The 67 best novels of 2024 – so far

Day by Michael Cunningham – ★★★★☆ 

Cunningham’s elegiac new novel follows the lives of three haunted New Yorkers, living in the same Brooklyn brownstone, over three dramatic years – starting in April 2019, several months before Covid reached America. Read our Day review

Top Doll by Karen McCarthy Woolf – ★★★★☆

The reclusive American heiress Huguette Clark left behind a vast collection of dolls after her death aged 104 in 2011. One of them ended up in author McCarthy Woolf’s hands, and in this eccentric verse novel, she imagines what goes on inside their heads. Read our Top Doll review

Wellness by Nathan Hill – ★★★★☆

Hill’s second novel explores the in-vogue concept of “wellness” for which the modern world strives, using the vehicle of a portrait of a couple settling down in Chicago in the 90s. Read our Wellness review

The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez – ★★★★★ 

This layered, thoughtful novel follows a nameless writer who’s house-sitting for a friend, and – as the pandemic begins – finds herself trapped there with the friend’s son and his beloved macaw. They find a way to rub along together. Read our The Vulnerables review

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett – ★★★★★ 

The short story writer’s first novel, set in Ballina in Co Mayo, revolves around the kidnap of sweet-natured teen Doll as collateral for his elder brother’s crimes. Dev becomes haplessly complicit in the operation when his sinister cousins hold the boy at Dev’s dead mother’s house. Read our Wild Houses review

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee – ★★★★★

In McGhee’s magnificent debut, the unemployed basement-dwelling protagonist is offered debt forgiveness in return for becoming a “dream auditor”, whereby he must, at night, expunge white-collar workers’ anxiety or distress so they might better serve their masters. Read our Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind review

What Will Survive of Us by Howard Jacobson – ★★★★☆

The British writer’s 17th novel has midlife pair Lily and Sam tumble into love on page one – but when they remember themselves, their respective 20-plus-year marriages, and their numerous incompatibilities, they must work out how to make their way in the world together. Read our What Will Survive of Us review

My Heavenly Favourite by Lucas Rijneveld – ★★★★★

The International Booker-winner’s second novel takes a Lolita-esque turn, its narrator an agricultural vet infatuated with the 14-year-old daughter of one of his clients. It’s graphic, unsettling and brilliantly written. Read our My Heavenly Favourite review

The Lodgers by Holly Pester – ★★★★☆

In this sharply honed debut novel by a superb young poet, a young woman becomes obsessed with a peer she has never met – the person she imagines must have replaced her in an old room she used to rent. Read our The Lodgers review

Change by Edouard Louis – ★★★★★

This superb work of autofiction has the leading French author retrace his formative teenage years. He doesn’t spare himself or the reader, razing his own psyche with ferocity. Read our Change review

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti – ★★★★☆

The Canadian novelist and essayist cut up 10 years’ worth of her diaries and ordered the sentences alphabetically, producing some strangely moving results, and conveying the raging, lusting, despairing turbulence of her mind. Read our Alphabetical Diaries review

Fury by Clyo Mendoza – ★★★★☆

The Mexican poet’s debut novel is a collage of character portraits, set in the towns of a war-town Mexican desert, and honing in on the fraternal love between two half-brothers. Strange, dreamlike and clever. Read our Fury review

Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux – ★★★★☆

Theroux’s 30th novel, about George Orwell’s years as a policeman in Burma, is both credible as history and enjoyable as fiction. It joins the many books published last year to mark the 120th anniversary of Orwell’s birth. Read our Burma Sahib review

Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh – ★★★★★

This magnificent debut, which opens in 2006, sets a young man’s coming-of-age and struggles with sexuality against the deep social fractures and impatient modernity of near-contemporary Nigeria. Read our Blessings review

The Painter’s Daughters by Emily Howes – ★★★★☆ 

This debut paints a deft portrait of painter Thomas Gainsborough’s family, narrated by his daughter Peggy. Her sister Molly’s behaviour is becoming increasingly erratic, and each family member has different ideas about what can best be done to help. Read our The Painter’s Daughters review

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov – ★★★★☆

The Ukrainian author launches a fast-moving new crime trilogy. Set 100 years ago in Kyiv, this first instalment tells the story of Samson Kolechko, a naive young Ukrainian swept into murder and conspiracy during the Bolshevik occupation of the capital in 1919. Read our Death and the Penguin review

