The ten best novels of 2024 – according to literary experts
London: From Samantha Harvey’s spellbinding Booker winner Orbital to Percival Everett’s ambitious retelling of Huckleberry Finn, James, these are the books that made the most lasting impression on our expert reviewers.
1. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden Recommended by Manjeet Ridon, associate dean interna-tional for the faculty of arts, design and humanities, De Montfort University. The Safekeep, a novel about the expropriation and theft of Jewish property during the second world war, revisits a dark chapter of Dutch history. Before being deported, Dutch Jews were stripped of their homes and be-longings, and forced to flee Amsterdam with what little they could carry. Van der Wouden’s debut novel shines an ironic light on the act of keeping or maintaining things that were to be reclaimed by their rightful owners, but which were lost or stolen in the war. The trauma of this history hangs over the lives of three siblings grieving the loss of their mother. Isabel, the novel’s lonely protagonist, lives alone in the family house, keeping it in order as her late mother would have wanted.
2. Orbital by Samantha Harvey Recommended by Debra Benita Shaw, reader in cultural theory, Univer-sity of East London. Winner of the Booker prize, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital skilfully exposes the hu-man cost of space flight, set against the urgency of the climate crisis. While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the International Space Station. Their everyday routine of tasteless food and laboratory work is in stark contrast to the awesome spectacle of the blue planet, oscillating between night and day, dark and light, where international borders are meaningless.
3. Gliff by Ali Smith Recommended by Sarah Annes Brown, professor of English literature, Anglia Rus-kin University. Gliff shares many of the same concerns as Smith’s recent Seasonal Quartet (2016-20): the effects of climate change, the plight of refugees, and the growth of intolerance and authoritarian-ism. But this novel is set in a dystopian Britain where all these problems have intensified in frightening ways. Smith follows in the footsteps of a growing number of literary novelists who have turned to sci-ence fiction in recent years, as boundaries between genres become less rigid. This is the first of a planned pair of novels – the second to be called Glyph. Although the two words sound identical, their meanings are quite different.
4. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney Recommended by Orlaith Darling, postdoctoral fellow in contemporary English literature and critical theory, University College Dublin. Intermezzo is perhaps Rooney’s most mature reflection on how relationships operate as exercises in optimism, both in each other and in the world itself. The novel is remarkable and bracing on the exchange of promises that happens in rela-tionships, on the currency of hope they run on and the mutual, voluntary emotional debts they create. These debts, of course, are not always repaid, and that is part of the point: the stakes of love are high, and we run the risk of defaulting and being defaulted on. And yet, for Rooney, this risk is always worth taking. It must be, because it is all there is. Rooney’s is a world in which relationships sustain us and in which small daily miracles make life seem more bearable than is proportionate.
5. James by Percival Everett Recommended by Emily Zobel Marshall, reader in postcolonial literature, Leeds Beckett University. James is an incredible rewriting of Mark Twain’s 1884 American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everett has reclaimed Twain’s “Jim” from the peripheries, boldly plac-ing him centre stage. Just like the original book, it’s set in the pre-civil war plantation south. It’s 1861, war is brewing, and James hears that he may be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his family. He goes on the run with the resourceful young white boy, Huck Finn. This is a literary, writerly and scholarly novel. 6. Butter by Asako Yuzuki Recommended by Jane McBride, PhD candidate in literature, University of Galway. Asako Yuzuki’s Butter melts uneasily in your mind. Descriptions of food, sex and violence be-come transcendent, almost detached from anything physical. The prose is intense and immersive, but also clear, never dense or heady. Journalist Rika conducts prison interviews with murderer Manako Kaji, a woman who lured lonely men with her delicious and deadly gourmet meals. As Rika talks with this strange woman, she finds herself drawn deeper into her world, fascinated by Kaji’s obsession with physical pleasure. This is something that affects all aspects of Rika’s life, from relationships with friends and family to her own body and childhood memories. 7. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar Recommended by Alice Kelly, assistant professor of literature and history, University of Warwick. How do we make meaning out of death, especially when it is violent and sense-less? This question preoccupies Cyrus Shams, the protagonist of Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Martyr! Cyrus is trying to make sense of the death of his mother, Roya, who was lost in an aeroplane shot down by US military forces over the Persian Gulf. In the wake of her death, Cyrus and his father Ali move from Iran to the US. T.
8. Parade by Rachel Cusk Recommended by Scarlett Baron, associate professor in the department of English, UCL. Parade is a searching book, written against conformity. It is an exploration of the role of gender in the genesis and reception of art – a novel in which selfhood, creativity and family relations are submitted to unflinching analytical scrutiny. Cusk’s examination of these subjects is conducted through a kaleidoscope of narratives, told from different points of view, in which the same themes crystallise and dissolve again and again. The book’s four chapters focus on the lives of artists, each of whom is referred to as “G”. The Stuntman tells the story of an artist who, “perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down”.
9. Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan Recommended by Ankhi Mukherjee, professor of English and world literatures, University of Oxford. This is an unforgettable novel of formation – an awakening from tribal loyalties into new possibilities of identity and agency – set in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, during the civil war (1983 to 2009). The protagonist, Sashikala Kulenthiren, is a Tamil teenager, walking apace with her brothers toward medical or engineering degrees, and elaborations of a future peaceful with books, dialogue and organic living. When the government atrocities and the call of militancy start dis-appearing boy after boy from the peninsula, Sashi is reduced to a bit-player of history. She becomes discombobulated by grief for fallen or embattled brothers. However, she finds strength and survives with a women’s collective that agitates, organises and treats hypermasculinity, instead of serving it. Ganeshananthan anatomises a separatist movement without once glorifying its concerted violence. The book is history-adjacent, the narrator says.
10. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck Recommended by Edward Sugden, senior lecturer in American studies, King’s College London. In Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, a character asks whether a human being is “a con-tainer to be filled by time with whatever it happens to have handy” or if there can be life beyond his-tory. The novel dramatises this question throughout. The book, which won the 2024 International Booker prize, is set in the last years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949-90) as western capitalism erodes a collapsing socialism. Against this context, two lovers, the ageing writer Hans and the late teenage Katharina, live out a doomed affair, having met on a bus one rainy evening. The mun-dane deceptions of infidelity that make up the book – Hans and Katharina meet in cafes, watch films, listen to music, go shopping, take secret holidays – are freighted with history and emotional intensity as the plot plunges towards its ending, where the links between politics and the personal become tragically clear.
(The Conversation)