Our Reader-Selected Best Books of 2024

In our special year-end feature, we asked you to share both your favorite book that you read with your book group and your favorite book that you read outside your group in 2024.

The results are in! Below are the top 10 titles in each category.

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Susan Mallery, author of One Big Happy Family

Julie Parker’s kids are her greatest gift. Still, she’s not exactly heartbroken when they ask to skip a big Christmas. Her son, Nick, is taking a belated honeymoon with his bride, Blair, while her daughter, Dana, will purge every reminder of the guy who dumped her. Again. Julie feels practically giddy for one-on-one holiday time with Heath, the (much) younger man she’s secretly dating. But her plans go from cozy to chaotic when Nick and Dana plead for Christmas at the family cabin in memory of their late father, Julie’s ex. She can’t refuse, even though she dreads their reactions to her new man when they realize she’s been hiding him for months. As the guest list grows in surprising ways, from Blair’s estranged mom to Heath’s precocious children, Julie’s secret is one of many to be unwrapped.

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Stephanie Booth, author of Libby Lost and Found

Meet Libby Weeks, author of the mega-bestselling fantasy series The Falling Children --- written as "F.T. Goldhero" to maintain her privacy. When the last manuscript is already months overdue to her publisher and rabid fans around the world are growing impatient, Libby is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. Already suffering from crippling anxiety, Libby's symptoms quickly accelerate. After she forgets her dog at the park one day --- then almost discloses her identity to the journalist who finds him --- Libby has to admit it: she needs help finishing the last book. Desperately, she turns to 11-year-old superfan Peanut Bixton, who knows the books even better than she does but harbors her own dark secrets. Tensions mount as Libby's dementia deepens --- until both Peanut and Libby swirl into an inevitable but bone-shocking conclusion.

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Susan Rieger, author of Like Mother, Like Mother

Detroit, 1960. Lila Pereira is two years old when her angry, abusive father has her mother committed to an asylum. Lila never sees her mother again. Three decades later, Lila rises to the pinnacle of American media as the powerful, brilliant executive editor of The Washington Globe. Lila leaves the rearing of her daughters to her generous husband, Joe. Grace, their youngest daughter, feels abandoned. She wishes her mother would attend PTA meetings, not White House correspondents’ dinners. As she grows up, she cannot shake her resentment. She wants out from under Lila’s shadow, yet the more she resists, the more Lila seems to shape her life. Grace becomes a successful reporter, even publishing a bestselling book about her mother. In the process of writing it, she realizes how little she knows about her own family.

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Paula Hawkins, author of The Blue Hour

Welcome to Eris: an island with only one house, one inhabitant, one way out. Unreachable from the Scottish mainland for 12 hours each day. Once home to Vanessa, a famous artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared 20 years ago. Now home to Grace, a solitary creature of the tides, content in her own isolation. But when a shocking discovery is made in an art gallery far away in London, a visitor comes calling. And the secrets of Eris threaten to emerge.

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Louise Penny, author of The Grey Wolf

Relentless phone calls interrupt the peace of a warm August morning in Three Pines. Someone has managed to track down Armand Gamache, head of homicide at the Sûreté, as he sits with his wife in their back garden. Reine-Marie watches with increasing unease as her husband refuses to pick up, though he clearly knows who is on the other end. When he finally answers, his rage shatters the calm of their quiet Sunday morning. That's only the first in a sequence of strange events that begin THE GREY WOLF. A missing coat, an intruder alarm, a note for Gamache reading "this might interest you," a puzzling scrap of paper with a mysterious list --- and then a murder. All propel Chief Inspector Gamache and his team toward a terrible realization. Something much more sinister than any one murder or any one case is fast approaching.

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