Bestselling author Sally Rooney's fourth book, Intermezzo, is one of the best novels published in 2024, writes Telegraph literary editor Cal Revely-Calder. Photo / Kalpesh Lathigra
Bestselling author Sally Rooney's fourth book, Intermezzo, is one of the best novels published in 2024, writes Telegraph literary editor Cal Revely-Calder. Photo / Kalpesh Lathigra
This year’s standout novels offer a mix of brains and fun, with side helpings of sex, God and rural Australia.
Last year, many a leading novelist had something new to sell: Salman Rushdie, Sebastian Barry, Zadie Smith. But, by and large, it was nothing special. OnlyBret Easton Ellis and Eleanor Catton impressed me, not just by finding their stylistic groove but by treating their respective subjects – serial murder and eco-activism – with a blend of seriousness and lightness of touch. Forget those old shibboleths “highbrow” and “lowbrow”: there should never be a contradiction between being thoughtful and having fun. And in 2024, the two biggest novels proved the point.
First, James by Percival Everett, which might be the book of the year and ought to have won the Booker Prize. (That went instead to Samantha Harvey’s lush Orbital, from 2023.) Playful and viciously comic, it dissects and rearranges Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: as Jim, aka James, flees downriver with Huck, Everett gives him a secret linguistic register – exactly the same as his white masters’ – which he conceals beneath his “black” dialect. To be a slave, then, is to play a ludicrous role. It may feel odd to enjoy a screwball caper in which racism is the main motif, but that’s Everett’s gambit and he pulls it off: every scrape into which James and Huck crash seems more cringeworthy and cartoonish than the last. The acme is a hilarious scene with a minstrel band that few novelists would dare to write.
Percival Everett's James dissects and rearranges Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake offers equal, if dissimilar, joys. We’re in rural France, where a caustic, hard-drinking spy, whose name “Sadie Smith” is probably as fake as her breasts, is delving undercover in an eco-commune. The activists might or might not be planning acts of violent sabotage, inspired by a reclusive guru who might or might not exist. Like Everett, Kushner exults in fiction’s capacity to bend the truth. If you don’t yet own both novels, get to a bookshop stat.
Among the rest of the grands fromages, there was much to enchant the returning reader, though less to attract the new. In Long Island, Colm Tóibín reintroduced us to Eilis of Brooklyn fame, two decades down the line: enraged by her husband Tony’s affair, she retreats to Ireland, where new love awaits. Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, the fictional memoirs of an Anglo-Burmese actor, was his third novel in a row to be fashioned from neatly fragmented memories. And with The City and Its Uncertain Walls (tr Philip Gabriel), Haruki Murakami again explored the border between reality and invention, and whether that border is ever clear, as a pair of young lovers converge in an ethereal “dream library”. You couldn’t claim that any of the above was treading new ground – but if it ain’t broke, as they say.
Long Island by Colm Tóibín
Even the dead were on song. Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s autofictional novel War, a harrowing panorama of death at the Somme, was believed lost until 2019; five years on, it appeared in English in two separate editions. Look for the New Directions one, translated by Charlotte Mandell; it’s less slangy and anachronistic than the Alma version by Sander Berg. Admittedly, not all departed writers did well from being summoned back. Gabriel García Márquez’s novella Until August (tr Anne McLean), about a married woman whose annual visits to her mother’s grave become occasions for one-night stands, was as hotly anticipated as any new book this year – yet on arrival it felt too rough. (The great Colombian had agreed: though parts were published in magazines, he held the rest back, thinking his powers had waned with age. A decade after his death, his sons have had other ideas.)
Until August by Gabriel García Márquez
To return to a mantra of this annual column: if you want to be surprised, go to the independent publishers. They can’t coast on A-list laurels; they have to nurture novelty if they want it, and themselves, to survive. First, then, Granta, who had my book of the year in 2023, Sarah Bernstein’s beautiful Study for Obedience. In 2024, they had early success with The Lodgers, the debut novel by poet Holly Pester. In it, as a young woman moves into a sublet flat, she becomes haunted by thoughts of who might be moving into the one she’s left behind. It’s a crafty book, speaking to the shifting sands of the housing market in which young people today are trapped. Superb, too, was Mariana Enríquez’s A Sunny Place for Shady People (tr Megan McDowell), a collection of enthralling and sinister stories from one of Latin America’s brightest stars. Next year, Granta’s lead offering will be a fiction-memoir hybrid from Catherine Lacey – a literary highlight of the spring.
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
Over to Verso, whose young fiction list continues to grow. (At this point, a disclosure: I’m working on a book with them myself, albeit on the non-fiction side.) Atop their pile were two sensual novels, brought into English belatedly and not a moment too soon. In Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only (tr Charlotte Barslund), published in Norway in 2001, two married writers fall into a coruscatingly passionate affair; and in the late Izumi Suzuki’s Set My Heart on Fire (tr Helen O’Horan), published in Japan in 1983, a young woman sleeps and drinks and betrays her way around Tokyo’s music scene. Both are thrillingly written and pulse with dirty life.
