Nonfiction had a remarkable 2024. Writers turned personal grief into universal wisdom, wrestled with technology's grip on childhood, and found new ways to tell stories about race, identity, and the natural world. The books below span memoir, science, essays, and history—what connects them is ambition and honesty. Each one left readers thinking differently about something they thought they already understood.
Here are the ten nonfiction books from 2024 that earned a permanent spot on our shelves.
1. The Anxious Generation
By Jonathan Haidt
Haidt argues that smartphones and social media have fundamentally rewired childhood, and he backs it up with data that's hard to dismiss. He traces how the shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood has driven rising rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among teens—with different mechanisms affecting girls and boys. The book spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list and became required reading for parents and educators. It's alarming, but Haidt doesn't leave you hopeless—he offers concrete proposals for schools and families.
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2. Knife
By Salman Rushdie
On August 12, 2022, Rushdie was about to give a lecture on protecting writers from harm when a man in black charged the stage and stabbed him repeatedly. He lost sight in one eye and nearly lost his life. Knife is his account of the attack and its aftermath—the surgeries, the recovery, the reckoning with mortality and the man who tried to kill him. Rushdie writes about his own near-death with the same fearless prose that made him a target in the first place. It's angry, tender, and darkly funny in turns. A National Book Award finalist and one of the year's most talked-about memoirs.
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3. There's Always This Year
By Hanif Abdurraqib
Abdurraqib uses basketball—specifically, growing up watching LeBron James in Ohio—as a way into larger questions about Black boyhood, community, violence, and what it means to witness greatness from up close. The book blends prose, poetry, and footnotes into something that doesn't really have a genre. It made multiple best-of-the-year lists, including Kirkus and TIME, and readers who love sports writing will find it transcends the category entirely. Abdurraqib writes about joy and grief with equal precision, and every page feels earned. If you love writing that mixes genres fearlessly, check out our best sci-fi picks for fiction that takes similar risks.
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4. The Light Eaters
By Zoë Schlanger
Plants can communicate, make decisions, and respond to their environment in ways that look suspiciously like intelligence. Schlanger, an environment reporter, takes readers into labs and forests where scientists are rethinking everything we assumed about the green world. She profiles researchers studying how plants send chemical warnings to neighbors, how they track time, and how they solve problems without a nervous system. The writing is vivid and accessible without dumbing anything down. If you liked Ed Yong's An Immense World, this belongs on your shelf. A New York Times Bestseller and a TIME top-ten pick for 2024.
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5. Soldiers and Kings
By Jason De León
De León, an anthropologist, spent seven years embedded with migrants and coyotes moving through Mexico. The result is the first character-driven account of human smuggling—told not from a policy desk but from the road, the safe houses, and the border crossings. The people here are complicated and real: smugglers who are also fathers, migrants who become smugglers out of necessity. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and the power comes from the trust De León builds with his subjects over years.
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6. Be Ready When the Luck Happens
By Ina Garten
The Barefoot Contessa's long-awaited memoir is warmer and more surprising than anyone expected. Garten traces her path from a difficult childhood to a government job in Washington, to buying a specialty food store in the Hamptons on a whim, to becoming one of America's most beloved food personalities. The book is candid about the hard parts—family estrangement, career uncertainty, the loneliness of starting over—without ever becoming heavy. You don't need to know a thing about roast chicken to enjoy this memoir about reinvention. Readers who enjoyed memoirs on our literary fiction list will find a different kind of honesty here.
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7. The Friday Afternoon Club
By Griffin Dunne
Dunne grew up in a Hollywood and Manhattan dynasty—his father was Dominick Dunne, his aunt was Joan Didion, and famous faces were at every dinner party. Then his twenty-two-year-old sister Dominique was murdered, and the family's life split into before and after. This memoir covers both halves with a storyteller's eye for detail and a survivor's refusal to look away. Dunne writes about celebrity, grief, and family obligation without self-pity, and the scenes involving Joan Didion are worth the cover price alone.
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8. Grief Is for People
By Sloane Crosley
After her apartment is burglarized and her closest friend dies by suicide weeks later, Crosley writes about loss in a way that's bracingly honest and unexpectedly funny. She interrogates what we own, what owns us, and what disappears when the people who defined our lives are gone. The book is short—barely 200 pages—but every sentence carries weight. Crosley, known for her essay collections, has never written anything this raw. TIME named it one of the year's ten best, and readers who appreciate sharp, unsentimental prose about hard subjects will find it unforgettable.
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9. The Message
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates returns with three linked essays about how stories shape reality. He travels to Dakar, Senegal, to reckon with the legacy of slavery; to Columbia, South Carolina, where his own earlier book was banned; and to Palestine, where he witnesses occupation firsthand. The Palestine essay generated the most conversation—and controversy—but the whole book is Coates at his most direct, probing how narrative creates power and how power controls narrative. Fans of Between the World and Me will recognize the voice, sharpened by a decade of silence. It's not a comfortable read, but it's a necessary one.
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10. The Bookshop
By Evan Friss
A history professor chronicles the American bookstore from Benjamin Franklin's first shop in Philadelphia to the Amazon age, arguing that bookstores have always been more than retail—they're community infrastructure. Friss draws on oral histories, municipal records, and interviews with booksellers to tell stories about the Strand, the Gotham Book Mart, Black-owned bookshops that doubled as civil rights meeting points, and sidewalk vendors who kept literature alive on city streets. It won the Goodreads Choice Award for History & Biography. If you're the kind of person reading a book recommendation site, this was written for you.
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Every book on this list offers a different window into the world—whether that's a lab full of talking plants or a smuggler's route through Mexico. The best nonfiction doesn't just inform; it changes the questions you ask. Looking for more recommendations tailored to your taste? Drop your favorites into ShelfHop and let us find your next obsession.