies that feel far removed from our modern sensibilities, one of which—the Aztec empire—has often been shoddily reproduced, its complexity buffed away … The intricacy of this series of events might have daunted many writers; it’s difficult enough just to portray it accurately and make it comprehensible. Even when someone has done their research—and Enrigue has done it admirably well—the story could easily become ponderous and overblown, a mothballed costume drama. Enrigue’s genius lies in his ability to bring readers close to its tangled knot of priests, mercenaries, warriors and princesses while adding a pinch of biting humor.”
–Silvia Morena-Garcia (The Los Angeles Times)
6. Wild Houses by Colin Barrett
(Grove)
12 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Wild Houses here
“[A] heartbreaker of a debut novel … It could be argued that the heart and soul of Irish character, were one to venture into generalities, stem from a sensitivity to light. Certainly, the characters in this novel see very little sun, both metaphorically and practically … Nicky—and her quest—is the soul of this fine novel … In Colin Barrett’s nimble hands…the lives of a small collective of mournful souls become vibrant before us, and their yearning is depicted with wistfulness, no small amount of humor and one dangerously ill-tempered goat.”
–Dennis Lehane (The New York Times Book Review)
7. Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
(Henry Holt)
14 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an essay by Ferdia Lennon here
“[A] thrilling and heartbreaking debut novel … a stunning (and stunningly fun) meditation on companionship, humanity and the role of performance in keeping us all afloat … Most everyone in Glorious Exploitsis eternally trying on new personas and attuning them to the audience at hand. In time, that jovial creativity yields an underlying darkness; there can be morbid consequences when we step outside of ourselves to withstand the impossible … Sometimes grief is so profound that the only thing to do is proclaim it, in our own halting ways, to heaven and earth — even if those proclamations themselves cause more grief.”
–Talya Zax (The Washington Post)
8. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
(Knopf)
16 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Wandering Stars here
“A dazzling work of literary fiction that springs from the center of otherness, his new book delves deep into what it means to be Native American in this country … This is a novel that’s not scared to go into ugly, violent places. Orange perfectly balances the beauty of knowing where you came from, celebrating your ancestors, and recognizing the meaning of your roots and heritage with the brutality of racism and discrimination. That balance is reflected in the writing; poetic passages lead to shattering ones, cracking open the souls of his characters to reveal both their beauty and the lingering scars left by centuries of cruelty and forceful attempts at obliteration … Tommy Orange has dug deep into the wound of history to deliver a narrative that shows what it’s like to be brown in a land that celebrates white, what it’s like to feel like you’re an outsider in your own home.”
–Gabino Iglesias (The Boston Globe)
9. The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
(Harper)
13 Rave • 2 Positive • 3 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Mighty Red here
“Flexes through an emotional range that most writers would never dare attempt … Humor and sorrow are fused together like twined tree trunks that keep each other standing … Erdrich is so good at romantic comedy, with her special blend of Austen sense and Ojibwe sensibility. As the funny scenes flow one after another, you may not even notice the stray drops of blood scattered along the novel’s margins … As usual when closing a book by Louise Erdrich, I’m left wondering, how can a novel be so funny and so moving? How can life?”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
10. Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
14 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Pan
“Garth Greenwell is unafraid to depict plainly what often goes unspoken … But Small Rain is not a critique of U.S. health care disguised as a novel. Its power, instead, comes from the dissonance between the terrifying condition of waiting for answers and the flights of imagination that this purgatory, paradoxically, sustains … Throughout Small Rain, a consistency of cadence makes the novel feel like a cohesive whole—not unlike the recurring motif you might hear in a movement of a symphony. Inspiring acts of kindness and moments of mundane bureaucracy are depicted with the same tender attention.”
–Walt Hunter (The Atlantic)
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Our System:
RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points
The fifteen books with the highest points totals are ranked by weighted average, and the top ten make the list