There’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer’s debut fiction feature next month.
In January, we kick things off with My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar, a powerful story of friendship and loss. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded by government agents during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London. The pair find themselves torn between the comforts of their life in the UK and the horrors of a civil war at home. Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (Virago) is the first great lockdown novel (Nunez, of course, has pandemic form – Salvation City was about a flu epidemic). Beginning in the spring of 2020, The Vulnerables tells the story of an unlikely couple thrown together by the confines of Covid: an older writer and a young college dropout, united by their shared responsibility for a cantankerous parrot called Eureka.
