Our Books of the Year for 2024
Our booksellers have each distilled their respective year’s reading and settled on those books that left the greatest impression. Here they are along with some brief words of adulation. We love these books & hope they find their way out into the world to meet many new readers – they deserve it.
Click on the cover images to read more and buy the books.
Tom Recommends
When poets write novels… we end up with these glorious experiences full of terrific crunchy language, strange oblique humour and sharply observed insights. This is a meditation on home, what it means, what it does to us, how we seek it and run from it. Pester uses two protagonists (one of whom is imagined by the other) to play out this drama that is small and suffocating and simultaneously as large as the aspirations and doubts of everyone in this funny little country. This was one of the first books I read this year, and it has remained with me since, interjecting itself at unexpected moments. I highly recommend it.
Perhaps the most singular reading experience of my year. The six astronauts in their spacecraft will orbit the earth 16 times in the 24 hours of this extraordinary novel. They will meticulously follow their scheduled daily routine, recording data, reporting on weather patterns, eating, sleeping and exercising when and how their programme details. In between the monotonous minutiae of these activities they gaze down at Earth below them, watch the sunrise chasing across continents, in a perspective that their human minds struggle to contain. It’s a dizzying movement from prosaic to sublime, from tightly contained to terrifyingly vast, and it makes for a strikingly embodied reading experience. I’ve read nothing like it.
I was lucky enough to interview Bruce Omar Yates here in the bookshop. This brilliant debut novel is a reworking, or maybe just a re-contextualising, of the western genre. It contains the kind of tension, steely resolve, gun fights, moral quandaries and desert abandonments that I think of when I think of my experience with the genre (mostly from old movies on Channel 4 on Sundays at my grandparents’ house). But Yates also adds a touch of Don Quixote eccentricity, giving us an Iraqi ‘cowboy’ obsessed with Americana, travelling the post-invasion desert landscape on his trusty camel. It’s such a precarious balance that he manages; the story is both a loving send up of the genre, and a deadly serious example of it. It’s the kind of sleight of hand that Percival Everett managed in The Trees to such devastating effect. Yates’ tone is very level, keeping an unruffled distance from the action as it unfolds in highly cinematic fashion. It’s a fascinating effect, producing laugh out loud moments and gently underplaying the more emotive scenes in a way that only makes them more poignant. It is a smart book, playing with our expectations in an enjoyable way, but it is also a book with heart. The characters here clearly matter to their author, which mean that as readers they matter to us too. It is a book that provokes questions, but does so without hitting us over the head with them. It avoids offering any easy answers, instead it gives us the example of one man’s idiosyncratic quest for identity in a world intolerant to nuance.
Enter Ghost is one of the most affecting books I’ve read this, or any other, year. It’s a novel that uses every one of its 319 pages to gradually steep the reader in its context and fully develop its characters. It is set between London, Palestine and Israel and is particularly brilliant on the subtle distinctions between Palestinians of different generations, with different sense of belonging, different experiences of resistance and diaspora. The novel’s narrator is an actress living in London who decides to spend a month in Haifa to be with her sister and re-establish her relationship to the country of her birth. While there she finds herself persuaded to join a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Hammad uses the play beautifully as a vehicle for exploring the nuanced distinctions between her characters, their relationships to the fraught geographies between Palestine and Israel, and the fragile chemistry that coalesces as opening night looms closer.
Percival Everett brings his wild genius imagination to the world of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, reframing our perspective as readers to centre the experience of James. This is an adventure story very much in the mode of Twain’s, but as we have come to expect from Everett, it is much more besides. It is a very funny book, but the humour can never be separated from horror – specifically the horrors of enslaved peoples at the hands of their white tormentors. Everett is deft in his use of the child Huck’s perspective to frame the battle in his consciousness between his inherited racism that has so far existed unquestioned, and his developing relationship with James as, perhaps, friend and protector. There is just no one quite like Percival Everett.
This is a crime novel with a light touch science-fiction set up. Set in an undisclosed time not far from now, in an unnamed city that could perhaps be Chicago or Los Angeles for instance, but is probably neither, in which a medical procedure has been developed which can put humans through a second puberty. This process rejuvenates the patient, adding significant years to their life, and also causing further growth. Those who have undergone the procedure grow physically larger and stronger; these ‘titans’ are now a distinctive elite within human society. Cal Sounder is a detective with a track record in delicate cases involving titans. He’s very much in the classic mould of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer – world weary and cynical but fundamentally decent. It’s an atmospheric noir, with some really nice inventive sci-fi touches that nevertheless manage to leave the basic structure of the detective novel intact. Excellent fun.
