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!

Reviewing my year’s reading is an annual ritual and this year, like any other, has been one of many delights and some disappointments. I’ve been able to read more during 2020 because … well, the pandemic and so forth. Add on a couple of operations and time to read while convalescing, and my total was greater than last year. This isn’t going to be anywhere near a comprehensive list but here are the highlights.

As I read for research and in order to teach writing, there will always be the ‘reading for the job’ aspect. This year many of those books were to do with theories of creativity, neuroscience and the search for meaning, which have helped me clarify some of my thinking for the book I’m writing on mindset for writers.

When it comes to novels and short stories, I loved Pat Barker’s The Silent Girls, C.J. Sansom’s Tombland, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, Susannah Rickards’s Hot Kitchen Snow, Geraldine McCaughrean’s Where the World Ends and Susan Fletcher’s Let Me Tell you about a Man I Knew – the last of which took me back to Provence in the heat of summer, in its account of Vincent van Gogh’s sojourn at the asylum in St Rèmy de Provence. All of these offered me what I love most: beauty of language, being transported in time and place, something memorable to stay with me after I closed the covers.

For sheer gorgeousness, Jackie Morris’s The Unwinding, which I subscribed to via crowdfunding publisher Unbound, was so very beautiful I bought her second version, The Silent Unwinding, where the text is removed and the illustrations remain so you can use it as a notebook. (Did I? No! Too beautiful!)

In non-fiction, Halle Rubenhold’s account of the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper, The Five, was a powerful portrayal of the blighted existences of women toppling into destitution in heartless Victorian times – a true-crime contradiction of the message of A Christmas Carol. No one here is saved. Raynor Unwin’s very human and uplifting account of tracing the South-west coast path with her husband, in an act of desperate life affirmation in the teeth of illness, took me to Devon and Cornwall once more. (I’ve just been given its sequel for Christmas.) Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am was heartstoppingly good – especially the first part. Oh my. Unforgettable.

In the weeks of recovery from a major operation, I indulged in comfort reads. Escape reads. Reading that washed over me, lulled me, took me out of myself when I was in pain. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were fluffy reads: I like a good thriller so Tess Gerritsen featured – The Shape of Night. Clare Flynn’s Penang trilogy (The Pearl of Penang, The Prisoner of Penang and A Painter in Penang) described the lushness of the Far East but also the privations of war, loss and betrayal. JJ Marsh’s Odd Numbers was a spikily intelligent multi-voiced thriller, ranging through a satisfyingly wide array of locations. But there were also the heartwarming reads: Carol Drinkwater’s The House at the Edge of the Cliff (south of France once more!); Barbara Erskine’s Time’s Legacy (she is the diva of time-slip novels) and Debbie Young’s warm and witty cosy crime novel Best Murder in Show, with its gentle satire of village life.

As I said, this is just a selection and I really feel it was a good year of reading, this one. But you’ll see from the image I have picked four highlights.

First, Maria Popova’s Figuring. Now, in no way is this an easy read. It’s the kind of book that highlights just how much you don’t know. And it is all about connections. You may have heard of Brain Pickings, Maria’s blog, where she highlights the wisdom of philosophers, artists, musicians, scientists and writers. That description completely fails to capture the breadcrumb trail of fascinating quotes and snippets she lays and the way she dances you from one to another, spinning the lines of connection between them. You can spend whole days just clicking links! Well Figuring is this in book form: she explores the lives of women astronomers, artists, writers, thinkers. Some well known, like Emily Dickinson and Rachel Carson, others less so, like Margaret Fuller, Maria Mitchell and Harriet Hosmer. She shows them trying to create lives of mental and social independence in contexts of greater or lesser restriction, simply because they are women. It is dense, knotty, incredibly detailed, often hard to follow as she tracks to and fro between lives and eras, at times utterly gripping (there is a shipwreck scene that will etch itself on your brain), and always fascinating. It took me weeks to read but I am so very glad I did.

Next we have Anna McGrail’s A Life in 26 Letters. It is exactly that: Anna uses correspondence she sent or was sent to trigger memories of stages of her life. I am proud to say I read this book in draft and am so glad to see it in print. I love everything about it. Her voice is precise, mordant, utterly non-self-pitying. I love her observations: unsentimental but capable of triggering tears and sighs of recognition and fellow-feeling. I love her wit. I love that she and I share the same generational background so every detail – alien, no doubt, to editors of publishing houses who don’t share those memories and experiences – strikes a chord. In short, you identify with her. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Thirdly, Jane Davis has explored the position of women in 1950s society in her compelling novel At the Stroke of Nine O’Clock. She interweaves the stories of three women: an aristocratic grande dame, a club hostess and a famous actress shunned for her extra-marital affair, as all three are affected by the fate of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged for murder in England. The sense of the era is impeccably evoked, the dialogue brittle and resonant, the tension between public life and private secrets is ever-present and the overall effect poignant and powerful. (Jane’s previous novel, Smash all the Windows, was my book of the year 2018 – read about it here.)

Finally, Mary Oliver. Upstream is a collection of essays. Meditations celebrating the importance of just … living, seeing, noticing. I knew her already as a poet, but this book blew me away. It is so profound, yet that profundity is couched in prose often deceptively simple. Lucid, limpid, wise, with phrases to roll around your tongue and preserve in your brain, memorable, incantatory – a kind of blessing that such a brain and voice should have existed, a comfort in a world of Covid and climate change, yet hers is not a sentimental, escapist brand of nature-loving. It looks things in the eye. This is a book that looks at the preciousness and littleness of life and celebrates its significance in every form it takes, on this lovely, blighted, vulnerable planet of ours.

OK, I mentioned disappointments at the start of this review. There are always disappointments. Some books lose the power to charm us, even if we loved them once. Some hold no appeal, ever. Some are shallow, some repellent. What disappointed me most this year – and I am not going to name them – were the books that could have been better, had they been properly edited. And they were all trade-published books. I’m sorry, but really. There were gaping plot-holes and trailing plotlines. There were factual inaccuracies and anachronisms, howling errors in grammar and spelling. There were rushes to unsatisfying endings, as if the editor had told the writer to tie it all up in the last 20 pages, thanks. One of these had been shortlisted for the Booker a few years back, another was from a multi-published thriller writer whose previous book I had enjoyed. All started well, but then failed to deliver. And that is disappointing.

But that may be the editor in me speaking. I read as a reader. But I read as an editor too – I cannot for the life of me switch that beady-eyed perspective off!

Signing off, looking forward to the books I’ll read in 2021!

Books of 2024

Books of the Year 2020

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