Books of 2024

Like so many people, when I come to the end of the year I review all sorts of aspects of it: work, family, health, the state of the world — trying not to linger long on the last of these … Of course, as a writer and reader, books are core to my world, whether I’m helping my editorial clients or guiding new writers, or producing my own work. I’ve ended 2024 on a flourish, publishing my first new book in some years – and I will have more to say about that process in future posts. For now, though, this post is about highlighting some of the books I’ve read and liked in 2024. (They are not all in the photo above as quite a few were read on Kindle.)

I read over 60 books and as in previous years non-fiction books made up a high proportion. Quite a few I am not going to mention at all as they were research books for the novel I’m working on and I don’t want to pre-empt that. Nor am I going to pick a ‘book of the year’ because so many were impressive and for different reasons so it is like picking your favourite child! I’ll list them under categories and you can take it as read (!) that they’re all worth spending time with.

Non-fiction and Memoir 

Judi Dench: Shakespeare, the Man Who Pays the Rent, in which she shares her passion for the magic of Shakespeare’s writing and combines that with her memories of a long stage career.

Rory Stewart: Politics on the Edge. Read this and you will want to laugh and cry. You’ll learn how it is a miracle that anything at all gets done in a failed political system like ours. 

Franny Moyle: The King’s Painter. Any lovers of Wolf Hall will enjoy this, a biography of Hans Holbein, painter of Cromwell at the height of his career and of Ann of Cleves, the trigger of Cromwell’s downfall. 

Alan Garner: Powsels and Thrums. I attended an event at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford where actor Robert Powell gave wonderful readings from this extraordinary book, a collection of thoughts, memories and opinions by a unique writer, now 90 years old. If you’re interested in language, deep history and the nature of creativity, this is for you. But it is the brief account of the man he went running with that will stop you in your tracks and bring tears to your eyes. 

Fiction 

I’m listing these alphabetically and they are all jolly good reads in various genres. Language and story and character and setting: these are the watchwords for any good book. I leave you to explore! 

Margaret Atwood: Stone Mattress. Read this for the first three stories if nothing else. They are blindingly good, with biting satire of the literary world, ambition, envy, rivalry, dreams and losses.

Jane Davis: The Bookseller’s Wife. I love Jane’s writing for the richness of detail and this one, set in the 18th century, is no exception. High quality research lies behind every book she writes and I can wait to read the sequel.

Clare Flynn: The Artist’s Wife and The Artist’s War, the last two novels in the Hearts of Glass trilogy; both of these novels feature social change and the First World War – often to heartbreaking effect. 

Jean Gill: Among Sea Wolves, the second of her 12th century Viking stories which blend adventure with heart and otherworldliness. She’s another writer who takes extraordinary care with her research but never lets it weigh her prose down. The narrative momentum is unstoppable and the rich range of vibrant characters compelling. The third in the series, Hunting the Sun, is due out in March and I can’t wait to see where her hero Skarfr’s journeys lead next!  

Linda Gillard: Time’s Prisoner. A house with history, where past and present interweave – that’s Linda’s speciality and she doesn’t fail us with this one. In fact reader demand means that she is close to finishing a sequel!  

Clare Keegan: Small Things Like These. Having spent the past few months writing my new collection of short stories I know that the power of short fiction rests in how much lies packed within seeming simplicity, how the selection of the tiniest sensory detail can convey so much. This brief book is tight, poetic, indignant and moving – it reminded me of Joyce’s Dubliners. 

S.G. McLean: The Bookseller of Inverness. This is set in the aftermath of the crushing of the Jacobite Rebellion at Culloden. (You can read more in my previous blogpost, about the Historical Novel Society’s conference at Dartington Hall in Devon, where Shona McLean was one of the speakers.) 

Alison Morton: Exsilium. This is a novel that gives more background to her successful Roma Nova series and I was gripped by its multiple point of view approach and fascinated by a part of Roman history I was unfamiliar with – oh, and it was tense! 

Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kitteredge. So many of my friends have loved this book and at last I’ve read it and understand why. For sharpness of observation, comedy that hurts and dialogue that couldn’t be more economically powerful, she’s hard to beat.  

Pip Williams: The Bookbinder of Jericho. This is close to home for me, set as it is in Oxford during the First World War – the bonuses being the details of how the Oxford University Press worked in those days and, as in Clare Flynn’s books, the fascination with the struggle for women’s rights in the early 20th century. 

Poetry 

I’m aiming to publish some of my own poetry this year or next. Here are three collections I admired in 2024. 

Jessica Bell: A Tide Should Be Able to Rise Despite Its Moon. This is a powerful, no-holds-barred collection, the theme of which is the tenderness and resentment of motherhood, where roles must be adjusted, resisted, succumbed to. 

Patrick McGuinness: Blood Feather. I bought this one as a result of another Blackwell’s bookshop event. Patrick read the poems so well, conveying wit, irony and loss in another collection that confronts the mother-son relationship. 

Jenny Lewis: From Base Materials. A superb collection, which I’ve revisited several times since publication. She explores, amongst other things, ageing and mortality – particularly from the female perspective. My two standout poems are ‘Love in Old Age’ and ‘For Sarah Everard, and all those who are/were not protected’, a copy of which should be sent to every police force in the land. It is stunningly good and shockingly true. 

As I said at the start, this is not a comprehensive list of my year’s reading, nor is it a hierarchy. I hope that you may be interested in reading some of these too, and if you do, let me know your thoughts!

And if you’re interested in my work, well, there’s the new edition of The Chase, with its beautiful new cover and there’s my new book, a collection of short stories all set in France, One Morning in Provence. Now that January’s here, you may be thinking of travel and holidays – you can use it for a bit of armchair travelling in the meantime!

