Our Reader-Selected Best Books of 2024

In our special year-end feature, we asked you to share both your favorite book that you read with your book group and your favorite book that you read outside your group in 2024.

The results are in! Below are the top 10 titles in each category.

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Susan Minot, author of Don't Be a Stranger

Ivy Cooper is 52 years old when Ansel Fleming first walks into her life. Twenty years her junior, a musician newly released from prison on a minor drug charge, Ansel’s beguiling good looks and quiet intensity instantly seduce her. Despite the gulf between their ages and experience, the physical chemistry between them is overpowering. Over the heady weeks and months that follow, Ivy finds her life bifurcated by his presence. On the surface she is a responsible mother, managing the demands of friends, an ex-husband and home. But emotionally, psychologically and sexually, she is consumed by desire and increasingly alive only in the stolen moments-out-of-time, with Ansel in her bed.

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Jeff VanderMeer, author of Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel

When the Southern Reach trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation. Each volume climbed the bestseller list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. And yet, for Jeff VanderMeer, there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, ABSOLUTION is a brilliant, beautiful and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions and profound new surprises.

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Katherine Rundell, author of Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In VANISHING TREASURES, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction. This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call insisting that we look at the world around us with new eyes --- to see the magic of the animals we live among, their unknown histories and capabilities, and, above all, how lucky we are to tread the same ground as such vanishing treasures.

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Lili Anolik, author of Didion & Babitz

Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin and filth of her apartment was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. Inside was a lost world that centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-the-heel section of Hollywood: 7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock ’n’ rollers and drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion. It also was the breaking and then the remaking --- and thus the true making --- of another great American writer: Eve Babitz. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now.

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David Baldacci, author of To Die For: A 6:20 Man Thriller

Travis Devine has become a pro at accomplishing any mission he's given. But this time it’s not his skills that send him to Seattle to aid the FBI in escorting orphaned, 12-year-old Betsy Odom to a meeting with her uncle, who’s under investigation for RICO charges. Instead, he’s hoping to lay low and keep off the radar of an enemy --- the girl on the train. But as Devine gets to know Betsy, questions begin to arise around the death of her parents. Devine digs for answers, and what he finds points to a conspiracy bigger than he ever could’ve imagined. It finally might be time for Devine and the girl on the train to come face to face. Devine is going to find out the difference between his friends and his enemies --- and in some cases, they might well be both.

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