Helen Garner has been suitably adored in Australia since the late 70s, yet we have largely been blissfully unaware of her in this country. She writes the kind of gorgeous sentences that read as effortless, which inevitably means they are in fact the product of enormous effort – of careful working and re-working, until they have the kind of balance that allows them to simply fall from the page as it is turned. The book is about people, or rather it is about the connections between people; how they set and ossify with time, how they can suddenly become so shockingly weak, and how delicate new tendrils begin the process anew. Garner does not spend so much time in any one character’s subjectivity as to weight the story to their narrative, rather she flits between her cast, showing us the different facets of the strange geometry they are busily creating. W&N have published three of her book-length works so far this year, with further editions of collected writings due in 2025 and beyond. The Children’s Bach is an incredible introduction to a writer I know I will eventually be reading in her entirety.
This is just the most extraordinarily generous book. Each poem in this anthology is presented alongside an early draft, and then followed by an interview between the poet and the book’s editor, Rosanna McGlone. It allows us unprecedented insight into the various poets’ writing processes. Poetry can be inscrutable and forbidding for those of us less confident or steeped in its ways. This collection allows the veil to be pushed aside just a little, allowing us a glimpse of the inner workings of the poems. There is a real variety of work included, and I found some poets here that I absolutely adore. One of the brilliant things about this book though, is that even the poems I didn’t really enjoy were fascinating – working out what it was that worked less well for me as a reader was almost as rewarding as discovering the poems that I really responded to. This would be a brilliant gift for someone already addicted to poetry, and perhaps an even better gift for someone who has not yet found their way into this intoxicating world.
There are brilliant books I’ve read that I feel perhaps I could understand what it might be like to write. I think I can see what the author has locked onto and how they have gone about bringing it into the world. Then there are books like The Empusium, which I adore with the kind of bemused starry eyes of a mere mortal confronted with some kind of shimmering deity. I have not even the beginning of a notion as to how Tokarczuk conceived of a book so rich, so enveloped in both atmosphere and detail, so wildly circuitous and yet somehow always relentlessly tracking toward its conclusion. It is glorious and horrifying, funny and grotesque. My only advice is to submit yourself to the supreme authority of Olga and enjoy the ride.
Vanessa is a Bristol based writer & performer, and a regular customer of the shop. One of the many things I could say in favour of this brilliant book is that reading it felt very much like having a conversation with Vanesssa. She moves from high art to popular culture with breathtaking speed, and not in a way that is distractible or flighty, but in a way that is curious, generous and far more interested in nuance and surprise than judgement. She isn’t trying to prove anything, she doesn’t need to win or convince. She’s exploring a profoundly difficult subject with all of her considerable intelligence, empathy and imagination. She does this with us beside her rather than looking up at her on her authorly pedestal. We are invited to think, feel, remember and imagine our way through just as she is doing; she gives us space to agree or disagree, encouraging us simply to engage.
Libby Recommends
As a self proclaimed short story hater, you can well imagine it was a real blow to my sense of self that this collection made it to my top 10. Nevertheless, this set of 14 stories zooms in on some of the nichest relationships I’ve ever encountered in a book, with equally specific and searingly honest descriptions of human relationships. I appreciated that of all kinds. I was enthralled.
George Orr is a reluctant God; able to alter reality just by dreaming yet with no conscious control over what he dreams. He seeks out a sleep therapist which comes in the bombastic form of Dr Haber. In George, Haber sees and seizes a golden opportunity to restructure the world to his liking– starting with his office, and rapidly progressing to the heady heights of global peace and prosperity. The philosophical underpinnings of this book and its critique of top down structural change are interesting but, truth be told, it made it to my favourites for the sheer strangeness that escalates with every passing dream.
This was my first Becky Chambers novel and I devoured it in one sitting (that’s not a boast, it’s a novella). I am an existential individual and this book soothed my anxious soul which is impressive and only made more so by the fact this soothing effect has lasted. Set on a moon named Panga where robots, once created by humans, have gained consciousness and abandoned civilization in favour of living in the wilderness. It’s a hopeful and comforting tale about striking a balance between nature and technology.
Written and illustrated by the same person, which is always a wonderful sight to see, this is such a loveable picture book. Liddy falls asleep on the eve of a much anticipated trip to Dim Sum Palace with her parents. Her understandable excitement for delicious food weaves its way into her dreams where she enters the kitchens of Dim Sum Palace (transformed into a real palace). Just as she readies herself to inhale dumplings and baos and buns and all sorts of other delights, she slips and falls into the dough and is served up as a tiny bao bun. The illustrations in this book are gorgeous and sumptuous and just really good fun. Cannot recommend enough for ages 4 and up (way up!).
Right from the opening pages where observations of human behaviour are seamlessly woven in alongside eco-analysis as Giggs recalls the day she watched the body of a beached whale begin to decay, I knew I was in the hands of someone who deeply appreciates our planet. The whale becomes a symbol of the state of things and also a doorway to talk about a multitude of topics. I learnt so much, so effortlessly, whilst also being struck with some of the most lyrical and heart wrenching prose I have read this year.
