Credit: Marija Ercegovac
What happens when you ask 56 authors what they loved reading in 2024? Nearly 180 titles later, we give you the year’s best books guide.
I thought Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow (Text) was an exceptional novel from this year, a novel of exquisite simplicity and humanity. Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (Granta Books) is stunning, a reflection and refraction on German history seen through a very particular and intimate lens, that of a destructive sadomasochistic relationship. It’s a daring conceit, and it could have gone very badly, yet Erpenbeck has such control of her craft and her intention that she succeeds in being both profound and affecting. The translation by Michael Hoffman is also a labour of care and attention. Aurelian Craiutu’s Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in the Age of Extremes (Uni of Pennsylvania) is terrific. His thoughtful, exact consideration of how philosophies of forbearance and moderation are not fence-sitting but are instead necessary interventions in a world dominated by rage and intolerance was galvanising to read. I wish every parliamentarian would read this book. Every journalist should read it as well.
Christos Tsiolkas’ latest novel is The In-Between (Allen & Unwin).
Anne Manne’s Crimes of the Cross (Black Inc) is a deeply researched and superbly written account of the Anglican paedophile network of Newcastle and the survivors of it who, against fierce resistance, dragged its soul murders out into the light. In Shakespeare is Hard, But So Is Life (Head of Zeus) Fintan O’Toole takes apart the long-established concept of the “fatal flaw” as the key to Shakespeare’s tragedies and replaces it with a darker, starker, more terrifying understanding. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem (Scribner), Nam Le: You fight your way into these difficult poems, you wrangle with their knots and mysteries, then you turn a page, and a blast of clarity – ghosts, herbs, diamonds – clears the air for miles around.
Helen Garner’s most recent book is The Season (Text).
OK, fiction first. Daniel Mason’s North Woods (John Murray) is a wonderful weaving of place and people. Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds (Cornerstone) is a beautiful and haunting evocation of a young woman’s escape into 1600s America. Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger (Picador) is brilliant and heartbreaking, as is Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time (Faber). Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (Penguin) is superb. In non-fiction Robert Macfarlane’s Underland (Penguin) takes us into the caves, tunnels and core of our mighty and fragile planet. Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin (Simon & Schuster) is a brilliant lens into the forming of America’s government that gives insights into current challenges. Isaacson’s biography Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster) is an important read if you want to better understand the most powerful man in the world.
Heather Rose’s most recent book is Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here (Fourth Estate).
In The Cracked Mirror (Little, Brown) Chris Brookmyre has a lot of fun mashing genres in this pacey novel as a hard-boiled American cop and an English-village-dwelling amateur sleuth team up to solve a mazey mystery that will eventually take them into cyberspace and beyond. Outrageous fun and so very smart and complex. White City (Headline, February) by Dominic Nolan is 1950s London as if it were James Ellroy’s Los Angeles in a hard-hitting but poetic saga of thwarted dreams and very bad men. Real events and historical characters are interwoven with memorable fictional creations. Race riots are in the offing and Soho has never been more seedy or needy. Heady stuff. Children of Paradise (Atlantic) by Camilla Grudova is a vivid fever dream of a novel centred around the staff at an ailing art-house cinema - possibly based on the one the author once worked in herself! The troubled heroine finds herself spending more and more time with her rum bunch of workmates as weird things happen all around them and the picture-house takes over their lives. Reminds me of early Ian McEwan in that it finds a certain sensuality in the sordid. A short novel but it certainly lingers in the mind.
Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus novel is Midnight and Blue.
There is a lifetime of learning in Julian Jackson’s France on Trial (Penguin), but this meticulous retelling of the treason trial of the Vichy dictator Marshal Petain wears it lightly. It is in the tradition of the best courtroom drama, with a seamy moral and political centre, full of jaw-dropping revelations and incisive character studies. Cue the Sun! (Random House), Emily Nussbaum’s history of reality television back to its roots in Candid Camera and The Gong Show to its manufacture of Donald Trump, is brilliantly reported and acutely analysed - cultural history at its very best. No self-described “renegade tambourine master” can have written a cooler memoir than Joel Gion, whose In The Jingle Jangle Jungle (Orion) describes the story of the Brian Jonestown Massacre in hilariously despairing detail.
Gideon Haigh’s most recent book is My Brother Jaz (MUP).
My top favourite of 2024 is A Little Trickerie (Penguin) by debut author Rosanna Pike, which tells the true story of Tudor vagabond Tibbs Ingleby with a voice so outrageous and addicting, you’ll never forget it; James (Mantle) by Percival Everett, which should win every prize possible - that’s how good it is; Blue Sisters (HarperCollins) by Coco Mellors is a story of grief and reconciliation that had me from page one; Kara Swisher’s Burn Book (Little, Brown) is a must-read that illuminates how technology went from friend to foe; and finally, Nicholas Kristof’s Chasing Hope (Random House US) is the best memoir of the year, highlighting the erratic, often dangerous life of a foreign correspondent.
Bonnie Garmus′ most recent book is Lessons in Chemistry (Transworld).
Chinese Postman (Giramondo) by Brian Castro is a work of genius that made me feel like my brain was on fire. Inga Simpson’s The Thinning (Hachette), suspenseful cli-fi propelled by moral purpose, is assured and important. Host City (Puncher & Wattmann) by David Owen Kelly, another highly creative novel animated by righteous anger, thrilled while it bruised. Dominic Gordon’s excellent Excitable Boy (Upswell) changed the way I see my city. Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging (NewSouth) by Cher Tan is smart and savage, strong on the precarity of creative lifestyles and vicissitudes of work. I delighted in The City of Lost Intentions: A Guide for the Artistically Waylaid (Varoque) by A. Valliard, a quixotic self-published compendium turning artistic blockages and missteps into mythical creatures.
