The Best Books of 2024

We’ve had a fabulous year for books here at Our Culture — we’ve published 19 interviews, 12 monthly anticipated lists, 6 essays, and 2 reviews, covering more than 100 books. There’s a lot more in store for 2025, but in the meantime, here are the ten best books of 2024, scooped from an incredibly strong year of reading.

Good Material, Dolly Alderton

Dolly Alderton is one of the most effortlessly funny writers, and her second novel Good Material cements her as a modern-day Carrie Bradshaw or Nora Ephron. It tracks the dissolution of a relationship from a male comic’s perspective, and her deft manoeuvring results in an empathetic and moving book that’s as romantic as it is honest. I’d read anything she writes.

Beautyland, Marie Helene-Bertino

I fell in love with the protagonist of Marie Helene-Bertino’s third novel, Adina, a small alien sent to report on the lives of humans and communicate to her overlords via a fax machine. Beautyland sees Adina grow up in Philadelphia, find herself in New York City, and the novel has the guts to commemorate the joys and despair of young adulthood and the lesser-known loneliness of elderhood. It’s gorgeous, and despite Adina’s alienness, deeply human.

Read our interview with Marie Helene-Bertino here.

Woo Woo, Ella Baxter

Ella Baxter’s Melbourne-based art world satire is equally as terrifying as it is funny. Sabine, a conceptual artist preparing for her new exhibition, is stalked by a menacing figure while simultaneously being visited by the ghost of Carolee Schneeman, another artist. She is head-over-heels with herself, obsessed with the importance of her own work, which, for an artist, is somewhat of a requirement. Sabine’s insane way of seeing the world (and herself) was glorious and ridiculous.

Read our interview with Ella Baxter here.

Worry, Alexandra Tanner

Alexandra Tanner’s Seinfeldian, situational comedy Worry unfolds over the turbulent year of 2019, where two sisters move into a small New York City apartment together, immediately bristling at the other for breathing or leaving a paper towel on the floor. It’s realistic, absurd, and through its minutiae taps into something bigger, realer, with their pseudo-conspiracy theorist mother or the right-wing influencers Jules scrolls through on her phone. It reveals something true about modern America while still being funny as hell.

Read our interview with Alexandra Tanner here.

Plastic, Scott Guild

I was pretty shocked by how far Scott Guild’s debut novel Plastic goes — in its first few pages, a small plastic town gets rocked by a terrorist attack, sending its figurines flying and characters horrified by what’s to come. It’s a common occurrence of dystopian eco-terrorism, handled by a satirical wit that never turns didactic; the people of the town distract themselves through VR headsets, where Erin, its protagonist, explores the dark history of her city while falling in love. Plastic is a stunningly ambitious and imaginative debut that never falters under the weight of its own intelligence.

Read our interview with Scott Guild here.

Godwin, Joseph O’Neill

Joseph O’Neill’s storytelling abilities get pushed to the max with Godwin, his most notable book after 2008’s Netherland. A young soccer prodigy known only as Godwin is discovered somewhere in Africa, and Mark Wolfe, an American, is pulled in by his half-brother to find the kid and hopefully turn him into the next Lionel Messi. A continent-spanning epic about the horrors of white saviorship, colonialism, the ends of capitalism, Godwin is continuously gripping, the type of book to linger in your mind deeply after its last words.

Read our interview with Joseph O’Neill here.

Let Me Try Again, Matthew Davis

Matthew Davis’ absurdly funny debut novel about a twenty-something Jewish guy keeping afloat through his parents’ untimely death in a helicopter crash over Turks & Caicos and his sister’s conversion to Catholicism through micro-dosing, supplementation, weightlifting, and a plot to get his girlfriend back is laden with references, schemes, and egotistical tangents, revealing an interiority that makes for one of the most interesting character studies of the year. It’s a total riot.

Read our interview with Matthew Davis here.

Mood Swings, Frankie Barnet

The premise of Mood Swings is simple — all of the world’s animals are dead, immediately killed by a press of a button by one Roderick Maeve, a billionaire who eradicates Earth’s fauna because they were irritating him. In this new world, Jenlena and Daphne navigate this world the best they can, the latter through dating a cancelled man who provoked a small cult, and the former through writing Instagram poetry and dressing up as animals for rich people who miss their pets, before meeting Maeve himself and embarking on a relationship. Mood Swings is hilarious, absurd, and bizarrely prophetic.

Read our interview with Frankie Barnet here.

Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte

Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection is disgusting, which is not a great sell. But the funniest book of the year doesn’t achieve that title without an in-depth excavation of deeply online culture, humor, and absurdity — a male feminist blames his narrow shoulders on his failures to connect with girls, despite his “READ MORE WOMEN” tote bag, a biohacker pre-plans decades of his future children, and a sexually stunted gay man goes into horrific detail into his request for an online porn star. It’s dangerously addictive, and does what modern fiction seems scared to do, which is the pursuit of ruthless honesty. Tulathimutte’s imagination is as sharp as it is frightening.

Read our interview with Tony Tulathimutte here.

Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti

On a sentence level, Sheila Heti is plain excellence. Unlike her previous books (How Should A Person Be?, Motherhood) which interrogated single concepts under the guise of autofiction, Alphabetical Diaries was written in the span of ten years, where the author kept a diary and then alphabetized the sentences, cutting and editing as needed. It sounds a little pithy, a little art-school, but the finished result quickly hypnotizes by its daring complexity and honesty, which she had already perfected. There’s no one who writes quite like Sheila Heti, and Alphabetical Diaries is the kind of book that makes you think deeply about yourself as a writer, artist, and person. I’ll leave with one of many passages whose sentences flow into each other and bring despair and elation right next to each other, no matter how many years apart they were actually written:

“All you have wanted since you were twenty-five was to get back to that place of being seventeen, seeing friends who live close by, having sex, reading books and writing. All you want to do is go home, curl up and die. Almost collapsed writing that story. Alone in a room. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Already I am feeling happier.”