This book was recommended to me by a friend so long ago that we are actually no longer friends. It is a shame she’s not a terribly good person because she has terrific reading taste. It is perhaps the book that made me, someone who does not usually gravitate towards non fiction, seek it out for the rest of the year. What the book does is deliver a new way of seeing. You get the sense that Dillon is living in a different world, or at least viewing it through a different lens. What is missed by the average eye is exposed with a level of detail and astuteness that can only come from the mind of someone in deep communion with the natural world.
Why We Sleep, in my opinion, should be required reading. I rather begrudgingly started this book and now it is the book I have recommended most often this year simply because of how transformative I know it will be. For me, it helped solidify my more abstract belief in the vital nature of a slower pace of living. It has helped me prioritise, in small but significant ways, my health. I desperately want to go back through it one day and write summary notes on each chapter just so I can force it upon people. Maybe one day, when I am diligently getting 8 hours of sleep every night as the book prescribes, I’ll actually have the energy to do so!
I would never have expected to enjoy a collection of diary entries so much so that they would make it to my top 10 books of the year. However, a glimpse into the still forming mind of Susan Sontag is a lucky thing to have. I enjoyed each petty, dark, destructive moment as much as I enjoyed her intellectual musings. If you read books to feel that pang of recognition that comes when someone speaks your experience back to you but in a new light, or to inspire you to live a more authentic existence- then I cannot recommend this enough. I started this because, truth be told, I felt a little lost and I ended it knowing that to be lost is to be searching and maybe that is a good thing.
The first thing that must be said is that this book is a memoir that documents Machado’s experience with a toxic and abusive ex girlfriend. It will not be to everyone’s tastes and her writing style makes it, I think necessarily, meaty. Machado uses all of the tools in her belt to make form mimic emotional experience- whether approaching a moment in her life with a lofty, almost dissociative tone, to more brutal and based moments where anger and hurt are palpable through the pages- I found myself needing to give this one time to percolate. Easy reading it is not. However, as a lover of the interior voice, I found this intensely inward looking book to be just the right amount of thought provoking.
In an occupied country a boy named Petya is shot. Immediately afterwards, all the other citizens become deaf. Deaf Republic explores the effects of public violence on private lives through poems that can be devoured as one narrative piece, or savoured as standalone moments. Unfortunately and importantly relevant, I have found myself turning to Ilya Kaminsky’s words often this year.
Joe Recommends
This ultra-atmospheric debut novel is set in an isolated, unnamed town with a brutal history. It’s a coming-of-age tale which recounts the looming clash between the town’s uncompromising authorities and a group of dissenting activists. The novel abounds with exhilarating prose and wonderfully inventive storytelling. Whether she is writing about inhumane acts, steadfast resistance, or a bus ride, the experience of reading Smith’s sentences is unforgettable. Fearless, powerful, gripping and extremely moving, I have never read anything quite like this before. Han Smith is doing her own thing and it is stunning.
A thunderous gem of a book, and of all the short story collections I have read this year it made the strongest impression. After relatively calm beginnings the stories detonate to reveal the monstrous, the violence, the vast mess, the darkness beneath the seemingly everyday surfaces of their settings and characters. They are populated by those seeking escape, discarded lovers, mourning children, those looking for revenge. There is, at times, something of the biblical, the fable to them and I really hope much more of Bastarós’ work is translated into English following this very striking first offering.
Set in 19th Century Montana, Kevin Barry’s brilliant fourth novel chronicles the wild affair between occasional poet and recreational narcotic fan, Tom Rourke, and mail order bride of the town’s mine owner, Polly Gillespie. Barry is such a magician; the book overflows with memorable moments and his riotous humour is thick on the ground. How this didn’t appear on the Booker Prize longlist is, perhaps, 2024’s greatest mystery.
Dusapin’s wonderfully understated style is on full display in this, her third novel to be translated into English. Set in the circus of the title, it follows the attempt by three performers to execute the near-impossible Russian Bar act. It’s the strength of Dusapin’s spare and lean writing, and the gravity placed on what is unsaid, that makes this a genuinely moving paean to the perseverance and resilience of human endeavour.
A comprehensive examination of the very real dystopian possibilities that may emerge from the advance of AI technologies. It is certainly an unnerving read but also a very courageous alarm call from someone at the frontline of the industry. It might make you want to run for the hills but Suleyman’s consistent demand for reasonable containment of advances and acknowledgement of the benefits AI may bring is very hard to ignore. Essential reading.
Panoramic in scale and time, Paul Yoon’s prizewinning book is a wonderful example of the range and possibilities short story collections so often achieve. What I loved about these stories is how Yoon’s pinpoint elegance and controlled beauty in chronicling the Korean diasporic experience brilliantly elevate the significance of what he is recounting. This is a scintillating encounter with a sublime storyteller.
