Late I know, but in case anyone is curious I thought I’d share my 2024 end of year list. I like to do these in January in case I have a great late December read, which this year I did!
So, without further ado, here we go! These aren’t in any particular order until we get to the end and my best of 2024 read.
Best SF crossover novel: In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes.
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-cK0k0x.jpeg)
This is blisteringly good. It deservedly won the Arthur C. Clarke award, but reached far beyond SF to find a much wider readership. It did that because it’s extremely well written and works as a piece of literary fiction just as well as it does as SF. It’s very, very rare to pull both those off in the same book. I often say when I praise SF works that they’re not ones for those who’re new to SF. That isn’t true here. If you’ve no interest in SF at all you might well still enjoy this.
Best long-form Californian novel in verse: The Golden Gate, by Vikram Seth.
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-dD9a5S.jpeg)
Novels in verse are always a bit of a tough sell but this is just a delight. It’s a tale of some fairly ordinary twenty-somethings living in San Francisco in the 1980s. As you’d expect of Seth, it’s beautifully written, the characters are expertly drawn and at times it’s very funny. Very, very strongly recommended. Emma of Bookaround did a great review of this here. It took me a decade after reading Emma’s review to finally get round to this, but it was well worth the wait.
Best novel that’s simply lovely: Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yoko Tawada and translated by Margaret Mitsutani.
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-kUe4vc.jpeg)
This is a charming tale set in a sort-of-future but not really. Japan has disappeared (this is totally not explained or explored) and Hiruko is the only person left with any real memory of it. Accompanied by a mixed group of friends she goes on a quest to find Japan, but as the cliché goes the real treasure is the friends we find along the way. The group is multi-national, multi-gender, multi-gender identity (if you have a thing about ‘woke’ this may not be the novel for you…) and their quest is utterly charming. Honestly it’s hard to oversell how lovely a book this is. There’s great reviews of this from both Radhika here and Tony here. I agree with Tony that it’s stronger than Tawada’s first novel (much as I enjoyed that) and I’m delighted to hear there’s a sequel.
Best novel featuring extraordinary architecture: Piranesi, by Susanna Clark.
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-a2SPHp.jpeg)
I loved Susanna Clark’s epic Jonathan Strange & Dr Norrell which I continue to view as one of the few genuinely innovative fantasy novels. This is much shorter and in many ways much stranger than JS&DN, yet very readable. The main character, Piranesi, lives in a solitary world consisting of a seemingly endless house filled with great statues and the sea rushing in on the lower levels. It had me hooked right from the opening line: “When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of the three Tides.” Piranesi believes he is one of only 15 people who have lived in the world, only one of whom known as “the Other” didn’t die years before.
Interestingly Piranesi is not an unreliable narrator, he’s scrupulously honest, but he is a very badly informed narrator. Part of the joy of this beautifully crafted novel is how much the reader can see that Piranesi can’t, but with the why remaining utterly unclear. The answers, when they come, are satisfying and the book as a whole is exceptionally well paced. Honestly this was very close to being my book of the year and even if the idea of reading fantasy makes you reach for your gun I’d still press it upon you.
Best absolutely harrowing but important read: My Fourth Time, We Drowned, Sally Hayden.
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-no3TBA.jpeg)
I tend to have two books on the go at any time. One is my main read, the other a bedtime read. I started this as a bedtime read. Don’t do that; I had nightmares.
This is the non-fiction account of the harrowing journeys faced by refugees coming across Africa into Libya and then hopefully onto Europe. It’s an extraordinary, harrowing and difficult read. Systematised torture and sexual assault, mass exploitation of vulnerable people, appalling abuses, often documented in the refugees own voices. This won the Baillie Gifford non-fiction prize and rightly so. It’s not an easy read but it is one of the few books I’ve ever read that changed how I see the world.
Best comic novel set in Cold War east Berlin: The Short End of the Sonnenalee, by Thomas Brussig and translated by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson.
This is a very slim and very funny novel set prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Misha is a teenager living pretty much next to the wall, so close that when his first love letter is blown out of his hands by a gust of wind it lands in the death-strip between East and West. He didn’t even get it to see whether it was from the girl he has a crush on, or the one he definitely doesn’t but who does have a crush on him. It’s full of wonderful characters like the uncle who smuggles items over from the West but who always brings things you can already buy in the East…
There’s not huge plot here. It’s a mix of teenage pranks and a movie-style crush on a cool pretty girl who only goes out with boys from the West. Interestingly, while early on she seems not to have too much actual personality of her own and to just be a vehicle for his desires, later it becomes apparent that’s because you’re only seeing her through his image of her, and in fact she does have her own voice. It’s cleverly done. There’s a nice review of it on Lizzy Siddal’s blog here.
