Our Favorite Books of 2024

We read a lot of great books this year! We hope you did, too.

Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp, was “hands down,” store manager Emily’s favorite book of the year. “It’s really hard to express just how incredibly special this novel is in just a few sentences… Just trust me!” she writes.

And store co-founder, Judy Blume, concurs. “I couldn’t agree more!”

Bookseller Joey’s favorite book of the year is his most anticipated book, the eagerly awaited fifth book in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series, Wind and Truth. Joey is sure he’ll love it!

This year, we read books to help you understand the current moment, shape the current moment, and escape the current moment.

Co-founder George Cooper writes of The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson, “There’s nothing so interesting as reading a history of a profound event when you have an uncomfortable dread that you are living through a run-up to its successor.” Read George’s full review.

Sara, our assistant manager, found inspiration in The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. “One takeaway from the book is that we are all creators of something in our daily lives,” she writes. “It does a great job capturing the sacred practice of trusting one’s own intuition and being free to experiment with finding ways to express yourself. My favorite quote from the book reads, Look for what you notice but no one else sees.” Read Sara’s full review.

If you’re a regular reader of our newsletter, you’ve seen a number of these titles before. Several of our favorites were monthly featured staff picks. (Click the book cover for a link to the review.)

Social media manager Robin recommends We Solve Murders by Richard Osman as a Libro.fm audiobook.

Bookseller Camila really loved James by Percival Everett, but she also has a few bonus picks for you:

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

What did you read and love this year?

December Staff Pick: Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson (Mariner), picked by social media manager, Robin

Ernest Cunningham’s 7 Commandments of Holiday Specials:

3. The detective must, at some point, learn the true meaning of the word Christmas.

And, indeed, Ern, does. You, Dear Reader, will not, unless your holiday is even more skewed towards murder and mayhem than the typical holiday get-together.

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson, our December featured staff pick, is a fun take on the holiday mystery, and as this series is known for, full of classic misdirection. Full of secret Santas, advent calendar clues, and rigged magic tricks, it’s a great way to spend a cozy afternoon.


And here’s a few more seasonal reads to get you in a holiday mood:

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Most Wonderful: A Christmas Novel by Georgia Clark

Brightly Shining by Ingvild Rishøi, translated by Caroline Waight

Kissing Kosher by Jean Meltzer

The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter. And the audiobook is currently on sale via Libro.fm!

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Eight Very Bad Nights: A Collection of Hanukkah Noir Edited by Tod Goldberg

Poor Deer – Claire Oshetsky

NOW IN PAPERBACK!

“Margaret Murphy is only 4 years old when tragedy sets her life in motion. Living with her mother and aunt has its ups and downs as she tried to navigate the future and understand the past. This book and its unreliable narrator is not for everyone but for us weirdos it is a gem of a read.”
– Emily, Books and Books Staff

A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life—from PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Oshetsky

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died.

No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.

Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.

Heartrending, hopeful, and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding the children we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life’s most difficult moments.

Rental House by Weike Wang

“Wang’s slender tour de force offers one of the most nuanced, astute critiques of America now I’ve read in years. And it’s also frequently hilarious.
Los Angeles Times

“[For] basically anyone who is breathing, Rental House is a must-read.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Sharp, insightful, occasionally heartbreaking, and incredibly relatable.”
—Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“For anyone who’s experienced demanding parents, misunderstanding in-laws, a vacation-gone-wrong, or mid-life questions about how to reconcile your own personality liabilities with those of the person you love most.”
—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot


From the award-winning author of Chemistry, a sharp-witted, insightful novel about a marriage as seen through the lens of two family vacations


Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife.

Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation. At a Cape Cod beach house, and later at a luxury Catskills bungalow, Keru, Nate, and their giant sheepdog navigate visits from in-laws and unexpected guests, all while wondering if they have what it takes to answer the big questions: How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash?  How many people (and dogs) make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what can you do to shepherd everyone back together?

With her “wry, wise, and simply spectacular” style (People) and “hilarious deadpan that recalls Gish Jen and Nora Ephron” (O, The Oprah Magazine), Weike Wang offers a portrait of family that is equally witty, incisive, and tender.

The Last Kilo

From true-crime legend T. J. English, the epic, behind-the-scenes saga of “Los Muchachos,” one of the most successful cocaine trafficking organizations in American history—a story of glitz, glamour, and organized crime set against 1980’s Miami.

Despite what Scarface might lead one to believe, violence was not the dominant characteristic of the cocaine business. It was corruption: the dirty cops, agents, lawyers, judges, and politicians who made the drug world go round. And no one managed that carousel of dangerous players better than Willy Falcon.

A Cuban exile whose family escaped Fidel Castro’s Cuba when he was eleven years old, Falcon, as a teenager, became active in the anti-Castro movement. He began smuggling cocaine into the U.S. as a way to raise money to buy arms for the Contras in Central America. This counter-revolutionary activity led directly to Willy’s genesis as a narco. He and his partners built an extraordinary international organization from the ground up. Los Muchachos, the syndicate founded by Falcon, thrived as a major cocaine distribution network in the U.S. from the late 1970’s into the early 1990’s. At their height, Los Muchachos made more than a hundred million dollars a year. At the same time, Willy, his brother Tavy Falcon, and partner Sal Magluta became famous as championship powerboat racers.

Cocaine, used by everyone from A-list celebrities to lawyers and people in law enforcement, came to define an era, and for a time, Willy Falcon and those like him—major suppliers, of whom there were only a few—became stars in their own right. They were the deliverers of good times, at least until the downside of persistent cocaine use became apparent: delusions of grandeur, psychological addiction, financial ruin. Thus, the War on Drugs was born, and federal authorities came after Falcon and his crew with a vengeance. Willy found himself on the run, his marriage and family life in shambles, the halcyon days of boat races and lavish trips to Vegas and parties at the Mutiny night club seemingly a distant memory.

