2024, A Year in Reading: Best Books of the Year

I read 190 books in 2024. That is, I think it's fair to say, a lot of books. And yet somehow, when I come to make my year-end summary, all I can think of are the books I didn't get to. The series I meant to start. The reading projects that I've been putting off for months. The awards contenders I still haven't given a fair shake. The impulse buy I haven't gotten around to. The ARCs that are piling up in my kindle.

So what did I end up reading in 2024? I caught up with a lot of 2023 publications (but not, of course, all the ones I wanted to get to). I read all of Patricia Highsmight's Ripley books (some of them are decent, but you can stop with the first). I went a little deeper than I previously had into Tolkien marginalia (one good thing to come out the increasingly turgid Rings of Power). I started Ryoko Kui's delectable manga Delicious in Dungeon (I have almost reached where the first season of the excellent anime adaptation lets off). I read a lot of Georgette Heyer (some thoughts here). I read all of Jeff VanderMeer's Area X series (and reviewed the most recent one). I read for awards, and for reviews, and for the Locus Recommended Reading List. I read romance, mystery, books discussed by podcasts I like, books published decades ago, books about to get film and TV adaptations. I read a lot. And somehow it wasn't quite enough. Something they don't tell you about reading a lot is how it intensifies the feeling that just around the corner is that great, unmissable read, the one you're going to want to scream about from the rooftops.

Well, there were quite a few books like that this year, as you'll see below. And as I did last year, I have added some extra categories for books that didn't quite make this list, or trends that didn't quite produce an all-time favorite, but still feel worth shouting out as the year draws to a close. So if you're feeling self-conscious about the number of books you read this year—and please, I urge you, do not; the right number of books to read is the number you read and enjoyed—perhaps there will be something here that attracts you and lights a fire under you. Will I read as many books—or more?—in 2025? Who can tell. But one thing I can tell you, as a now-confirmed voracious reader, is that there are always more books you want to read than there is time and energy to read them. 

Best Books of the Year:

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

In the world of Armfield's second novel, rising sea levels and warming weather have caused near constant flooding, eroding both physical structures and the underpinnings of civil society. For the three sisters at the novel's center, brought together by the death of their estranged father, this collapse is merely a backdrop to their true obsession, of relitigating their abusive childhood. debating which one of them had it easier than the others, and constantly putting the worst possible interpretation on anything the others say. The result initially feels quite disorienting: is this climate fiction, or a dysfunctional family drama? It's not until we realize that it is not just the sisters, but everyone around them, who is distracting themselves—with futile pursuits, magical thinking, cultlike behavior—that we realize Armfield has actually written a different sort of climate novel. One that is concerned not just with the physical, social, and economic effects of climate change, but the psychological ones. With the defense mechanisms people put up to avoid facing what is happening to the world, which can sometimes become their own hazard. It's only when they realize the kind of story they're in that its heroines can start to do something about the state of their lives—and the same, Armfield seems to be saying, might be true of us. (review)

The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill

Fairy tale retellings have been all the rage for several years now, and I admit to being a little tired of the form. My expectations of Barnhill's novella, which retells "The Crane Wife", were therefore quite modest, but instead it shocked me with both its force and originality. The narrator is a teenage girl living in a small Midwestern town, caring for her younger brother while their mother, a respected but flighty fiber artist, keeps the lights on with her art but otherwise leaves all other practical considerations—buying groceries, arranging sales, fobbing off teachers and social workers—to her daughter. This fragile equilibrium is shattered when the mother brings home a new lover, a gargantuan crane for whom she begins weaving an immense, all-consuming new work. Told in sharp, dry first person narrative that only just conceals the narrator's fear and desperation, The Crane Husband perfectly captures her mingled love and anger towards her mother, her fear of the crane husband and determination to protect her brother, her loathing of authorities who see her merely as a problem to be solved and desperation for someone to hold out a helping hand, and the moments in which she is still able to recognize her mother as a great artist, and the work she's destroying herself to produce as something miraculous. By its end, The Crane Husband is precisely what a modern fairy tale should be—dark, sad, and strangely wondrous.

