Books of the Year
Lunate contributors and friends share their favourite books of 2024
Niamh Campbell
This exercise is a reminder that I need to read more and, next year, have a longer list, but, here goes. I was bleakly mesmerized by Clair Wills’ Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets (non-fiction): Wills is a cultural historian but her attention this time falls on a private, incredibly sad, representative and yet idiosyncratic family history of unmarried motherhood, family rejection, poverty, and loss; it is devastating but as sober and considerate and elegant as a piece of academic writing. Tunnel of Toads by Chris Beausang is a weird little cult hit (or should be) about Dublin’s psychotic embrace of neoliberalism, extremely funny and disturbing, published by the tiny Marrowbone Books in Dublin and as such, so far, limited in its print run and reach. Maggie Armstrong’s Old Romantics is a sequence of gorgeous linked short stories about love and bad decisions that is much chicer and more original than that makes it sounds. Practice by Rosalind Brown is a wonder of a book about, quite simply, a student writing an essay. I enjoyed it because it took me back to the long, hermetic, loving hours I once spent writing college essays and because it seems important that a book like this be published and find readers and exist; there are sequences about complex masturbation fantasies that are funny and also kind of regal in their self-possession. Each of these works is unique and full of integrity and, above all, pleasures to live with for a time.
Linda Mannheim
Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time seems like the novel I’d been waiting for. The way it braids time travel and espionage narratives, and follows an impossible romance between a 21st Century British-Cambodian civil servant and the 19th century polar explorer Graeme Gore -- rescued and brought into the present along with other ‘expats’ from a near death experience in the past – in itself is dazzling. That it takes familiar genre conventions and reassembles them into something unfamiliar adds to its magic. The Ministry of Time also evokes the way refugees and their descendants occupy a kind of post-apocalyptic world. I have a lot to say what it means to read a novel like this whose protagonist is the descendant of a genocide survivor, and so little space to say it here. As someone who is also the descendant of a survivor, I’m grateful that the narrator, whose name we never learn, exists in the pages of this book and bats back dumb things people say. I reread this book as soon as I finished it. Other books that pulled me into their universe in 2024 were Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel (the crime is gentrification), Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (reframing 19th Century London), Isabel Waidner’s Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (the logic of its world lifted me up), Eley Williams’s Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good (details from those stories keep haunting me), and Glen James Brown’s Mother Naked (completely absorbing and always surprising).
Kate Vine
My favourite reads this year took me through Italy to New York via Argentina, yet the themes were unexpectedly coherent. In Forbidden Notebook by Italian-Cuban writer Alba de Céspedes (newly translated into English by Ann Goldstein), housewife Valeria begins to discover herself anew by chronicling her daily thoughts. Through writing, she reveals the repression in her existence – and begins to forge a route to freedom. Though contrasting in time and genre, Splinters, Leslie Jamison’s latest memoir, also follows a writer employing language to understand the chaos of domesticity. Welcoming her first child amid the breakdown of her marriage, Jamison's vivid, scattered prose portrays the simultaneous joy and brutality of her situation. Devastating, yet fuelled by love and hope, Jamison explores how to shed preordained narratives and piece together new stories. But my true highlight this year was Argentinian writer Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies (translated by Frances Riddle). After a prison sentence for murder, Ines starts a new business with her former cellmate, offering both fumigation and investigation services. When she learns her estranged daughter is in danger, Ines finds new maternal instincts as she tries to protect a family she no longer knows. It sounds mad – because it is – but between the lines of this eccentric thriller lies a vigorous interrogation of domestic abuse, maternal ambivalence and the true nature of women’s freedom.
Eloise Poole
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel has been my standout book of the year. In the months since I read it, I’ve found myself drawn back to Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, and the fights and fates of the eight teenage girl boxers. I was looking forward to Parade by Rachel Cusk, and it did not disappoint, dealing with art and womanhood with her characteristic spare sharpness. Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith presents a story through 77 portraits, exploring history, memory, and language. It’s completely fresh, and I loved it. Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries does what it says on the tin: an alphabetised and edited version of Heti’s diaries across a ten-year period. A grand project and a singular book, which I found at times compulsive, contradictory, hypnotising. Honourable mentions for Goblinhood: Goblin As A Mode by Jen Calleja, A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, and The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan.
