It’s certainly been a good year so far for book lovers. 2024 has seen the much anticipated return of Sally Rooney, whose fourth novel Intermezzo is arguably her best effort to date, as well as new works from American literary heavyweights such as Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner.
There’s also been a spate of brilliant, inventive debuts – from Kaliane Bradley’s time-twisting, genre-busting The Ministry of Time to Rita Bullwinkel’s propulsive Headshot to Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin, a hypnotic tale with shades of Ottessa Moshfegh.
Here’s our pick of the very best fiction of 2024.
Done well, a literary retelling can shine fresh light on a story we think we know inside out: just look at Jean Rhys’s Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea, or, more recently, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which moves Dickens’ David Copperfield to contemporary opiod crisis America. Percival Everett’s James does exactly that, retreading the events of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave. James fills in the gaps in Jim’s story, lending dimension and nuance to a once flat, stereotyped character as he and Huck journey down the Mississippi river. Everett, a prolific and dazzlingly wide-ranging writer, also cleverly plays with language: here, Jim’s heightened dialect is a protective form of code-switching. Surely an American classic in the making – and it’s already generating serious Booker Prize buzz, having made the shortlist earlier this year. (Pan Macmillan)
“There are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine,” says Manako Kajii, the suspected murderer at the heart of this delicious thriller, based on the real case of the “Konkatsu Killer”. Kajii is accused of seducing a string of lonely businessmen with her extravagant cooking, then killing them. Her case fascinates Rika, an ambitious young journalist with dreams of becoming the first female reporter on her news desk; if she can just get Kajii to speak to her, she might snag that promotion. Soon she’s embroiled in a strange cat and mouse power play with Kajii, one that will also cause her to question the fatphobia and misogyny that she’s been brought up with. Warning: you may come away from this with a serious craving for rice cooked in soy sauce and butter. (4th Estate)
Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna
Set over the course of two sweltering hot London days in the summer of 2019, Oisín McKenna’s exhilarating debut captures the promise and the pain of millennial life in the capital. Maggie and her boyfriend Ed are expecting a baby; they are planning a retreat to the suburbs after years of just about making it work in a mouldy flat in Hackney. Her best friend Phil can’t fathom the decision, which feels like a betrayal of their teenage selves. McKenna nails the slightly feral atmosphere that descends on the city when the temperature rises, when workers flood out of offices into an evening filled with possibility. (4th Estate)
The Coin is one of 2024’s most fascinating debuts, at once chaotic and razor sharp. An immaculately turned out Palestinian woman with a trust fund and an enviable wardrobe arrives in New York to start a new life as a teacher, thanks to her shady Russian boyfriend’s connections. Soon, though, she is drawn into the orbit of a strange grifter she refers to only as Trenchcoat, who soon puts her to work on his latest money-making ruse: buying up Hermes Birkin bags and selling them on to the sort of people who could never hope of making their way onto the brand’s exclusive waiting list. Yasmin Zaher’s prose has an almost surgical precision to it, and her protagonist’s unravelling makes for compulsive reading; I can’t wait to read whatever Zaher writes next. (Footnote)
Coco Mellors’ follow up to her 2022 hit Cleopatra and Frankenstein is a beautifully observed family saga that unpicks weighty themes of addiction, estrangement and the unique bonds forged between siblings. High-flying lawyer Avery, former boxing champion Bonnie and party girl Lucky have barely spoken since the death of their beloved sister Nicky. But when they learn that their parents plan to sell their family home, they must reunite in New York to work through the flotsam of their childhood. Mellors’ writing on sisterhood will stay with you long after the last page – and it’s not hard to imagine this globe-trotting story getting the TV mini-series treatment. (4th Estate)
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
A celebrity art historian courting controversy. A working class student with a talent for ethical hacking. A disgraced retail mogul. An aspiring drill rapper. A long-distance truck driver tangled up with a people trafficking gang. All of these characters and many more come together in unexpected ways in Caledonian Road, Andrew O’Hagan’s sweeping state of the nation – or should that be the-nation’s-in-a-state? – novel. There’s a Dickensian quality to the way O’Hagan jumps from high society to the criminal underworld, and to his memorable ensemble cast. An ambitious, absorbing tale that manages to feel both enjoyably old fashioned and bracingly contemporary. (Faber)
Private Rites by Julia Armfield
