Our 12 favourite books of 2024 (so far)

Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel in seven years has given me more pleasure than any other book this year — but it also had me weeping on trains. As with his 2004 masterpiece, The Line of Beauty, it’s about a man who has spent his life beguiled by an upper-class family and it continues Hollinghurst’s preoccupations with class, sexuality and social change. However, its exploration of race sets this book apart. The story is narrated by a gay Anglo-Burmese actor called Dave Win whose path keeps on criss-crossing with his school bully, Giles Hadlow. Half a century on, Giles has become a leading Brexiteer with serious consequences for Dave. Hollinghurst’s seventh novel is a deceptively low-key story, funny, beautifully observed with some sparkling set pieces, but relatively undramatic until the book’s tense closing pages that are well worth waiting for. You couldn’t wish for a finer exhibition of Hollinghurst’s talents.
Our Evenings (Picador £22). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

There is something pleasingly anti-parochial that the one British writer who has made it on to the Booker Prize shortlist has written the most un-British of books. Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, takes place over 24 hours on the International Space Station where a team of six astronauts — four men, two women — experience sunrise every 90 minutes. It’s a slim book with barely any plot but what’s striking is how full of awe and reverence it is for the earth below the astronauts. Harvey has eliminated all excess or flab in the prose to produce the most gorgeously poetic opening pages of a novel that I’ve read in a long time. I was knocked out. It’s also surprisingly funny, particularly as the astronauts banter about all the pointless things they miss about Earth such as ornaments and rugs. One of the most original novels I’ve read this year.
Orbital (Vintage £9.99). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

You have to applaud Rachel Kushner for thinking up a wheeze like this. Her fourth novel is an unconventional espionage story narrated by a supremely unreliable female spy-for-hire. Sadie Smith — not her real name — is a hard-drinking, hard-shagging agent hired by a shadowy employer to disrupt a commune of eco-activists in southwest France. It seems they are being led by a guru who lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes in primitivism. Hauled up in this rustic joint, Sadie wrestles with her “constructed self” as she tries to rationalise the fictions she has told others about her identity. It’s witty, it’s unpredictable and it keeps you in suspense until the very final pages. It might just win the Booker prize too.
Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape £18.99). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

Ceci Browning, assistant books editor of The Times

Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik

Few writers have as strong of a hold on young women (including me) as Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, the two most brilliant chroniclers of LA in the Sixties. In this dense joint biography, journalist Lili Anolik uses extensive interviews and never-before-seen letters to expose the remarkable parallels between the writers, who each experienced tragedy and success in equal measure. Few are aware that Didion changed the course of Babitz’s life, when she sent an essay that her young friend had written to Rolling Stone magazine. Then, when Babitz wrote her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, Didion edited it, an unprecedented favour. Theirs was an almost Shakespearean relationship, full of longing, jealousy and thorny ambivalence. The book’s pretty long, but also immaculately researched and laced with gold. If you enjoyed The Year of Magical Thinking or Slow Days, Fast Company, definitely give it a go.
Didion and Babitz (Atlantic £20). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht

In this odd but evocative book, a middle-aged man brings his perpetually drunken elderly mother on a road trip across Switzerland. After a trip to the bank, they set out to squander their enormous family fortune, originally amassed through dubious investments in the armament industry. Most of their time, however, is spent fighting over other matters: a bulging stoma bag, her father’s unapologetic Nazism, the likelihood that a hotel they stop at is a cult headquarters. Vodka and barbiturate pills are among the few constants in what turns out to be a fast-paced, scatter-brained and eccentric plot. The Swiss author’s autobiographical novel is technically a sequel to his 1995 debut Faserland, but easily stands on its own two feet, a frolicking rumination on waning parent-child relationships and the struggles of approaching the final chapter of life.
Eurotrash (Serpent’s Tail £12.99). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

Hares get a bad rep, dismissed as big ugly rabbits. But with her account of finding and raising an abandoned leveret during lockdown, Chloe Dalton sets the record straight. Only by scouring the literature on how to care for European brown hares — sparse compared with hunting manuals — and leaning on the know-how of her veterinarian sister was she able to keep the undomesticated beast alive. But one day it hopped over Dalton’s garden wall and disappeared. Grief-stricken, the author believed her accidental pet would fall prey to buzzards or stoats, but the miracle of the story is that the leveret kept coming home, sleeping by Dalton’s fireplace by day and scampering freely in the surrounding fields by night. She even installed a hare-flap in her back door. For those made claustrophobic by the grey blocks of the city, this love letter to the natural world is the perfect antidote.
Raising Hare (Canongate £18.99). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

