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!

Orbital by Samantha Harvey It’s a Tuesday morning in October, and hundred of kilometres above Earth, six astronauts snooze weightlessly in their sleeping bags. The uncleared paraphernalia of last night’s dinner sits in the galley, while beyond the spacecraft’s titanium shell, ‘the universe unfolds in simple eternities.’ In the beautiful, Booker Prize winning Orbital by Samantha Harvey, we spend one day and sixteen orbits of the Earth in the astronauts’ company, as they reconcile their scientific objectives with existential contemplation and the insistent human buzz emanating from our lonely planet.

Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd 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. A traumatic episode in Garbiel’s childhood runs in parallel to the spy story, setting the context for his restless, vagabond-like existence and a future series of spy thrillers which I’ll happily read.

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a classic in American juvenile fiction. Set in 1880s Missouri, it’s the story of the friendship between a young white boy and a black slave, both on the run, from a violent father and a slave owner. Much loved for its portrayal of youthful adventure, Huckleberry Finn, packed with racial stereotypes and the N-word, makes for uncomfortable reading today. In James by Percival Everett, we get the story from the black man’s perspective, and it’s far cry from the charming adventure story so many readers have come to love.

Dead-End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto An offbeat and lovely addition to the world of short story collections, Dead-End Stories by Banana Yoshimoto is, in essence, a tribute to hope, light, and resilience. The women in each of her five stories experience episodes of emotional pain or trauma, from the extremes of abuse and murder, to the heartbreak inflicted by an inconstant lover. In Yoshimoto’s tender hands, ultimately these events will not be allowed to warp and embitter, as each character is set on a path towards acknowledgement of life’s random cruelties and a final blessing of solace and clarity.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner When Carl Fletcher, styrofoam factory owner and one of Long Island’s richer residents, is kidnapped from his driveway one morning, life changes forever for the Fletcher family. Carl is returned unhurt, at least physically, in exchange for a large pile of cash placed on a baggage carousel at La Guardia airport, but the kidnapping still reverberates decades later. His three children have turned out deeply dysfunctional, each in their own way. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner is an extremely funny satire and deep dive into privilege, Jewish identity and a spot-on comment on how we live now.

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.

You Are Here by David Nicholls Having just finished watching the lovable Netflix series One Day, I went straight for You Are Here by David Nicholls. It’s not that Nicholls’ plots are that different from other romcom novels. Where he stands out is in his incredible skill at making it all so very relatable. It’s impossible to read his books without nodding, smiling, even shedding a tear with recognition. You Are Here, is the story of not-so-young-anymore Michael and Marnie finding love (no spoiler, it’s in the blurb). It’s the way there that makes this such a special read.

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.

Held by Anne Michaels A poetic gem on this year’s pleasingly eclectic Booker Prize Longlist, Held by Anne Michaels explores the many ways that the dead walk alongside us. Spanning time and space, her haunting and humane novel portrays four generations of one family and how their choices, traumas, and loves resonate through decades, if not centuries. From a World War I soldier hovering between life and death on the battlefield, to his granddaughter’s career as a war medic and her own bequeathal, Michaels threads their lives together in a meditation on mortality and inherited history.

Table for Two by Amor Towles Anyone wary of short stories should put their doubts to rest and dive into the utterly magnificent Table for Two by Amor Towles. I’ve been chuckling through his stories which range from a neurotic wife convinced her husband is having an affair to a Russian peasant turned opportunistic capitalist by the Russian revolution; from a high-strung Goldman Sachs banker suspicious of a fellow concert goer to the incompetent aspiring author whose skills at forging puts him on a new career path and many more. Once again, Towles’ superb storytelling skills shine.

The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry Butte, Montana, 1891, a magnet for Irish immigrants seeking their fortune at its famous copper mines. Here we meet Tom Rourke, tortured soul, ballad maker, and a man whose Hibernian eyes gleam with ‘the lyric poetry of an early death’. The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry depicts his electrifying love affair with the wife of a mine captain and their subsequent flight for freedom, in possession of purloined banknotes and pursued by vengeful hired gunmen. All hail a gleefully delinquent outlaw tale of wild hearts and hard lives, and the first Irish western I’ve ever read.

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024, Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo is a funny, fearless and gleefully bizarre work of Italian autofiction, chronicling one woman’s journey to authorhood. Told by Vero, now in her forties, it’s the story of her childhood in Rome and subsequent years spent trying to escape the clutches of a dysfunctional family. In a confessional outpouring that ranges from her struggles with constipation to what looks a lot like emotional abuse from her highly-strung mother, Vero’s tale is written in a self-proclaimed style of ambiguity.

Non-Fiction

Broken Threads by Mishal Husain I confess to being a complete ignoramus on the history of the partition of India. Luckily, the brilliant Broken Threads by Mishal Husain has come along to change that. Husain – fiercely intelligent BBC Radio 4 news presenter (soon to leave, unfortunately) feared by British politicians for her razor-sharp interviews – has written the memoirs of her grandparents and parents. In Broken Threads, she weaves together the political and the personal to create an insightful and moving account of their lives as well as India and Pakistan’s fraught shared history.

If thoughts about fungi ever flit through your mind, chances are it’s in reference to last night’s truffle risotto dinner, or perhaps, less fortunately, a bout of Athlete’s Foot or spreading spores on your bathroom ceiling. The splendid Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is here to bedazzle your uninformed brain, as both a scientific exploration and all-round appreciation of fungi as ‘regenerators, recyclers, and networkers that stitch worlds together’. From medicinal aides to mind-controlling zombie types, there’s a fungus for every occasion; they are sophisticated, problem-solving survivors and our world would collapse without them.