Michael Winkler’s most recent book is Grimmish (Puncher & Wattmann).
To read Raimond Gaita’s Justice and Hope (MUP) with close attention is to come to know the beautiful mind of Australia’s greatest moral philosopher. It is, in its essence, the big book of philosophy that Gaita’s life’s work has long promised us. In nearly 600 pages the most challenging moral questions that have confronted us, and which continue to confront us, are addressed with Gaita’s unique intelligence and courage. Gaita’s thoughts, his hopes and his doubts, his passions and the things that most deeply puzzle him, are presented to us in a direct and beautifully limpid prose that mirrors the profound integrity of this man of genius. In A Season of Death (MUP) I was blown away by Mark Raphael Baker’s ability to handle tragedy and comedy with an equal brilliance and lightness of touch. The depth is there from page one and the lightness of the dance along with it. I cried when I finished reading this heartbreaking beautiful story.
Alex Miller’s most recent book is The Deal (A&U).
Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 was the first book I read in 2024, and one of the most memorable I’ve read, ever. This memoir-history-philosophical musing on the nature of love, death, violence and forgiveness has a depth of inquiry and a capacious humanity that is destined to render it a classic. And speaking of capacious, I waited till Abraham Vergese’s novel, The Covenant of Water, was in paperback, so I could manage to heft it. A big, big novel that nevertheless seemed too short, it’s a family saga whose characters are vividly alive, their fates compelling and consequential. I was a latecomer to Anna Burns’ brilliant novel, Milkman, which won the Booker in 2018. It’s a masterclass in voice. Her 18-year-old narrator’s understated account of her fraught life during the Troubles bringing that period to life with chilling veracity.
Geraldine Brooks’ memoir, Memorial Days, will be published in January.
Nothing so dramatic transpires in Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst’s seventh novel. People meet one another, become enemies or friends or fall in love; they discuss politics or make art; they reminisce about the past and talk about the future; they live and they die. A gifted novelist (to call Hollinghurst this is maybe an understatement) finds the miraculous in life itself. I don’t know how a writer can make a reader feel real pain and sadness over the death of a character — not a real person at all, only a collection of words — but Hollinghurst is a writer with the power to make me feel, and Our Evenings is a book I feel fortunate to have read.
Rumaan Alam’s latest novel is Entitlement (Bloomsbury).
Sally Adee’s We Are Electric: The New Science of Our Body’s Electrome (Canongate) has been a stand-out. If Adee is right, we’ll soon be treating everything from infertility to cancer by manipulating the electricity our body generates. And who would have guessed that the great scientist Alexander Von Humboldt shoved electric wires so deep into his fundament that lights appeared before his eyes. David Lindenmayer’s The Forest Wars: The Ugly Truth of What’s Happening in our Tall Forests (Allen & Unwin) is a sickening eye-opener. A must-read for anyone interested in forest protection, its documentation of deceit, perfidy and destruction by those involved in the logging industry should spark a royal commission. Tom Lathan’s Lost Wonders. 10 Tales of Extinction from the 21st Century (Pan Macmillan) reminds us of how real and growing the extinction threat is. No less than three of the 10 lost species once lived on Australia’s Christmas Island, and all became extinct as a result of the Federal Government and its agencies moving at a glacial pace while threats moved like wildfire. Those responsible should hang their heads in shame. Finally, I’ve just put down Richard Dawkins’ The Genetic Book of the Dead (Bloomsbury). A follow-up of his bestseller The Selfish Gene (OUP), it takes the argument that genes are the sole focus of natural selection, but with more generalities, faults and intuitions. Dawkins ends with “You are the incarnation of a great, seething, scrambling, time-travelling cooperative of viruses”. No wonder many on the right think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
Tim Flannery’s most recent book, with Emma Flannery, is Big Meg (Transworld).
It is a weird contradiction that we novelists, who dream of writing for the ages, publish into a storm of reviews and lists concerned solely with what has appeared in the year or month or day before. Having always obediently produced my own “Best of the year” it is a little late for me to play the rebel, but let me try by raising the flag for a great novel first published in 1999. This was a year when Americans could not hope to win the Booker prize but, had this been possible, Kent Haruf might well have made the 2000 Booker shortlist and found himself up against John Coetzee. I have never judged a literary competition and I won’t start now. Enough to say that Kent Haruf’s Plainsong (Picador) would have been perfectly at home.
Peter Carey’s latest novel is A Long Way from Home (Penguin).
I was writing essays this year, so I read essays: Brian Dillon’s stimulating Affinities and Essayism (Fitzcarraldo); older, still incandescent works by John Berger, Pascal Quignard and Annie Dillard, then Australian essayists Marian Macken on grief and architecture with Our Concealed Ballast (Vagabond Press) Kim Mahood’s Wandering with Intent (Scribe) and Katia Ariel on identity and passion with The Swift Dark Tide (Gazebo). I went travelling literally and imaginatively with Kassa Kappabova in Border (Granta) and Elixir (Vintage), set in Bulgaria, and into medieval Arab culture with Richard Fidler’s The Book of Roads and Kingdoms (ABC). Finally, the wise calm of Joanna Macy’s World as Lover, World as Self (Parallax) and the hybrid generosity of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (S&S) by Camille T. Dungy nourished my ecophilosophical appetite.
Kate Holden’s most recent book is The Winter Road (Black Inc).