My favourite reads of 2019

Well, hey, it’s that time again: time to look back over the past year. Time to take stock. I’m starting by selecting some of the books I’ve enjoyed most in the past twelve months. My year has as usual involved lots of ‘professional’ reading: searching out examples of writing technique for workshops, books that compare with clients’ work so I can give guidance as to genre and market etc. To be honest, I’ve been feeling that I’ve lost some of the joy of reading fiction. Too often, my editorial brain kicks in and I start analysing, spotting flaws, inconsistencies and repetitions and coming up with ways to improve the structure or the prose. This means that I find myself enjoying non-fiction more and more, as you’ll see from the list.

It also means that some books disappointed me. Some of these were ‘big-hitters’ with huge marketing clout behind them. It wasn’t that they were bad, as such, just that they weren’t quite as mind-blowing as I had hoped they’d be. And two of them, one a heavily-promoted debut, the other a prize-winning historical novel, really could have done with serious editorial advice! The debut started brilliantly, then followed the law of diminishing returns, culminating in an unbelievable ending, sketchily executed. The historical had gorgeous language and detail but neither gripped nor convinced me.

Right, now I’ve got the Scroogey curmudgeonly stuff out of the way (and no, I’m not going to name the books in question!), time for the goodies. These are books that stood out for me as jolly good reads.

Fiction:

I like crime novels and the stand-outs for me were Lisa Jewell’s Watching You and JJ Marsh’s Behind Closed Doors (the first in her Beatrice Stubbs series – strangely, although I’ve read several, I hadn’t yetread the series starter!) and Bad Apples. I love how these books combine crime and mordant wit along with a wonderfully unconventional heroine and her eccentric circle of friends. A bonus is the range of European backdrops for Beatrice’s adventures. Her latest, Black Widow, is on my list for 2020.

Emily St John Mandel: Station Eleven. Now, it took three goes for me to get into this book but once I was in I was really in, increasingly awestruck by the architectural complexity of a post-apocalyptic story full of intelligence, pathos and the celebration of human creativity in a destroyed world. It was gripping, memorable, haunting, clever. One I will definitely re-read.

David Nicholls: One Day. I was late to the party on this one but loved how he captured the different eras of his characters’ lives. Great dialogue, great social observation.

Non-fiction:

Michael Palin’s Erebus is about a famous ship, lost for more than a hundred and fifty years under the icy waters of the Canadian Arctic. It was one of the famous Franklin expedition ships and that’s a subject I’ve been fascinated by for decades so I couldn’t wait to read the book. What was a revelation, though, was the story of that ship before it became part of that doomed expedition: the gallant Erebus had led a life of adventure for many years, including voyaging the stormy seas of the Antarctic. Palin is genuine in his enthusiasm and the deceptively light touch of his narration is a delight.

Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad about my Neck has all her trademark sharp wit. Wry laughter and recognition throughout. I wish she were still around.

Bernadette Murphy’s Van Gogh’s Ear is an extraordinarily detailed examination of the mystery of the famous event in Arles. She applies the skill of a detective and the familiarity of someone who lives in that region to unpick the legend and get to the bottom of what really went on. I bought this at the ‘Van Gogh in London’ exhibition at Tate Britain, one of the highlights of my year.

Robert Macfarlane’s Underland is an exploration of the hidden places of the world, deep under our feet, deep in the bowels of cities, caves and mines. It is gorgeously written and it is profoundly thoughtful, so much so that it’s one of those books you can only read in instalments because it feels like too much for you to take in. Plus some of his accounts are quite horrifying, if you are at all prone to claustrophobia. I remember when I was 19, crawling on hands and knees through a low passage in the Sterkfontein Caves in South Africa, utterly freaked out by the lack of light and the sense of the weight of rock poised above my skull – this book brought that sensation back to me. But if you want an erudite guide who will show you places you never imagined and take you on a journey of historical and ecological resonance, he’s your man. (Lofoten, Norway, oh wow – echoes of Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter.)

Clare Josa’s Ditching Imposter Syndrome helps you to do just that. It’s inspiring, direct and encouraging, waking you up to how imposter syndrome manifests itself in your life and career. Like her earlier Dare to Dream Bigger, it is one of those books you devour fast, knowing you’ll go back for a slower, thoughtful read after.

I read Robert Poyton’s Do/Pause during my research for my book The Unputdownable Writer’s Mindset (coming out next year - sign up for the wait list here!) It’s a small book but a really wise one, highlighting that in our fast-paced hyper-productive lifestyles we become our to-do lists and lose sight of what truly matters or how to manage our lives. He is ‘not so interested in how you cram more in to your life but in how you get more out.’ At this time of the year, at the solstice, at the season of festivals, this would be a good book to read and remind yourself that sometimes it is important to step off the treadmill.

Good reads yet to come:

Of course, like you, I have a vast to-be-read pile. Here are some I own but didn’t get to this year: Marion Turner’s Chaucer – A European Life; Peter Moore’s Endeavour (another ship book!); Maria Popova’s Figuring – I have followed her amazing Brain Pickings blog for several years and highly recommend it. Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and C.J. Sansom’s Tombland (I was given it last Christmas and cannot believe I haven’t read it yet!) Plus many novels by my writer friends, a whole range of clever, enchanting and gripping fiction queuing up on my Kindle or my bookshelves!

Which were your favourite books of 2019 – I’d love to know! Do please comment below and share your recommendations! I have no single book of the year this year but you can read about my choice last year - the amazing and powerful Smash all the Windows by Jane Davis here.