I read about 85 books this year, and three of the ones on my top ten reads of 2024 I listened to as audio books. An excellent audio book does depend on an excellent narrator as well as a brilliantly written book, and while I always have an audio book on the go as well as a physical book, when I’ve finished listening, if I’ve loved the audio book, I always buy a physical copy. I sometimes use my library to get my audio books, but recently, I also been using xigxag – a UK-based audio book company where you can buy audio books without a subscription, are usually only £7.99, and where some books are ‘x-books’ which allow you to switch between the audio book and an ebook. (If you’d like to get your first xigxag audio book for £3.99 click this link to download and register in the xigxag app – I will earn a free book when three people buy their first book via this link.)
So, here are my and Tim’s favourite ten books of the year. We share one: Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke, which we read for our book group.
All of my and Tim’s books can be bought from my list on Bookshop.org.
Let me know if you’ve read any and which catch your eye.
You can see previous year’s lists here: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.
Claire’s Top 3 (in no order)
The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman
| Rachman is just so damn good at writing completely believable characters, those I love and those I hate. I listened to this read by Sam Alexander (who read it exceptionally well), and I loved it so much I bought a physical copy. This novel covers the life of Charles (Pinch) Bavinsky, and we first meet him when he is five in his father’s painting studio in Rome, in 1960. Bear Bavinsky is a famous, philandering, egotistical, larger-than-life painter and Pinch is both terrified and in awe of him, and really remains so for the whole of his life. And yet although everyone crumples in the path of Bear – his several wives, his many children and so on – Pinch has the last laugh, although it’s still not funny. For the most part Pinch’s life is a sad one – solitary, unfulfilled, dissatisfied, but so real. I wanted to shake him; I wanted to hug him; I loved him. Buy The Italian Teacher from Bookshop.org |
North Woods by Daniel Mason
| Another book I listened to and then bought when I fell in love with it. Beginning in the 1760s, the novel starts with a couple fleeing a community to exist on their own as lovers in a cabin in the woods of New Hampshire. And from there we meet the occupants of the cabin – which is developed to a house – through the ages and even into the future. We meet an apple farmer and his two daughters who die in extraordinary ways; a man hunting for a slave; the doctor of a man with schizophrenia who lives in the house; and after his death his sister who finds his videos of the woods with titles that relate to those who have lived there before; a closeted painter in love with a poet; a young biologist, and many more. The most perfect snippets of human life and the nature that surrounds them and how all histories leach into each other, leaving traces behind. I was sad to say goodbye to every character. Buy North Woods from Bookshop.org |
Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst
| This might be my perfect kind of book. I LOVE true stories of physical danger and survival, and have read many. But this non-fiction account of how Maurice and Maralyn Bailey’s boat capsized and how they survived in the Pacific for four months in a raft and a dinghy, goes beyond that (fascinating) story, to what happened immediately afterwards and in the rest of their lives. It is a love story, and yes, there was a moment when I cried. In 1973 M&M set sail from England, heading for New Zealand, but in the pacific their boat is hit by a whale and sinks. They manage to grab a few provisions and scramble into the life-raft. They survive for 118 days floating on the ocean, catching fish and birds and sharks, and eating them raw. When they are finally rescued they are given celebrity status. Elmhirst writes their story in wonderfully clear and precise prose, without melodrama and with exactly the right amount of detail. The audio book is beautifully read by Florence Howard. Buy Maurice and Maralyn from Bookshop.org |
And Claire’s next 7
Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford
| A slippery, fever-dream of a novel. Unsettling, puckish, and brilliantly written, it’s an absolute one-off. I loved it. Written mostly in the first person plural, a group of young cousins gather with their parents for a birthday party at Aunt Frankie’s house in upstate New York. They see something from a bathroom window moving from the treeline to a shed, ‘…we just knew it was the same thing over and over, which was worse, somehow, even though it should have been better that there was only just one.’ Abi, only three goes charging outside, and the others go in search of her. It gets darker and weirder as the children encounter many inexplicable things in the woods. These sections are interspersed with ‘Intermezzos’ giving some of the history of the family and Beezy the matriarch and how she died. There is creepiness, and surprise, and craziness, all of it brilliantly written. At the end there is some kind of resolution but just enough to leave me thoroughly unsettled. Highly recommended. It will be published in the UK in April 2025. Pre-order it and thank me later. Buy Idle Grounds from Bookshop.org |
