NPR's top 2024 summer book picks

Need a book to curl up with on the beach or to throw in your carry-on for a long flight this summer? NPR’s staffers picked some of the best books out in 2024 so far.

NPR's "Book of the Day" host Andrew Limbong breaks down that long list to offer some curated favorites.

Fiction

“It's this really funny exploration of lying, but it's also a kind of funny parody about like what's incentivized in the writing industry,” Limbong says. “For a debut writer, I think it's a really strong first impression.”

“It's about a newly divorced woman named Celeste who meets an expert birder named John,” Limbong says. “And by the virtue of the rom-com gods, Celeste has to be a birding partner to John.”

“It's about, uh, two Indian Americans whose parents are pressing them to get married and to get pushed into this arranged marriage and they decide, ‘You know what? Let's just make them happy,’ Limbong says. “You got to make your folks happy.”

“It's an interesting and funny look at aging and desire,” Limbong says. “It's kind of about this transitional time in life.”

“It's a retelling of the ‘Huck Finn’ story from James's point of view,” Limbong says. “That's Huck's friend who is escaping slavery, and the book toys with history and language in a really funny way.”

Nonfiction

“A few years back when the Supreme Court was hearing arguments on the Dobbs case, which eventually overturned Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that adoption could relieve a person of their parental duties and responsibilities the same way an abortion would,” Limbong says. “The book takes this really close look at what that really means for a woman to be pregnant, have the baby and then give it away for adoption.”

“It's about his time in the 1970s as a boy where he really experienced just an unbelievable amount of abuse and cruelty,” Limbong says. “I do think at the end of the day, it is a book about taking charge of your own narrative.”

“It's about a train burning in India in 2002,” host Deepa Fernandes says. “This is the memoir of a teenage Muslim girl living through the terror.”