We've found the best books of 2024 to curl up with

The follow-up to Brodesser-Akner’s whip-smart debut, Fleishman is in Trouble, is a bigger novel in every sense. Where her debut was largely focused on the marriage and milieux of the couple in question, Long Island… sprawls – across generations, decades, geography and the corrupting influence of wealth on both those who have it and those who do not. It opens at breakneck speed in 1980 with the kidnap of millionaire Carl Fletcher from outside his home, and barely lets up from there. When Carl is returned, the family do their best to put the incident behind them. But that is not, as we all know, the way trauma works and Brodesser-Akner follows each member of the family, with a particular focus on Carl’s children – sex- and drug-addicted Hollywood screenwriter Beamer, anxiety-riddled lawyer Nathan, and anti-capitalist Jenny – as they wrestle with its fallout.

In the six years since Barker published the first instalment of her reinterpretation of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad, told from the perspective of the women caught up in the 10-year battle for Troy, feminist ‘retellings’ of Greek legends have become a publishing phenomenon. But as this – the final part of her trilogy – reveals, no one does it quite like she does. The fates of Cassandra and Clytemnestra take centre stage here as warrior king Agamemnon returns to the island from which he sacrificed his daughter in exchange for fair winds to sail his men into battle a decade earlier. Both women have good reason to want to see him dead and Agamemnon’s end, when it comes, is as viscerally satisfying as it is inevitable. A chilling and triumphant end to the trilogy.

Grabowski’s quietly commanding debut is a novel of interlinked stories divided between the ‘Before’ and ‘After’ of the sudden death of a teenage girl in a small coastal US town. Each chapter is narrated by a different woman who is more or less directly related to the tragedy – the disillusioned student guidance teacher who discovers a secret relationship between a colleague and a student; the grieving mother whose guilt continues to tear at her; the teenager who fled the scene, and so on. Together, they build up a picture of a town riven not only by grief, but the legacy of economic failure in contemporary USA. Complex and considered, it refuses to deal in easy answers.

The You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty author’s new release is not going to be for everyone: subtle it is not. But assuming you do have the stomach for the sex, lies and video that proliferate throughout, let’s just say it is quite the ride. Set over the course of a weekend in the fictional city of New Lagos, it opens on a heartbroken Aima preparing to leave Nigeria once and for all having broken up with her boyfriend Kalu for refusing to put a ring on it. She gets as far as the airport before changing her mind. The odyssey of drugs and sexual experimentation that follows is matched by the antics of her ex, who throws himself into a sex party in an attempt to forget his heartache and ends up with a price on his head. Add two prostitutes back in the city for the weekend, a corrupt pastor and a whole lotta drama and it all adds up to a tale that is so wilfully decadent it quickly veers into the highest of high camp.

Watson’s debut Little Scratch – a freewheeling stream of consciousness across a day in the life of a woman struggling to deal with a recent sexual assault – was a literary sensation when it was published in 2020. This follow-up is on similar ground, insofar as it is another intensely close study of its narrator’s response to a life-defining incident – in this case, the death of her estranged brother in a car crash. Plotted over the course of a weekend, it dives deep into their personal history and that of their family, inviting questions about decisions made and perception and whether the experiences we’ve always seen as defining are that way by objective reality or choice.

This sprawling, multi-generational saga captures the brittleness of generational wealth and the divide between the haves and have-nots of a community in the unforgiving Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York. It opens in 1975, on the morning Barbara Van Laar – wayward teenage daughter of the family who own much of the surrounding land – is reported missing from summer camp. Her disappearance echoes that of her brother, Bear, several years before and coincides with the prison escape of the serial killer widely believed to have been responsible for that incident. As the news spreads and the search begins, the dark secrets at the heart of the Van Laar family and residents of the nearby town begin to be revealed. Superbly plotted, it’s a great poolside read.

Vita has been laid up in bed for months with a mystery illness that continues to escape diagnosis. She hasn’t spoken to her sister in weeks and partner, Max – a busy surgeon – has to leave her for long stretches on her own, with only her goldfish Whitney Houston and the ghost of a centuries-dead Italian nobleman for company. When a leak from upstairs threatens to turn into a flood, Vita is forced to journey upstairs to the neighbouring flat, which sets her on the path to a tender, tentative friendship with recently bereaved neighbour Mrs Rothwell and her lodger, Jesse. As stories and intimacies pass between them, Vita gradually reconnects to long-buried traumas that have brought her here. A sensitive, astute, gently funny study of the powerful intersection between body and mind.

Baltasar’s intriguing follow-up to her International Booker-shortlisted Boulder comes in at just a little over 100 pages, in which not a sentence is wasted. We meet our unnamed narrator on the day she has determined she will become pregnant. A handful of pages later that attempt has failed, her growing disquiet has seen her leave her university research job, dabble unsuccessfully in a handful of others and determine the only way forward is to ‘flee’ from her life. So begins a quest to live off-grid in the mountains, reconnect with nature, herself and a fair number of random strangers – and all the while the search for meaning goes on.

Young mother Kit has been struggling with parenthood, work, the truth – all of which is related to her ongoing grief from her sister Julie’s recent death. A weekend away with her gay best friend is supposed to help, but when Kit returns home closer to unravelling than ever, it’s clear something has to change. This sharp, funny, howl-of-pain of a novel has much to say about sisterhood, motherhood, friendship and love.

If you’re after a little cosy crime to keep you company on your sun lounger this summer, then Cunningham’s debut – a funny, off-beat murder mystery – is the one to pack. Risk-averse life insurance actuary Una is horrified to learn that a sudden spike in deaths in the seaside town of Eastbourne (where, by chance, her widowed mother lives) has thrown her numbers out and sets out to find out why. Once there, she uncovers to a link to a local lottery syndicate, led by her mother’s new fiancé, Ken. Can she uncover the truth about the murders before the next one – which according to her calculations is scheduled for Ken and her mother’s wedding day – takes place?

Lusk’s second novel tells the real-life story of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (who, incidentally, inspired Aunt Harriet in his debut The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley), whose many achievements include introducing an early form of inoculation for smallpox to Britain in the early 18th century. Mary was, as the title suggests, neither shy, nor retiring by nature, making as many enemies as she did friends. Lusk captures her complexity with wit and compassion in a globe-trotting plot that’s sure to be catnip to historical fiction fans.

Stewart’s culinary whodunnit blends Boiling Point with The Bear and serves it up with a sprinkle of surrealism and more than a soupcon of black humour on the side. Waitress Marley is in the kitchen of London restaurant of the moment, Midgard, waiting for her shift to begin when she realises something’s not quite right; she appears to be trapped between the refrigerators and unable to move or call for help. The truth about her circumstances gradually unfolds over the course of what is revealed up top to be the final night of the service. Told in extended chapters focused around each of the restaurant’s seven tables, A little rich in places perhaps, but overall, it’s a fun and pacey summer read.

Affecting coming-of-age tale of thwarted first love, written as a series of journal entries by narrator Daniel to his college roommate, best friend and sometime lover, Sam, who we learn in the opening pages has just died. Where the novel really comes into its own is in the parallel story of Daniel’s deepening understanding of his family history on a summer visit to his Mexican homeland where he learns about his namesake and over the course of several weeks becomes more confident in exploring and understanding his own sexuality.

High school teacher Dolores is aware that all is not entirely well in her marriage, but it’s only when she discovers a programmable AI sex doll (the Zoey of the title) hidden in the garage that she realises just how bad things have become. Left alone in the marital home, she begins to chat with Zoey who serves as a sounding board to her insecurities and fears. What could have been played for easy laughs or simple shock-factor becomes a fascinating dig into Dolores’s past as she begins to grapple with her emotional frailties and confront long-buried traumas. A funny, insightful tale of love and complicated families.

Set in a near-future city teetering on the brink as rising waters threaten all-out climate collapse, Armfield’s follow-up to Our Wives Under The Sea follows three queer sisters – Irene and Iris and half-sister Agnes – as they come together in the wake of their father’s death. The set-up is a clear and knowing riff on King Lear, and like Shakespeare’s great tragedy, this is ultimately a tangled emotional tale of inheritance and legacy. But what, exactly, is being inherited and whose legacy is it? With each sister narrating their own story, we’re given a powerful insight into the traumas and events that have shaped all three of them. But it is the fourth narrator – the drowning City itself – that underscores the novel’s wider themes and the eerie sense of creeping dread that, as the waters rise, builds to its catastrophic denouement.

Three novels in and husband-and-wife writing partnership Ellery Lloyd are carving out a clever niche for themselves: ingenious, well-written plots with thought-provoking, zeitgeisty themes (‘lost’ women in art history serving as a key one here) that never come at the expense of pacing or plot. This one – an art-murder mystery set over three timelines that span roughly a century – is another winner from the pair, a darkly glamorous and twisty caper that is their most ambitious and compelling to date.

In this, July’s second novel, her unnamed protagonist – a semi-famous, middle-aged, multidisciplinary artist who may or may not resemble the writer herself – leaves her husband and child in their LA home and sets out on a cross-country road-trip to New York. She gets as far as a neighbouring suburb, where she checks into a motel, remodels the room, falls hard for a young, married, wannabe dancer and ends up staying for the full three weeks of her vacation. The stay is a catalyst for the entire upending of life as she and her husband know it as she explores her sexuality, analyses perimenopausal lust (of which – warning – there is a lot), and generally changes her life in any and every way she can. Vivid, frank, and for all its endless naval-gazing, very, very funny – this is menopause, baby, but not as you know it.

Darraj’s debut – told in a series of interlinked stories – explores the lives and ties of a diverse community of Palestinian Americans with humour and compassion. A teenage girl’s discomfort over the racial implications of her high school production of Aladdin is handled with wit and nuance, while the slow-drip horror of a husband and father’s possible implication in an incident that sets the internet alight is unveiled with a restraint that makes its revelation all the more chilling. Elsewhere, intergenerational differences and the clash of the old world (Palestine) and new (America) are explored from both sides with keen-eyed humanity and understanding. But it’s the closing story, in which police officer Marcus honours his dead father’s wish to have his body returned to Palestine for burial, that ties the novel’s many themes and threads together in an extraordinarily moving tale made all the more powerful by our knowledge of all that’s come before.

Mellors’ bestselling debut Cleopatra and Frankenstein explored the messy, complicated romance of the bohemian couple at its centre. For her follow-up, the author turns her attention to the messy complicated lives of three sisters – Avery, Bonnie and Lucky Blue – who are drawn together in the wake of their fourth sister’s accidental death by overdose. In both, addiction and self-destructive behaviours are rife. Blue Sisters, however, uses familial patterns and rivalries to dig deeper into Mellors’ exploration of dependency of all kinds.

There are undeniable shades of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Women, Other in this debut, which follows the lives of the extended family and friends of four sisters across several decades in and around Washington DC across 13 interlinked stories. Sanders has fun playing with her characters as alignments and allegiances shift and change with the perspectives, points of view and timeframes of each story’s narrator.

Thirtysomething translator Nat moves to an oppressively small rural town where she rents a rundown property and adopts a skittish, badly trained dog. Struggling to fit in and afraid to deal with the threat of her bullying landlord, she accepts the terms of an unusual offer that shifts her standing within the community and her own understanding of herself. Nat’s inability to ‘translate’ her own actions and behaviours drives this intriguingly ambiguous tale of autonomy and power.

It’s summer in the South of France and sisters Thea and Violet are spending the week in their father’s holiday home with half-brothers Luke and Conner, before their father – a busy international lawyer – flies in from China to join them. It’s the first time the four of them have spent any real time together and the unease in their dynamics as they struggle to get to know each other is palpable – especially between Thea and Conner, with their undercurrent of forbidden attraction. That, however, is soon to be the least of their worries. From the unidentifiable sound only Conner can hear to a plane that appears to drop from the sky, Andrew spins an elegantly unsettling web from the start. If there are inevitable echoes of Rumaan Alam’s masterful Leave The World Behind in its set-up, as it becomes increasingly clear that something very strange indeed is going on, Andrew’s dystopian tale takes on a vivid, haunting life of its own.

The lives of 10 people living in and around Sheffield and Manchester cross and recross through a series of sexual encounters that range from joyous to transactional to downright troubling over the course of one long, hot summer. Recently separated Will kicks things off with a Tinder date with Manda, who is not impressed to learn he’s bisexual after they’ve had sex – an exchange that sets the scene for the various misunderstandings and misalignments that occur as each character takes charge of their story. Williams corrals a diverse cast – an artist, a sex worker, a drag queen and a welder among them – to create a fun, big-hearted and at times thought-provoking read about the search for connection in an all-too-busy, atomised world.

‘If it weren’t for what happened later, everyone would have forgotten that night entirely,’ narrates mid-1980s emerging art star Anita de Monte of the night of her death (an incident that mirrors a notorious real-life event in the same year). The irony being that forgotten is exactly what Anita is by the time Puerto Rican-American art history student Raquel Toro stumbles on her story nearly 15 years later as part of her research into world-famous minimalist artist, Jack Martin – Anita’s husband – whose alleged involvement in his wife’s death has been carefully covered up. Set across dual timelines in which both so much and so little has changed, this is a smart, funny – and furious – shout out to agency, ownership and the female creative spirit in the face of art world hierarchies, hypocrisies and -isms.

This novel in three parts opens with what at first appears to be a gentle domestic scene, as father of twins Ayush announces his plan to swap out his children’s usual cosy bedtime story with a ‘surprise’ video. The video in question, however, quickly subverts what’s happening into something starker, darker and considerably more challenging, and serves as an arresting introduction into the subtly interlinked narratives that follow. Mukherjee isn’t setting out to tell us what to think, he’s telling us to think – about the lives we live and the impacts of the decisions we can all so easily and blithely make. A beautifully written and provocatively compelling tale of lives at the crossroads.

Beautifully observed debut set on an island off the Welsh coast in the late 1930s, where the arrival of a beached whale – shortly followed by two English strangers there to record its residents’ traditional ways before they’re lost forever – augurs ill to locals, not least because rumours of another looming war are beginning to swirl. To 18-year-old Manon, however, the strangers offer a promise of potential escape from the life she feels trapped within on the island. But these are dark and suspicious times, and things – including Manon’s new friends – are not entirely as they seem. A shimmering coming-of-age story.

Punk poetess and musician, Kyoko, is determined to avenge the death of her mother, Emi, by killing the man she holds responsible. The man in question – and sexual obsessive of the title, for his history of sleeping almost exclusively with Asian women – is middle-aged violinist Daniel. But as Kyoko’s foiled murder attempt turns into an increasingly hapless kidnapping, the truths and lies behind what really happened between Daniel and Emi – and, crucially, Alma, the beautiful, talented rising-star violinist Daniel was in a relationship with at the time – reveal more to all of their stories than first exposed. Prize-winning Korean American author Min’s posthumous novel is provocative, prescient and funny – it’s also a heartfelt tale of love.

With One Day bouncing back into the book charts on the back of the success of the current Netflix series, Nicholls’ latest novel reads rather pleasingly like a coda to its famous older sibling, albeit set over 10 days rather than two decades. It follows a pair of mismatched-on-paper (naturally) late-thirtysomethings – Marnie, a freelance copy editor, and recently separated geography teacher Michael, both of whom are desperately lonely – on an epic hike from one side of England to another with all the will-they-won’t-they tension Nicholls deploys so well. Does the course of love run smooth? Of course not – what would be the fun in that?

A notable novelist attends his playwright daughter Sophia’s first West End production with no knowledge that the story that’s about to unfold on stage is a deeply unflattering portrait of his behaviour on a holiday they shared in Italy a decade earlier. What follows is an astute, funny-sad analysis of power, perception and memory that questions the value of art and the responsibilities – and egos – of those who make it. Who, we’re left asking at its end, is the hypocrite now?

When artist and true-crime podcast obsessive Esther meets the wealthy, glamorous Naomi at an art dinner in New York, she baulks at Naomi’s suggestion that she takes on a glorified scrapbooking assignment she has planned as part of the celebrations for her husband’s forthcoming 60th birthday. Just days later, however, Esther’s world has fallen apart – her fiancé Jessica has left her and the only chance she has of holding onto the physical trappings of the life they’d built together means that scrapbooking for entitled billionaires will have to be done. Things get really interesting when Naomi dies mysteriously midway through the project. Henkel sets up the nod to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl early on and as Esther’s obsession about what could have happened deepens, she gleefully riffs on its themes and tropes, sending Esther down a series of increasingly outlandish rabbit holes. Bonkers. In a good way.

This ambitious, three generation-spanning saga opens on the cusp of Y2K with Lily Chen – the daughter of Chinese refugees – feeling adrift. Recently graduated, she works as unpaid intern for an online magazine. It is not, she ruefully notes, the life her scientist parents imagined for her when they fled Mao’s cultural revolution in search of a better future. Meeting the handsome Matthew – a rich financier with an even richer family – changes all that and a fairy tale marriage follows. So why, when we meet Lily again several years later is she living alone with their son Nick on an isolated island estranged from Matthew and his family as well as her own? When Nick goes in search of his father, the truth he eventually uncovers is far wilder than any he might have imagined.

Ever fancied running away to the circus? Then step right up. This tale of three Russian bar performers and the costume designer tasked with kitting them out for the competition of their lives takes you backstage and centre ring. Nathalie is between art college and her first job at a theatre company back in Belgium. Anna, the group’s star, has turned to circus after a failed sports career and is a relatively recent addition to Anton and Nino’s team, both of whom, we learn, are still reeling in their own ways from the near-fatal accident suffered by their previous flyer. They are all, in other words, in a period of life-changing transition. As the act comes together, trust between all parties gradually forms, and with it the ways in which each character – and Nathalie in particular – is ensnared by their pasts is revealed. Rich, immersive, psychologically astute – it’s a star performance all round.

This pacey, character-driven spin on US campus life forgoes the lecture hall to focus on a college dorm rooms and the myriad power struggles – financial, sexual, social – within. Set in a Southern university, it features the antics of five young women who share a dorm (three of whom for which money is no object), Millie, the live-in resident assistant overseeing them, and dreams of a home of her own, and visiting professor Agatha, who’s new to town, licking her wounds from an ill-fated romance and looking for her next writing project. If not quite as sharp as her exquisitely sharp debut, Such A Fun Age, its rat-a-tat pace and Reid’s keen ear for dialogue ensures a swallow-in-one-sitting read.

The queer Gen Z siblings of the title share a flat in central Auckland and a history of thwarted romance. Both are warm, witty, wry eccentrics who wear their hearts very firmly on their sleeves. Hapless TV host Valdin is in love with his ex – who now lives in South America – while English tutor Greta has fallen hard for a colleague who exploits that crush to her advantage. So yes, we have all the trappings of a very modern romcom, but it’s the pair’s relationships with and places within their complex, sprawling, loving Russian-Māori-Catalonian family that is the beating heart of their story, and this novel is all the richer for that. A huge hit when it was published in New Zealand, fingers crossed its considerable charms chime with an international audience – such success very much deserves repeating.

