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From Sally Rooney’s funny and observant latest to Joseph O’Neill’s compelling Godwin and Sarah Manguso’s gripping portrayal of a broken marriage, these are the year’s most enjoyable novelsThe best books to give as gifts this ChristmasAlison Flood on the best thrillers of 2024Rachel Cooke on the best graphic novels of 2024Sequels and reboots were the trend: Pat Barker, Percival Everett, Nick Harkaway and Colm Toíbín all went back for seconds one way or another. David Nicholls’s outdoor romcom You Are Here and Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital, bestsellers both, spoke to a hunger for escape that was forged in lockdown, still on writers’ minds. What’s ahead in 2025, I don’t dare hazard, but here’s what I liked best from a year in which I was drawn, I now see, to character-led novels of relationships, not always dysfunctional.Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber)
She’s too shy; you can tell she didn’t study creative writing; her characters never stop eating bread... just three of the frankly batshit statements lately uttered amid the discourse frenzy that greets this gifted young novelist’s every last move. Hats off to her for blocking out the noise to rediscover her glorious A-game in a tale of two Irish-Slovak brothers struggling to emerge from the shadow of their parents’ long-ago divorce. So funny and observant about love of many different kinds, this is the book I enjoyed most in 2024.The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota (Harvill Secker)
One of Britain’s finest writers wrung page-turning drama from the unsexy-sounding subject of a trade union election in Derbyshire. Two leadership hopefuls, both British Asian - one a middle-aged factory worker, the other a privately educated diversity officer - fight dirty over their contradictory visions of leftwing politics. Continue reading...