Henry Henry by Allen Bratton

Hal Lancaster is the dissipated eldest son of a duke, his aimlessness, gayness, and relentless drug consumption blithely tolerated by his family and social set because his only real purpose is to stay alive and produce an heir. So accustomed is everyone in his orbit to dismissing Hal as a fuckup that they can't see what is truly at the heart of that behavior—the decades-long physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by his father, Henry. When a hunting accident hurls Hal into an unexpected romance with his childhood frenemy, the man who embodies everything he has always failed to be, he suddenly finds himself with the chance at a full life—and must confront the entrenched forces of his class, who would rather he remain silent. Plot-wise, Henry Henry resembles recent blockbuster romances like Boyfriend Material or Red, White & Royal Blue, but Bratton takes a more psychologically realistic approach. There is no guaranteed happy ending here, and Hal is often a frustrating character, prone to self-sabotage and uncomfortably sympathetic towards the people and institutions that have been hurting him. What there is instead is a delicate but often bracing portrait of abuse and its lingering effects, of first love and its limitations, and of a young person coming into their own, however haltingly and imperfectly. (review)

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

The premise of Bradley's debut reads like self-insert fanfic: the nameless narrator is assigned as the liaison to Commander Graham Gore, an officer on the doomed Franklin expedition who has been rescued from his historical death and brought to near-future England. As she introduces him to things like motorcycles, Spotify, and Sherlock Holmes (but also decolonial theory and why it's not OK to call someone a "negress"), the two inevitably fall in love, even as the narrator begins to suspect that the program that has brought Gore and other doomed people from history into the present has ulterior motives. Very quickly, however, Bradley begins to introduce pointed barbs into her romantic romp. The narrator is more careerist than we might expect, more willing to lie to Gore and to go along with her superiors' obvious manipulations of him. And in her attempts to teach him the correct, enlightened way to talk about race, colonialism, and immigration, she only reveals the ways in which these issues remain unsolved, and in some cases worsening, problems for her society. As much as it is a moving love story, The Ministry of Time is also an intelligent, often disquieting meditation on how we engage with the past, and how its tendrils stretch into the present. (review)

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

I am, of course, awfully late to the party with this novel, which has been on my TBR for decades and which, surprise surprise, turns out to be exactly as good as the almost seventy years of praise for it would have you believe. Focused tightly on the perspective of Tom Ripley, a petty conman with aspirations to gentility, the novel follows him to Italy where he first befriends, then develops an obsession with, and finally murders and steals the identity of, a debauched child of privilege. The thriller plot is impeccably crafted—the machinations with which Tom conceals his crimes and manipulates everyone around him into seeing him as an innocent victim are delivered with clockwork precision. But at the same time, the novel also leaves space for passion—for Tom's deeply suppressed homosexual longings; for his hunger to belong to the world of luxury and privilege that he is, at best, a guest in; for his eruptions into sudden, uncontrollable violence. It's the balance between these two aspects of Ripley—the reptilian psychopath and the yearning young man—that is where the true genius of this novel lies (and which its adaptations, however successful, have mostly failed to capture). Highsmith might not have been the first to make the villain of a story its protagonist, or to situate her story within the point of view of an unrepentant psychopath, but she set a bar that crime and suspense writers for the better part of a century have been trying, and only rarely managing, to clear.

A Mourning Coat by Alex Jeffers

A thoroughly mundane story told in a thoroughly fantastical world, Jeffers's goregous, haunting novella follows a man in the days and weeks following the death of his father, after years during which he succumbed to dementia. Consumed with the minutiae that follows a death—organizing a funeral, dealing with relatives and lawyers—the son also finds himself struggling with all the loss that the last few years of his life have encompassed, not just of his father, but of his own career and relationships, whom he let fall by the wayside while consumed with his father's care. All of this pain and emotion are channelled into the construction of a magnificent mourning garment, which becomes both an expression of grief, and a path back into life. All of which might have been encountered in any naturalistic, character-based novel, but A Mourning Coat is set in a fantasy world with an elaborate history of conquest and colonization, which Jeffers expands on in the background of his story—it underpins such choices at the color of the mourning coat, or the progression of the main character's career—while leaving his main story almost completely devoid of anything fantastical. It's an original and quite unexpected approach to the fantasy genre that makes this novella, not just a moving story, but a fascinating exercise in balancing genre expectations.

