The second half of an election year can be a fraught one for books. Publishers tend to front-load their most interesting titles away from the election to try to keep them from being swallowed up by politics come the fall. After an election, books can feel too trivial and unserious to deserve our focus.

The books I took the most from in the second half of 2024 are the ones that fought against that impulse, that insisted on their own importance. They were works that took their subjects and their language seriously, that demanded my focus and rewarded it with something bigger and more beautiful than I could come to on my own. I hope, in these strange and confusing months, that they can do the same for you.

I’ve already chronicled the best books of the first half of the year here. (One of the below is actually from this January, but I didn’t get to it until now and it was so good that I didn’t want to keep it from you.) A number of them I first recommended in my monthly book recommendation newsletter Next Page. If you’d like to learn about the best books I’m reading early, subscribe here.

Martyr!, the debut novel from poet Kaveh Akbar, is word-drunk and elegiac, an enormous pleasure to read. Just look at that exclamation point in the title: its ironic knowingness, its outrage, its euphoria. This is a book whose author has weighed every punctuation mark just that carefully.

The inciting incident of Martyr! is a true one. In 1988, the US military shot an Iranian passenger plane out of the sky, mistakenly believing it to be a fighter jet. Akbar takes as his premise the idea of a man whose mother died on that flight, instantly “turned into dust” when the missile hit the plane: “clean in a way, if you didn’t think about it too much.”

The motherless boy grows up to become Cyrus, a poet and a recovering addict searching aimlessly for purpose. What Cyrus cares about most is poetry, but he feels that language, rule-bound and limited, will never be able to touch his depression, “get rid of the big ball of rot inside me.” He tells his AA sponsor he wants to die, then tries to channel the impulse into a literary project about martyrs. Cyrus’s mother died because of an error the US never apologized for (“Actuarial,” Cyrus fumes, “not even tragic”), but a martyr can make their death bear meaning. Perhaps by studying them, Cyrus can give meaning to his own life.

Martyr! is a messy book. Akbar has a poet’s unease with plot, and the coincidences that power his narrative forward never manage to feel elegant. Still, the dreams and poetry and warmth that lace the novel make a triumphant case: for life, and for art, and for beauty, which matter even when they shouldn’t.

The reign of Queen Elizabeth II was so long that contemplating it can feel, sometimes, like contemplating eternity. She came to the English throne in 1952, anointed by God, still expected to hand-pick her prime ministers and decide when to dissolve Parliament. At her death in 2022, Elizabeth was queen of a cosmopolitan liberal democracy with almost no real political powers left to her, but her remarkably strong aura of stateliness remained unshaken despite decades of familial royal scandal.

In Q, Craig Brown makes Elizabeth the still, behatted center of a kaleidoscopically turning world, ever stoic and unchanging as the world powers forward without her. Brown’s trademark move is to write biographies in fragments, assembling them out of bits and pieces of other sources; he likes to go to the London Library and check the indexes of every memoir and biography in the place for mentions of his subjects. He’s got a chapter on every person who ever called Elizabeth “radiant” (including Sylvia Plath), all the surreal dreams people have about her (English novelist Kingsley Amis dreamed of trying to elope with her), all the inane things people have said in a panic when they have to make small talk with her (the author found himself expounding on the German playwright Bertolt Brecht).

Brown’s key insight is that Elizabeth was so determinedly unreadable that she became a mirror to her subjects, a figure on whom they so fervently projected their fears and aspirations that she ended up showing them themselves. What to make of a woman whose coronation was marked by active combat troops in Kenya firing shells filled with red, white, and blue smoke into battle? Or whose death inspired a supermarket chain to turn down the volume of the beeps on its cash registers? What, except: what strange impulses we find in our strange human selves.

Garth Greenwell is a hedonist of language. In previous books, his sentences have hummed the pleasures of the body, of sex and of conversation and poetry. In Small Rain, Greenwell begins with pain — five days of it, so intense, the narrator tells us, it felt as though “someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked.” Yet even here, in this novel about illness and suffering, Greenwell cannot abandon his palpable joy at sensory pleasures, at beauty.

Greenwell’s narrator brings himself reluctantly to a hospital, still in the grip of early Covid in spring of 2020, after those five days of pain don’t seem to be abating. There, he occupies himself charting the power dynamics of the hospital staff and sending his partner out to bring him books of poetry. In the dream space of the hospital bed, where days follow the rhythms of tests and doctors’ rounds and meals, there are long stretches of unmarked time with which the narrator can do nothing but think. “The point was to perceive reality,” he thinks of poetry, “to see things that are only visible at a different speed, a different pitch of attention, the value of poems is tuning us to a different frequency of existence.”

What to do about America in this moment when we are far past whatever we might imagine to be her golden age? So many of our old national myths have gone threadbare and shabby, increasingly revealed to be too flawed to sustain us now, or riddled with hidden cruelties, or always only beautiful lies. What stories can we tell about ourselves and each other now if we want to learn to move forward?

One of the metaphors we sometimes turn to in these moments is King Arthur’s Camelot, which provided a romantic lens for processing the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. In Lev Grossman’s Arthurian novel The Bright Sword, Camelot feels like a match for our own post-Trumpian moment. It’s a Camelot after the death of King Arthur. All the higher powers and supernatural figures who used to take an interest in Camelot’s fate have turned their backs. All the quests are over. The only people left alive are the ones who never quite fit into the stories to begin with, the ones who were too poor or too queer or too feminine or too Black to become legends. How, Grossman’s characters seem to ask, are we supposed to figure out what to do next in this kind of story?

