The Best of 2024: Fiction
Our final list that rounds up the best of the year is a collection of the fiction we’ve most enjoyed, remembered or looked forward to. Don’t forget to also check out the lists of our favourite 2024 debuts, the top South Asian selections and our nonfiction list.
Alan Hollinghurst - Our Evenings
Spanning half a century, and written with Hollinghurst's trademark eloquence and insight, Our Evenings traces the journey of Dave Win from boarding school childhood to an artistic flourishing in experimental theatre, against the backdrop of an ever-changing Britain. It’s a book that is hard to categorise but captures queer coming of age, the creative world and family relationships, among other things, with luminosity and power.
Hisham Matar - My Friends
In April 1984, a demonstration outside the Libyan Embassy in London, brought supporters of Colonel Qaddafi against protesters in opposition. The demonstration had barely begun when shots were fired from the Embassy windows, injuring several and killing a policewoman. Taking this event as a trigger, Hisham Matar’s new novel is narrated by a Libyan exile and the friends he has known for decades since this event. It’s lyrical, thoughtful and truly brilliant.
Rachel Kushner - Creation Lake
A tragi-comic tour de force that was shortlisted for the Booker, Kushner's parodic spy novel is actually a novel of ideas about an undercover agent sent to an ecological commune in France. The book centres on this gang of radical eco-activists, their charismatic leader and the protagonist, a woman ‘caught in the crossfire between the past and the future’. An examination of human history couched in the spy novel, it’s a powerful novel.
Miranda July - All Fours
Artist, filmmaker and writer July’s latest novel is a study of crisis. The narrator is a forty-five-year-old in L.A. with a mellow husband and a precocious seven-year-old who decides, on a whim, to take a road trip across America. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic and domestic life of a middle aged female artist, this is a novel that transcends and subverts expectations.
Joseph O’Neill - Godwin
Mark Wolfe, the protagonist of this intricately structured novel, is a technical writer in Pittsburgh going through some emotional turbulence. Amid workplace turmoil, Wolfe is lured by his English half brother—an aspiring soccer agent who is “a tornado of unreliability”—into a quest to locate a prodigiously talented young African player before a rival. Their effort leads them from England to France to Benin, and, ultimately, back to the U.S. O’Neill’s novel is hilarious, meditative and incisive on family, ambition, colonialism, and the history of football.
Tony Tulathimutte - Rejection
In this collection of linked short stories, Tulathimutte gives alienation, unhingedness and loneliness a microscopic examination. Described as a ‘parade of marketplace failure and personal pathology’, he’s ten steps ahead of any reaction you could have and writes with brilliant precision and detail. Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life, seamlessly going between the personal crises and comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.
Suzumi Suzuki - Gifted
This acclaimed novella, written by a former adult entertainer turned writer, is about a young woman working as a bar hostess in Tokyo reckoning with various traumas over a few weeks. Based on Suzuki’s own experiences in the adult industry, the book chronicles the young woman’s wanderings from bar to bar, hospital to home, with brutal honesty. In sharp, elegant prose, the book explores mother-daughter relationships, modern society and loss with clarity and depth.
Danzy Senna - Coloured Television
Danzy Senna’s new novel follows a writer, Jane Gibson, whose main issue with her mixed identity is figuring out how to exploit it properly. Jane has spent nine years on a sprawling family saga that is described as the ‘mulatto War and Peace.’ When it’s rejected for publication, she fibs her way into television, with various consequences. Funny, piercing, and propulsive, Coloured Television is a portrait of precarious modern America and the narcissistic task of self-commodification.