Best of 2024

Sally Rooney's fourth novel follows two grieving brothers whose romantic entanglements force them to confront what they owe each other and what it means to be truly known by another person.

Denis Villeneuve completes his adaptation of Frank Herbert's masterwork with a visually staggering epic that transforms Paul Atreides from reluctant hero into something far more ambiguous and dangerous.

FX's lavish adaptation of James Clavell's novel is a masterpiece of historical drama, following an English navigator shipwrecked in feudal Japan as warring lords plot to seize supreme power.

Steven Zaillian's gorgeous black-and-white adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel follows Tom Ripley through 1960s Italy as he murders, impersonates, and improvises his way into a life he was never meant to have.

Alfonso Cuarón's hypnotic Apple TV+ limited series stars Cate Blanchett as a documentary filmmaker whose carefully constructed life unravels when a mysterious novel exposes a secret from her past.

The fourth season of Apple's espionage thriller sends Jackson Lamb and his band of disgraced spies into the murky world of Cold War legacies, proving once again that the best spy show on television is also the funniest.

Ed Park's wildly inventive debut interweaves a failing tech company, a secret history of Korean independence, and a conspiracy theory about a provisional government that never really dissolved.

Samantha Harvey's Booker Prize-winning novel tracks six astronauts aboard the International Space Station over a single day, turning 16 orbits of Earth into a meditation on beauty, fragility, and what it means to see our world from above.

HBO's ferocious finance drama returns with its most ambitious season, following Harper, Yasmin, and Robert as they navigate a post-Pierpoint world where the real currency is leverage and the stakes are existential.

Percival Everett reimagines Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man whose intelligence, dignity, and interiority the original novel could never fully see.

Daniel Mason's Pulitzer finalist follows a single house in the woods of New England across centuries of inhabitants, from colonial lovers to a true-crime podcaster, creating a kaleidoscopic portrait of American life.

Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer-winning retelling of David Copperfield transplants Dickens to Appalachian Virginia, where a boy born to a single mother in a trailer fights his way through foster care, addiction, and a system designed to forget him.

Celine Song's luminous debut follows two childhood friends from Seoul who reconnect in New York decades later, exploring the space between the lives we live and the lives we might have lived.

Paul Murray's Booker-shortlisted novel follows the Barnes family of small-town Ireland as financial ruin, marital secrets, and adolescent fury converge toward a reckoning that has been building for generations.

Abraham Verghese's sweeping multigenerational epic follows a Kerala family haunted by a mysterious curse of drowning, spanning from 1900 to 1977 across three generations of love, medicine, and sacrifice.

Eleanor Catton's razor-sharp thriller follows a guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand that stumbles into a partnership with an American billionaire, not realizing that his interest in their land has nothing to do with vegetables.