David Coates
Daunt Books have absolutely killed it this year releasing at least three of my favourite books of 2024: Sam Sax’s Yr Dead, Griffin Hansbury’s Some Strange Music Draws Me In and my number one book of the year Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel - a stunning novel looking at the lives of eight girl boxers told over the course of seven rounds as they face each other in the ring. Alana S. Portero’s Bad Habit (tr: Mara Faye Lethem) is a trans coming-of-age novel set in a working class suburb of Madrid during the 1980s. Both funny and harrowing, heartbreaking but full of hope, it’s absolutely essential reading! Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin is wildly funny, utterly filthy and quite brilliant - a madcap, existential scream from one of the most distinctive narrative voices in ages! 2024 saw new releases from two of my favourite authors: Percival Everett’s James needs no introduction but it really is incredible and Eva Baltasar’s Mammoth (tr: Julia Sanches) crams so much life and dark humour into its 100 pages before delivering a sucker punch of an ending that had me in tears. We also got Nat Reeve’s Earlyfate, a more than worthy sequel to their debut novel Nettleblack that had me squealing with joy! Failing marriages appeared to be my favourite genre this year - pretty much read Miranda July’s All Fours, Saran Manguso’s Liars and Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott back to back (over our wedding anniversary!) and loved all three.
Naomi Booth
This year, I have gobbled up inventive, heart-filled fiction. I especially enjoyed All Fours by Miranda July, The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry (which includes one of the best psychedelic scenes I’ve ever read), and Pity by Andrew McMillan—each of which takes us deep into subterranean worlds of desire. Jacqueline Crooks’ Fire Rush was a total joy to read: it pulses with the musical energy that drives its characters. I tore through Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch and Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot—both of which find sharp new ways to narrate the lives of women and the brutal worlds of horse racing and boxing, respectively. And to end with a possible alien: I loved Abi Curtis’ The Headland—a tale of the Great Storm of ‘87 and the arrival of a mysterious source of beauty and grief.
Han Smith
The books of my year were mostly not from this year, but one huge 2024 highlight was Minihorror by Barbi Marković. It follows Mini and Miki (Maus…) in short, airily observed and sometimes extremely surreal episodes, skewering the contradictions of oblivious urban lifestyles. Some of the ‘adventures’ are specific to Vienna/Austria and some not: maybe family members baking harmless festive biscuits together could accidentally turn into dough, lop their own thumbs into the mixing bowl, and continue kneading anywhere. There’s an English translation coming soon from the excellent Jen Calleja, so do watch out for that. I’ve also just finished and wholly enjoyed The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş, a deceptively gentle, rich novel that traces how people who feel to some extent rootless (or who have roots in a different way from those around them) find and create their own rituals and language, and sustain connections in distanced environments. Meanwhile, the paperback of Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad came out this year, so I hope I can still mention that. It’s layered, elegant and often appalling, setting an absorbing personal story in a crucial wider Palestinian context. And for fiction that ‘breaks the mould and expands the possibilities of the novel form’, check out the broken moulds mercilessly scattered by the books shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize: Lara Pawson’s Spent Light, Rachel Cusk’s Parade, Neel Mukherjee’s Choice, Jonathan Buckley’s Tell, and All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles.
Joshua Jones
Pity by Andrew McMillan truly stayed with me throughout the year, and is a phenomenal and poetically-crafted exploration of queerness in the working-class, ex=industrial North. Plenty to relate to, coming from an ex-industrial, working-class town in south Wales. Ripcord by Nate Lippens, the followup to his debut My Dead Book, is less angry than the narrative voice of its predecessor, but just as sharp and queenie. Originally published in 1970, I got seriously swept up in The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine by Uruguayan writer, Mario Levrero. It's the best short story collection I've read this year and I can't wait to be taking their weird delights and oddities into 2025.