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
| The Shards: Sex and death in 1981 in LA. This is a lustful, gory, page-turnery, meta, fictional writer’s origin story, and I loved it. I did love the second half more than the first, but by the end I was eating it up and then I had to spend another hour on Reddit to work out what the hell I just read (and still didn’t know). Seventeen-year-old Bret Ellis is alone for the start of his senior school year at Buckley – a private LA school where everyone is rich and good looking (and where the actual BEE went) – his parents being on an extended trip around Europe. When new student, Robert arrives, Bret immediately believes he’s got something to hide and is lying about a great deal. At the same time there is a serial killer on the streets of LA, as well as a weird hippie cult, and girls and animals are disappearing. Bret believes that Robert has something to do with it. But Bret himself is unreliable, writing this story age 57, telling us many times that it’s a narrative, and that he is prone to embellishment. He scatters the story with clues which are slippery and clever so that by the end you realise nothing was as you thought…or was it? Bret is a semi-closeted lust-filled young man with a girlfriend, and the sex – of which there is a great deal – is graphically described. Buy The Shards from Bookshop.org |
Birdeye by Judith Heneghan
| Yes, I’m quoted on the cover of this, and yes, Judith is a friend of mine, that wouldn’t be enough to make her second novel (for adults) on to my top ten reads of the year. The book is here because I stand by every word of my quote: Evocative, haunting, masterful. I loved this book. Liv Ferrars, born in England, has lived in a ramshackle house in Upstate New York since the ’60s when Birdeye was a thriving commune. Now there is only Liv, her two closest friends Sonny and Mishti, and one of her adult daughters left. And then one April morning a young man turns up unexpectedly. At the same time, Sonny and Mishti make an announcement, and shortly afterwards Liv’s other daughter arrives from England, and everything that Liv thought was stable and ongoing is upset and unreckonable. Buy Birdeye from Bookshop.org |
Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke
| Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke is a re-issue from 1973, which apparently was met with horror on its first publication. I can see why, but I loved it. It is repulsive, disturbing, grotesque, and mordantly funny – I laughed out loud many times and then felt bad about laughing. It’s a clever writer who can make a reader feel both delighted and appalled in the same moment. Dinah Brooke’s writing is clear and crisp, and the images she creates in the reader’s head are vivid and nightmarish. Lord Jim at Home is a story in three parts about the life of Giles Trenchard, born between the wars into an upper middle class family where he is cruelly treated by his father and his first nursemaid. He learns to keep his head down, and by doing this he survives school and escapes to the Navy. The second part is about long stretches of time doing nothing, and an hour or two of intense and terrible fighting. When Giles returns to England he finds he doesn’t fit in anywhere, can’t understand what he’s supposed to be doing, and the third part is completely unexpected and yet makes complete sense in a weird and very dark way. Buy Lord Jim at Home from Bookshop.org |
People who eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry
| This non-fiction book tells the story of twenty-one-year-old Lucie Blackman, from England, who disappeared in Japan in 2000. She’d been working as a hostess in a nightclub and had gone with an unknown man to the seaside. Her father, Tim worked hard to keep her disappearance in the newspaper headlines, until finally her body was discovered buried in a cave some months later. This is the story of what kind of person Lucie was, how her disappearance and the search for her unfolded, and what happened after her body was discovered. Lloyd Parry is a master at giving us all the details without sensationalism, yet as a narrative which makes us want to read on. Utterly compelling, and highly recommended if you enjoy true crime. Buy People Who Eat Darkness from Bookshop.org |
The Night Interns by Austin Duffy
