Category: books

This year I got around to reading a number of books I’d always meant to read, and which, frankly, made me feel embarrassed about not having got around to reading. By far the best of these was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847), which had the capacity to surprise even though I knew the plot fairly well, and which I found totally absorbing throughout.

A more surprising favourite was The Beast Within (La Bête Humaine) by Emile Zola (1890). I’d already read and loved Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and assumed his other novels couldn’t possibly reach the bleak heights of that novel, but this one absolutely does, with grim setpieces that will stick in my mind. I’ll be searching out more Zola in 2026, I’m sure.

I approached the 1999 Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf with caution, as I tend to struggle with verse, but I read it in a single sitting and was astounded at the impact of the poem, and the outright horror imagery.

My final five-star novel I read this year was The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939), a dour but funny tale of an artist lost in Hollywood.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) was as excellent as I’d been told – I’ll confess I skim-read some of the whaling sequences, but I lingered over everything involving the characters themselves. Similarly, I found lots of dark humour in Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890), though it certainly benefits from its short word count as the bleaker elements could overwhelm the reader. I adored Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (1967), which is as satisfyingly weird as the film adaptation, and performs some really interesting tricks with viewpoint.

Books I admired rather than loved included time-travelling slavery drama Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979), down-to-earth Coming Up For Air by George Orwell (1939), pleasingly melodramatic Adolphe by Benjamin Constant (1816), wholehearted family epic Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (1862), frequently gripping A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859), Nabokovian thriller The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester (1996), beautifully snide Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West (1933), viewpoint-undermining The Last Film of Emile Vico by Thomas Gavin (1986) and meandering but witty Lost for Words by Edward St Aubyn (2014).

I didn’t read much recent fiction this year, but my favourite was The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe (2024), which has the expected well-drawn characters and social commentary, but also the addition of a metafictional mystery plot that involves an outright cheat and yet remains deeply satisfying, which is an achievement no author can reasonably expect to pull off.

My favourite non-fiction book this year was crime-meets-architecture analysis A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh (2016). I also enjoyed The Artist’s Voice, a series of interviews with artists edited by Katharine Kuh (1962) and writing guides Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin (2015) and Writing the Magic, edited by Dan Coxon (2025).

Of all the recently published books I read this year, Six Lives by Lavie Tidhar (2024) was the one I relished the most. Each of the six parts follows, as you’d expect, a single life (all members of a convoluted family tree), and there are pleasing links between the stories that reward attention. But it’s the style that most impresses – not only does each story move forward in time, which affects the tone, but each episode is essentially a different genre, including an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery and a Cold War espionage tale. The prolific Tidhar has form in this sort of genre-hopping novel, and I also enjoyed his 2023 novel The Circumference of the World, which concerns SF genre history and also contains a hard-SF sequence in its own right.

I was deeply impressed by Whalefall by Daniel Kraus (2023), a novel that sounds like either a Moby Dick ripoff or high-concept pulp (a man goes diving, finds himself trapped inside a whale, spends an entire novel trying to escape) but is actually thoughtful and considered, concerning the character’s troubled relationship with his father. There’s similar paternal territory covered in The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman (2018), a wonderful novel about an artist operating in the shadow of his much more celebrated father. Far more straightforward than Six Lives and Whalefall, this is probably my most satisfying read this year in terms of recent releases.

Two structurally experimental novels I enjoyed were Cuddy by Benjamin Myers (2023), which treads a line between his raw, ugly fiction like The Gallows Pole and his gentler contemporary fiction, and Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (2022), which is decidedly cold but thought-provoking and surprisingly entertaining in its rambling discourse on environmental issues.

My biggest belated discovery was the Patrick Melrose sequence by Edward St. Aubyn: Bad News (1992), Some Hope (1994), Mother‘s Milk (2005), Never Mind (1992) and At Last (2011), which I rationed out over several months, not wanting the series to end. The first novel almost threw me off, as I’m no fan of tales of drug binges, but by the second novel Patrick has found a more even keel and his acidity is directed outwards. Sentence by sentence, the books are a joy to read, and the series is now up there with John Updike’s Rabbit sequence in my estimation.

