The Best Books of 2024
Our contributors choose their favourites.
Each issue, we feature reviews of the latest fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art and photography. This year, we asked our 2024 reviewers to select their favourite book of the year. Selections include Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo and A Question of Palestine by Edward Said, as well as collections of essays on French theory, re-issued aphorisms and photographic monographs.
Alongside this list, we’ve made all the reviews from this year’s print issues available to read for free on our website. These are linked to the contributor’s name under their Book of the Year selection, and we would encourage you to look back on those too as another worthy amalgamation of 2024 releases.
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Napalm in the Heart
by Pol Gausch (tr. Mary Faye Lethem, Faber)
FICTION
Viktor Shklovsky’s term ostranenie, which Benjamin Sher translated as enstrangement, neatly describes the central achievement of Napalm In The Heart, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem. Something calamitous has happened but is never explained. The narrator concentrates on his primary concerns: his lover Boris and his mother. Throughout these barren lands, cruelty is as casual as death. Within this skillfully translated novel we learn by almost understanding. The unsettled narrative acts like a dam holding back the details then letting flow with immense force: ‘the fire is always inside: like napalm in the heart’.
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A Last Supper of Queer Apostles
by Pedro Lemebel (tr. Gwendolyn Harper, Pushkin Press)
NON-FICTION
My book of the year is A Last Supper of Queer Apostles. This collection of crónicas and essays vividly captures the raw vibrancy of Lemebel’s writing, showcasing his fearless engagement with themes of queerness, marginalisation and political activism. Harper’s translation skilfully preserves Lemebel’s linguistic nuances and quirks, both his dark sense of humour and tender self, offering Anglophone readers a rare glimpse into a world that defies simplification and classification.
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The Last Sane Woman
by Hannah Regel (Verso)
FICTION
‘It would seem my lot in life is that I am too committed to the world of fire and force to share it with anyone else,’ concludes Donna Dreeman, the ceramicist whose suicide drives the narrative engine of Hannah Regels’s accomplished debut novel, The Last Sane Woman. Told, in part, through the letters she exchanges with her friend Susan while studying at Norths Staffs Polytechnic (kudos – I grew up two streets away), the book boldly dispenses with traditional signposting as it switches viewpoint and voice. Regel sketches her mercurial protagonist with uncommon compassion – nothing else I read this year moved me quite so deeply.
Orbital
by Samantha Harvey (Vintage)
FICTION
Reading Orbital is to become it; to experience our world from the outside and return to it a stranger of a kind. From this distance, Samantha Harvey presents a poignant picture of the planet, and reflects on what we miss when we fixate on our own little corner of it.
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Curandera
by Irenosen Okojie (Dialogue Books)
FICTION
We are sold the myth that books are finite finished products, with a beginning, middle and end. Curandera tips this notion upside down and turns it inside out. Traversing multi-verses and diverse narratives, and oscillating between seventeenth-century Cabo Verde and twenty-first century London, this novel ripples into our present tense whilst cavorting with the past. Written in the most hypnotic and scintillating prose, it tells the story of Zulmira, one of the titular curanderas, and four shamans living in a cosmic cosmopolitan of the early 00s. What ensues is a quest for revenge, sublunary recreation and divine rebirths.
Henry Henry
by Allen Bratton (Jonathan Cape)
FICTION
Of the books published this year I had the most fun with Henry Henry, a pitch-black reimagining of Shakespeare’s Henriad with a cover so hideous I had to throw away the dust jacket. This novel sent me into such a frenzy that I started recommending it to people before I’d even finished it, selling it with increasingly bizarre comparisons including ‘evil gay Martin Amis’ and ‘the better version of that Lear retelling Edward St Aubyn did’. It’s bleak stuff, at times, but also very funny, and has a delicious sense of its influences that’s all the more impressive considering this is Bratton’s debut.
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The Most Secret Memory of Men
by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (tr. Laura Vergnaud, Harvill Secker)
FICTION
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men was published in English translation by Laura Vergnaud this year, so I’m going to go with that. No novel by a writer of my generation has struck me as its equal in ambition. Many novels nowadays are about the ‘relation between art and life’, but this one, which is also funny and moving, actually clarifies what might be at stake in opposing those two ideas. The story of a Senegalese writer living in Paris who becomes swept up in the afterlife of an ill-fated novel and its cursed author seems to touch world literature everywhere that it hurts.