I’m throwing away my scholarly hat, here, to recommend a book that’s close to my heart. You know the feeling when a dear friend produces something absolutely amazing? (You love them, and always thought they were brilliant, but then you read something they write and it blows your mind.) That’s the feeling I got reading Clare Wright’s Näku Dhäruk:The Bark Petitions (Text) — it’s a brilliant book that moved my understandings of what Australian history could be. With much less bias, I also loved James Bradley’s Deep Water: The World in the Ocean (Penguin), for its urgent consideration of climate and ecology, as well as Kairos (Granta) by Jenny Erpenbeck and Long Island (Picador) by Colm Toíbín, for being fabulous reads.
Anna Clark’s most recent book is The Catch (Penguin).
Adam Rapp is a strikingly bold writer of sentences - so refreshing at a time of writerly fidgeting and tweezing in effort to offend no one (or make any difference). Rapp also stands right up to large subjects - in Wolf at the Table (Little, Brown), an engrossing multi-generational middle-America saga, at the sinister heart of which lurks John Wayne Gacy, the Chicago serial killer who posed as a clown to entice his victims. Rapp is a celebrated playwright and consequently good at showing things as well as telling them. And his gift for portraying a large cast of highly individuated and memorable characters is utterly exceptional. Rapp is from Illinois and comes by Americana natively and with alluring confidence. Plus, he owns a starkly keen eye for the genuinely creepy - something I envy and which, in its seriousness, reminds me of Flannery O’Connor rather than Stephen King. It was by far the best new novel I read in 2024.
Richard Ford’s latest novel is Be Mine.
I am in year seven (I know) of working on my third novel manuscript and reading mostly academic articles and books about education and Koreans. All of this non-fiction is excellent and edifying, but for the holidays, I want to share two short works of sublime fiction written by the Irish author Claire Keegan. I have become a committed admirer of her work. In my brief respites from reading for research as I rewrite yet another novel draft, I have read and reread Foster and Small Things Like These (both Faber). Keegan’s prose is perfect and her narrative precision is masterful. Above all, both works will knock you out emotionally. I promise.
Min Jin Lee is author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko (Head of Zeus).
The most memorable novel I read this year was Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (Granta). Set in East Berlin in the late 1980s, it tells the story of a relationship between an older, married man (Hans) and a much younger woman (Katharina). Their internal crises are mirrored by the collapse of the society around them. Erpenbeck’s writing is intense, vivid and intimate, while the story takes us inside daily life in the former GDR in a way that no other novel has done before. Clare Wright’s Näku Dhäruk (Text) is a rare example of finely honed, lived-in history. Wright allows us to see the 1963 Yirrkala Bark petitions from the perspective of the Yolngu communities where they originated. Finally, a book that took me a while to get to, but has stayed with me ever since – Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan’s Faith Hope and Carnage (Canongate).
Mark McKenna’s most recent book is Return to Uluru (Black Inc).
My pick of the year is Volume 1 of Matthew Lamb’s biography, Frank Moorhouse, Strange Paths (Knopf). Written with clarity and verve, it not only offers a revealing account of one of Australia’s most significant writers but also of the wider Australian culture that produced him, and us. Lamb brings a rare breadth and depth of cultural analysis to an appreciation not only of Moorhouse’s literary achievements in a golden era of Australian fiction but also the man’s unstinting efforts as an activist in areas such as worker education, censorship, sexual politics and author’s rights. This is an exemplary biography of the writer-in-context.
Amanda Lohrey’s latest book is The Conversion (Text).
My first great read of the year was David Annand’s Peterdown (Corsair), a tremendous novel of a post-industrial town’s response to potential revival, written with humanity and wit. Thriller-wise, a long-awaited highlight was Nick Harkaway’s deep dive into his late father’s world, and the reappearance of John le Carré’s much-loved George Smiley did not disappoint. Karla’s Choice (Viking) is a seamless addition to the canon, in which Harkaway has pulled off the neat trick of being faithful to the original vision without producing a retread of familiar tropes. I’ve also been hugely impressed by Abigail Dean’s Day One (Hemlock Press), the follow-up to her brilliant Girl A. Once again, Dean handles a difficult subject with tact and insight: an engrossing read.
Mick Herron’s most recent book is The Secret Hours (John Murray).
Lech Blaine has written the most remarkable family saga with Australian Gospel (Black Inc). The reader constantly has to remind themselves they are, in fact, reading a work of stunning, hilarious, harrowing non-fiction and not an Australian fiction classic. I started the year with Malcolm Knox’s excellent Stalin-era black comedy, The First Friend (A&U), and I am ending it with an extraordinary book called If This Is the End (Magabala Books) by queer Blak poetry king Bebe Oliver.
Trent Dalton’s most recent book is Lola in the Mirror (HC).
2024 was the year of short story anthologies. I was sometimes transported to improved societies via First Nations spec fiction by Mykaela Saunders in Always Will Be (UQP), and Unlimited Futures: Speculative, Visionary Blak+Black Fiction, edited by Rafeif Ismail and Ellen van Neerven. As an author, I was inspired by award-winning short-story collections by Laura Elvery (Ordinary Matter, UQP) and Laura-Jean McKay’s Gunflower (Scribe). The Heart Will Find A Way: An Anthology: Stories of Heartache, Heartbreak and Heartbalm (Southern Key Press), was an eclectic mix of voices that spoke to my own heart and made me weep more than once, with proceeds going to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.
Anita Heiss’ most recent book is Dirrayawadha (S&S).