Claire Carroll and Gary Grace
This year, Gary continues to embody the typical Irish writer abroad, so has spent 2024 soaking in the contemporary fiction of his homeland. Highlights include Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses, Sinead Gleeson’s Hagstone, Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s Let’s Dance and Ferdia Lennon’s deservedly adored and decorated Glorious Exploits’. Really though, to be a true highlight, a book has to make Gary weep uncontrollably, and the 2024 award in this category goes to Connor Niland’s The Racket (Penguin), a memoir on the career trajectory of a promising Irish tennis player, a classic underdog story, rich with typically self-deprecating anecdotes and strange occurrences. Claire has spent 2024 reading almost exclusively collections of short fiction, which she says is ‘research’ for ‘work’ but is really because she is part of a secret cabal intent on bringing about world domination of the form. Claire demands that Gary tells her about the novels he reads in detailed summary so that she doesn’t need to dilute her commitment to the short form, but can still stay abreast of what a long book is like inside. She’s dangerously fixated. We’re all very worried. Claire’s favourite collections this year have been Eley Williams’ Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good, Rita Bullwinkel’s Belly Up (her 2016 collection, published in the UK for the first time this year by Daunt Books) and Naomi Wood’s This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things’. The stories in Bullwinkels’s collection take place across weird, bleached-out American landscapes and are the best combination of yucky and tender. Wood’s collection shows us the ambivalence and angst of (amongst other things) contemporary motherhood, or the void left by motherhood, perhaps. Wood’s stories are a joy to read; they are at once technically sublime and (perhaps because of this) acutely accessible. Definitely one to buy for, and convert therewith, relatives who love reading but ‘don’t like short stories’. Eley Williams is one of Claire’s favourite short fiction writers, and whilst her collection is an invigorating return to form after her seminal 2017 debut, Attrib, it is her story ‘Merrily, Merrily Merrily Merrily’, a ghost story co-authored with Nell Stevens for the Duets Anthology (Scratch Books) which has been swirling around in Claire’s head since hearing Stevens and (the disembodied voice of) Williams perform the piece live at the Duets launch this autumn. Duets is a unique and dazzling project, which brings together brand new short stories which each have two writers. Can you tell, dear reader, from the form of this review, that we continue to draw inspiration from its very existence…? Happy Holidays / Bouan noué / Nollag Shuna.
Adam Farrer
I read a lot of books this year, more than usual, and loved so many of them. So, I knew deciding on a set of book of the year would be difficult. My solution to this problem was to leave a piece of paper on my bedside table one night that read ‘Favourite books from 2024 – DON’T OVERTHINK IT’. The idea was that, when I awoke, I would see this piece of paper and write down the first few books I thought of. Here they are. Above Us The Sea by Ania Card, a hugely compelling novel that authentically captures what it means to tumble through the waves of grief, friendship and identity. Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg. The itchy, scuzzy and captivating story of life and tensions on a remote women’s commune. I raced through this one, almost out of fear that if I wasn’t quick enough about it, it’d get up and crawl away of its own volition. Determination by Tawseef Khan, a kaleidoscopic novel about the challenges faced by Jamila, a young lawyer taking over her father’s immigration law firm, punctuated with fleshed out narratives delving into the lives of her clients. Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things? by the brilliant stand-up comedian Pierre Novellie. An incredibly funny and captivating memoir about his later in life autism diagnosis that was initiated by a heckler. This one benefits from the audio version, which includes a great post-book interview with Phil Wang.
Rónán Hession
Looking past all the cherry blossom and cat books, there are still sharp new novels coming out of Japan. The pick of them this year was Cannibals by Shinya Tanaka, translated by Kalau Almony. This is a dark and tense novella, in which a young man confronts the cruelty that lurks inside him. It won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and introduces a bright new talent. This year also saw Yoko Tawada’s early gem The Bridegroom Was a Dog finally get its UK release in translation by Margaret Mitsutani. Crazy, sui generis, funny – it shows why she has always been one of the most original writers around. I was a fan of the previous novels by Hwang Jungeun, and her latest work, DD’s Umbrella (translated by E Yaewon), shows her navigating the personal and political, as she explores what is won and lost – and who is included in and excluded from – South Korea’s rapid economic growth. Winning the International Booker with Time Shelter brought the writing of Bulgarian master, Georgi Gospodinov, to world audience. Though written before Time Shelter, The Physics of Sorrow, was only published in English this year, in translation by Angela Rodel. It is an even better novel and would be a worthy winner of the Booker all over again. It is an extended riff on the theme of abandonment, brilliantly weaving together the writer’s own family history with the Greek myth of the Minotaur. Moving, inventive, uncategorizable.
Amy Twigg
What a year for books. Perhaps my favourite has been Stone Yard Devotional, a sly book that delves into guilt and human connectivity. The language is at once clean and powerful. I’ve been a fan of Charlotte Wood since I read The Natural Way of Things, and was so glad to see her on the Booker shortlist this year. I also loved I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning by Keiran Goddard, which follows a group of estranged friends, set in a working class area of Birmingham. It felt like a book written for me, to me, in its commentary on wealth and social mobility, and the rocky estrangement of adults from their youth. Finally, I loved reading The Hotel by Daisy Johnson. I’m not very good at concentrating on audiobooks, so I’ve been hoping these stories would be adapted from their original BBC Sounds series. It’s a slim collection of stories about a haunted hotel, where nothing is quite as it seems. No one writes short stories like Daisy, let’s leave it at that. On the non-fiction side, Doppelganger by Naomi Klein was brilliant and terrifying in equal measure, about how conspiracy theories have become mainstream under Trump’s America. I also adored A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, a memoir about her pilgrimage to several flat landscapes in a bid to understand her C-PTSD. Noreen is incredibly perceptive, and hilarious – I challenge you not to love her book as much as I did.