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Poems: 2016-2024
by J. H. Prynne (Bloodaxe)
POETRY
This year saw the publication of J.H. Prynne’s Poems: 2016-2024. A freaking network of grace and chaos, it gathers together the unbelievable prolificity of Prynne’s late spate of pamphleteering in a monolithic addendum to his collected Poems. ‘Diplomat cantaloupe ride a cock horse’, we read in Snooty Tipoffs, a series of deranged nursery rhymes; then Memory Working Impromptus permits intense lyric eloquence: ‘Shade in time of its own pass with notably easy care, this is memory at work’. It reveals wild and before-unimaginable strategies of poetical-political inquisition, taking – and making – the world utterly as it is: bewildering and rarely felt.
The Question of Palestine
by Edward Said (Fitzcarraldo)
NON-FICTION
Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine is my book of the year. Writing such a detailed history of Palestine is no small feat, but Said does it with incredible empathy and insight. Reissued this year, twenty-five years after it was first published, The Question of Palestine is more important than ever. I really hope everyone gets a chance to read it.
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Secrets of Beauty
by Jean Cocteau (Eris Press)
NON-FICTION
Jean Cocteau was one of few true polymaths in the Modernist era, precocious to absurdity as he influenced the course of film, music, illustration, theatre, poetry and the novel as a Surrealist, Dadaist and Classicist by turns. What was his secret? He had a number, and jotted them down on napkins with fist-banging élan, many of which Eris Press has collected in this slim, aphoristic volume, Secrets of Beauty. ‘Beauty hates ideas,’ Cocteau notes in one. ‘It is sufficient to itself.’ Another: ‘Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ This writer performs a similar trick: if you take nothing else from this book, you’ll be convinced you’re reading a madman who believes he’s Jean Cocteau.
Adam
by Gboyega Odubanjo (Faber)
POETRY
Adam is the first and last collection by the poet Gboyega Odubanjo, who tragically died last year aged 27. It’s difficult to read and also extraordinary. Comprised of standalone poems and longer sequences, the title draws from the name given to an unidentified Black boy’s body found in the Thames in 2001. Odubanjo’s poems lyrically prise open that case, Genesis, the systematic failures of the police and above all, London. Last year at The TS Eliot Prize readings, Odubanjo was honoured with a heartfelt toast from his friend Joe Carrick-Varty. This year, he will probably win it.
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An Inconvenient Place
by Jonathan Littell and Antoine D’Agata (Fitzcarraldo)
NON-FICTION
Part travelogue, part photo-essay, part history of the present, An Inconvenient Place follows the Franco-American novelist Jonathan Littell and his friend, the photographer Antoine D’Agata, from Kiev to Bucha, where they are among the first to document the killing spree carried out there by Russian troups in March 2022. Sensitively drawing this recent outrage into dialogue with what is surely the greatest enormity ever committed on Ukrainian soil, the Babyn Yar Massacre, in which an estimated 33, 771 Jews were executed by the SS over two days in 1941, this is a devastatingly relevent meditation on violence and its aftermath.
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Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
by Edwin Frank (Fern Press)
NON-FICTION
In the introduction to Stranger than Fiction, Edwin Frank – founder of the NYRB classics series – describes how he was washing up one day listening to Radiohead, as you do, and found himself thinking about a recent book by another Radiohead fan, The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross. It had charted modern classical music’s shifting forms against the upheavals of the twentieth century. Frank wondered if he could do the same for fiction (he could). Stranger than Fiction is a graceful tour through the literary century via twenty or so novels, each of which exemplifies how the novel at large buckled and strained with its times, and came out the better for it.
The Dissenters
by Youssef Rakha (Graywolf Press)
FICTION
The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha, forthcoming in only two months by Graywolf Press, should be on everyone’s reading list in 2025. Spanning 70 years of modern Egyptian history, it is an unflinching portrayal of women’s bodies and the state systems that betray them. With fierce attention, an amused eye and delectable prose, Rakha turns a complex novel into a compulsive read; one that is sexy, haunting, horrifying, hilarious and thought-provoking all at once.
