As we wrap up 2024, I was curious about what some of my favorite writers read this year. Here are twelve writers who recommended the book that they loved the most in 2024. You’ll recognize some Debutiful favorites, debut titles I missed, and standout books from established writers.
This isn’t the last time you’ll see book recommendations from writers. The plan is for this to become a recurring offering throughout the year so readers can discover their favorite writers’ favorite books.
Andrés Ordorica, author of How We Named the Stars
Some Strange Music Draws Me In is the debut novel by award-winning writer Griffin Hansbury. Narrated by Max, a transgender man nearing 40, who has returned to his small town in Massachusetts to deal with his mother’s passing, this soulful coming-of-age story is contemplative, funny and harrowing. Hansbury weaves in a wistful second perspective through the teenager Mel, Max’s pre-transition self, with such care and precision creating a beautiful exploration of adolescence and aging. Filled with the lingering echoes of a former self, Hansbury offers up a rich portrayal of moving forward in all life’s messy glory while wrangling with a painful past.
Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy
We Were The Universe by Kimberly King Parsons is a perfect balance of hilarious, horny, and tender. I inhaled it, briefly came up for air, then started reading again from the start.
Ruben Reyes Jr, author of There is a Rio Grande in Heaven
Amid all the reading I did this year, I could not ignore the year’s largest and most harrowing story: the genocide of the Palestinian people. Thankfully, two books served as guideposts in the dark: Enter Ghost and Recognizing the Stranger by Isabella Hammad. Whip-smart, politically fearless, and meticulously written, these gorgeous books portray the Palestinian people with the depth they’ve been historically denied, far better than any headline or piece of propaganda ever could.
Gina Chung, author of Green Frog
The book I can’t stop recommending to everyone this year is Greta and Valdin by the supremely talented Rebecca K. Reilly. My elevator pitch for this novel is that it’s a bit like Franny and Zooey, but much funnier and gayer. Told in alternating first person POV from older brother Valdin and younger sister Greta’s perspectives, it’s the story of two queer mixed-race Maaori siblings in Auckland navigating the complexities of life, love, work, and family. This novel is both hilarious and wise — two things that are honestly quite hard for one book to be, especially at the same time. Reading it made me so damn happy (let’s just say it made me snort-laugh on the subway several times). Read it over the holidays when you need a bit of a break from family and enforced cheer, or whenever you’re feeling a bit lost and want something fizzy but emotionally profound to keep you company.
Manuel Betancourt, author of Hello Stranger
There are few writers who are as brilliant alchemists of language as Garth Greenwell. With a novel that’s both intimate and expansive—about pain and the body, about the self and the other, about agency and surrender—Greenwell has crafted something of a wonder. Ostensibly about the trials and tribulations of the narrator’s stint at a hospital following a piercing pain that flummoxes his doctors, Small Rain balloons out to paint a painstakingly detailed portrait of a couple, a family, and a country. Reading it shortly after I had my own health scare last year, at a time when my own sense of safety within my own body addled my everyday existence, Greenwell’s novel was a welcome, soothing balm; a cleansing befitting its title, which felt nourishing precisely because its prose and tenor were so pure, so clear, so distinct.
Christina Cooke, author of Broughtupsy
A recent book I love? Easy: Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler—which, despite its snappy title, isn’t interested in dissecting gender at all. It’s actually about the ways gender variance and noncompliance has been made into a catch-all scapegoat for the erosion of community connection and our quality of life; about how subverting gender has come to embody the moral fears and social anxieties caused by our crumbling world; about how gender can not just exclude but also occlude our vision as a way to deter collective action, to keep us always thinking about “I” and never about “us.” It’s a must-read for anyone interested in a clear-sighted view of what’s wrong, as well as nuanced and pragmatic optimism on what we can do right. For a Black queer butch woman like myself who has often felt like people who’re weird about my gender are actually responding to something that has nothing to do with me or my gender at all, I needed this book like my body needs air.
