The Best Book Club Books of 2024

If any book won 2024, it’s this retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, an enslaved man. When learns he’s about to be sold to a white man in New Orleans, he hides out until he can think of something that’ll keep him with his family. Then there’s Huck Finn, who is trying to escape his own violence. The two embark on their familiar story, this time with Jim’s full humanity on display.

James won the year, but Moore’s latest was the queen of the summer. It takes place in August 1975, when 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar disappears from camp. Thing is, she’s not the first Van Laar child to go missing—her brother also disappeared 14 years ago. As the search for Barbara commences, secrets about the the Van Laars—who own the Adirondack summer camp where their children went missing and where many of the area’s blue-collar community works—come to light.

This book is busy in all the ways I love—it’s got time-traveling romance, slice-of-life comedy, and spy thriller teas. In it, a little ways into the future, a civil servant is offered beaucoup bucks, but the new project that comes with this increase in salary is a little…weird. It involves her working as a “bridge” to a time “expat”—someone from another time. Her expat is Commander Graham Gore, a man from 1847 who was supposed to have died during an Arctic expedition. As he lives with the civil servant turned bridge and adjusts to things like washing machines, music apps, and women’s constantly exposed calves, he falls in love. A zany cast of secondary characters—which include everything from a 17th-century film (and Tinder) lover to a former spy and a WWI captain—round out this everywhere kind of story.

Creative soul Ricki Wilde has never fit in with her family of socialites. So when one of her family’s older customers offers her the chance to rent the bottom of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki sees it as an opportunity for something new. She opens the flower shop she’s always dreamed of and experiences the magic and wonder of Harlem — which includes meeting the mysterious and enchanting Ezra. But Ezra has quite the secret. While things between Ricki and Ezra heat up, there’s another timeline of a past Harlem. One that tells of Ezra’s past.

Akbar’s protagonist, Cyrus Shams, mirrors himself—for one, both are poets who have struggled with alcoholism. For Cyrus, his obsession with martyrs leads him down a path of familial discovery. He learns of an uncle who dressed as an angel of death on Iranian battlefields, and of his mother, who may not have been who he thought she was.