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Shy Creatures
by Clare Chambers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
FICTION
My most memorable read of the year was Clare Chambers’s Shy Creatures. Inspired by a real-life event, this unusual novel explores the ‘rescue’ of a recluse in the 1960s. Chambers gently gives a window into both the conflicted psychiatry of the era (and beyond) and abuses of power. She foregrounds the role of art and compassion in restoring the human spirit. Her focus on hidden, interlocked lives and quiet struggle recalls Barbara Pym, as does her clear, understated, witty prose. Ultimately the book is about ‘ordinary’ individuals helping each other to repair life, especially when failed by authority figures and institutions.
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Our Evenings
by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador)
FICTION
In the blurb to his latest novel, Picador describe Alan Hollinghurst as ‘one of the finest writers of our age’ and Our Evenings consummately proves that right. We follow David Win, initially a scholarship student at a prestigious English boarding school, over his lifetime to the recent past of Brexit and Covid. David’s half-Burmese heritage elicits diverse reactions as he goes up to Oxford, and then on to an acting career and love affairs with various men. The wit, perception and moments of vulnerability in the narrative voice engage the reader in a novel that beguiles with light-winged prose and suggestive shadows.
– Pat Cash
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Skinningrove
by Chris Killip (Stanley/Barker)
PHOTOGRAPHY
A beautiful book from 2024 is Chris Killip’s Skinningrove, a posthumous publication of photographs from a remote coastal village in the North East of England. Killip took the pictures in the early 1980s, ingratiating himself into a small fishing community, documenting their lifestyle and landscape. He refrained from publishing the photographs for decades, too intimate, he felt, to be exhibited. In 2018, Killip returned to Skinningrove for the first time in nearly 30 years to post a copy of the photographs anonymously through every letterbox in the village. He died just two years later, aged 74, before the series was published in its final hardback format. Elegiac, epic and eerily beautiful, the photographs offer a powerful portrait of hardship and community in an era of decline.
The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV
by Helen Castor (Allen Lane)
NON-FICTION
Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart is narrative history at its best. Impeccably researched, but accessibly written, it recounts the calamitous power struggle between two of England’s Plantagenet monarchs. The boy-king Richard, who grew up to be a paranoid petty tyrant, was eventually deposed and left to starve to death in Pontefract Castle, while his first cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, claimed the throne. Castor is a Cambridge historian who is not above allowing herself the occasional poetic flight. Gripping from start to finish.
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Wellness
by Nathan Hill (Picador)
FICTION
Read in spring, Nathan Hill’s Wellness is one that has stayed with me. His second novel weighs in at almost 600 pages – his debut The Nix was equally hefty. Wellness covers the span of a marriage with all the tenderness, irritation and boredom that entails. Woven into the funnily fraught story of Jack and Elizabeth’s very real love is a witty excavation of modern anxieties, with observations on such topics as buying off-plan, swinging and how far algorithms rule our emotional lives.
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Dan Flavin: Dedications in Lights
edited by Josef Helfenstein and Olga Osadtschy (Walther Koenig)
ART
I’m obsessed with light, so translating Dan Flavin: Dedications in Lights was a dream. I loved the story of how Dan Flavin came to art while working as a guard and elevator operator at the MoMA; of how he used DIY shop materials to construct his light sculptures. Equally, I savoured an anecdote from the archives retelling how Flavin and his foundation attempted to donate one of his installations to Kunstmuseum Basel multiple times before their offer was accepted – and then, not on artistic merit but to avoid insulting Flavin with a further refusal. This lesson of persistence is one all writers and artists might take to heart.
The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present
by Fredric Jameson (Verso)
NON-FICTION
Straight-talking, yet never pedestrian, The Years of Theory, a collection of Fredric Jameson’s lectures, offers a history not of ideas, but of ‘problems’. Beginning with Sartre and the problem of being, ‘French thought’ is tackled through critical events from May 1968 to the EU (‘always historicize!’). Postmodernity is dizzyingly circular: its best spectacle, Jameson argues, has been to cajole us ‘that the future is here’. We end on a cryptic, rousing chiasmus: ‘the future of “the problem” is the problem of the future.’ Ever the Marxist, Jameson has dismantled the camera obscura to develop a more historically focused snapshot of that amorphous thing called ‘French theory’.
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