The answers, when they come, are radiant, and they feel surprisingly true.

Rachel Kushner’s cool-voiced ecothriller Creation Lake got a fascinatingly polarized reception when it came out this fall. Brandon Taylor at the London Review of Books said it was so bad he “wanted to weep”; Dwight Garner at the New York Times said that after the opening paragraphs, he knew he was “in the hands of a major writer, one who processes experience on a deep level.” Me, I think Creation Lake is a rich, messy, frustrating piece of work. It doesn’t always land, but when it does? Oh boy.

Creation Lake tells the story of an American spy we know only by her alias, Sadie Smith. A Berkeley dropout, she’s been hired to infiltrate a group of radical environmentalists in rural France to see if they’re planning a terrorist action. Sadie goes about her job efficiently, but she doesn’t particularly care about the group, whose members she considers boring and hypocritical, or about the environment. Kushner handles the espionage part of the plot with an almost hostile disregard for such classic thriller elements as suspense or intrigue, but the whole book comes to life when we get to the part of the story Sadie (and, apparently, Kushner) actually cares about.

The environmentalists correspond with Bruno Lacomb, an esoteric philosopher who long ago renounced the excesses of human civilization to go live in a cave and think about Neanderthals. Periodically he emerges to use his daughter’s computer and write to his environmentalist friends, and Sadie, having hacked into their inbox, is entranced by his emails. Reading them, she winds across vast stretches of time, encountering alien and disenfranchised figures: the gentle and depressed Neanderthals of prehistory, whom Sadie imagines as 1950s greasers with Joan Crawford faces; the persecuted Cagot of medieval Europe, who Bruno provocatively suggests might have been descendants of Neanderthals; Bruno himself, a Jew who grew up in occupied France in World War II.

Sadie, who is so cynical in her interactions with the people she manipulates and uses, seems to long for Bruno’s letters to cohere into a grand unified theory that will tell her there is something worthwhile about being human, no matter how destructive human civilization may have been. She searches his emails for redemption — and he doesn’t, in the end, disappoint her.

The women’s hotel was an institution of the first half of the 20th century: a place for ambitious young women and virtuous spinsters who were modern enough to try to make something of themselves in a big city, but modest enough (either of character or of means) to want to do it in a chaperoned facility, for a reasonable fee.

In the midcentury, however, everything changed. The women’s hotel, writes Daniel Lavery in his exceptionally charming new novel, found itself “made obsolete by the credit card, by hippies and the New Age movement, by lesbianism and feminism, by the increase in affordable apartment stock and the increased acceptance of premarital cohabitation.”

Lavery’s story takes place in the 1960s, in the dying days of the women’s hotel. New York’s Biedermeier hotel, where his focus lies, was always a second-rate facility, but now, its profits are so low that it has had to stop serving breakfast, a move the penny-pinching residents take as a deep affront. (“We’re all used to breakfast now,” one laments. “It’s like smoking. You can’t just ask people to give it up once they’ve made a habit of it.”)

Lavery tracks the foibles of the Biedermeier’s band of misfits with a light touch. His characters were driven to its dubious comforts by family estrangement, addiction, poverty, and ambition above their means; dark subject matter, yet he writes their story with a tender affection. This novel is sweet, thoughtful, and very, very funny.

All book critics have to spend a lot of time making our way through mediocre books where the prose starts off feeling solid enough but begins to fall apart in your hands as you read on. There is so much relief, under those circumstances, in turning to a Sally Rooney novel: taking the weight of her elegant, deeply felt sentences; feeling how much control she has over the words she’s using; how strongly she believes that they should be as beautiful as she can make them. At last, the chance to relax in the presence of someone who knows what she’s doing.

In Intermezzo, Rooney shifts her usual focus on romantic couples to spotlight the relationship between brothers Peter and Ivan. Peter is a lawyer in his 30s, charming, fastidious, and depressed. Ivan is an aging chess prodigy in his 20s, awkward and perhaps autistic, trying to evolve away from adolescent flirtations with incel forums and still wearing braces on his teeth. We meet them in the aftermath of their father’s funeral, semi-estranged, each ignoring the other to focus on their own fascinating love lives. They ignore each other, they try to make up, they fight, they hurt each other as badly as they possibly can.

What elegance. What bliss. What beauty. Which is, as Ivan thinks, maybe the most important thing, anyway: Beauty is where God is, which means it’s all connected to what right and wrong are, too.

When young Mieczysław Wojnicz arrives at the mountain resort of Görbersdorf, Poland, in 1913, he’s looking forward to a brief, healthful, and relaxing sojourn. Wojnicz is consumptive, and, like the hero of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain before him, he has put his faith in the pure mountain air to cure him.

On Wojnicz’s first day at the sanatorium, however, he arrives at his boarding house to find the dead body of his landlord’s wife stretched out on the dining room table. She’s killed herself, the landlord reports without emotion to the shaken Wojnicz.

In the wake of his disturbing discovery, Wojnicz tries to focus on the concrete rituals of sanatorium life: the cold showers and long hikes, the simple food and hard drinking, the long debates with his fellow patients about history and philosophy. Yet there’s something violent and misogynistic lurking behind these everyday habits. All of the women he meets around town seem despondent. The philosophical debates always seem to hinge on the inferiority of women. On those long mountain hikes, he keeps coming across eerily anatomical glory holes built into the earth itself.

Wojnicz doesn’t quite know what to make of all these horrors. But Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, is playing a long game. One hint is in the title: Empusa is a Greek shapeshifter who feeds on men. Perhaps the dead woman on the table will be avenged in the end.