A stand-out read of the year, All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley is a finely understated combination of memoir, lessons on the art of seeing, and a glorious and very personal tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Capturing a transformative period in Bringley’s life, the book focuses on the months and years after his brother Tom’s untimely death, when poleaxed by grief, Bringley drops out of his relentless New York life and takes a job as a museum guard at the Met. Here, with a broken heart, he gets to just stand still awhile and let the art and life of the museum work its healing magic.

Curiously beautiful and unique, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig is that rare thing, a book you didn’t know you needed but one destined to bag a lifelong space on your bookshelf. A dictionary in six parts, Koenig’s labour of love is a compendium of new words for emotions. Woven from fragments of a hundred different languages, these are words that give expression to those thoughts and feelings that hover ‘on the cusp of language.’ In the vein of established words like schadenfreude and hygge, they convey the universal experiences that we cannot adequately articulate alone.

Children’s Books

Shortlisted for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration 2024, The Midnight Panther by Poonam Mistry (5-8 years) is a beautiful work of art. Inspired by her Indian heritage, Mistry recreates the fabrics, paintings and ornaments of her youth in a glorious palette of rich colour and pattern, telling the tale of a shy and lonely panther. Beside the blaze of the lion’s mane and the dazzle of the leopard’s spots, the panther feels small and plain. His journey towards self-belief and acceptance is a magical one in Mistry’s stunning fable.

King Winter's Birthday Bestselling author Jonathan Freedland’s first children’s book, King Winter’s Birthday (5-8 years), is a thought-provoking tale inspired by Ulrich A. Boschwitz’s writing on exile and internment during World War Two. It’s King Winter’s birthday, and this year he invites all his siblings for a day of games, feasting and fun. Queen Spring, King Summer, and Queen Autumn duly arrive for celebrations, but their absence from home sends the weather into a spin and the crops and animals become utterly muddled. Maybe we cannot always be in the same place with our loved ones,‘…except in our dreams’. Wonderfully illustrated by Emily Sutton.

The Cosmic Diary of a Future Space Explorer by Tim Peake (8-11 years). This shining star of a book sees Tim Peake take the hand of astronautical bookworms and lead them on an interplanetary expedition. He tells us that fascinating as it is to study past space missions, we need a crew of dynamic youngsters to lead us into the next phase of exploration. And what a phase it promises to be! Future missions will find humans visiting volcanoes on Mars and toasting their toes in the 475 degrees Celsius heat of Venus. If the Milky Way contains at least 50 billion planets, what are the chances of finding life?

Shakespeare’s First Folio by William Shakespeare (8-11 years). Celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare’s First Folio, this innovative edition makes the Bard’s stories and characters leap from the page. Lovingly created for those with a performative streak, each play has been abridged so that a group can perform it in under 20 mins, including adapted stage directions. Emily Sutton’s intricate watercolours help readers imagine their roles and, refreshingly, the language has been preserved. A poetic preface by Michael Rosen suggests the Folio represents ‘The lives of us in every age,’. A book that deserves a forever space on the family bookshelf.

Rosa by Starlight by Hilary McKay (8-11 years). Brimful of cats and magic, this enchanting tale is top of our wishlist. It contains all the ingredients for a great read: an orphaned girl, hideous long-lost relatives, and peril in a foreign land. Rosa’s first glimpse of magic comes shortly after her parents death, heralded by a midnight black cat with eyes like sherbet lemons. A trip to Venice with her aforementioned hideous relatives finds the vulnerable girl abandoned, and seeking magical salvation in the company of cats and starlight. A delight!

Mallory Vayle and the Curse of Maggoty Skull by Martin Howard (10+ years). Deliciously dark and irreverent, this is the perfect book for those with a penchant for the spooky. It tells the tale of Mallory Vayle, determinedly normal reader of pony books. Except Mallory isn’t normal at all, she’s an unwilling psychic whose dead parents hang out with her. When her parents are unfortunately kidnapped by an evil necromancer, Mallory has to accept and utilise her unwanted supernatural powers. With lashings of cobwebby Victoriana, this clever, funny, and fiendish tale looks set to be the first in a series.

Big-hearted, relatable, and funny, Steady for This by Nathanael Lessore (13+ years), portrays the awkwardness of adolescence through the eyes of aspiring London rapper, Shaun (that’s MC Growls to me and you). ‘Man’s got bars,’ he tells us, and ‘spitting bars’ could make him rich and impress his crush, Tanisha. A mortifying incident during a livestream practice for a rap competition throws a major spanner in the works, and on top of that the council are threatening to evict Shaun’s family from their flat. Is he steady for this? A great book for reluctant teenage boy readers.

Murder on a Summer Break by Kate Weston (Teen/ Young Adult). The sequel to the fantastic Murder on a School Night, in this new caper, feminist detectives, Kerry and Annie, encounter murder and mayhem at an influencers festival. As in their previous crime case, the first murder is committed with an unusual weapon (in this instance, a prankster influencer has been suffocated by a condom stretched over his unfortunate head). Thankfully, the girls are on hand, ready to deal with bumbling police and red herrings. Another hilarious girl-powered whodunnit, and a brilliant sofa read for lazy Twixmas days.