Best Books 2024: Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly

The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World

Sharon Brous (Avery)

At the heart of this eminently wise call for human connection in an increasingly fractured world is the “holy practice” of simply “showing up” for one’s community in moments of celebration or crisis. It’s a deceptively simple concept that Brous makes theologically rich by breathing new life into familiar Jewish midrashes, rituals, and scriptural stories.

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The Bible: A Global History

Bruce Gordon (Basic)

In Gordon’s hands, the Bible becomes a “migrant” that wanders across borders, continually reinventing itself through cultural blending, reinterpretation, and rebellion. Rigorous research and fine-grained textual analysis make this an ambitious and necessary reassessment of the world’s most-read book.

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Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

Eliza Griswold (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Drawing on years of immersive research, Pulitzer winner Griswold paints an indelible portrait of the interpersonal tensions, internal biases, and gaps between utopian ideals and messy reality that unraveled a progressive Philadelphia church in 2023. In its particularity, this speaks powerfully to the broader trend of partisanship playing out across the country.

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Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

Catherine Nixey (Mariner)

Nixey peers beyond today’s familiar “Jesus of Sunday school and sunbeams” to reveal an array of far weirder—and more intriguing—textual Christs, from the two-bit magician of ancient Greco-Roman writings to the arrogant miracle worker of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Written with wit and verve, this fascinating history asks trenchant questions about which historical narratives get preserved and why.

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Somehow: Thoughts on Love

Anne Lamott (Riverhead)

Lamott proves herself a master storyteller in these meditations on the most elusive of emotions, using her trademark humor and compassion to enliven life’s ordinary moments and find wisdom in its tragedies. In one of the book’s most remarkable passages, she writes of the love that once found her holding a sharpened pencil to her “addict son’s throat” and warning him that he couldn’t come home again until he stopped using.

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