In her second novel, Julia Armfield imagines a very soggy apocalypse. Climate change has left Britain almost entirely submerged. City dwellers travel by ferry to work, sailing past the skeletons of abandoned cable cars and other attempts at infrastructure. The rich live high above ground, and for years, celebrated architect Stephen Carmichael has designed their homes (think Grand Designs at the end of the world). When he dies, his three estranged daughters congregate in his house, a floating glass rectangle, to reckon with his fraught legacy. There are clear shades of King Lear at play in the siblings’ tense dynamic, and Armfield soaks every page with a real sense of disquiet: no one does “unsettling” quite like her. (4th Estate)
The House of Broken Bricks by Fiona Williams
This story of a family attempting to mend old wounds is gorgeously observed and full of tender, lyrical writing; Fiona Williams knits together multiple perspectives with a skill and grace that belies the fact that this is a debut. As the only black woman in a small Somerset village, Tessa feels out of place. Her marriage to Richard, who brought her here, is struggling, and their twins Max and Sonny are grappling with issues of race and identity in their own ways, too. One day, a tragic event makes their cottage fall quiet. The emotional revelations come like a series of gut punches, but there’s an undercurrent of hope here, too. Williams is one to watch. (Faber)
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Part science fiction, part thriller, part historical novel, part romantic comedy, The Ministry of Time is impossible to categorise (and impossible to put down). When a civil servant applies for a job in a secretive new department, she assumes it’ll be something to do with espionage or counter-terrorism. She couldn’t be more wrong. As part of a hush-hush time travel project, she’s assigned to look after Commander Graham Gore, an Arctic explorer who has been snatched from the nineteenth century and brought into the present day. When she ends up falling for his courtly Victorian charms, things quickly get complicated. It’s a little bit bonkers, but a total joy to race through. (Sceptre)
Over the course of 48 hours, eight teenage girls congregate in a shabby boxing gym to take part in a competition that might make them, break them, or just become a strange, almost dream-like footnote in their lives. In the Booker longlisted Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel takes us into the minds of each fighter as they face off, leaping forward and backwards in time with dazzling ease. Her writing has a propulsive, kinetic quality, deftly evoking the intense back and forth of each bout, and her characters leap from the page (like Rachel Doricko, an oddball fighter who attempts to disarm people with her strangeness). Whether you’re a boxing fan or not, Headshot is a winner. (Daunt Books)
Sally Rooney’s fourth novel is her most meditative, empathetic work to date, proving in no uncertain terms that she is far more than a chronicler of millennial ennui with an aversion to speech marks, as the naysayers would have us believe. Intermezzo is the story of Peter and Ivan, two brothers who are dealing with their father’s death in different ways, while also navigating a sibling relationship marred by resentments and feelings left unspoken. It’s also Rooney’s most formally experimental work yet, carried off with virtuoso skill. (Faber)
Real Americans by Rachel Khong
Mei is a talented geneticist who must make a huge sacrifice in order to escape Sixties China as Mao’s cultural revolution sweeps the nation. On the verge of the millennium, Lily is an unpaid intern whose life is turned upside down by a seemingly fairytale romance. And in the present day, Nick can’t work out why his mother won’t answer any of his questions about his estranged father. Rachel Khong weaves together these stories to craft a multi-generational family epic, one that asks big questions about whether we make our own destinies, but does so with a wonderfully light touch. (Hutchinson Heinemann)
You Are Here by David Nicholls
Michael is a forty-something geography teacher who is reeling from the implosion of his marriage. Marnie is a copy editor who spends most of her time working alone in her London flat. They’re drawn together when a mutual friend invites them both on a lengthy coast to coast walk across the north of England (complete with godawful British weather, weird hotels and awkward small talk). It’s the sort of unlikely love story that David Nicholls does so well: moving, funny, likely to make you shed a few tears along the way. (Sceptre)
This Is How You Remember It by Catherine Prasifka
The second novel from Irish author Catherine Prasifka marked a maturing of the internet novel. In startling second-person prose, This Is How You Remember It charts the moment a young woman’s life is changed (or “invaded” might be a more appropriate term) by a family computer with dial-up internet. By using the coming-of-age genre to show how a generation of young women had their very sense of self rearranged by the dark recesses of the online world, Prasifka has created something not just highly original but bittersweet and urgent. (Canongate)
Bored in her stultifying job as a content moderator for a news website, Hera starts engaging in a flirtatious back and forth with her older colleague, Arthur, on the company’s internal messaging system. Soon the promise of the green dot that indicates he is online is all that gets her through the day. When they start sleeping together, things get messy, fast, not least because Arthur is already married. The messy twenty-something woman is a well-worn trope at this point, but Madeleine Gray manages to inject new life into it, thanks to Hera’s sharp, self-aware narrative voice. (W&N)
Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson
It’s the follow-up that millennial women have been waiting for. Think Again sees beloved author Jacqueline Wilson pick up the stories of Ellie, Magda and Nadine, three best friends and the heroines of her Girls in Love book series for teenagers, first published in the Nineties and early Noughties . Now, the trio are in their forties; protagonist Ellie is a single mother dealing with rubbish jobs, dating woes and family pressures. It’s a warm, nostalgic hug of a book. (Bantam)
Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers
You could practically smell the casseroles cooling on the side in Small Pleasures, Clare Chambers’ 2020 word-of-mouth bestseller set in 1950s suburban south London. She’s followed it up with another page-turner that keeps all the best things from that novel; the suppressed desires, the smart-but-somehow-alone Anita Brookner-esque protagonists, the gripping mystery subplots. Shy Creatures is set in a psychiatric hospital in 1960s Croydon, where an art therapist is having an unsuitable affair with a married doctor; everything changes when she discovers a mute man in his thirties with a beard down to his waist. Inspired by the real-life mystery of the “Hidden Man”, this beguiling book might even be better than Chambers’ last smash hit. (W&N)
As a teenager, Sophia spends the summer in Italy with her contrarian novelist father, typing out the draft of his latest work as he dictates it. He encourages her to pursue an ill-advised holiday romance, while he spends his evenings picking up women. A decade later, Sophia has written a play based on that same holiday – and her father is about to attend a matinee showing, watching his mistakes play out on stage. Jo Hamya’s second novel is witheringly acerbic and constantly upends our expectations; she is just as comfortable skewering Sophia’s earnestness as she is critiquing her father’s wrongs. (W&N)
Described by the New York Times as “the first great perimenopause novel”, the latest work from filmmaker, artist and author Miranda July is the kind of book that you want to text all of your friends about the minute you finish reading it. It begins with the surreal, brilliant scenario of a female artist, whose life closely resembles July’s, using a recent, unexpected cash windfall to go on a road trip to contemplate her next project. Except… she drives 30 minutes from her house, husband and son, and finds herself checking into a local motel, where she instead spends the next two weeks – and all of her money – hiring an interior designer to make over the room exactly to her tastes. As well as a brilliant study of women at a turning point of their lives, rethinking desire and social roles, it’s a poignant look at the whys and hows of how we make art inspired by our own lives. (Canongate)
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
A thriller with a side line in philosophy, Creation Lake surprises at every turn. Sadie Smith (not her real name) is a mercenary spy for hire, dispatched around the world by shady employers to keep tabs on protest groups. Her latest mission is to infiltrate a commune of environmental activists in rural France (and to shake up their plans for protest); at the same time, she ends up slowly being drawn in by the musings of their enigmatic spiritual leader. Think John le Carré with a dash of Killing Eve and shades of Eleanor Catton’s brilliant Birnam Wood. No wonder it’s a Booker contender, too. (Jonathan Cape)
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
The year is 412 BC, and the ancient Sicilian city of Syracuse has just managed to shake off an Athenian invasion, and thousands of defeated soldiers are left imprisoned in the city’s quarries. Two shambolic childhood friends with a love of Greek literature decide to embark on a strange project: recruiting these prisoners to stage a performance of Medea, to celebrate the work of their beloved Euripedes. Oh, and the characters speak in a wonderfully sweary, and very modern, Irish vernacular – bizarre and brilliant. The author won this year’s Waterstones debut fiction prize for the book earlier this year. (Fig Tree)
My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes
A new Marian Keyes novel makes readers rejoice, and for good reason. My Favourite Mistake picks up on the story of Anna Walsh, who was last seen escaping to New York to become a high-flying beauty PR queen in order to avoid the grief at losing her partner. Now she’s suffering from burnout so bad that even the free make-up samples make her feel disillusioned, so she hotfoots it back to Ireland in order to spend some time “buffering”. It features all the hallmarks of Keyes at her best: the warmth, the laugh-out-loud humour, the compulsive readability, and the compassionate, feminist lens onto the interior lives of women and the pressures that society places upon them. (Michael Joseph)
I’m F*cking Amazing by Anoushka Warden
The cover has a pot of Vaseline on the front, there’s a swear word in the title and the word “fanny” appears 113 times. It’s obvious before you’ve even read the first page that debut novelist Anoushka Warden’s book is pretty unique, but that’s true of the writing as well as the packaging. Telling the story of a woman on a journey to unapologetically embrace her own desires – and confused that things don’t feel right in this department even after meeting her dream man – the book is a daring, intimate, funny at how difficult it is for women to enjoy their sexuality on their own terms, in a world where it’s so often defined by men. (Trapeze)