Sophie Parkes
I rarely manage to read books in the year they are published, I never quite get my act together. But this year I’ve actually read three novels which all came out in 2024 – and two became high-points of my reading year. I love a historical novel that shines a light on something about which I know nothing, and Bright I Burn by Molly Aitken proved a bright light indeed. Alice Kyteler was the first person in Ireland to be accused of witchcraft, in the 1200s, and Molly could have produced a blow-by-blow account of her downfall. Instead, Bright I Burn foregrounds Alice herself, rather than her acts or accusers, and takes a remarkable look at her desires, her sexuality, her motivations, and her desperation to survive. It is fierce and surprising, and the gossipy interludes are hilarious, too. I was lucky enough to be at the launch of Tawseef Khan’s Determination at Manchester Museum back in June. His eloquence about the novel’s subject, the UK immigration system, comes from his years as a specialist lawyer and scholar, and this enhances the heart of the novel, rather than stifling it in jargon and exposition. Tawseef knows only too well the suffering of the people who are embroiled in the system, including those whose professions are aligned with it, but still he manages to offer us levity, humour – and even hope.
Gary Kaill
Glen James Brown’s astounding feat of narrative craft(iness) Mother Naked was my page-turner of 2024 but not far behind it were Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Neomi Kiss-Deaki and All This Precious Madness by Mark Bowles: all three darkly comic and politically astute. I loved It Lasts Forever and Then It's Gone by Anne de Marcken and The Earth is Falling by Carmen Pelligrino: two books that pair perfectly due in part to how much wisdom they contain on the subject of grief and loss. I was astounded by Hannah Regel’s The Last Sane Woman: the tragic story of a young ceramicist and the researcher working through her letters decades later. I loved how Regel’s deft plotting allowed her to entirely eschew highlighting the book’s multiple timelines: a gift of a challenge for the reader. But my book of the year is The Unreliable Nature Writer by Claire Carroll: a writer whose work caused our journal to undertake an aesthetic re-set and who later came to help shape the direction of our print edition. I can remember the thrill I felt when reading ‘My Two Sons’ for the first time in 2020 and it’s here now in this ambitious, accomplished debut collection. The Unreliable Nature Writer, with its gripping narrative through-line, and a bag full of stories that take a sidelong and unflinching view of the collapsing world around us, human behaviour at its absolute weirdest, and excellent advice on the perils of android ownership, is more than just mere effect. Beneath its immediate thrill (weird, sexy, gripping tales) is a foundation of The Good Stuff: complex world-building; thematic substance; precision plotting: dialogue (clipped, naturalistic, wry as fuck) to die for.
So Mayer
If you've been able to read many or long books this year, you have my admiration: my concentration is absolutely shanked for continuous prose bar Shourideh C. Molavi's Environmental Warfare in Gaza (Pluto). Thank fuck for anthologies like SLUTS edited by Michelle Tea for Cipher (RIP Gary Indiana who has an outstanding piece therein) and magazines like Lunate - also The Funambulist, Wasafiri, Shado, Protean and Jewish Currents - and for 404Ink, whose Solemates: A New History of Our Fetish for Feet by Adam Zmith was a delicious pocket-sized stimulant. To thought, obvs. Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir by Skye Arundhati Thomas and Izabella Scott was another pocket shot of political urgency and nuanced writing from MACK's excellent DISCOURSE series. And thank spirit also for poetry & what a year: Fady Joudah's heartstopping [...] from Out-spoken, Nisha Ramayya's heartsinging Fantasia from Granta, and Gboyega Odubanjo's heartstunning Adam from Faber are all must must must reads and re-reads. The Funambulist's amazing multilingual issue foregrounding the work of Yásnaya Elena A. Gil has been followed by the UK publication of her powerful manifestos for linguistic diversity in This Mouth is Mine, translated by Ellen Jones for Charco. dd's umbrella by Hwang Jungeun, translated by e. yaewon for Tilted Axis is one of the only novels I've finished this year, but - filled with grief, political protest, resistance to gentrification, love and rage - it's also the perfect one for this year.