My book of the year is Emily Maguire’s extraordinary Rapture (A&U) - fierce, wise and magnificent. Also reaching back into history, the exquisite To Sing of War (HC) by Catherine McKinnon, which weaves a tale of war, song and catastrophic consequence. If You Go (Affirm) by Alice Robinson is a haunting and visceral examination of motherhood and a world we are fast approaching. I laughed and gasped in the debut thriller The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt (Affirm) by Mark Mupotsa-Russell. In non-fiction, Deep Water by James Bradley is urgent and galvanising and should be read widely. The overseas titles I’ve talked about and recommended most this year are Orbital by Samantha Harvey (those sentences!), All Fours by Miranda July (the premise alone is worth the price of entry), and the mind-blowing meta-novel of translation and forests from Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey.
Kate Mildenhall’s most recent book is The Hummingbird Effect (S&S).
My most important book of 2024 is Clare Wright’s Näku Dhäruk (Text). Unlike most Australians I grew up knowing much of the story about what was called the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, and yet ... What she has done, weaving forensic historical research with Yolngu knowledge is nothing short of brilliant. Näku Dhäruk with its cultural respect and drive for truth-telling left me both awestruck and sobbing. Brian Castro’s Chinese Postman (Giramondo) is extraordinary. To read it is to feel intellectually and imaginatively on fire. A work of genius. Every novel by Michelle de Kretser challenges us to read anew, to see and understand our worlds differently. Theory & Practice (Text) delights, seduces and rages as it deconstructs the machinations of power, shame, colonialism and race.
Bernadette Brennan’s most recent book is Leaping into the Waterfalls (A&U).
I always look forward with eager anticipation to a new Liane Moriarty and she delivered yet again with the wonderfully page-turning Here One Moment (PanMac). Meanwhile, everyone on my Christmas list will be receiving a copy of Benjamin Stevenson’s latest twisty mystery, Everyone This Christmas has a Secret (Penguin). My children, aged five and eight, gave a big thumbs up to the first in Andy Griffiths’ new Adventures Unlimited series with The Land of Lost Things (PanMac), and enjoyed the fun illustrations from Bill Hope.
Jane Harper’s most recent book is Exiles (PanMac).
Mark Mupotsa-Russell’s The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt (Affirm) is the best debut novel I have read in a long time. Part thriller, part crime caper, Mupotsa-Russell’s narrative crackles with dry wit and features incisive commentary on everything from gym-bro culture to grief to child-rearing. A Brilliant Life (Hachette) by Rachelle Unreich tells the extraordinary true story of Mira, who survived the Holocaust as a young girl through a mix of chance, ingenuity and her own remarkable force of character. American Mother (Bloomsbury) by Colum McCann is a deeply moving and exquisitely written meditation on forgiveness as seen through the eyes of Diane Foley, mother of journalist James Foley, who comes face to face with one of her son’s killers years after he was tragically beheaded by ISIS in Syria.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University and author of The Uncaged Sky (Ultimo).
This has been a year of reading wonders. Leslie Jamison is an astonishing and brave essayist and I loved her Splinters (Granta), a brilliant memoir of a relationship ending and a new self coalescing. I laughed and gasped reading Miranda July’s exhilarating novel All Fours (Canongate), in which a woman re-creates herself with magnificent abandon in midlife. Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed (Virago) is an exquisitely moving novel about a woman bringing up her grandchild. Sarah Manguso’s Liars (Picador) is a scorching tale of the end of a marriage. I loved Marie-Hélène Lafon’s The Son’s Story (Hachette), beautifully translated by Stephanie Smee, and also The Inseparables (Vintage), translated by Lauren Elkin, Simone de Beauvoir’s posthumously published novel, depicting an intense friendship she had as a young woman. I’ve just devoured Tim Winton’s Juice ( Hamish Hamilton), a magnificent and searing work, his devastating genius so lightly worn. In non-fiction I loved Josh Bornstein’s Working for the Brand (Scribe), essential reading for those of us keen to protect both individuals and democracy from the ground up. Nick Bryant’s brilliant The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself (Viking) is essential reading. And in poetry I loved Bright Crockery Days (5 Islands Press), a book of Robert Gray’s astonishing and treasured poems, with essays honouring them by some of Australia’s most revered poets.
Anna Funder’s most recent book is Wifedom (Penguin).
The book of the year is Woven (Magabala), edited by Anne-Marie Te Whiu – an exquisite collaboration between First Nations poets and an incredible read. This collection burst through in a year of novels, of which there have been standouts! I’m a fan of Charlotte Wood and Stone Yard Devotional (A&U) is my favourite – a character study in quiet strength. I was also swept away by two historical novels: James (Mantle) by Percival Everett and Dirrayawadha (S&S) by Anita Heiss. James I read in a few days. This retelling of Mark Twain’s classic from the perspective of Jim, an enslaved man, is so impressive. Heiss’ Dirrayawadha, on the Bathurst frontier wars through Wiradyuri woman Miinaa’s experience, completely enveloped me in its intricacy of place, cultures and prose.
Laura Jean McKay’s most recent book is Gunflower (Scribe).
For a year short on empathy, some books that invite us to see the world through different eyes. Counsellor Jodi Rodgers’ Unique (Hachette) confronts the adage “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met … one autistic person” with dozens of diverse – and fascinating – stories from her clients. Same but different: Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum (Wellcome Collection). Author Daniel Tammet is himself autistic and his narration adds a 10th mind to the profiles. Heidi Everett’s My Friend Fox (Ultimo) is a finely written story of the author’s schizophrenia journey: wry, knowing and eye-opening. My co-author, Anne Buist, recommends Ariane Beeston’s memoir of postpartum psychosis: Because I’m Not Myself, You See (Black Inc).
Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist’s next novel, The Oasis (Hachette), a sequel to The Glass House, will be published in March.
