The 10 best novels of 2024

“A work of imagination consisting of a prose story of a certain length, the interest of which is in the narration of adventures, the study of morals or characters, the analysis of feelings or passions, the representation of real or various objective and subjective data; literary genre grouping together works that present these characteristics”: such is the beautiful definition given by the Larousse dictionary to the word “novel”, which remains, despite a strong return to poetry and the solidity of the non-fiction section, the great star of bookstores. If we had to choose only ten this year, both written in French and in a foreign language, as phantasmagorical as they are linked to reality, here they are.

The Lost Children’s Club by Rebecca Lighieri

“This pseudonym completely disinhibited me and allowed me to embrace my taste for romance… a real psychotropic drug!” confided to us, a few seasons ago, Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam, who therefore chose to sign under the name Rebecca Lighieri this wonderful Lost Children’s Club. But whose style is getting closer and closer to the touch Bayamack-Tamto whom we owe Arcadia or The Thirteenth Hour. Two voices: a father, a daughter. The first, a somewhat vain and seductive actor, who barely understands the personality of the one he saw grow, certainly strangely, then sink into an unfathomable malaise. It’s both funny and tragic, and we unreservedly join the club – to the point of making it one of our best novels of 2024.

Well-being de Nathan Hill

Don’t be fooled by the title, so ironic, and ultimately poignant when you turn the last page… We had already noticed its potential with Ghosts of the old country, but with Well-beingrightly crowned with the Grand Prize for American Literature, Nathan Hill signs a very great novel. We follow the anatomy of the fall of a couple formed by Jack and Elizabeth, who, since their meeting in Chicago in the early 90s, firmly believed that they were soul mates. The usual torments of marriage will catch up with them… and lose them along the way, whileHill goes back to the source of their respective traumas. A great literary demonstration made in USA.

The Imposture the Zadie Smith

Here, the Anglo-Jamaican writer Zadie Smith also features one of her most beautiful characters, Eliza Touchet. A woman of wit, a keen reader with a pen that is best hidden, she lost her husband and child at a very young age and moved in with her cousin by marriage, William Ainsworth. Which (like Mrs Touchet) really existed, having written a gaggle of grandiloquent novels in the 19th century. But Eliza’s great love is William’s (first) wife: Frances. Here, the abundant fabric of Zadie Smith plays with the realistic straightjacket established by Charles Dickens to, under the cover of an apparent classicism, revolutionize his own writing. And establishes her as one of the greatest feathers on the British scene.

Houris by Kamel Daoud

“Do you see it? I show a big uninterrupted smile and I am silent, or almost. To understand me, people lean very close to me as if to share a secret or an accomplice night. You have to get used to my breath which always seems to be the last, to my annoying presence at the beginning.” Algeria, dark decade. A man tried to slit Aube’s throat. He almost succeeded. Dawn’s vocal cords are destroyed, but the memories rumble. It’s time to confide in your unborn daughter… Ten years after the incredible Meursault, counter-investigationwho returned in the footsteps of the Camusian foreigner, the committed Algerian writer Camel Daoud signs a novel with multiple opacities, with a poetry putting all the more in contrast the infinite violence of men blinded by obscurantism. Enough to win the 2024 Goncourt Prize, and be among the best novels of 2024.

Boucher by Joyce Carol Oates

In the 19th century, the Dr Silas Weir carried out numerous tortures in a women’s asylum in New Jersey. The caregiver becomes a butcher, as told in this new novel by the prolific Joyce Carol Oates, the fruit of long years of research, and where the victims can take their revenge – commensurate with the abuse suffered. Through the diary of the sinister Weir but the words of his son as well as those which must have ended up on his operating table, or assisted him in his dirty maneuvers. Suspense, tension, still a great success for Oates, 86 years old, who reminds us that, almost two centuries later, the condition of women remains constantly under threat.

The Collapse by Edouard Louis

“I felt nothing when my brother died: neither sadness, nor despair, nor joy, nor pleasurer”, announces Edouard Louis from the beginning. After a second book devoted to his mother, the rather joyful and emancipatory Monique escapesthe writer devotes here sixteen facts, in an investigative manner, to the man from whom he was so estranged, found dead in his studio when he was only 38 years old, consumed by insecurity and alcoholism. Ten years after the publication of the inaugural Put an end to Eddy BellegueuleEdouard Louis closes his great family story with this striking Collapse.

The Knife de Salman Rushdie

“Writing is writing, therapy is therapy, but there was a good chance that writing this story would make me feel better ”: we have never read him so intimate, and yet we find the lyricism that is his. Because it is not an assassination attempt that will prevent Salman Rushdie from picking up his pen. Just like the fatwa launched against him, following the publication of Satanic verses. It is therefore a question of telling what happened on August 12, 2022, this day when a man stabbed him several times in the middle of a conference, in the United States, then after: these days between life and death, the long, very long recovery… and the love that binds him to his writer wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Pretty evil d’Emma Becker

Adultery in all its states, from consuming passion to mental burden. This is what Emma Becker tells us, with a romantic brilliance that is not bothered by any taboo. After dwelling on the maternal experience (Misconduct) or his experience in a brothel, with The House since adapted to the cinema, she shocks us with this story where her alter ego, married and mother of two children, falls in love with a writer… of the right! Raw and erudite, sexy and melancholy, this Badly pretty is exhilarating.

Orangerie Syndrome by Grégoire Bouillier

“We understand nothing about Water Lilies if we believe that they copy nature, even through the veil of the soul.”. Returned in the costume of detective Bmore, Grégoire Bouillier dedicates itself, in this great historical, artistic and emotional story, to telling it to us. Taken by an anxiety attack in front of the famous panels exhibited at the Musée de l’Orangerie, the writer decides to immerse himself in the life of Claude Monet through his work – and vice versa – while linking it to a modernity which has since has lost all common sense. Clever, unique, exciting.

Jacaranda by Gail Faye

Two works will have been crucial in this year of commemoration of the Tutsi genocide. The superb Convoywhere Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse testifies about what she (sur)vived, and how she found those who organized the humanitarian convoy who saved her and her mother when she was 15 years old. And on the novel side, JacarandaRenaudot Prize 2024, affirmation of the writing of Gail Faye. After Small Countryhe continues his quest for the past, as unspeakable as it may be, through the character of young Milan, a schoolboy from the 90s. His mother, Venancia, is Rwandan and, faced with the events of 1994, will not say a word. However, another young boy, with a bandage on his head, is housed with them… and returns where he seems to come from. Milan will want to understand, and it is in Rwanda itself that he will find fragments of memory. Where little Stella has her refuge tree, the Jacaranda. As sensitive as it is accessible, a necessarily recommendable novel.

More culture on Vogue.fr:
Patti Smith seen by Lynn Goldsmith, a certain history of rock’n’roll
4 books to read in 2025 according to Charlotte Casiraghi
Annie Ernaux’s 5 must-read books

More Vogue France on video: