We’re back with the first of this year’s offering of brilliant new reads that are sure to keep the pages turning for you throughout 2024. In the spirit of that newness, we’ve given ourselves a little refresh, with a more detailed, bimonthly offering of fully reviewed must-reads and recommendations, supported by a flurry of additional favoured titles in brief.
Where to start? This months’ top-notch selection takes us from dystopian futures to new romance, spans centuries past and future, and sees magical realism sit happily alongside the gritty realities of a teenage girls’ boxing tournament.
Let’s just say it’s a knock-out.
The best new books of 2024
Bullwinkel’s debut novel is set over two days of a teenage girls’ championship boxing tournament in Reno, Nevada, and puts you right there in the ring with the eight fighters slugging it out. Told as a series of linked stories from the point of view of each pair of boxers as the fight is underway, it gets into their minds, backstories and motivations, without ever losing the thrill of the action. Right at the top, for example, we learn that underdog and part-time lifeguard Andi Taylor is reeling from a boy dying on her watch at the pool. The wages she used to pay her fee to fight in this tournament, she notes, now ‘feels like blood money’. The novel’s prose as taut as the novel’s structure, with knock-out literary punches throughout. It may be early to call it, but this has to be one of the most dazzling debuts of the year.
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.
Cuban-born, Miami-based Ismael (‘Call me Izzy’) is making a living working as an unofficial Pitbull lookalike when he receives a cease-and-desist letter from the rapper’s legal team. His solution? To model his life on the star of another infamous Miamian – drug lord Tony Montana, aka Scarface, in the Al Pacino movie of the same name. This brings him to the attention of Lolita, a captive orca stolen from her pod decades before and now stuck in a tiny tank at Miami Seaquarium, going slowly mad with loneliness. Lolita sees something in Izzy – who lost his own mother during their perilous illegal crossing from Cuba to Miami when he was a child – and forms a psychic connection with him that serves as the second motor of what you may have already guessed is no straightforward plot. In lesser hands, this – not to mention the host of meta-narratives and divergences that Crucet throws on top – could have resulted in one big unholy mess. Crucet, however, is in charge at every step. A pacey, knowing, smartly insightful read that is laugh-out funny and desperately sad.
A woman returns to her home town, not to see her parents (she visits their graves ‘for the first time in 35 years’ on her way there), but to seek refuge in an austere monastery run by an order of nuns. She is disillusioned, it’s implied, by her work and her marriage, and while incredulous at the piety of the nuns and their routines (she doesn’t pray or believe in God herself), she finds a solace in the quiet that she returns to, eventually moving in with the order fulltime. That peace is disrupted, however, when a near-biblical plague of mice coincides with the return of the human remains of one of the order’s sisters from abroad. Overseeing their return is a ‘celebrity nun’ and activist from the town who our narrator went to school with, forcing her to reckon with unfaced truths from their entangled pasts as well as her own. Masterfully understated and all the more powerful for it.
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.
It’s 1843 and John Ferguson is a minister without a ministry. Sorely in need of the money he hopes will re-establish his congregation, he agrees to travel to a remote Scottish island to deliver the news that its remaining inhabitant, Ivor, must leave the home that has served his family for generations after its landowner decides to populate it with sheep (a practice in line with those of Scotland’s historic Highland clearances). When John suffers an accident, Ivor nurses him back to health, and the pair gradually build an understanding and connection over the days and weeks that follow. Back on the mainland, however, John’s wife Mary grows restless for her husband’s return and sets off on the long journey to bring him home. A profoundly intimate tale of loneliness, longing and the lengths you will go to for love.
‘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.
If it takes a bold writer to take on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it takes a brilliant writer to do it with the style, vigour and wit Everett brings to the story. James being, of course, Jim – the Black slave who runs away after learning he may be sold ‘down the river’ and ends up escaping on a raft with Huck. This, however, is Jim’s story first and foremost, not Huck’s, and Everett has a lot of fun playing with the tropes and expectations of the original (in this version, the language and speech patterns Jim and other Black slaves employ – so problematic to many contemporary readers – is a put-on for ‘white folks’ who ‘expect us to sound a certain way’). Following his Booker shortlist for The Trees in 2022 and current success of American Fiction, the Oscar-winning script for which was based on his 2001 novel, Erasure, Everett is on a much-deserved roll. James adds to that momentum brilliantly.
If you haven’t read Irish writer Mary Costello before, now’s the time – this is a writer so fully in control of her craft, she makes it look easy. Across its nine short stories entire histories are excavated and explored as family feuds, bitter marriages, lost dreams and more, quietly and desperately come to a head in settings as mundane as a car journey or mid-range hotel room. Costello’s prose remains coolly distant throughout, creating a dissonance that delivers its emotional insights and blows all the more powerfully. Just superb.
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.
More March/April books in brief:
- The Children's Bach, Helen Garner: In her home country, Garner is recognised as one of Australia’s greatest living writers. This deceptively simple story of what happens when two old friends from university, Dexter and Elizabeth, are reunited by chance goes a long way to explaining why.
- Until August, Gabriel García Márquez: While far from his finest (García Márquez himself declared the story ‘didn’t work’), this posthumously published tale of a woman’s annual pilgrimage to place flowers on her mother’s grave and the one-night stands that follow, is an intriguing post-script to the great Gabo’s career.
- Day One, Abigail Dean: Dean’s follow-up to her best-selling debut, Girl A, explores the years-long fallout of a mass shooting in a Yorkshire primary school. As with Girl A, the chief focus is on the psychology and motivation of those involved rather than the horror of the event itself. A gripping read.
- The Morningside, Téa Obreht: Magical realism meets climate catastrophe in this latest novel from The Tiger’s Wife author. In a future world, the once prosperous Island City is now dependent on ‘climate refugees’ to attempt to repopulate it. Enter Sil and her mother, who move into the now seriously rundown, building of the title where, Sil soon learns, darkness resides.
- Meet Me When My Heart Stops, Becky Hunter: Emery is born with a rare illness that causes spontaneous heart failure. Each time it happens, she meets Nick, whose job is to guide people through their deaths. It’s an unusual premise for a love story, to which Hunter brings both plausibility and vulnerability. Heartbreakingly tender.
- Her Side Of The Story, Alba de Céspedes. First published in 1949 and reissued after renewed interest in de Céspedes brought praise from fans of both her writing and proudly feminist stance, including none other than Elena Ferrante (who writes the afterword in this edition), Her Side… is an epic tale of love and a woman’s search for independence and agency, set in fascist Italy. Brilliant.
Best books from earlier this year
Our Jan-to-Feb reads kick things off as we plan to continue with a brace of debuts by award-winning writers in their various other lives as poets and masters of the short story. Add to that a sprinkling of very different takes on pandemic fiction – a genre that doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere fast – some dark dystopian fiction from both sides of the pond, a visit to the Russian circus and an eerily beautiful Sami-Swedish novel in verse, and you have some idea of the diversity of reading fun that lies ahead.
Sigrid Nunez has form when it comes to populating her writing with animals – most famously in The Friend (in which a bereaved woman inherits a bereaved dog), which picked up the US National Book Award and brought Nunez to the wider audience she had long deserved. The animal in question this time is a macaw called Eureka, who our unnamed narrator is asked to house sit for in New York after his owners get locked down on the West Coast. She is later joined there by a young college dropout – the son of friends of the owners. If you hadn’t already guessed, it’s early 2020 – and we all know what that means. In many ways, then, this is a covid diary, and while Nunez captures the strangeness of that time, she is too good a writer for it to stop there, with musings on friendship, connection, writing, grief and the many vulnerabilities that are part and parcel of being alive.
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.
Fans of surreal workplace dystopias in the vein of drama series Severance are well served in this scathing attack on the American dream-turned-nightmare. The Jonathan Abernathy in question – deeply in debt from student loans and being hounded for the debts of his deceased parents – is invited to become a ‘dream auditor’ for a firm hired by businesses to enter the subconscious minds of their white-collar workers and rid them of anything that might negatively impact on their productivity. For this, Jonathan will be released the brutal wheelhouse of endless repayments and – if he’s lucky – become a fully paid-up member of the capitalist machine. He attacks it with gusto but this does not, unsurprisingly, go well. As Jonathan’s dream life and real life begin to overlap ever more perplexingly, things get very dark indeed. Brutal, funny – and at its heart, deeply tender – this read is more than worthy of your hard-earned pay check.
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 acclaimed Irish short-story writer’s novel debut is a tale of grief, greed, desire and small-town rivalries – not only the feud between drug gangs that sets the narrative ball rolling with the kidnap of Doll, who’s being held for the alleged crimes of his older brother, but family, friends and co-workers too. Doll is delivered late at night to the isolated country house of misunderstood loner Dev – who is less than impressed by this development to his relatively benign involvement in local dealers the Ferdia brothers’ activities up until now. With Doll locked up in the basement and his girlfriend Nicky plotting with his family to get him back, all manner of dark comedy and chaos ensues. Essentially a study of manners and human behaviour dressed up as a crime novel, this rollicking tale is expertly and brilliantly told.
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.
Subtly powerful tale of masculinity, memory and generational trauma set in a former mining town in northern England, as told through the lives of three generations of men. That’s brothers Brian and Alex, and the latter’s twentysomething drag artist son Simon in the main narrative, interwoven with a series of short, lyrical flashbacks to the siblings’ father in the days when the mine was still open. McMillan builds his story as carefully as the students who have descended on the town to do fieldwork for an academic study, unpicking Alex and Brian’s childhood to reveal its impact on their lives today. As Simon prepares for the genre-defying drag performance that he hopes will move him onto greater things, Alex is finally forced to confront a long-hidden truth. Quietly brilliant.
A single day broken into three parts (morning, afternoon and evening) across three years, from 2019 to 2021, Cunningham’s first novel in 10 years is a beautifully compassionate portrait of love and longing. The morning opens on Isabel, in Brooklyn, who is worried about work, her marriage to stalled rock musician Dan, her children and her beloved brother Robbie, who lives upstairs for now and with whom she projects her fantasies for an alternative, picture-perfect life in the form of a fake Instagram account headed up by the handsome, worldly ‘Wolfe’. However, the pandemic is coming and the walls are closing in, turning everything on its head. Stylishly told and beautifully – almost manneredly – written, Day is an exquisitely formed examination of the ever-shifting importance of bonds, how easily the threads between them can be pulled to breaking, and the beauty in what remains.
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.
More Jan/Feb books in brief:
- The Storm We Made, Vanessa Chan. Chan’s debut is a heartbreaking – and hopeful – generational saga set in British colonial Malaysia as falls into Japanese occupation during WW2. And yes, it is as epic as that sounds.
- Glorious People, Sasha Salzmann. A fascinating account of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its fallout over several generations of one extended Ukrainian family and their friends.
- The Beholders, Hester Musson. Musson’s gothic historical debut abounds with secrets, lies and mysteries after young maid Harriet takes up a new post in a big scary house and falls under the spell of its charismatic mistress, Clara. Need we say more?
- Aednan, Linnea Axelsson. Axelsson If you’re going to read one so-called ‘experimental’ novel in 2024, let it be this. Awarded Sweden’s prestigious August prize, this novel-in-verse tells the story of two Sami families across three generations and is as stunning as it is ambitious.
- Green Dot, Madeline Gray. Terminally dissatisfied Hera takes up a post as a comment moderator at a Sydney news outlet and surprises herself by falling into a passionate relationship with an older, very married, male colleague. (She has, up to this point identified as a lesbian.) As smart and sardonic as they come.