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken – ★★★★★ 

This smart novel, which takes aim at our modern obsession with tidy endings, is set in a post-apocalyptic afterlife. A nameless, undead, cannibalistic narrator has a series of experiences to convey de Marcken’s thesis about endings – such as retaining awareness after being decapitated. Read our It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over review

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood – ★★★★☆ 

Wood’s beautiful seventh novel follows an unnamed woman who abandons urban Sydney life, visits her parents’ graves for the first time in 35 years, and moves to a Catholic compound near her hometown, in search of some kind of answer – though she’s not sure exactly what. Read our Stone Yard Devotional review

2054 by James Stravridis and Elliot Ackerman – ★★★★☆ 

The co-writers follow their thriller 2034 with their predictions for 2054: “the Singularity”, the equivalent of thousands of years of evolution crammed into months or even weeks when machine and human learning will integrate into one consciousness. We observe the fallout, and watch a cast of characters trying to cope. Read our 2054 review

Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman – ★★★★☆

Waldman’s scathing, though often humorous, second novel follows a cast of characters worn down by the drudgery of supermarket warehouse life in rural New York state. Sharply observed, and a confrontational read for Amazon-dependents. Read our Help Wanted review

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel – ★★★★★ 

This debut novel, set over the two days of an amateur boxing tournament for teen girls in Nevada, draws each fighter’s backstory with impressive sympathy, and skilfully isolates telling details. Read our Headshot review

Tell by Jonathan Buckley – ★★★★☆

Buckley’s 12th novel, set at rich man Curtis’ estate and narrated by his gardener, tells the story of Curtis’s life, times and bedroom antics through a series of interviews with those who’ve played a role in his life. Read our Tell review

Choice by Neel Mukherjee – ★★★★☆

A triptych of tales, dissecting our moral and economic decisions, that move between England and India in frequently beautiful prose. We hear from literary editor Ayush; academic Emily; and finally, a family in rural India. Read our Choice review

My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes – ★★★★☆ 

The Irish writer reunites us with the five-sister family of her debut, focusing this time on the second-youngest, Anna. The latter blows up her glossy New York life and moves back to Ireland, helping her friend Brigit work out who vandalised a controversial local wellness retreat. Read our My Favourite Mistake review

Overstaying by Ariane Koch – ★★★★★

In this debut novel, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed small town takes in a destitute wanderer on a whim. The fault-lines of the arrangement quickly emerge, and the bizarre lodger causes all manner of sinister, but comic, chaos for the hapless landlady. Read our Overstaying review

Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis – ★★★★☆

The Bosnian writer’s novel is pure horror. With a kind of apocalypse occurring around them, we’re told several stories about various sinners, troubled by impending death and the moral dilemmas of their lives. Our mysterious narrator is the one who’ll decide whether they go to Hell. Read our Anomaly review

James by Percival Everett – ★★★★★

Everett reworks Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to centre the character most talked about and criticised in waves of controversies, bannings and retellings: Jim, here renamed James. This is a modern masterpiece. Read our James review

The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan – ★★★★★

Callahan’s first book is a semi-autobiographical novel based on her experience waking up one morning with sudden deafness, a condition that puzzled researchers and left her life upended. Read our The Hearing Test review

How to Make a Bomb by Rupert Thomson – ★★★★☆

In this magnetic portrait of radicalisation, a middle-aged, middle-class man – a respected historian, with a picture-perfect family life in leafy north London – feels a sudden, all-encompassing revulsion for modern life, and becomes a domestic terrorist. Read our How to Make a Bomb review

The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota – ★★★★☆

Sahota’s fourth novel about identity and personal history follows Sajjan, a novelist who rekindles his friendship with Nayan, a washed-up activist, when returning to their hometown in lockdown. We gradually learn more about Nayan’s troubled past. Read our The Spoiled Heart review

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry – ★★★★☆

Set in the world of Perry’s beloved The Essex Serpent, this layered novel follows Thomas, a 50-year-old writer, as he helps a local museum director dig into an unsolved mystery, and his friend Grace, who meets a man offering an alluring escape from her family home of cloistered piety. Read our Enlightenment review

The Coast Road by Alan Murrin – ★★★★☆ 

A crisp debut, this Irish novel follows poet Colette trying to illicitly see her son again in a gossipy small town, after leaving her husband and children years ago (but unable to divorce, with the novel set just before its 1996 legalisation). Read our The Coast Road review

