There’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer’s debut fiction feature next month.
In January, we kick things off with My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar, a powerful story of friendship and loss. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded by government agents during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London. The pair find themselves torn between the comforts of their life in the UK and the horrors of a civil war at home. Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (Virago) is the first great lockdown novel (Nunez, of course, has pandemic form – Salvation City was about a flu epidemic). Beginning in the spring of 2020, The Vulnerables tells the story of an unlikely couple thrown together by the confines of Covid: an older writer and a young college dropout, united by their shared responsibility for a cantankerous parrot called Eureka.
April brings yet another novel by the prolific Percival Everett. James (Mantle) – his 28th work of fiction in a career spanning 40 years – is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, fleeing slavery with young Huck. It’s a rambunctious, perspective-altering book, keeping the adventurous spirit of the original but full of contemporary resonances. Another generous novel with a journey at its centre is You Are Here (Sceptre) by David Nicholls. Marnie and Michael are stuck in the midlife doldrums until they meet on a 10-day hike through the Lakes and Dales. No one does the minutiae of love as well as Nicholls, and while this is a more mature and cagoule-wearing novel than One Day or Sweet Sorrow, it delivers the same satisfying emotional punch. April also sees a new novel from the great Andrew O’Hagan. Caledonian Road (Faber) is the story of Campbell Flynn, a Scot teaching art history in London. When he meets a charismatic young student, Milo Mangasha, he’s struck at once by the “potential for things to get wayward”. It’s a barnstorming book, taking us deep into a London of wealth, crime, fashion and art.
I danced a jig when Sarah Perry’s latest novel, Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape, May), landed on my doorstep. It’s glorious, doing what her books do best: intertwining a love story with reams of esoteric learning and big ideas. Enlightenment ranges boundlessly across space and time – from a touching portrait of the friendship between Grace and Thomas, co-worshippers at an Essex Baptist church, to the work of Maria Veduva, a 19th-century astronomer whose ghost haunts a local stately home. This is a beautiful, memorable novel. Also in May, there’s the great Claire Messud, with This Strange Eventful History (Fleet), the sweeping tale of a family – the Cassars – whose life takes them from second world war Paris to the US, Cuba, Australia and beyond over the decades that follow. It’s almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose. Finally in May, there’s All Fours (Canongate) by screenwriter and director Miranda July. Usually, Hollywood novels are an embarrassment (or just very boring – thanks Mr Hanks). July, though, is a proper novelist and this is a great book about art, fame and reinvention.
I loved Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse; in Scaffolding (Chatto & Windus), out in June, she tells the story of two couples who live at the same address in north-east Paris in 1972 and 2019. It’s atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised. It has been five years since Kevin Barry’s last novel, Night Boat to Tangier. In his latest, The Heart in Winter (Canongate), also published in June, Barry moves to Montana in the 1890s. It’s an Irish western, by turns funny and tragic, full of typically outrageous figures and sublime writing.
August sees the publication of the final novel in Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s unnamed trilogy (the previous book, Boulder, was shortlisted for 2023’s International Booker). Mammoth (And Other Stories), again translated by Julia Sanches, is about an unnamed young lesbian woman who yearns to be a mother. She carves a riotous path from Barcelona to the Catalan countryside, her story told in jagged sentences and eccentric metaphorical language. Benjamin Myers is another whose prolific output doesn’t diminish the quality of his writing: Rare Singles (Bloomsbury) returns Myers to his past as a music journalist, telling a warmly nostalgic tale of northern soul and unlikely friendship in Scarborough. The great but forgotten Bucky Bronco’s visit to the Yorkshire coast is handled with Myers’s customary humour and generosity of spirit. Next, thrillingly, there’s Evie Wyld’s The Echoes (Jonathan Cape). Wyld has always been in a category of her own, but this is stranger, darker and more brilliant than anything she’s written before. Max is dead; we know this because the opening of the novel is narrated by his ghost. The book laces between south London and Australia, between Max, his girlfriend Hannah, and a wide circle of their friends and family, all of their stories hurtling towards the novel’s hallucinatory ending. This is a book that will stay with you for ever – both intimate and extraordinarily ambitious.
Finally, in September, there’s my early pick for this year’s Booker: Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner. It’s a wild and brilliantly plotted piece of science fiction. This is the story of a secret agent, the redoubtable Sadie Smith, sent to infiltrate and disrupt a group of “anti-civvers” – eco-terrorists – in a France of the near future where industrial agriculture and sinister corporations dominate the landscape. Think Kill Bill written by John le Carré: smart, funny and compulsively readable.