T. J. English has been granted unprecedented access to the inner workings of Los Muchachos, sitting down with Willy Falcon and his associates for many lengthy interviews, and revealing never-before-understood details about drug trafficking. A classic of true-crime writing from a master of the genre, The Last Kilo traces the rise and fall of a true cocaine empire—and the lives left in its wake.

When the Mapou Sings by

Infused with magical realism, this story blends first love and political intrigue with a quest for justice and self-determination in 1930s Haiti.

Sixteen-year-old Lucille hopes to one day open a school alongside her best friend where girls just like them can learn what it means to be Haitian: to learn from the mountains and the forests around them, to carve, to sew, to draw, and to sing the songs of the Mapou, the sacred trees that dot the island nation. But when her friend vanishes without a trace, a dream—a gift from the Mapou—tells Lucille to go to her village’s section chief, the local face of law, order, and corruption, which puts her life and her family’s at risk.
Forced to flee her home, Lucille takes a servant post with a wealthy Haitian woman from society’s elite in Port-au-Prince. Despite a warning to avoid him, she falls in love with her employer’s son. But when their relationship is found out, she must leave again—this time banished to another city to work for a visiting American writer and academic conducting fieldwork in Haiti. While Lucille’s new employer studies vodou and works on the novel that will become Their Eyes Were Watching God, Lucille risks losing everything she cares about—and any chance of seeing her best friend again—as she fights to save their lives and secure her future in this novel in verse with the racing heart of a thriller.

A magisterial cultural history of the Atlantic Ocean before Columbus, ranging from the early shaping of the continents and the emergence of homo sapiens to the story of shipbuilding, navigation, maritime exploration, slavery, and nascent European imperialism.

A dazzling and ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic seas, Ocean is a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, providing a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonization of the New World.

John Haywood eloquently argues that the perception of Atlantic history beginning with the first voyage of the celebrated Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus is a mistaken one, and that the seafaring and shipbuilding skills that enabled European global exploration and expansion did not arrive fully formed in the fifteenth century, but instead were learned over centuries and millennia in the Atlantic and its peripheral seas. The pre-Columbian history of the Atlantic is the story of how Europeans learned to master the oceans. This story is, therefore, key to understanding why it was Europeans, and not any of the world’s other seafaring peoples, who “discovered” the world.

Informed by the author’s extensive travels around the Atlantic Ocean, crossing Newfoundland’s Grand Banks, the Sea of Darkness, and the weed-covered Sargasso Sea, and populated by a heterogeneous and multiethnic cast of seafarers, fishermen, monks, merchants, and dreamers, Ocean is an in-depth history of a neglected subject, fusing geology, geography, mythology, developing maritime technologies, and the early history of exploration to narrate an enthralling story—one which lies at the very heart of Europe’s modern history and its relationship with the rest of the world.

From the BELOVED, AWARD-WINNING author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world

“One of my FAVORITE NOVELS of the past few years.” —Jeff VanderMeer, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING author of Annihilation

It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and old rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father, an architect as cruel as he was revered, dies. His death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.

The sisters are more estranged than ever, and their lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams, Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling, and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters’ lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.

Ingrained by Callum Robinson

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION

For fans of H Is for Hawk and Shop Class as Soulcraft comes a captivating literary memoir, immersing readers in the life of a Scottish carpenter as he perfects his craft, builds a business, and reflects on what inheritance and shared responsibility really mean.

The eldest son of a master woodworker, Callum Robinson spent his childhood surrounded by wood and trees, absorbing craft lessons in his father’s workshop. In time he became his father’s apprentice, helping to create exquisite bespoke objects. But eventually the need to find his own path led him to establish his own workshop and chase ever bigger and more commercial projects, until the devastating loss of one major job threatened to bring it all crashing down. Faced with the end of his business, his team, and everything he had worked so hard to build, he was forced to question what mattered most. 

In beautifully wrought prose, Callum tells the story of returning to the workshop and to the wood, to handcrafting furniture for people who will love it and then pass it on to the next generation—an antidote to a culture where everything seems so easily disposable. As he does so, he brings us closer to nature and the physical act of creation—and we begin to understand how he has been shaped, as both a craftsman and a son. 

Blending memoir and nature writing at its finest, Ingrained is an uplifting meditation on the challenges of working with your hands in our modern age, on community, consumerism, and the beauty of the natural world—one that asks us to see our local trees, and our own wooden objects, in a new and revelatory light.

Gifts for Everyone!

We love books as gifts, they are easy to wrap, fun to unwrap, and there’s an option for every reader, but there’s much more to our shop than books! Come see what’s new and fabulous. We’re happy to help you find just the right thing.

Join us for extended shopping hours starting Friday, December 20th. We’ll be open 10am to 8pm through Christmas Eve (Tuesday, December 24th).

Here are a few of the things we’ll be giving our friends and family this year!

  • Signed and special editions: Do you know someone who loves sprayed edges? Try Jessica Warman’s Repeat After Me or the deluxe edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
  • Art books, celebrity cookbooks, and hot memoirs: Key West: Paradise Found by Ellen T. White, Ina Garten’s new memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens, or I Love You by Pamela Anderson, might fit the bill.
  • Plus, puzzles, games, plushies, books for kids of all ages, art supplies & much more!

Can’t decide? A gift card is always the right pick! Can’t find something on our website? Give us a call, we’ll be happy to help.