Long Island by Colm Toibin – ★★★★★

This is the superb and long-awaited sequel to 2009’s Brooklyn, in which, after years of quotidian mundanity in that New York suburb, Eilis returns to Ireland for an indefinite period, furious about a betrayal by her husband. Read our Long Island review

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud – ★★★★★

A rich, sprawling saga following a family from 1920s Algeria to the USA in 2010, as they go to war, move continents, develop dementia and alcoholism, and marry (or fail to). Epic but still paying attention to the everyday – is Messud the 21st-century Balzac? Read our This Strange Eventful History review

Going Home by Tom Lamont – ★★★★☆ 

A spirited, shrewd debut about 30-year-old Londoner Téo, whose life changes overnight. Old flame Lia asks him to babysit, but, long-depressed, commits suicide that night – leaving Téo to bring up two-year-old Joel. Read our Going Home review

Briefly Very Beautiful by Roz Dineen – ★★★★☆ 

A disturbing, stylish debut set in a dystopian version of a Britain-like country, marked by the government’s gradual atrophy, environmental breakdown and eco-terrorism. A mother and her children attempt to escape their city for the country. Read our Briefly Very Beautiful review

Cleavage by Cleo Watson – ★★★★★

The second erotic novel by the ex-No 10 aide (who served during Johnson’s premiership before her firing – or resignation, even she isn’t sure – in 2020). We again follow the trials and tribulations of Jess, Bobby and Eva, a journalist, and two prospective MPs respectively. It’s more fun and wild than you could hope – and features some oddly recognisable characters. Read our Cleavage review

Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler – ★★★★☆ 

This debut is a tender account of a 26-year-old American man, newly sober, who drifts between homes, jobs and partners aimlessly, stuck in a stagnating society and economy. Vivid and conversational prose – and a fairly bleak portrait of a generation. Read our Early Sobrieties review

The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel – ★★★★☆ 

Londoner Nicola gave up her unsuccessful art career for a listless life as a nursery nurse. But one day, she finds one side of a 30-year-old correspondence from a woman uncannily like her, who she gradually becomes obsessed with. An unnerving tale, playing intelligently with ideas of tragedy and failure. Read our The Last Sane Woman review

Silverback by Phil Harrison – ★★★★☆ 

When thug William Rusting is found dead, his son Robert is charged. On the jury at his trial is James Fechner, a middle-aged, middle-class doctor from the other side of Northern Irish society – but who soon finds himself inexplicably drawn towards and into Rusting’s life. A portrait of Belfast, masculinity, and its tantalisingly enigmatic doctor protagonist. Read our Silverback review

Rosarita by Anita Desai – ★★★★★

This magnificent, taut novella, Desai’s first fiction in 13 years, relays the story of Bonita, an Indian student of Spanish who is approached one day by a stranger claiming to know her mother. It sets Bonita off on an obsessive quest to learn the truth about her mother. Told discomfitingly in the second person (“your mother”). Read our Rosarita review

Napalm in the Heart by Pol Guasch – ★★★★☆ 

This dystopian debut opens in an unnamed city on the Catalan river Tet, after a mysterious ecological disaster at the local factory. We follow the unnamed narrator as he tries to navigate post-apocalyptic life. Using unflinching descriptions of violence and some beautiful turns of phrase, it asks whether individuals can withstand a ruined world. Read our Napalm in the Heart review

Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Deáki – ★★★★★

Based on the true story of Mary Toft, a woman from Godalming who in 1726 achieved notoriety for purportedly birthing a litter of rabbits (in reality, a product of her inserting animal parts into her vagina before the “births” – a con she was later exposed for). A smart, original debut, resisting the fashion for clunkily turning historical female figures into 21st-century feisty “girlbosses”. Read our Mary and the Rabbit Dream review

Great Fear on the Mountain by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz – ★★★★☆ 

Released in a fine new translation, Ramuz’s tale (1925) is set in the 19th century Swiss Alps, and follows a band of men leading their cattle up to mountaintop summer pasture. 20 years before, a similar expedition mysteriously failed – and the new adventurers, though initially undaunted, soon too suffer some uncanny happenings. One of this year’s most haunting books. Read our Great Fear on the Mountain review

The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville – ★★★★☆ 

The actor and the sci-fi writer’s entertaining, fleshed-out collaborative novel is already being adapted by Netflix. It follows a soldier, “B”, who can’t be killed but can be hurt. Promised the escape of death he so longs for in return, he takes on a role in a mysterious government plot – and is soon in way over his head. Read our The Book of Elsewhere review

Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers – ★★★★☆ 

Septuagenarian American soul singer Bucky, slightly past it and wistful on the anniversary of his wife’s death, accepts an invitation to sing at a Northern Soul festival in Britain. He strikes up an unlikely friendship with Dinah, tough, Scarborough born-and-bred, and bogged down by her feckless husband and son. Lively, humorous, pacy, and giving space to an often-forgotten musical movement. Read our Rare Singles review

Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adèle Rosenfeld – ★★★★★

A translated-from-French tale of a young woman, Louise, losing her hearing, and depressed in the face of it. Told from her perspective, the prose dexterously recreates how Louise experiences the world – misheard and versions of words remain, as does her constant attentiveness to the speech of those around her. Gorgeously written. Read our Jellyfish Have No Ears review

Phantom Limb by Chris Kohler – ★★★★☆ 

A young Scottish minister finds a severed hand one night in the grounds of his manse. Mysteriously animated, it begins to draw, depicting the story of a 16th-century painter, which then unfolds as a second plot alongside the chaos this hand causes in the minister’s own world. A disturbing, mesmerising debut, about miracles in a faithless world. Read our Phantom Limb review

Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs – ★★★★★

A single-page foreword sets up a frame narrative. In November 1919, a young girl Greta, hospitalised for her mysterious muteness, is sent a series of alphabetised stories (entitled “Architect”, “Ballet master”, and so on) by her father, himself a sanatorium patient and unable to attend her, in an effort to end her silence. All that follows is the stories themselves, fairytale-type narratives which create a frightening, surreal panorama of inter-war Mitteleuropa – a society beset by madness and on the brink of collapse. Read our Gretel and the Great War review

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar – ★★★★★

In this scintillating novel, a postdoctoral researcher rejects academic work she doubts the value of, and the working-for-the-man nature of the casual shift work she tries as an alternative. She instead opts for a simple, off-grid life alone in a cottage, that also isn’t without its trials, but nonetheless has a kind of beauty to it. An intelligent and incisive third novel from Baltasar. Read our Mammoth review

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak – ★★★★☆ 

Three protagonists – a Londoner living in poverty in 1840; a modern-day hydrologist fleeing her broken marriage for a Thames houseboat; and a young Yazidi girl in a Turkish riverside village on the brink of change – live in different times but are connected by a drop of water, whose journey we follow as it comes into contact with each character. Expansive, astute, and loyal to reality’s true complexity. Read our There are Rivers in the Sky review

Mamele by Gemma Reeves – ★★★★☆ 

Reeves’s second novel tells of Edie, a woman in mid-life still haunted by the voice of her émigré mother Zelda, despite 30 years of estrangement. A convincing portrayal of loss and intergenerational trauma – the Yiddish word mamele (meaning “little mother”) repeats often, like an incantation that threatens to devour Edie. Read our Mamele review

Yr Dead by Sam Sax – ★★★★★

Sax’s debut novel begins with narrator Ezra’s self-immolation, which occurs in 2016, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, outside Trump Tower. We then flit, in short chapters, between this moment of destruction and Ezra’s life before. Sax builds the narrative using a broad patchwork of voices, documents, photocopies and clippings, and is beautifully attentive to the smallest details. Read our Yr Dead review

Mr Geography by Tim Parks – ★★★★★

A retired teacher goes on a 220-mile walk from Germany to Italy, retracing a route he last attempted in the mid-2000s with married literature professor Julia, who he’d been having a five-year affair with. Their relationship was scuppered, shortly after, by circumstance, and Julia has now passed away. A slim, tender novel about loss: of love, of wasted decades. Read our Mr Geography review

There’s Nothing Wrong With Her by Kate Weinberg – ★★★★☆ 

One day, a chronically ill young woman is visited in her London basement flat by an apparition of 16-century Italian writer, historian and soldier Luigi Da Porto, who wrote the source text for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Promising to release her from her pain, he guides her into days’-worth of reminiscences about her past. Hallucinatory and inventive, dissolving the boundaries between past and present, real and imaginary. Read our There’s Nothing Wrong With Her review

Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamieson – ★★★★☆

An elegant imagining of the heiress Peggy Guggenheim’s life, a Bildungsroman proceeding from her youth to 1938, the year her first gallery opened in London. Worked on by Godfrey for a decade before her death in 2022, and thereafter handed over to her friend, the writer Jamieson, the novel does away with myth-making and takes a rich, rewarding dive into the soul concealed beneath. Read our Peggy review

