Sequels and reboots had been the pattern: Pat Barker, Percival Everett, Nick Harkaway and Colm Toíbín all went again for seconds a method or one other. David Nicholls’s outside romcom You Are Here and Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital, bestsellers each, spoke to a starvation for escape that was solid in lockdown, nonetheless on writers’ minds. What’s forward in 2025, I don’t dare hazard, however right here’s what I preferred greatest from a yr by which I used to be drawn, I now see, to character-led novels of relationships, not all the time dysfunctional.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber)
She’s too shy; you possibly can inform she didn’t research artistic writing; her characters by no means cease consuming bread… simply three of the frankly batshit statements currently uttered amid the discourse frenzy that greets this gifted younger novelist’s each final transfer. Hats off to her for blocking out the noise to rediscover her wonderful A-game in a story of two Irish-Slovak brothers struggling to emerge from the shadow of their mother and father’ long-ago divorce. So humorous and observant about love of many alternative sorts, that is the e book I loved most in 2024.
The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota (Harvill Secker)
One of Britain’s most interesting writers wrung page-turning drama from the unsexy-sounding topic of a commerce union election in Derbyshire. Two management hopefuls, each British Asian – one a middle-aged manufacturing unit employee, the opposite a privately educated variety officer – battle soiled over their contradictory visions of leftwing politics.
Godwin by Joseph O’Neill (4th Estate)
Another novel that shouldn’t work however does. Half of it’s a drily compelling office procedural about bickering pharmaceutical grant writers – see what I imply? – whereas the opposite half is a transcontinental chase caper involving an African soccer prodigy. Both narratives twine round a murky household psychodrama akin to a depraved stepmother fairytale, as if O’Neill hadn’t already given us sufficient.
Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes (translated by Frank Wynne) (MacLehose Press)
Lockdown met #MeToo in probably the most entertaining novels to have emerged from both. Centred on the testy bond between a washed-up actor and a cancelled novelist who turn out to be pen friends after one slags off the opposite on Instagram, it’s impish in addition to honest, written with all of the lapel-grabbing bluntness you’d anticipate from the title.
Liars by Sarah Manguso (Picador)
Novels of feminine rage have turn out to be one thing of a advertising and marketing cliche lately – ditto, tell-all autofiction that cuts near the bone – however don’t let any of that put you off this grippingly acrid story of marital breakup, by which a wounded ex-wife recounts sleepwalking right into a disastrously draining years-long union.
One for my stocking
I’ve been snacking on Martin Amis’s outdated Observer journalism – the time he bought ghosted by Madonna; his report on Manchester United’s last-gasp treble win – and I wish to return to the novels, not too long ago reissued with A-list intros. Rachel Cusk as soon as stated of Amis that he was “one thing of an honorary girl: the eye due his work is snagged, as a substitute, on his self”, so I’d like to take a look at what she says in her new preface to London Fields (Vintage Classics).