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

If you want a one-sentence pitch for this novel, which won the Arthur C. Clarke award earlier this year, it might be: Contact for the 21st century. As in Carl Sagan's novel, In Ascension focuses on a female scientist who joins the astronaut program when her research converges with what might be alien contact. Instead of a meditation on the conflict between science and religion, however, what MacInnes's take on this story concerns itself with are the demands of science, and of space exploration in particular. Its heroine is unemotional and self-contained, willing and perhaps even eager to cut herself off from family, friends, and any chance of a normal life for a glimpse of the unknown. Like this year's Booker-winner Orbital (which feels very much of a piece with In Ascension, despite belonging to different genres), the novel is at once skeptical, and in awe of, this kind of monomaniacal dedication to a cause, recognizing its necessity while also reminding us that human life is happening somewhere else. All the while, the alien plot builds in a background, raising questions about our heroes' understanding of their mission and themselves, leading up to a conclusion of cosmic significance. (review)

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

The crux of Makkai's twisty, busy, unputdownable novel is that it is at once a seamless and irresistible merger of some of the most popular crime tropes of the last few years—true crime podcasts, murders in boarding school, MeToo—and a sharp, often devastating examination of how their popularity, in fiction and in discussions of actual crime, has often had baleful effects, especially for victims. Returning to her old school to conduct a seminar on podcasting, the narrator just happens to mention to her students that when she was at the school, a fellow student was murdered, and that she has never believed the right man was convicted for the crime. Naturally, this causes the students to reopen the investigation, and as she good-naturedly sits for interviews with them in which she discusses her experiences at the school, her relationship with the victim, and her recollections of the murder, the narrator quickly reveals how feigned her insouciance about all these things actually is. That despite a distance of years, she is still angry and hurting, not just over the murder, but over the atmosphere of misogyny and sexual assault from which it emerged. This is ultimately what I Have Some Questions For You is actually about—not a particular, and particularly outrageous, act of violence, but the ubiquity of that violence, and how often it is normalized, or turned into entertainment. Even the narrator herself is not innocent in these matters—at the same time as she pushes her students to investigate one act of sexual violence, her husband and podcasting partner is accused of sexual impropriety. By its end, I Have Some Questions For You reaches a thrilling and satisfying conclusion to its murder mystery, but situates it in a world in which thrills are insufficient, satisfaction is hard to come by, and justice is heartbreakingly rare.

Dry Land by B. Pladek

Short and beautifully told, Pladek's novel follows Rand, a young forestry agent in the early 20th century, who has a profound love of nature, a fascination with the new science of ecology, and a broken heart over the collapse of natural environments, such as a wetlands he tried to save as a boy. When Rand discovers that he has the power to make plants, trees, whole forests and ecosystems appear in the blink of an eye, he thinks he's found the solution to the environmental crisis whose signs he sees all around him, while his superiors see him as a tool, and ship him off to Europe to grow timber for the war effort. What neither they nor Rand are willing to publicly admit, however, is that the plants he grows inevitably die, leaving poisoned ground behind—a secret that poisons Rand's tentative romance with fellow agent Gabriel. Despite its historical setting, what Dry Land turns out to be about is the supposedly modern phenomenon of climate despair, to which the cure is not for Rand to assume superhero-like control over nature, but to learn to understand himself as merely a part of it. (review)

The This by Adam Roberts

A rollicking cyberpunk comedy about loneliness and the impossibility of human connection, Roberts's novel begins with a premise that already feels a little dated: what if a service existed that could beam Twitter directly into your brain? Perhaps a tad implausibly, the result is a hivemind whose users express blissful contentment and a sense of togetherness, quickly splitting humanity into two separate, and increasingly belligerent, species. The two main storylines show us the early days of the hivemind's emergence, in which a lonesome, unambitious man is recruited to introduce a virus into its systems; and the height of its powers, in which a childish buffoon, recruited as canon fodder in the war against the hivemind, is revealed to have the power to control it. The real meat of the novel, however, comes in gonzo interludes that switch genres and styles with a delightful speed and facility: a swift, Kim Stanley Robinson-like passage in which the hivemind terraforms Venus; a retelling of 1984 in which Eurasia and Oceania are themselves hiveminds, whose unincorporated citizens are repeatedly informed that they are literally not human; a chapter in which a single being embodies every human who has ever lived; a bloody deployment of troops onto a beach that feels straight out of Starship Troopers. Taken together, they all amount to a meditation on connection, which is both essential, and impossible. What the hivemind offers its users is a corrupted sham of togetherness, but as the novel makes clear, human beings on their own can never fully understand one another. Somehow, in Roberts's exuberant hands, this meditation on a heartbreaking human truth becomes something exhilarating and even joyful.