Vanessa Chan, author of The Storm We Made
Annie Bot by Sierra Greer was alarming, funny, familiar, horrifying and just so perfectly plotted. I’m not usually a big sci-fi reader but because of how human this book is (which I suppose is the point given it’s about a humanized robot) I was locked in from the first page.
Mariah Rigg, author of Extinction Capital of the World
I read almost ninety books this year (thanks, Libby!) and there were so many bangers, but the one that made me cry the hardest—in a healing way—was Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe’s Thunder Song. The breadth of this essay collection knows no bounds, ranging from LaPointe’s great-grandmother, Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert’s, work to commission a symphony based on Coast Salish spirit songs with lyrics in Lushootseed, to meditations on class, race, and yearning surrounding the hand-painted Little Mermaid jacket gifted to LaPointe by her mom. As someone who loves punk, I was especially taken by LaPointe’s expansion on her first memoir, negotiating an attraction to Seattle’s punk scene while recognizing its many exclusions, and I sincerely sobbed when LaPointe wrote about the decolonization of her own diet through the eating of salmon. A must-read on love in defiance of settler colonial norms, the lethal prejudices of the American healthcare system, and a necessary exploration of life as a queer Indigenous person in the Coast Salish territory.
Rasheed Newson, author of My Government Means to Kill Me
One of my favorite debut novels of the past year is Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun. The book delivers such an intimate portrait of an interracial, gay couple in crisis that I was pleading with the characters as I turned the pages. Reading this novel is a visceral experience. With biting prose and tender precision, Pyun exposes the unspoken assumptions and the swallowed resentments that initially draw his lead characters to one another, and he examines how race, upbringing, and internalized homophobia can intertwine and shape relationships in ways we hardly ever want to acknowledge or discuss. And he does all that while managing to be funny along the way. The book is exquisite.
Kyle Dillon Hertz, author of The Lookback Window
This year, I want to say my favorite book was Pol Gausch’s Napalm in the Heart, a queer post-apocalyptic novel of extraordinary beauty. This is the sort of book that I hope thrives in our world—that is the world of readers and writers—because of its originality and opacity and profundity. Sometimes, I get so frustrated with the repetitive quality of the online literary world, the ways tropes are regurgitated and fed to us endlessly on the same plate as if this is what we want. Some people claim it is in fact what they want, and the chicken before the egg argument ensues. I find all disgusting, chickens and eggs and the argument. Frankly, I don’t believe people want the same shit all over again. Readers want freedom, and books they love allow them a deeper inner space, more internal aliveness, and so they ask for that. Napalm in the Heart did this for me. I followed it there. I alived the book inside myself. I didn’t understand everything. I searched for meaning. I missed some cues. Yet there I was, on the inside, full of imaginings, fuller than myself.
Kendra Winchester, founder of Read Appalachia
Annie Liontas uses a combination of personal narrative and research to present the devastating impact of traumatic brain injuries. But on a personal level, Sex with a Brain Injury found me at the perfect time after I’d just hit my head (again), and I couldn’t have needed it more. While my brain crackled and frizzed, Liontas was there reminding me that a life with a brain injury is complicated, yes, but it’s still beautiful. Everything about the book worked for me. Even the chapters flowed like snippets of thought with tendrils of connection between them that made sense to my shattered brain. Sex with a Brain Injury is a powerful book on disability, shedding light on an injury far too often underestimated. And o
n every page, I could tell that this book was written by someone with a brain like mine, and to see that . . . well, I’ve lost the words for how good that feels.
Richard Mirabella, author of Brother & Sister Enter Forest
I read so many wonderful books this year, but Bird Suit by Sydney Hegele stands out as one of the most original, strange, and emotionally gutting. Beautifully told, with a cast of imperfectly troubled characters, and an atmosphere of wonder and menace, the novel lives in that riveting space I look for and don’t often find: the thin place between what is real and what is not. At its heart, though, it is a novel about love and how difficult it is to hold onto.