Faber & Faber, by comparison, were underpowered. It’s a widespread opinion that their fiction today is far from the cutting edge. Luckily for the sales department, Faber’s superstar came through: Intermezzo,Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, proved her best since her debut. A detailed study of two brothers, shared grief and interpersonal power, it offers a reminder of why she’s acclaimed – and why, in her attention to the everyday weft of lives, she’s one of the most political writers around. Rachel Cusk returned, too, with Parade, a typically riddling story, or series of stories, about everyday life interwoven with works of art. It won the Goldsmiths Prize, but that surprised me and many others: by Cusk’s standards, it’s pretty wan. In the spring, Faber’s best prospects will be books by Eimear McBride and Benjamin Markovits; both are always exciting, but that list needs real work.
South Korean author Han Kang won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Photo / Lee Chunhee
No such issue at Fitzcarraldo, Britain’s window on what’s new in fiction abroad. This year’s Nobel Prize, which went to the South Korean writer Han Kang, eluded them – remarkably, had another Fitzcarraldo writer won, it would have been their third in a row, and fifth in 10 years – but never mind: the quality of their books held up. If you want eerie, try Anne de Marcken, with It Lasts Forever & Then It’s Over, about an undead woman navigating the weirdness of the afterlife; if you want heartache, try Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s The Son of Man (tr Frank Wynne), about a boy whose father drags their family into the wilds to live off-grid.
Del Amo wasn’t the only French writer to impress. Michel Houellebecq, that charming man, took on euthanasia with disquieting aplomb in Annihilation (tr Shaun Whiteside), and Virginie Despentes did the same for the politics of MeToo in Dear Dickhead (tr Frank Wynne; MacLehose, £18.99), framed as an exchange of letters between an ageing actress and the middle-aged male writer who publicly insulted her. Less controversially, I would recommend Anne Serre’s novella A Leopard-Skin Hat (tr Mark Hutchinson), a slim and haunting portrait of a woman slipping into mental illness, and the dear friend trying to keep her afloat.
It was a good year, too, for Australia. Gerald Murnane’s Inland, first published in 1988, was reissued in January; cryptic and beautiful, it unspools a novelist’s musings on his life, travels and work. Murnane, an old-fashioned guy who lives in a remote Victorian town, despises the ocean and never wears sunglasses, has become a cult figure and a contender for the Nobel. Another success was Tim Winton’s Juice. Imagine 1001 Nights narrated by Max Rockatansky: set in a post-apocalyptic future, it follows a nameless young assassin sent to murder the descendants of BP, Exxon and other corporate titans, who are blamed for destroying the Earth. The biggest splash, though, was made by Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, in which a late-middle-aged woman retreats to a convent only to fall prey to its petty dynamics. In my view, it didn’t find enough purchase on the spiritual life, but the Booker judges disagreed and made Wood the first Australian in a decade to be shortlisted for the prize.
Australian writer Tim Winton. Photo / Supplied
Wood was at least on trend, because some of 2024′s most incisive writers had the divine upon their mind. The most entertaining of them, serialised in these pages in July, was Joy Williams’sConcerning the Future of Souls. It’s a strange and witty sequence of stories in which Azrael, the disaffected Angel of Death, frets about his job to a preening, stylishly dressed Satan. Back on Earth, Sarah Perry’s novel Enlightenment elegantly tackled the clash between faith and science in a strict Baptist milieu. And Morning and Evening (tr Damion Searls), another affecting novella by last year’s Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, set a foot in both realms at once: it shows us a Norwegian man experiencing the first moments of his life, then the very last. A word for Chris Kohler, too, who knows that piety often makes for excellent jokes. In his debut, Phantom Limb, a young minister in a Scottish fishing town, who’s struggling to engage both with God and with his attractive ex-girlfriend, discovers an animated severed hand – and soon has to stave off not just the onset of religious mania but the get-rich-quick schemes of a local spiv.
Choice by Neel Mukherjee
On the subject of piety, let’s hope that 2024 proves, once and for all, the incompatibility of good fiction, which is rich and complex, with “cancel culture”, which is not. Despentes’s novel was a rare success, because she made it more than just satire: she drew people in whom, even at their worst, you could see yourself. But more chatter attended two clunkier books: How I Won a Nobel Prize, in which Julius Taranto invented an odd American institute for “cancelled” academics, and Mania, in which Lionel Shriver conjured a world where the doctrine of Mental Parity means you can’t call people stupid any more. Fair enough for a pub discussion, yet fiction has to cut deeper if it wants to make you think. Try, instead, Neel Mukherjee’s Choice, a novel woven around people in moral crises. Whether he’s following a publisher terrified that the Earth is doomed or an academic involved in an Uber hit-and-run, Mukherjee dispenses with the platitudes fashionable in every walk of life while taking seriously the sincerity – however hapless and doomed – of anyone who wants to do some good.
My First Book by Honor Levy
A final thought: always seek out someone new and interesting. Among a slate of brash debutants – other names on lips included Gabriel Smith and the duo Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente – the liveliest was Honor Levy. In My First Book, she assembles a series of high-energy tales, probably autobiographical, about parties, love, the internet, drugs, eating disorders and sex. Levy rolls her eyes at her own cliches and her writing thrums with punky energy, full of internet-speak, pithy phrasing and the sort of shocking opinions that would get her “cancelled” – if she weren’t courting it with glee. Maybe you’d call her childish; sometimes she really is. But in a year when the older writers stuck to familiar scripts, it was bracing to see younger ones, as Bret Easton Ellis did 40 years ago, rip them up and remix them with style. “Breaking the rules,” Levy writes, “is the only hope we have.” I agree.
Cal Revely-Calder is literary editor of The Telegraph.