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

Twenty years after The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a novel that starts from a similar premise but with a different focus: what if the Native American city of Cahokia endured into the 1920s, and became a Native power center within the United States? Spufford's novel is remarkable for the breadth and inventiveness of its worldbuilding, which imagines not only how the modern Cahokia would work, but how the country, continent, and world around it would be altered by its existence. For placing a twisty murder mystery within that setting, one that takes its detective protagonist to every one of the city's stratums, from the palaces of the city's princes, to the factories where burgeoning communists argue that Cahokian independence is merely a means of oppressing the proletariat, to white enclaves where the KKK sells white robes in bulk, to the twisty streets of the old town where ancient cults exert the real power in the city. Finally, for that detective himself, who is part-Native and part-black, who dreams of becoming a jazz pianist while realizing that he can actually do good as an officer of the city, who distrusts Cahokia, but is also seduced by it. The result is thrilling, fascinating, and thought-provoking, a world so real—and so compelling—that is sad to realize, when you turn the final page, that it does not actually exist. (review)

Honorable Mentions:

A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall - Cod-Victorian lady scientists in fantasyland has been a fast-growing subgenre for several years, but Cathrall's take on the subject is one that has really engaged me. Set on a water planet, it depicts a society of scientists and scholars who have dedicated their lives to plumbing the ocean's depths. When two aspiring naturalists forge an epistolary friendship and then disappear, their siblings join forces to reconstruct their correspondence and uncover what they were working on. The mannered, overly formal style of the letters nevertheless reveals a touching love story between two lonely, damaged people, and a society that, despite its commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, does not fully understand itself.

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio - Somewhat overshadowed by the juggernaut that was The Ministry of Time, Gramazio's debut is another entry in what I am beginning to term "elevated romantasy". Returning home from a night out, the novel's heroine discovers a husband in her apartment whom she has no memory of. She soon discovers that if she sends the husband to the apartment's crawlspace, another will return in his stead, which quickly becomes a whirlwind tour through her romantic possibilities. Despite the romcom premise, what the novel quickly becomes is a meditation on what we look for in couplehood. Should the heroine dismiss potential husbands for wearing shoes with toes? Should she hold out for The One? Should she send the latest husband away and stay single? Gramazio ends up working through her premise—and what it means for her heroine—in thoughtful, and ultimately quite affecting, ways.

Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie - For nearly a decade, Leckie has been producing top notch science fiction and fantasy novels with so little fuss that it has become easy to take her for granted. Lake of Souls is a reminder of what a remarkable writer she is. Each of these stories—some of which take place in the universe of Leckie's novels, while others are standalones—constructs an entire, elaborate setting, complete with culture, customs, unique physical attributes, flora and fauna. Then it sets a rollicking story within that setting. And then the next story does it all over again, casually delivering a premise that in another author's hands might have powered whole novels. The sheer force of inventiveness, of storytelling verve, on display here is simply dizzying, and the result is some of the best short fiction of the last year.

Star Trek: Lower Decks - Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio - It's been a month since I read this book and I'm still not done feeling delighted by it. Not only a great story in the world of the cancelled-too-soon Star Trek series Lower Decks, but an absolutely brilliant application of the Choose Your Own Adventure storytelling format that turns its limitations on their head. The result feels less like a novel and more like a game, in which the book teaches you how to productively break its own rules, and brings its characters to a happy ending. (review)

North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher - Once a commonplace of SF publishing, mosaic novels (also known as "fix-ups") have fallen slightly by the wayside. Whitcher's book is a reminder of why this is an effective format, and how disparate stories, taken together, can become a greater whole. Set over the course of centuries on a planet colonized by humans whose society is deeply stratified and mannered, this a sort of stealth cyberpunk story, with issues such as extreme social stratification, the right of AIs, and the enslavement of uploaded personalities cropping up in unexpected, but deeply affecting, configurations. 

Most Intriguing Trend: Core SFnal Tropes in Core LitFic Novels

Outsider SF has been a known phenomenon for many years, and in the past it has often produced disappointing work, whose authors seemed to feel that they had invented the wheel while delivering an utterly perfunctory handling of their premise and tropes. A new generation of writers seems to be changing the landscape. Novels like Flux by Jinwoo Chong, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, In Universes by Emet North, and Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías have been published by mainstream publishers, and aimed at mainstream and crossover audiences. But they all center around foundational SFnal tropes (time travel, aliens, alternate universes, etc.) which they handle in sophsticated, thoughtful ways. The purpose to which these novels deploy those tropes, however, is often purely literary. In Beautyland, the heroine's alienness may be real, or it may be a metaphor for having to go through life as the neurodivergent daughter of a single, financially struggling mother. Flux's protagonist uses time travel as an expression of his obsession with the past, which has poisoned his future relationships. In Universes might be the tale of how its heroine developed the ability to jump between alternate realities as a way of dealing with guilt over past choices, but it could also be read as a literary exercise, a collection of stories featuring the same characters in different settings, situations, and genres. Some genre readers may find this approach frustrating (and equally, some litfic readers may ignore the books' genre elements entirely—I have encountered many readers of Beautyland, for example, who have read it as a purely naturalistic novel), but to me it represents an interesting broadening of the horizons of both publishers and authors. More importantly, it's producing some very good books.

