Christmas 2024

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Our Favourite Books of 2024

2024 has been a good pretty good year for books. We’ve enjoyed a few blockbusters and some experimental fiction, fallen in love with a couple of short-story collections, been educated by non-fiction and travelled back to our younger selves while searching for our favourite children’s books.  We’ve pulled out our top reads and hope this will inspire you to spread the joy. You’ll find the full review by clicking on the titles. Happy reading and Merry Christmas!

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Open Throat by Henry Hoke

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Open Throat

The nature of the beast

From the outset, Open Throat by Henry Hoke promises to be a wild ride, its eye-popping first line, ‘I’ve never eaten a person but today I might,’ spoken by a queer, non-binary mountain lion, who has made their home alongside the legendary Hollywood sign overlooking Los Angeles. The lion is desperately hungry and spends their days covertly watching the locals, torn between curiosity about human life and the desire to shred passers-by and eat them for lunch. In this razor-sharp allegorical novella, the lion considers modern American society and its impact on the marginalised, whilst being dangerously tempted to join the club.

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Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

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Our Evenings

Tame Hollinghurst

Growing up mixed-race, gay, with a single mum in 1960s rural England leaves a lot to be desired. Yet, that’s the reality of English-Burmese actor David Win, the protagonist of In Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst. David looks back and reflects on life at his scholarship funded boarding school, his gay love affairs and budding acting career, all seeped in homophobia, snobbery and racism. Despite these explosive subject matters, I’m sorry to report that I found the novel lacking. I never expected to use the word ‘tame’ and ‘Hollinghurst’ in the same sentence, but that, Hollinghurst fans, is, unfortunately, what we have here.

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Though the Bodies Fall by Noel O'Regan

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Though the Bodies Fall

The salvation of lost souls

Flanked by the Atlantic Ocean on the Kerry Head peninsula, Micheál lives in his childhood home, a picture-postcard bungalow which is the final dwelling before the rugged rocks of the headlands. With his sisters flown the nest and his parents dead, Micheál’s solitary life is dedicated to continuing his parents’ work, saving the ‘lost souls’ who attempt to commit suicide by leaping from the clifftops. In Though the Bodies Fall by Noel O’Regan, Micheál’s story of trauma and duty, and his attempt at reconciliation with the past, is told in an atmospheric and strikingly unique Irish debut.

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The Romantic by William Boyd

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The Romantic

The Accidental Adventurer

Who doesn’t love a sweeping novel? A story that captures an entire life and spans countries and continents. The Romantic by William Boyd, which charts the life of Cashel Greville Ross, is such a book. An out-of-wedlock love child, Cashel becomes a peripheral participant in some significant historical events, accidentally meets some important people and stumbles upon various adventures. I loved Boyd’s enthralling, amusing storytelling, his effortless writing and our charming anti-hero Cashel.

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The Children's Bach by Helen Garner

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The Children’s Bach

Domesticity and desire in suburban Melbourne

The splendid W&N Essentials series is a carefully curated collection of books considered to have stood the test of time, and been adored by their first readers. The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner is one of its brightest stars, a spare and fearless novel, highly acclaimed in the author’s native Australia in 1984, but curiously, only now feeling the love in the U.K. Set in suburban Melbourne in the early 1980’s, it’s the story of Dexter and Athena Fox and some blast-from-the past visitors, whose presence causes the Fox’s cosy domesticity to unravel into fantasy, escapism, and moral dilemma.

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Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd

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Gabriel’s Moon

A useful idiot

In Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd a trip to Congo and an unexpected interview with the president throws travel writer Gabriel Dax into a maelstrom of espionage and counterespionage.  Congo’s president is assassinated soon after the interview and Gabriel possesses, unknowingly, information that reveal the perpetrator and the sinister geo-political game that lies behind. For reasons I can’t explain, I’ve never read anything by William Boyd. It’s clearly been my loss.

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A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez

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A Sunny Place for Shady People

A dozen disquieting tales

Designed to provoke shock, discomfort, and debate, A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez is a new collection of short stories from the Argentinian queen of Latin American Gothic. Enriquez’s macabre tales centre around the very notion of haunting, be it literal, or a manifestation of psychic or societal trauma. From one woman’s infatuation with her surgically removed fibroid to a community of birds who were once unruly women, Enriquez interweaves mythology, history, and the darkest imaginings, in her exploration of horror and humanity.

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The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

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The Safekeep

Mesmerising debut of displacement and desire

Marvellously, an unparalleled five of the six titles shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize are by female writers. One of them is also a debut novel, a remarkable achievement for The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden. Set in a sleepy Dutch province in the early 1960’s, this meticulously plotted story introduces us to Isabel, an uptight young woman leading a lonely existence as the sole inhabitant of her childhood home. Her life is set to be irrevocably altered one sultry summer, when an uninvited guest moves in, disrupting Isabel’s quiet days of ‘small moments,’ and forcing her to confront some uncomfortable truths.

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The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb

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The Night of the Hunter

A deliciously eerie slice of period piece Americana

Brooding 1953 cult favourite, The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb is perhaps better known for its darkly expressionistic film adaptation, starring Robert Mitchum. For film fans seeking out the book, Mitchum’s charismatic, menacing performance as Harry Powell, self-proclaimed preacher and depraved soul, inevitably sears itself onto the page, a character with evil intent from the moment we first meet him, plotting to lay his hands on a bank robber’s loot. In Grubb’s nightmarish Southern Gothic cat-and-mouse tale, a classic contest of good versus evil is underway, as the preacher’s predilection for seduction, theft and murder is resisted by a lionhearted boy and his little sister.

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