Author Percival Everett attends the 75th National Book Awards ceremony in New York last month. Photo: AP
Even through a year of non-stop news about elections, climate change, protests and the price of eggs, there was still time to read books.
US sales held steady according to Circana, which tracks around 85% of the print market, with many choosing the relief of romance, fantasy and romantasy.
Some picked up Taylor Swift’s tie-in book to her blockbuster tour, while others sought out literary fiction, celebrity memoirs, political exposes and a close and painful look at a generation hooked on smartphones.
Here are 10 notable books published in 2024, in no particular order.
House Of Flame And Shadow, by Sarah J. Maas
Asking about the year’s hottest reads would basically yield a list of the biggest hits in romantasy, the blend of fantasy and romance that has proved so irresistible fans were snapping up expensive “special editions” with decorative covers and sprayed edges.
Of the 25 top sellers of 2024, as compiled by Circana, six were by romantasy favourite Sarah J. Maas, including House Of Flame And Shadow, the third of her Crescent City series. Millions read her latest installment about Bryce Quinlan and Hunter Athalar and traced the ever-growing ties of “Maasverse,” the overlapping worlds of Crescent City and her other series, Throne Of Glass and A Court Of Thorns And Roses.
The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt
If romantasy is for escape, other books demand we confront. In the bestselling The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt looks into studies finding that the mental health of young people began to deteriorate in the 2010s, after decades of progress.
According to Haidt, the main culprit is right before us: digital screens that have drawn kids away from “play-based” to “phone-based” childhoods. Although some critics challenged his findings, The Anxious Generation became a talking point and a catchphrase.
Admirers ranged from Oprah Winfrey to Arkansas Gov Sarah Huckabee, who in a letter to state legislators advocated such “commonsense recommendations” from the book as banning phones in schools and keeping kids off social media until age 16.
War, by Bob Woodward
Bob Woodward books have been an election tradition for decades. War, the latest of his highly sourced Washington insider accounts, made news with its allegations that Donald Trump had been in frequent contact with Russian leader Vladimir Putin even while out of office and, while president, had sent Putin sophisticated Covid-19 test machines.
Among Woodward’s other scoops: Putin seriously considered using nuclear weapons against Ukraine, and President Joe Biden blamed former President Barack Obama, under whom he served as vice president, for some of the problems with Russia. “Barack never took Putin seriously,” Woodward quoted Biden as saying.
Melania Trump did little publicity for her book, but it still sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Photo: AP
Melania, by Melania Trump
Former (and future) first lady Melania Trump, who gives few interviews and rarely discusses her private life, unexpectedly announced she was publishing a memoir: Melania. The publisher was unlikely for a former first lady – not one of the major New York houses, but Skyhorse, where authors include such controversial public figures as Woody Allen and Trump cabinet nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And its success was at least a minor surprise. Melania Trump did little publicity for the book, and offered few revelations beyond posting a video expressing support for abortion rights – a break from one of the cornerstones of GOP policy.
But Melania still sold hundreds of thousands of copies, many in the days following her husband’s election.
With her 'The Eras Tour Book', Swift was more than a music story in 2024. Photo: AFP
The Eras Tour Book, by Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift was more than a music story in 2024. Like Melania, the news about Taylor Swift’s self-published tie-in to her global tour isn’t so much the book itself, but that it exists. And how well it sold.
As she did with the Eras concert film, Swift bypassed the established industry and worked directly with a distributor: Target offered The Eras Tour Book exclusively.
According to Circana, the Eras book sold more than 800,000 copies just in its opening week, an astonishing number for a publication unavailable through Amazon and other traditional retailers. No new book in 2024 had a better debut.
Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney
Midnight book parties are supposed to be for Harry Potter and other fantasy series, but this fall, more than 100 stores in the US stayed open late to welcome one of the year’s literary events: Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo.
The Irish author’s fourth novel centres on two brothers, their grief over the death of their father, their very different career paths and their very unsettled love lives. Intermezzo was also a book about chess: “You have to read a lot of opening theory – that’s the beginning of a game, the first moves,” one of the brothers explains.
“And you’re learning all this for what? Just to get an okay position in the middle game and try to play some decent chess. Which most of the time I can’t do anyway.”
From Here To The Great Unknown, by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough
Lisa Marie Presley had been working on a memoir at the time of her death, in 2023, and daughter Riley Keough had agreed to help her complete it. From Here To The Great Unknown is Lisa Marie’s account of her father, Elvis Presley, and the sagas of of her adult life, notably her marriage to Michael Jackson and the death of son Benjamin Keough.
To the end, she was haunted by the loss of Elvis, just 42 when he collapsed and died at his Graceland home while young Lisa Marie was asleep.
“She would listen to his music alone, if she was drunk, and cry,” Keough, during an interview with Winfrey, said of her mother.
Cher: The Memoir, Part One, by Cher
Meanwhile, Cher released the first of two planned memoirs titled Cher – no further introduction required. Covering her life from birth to the end of the 1970s, she focuses on her ill-fated marriage to Sonny Bono, remembering him as a gifted entertainer and businessman who helped her believe in herself while turning out to be unfaithful, erratic, controlling and so greedy that he kept all the couple’s earnings for himself.
Unsure of whether to leave or stay, she consulted a very famous divorcee, Lucille Ball, who reportedly encouraged her: “F*** him, you’re the one with the talent.”
James, by Percival Everett
A trend in recent years is to take famous novels from the past, and remove words or passages that might offend modern readers; an edition of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn cuts the racist language from Mark Twain’s original text.
In the most celebrated literary work of 2024, Percival Everett found a different way to take on Twain’s classic – write it from the perspective of the enslaved Jim.
James, winner of the National Book Award, is a recasting in many ways. Everett suggests to us that the real Jim was nothing like the deferential figure known to millions of readers, but a savvy and learned man who concealed his intelligence from the whites around him, and even from Twain himself.
Knife, by Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie’s first National Book Award nomination was for a memoir he wished he had no reason to write.
In Knife, he recounts in full detail the horrifying attempt on his life in 2022, when an attendee rushed the stage during a literary event in western New York and stabbed him repeatedly, leaving with him a blinded eye and lasting nerve damage, but with a spirit surprisingly intact.
“If you had told me that this was going to happen and how would I deal with it, I would not have been very optimistic about my chances,” he told The Associated Press last spring.
“I’m still myself, you know, and I don’t feel other than myself. But there’s a little iron in the soul, I think.” – AP