Best New Series: Dublin Murder Squad by Tana French

New to me, that is. Fans of mystery and crime writing have been raving about French's series for more than a decade, and this year was the one in which I finally realized what all the fuss was about. The Dublin Murder Squad series consists of six novels, each of which follows a different detective as they investigate a murder case in the titular city. The mysteries are well drawn, and their unraveling involves a lot of interesting detail about the workings of the Irish police force and legal system (as the detectives repeatedly remind us, their job is less to solve the mystery as to put together a case that the prosecution can successfully pursue). But the heart of all six novels is less in the mystery as in their detective protagonist, who invariably discovers that the case has some personal resonance for them, which can lead them to self-destruction or epiphany, and sometimes both. These are gripping psychological thrillers, and masterful demonstrations of the art of constructing an unreliable narrator, who will spend hundreds pages assuring you that they are fine, even as it becomes alarmingly clear how not-fine they are. In addition, French expertly weaves folklore into her stories, so that some of the books in this series are in a delightful superposition between mystery and fantasy. And she has a lot to say about the social and economic convolutions that buffeted Ireland in the last few decades—the financial downturn of the late 20th century, the 90s tech boom, and the 2008 financial crisis—and how they have affected Irish society. Each of the novels is a microcosm of a different part of Dublin that also reveals how these financial currents have affected how Dubliners see their lives—and how they are drawn into crime and violence.

Novel That Best Incorporates a "Fuck You" to the Critics of the Author's Previous Book: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

After becoming a superstar fantasy author, Kuang made the jump into general fiction with Yellowface, a sharp, darkly funny satire of the publishing world and the way it consumes authors of color. The narrator, a failing author, is on hand when her former college classmate, a rising literary superstar, dies in a freak accident. In the affray after the death, the narrator makes off with the dead woman's just-completed new manuscript, a sprawling historical narrative about enslaved Chinese workers in WWII, and presents it to her agent as her own work. This sets off a chain reaction of increasingly immoral choices, not the least of which is the decision by a white woman to present a novel by an Asian woman, about Asian people, as her own work. As she edits the stolen draft into a publishable form, the narrator repeatedly tells us that she is fixing it by making it less strident, its depictions of racism less obvious, its potted history of colonialism and exploitation less blaring—exactly the criticisms that were lobbed from some quarters at Kuang's previous novel, Babel. I made those criticisms myself, and I stand by them, but I have to admit that it's pretty bold, and not a little bit funny, for Kuang to put them in the mouth of someone who is not only a monster, but clearly completely high on her own supply. And in a way, that even feels a little validating of my problems with Babel. One of the most effective parts of that novel, after all, was precisely the thing that works best in Yellowface—the self-justifying point of view of a white woman who sees herself as the most victimized person in the world, a perspective that offers the kind of queasy sympathy, mingled with disgust, that the rest of Babel so sadly lacked. As someone who was sorely disappointed in Babel, Yellowface was a reminder of what Kuang is capable of, including how sharp her authorial blade can be.

Most Promising Publisher: Neon Hemlock

Perhaps not a surprising choice, given that I highlight two of their 2024 publications—A Mourning Coat and North Continent Ribbon—in the list above. But I wanted to state explicitly that this small, independent publisher, with an emphasis on queer authors and stories, have had a stupendous year. As well as the two novellas mentioned already, I was also impressed by A.D. Sui's The Dragonfly Gambit, a space opera in which a rebel sets in motion a plan to bring down an empire that reads like a bloodier Arkady Martine. The fact that these are all novellas feels particularly notable. For some years now, the novella field, and especially the novella categories in the Hugo and Nebula awards, have been completely dominated by Tordotcom. That's not entirely unjustified when you consider that Tor are not only putting serious money behind acquiring and producing novella-length work, from established and new writers, but are actually doing the work of publicizing and promoting these stories. But the Tordotcom line also has a certain sameyness of style and emphasis, which has of course been reflected in recent years' award ballots. I'd like to see nominators for those awards looking a little further afield, which of course means reading a little more broadly. The Neon Hemlock 2024 novella line is a great place to start. (It's cutting it a bit close, but until the end of the year Neon Hemlock have got a 50% off sale on all their ebooks, using the code WINTER2024.)