Review of the Year #3, 2024 – Books of the Year!

It’s finally time for me to share my favourite books of the year with you. It’s always a difficult decision and, as so often happens, the last two books I finished, but have yet to review, both pushed their way onto the list! I read 122 books this year, of which I awarded 10/10 to 14 titles – slightly fewer than usual, but due to good reading choices, an awful lot of other titles got nine and above. I’m allowing myself 14 best books again this year with a few runners up, including titles I reviewed for Shiny New Books. But regardless of score, here are the books that resonated the most with me this year, whatever their initial score, plus a couple of runners-up:

Best Psychological Family Drama: The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly – Having grown up with cult treasure hunt book Masquerade, the inspiration for this novel, how could I not find this tale of a cult book, art, obsession and jealousy and more skeletons than should fit in a family-sized cupboard in Hampstead absolutely gripping, even at nearly 500 pages. Superb.

Most Affecting Memoir: Rememberings by Sinéad O’Connor – Read on the anniversary of her death, O’Connor’s memoir is wonderful, written with a true voice. It is witty, honest, painful, and full of love for her children (and their fathers intermittently), as well her family and friends, and those who did look after her in the music industry. I particularly enjoyed her commentaries on her albums and the insights into her songwriting, we tend not to realise how good a songwriter she was.

The Best Materials Science: It’s a Gas by Mark Miodownik – A shout-out for my own brand of popular science! Miodownik is a superb communicator, and in his third book on the states of matter, he takes on explaining the effects that gases have had on our lives. This requires some history, but also there are many more ‘gases’ than just the elements and compounds you’ll first think of, and their elusive nature of gases, largely invisible, intangible, magical even to consider. Blended with his self-deprecating humour incorporating witty personal anecdote, this was great fun.

Best State of the (French) Nation: Nothing is Lost by Cloé Mehdi – translated by Howard Curtis. The novel is told through the eyes of eleven-year-old Mattia, who lives with his guardian Zé and his suicidal girlfriend Gabrielle in the Paris suburbs. Mattia’s complicated family set-up and all the questions it raises over mental health and its treatment runs alongside the social & racial justice noir involving the resurfacing of the dismissed case of a teenager’s murder through new graffiti. Things get very dark indeed before there’s any kind of resolution, I found it extremely intense, and burst into tears at one point. Don’t let that stop you reading it though – it was very well done indeed. (Runner-up: Kids Run the Show by Delphine De Vigan)

Most Meta!: The Unfinished Harauld Hughes by Richard Ayoade – You’ll love or hate this! Obviously, I’m in the love camp. Ayoade’s lockdown project was this book exploring the life of ‘mythical’ 60s playwright Hughes – told as a fictional memoir of Ayoade making a documentary on the man, who wrote distinctly arch and Pinter-esque scripts with nods to the great kitchen sink dramas of the period, and not a little ‘Carry On’. Ayoade had such fun, he wrote Hughes’ complete works too! It’s witty, clever, hilarious, twisted, very meta and I loved it.

Best Two-Hander: This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone – This novella wasn’t what I expected at all! A prizewinning SF&F novella that is an epistolary, time travelling, love story written by a pair of authors, one a Canadian poet and author of spec fiction, the other an American fantasy author. Red and Blue are agents of warring empires who travel through time to change history in multiple timelines. They’ve been becoming aware of each other for some time, they should be enemies, but fall in love and keeping it secret gets harder and harder. 

Best previously unpublished Beatles material: All You Need Is Love by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines – Compiled from never-before released interviews recorded by the authors. Brown was there all the way from Liverpool starting out as Epstein’s assistant; Gaines is an American journalist. The pair conducted these interviews in 1980-81, managing to talk to nearly all the key characters who were still alive. They had extracted from them for a previous book which caused an uproar when published, but locked the rest in a vault until now! Little would they know but these interviews, except for Yoko’s, took place in the weeks before John was murdered in late 1980, they never got to him. Getting all the different PoVs was riveting!

Best View of Earth: Orbital by Samantha Harvey – is a beautifully written love letter, a thought-provoking and heart-warming view of Earth from above, exploring the thoughts of six astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) as they observe their planet from outer space, over one days’ 16 orbits, seeing it afresh in awe of its fragile majesty. There is plenty of space for delicate introspection too in the lives of the astronauts. Harvey is pitch-perfect on the technical detail where it’s needed, but space is just its setting, as a situation is to comedy. You could, however, say that it is a political novel for it forces us to look afresh at what we’re doing to the Earth through the astronauts’ eyes. That shift in perspective is humbling.

Best Irish novel: Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong – Set in a fictional seaside village in the north-west of Ireland, the season is just kicking in. We follow events through a series of narrators, one of whom discovers a body on the beach. A beautifully observed novel, it could be regarded as more of a story cycle, given the many narrators – but they are linked so closely and the story advances cleverly from one to the next, so it holds together as a novel too. Armstrong’s language about the sea is wonderful and impressionistic, poetic even; her backstories for all the narrators ring so true but don’t give into hyperbole. It may be low-key for the most part, but there is an intensity to her prose that gives balance and an overriding need to carry on reading. (Runner-up: Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan)

The Lived Up to the Hype One: Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway – Loving John Le Carré’s novels so much, it was with fingers crossed that I began his son’s continuation of the Smiley vs. Karla story with this novel that neatly sits between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I needn’t have worried, as Harkaway is himself a great storyteller in his father’s mould. Just fabulous to meet all the wonderful characters again.

Best New Spy Author: The Peacock and the Sparrow by I S Berry – An Edgar-winning debut written by a former CIA staffer, this thriller introduced me to 2010s Bahrain where the author lived for some time, and a world of political foment between the various sects, in which the Americans take an interest there. Meet world-weary Shane Meadows, due to return home, but to what? Under pressure to get information, he meets and falls for artist, Almaisa, who is not what she seems… Having a wonderful sense of place and history, if I were to pitch this book, I’d describe it as Greene meets Le Carré in Bahrain.

Best Parrot and Musings: The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez – I’m so glad to have fitted this novel in at the end of the year. Written in much the same vein as The Friend and What Are You Going Through, Nunez’s narrator gives us another mixture of life and musings on friendship, reading and writing. This is her lockdown novel, and for part of it, the narrator is parrot-sitting and said bird is quite a character. This novel (full review soon) gave me on the first page a quote that will continue to resonate:

Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t.

The Best of the Bard: Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench – Another delight to my end of year reading was this book, in which Dame Judi discusses her life in Shakespeare with actor/director friend Brendan O’Hea. They analyse the roles she’s played from major to minor, from the verse speaking to character motivation, the rehearsal process and more; the whole peppered with hilarious anecdotes. In between are vignettes on all aspects of acting Shakespeare, but one that comes across very clearly is her sense of company spirit being a key. Simply lovely. I’ve never seen her in a live Shakespeare, more’s the pity.

The Curve-ball Book Group Choice: Bear by Marian Engel – Far from being the best novel I read this year, this one has stayed with me – for all the wrong reasons! However, it turned out to be an inspired book group choice, generating a great discussion. Thus, I’d recommend it to those groups who are broad-minded. Say no more – click through to discover more.

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But which of these fourteen books was my

‘Book of the Year’ ?

When I read it in March, I said I hoped this book would get picked up by some prize longlists – it was missing from the Women’s Prize one back then. I also wondered if it would be my book of the year… and it is!

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Have you read any of my choices?

Can you recommend some of your best reads of 2024 to me…