The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable – ★★★★★

A superb historical debut about an early 18th-century violinist, orphan Anna Maria della Pietà. The Ospedale della Pietà was a real-life orphanage that, somewhat surprisingly, boasted a renowned orchestra – and their tutor was none other than Antonio Vivaldi. He grows increasingly hostile when his prodigy Anna Maria becomes his rival. A stark confrontation of women variously silenced. Read our The Instrumentalist review

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson – ★★★★☆

The sixth Jackson Brodie novel is, essentially, an out-and-out romp. PI hero Brodie trails an art thief whose acquisitions include a Turner nicked from a Yorkshire stately home – but, as usual for the series, the plot takes a back seat to delicious character studies, this time focussed on inhabitants of the estate and its surroundings. Witty, original and eccentric – while finding time to poke fun at Richard Osman-style “cosy crime”. Read our Death at the Sign of the Rook review

Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers – ★★★★☆

The floundering relationship between two psychiatrist colleagues at a south London hospital takes on new life as they work together to find out what’s wrong with an exciting new patient, William Tapping. Tapping’s life, recovery and backstory eventually become the novel’s focus. Setting the novel mostly in 1964, but also in the decades leading up to it, the Small Pleasures (2022) author inhabits the period detail with ease and relish. Read our Shy Creatures review

If Only by Vigdis Hjorth – ★★★★☆

The Norwegian writer’s 2001 novel, which has finally gotten an English translation, tells the story of the adulterous relationship between 30-year-old Ida, an editor, playwright and mother of two, and 39-year-old Arnold, a Brecht academic and father to one. An accomplished portrait of a by turns painful and passionate relationship. Read our If Only review

Precipice by Robert Harris – ★★★★☆

Drawing on the real love letters HH Asquith sent to aristocratic beauty Venetia Stanley (35 years his junior and his daughter’s friend) while in office, Harris’s new novel is a gripping drama about the PM’s wartime affair, the Asquith government’s conduct of the war, and the effect of both on each other. A British intelligence officer intercepting the correspondence to keep tabs on what secrets Asquith spills is our window into events. Read our Precipice review

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner – ★★★★★

Already on this year’s Booker longlist (and deservedly so), Kushner’s fourth novel is narrated by a female spy tasked with infiltrating a group of young French radicals, led by reclusive Parisian academic Bruno Lacombe. The spy, just as mysterious and slippery as Lacombe, is quickly fascinated by his takes on humankind and its history. Remarkably original, with profound meditations embedded thoughtfully into the framework of a thriller. Read our Creation Lake review

The Women Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle – ★★★★☆

One of Doyle’s greatest characters is revived in style, with this novel updating us on her and her family’s life in the intervening years since the last Paula Spencer book in 2006. As Covid hits and she heads for semi-retirement, Paula grapples with memories of her brutal ex-husband, and the present difficulties posed by her eldest daughter. Tight, telling prose that never whitewashes. Read our The Women Behind the Door review

Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes – ★★★★☆

Successful male author Oscar writes an insulting Instagram post about fifty-something star actress Rebecca – but she writes back, and the two begin a long email correspondence, which comprises most of the book. Insults, Oscar getting “MeToo’d”, their shared experience of addiction: the pair discuss it all in this energetic, confident book. Read our Dear Dickhead review

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman – ★★★★☆

A witty new crime series to rival Osman’s hugely popular The Thursday Murder Club. Rosie, the bodyguard for superstar crime writer Rose D’Antonio, finds herself framed for murder. She summons her father Steve, an ex-policeman-turned-expert in recovering lost dogs, to help her find the real killer, darting from South Carolina to St Lucia, and thence to Co Cork and Dubai. Read our We Solve Murders review

Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq – ★★★★☆

Siblings who range across the political spectrum – conservative Catholics and Leftist bobos – gather at their father’s sickbed, as the AI-ridden political context of an imagined 2027 rages outside. With all the siblings’s actions, the notorious French literary titan teases and confuses our moral compass – but also asks tender questions about euthanasia, sex, migration and love. Read our Annihilation review

All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles – ★★★★☆

This engrossing debut is a strange portrait of Henry Nash, a British man writing a “monograph” to reckon with his relationship with his late father. It’s unclear if it’s that text, or a general confession, that we’re reading – but whatever it is, it soon morphs into a diatribe against modern life, with Henry’s anger focussed on a businessman who also frequents the café he works in, and represents everything Henry hates. Read our All My Precious Madness review