Best novel about how the past is another country and they do things differently there: A Little Luck, by Claudia Pineiro and translated by Frances Riddle.
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-TuboQ9.jpeg)
Those who know me will know I’m a huge Pineiro fan. That hasn’t changed. Here the narrator, Mary, is traveling from America to Argentina to carry out a school inspection as part of an international accreditation scheme. What nobody knows but her is that the school is in the suburb she grew up in, her local school in fact, and while at first it’s not clear why she expects nobody there to recognize her. What is clear is that if they did that would be disastrous, as she did not leave on remotely good terms.
As ever with Pineiro it effortlessly combines page-turning readability with intelligence and genuine depth. Such a good writer.
Best epistolary novel: Lady Susan, by Jane Austen.
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-H5o7wK.jpeg)
I had thought this was an incomplete work, whereas it’s just an early one. It’s far from peak Austen, but even lesser Austen is better than most and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The film adaptation, oddly titled Love & Friendship which is a totally different Austen story, is also excellent by the way.
Best novel with a highly questionable narrator: The Light of Day, by Eric Ambler.
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-oKsueU.jpeg)
Typically Ambler has his hero be some fine upright British chap drawn unsuspecting into international intrigue. I’m not knocking it, it works, though it gets to be a bit of an obvious device.
Here instead we have a British-Egyptian minor conman drawn way in over his head through his own greed. He’s greedy, petty, and not particularly bright. The result is huge fun as he finds himself working simultaneously for a gang of international criminals (possibly terrorists) and the Turkish secret police…
Best novel featuring intelligent cephalopods: The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler.
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-gqF8Bb.jpeg)
There’s actually more intelligent octopi and squid in SF than you might think so this is a potentially hotly contested category. This is a very good first contact novel where the ‘aliens’ are a group of intelligent octopi living off the coast of a Vietnamese island. The novel follows a marine biologist’s attempts to communicate, but the octopi aren’t that keen. In fact, they’re downright hostile possibly because to them were strange monsters coming from outside their world and destroying their habitat.
It becomes a novel about the nature of consciousness and of our relationship with the environment. Genuinely exciting SF. There’s a very good Guardian review here.
Best novel that was much better than I ever thought it would be: A Room With A View, by EM Forster.
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-na4yUc.png)
For some reason I’ve long thought of EM Forster as a rather worthy novelist. No idea why. Like most classics there’s a reason his books are still read.
I’m not sure this one needs any introduction, but I found it lively, funny, and richly human. I’ve been missing out and I’ll definitely be reading more Forster. If you’ve not tried him this is one of the shorter ones and it worked very well for me as an entry to his work.
Best Rabelaisian read: Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, by Matthias Enard and translated by Frank Wynne.
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-DiUPOx.jpeg)
Enard is always great and this is no exception. This is an initially straightforward tale of a young anthropologist ensconced in deepest rural France to investigate local customs, but before too long it’s a raucous and dizzying examination of mortality, morality, suffering and pleasure. For a novel in which death is ever present it’s rammed through with life, not least in the extraordinary banquet sequence of the title.
This is an end of year summary so I can’t remotely do justice to this seemingly sprawling yet actually carefully crafted novel. Fortunately, I don’t need to as Radhika has written well about it here. As ever with Enard, clever and rewarding.
Drumroll please! Max’s best book of 2024: For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain, by Victoria Mackenzie
![Best of 2024! Best of 2024!](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7936877/best-of-2024-L-NDmOKh.jpeg)
Such. A. Good. Book. This is a novel about the historical encounter between 14th century English mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, both women in an age when women’s voices were not generally heard. Their’s were.
Julian was an anchoress, highly educated, well respected, though being a woman she had to hide her writings about her visions. Margery by contrast was an illiterate merchant’s wife prone to bouts of prolific sobbing and subjected to accusations of heresy. Margery dictated her life and visions to a scribe, making both her and Julian rare insights into medieval mysticism from a female perspective.
Both women’s voices are sharply drawn and utterly distinct. In a very slim novel Mackenzie brings the concerns of fourteenth century England and of these women to vivid life. It’s tremendously well done.
I appreciate a meeting between medieval mystics may not sound like much of a page-turner, but it’s my best of the year for a reason and against some very stiff competition.
And there you have it! Honourable mentions go out to Alexander Lerner-Holenia’s Count Bagge, JA Baker’s The Peregrine and Roberto Bolano’s rather good The Skating Rink, but hard choices had to be made…