AARP’s Favorite Books of 2024 (So Far)

James by Percival Everett 

Everett’s brilliant story revisits Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim — James, actually — who flees town when he hears he’s set to be sold and sent to New Orleans. Joined by Huck, also on the run and presumed dead, he begins a wild journey down the Mississippi in a story full of wry social critique (James hides his fierce intelligence and eloquence when in the presence of white people), humor and suspense. Everett, 67, who has described himself as “pathologically ironic” (love that), told PBS Newshour, “I don’t go to work with a message or a mission, but I do hope to generate thought.” He does that and more. His novel Telephone was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and 2001’s Erasure was the basis for the 2023 film American Fiction. 

"The Night in Question" Susan Fletcher

Courtesy Union Square & Co

The Night in Question by Susan Fletcher

This is a lighter-hearted pick, a mystery set in an assisted living community that’s full of warmth and humor, despite tackling some weighty issues. It’s centered around Florrie Butterfield, a kindhearted octogenarian who’s led a life of adventure and romance — while carrying a long-ago trauma. After the community’s young manager, Renata, falls to her near death from a top-floor window and ends up in a coma, Florrie and a new friend, Stanhope, try to find out what really happened. Everyone assumes it was an attempted suicide, but Florrie feels in her gut that there was foul play at work. As she and Stanhope piece together the puzzle, Florrie unspools her own dramatic story in this beautifully executed, life-affirming novel. 

"Briefly, Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End" by Alua Arthur

Courtesy Mariner Books

Briefly, Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End by Alua Arthur

Alua Arthur, a death doula, offers a memoir about her unique profession that’s also an eloquent argument for embracing our mortality and approaching the end with honesty and gratitude — and maybe even joy. As she puts it, “I want to saunter into my death like a tipsy woman might walk to a lover across a dark room.” Arthur was called to become a death doula — someone who guides and supports people and their loved ones through the dying process — after the passing of her beloved brother-in-law and watching her sister suffer in the chaotic, grief-filled and bureaucratic aftermath. It fueled her desire to help others in similar situations, she writes: “I could be with them in the trenches. … And while I couldn’t take their pain away, I could let them know that someone cared that it was hard. I could be their witness. I wanted to be.”  

Long Island by Colm Tóibín

Fifteen years after his 2009 novel Brooklyn (turned into a 2015 movie starring Saoirse Ronan), Colm Tóibín brings back Eilis Lacey, now living on Long Island with her husband, Tony, and two kids — an Irishwoman surrounded by a close-knit clan of Italian American in-laws. After a betrayal, she takes an extended trip to see her mother in their small Irish hometown, a community where everyone knows your business — including the fact that Eilis and local bar owner Jim were in love before Eilis mysteriously fled 20 years earlier. The quiet, moving story is told from the perspectives of different characters, each with a heartbreaking inability to express what they truly desire. Note that you don’t need to have read Brooklyn (I hadn’t) to enjoy this follow-up. 

"The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History" by Karen Valby

Courtesy Pantheon Books

The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History by Karen Valby

Netflix has already optioned the rights to this biography of a trailblazing group of five ballerinas — Lydia Abarca, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells and Karlya Shelton-Benjamin — who began performing with the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969. Author Karen Valby describes the range of challenges they faced while breaking down barriers, including a lack of public recognition, which she tries to remedy in this deeply researched telling. She interviewed all five dancers, who have been friends for half a century (a relationship highlighted in her 2021 New York Times story, which inspired the book after it went viral). 

"How the Light Gets In" by Joyce Maynard

Courtesy Harper Collins

How the Light Gets In by Joyce Maynard 

Maynard, 70, is the author of the bestselling memoir At Home in the World and novels such as To Die For and Labor Day (and is also known for her brief relationship with the author J.D. Salinger). This brilliant, moving story is a kind of sequel to her 2021 novel Count the Ways, which you don’t need to have read to become absorbed in this one. It’s centered around Eleanor, now in her 50s, who has moved from Boston back to the New Hampshire farm where she and her ex-husband, Cam, raised their family, to care for the dying Cam and live with her brain-injured adult son, Toby. Over a 15-year span, she wrestles with a baffling estrangement from her oldest daughter, along with guilt and resentment over the long-ago accident that injured Toby, while falling into a passionate but unfulfilling affair. And yet, as she ages, we see her begin to appreciate the love and beauty that her life holds despite (or because of) its many disappointments and apparent wrong turns. 

"This American Ex Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life" by Lyz Lenz

Courtesy Penguin Random House

This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life by Lyz Lenz

Lyz Lenz, a writer who divorced after a soul-sucking 12-year marriage, makes a controversial but unapologetic argument: Marriage as an institution is inherently flawed because it’s structured for men’s benefit. But not all marriage. “The sacred cow I’m slaughtering for steak and eating with a nice red wine is that of heterosexual marriages. And I am doing it from the perspective of the partner who is always asked to carry more than their fair share,” she writes. It’s easy to see why she left her ex. Besides expecting her to cook and clean for him, the guy did obnoxious things, like hide some of her favorite objects (quirky mugs, a copy of Madame Bovary). She couldn’t figure out why she kept losing her stuff until she found the items in a box in the basement. But you don’t need to want to leave your own marriage or burn your wedding dress — as she does, with joy, after her divorce — to appreciate the questions she raises about why and how we couple. It certainly wouldn’t hurt anyone to consider them before saying “I do.”

"Feeding Ghosts" by Tessa Hulls

Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

Even if you’re not usually drawn to graphic books, this heartfelt graphic memoir demonstrates how special they can be. Tessa Hulls, who was born to an English father and Chinese mother and raised in a tiny California town, uses a mix of text and evocative black-and-white drawings to describe her research into her family’s dramatic story through three generations of women. It begins with her late Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist persecuted for years for her anti-Communist writings until she fled with her young daughter Rose (Hulls’ mom) to Hong Kong in 1957. Sun Yi suffered from mental illness, shaping Rose, who was an emotionally repressed, fearful parent to Hulls. The process of uncovering and understanding her family’s painful past to create the memoir, she suggests, has allowed her to placate the ghosts of history that her grandmother and mother so feared. But “they never wanted to devour us,” she concludes. “They just wanted to be known, to have their story heard.”