| I loved this novel about three surgical interns in a Dublin hospital working the nightshift. And the more I think about it, the cleverer I realise it is: a novel with a structure that matches the content. It’s told from the point of view of an unnamed, ungendered narrator who’s working several shifts, mostly at night with two other interns, Lynda and Stuart. They are continually beeped on their pagers and have to go to different wards around the hospital to carry out various tasks – mostly mundane but some highly pressured. Sleep deprivation, and terror at doing something wrong or being accused of doing something wrong by the toxic hospital consultants is pervasive, which means there’s alternately a dream-like quality to what’s happening or everything is lit up with a hideous brightness. Some reviews criticised the book for a lack of a plot and that many (all?) of the crises fizzle out, but I think that’s the point. Instead of the usual Western structure of everything leading to a single climax, here is scene after scene that might go badly or might go well (just as the narrator feels). And these brightly lit scenes and are linked both physically and metaphorically by the long dark corridors that the interns have to traipse up and down to get to the wards and back to the res where they can (perhaps) rest. Lynda and Stuart talk and laugh with each other and just like the narrator we don’t always understand why. This kind of confusion just made me feel more like the narrator must be feeling – too tired, too discombobulated to work things out. I love novels set in places of work, and I love reading about hospitals, so The Night Interns was always going to appeal to me, but I think it’s a brilliant novel. Buy The Night Interns from Bookshop.org |
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
| I loved this from the very beginning. I took it on holiday with me and could not put it down. In fact it gave me such a book hangover that it spoiled all the other books I took with me. Reading it as a writer, I was alternately thinking, How does Andrew Miller do that?, and I might as well stop writing now. In the winter of 1962 to 1963, two women make a connection through their pregnancies. Rita and Irene are isolated, facing difficulties with their husbands, and everyone begins to struggle with the worst winter in living memory, and the snow. We hear also from the husbands’ point of view: the local doctor and a man who has decided to take up farming. Not a huge amount happens, but it is all absolutely gripping, fascinating, and beautifully written. I was completely smitten. Buy The Land in Winter from Bookshop.org |
Tim’s Top Reads of 2024
Tim’s Top 3 (in no order)
The Horse by Willy Vlautin
| I love all Willy’s novels and his most recent, published in 2024 is no exception. Ann Patchett describes this book as extraordinary, and I don’t argue with Ann Patchett. She’s also very perceptive when she says “Willy Vlautin writes about people overlooked by society and overlooked by literature.” 65-year-old Al Ward lives alone, miles from anywhere, in Nevada. One morning, a blind horse arrives outside his home, seemingly unable to feed itself or stay safe from coyote attacks. 30 miles from the nearest town and broken by alcoholism and anxiety, Al has to decide what to do. Ageing, memory, longing, music and the American landscape, even a hint of autobiography – it’s all in there! Heartbreaking. The Horse is just Brilliant. Buy The Horse from Bookshop.org |
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld
| Curtis Sittenfeld is remarkable. Her short stories are as complete as her novels and her novels are a sharp as her short stories. This collection will be published in February 2025 and contains 12 brilliant stories, 3 of which I’ve read before – but was excited to revisit. All her characters are so believable with their insecurities and anxieties. Familiar themes of divorce, relationships, female friendships and everyday life. All written in a way that no one else can get close to. Claire and I read this to each other and it was so difficult not to binge on. Buy Show Don’t Tell from Bookshop.org |
The Archive of Feelings by Peter Stamm
| I’ve only just found Russell Banks. I have no idea why it’s taken me so long – everything I love about contemporary American fiction is in this one. It’s his last collection, published after his death in 2023. Three stories all set in the same upstate NY town. They all work so well – individually and together. A man sells property to a temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man’s character. A couple grow concerned when a family move next door, and the children start sneaking over to beg for help. Two dangerous criminals kidnap an elderly couple and begin blackmailing their grandson, demanding that he pay back what he owes them. I’ve already made a start on his back catalogue. Buy American Spirits from Bookshop.org |
And Tim’s next 7
Click here to buy any of these from Bookshop.org
That’s it from us in 2024. I’d love to hear about your favourite reads of 2024.
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Are you currently editing a novel or a non-fiction book? I’ll be teaching Editing Fiction and Non-fiction for Arvon in Shropshire (UK) in January 2025. More information.