The most thrilling novel I read this year was Woo Woo (A&U) by Ella Baxter. It’s about an artist being stalked during the lead-up to her big new exhibition but that précis doesn’t begin to describe this life-force of a novel. Electrifyingly weird, squirmingly carnal and throbbing with rage, it often had me breathless and left me vibrating with delight. I was also blown away by Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time (Sceptre), which combines time travel, a gruesome failed polar exploration, British spy craft, post-colonial reckoning and serious (but never lecturer-y) moral grappling about nationhood and othering and thinking-we-know-best-because-we-are-we. All this as well as an utterly compelling narrator, crackling dialogue, sweet romance and steamy sex. An absolute joy.
Emily Maguire’s most recent book is Rapture (A&U).
Our Evenings (Picador), the fifth novel by the British author Alan Hollinghurst, is a story about class, theatre, gender, relationships and intimacy. The writing is restrained and precise; I am in awe of this wonderful novelist whose books reveal so much about the country of his birth. Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow (Text) holds a note of calm in the face of terrible loss and emotional turbulence. I was engrossed by this sage, mature and beautifully written novel. James (Mantle) by Percival Everett was a wonderful ride; I loved the adventure, the daring escapes, the storms and caves and wild river crossings! Told from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Everett turns everything upside down, and shakes it.
Sofie Laguna’s The Underworld (Penguin) will be published next year.
Headshot (Daunt) by Rita Bullwinkle was by far the most exhilarating, innovative book I’ve read in years. The unlikely story of a teen girls’ boxing tournament in rural America, it was everything that excites me about fiction. Melanie Cheng’s quietly devastating novella, The Burrow (Text), lays bare the precarious balance of family life after unimaginable tragedy and might well be the best pandemic novel that’s been written. I loved the generous whimsy of Rónán Hession’s Ghost Mountain (Bluemoose), in which the titular monolith appears one day on the outskirts of a small Irish town. And two short novels dealing with displacement, violence and the meaning of home seemed to resonate with particular urgency in the moment: Only Sound Remains (P&W) by Hossein Asgari and The Singularity (Text) by Balsam Karam.
Bram Presser’s most recent book is The Book of Dirt (Text)
In the four brief chapters of The Details (Wildfire; trans., Kira Josefsson) Ia Genberg’s narrator describes four people who have mattered to her and, in so doing, brilliantly illuminates her own life. The details presented aren’t remarkable, yet this wonderfully compressed narrative is profound and moving. How does Genberg bring about her extraordinary effects? I’ll be reading her novel many times to try to work it out. Fiona McFarlane’s Highway 13 (A&U) is a collection of stories loosely inspired by the backpacker murders of the 1990s. McFarlane’s imaginative and tonal range is astonishing; she presents an assortment of beautifully realised characters and settings, requiring us to consider the ripples that spread out from the killings over time. A few of the stories are almost unbearably suspenseful, but McFarlane’s ethical restraint spares us all voyeuristic gore. She is, simply, a superb writer.
Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel is Theory & Practice (Text).
I devoured Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (Hachette) by Irene Vallejo (trans., Charlotte Whittle). It weaves history, memoir and popular culture through the ages to tell the story of books since the great library of Alexandria. It is beautifully written, hugely entertaining, full of surprises and often deeply moving. The Burrow, by Melanie Cheng (Text), is an exquisite morsel of a book where each character is perfectly realised through their response to a shared grief. Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin (Penguin) is a sensual psychoanalytic exploration of attraction, love and commitment played out against the women’s movements of the ’70s and MeToo. Which leads me (naturally) to All Fours by Miranda July (A&U) - I bloody loved it!
Pip Williams most recent novel is The Bookbinder of Jericho (Affirm).
My favourite novel of 2024 was Burma Sahib (Hamish Hamilton) by Paul Theroux. A deliciously old-fashioned book reliant on good characters, a strong narrative arc and a gorgeous setting. It reimagines the story of George Orwell’s tenure in the Burma Police in the 1920s when the young man was fresh out of Eton College. We’ve all probably read Orwell’s famous essay Shooting An Elephant but what else happened in those five years when Orwell was a District Police Inspector of the British Raj? Theroux uses Orwell’s letters home and his own extensive travels in Burma as the basis for his speculations. Burma Sahib is deep and compelling and in another time Theroux would have cleaned up at awards seasons, but literary awards don’t seem to go to well-made, fun novels like this any more, alas. My favourite nonfiction book of 2024 was Kubrick (Faber) by Nathan Abrams and Robert Kolker. This is not the first biography of the famous Anglo-American film director and it will not be the last. But this comprehensive, well-researched text will likely be the lodestone against which others are measured. Since Kubrick’s untimely death in 1999 his mythology has only grown. Abrams and Kolker do a fine job sorting fact from fiction and offering their own analysis of Kubrick’s filmography. After reading it I think I finally understand what happened in 2001: A Space Odyssey, although Eyes Wide Shut remains as opaque as ever.
Adrian McKinty’s most recent novel is The Detective Up Late (Blackstone).
The books that stood out for me this year each undid, in their own ways, the artificial boundary between fact and fiction. Brian Castro’s Chinese Postman (Giramondo) is a brilliant, funny and erudite portrait of an ageing writer. At turns coarse and lyrical, Castro’s narrator reminds us that “the damage literature does is to make you unsuitable for the real world, but not for imagined other-worlds”. The narrator of Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice (Text) is also a writer, a novelist who “no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels”. De Kretser’s genius is to do precisely that – channelling her bravura technique into a sharp, impeccably observed narrative that also acts as essay and critique of, among other things, the (Virginia) Woolfmother.
Andre Dao’s most recent book is Anam (Hamish Hamilton).
