The Reviews Are In! Best Reviewed Books of September 2024

Reading a novel by Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) is always a pleasure — sharp dialogue, surprising characters (even the ones that make us mad), and very smart observations about who we are and what drives us, from love and money to family and more.

Josephine Quinn wants us to understand that Rome wasn’t built in a day — and neither was the West. Sharp and fascinating, this is a detailed history of our world.

Acclaimed author Garth Greenwell (Cleanness and What Belongs to You) returns to the United States with a haunting story of one man’s emotional reckoning.

Get everything you’ve ever wanted and lounge on borrowed time in Hollywood until it turns you upside down. Danzy Senna’s quick wit and wry voice has the big-heartedness of Dolly Alderton and the sensibility of Sally Rooney; readers of Miranda July’s All Fours and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It will want to tell all their friends about this smart and sharp tale.

A discourse on sex like never before, Want is a collection of anonymous insights from a diverse array of women sharing their secret desires.

In the new novel from the critically-acclaimed author of The Flamethrowers, a spy sent to France thinks she’s fully in control and running the show, but…

The truly remarkable and remarkably true story of a woman who left a massive — yet for so long unseen — footprint on the world through World War II and beyond.

This multi-layered novel about life in, out of and around the ocean riffs on ideas of playgrounds and paradise; computer games and AI; adventure, exploration, colonization and more.

For fans of Carys Davies’ Clear, Whale Fall is a stunning coming-of-age tale of a girl caught on the precipice between adulthood and childhood, familiarity and the unknown.

The polarizing former president Ronald Reagan is brought to full light by Max Boot, who pulls no punches in his deep dive into just who Reagan was and what he stood for, as well as the impact he left.

A murder leads to a landmark Supreme Court decision that reaffirms Native rights in America. This page-turner blends first-person reportage and historical sleuthing from journalist and podcaster Nagle, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation.

Stand on a street corner and ask passers-by to define freedom, and you’ll get a wide range of answers. Historian and public intellectual Snyder takes a long look at this concept we all hold dear (at least in theory) in this accessible and thoughtful book.