The Top Fiction of 2024, According to 70 Lists
Happy New Year! As in the past five years, I’ve compiled a bunch of end-of-year “Best Books” lists from across the web to see which titles get mentioned the most. Personally, I’ve found this a great source of recommendations for my own reading, since bubbling to the top across the breadth of lists I scrape indicates fairly universal appeal: book critics, TikTok, and Obama agree: these are just good books.
This year, I sourced 70 lists across the web. Here’s what showed up most often:
Read more about each at Goodreads:
1. James by Percival Everett (50 lists)
2. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (35 lists)
3. All Fours by Miranda July (34 lists)
4. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (31 lists)
5. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (23 lists)
6. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (22 lists)
6. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (22 lists)
8. Colored Television by Danzy Senna (19 lists)
9. Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (17 lists)
9. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (17 lists)
11. Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel (16 lists)
12. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (15 lists)
12. The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich (15 lists)
12. My Friends by Hisham Matar (15 lists)
12. Long Island by Colm Tóibín (15 lists)
16. The Husbands by Holly Gramazio (14 lists)
16. Playground by Richard Powers (14 lists)
16. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (14 lists)
19. The Women by Kristin Hannah (13 lists)
19. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (13 lists)
19. Real Americans by Rachel Khong (13 lists)
Skeptical? Don’t want your least favorite news source taking up space? You can select just the lists you want here. That link will also let you browse books beyond the Top 21.
A note on accuracy, as I’ve done in the past as well: which lists are the best predictors of top fiction, or put another way, which lists are the most accurate? There are a few ways to look at this:
Precision: which lists have entries most likely to be in the Top 21? (# of Top 21 entries divided by list length)
Short lists have an advantage in precision: if you just named your favorite book and it happens to be on the Top 20, you have 100% precision!
The New York Times Book Review is a good example of this: they only listed 5 fiction books, so when 3 of them are in the Top 21, they have fairly high precision. Taking a book rec from the New York Times Book Review gives you a high chance of a “good book”, but you’ll run out of books quickly.
Recall: which lists mentioned the most Top 21 books? (# of Top 21 entries divided by 21)
Long lists have a similar advantage in recall as short lists in precision: if you listed all books published in 2023, you would have 100% recall — but very low precision. The top 5 highest-recall lists are all at least 40 books long, but by definition can’t hit over 50% precision (maximum 21 “Top 21” books, of 43+ entries).
For example, if you read all the books on Chicago Public Library’s list (which also had the highest recall last year), you’ll eventually get to 75% of the very top ones, but it’ll take you awhile to get through all 94 books on the list.
Accuracy: so, how to combine precision and recall? Something called the F-score. I’ll let wikipedia explain the math.
Similar to Precision, this still favors shorter lists in my dataset, but you’ll notice that the shortest ones (like the New York Times Book Review) disappear due to their lower recall.
Tools used: webscraper.io to extract book titles and authors, Google Sheets to list them, and Looker Data Studio for the pretty graphs above.
Finally, the list of lists, for the curious.
Note: Count of fiction books may slightly overestimate, as I did not categorize long-tail books that were on 3 or fewer lists, which let me avoid manually categorizing over 600 titles. So what I actually mean here is “(N books that I have not explicitly marked as nonfiction)”. Some of these lists also reference books published before 2024, which I have not bothered to correct for.
Amazon Best Lit and Fiction (20 fiction books)
Barnes and Noble (25 fiction books)
BBC (24 fiction books)
Booker longlist (13 fiction books)
BookPage Best Fiction (15 fiction books)
Bookriot (24 fiction books)
Boston Globe (25 fiction books)
Chicago Public Library (94 fiction books)
Chicago Tribune (Fiction) (5 fiction books)
Christian Science Monitor (21 fiction books)
Electric Lit Best Novels (25 fiction books)
Elle (57 fiction books)
Engadget (8 fiction books)
Esquire (13 fiction books)
Financial Times (9 fiction books)
Glamour (13 fiction books)
Glamour Best Books for Book Clubs (40 fiction books)
Good Housekeeping (8 fiction books)
Good Housekeeping UK (20 fiction books)
Goodreads 100 Most Popular (98 fiction books)
Goodreads Choice Fiction (20 fiction books)
Harper’s Bazaar (40 fiction books)
Kirkus Prize Fiction (6 fiction books)
Kirkus Reviews Best Book Club Fiction (14 fiction books)
Libby Life (8 fiction books)
Library Journal (Literary Fiction) (10 fiction books)
Literary Hub Best Reviewed (67 fiction books)
Literary Hub Favorites (34 fiction books)
Los Angeles Times (13 fiction books)
Mashable TikTok Favorites (15 fiction books)
National Book Awards Longlist (10 fiction books)
New York Post (15 fiction books)
New York Times Book Review (5 fiction books)
New York Times Notable (53 fiction books)
NPR Fresh Air (8 fiction books)
NPR Staff Picks (113 fiction books)
NY Public Library Best Books for Adults (10 fiction books)
Obama’s Favorites (5 fiction books)
Obama’s Summer Reads (8 fiction books)
Oprah Daily (23 fiction books)
Parade (78 fiction books)
PBS News Hour (8 fiction books)
Penguin Random House (51 fiction books)
Powell’s Best Fiction (50 fiction books)
Publishers Weekly Best Books — Fiction (20 fiction books)
Reader’s Digest (12 fiction books)
Real Simple (57 fiction books)
San Francisco Chronicle (8 fiction books)
She Reads (19 fiction books)
Shelf Awareness (10 fiction books)
Slate / books critic (5 fiction books)
Slate / books editor (7 fiction books)
The Atlantic (7 fiction books)
The Economist (18 fiction books)
The Globe and Mail (43 fiction books)
The Guardian (45 fiction books)
The Independent (23 fiction books)
The New Yorker (11 fiction books)
The Times (UK) (23 fiction books)
The Wall Street Journal (3 fiction books)
Time’s Best Fiction (10 fiction books)
Time’s Must-Read Books (82 fiction books)
USA Today (9 fiction books)
Vanity Fair (19 fiction books)
Vogue (47 fiction books)
Vox (7 fiction books)
Vulture (8 fiction books)
Washington Post Best Books (5 fiction books)
Washington Post Notable Fiction (50 fiction books)
Waterstones (55 fiction books)