This year, there were two books I read compulsively — Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (Penguin) and Miranda July’s All Fours (Canongate). Reading these novels felt naughty and delicious, like gorging on dark chocolate in bed. I thoroughly enjoyed Penguin Prize winner Michelle See-Tho’s novel, Jade and Emerald — a stunning portrait of an unlikely, intergenerational friendship. Short stories will always be my first love and New Australian Fiction (Kill Your Darlings), edited by Suzy Garcia, which showcases the very best in local short story writing, was a highlight. I was lucky to receive an early copy of Michelle de Kretser’s latest work, Theory and Practice (Text), which I read slowly to savour every perfect sentence. Each one is a tiny act of magic. I have no idea how it’s done.
Melanie Cheng’s most recent book is The Burrow (Text).
For a while, every book I picked up in 2024 was about a woman blowing up her marriage. Miranda July’s All Fours (Canongate) was funny and outrageous, while Cathy Sweeney’s Breakdown (Orion) was its perfect, restrained yet reflective counterpoint. I loved both. There was a family navigating grief in Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow (Text) – it broke my heart and lifted it. There was an Australian Tongan girl coming of age in Western Sydney, in Winnie Dunn’s ferociously brilliant debut Dirt Poor Islanders (Hachette). There was the extraordinary reimagining of Agnes, the “girl Pope” in Emily Maguire’s mesmerising Rapture (A&U). There was the vulnerability of two men learning to trust and love again in Christos Tsiolkas’ The In-Between (A&U). And finally, there was Percival Everett’s James (Mantle) – a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that will blow your mind and have you reaching for Everett’s backlist.
Shankari Chandran’s latest book is Safe Haven (Ultimo).
It’s possible the book I enjoyed most this year was Richard Powers’ Playground: (Penguin) weaving together artificial intelligence and ocean science, it’s simultaneously a deeply affecting story of friendship and loss and a profound meditation on some of the biggest questions facing us as a species. I also adored Danzy Senna’s whip-smart satire of racial politics and Hollywood, Colored Television, (Hachette) and Ferdia Lennon’s hilarious reworking of Greek drama, Glorious Exploits (Penguin). And closer to home I loved two books that played games with history: David Dyer’s impossibly charming alternative history of Apollo 11, This Kingdom of Dust (Penguin) and Malcolm Knox’s wickedly funny riff on Soviet Georgia, The First Friend, (Allen & Unwin) as well as Stephanie Smee’s extraordinarily beautiful translation of French author Marie-Hélène Lafon’s tiny miracle of a book, The Son’s Story (Hachette).
James Bradley’s most recent book is Deep Water (Hamish Hamilton).
The poems in Kate Fagan’s Song In The Grass (Giramondo) remind us how to make praise and be where we are. Instead of online. She has an old-soul ability to sing for the human occasion while also making great and grounding earth-lists from her place in time. I’ve had a deep year of reading both the very old and the very new and the other book to really resonate with me was John Minford’s beautifully edited translation of Tao Te Ching (Penguin Classics), which includes just the right amount of commentary from both ancient and modern authors to properly cultivate Lao Tzu’s ambient meditations. Minford’s is one of those books that leads you to other books, which is always a great thing.
Gregory Day’s latest novel is The Bell of the World (Transit Lounge).
Sarah Manguso’s Liars (Picador) utterly annihilated me. The book charts the creeping demise of a marriage in short, crunchy paragraphs. Each scene unravels with the piercing dread of a psychological horror film. Manguso’s prose moves in a way that deftly ventriloquises the terror of being married to an entitled man. The Director and the Daemon (P&W) by the indomitable Pitaya Chin is one of the most fascinating and clever books I’ve ever read. Chin is a comedic genius who knows how to explore society’s most pressing issues with a painfully cool deference without compromising integrity. Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey (Scribe) is a mystery about a group of translators who search for a missing author. The narrator’s voice is outrageously smart, funny and succulent. It turned me on in the most surprisingly erotic and intellectual way.
Jessie Tu’s latest novel is The Honeyeater (A&U).
My two favourite novels of 2024 are Swift River (Dialogue) by Essie Chambers and All Fours (Canongate) by Miranda July. Swift River is a wise, warm debut about a smart misfit named Diamond coming of age in the 1980s as the only Black girl (or person) in her small town. All Fours is the clever, fearless story of a married LA artist who plans to drive cross-country and instead checks into a hotel a few minutes from her house and embarks on a quasi-affair with a younger man. Both these novels gripped me (no easy thing to do in 2024), articulated complex and thought-provoking ideas, made me laugh, and made me sort of glad to be a human.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s most recent novel is Romantic Comedy (Transworld).
Not every book on my list is a 2024 release, but I’ve realised there’s an abundance of exciting young Australian writers emerging. Some, like Siang Lu’s The Whitewash (UQP), and Dinuka McKenzie’s The Torrent (HC), were earlier novels. Lu’s book is a cavalcade of ideas, completely unconventional. McKenzie’s is my first real foray into Australian crime, and I loved every minute. Graham Akhurst’s Borderland (UWA) feels like the beginning of a writer who’s in it for life. Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s The Uncaged Sky (Ultimo) is a harrowing true account of survival, and Kirsty Iltners’ Depth of Field (UWA) is an example of a literary writer gathering everything she has and betting everything. You can’t ask for more than that.
Markus Zusak’s most recent book is Three Wild Dogs and the Truth (Picador).
One of my favourite books this year is a truly astonishing debut, Jumaana Abdu’s Translations (Penguin), a novel that sits firmly within an established tradition – its protagonist is a city woman, moving to a small town to escape her personal sorrows – but also moves, stylistically, philosophically and narratively, in new and unexpected ways (and is a cracker of a tale as well). I also loved Emily Maguire’s Rapture (A&U) for its wonderful carnality, and Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice (Text) for its deft and energetic grappling with big questions, and its simmering, controlled rage. In poetry, I loved Hasib Hourani’s Rock Flight (Giramondo), several images from which have haunted me for months now, and which is a masterful and beautiful collection.