Laura Hackett, deputy literary editor of The Times and The Sunday Times

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

It’s the novel that’s divided the books desk — but for me, Sally Rooney’s fourth novel gets a big thumbs-up. Peter and Ivan are two not-so-close brothers, dragged further apart when their father dies. But while they figure out their relationship with each other, they must negotiate their romantic lives too. Twenty-two-year-old Ivan enters into a clandestine relationship with an older woman, Margaret, while Peter must choose between his ex-girlfriend Sylvia and the much younger college student Naomi. Rooney’s decision to centre the novel on a sibling relationship, to narrate from the perspective of two men and to introduce a new, almost Joycean kind of syntax gives Intermezzo a real maturity. This is a chewier novel than her previous three — it takes some work. But the rewards are enormous.
Intermezzo (Faber £20). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

The Netherlands, 1961. People are still haunted by the Second World War, still finding “bullet holes in the barks of trees”, and still remember (but do not speak of) the neighbours who had left in the night or been bundled into trains and off to “the camps”. In this world, the debut author Yael van der Wouden conjures up one home overburdened by history. Lonely Isabel’s world is rocked when her brother’s annoying new girlfriend comes to stay for a month. Anger bubbles over into passion — and then a brilliantly executed twist elevates this love story into something much darker. I’ve been raving about this all year — and I’m delighted to see it on the Booker prize shortlist.
The Safekeep (Viking £16.99). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

The Party by Tessa Hadley

The novelist and short story writer Tessa Hadley is alternately beloved and teased for her focus on British middle-class life. But she does it so well! From doilies to olive oil to extramarital affairs, Hadley picks up every detail of life in the bourgeoisie. This, her first novella, is no different. It follows two sisters, Moira and Evelyn, in 1950s Bristol, as they navigate the postwar melting pot of posh types, bohemian art students and taxi drivers at a party. The consequences of the night reverberate ac9ross the story, as the sisters shed their innocence. Hadley’s power is in the details: by the end, Evelyn has left her little leather-bound New Testament behind her, and sits “with her elbows on the table, talking animatedly, gesturing with her cigarette for emphasis”. She has come of age.
The Party (Jonathan Cape £12.99). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

Robbie Millen, literary editor of The Times and The Sunday Times

Wellness by Nathan Hill

The American author Nathan Hill is superb at anatomising the lives of the modern educated bourgeoisie, everything from their eating fads to sex habits. Arty creative types Jack and Elizabeth fall in love while students, living in a slummily bohemian neighbourhood in Chicago in the 1990s. Twenty years on they are married with a kid, still living there, although the area is now boringly gentrified. Their relationship is under strain, their idealistic career dreams dashed. Is this just a midlife blip or is their relationship about to go under? It’s a little long but what pulls you through are some brilliant set pieces such as a mortifying trip to a swingers’ club or his inspired riff on the 21st-century mania for parenting books. There are some terrific observations on the politics of kitchen design and why air travel is made deliberately bad by the airlines. My favourite scene: Jack watching pornography in the dial-up internet age. So original.
Wellness (Picador £10.99). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

James by Percival Everett

Here’s a rash claim: I bet James will win the Booker. It deserves to. It’s a subversive reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but told from the point of view of the slave, Jim. Everett has great fun mocking how white authors like Mark Twain traditionally rendered African-American speech; in James, the black characters play stupid and speak in an “oh lordy lordy” way whenever they are in the presence of white people; in private, they speak like college professors. It’s witty, clever and also works as a pretty decent adventure story.
James (Mantle £20). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

Some Men in London: Queer Life in London 1945-67 volumes one and two, ed by Peter Parker

Gay life in London is told through snippets of newspaper reports, excerpts from diaries, letters, plays and novels, plus official reports. Volume One is the darker of the two — a reminder of how cruel the law was, which criminalised homosexual desire; volume two with decriminalisation on the cards is bouncier. It is an extraordinary piece of research, pulled together expertly by Peter Parker, who clearly has a superb camp sense of humour. “How to Spot a Possible Homo”, a bizarre piece of Sunday Mirror journalism, is one of the inadvertently funniest things I’ve read. “The fussy dresser. When one, two or three-button jackets are in he is the first to wear them. His shirts are detergent bright, his tie has the latest knot and is always just so, and he can never pass a mirror or a shop window without a sly glance at himself.”
Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-1967 (Penguin Classics £30 each). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk

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