When Teddy’s father drives off a bridge on the anniversary of her sister’s disappearance 10 years previously, it reopens the decade-long wounds that first split her family apart. Determined to discover the truth behind both events, she turns sleuth, falling down the metaphorical rabbit hole of the title – both online, via various Reddit threads, and by bad decisions and becoming enmeshed in a host of dubious relationships in real life. While very much a thriller-style hunt for what happened, Brody’s debut is more accurately a sensitive, psychological investigation into the long-term, traumatic impact of lingering, unresolved grief.

Englishwoman in New York, Dylan, walks out of her successful advertising job, sublets her apartment and takes on a housesit for a stranger with vague plans to become a writer. From that beginning, she slowly but surely continues to dismantle her life, cheating on her long-distance boyfriend with married downstairs neighbour Gabe, blowing up friendships, and more. The story is set in 2015 – that now pivotal period, as Pountney notes, between Donald Trump’s decision not to renew his reality TV contract on The Apprentice and the announcement of his plan to run for office, and, back in Dylan’s UK homeland, when the proposal for what will become Brexit is on its second reading. Dylan is similarly ‘in between’. Question is, which way will she fall?

Lewis’s debut is being billed as one for fans of The Secret History and White Lotus. Please cast such comparisons from your head – if anything this thoughtful, intelligent and beautifully written exploration of fractured, dislocated souls shares more in common with Emma Cline’s 2023 release The Guest, insofar as it features an emotionally adrift, down-on-her-luck woman who takes up with a band of rich, young teenagers while trying to find her metaphorical way home. Said woman is thirtysomething Elen. Drinking heavily and now evicted from her home shortly after her husband left her, she’s adopted by four British teenagers who travel the globe on an endless skiing adventure dressed up as a hunt for utopia. Lewis is definitely a new talent to watch.

Hill’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut, The Nix, is another sprawling novel of big ideas. We first meet Jack and Elizabeth as university students in bohemian 1990s Chicago as they secretly watch one another through the windows of their respective living quarters. When their paths finally cross, the pair fall head-over-heels hard. Fast-forward 20 years and they are now as bougie and conventional as their old neighbourhood: married with a child, fashionably disillusioned, and – in the case of Elizabeth – dreaming of separate bedrooms in the fancy new apartment they’ve stretched themselves to the limit to buy. What, Hill is asking, has brought them here? More importantly, is ‘here’ where they’re now destined to stay? An extended meditation on cause and effect, the stories we tell ourselves, and the possibilities or otherwise of creating a placebo effect on our psyches of the kind Elizabeth pedals in the novel’s title. At over 600 pages it’s almost off-puttingly long, but immensely rewarding once you dive in.

This hugely imaginative debut by TS Elliott-prizewinning poet Taylor pulls no punches. It opens in a Hackney tattoo parlour in 2233, where Jones has come to ‘stitch’ the stories told in the tattoos that cover her body together. These are revealed Arabian Nights-style in a series of vignettes after we learn that Jones has an unwitting, inherited ability to leave her earthly body and travel through time to inhabit the minds and bodies of a cast of (at times horribly) compelling characters – a child miner in a Northern coal town, vigilante sex workers and a brutally murderous incel among them. What follows is a fierce, tender – at times highly uncomfortable – study of power, agency and resilience.

While the rest of us spent those early days of lockdown obsessing over sourdough starters, Joe Wicks and yoga with Adriene, Margaret Atwood and chums were busy putting together this intriguing collaborative project. In covers a period of – you guessed it – fourteen days in New York, as the residents of a Manhattan apartment building gather each evening on the rooftop and share stories, community and hope during that first wave of the pandemic. The trick is, each character has been written by an unnamed writer. And we’re talking serious talent: Dave Eggers, Emma Donoghue, Celeste Ng, Angie Cruz – even Mr Blockbuster himself, John Grisham, is in there. Edited by Atwood and Douglas Preston, it makes for a fun, compelling game of literary who’s who.