Fiona Wright’s latest book is The World Was Whole (Giramondo).
The taut, compelling memoir Knife (Vintage) by Salman Rushdie opens up with the knife attack endured by the author, and while the book goes on to deal with his recovery, it also contains existential reckonings about purpose, work and love. The Wedding People (Orion) by Alison Espach sounds like a rom-com in written form – despairing, recently dumped wife accidentally lands in the midst of a wedding party week – but behind the parody and novel of manners lies a heartfelt study on life’s second chapters. Miranda July’s All Fours (Canongate) is like going to an avant-garde theme park, and rollercoasters leave some squeamish and disoriented. But others will be thrilled by this tale of a perimenopausal woman embarking on an erotic road trip. In Noble Fragments (Scribe) by Michael Visontay, a Sydney journalist discovers a maverick bookseller and harrowing Holocaust story intertwined in his past.
Rachelle Unreich is the author of A Brilliant Life (Hachette).
Naked Portrait: A Memoir of Lucian Freud (Picador) by Rose Boyt is a complex story about love and family and art. Boyt, a novelist, gives a riveting account of what it was like to connect with her father for the first time. He wants to paint her: “Nothing had been discussed, I just assumed I would be naked.” The best new novel I read in 2024 was Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings (Picador) for its exquisite and vivid dramas, scene after scene. But the book I loved most was Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (Penguin) for the urgency of the tone, the sharp sense of the past and for its emotional accuracy and honesty.
Colm Tóibín’s latest novel is Long Island (Picador).
In a year when I did more writing than reading, some literary tonics to ease the pain of deadline. Kate Grenville‘s Restless Dolly Maunder (Text) is a deceptively polished gem; her best book, I reckon. My colleague Yves Rees puts on their historian’s hat with Travelling to Tomorrow (NewSouth), revealing the accessible prose and keen intellect that made their memoir, All About Yves (A&U), such a hit. In Lest (S&S), Mark Dapin proves that he is a serious historian as well as master of a seriously good line in self-deprecation. On the international front, Leslie Jamieson provided the gut-punch of granular recognition in Splinters (Granta) while Miranda July’s All Fours (Canongate) offered a whole lot of fun. In my hand right now: Thomas Mayo’s Always Was Always Will Be (Hardie Grant). It’s the book for right now.
Clare Wright’s latest book is Näku Dhäruk (Text).
I very much enjoyed two newly published books: Long Island (Picador) by Colm Tóibín, whose artistic accuracy is simply beyond the means of almost every other writer; and Dinaw Mengestu’s unsettling, roving, boundlessly intelligent Someone Like Us (Hodder & Stoughton). And I finally and happily caught up with Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves (Head of Zeus), a memoir of self and nation, which seems to have already ascended into the Irish canon.
Joseph O’Neill’s most recent book is Godwin (HC).
This was a year in which quiet books were a respite from global turmoil. At once moving and intricate, Woven, ed. Anne-Marie Te Whiu (Magabala/Red Room), explores loss and resilience in a collaboration between First Nations poets across the world. In Tell Me Everything (Bantam), Elizabeth Strout turns an unsentimental but empathetic gaze on Lucy Barton and a crime that has unsettled her town. The confiding voice is utterly absorbing. The narrative pressure of Cheri by Jo Ann Beard (Serpent’s Tail) is likewise perfectly sustained. To describe this novella as about a woman dying from cancer is to miss its subtlety, fierce attention and moments of transfixing grace. Extraordinary. Finally, I loved three stunning historical fictions, by turns forensic, audacious, and transporting: Bernice Barry’s Sarah Evans (Echo), Catherine McKinnon’s To Sing of War (HC) and Emily Maguire’s Rapture (A&U).
Lucy Treloar’s most recent novel is Days of Innocence and Wonder (Picador).
My non-fiction standout this year was Mortal Secrets (Hachette) by Frank Tallis: a fascinating biography of Freud and the city that shaped him, which explores the many tenets of modern life that began as conversations in Viennese coffee houses over a century ago. Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel, The Ministry of Time (Hachette), is the most fun you could possibly have while engaging so seriously with history and our place in it. And from Australian writers, I adored Emily Maguire’s lush, immersive historical novel Rapture (Allen & Unwin), and I continue to be intimidated by Shankari Chandran’s productivity - her latest, Safe Haven (Ultimo) is just as good as last year’s Miles Franklin winner.
Diana Reid’s Signs of Damage will be published by Ultimo in March.
In response to Stanislava Pinchuk’s arresting and elegiac artwork, The Theatre of War, I spent this year reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (Norton). The story was familiar; its contemporaneousness was not. For what could be more current than this story about great men who believe in nothing more than their own specialness? Who - exalted and abased by masculinity, dragged by fame and shame - call down such carnage that the earth itself revolts? Which segues us into Esther Kinsky’s Rombo (Fitzcarraldo; trans., Caroline Schmidt), a polyphonic tour de force tracing the wake of an earthquake in Italy. Other books I was captivated by: Raeden Richardson’s The Degenerates (Text), Kate Grenville’s Restless Dolly Maunder (Text), and Danez Smith’s Bluff (Vintage).
Nam Le’s latest book is 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem (Scribner).