Irenosen Okojie’s second novel is a glorious sweeping epic, awe-inspiring in its ambition. It oscillates between 17th century Cabo Verde and modern day London as the spirit of shaman and healer, Zulmira, finds a home in botanist, Therese; the latter discovering she too has healing powers. Okojie’s canvas is rich and invokes all the senses simultaneously, and as with all her work, her imaginative flair is nothing short of astounding.
Jonathan Coe is a master at exposing the worst aspects and absurdities of the British establishment and that takes centre stage here. His latest novel is also structurally so satisfying: to a large extent a thriller, switching between 1980s Cambridge University and the carnage of the Truss premiership in 2022 with multiple twists and revelations that make it a completely immersive and wholly engaging read. There’s plenty of his scything humour, too, in what fascinatingly becomes a meditation on truth, storytelling and the written record.
Influenced by jazz great, Alice Coltrane, and several others, Nisha Ramayya’s poetry collection struts its improvisational heart with a wonderful abandon or, to use a phrase in the collection, “cochlea lawlessness.” Sounds populate the poems as Ramayya encourages us all to listen to the world around us, each other, humanity’s history and find connection. An energy-filled, aural jewel that demands to be heard aloud.
Tremor is a novel with a multifaceted interior, incorporating elements of memoir, essay, history, philosophy, cultural commentary and more. Cole’s protagonist, Tunde, experiencing turbulence in his long-standing relationship, reflects on past events from his life in Nigeria and the US, with colonialism’s impact and legacy underscoring much of the narrative. I savoured every word of this marvel, shifting into a slower reading gear so as not to miss a single syllable.
Helen Recommends
I know a book about the migratory patterns of seabirds might not sound riveting to some, but Nicolson manages to impart this information in a way that is astoundingly lyrical and poetic. There’s something incredibly soothing about this book, and it has forever changed the way I experience seagulls.
A heartbreaking novel about a stalled life, and an exploration of guilt and grief. Micheál, the protagonist, leads a life of ‘quiet desperation’, having stymied himself in a lonely existence of assumed responsibility. He spends his solitary days lost in reveries of thwarted chances, his only solace his connection to nature, his dog, and fulfilling a familial ‘duty’ that he once hoped to escape. The poetry of the writing lifts this book from hopelessness, whilst raising questions about the choices we make, and the ways in which we trap ourselves.
Set against the backdrop of the Troubles, this novel explores a relationship marred by difference- in age, gender, social class, marital status, and religion- and the complexities of love and betrayal. The personal is offered as a lens to look at the broader political landscape of the time.
Eco-catastrophe meets dystopian hyper-capitalism in this satire of the near-future. There’s something uncomfortable beneath the humour in this one, a truth in which we’re all complicit, but it manages to step just sideways of being bleak, and lands on cartoonish. 12 Monkeys meets road-trip novel.
This novel explores the lives and relationship between two best friends, as they both grapple with the question of whether to embark on the journey of motherhood. At once comic and hauntingly tragic, Nettel’s raw, evocative prose deals with one of life’s biggest questions, and the intricacies of our own agency- or illusion of agency- within that choice.
A beautifully moving exploration of motherhood, displacement, loss, and language. Private tragedies exist concurrently in the same family, overlapping, intertwining together even as each member falls apart. It’s a story about how grief can blind us to what is right in front of us. As the book progresses, and the narrative lens shifts, even the form the story takes begins to fragment.
A short, punchy volume. Whitney utilises lush, evocative prose to interrogate ideas of womanhood, motherhood, gender, childhood, identity, and memory… You’re pulled straight into the story, as three generations of a family are held up to scrutiny, and used as a lens to dissect the writer’s own trans identity.
What would It be like to wake up one day struggling to hear? This book follows a year in which life gets quieter and quieter, as an artist in her late 20’s journeys through increasing deafness. A study of loneliness, and an exploration of the fallibility of bodies, there are surprising moments of humour, and shifting perspectives on loss and solitude, as detachment from one form of connection illuminates others.
Disjointed, confusing, with a narrative shift as lilting and unpredictable as the sea we find our novel opening at, this mind bending tale within a tale is about a party, but it’s also about the past. It’s about identity, in all the forms that comes in – class, gender, family, place, and the addictions and distractions we use to amplify or obscure all that.
This is a book about talking animals, but it isn’t fluffy, and our protagonist certainly isn’t Dr. Doolittle. Another dystopian roadtrip novel about humanity’s treatment of animals and ecological collapse, the thing I liked most about this book was how unlikeable the main character is! It’s rare that you get a female portrayal of the hard-drinking, cynical, middle aged curmudgeon, and even such a small and seemingly obvious twist in an overdone trope brings new life to proceedings.