Middlemarch (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot is the portrait of an entire world. It elicits feelings of acute loss, unrequited love and stone-cold hatred. Yet there is no explicit sex, moments of suggested violence, and the main characters are well-meaning provincial folks. Eliot’s voluptuous prose demands our lingering, forensic attention. Nuked (MUP) by Andrew Fowler scrutinises the “art of the deal” in the Australian government under Scott Morrison, who openly lied to the French about his intention to ditch a submarine contract his predecessor had signed with France in favour of a more costly and less reliable one with America and Britain. Fowler’s gripping investigation is about a lot more than submarines. It asks us to contemplate Australia’s place in the world and contains a cast of political mobsters and show-pony Christians whose moral compass would have led Dante and Virgil astray. I’m reading The Book of Roads and Kingdoms (HC), Richard Fidler’s narrative history of the Muslim adventurers who set forth from Baghdad to honour Mohammad’s exhortation to explore the world, to gather cultural and scientific knowledge of the peoples living beyond the Arab world. This book drops you into 600-800 CE as though it were yesterday, aided by the superb story-telling of one of our master narrative historians.
Paul Ham is the author of The Soul: A History of the Human Mind and the substack, Who Made our Minds?
Clare Wright’s Näku Dhäruk (Text) is a dazzling conclusion to her Democracy Trilogy (which also included the Stella-winning The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and You Daughters of Freedom). Both a triumph of storytelling and a near-unparalleled feat of two-worlds thinking, this book — and the Trilogy — will stand as a milestone in Australian history. Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus (Fitzcarraldo,) is a scathing, darkly comic, and tragically timely critique of academia and Zionism. Think Roth but better. One of the best novels I’ve read in years — and the 2022 Pulitzer judges agreed. Other highlights included Ella Baxter’s second novel, Woo Woo (A&U) — even smarter and funnier than her acclaimed 2021 debut New Animal (A&U); Leslie Jamison’s Splinters (Granta) — a razor-sharp memoir of divorce and motherhood; and Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice (Text) —an understated masterpiece, her best novel to date.
Yves Rees’ most recent book is Travelling to Tomorrow (NewSouth).
My reading has been mostly classics lately, with only a few new novels. Rachel Kuchner’s Creation Lake (Vintage) missed out on the Booker, but I loved its (anti-)heroine, a cynical, burnt-out freelance spy without a conscience - or that’s what she tells herself. Closer to home, Ernest Price’s debut novel, The Pyramid of Needs (Affirm), is a sharp and funny skewering of the wellness industry and social-media influencers, who somehow manage to live in fact-free zones. It’s a timely read, given our changing times. And I’m quite tone-deaf, spiritually speaking, but I was moved by Courtney Collins’ haunting Bird (Hachette) and its idea of the reincarnation of souls across time and space, and their search for connection, and for home.
Toni Jordan’s most recent novel is Prettier If She Smiled (Hachette).
Funny how I go blank whenever anyone asks me what I’ve been reading. Do I read? I think I do, but maybe I wasn’t there when it happened. From out of the fog, I drag back the memory of Murray Middleton’s audacious No Church in the Wild (Picador), Ender Baskan’s dangerous Danger Baby (Vre Books), Michelle de Kretser’s table-turning Theory & Practice (Text), Lisa Tuttle’s slim and ecstatic My Death (NYRB), and Nikos Papastergiadis’ tender double portrait, John Berger and Me (Giramondo). And then, from out of the mist, a brick comes flying at my head! It’s Ladivine (Hachette) by Marie Ndiaye. If you threw those sentences at a window (to paraphrase Daniil Kharms), you would shatter the glass!
Miles Allinson’s most recent book is In Moonland (Scribe).
Thanks to my local booksellers’ artful persuasion and my own meandering discoveries, this reading year was a memorable one for first novels — I read more than 20 of them. Yael van der Wouden‘s The Safe Keep (Penguin), Jumaana Abdu’s Translations (Vintage) and Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall (Picador) were the most luminous. Despite wildly different settings (post-war Netherlands, contemporary NSW, a remote island off the coast of Wales in 1938), all of them centre the lives of women and the significance of home and are unflinching in their depiction of complex, tangled intimacies. Similar in theme was Carys Davies’ third novel, Clear (A&U). Set during the Highland Clearances on a remote Scottish island, Davies explores the bond formed between two men ostensibly at odds. I read it, closed the cover, and then read it all over again.
Hannah Kent’s latest novel is Devotion (Picador).
The debut speculative short fiction collection Firelight (Text) by John Morrissey was one of my favourite reads this year – eerie and unsettling in all the best ways, often with a slightly satirical bent. Firelight tackles heavy topics such as resources mining, Indigenous dispossession and environmental ethics in surreal and unexpected ways. Thanks for Having Me (Joan) by Emma Darragh, a fractured, poignant and unsettling tale of motherhood through three generations of one family, was another title that made me excited for the future of Australian fiction. In non-fiction, Ta Nehisi Coates’ The Message (Hamish Hamilton) is stunningly well-written – the kind of iconic book that seems to drop from the sky at exactly the right moment in history. It charts the author’s journey to three sites of conflict in Africa, America and Palestine, asking questions about fear, truth, oppression, power, and the nature of storytelling. Coates deftly weaves his personal story and anecdotes through the narrative, as is characteristic of his work. The Message is the must-read of the year for me. In poetry, two books that stood out for me are Hasib Hourani’s Rock Flight (Giramondo), a heartbreaking lyrical book-length poetic memoir that explores the personal and political cost of the occupation of Palestine, and Stellar Atmospheres (Cordite) by Alicia Sometimes, an unlikely pairing of science with poetry that reaches to the very edge of our existence, to explore astrophysics, cosmology, and the contributions of female scientists, among other things.
Maxine Beneba Clarke ’s latest book is We Know a Place (Hardie Grant).
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