I rarely get into series, but I did read another this year – the first Mortal Engines sequence by Philip Reeve: Mortal Engines (2001), Predator’s Gold (2003), Infernal Devices (2005) and A Darkling Plain (2006). I’d initially begun reading them as a sort of book-club read with my eldest son, but I was soon hooked. The shifts between novels and willingness to stray away from the initial protagonist are as satisfying as in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series – which I’ve also been rereading to my son this year, so I’ve absorbed a good deal of excellent YA fiction.

I finally read The Glass Cell by Patricia Highsmith (1964), which was more dour than most of her thrillers, but relentlessly compelling. Having also managed a reread of The Talented Mr Ripley before the Ripley TV series began, my opinion of Highsmith remains sky-high.

Another genre novel that surpasses its pulpy context is Magic by William Goldman (1976), recommended to me by a writer friend (I wish I could remember who). The narrative trickery is great fun, but it was the close descriptions of magic tricks and the surprisingly detailed insights into the protagonist’s thoughts and the caustic humour that most impressed me.

The novel I raved about most often this year, and which made me curse myself at not having read it sooner, was Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson (1973). It’s bleak and snide and yet incredible fun throughout, with Pythonesque humour and a disregard for the rules of novel-writing. I love experimental fiction, but I haven’t read much recently, and this playful novel is likely to shift my 2025 reading tastes in that direction.

The short-story collections I read this year were all by friends – incredibly talented friends, I should add. Treatises on Dust by Timothy J. Jarvis (2023) takes its weirdness and its place within the weird-fiction canon seriously, and the tales-within-tales become ever more labyrinthine – like Nabokov’s short fiction, these are stories that revel in being fiction, so it’s no surprise that the collection is proving so popular with fellow writers. I suspect it will become a classic in the future.

More contemporary weirdness can be found in Hunting by the River by Daniel Carpenter (2024), which gazes into the dark corners of urban spaces and finds little that’s reassuring there, Umbilical by Teika Marija Smits (2023), which twists mythology into modern contexts to examine parental concerns, and Out of the Window, Into the Dark by Marian Womack (2024), which contains stories that (as I wrote in my blurb) evoke the wild worldbuilding of Ursula Le Guin and the unsettling domesticity of Shirley Jackson, with a meticulousness that’s highlighted by a Borgesian fascination with libraries. Commercial Book by Andrew Hook (2024) contains stories each of exactly 1000 words, each paired with one of the songs on Commercial Album by The Residents. While no familiarity with the album is required – the affecting stories which are immersed in dreams and steeped in film and music certainly stand alone – listening to each song before or after reading the story reveals even greater depths.

Most of the non-fiction I read in 2024 related to writing projects, but I put time aside for I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (2007), a discourse on consciousness and self-reflexivity which will certainly end up inspiring more of my own stories and novels to come. I loved Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher (2014), especially his analysis of albums by Burial. While I contributed an article to Writing the Murder: Essays on Crafting Crime Fiction, edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst (2024), I thoroughly enjoyed the other contributors’ pieces, particular Tom Mead’s assessment of the locked-room genre, and Carole Johnstone’s very honest article about the pragmatism involved in selecting a writing project.

Of those published this year, the novel that perfectly matched my tastes was Biography of X by Catherine Lacey. It’s a fictitious biography of an artist skilled in creating diverse stage (and off-stage) personas, and as it’s written by her wife it’s a conceit that allows for insights into both characters whilst struggling to remain objective. Beyond that, it mixes Pale Fire-esque metafiction and alternate history politics reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Two other recent novels covered similar metafictional territory, but with very different results. Conquest by Nina Allan (2023) is another sort-of fictional biography and sort-of private investigation, and incorporates non-fiction articles and SF short stories to great effect. I love Nina Allan’s short fiction, and this fragmented novel harnesses her skills wonderfully.

Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley will be published in January 2024, but I was lucky enough to read an pre-publication ARC. Though it’s a fantasy quest narrative, it remains resolutely down to earth even in its wildest moments, and it features footnotes written by a scholar many decades later, which comment and interrupt the primary action, undermining and enhancing in equal measure. I think the novel works equally as well as epic fantasy as it does as a pure allegory about maturation, and when it made me cry, it was partly because I didn’t want it to end.

Speaking of which, the only other novel that reduced me to tears was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (2022). The framing of the real world as operating according to the mechanics of videogames is its most arresting aspect, but the cast of characters all trying to muddle through life, and the lack of antagonists, is perhaps what makes the novel so very life-affirming.

Ten Planets by Yuri Herrara (translated by Lisa Dillman, published by And Other Stories, 2023) was a great discovery. It’s not only one of the most enjoyable short story collections I can remember, it’s also one of the most inspiring books I’ve read in years, and it’s affected the style of my own short fiction. Though they’re nominally SF stories, these are truncated, magical tales more in line with works by Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino.

Death and the Conjuror by Tom Mead (2023) is a note-perfect Golden Age locked-room mystery featuring stage-magician-turned-detective Joseph Spector, who reappears in the excellent sequel, The Murder Wheel, and with more mysteries to come.

In Lamb (2023), Matt Hill allows the weirdness that’s inflected his recent novels to come to the fore. Like Aliya Whiteley’s Three Eight One, it comes across almost as a parable, and its tortured characters and murky setpieces will linger with me for a long time.

The Shane Meadows TV adaptation led to me to read The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers (2017) finally this year, and I cursed myself for not doing so sooner. It’s a vicious book, less because of any actual violence but more due to its violent prose. It’s the most viscerally affecting book I’ve read this year. In contrast, Myers’ The Perfect Golden Circle (2022) is a warm hug, strongly reminiscent of Mackenzie Crook’s TV show The Detectorists in the pairing of its central characters.

Similarly calm and unassuming is Brian by Jeremy Cooper (2023). Upon his retirement from his council job Brian settles on the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank as his new haunt, where he encounters like minds and an entire world via screenings of classic films. Like Rónán Hession’s Leonard and Hungry Paul, usual expectations about plot or character development don’t apply here, and the pleasures of this novel relate to witnessing an awkward personality finding peace in unlikely ways. Brian’s responses to the films he watches are a lovely insight into the effect that fiction can have on impressionable minds.

Moving away from recently-published books, the novels that had the biggest impression on me were The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas (1963), a Norwegian coming-of-age tale that reminded me of a snowy Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (1950), which of course is nothing like the Hitchcock adaptation, and being Highsmith it’s murkier and more compelling than other thrillers of its, or perhaps any, era.

Now for some other books I particularly enjoyed, which were published fairly recently. Black Lake Manor by Guy Morpuss (2022) is just my sort of high-concept mystery, deploying time travel most effectively. Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson (2019) had been waiting patiently on my shelf for years, and didn’t deserve to be ignored – it’s a fresh, strange and brilliant representation of Shelley’s classic. Boy Parts by Eliza Clark (2020) is second only to The Gallows Pole in terms of startling directness and, often, glorious ugliness. The Hood by Lavie Tidhar (2021) continues Tidhar’s Anti-Matter of Britain Quartet begun in By Force Alone, this novel dealing with the legend of Robin Hood and weirding its familiar subject satisfyingly.

Many of the older books I loved this year were mysteries, and many were books I’d anticipated as known quantities but which surprised me. Though I knew the ‘trick’ of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926), I found it enormously effective – it was probably the book I read fastest this year. I also finally got around to reading the Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy L. Sayers, beginningwith Strong Poison (1930) and Whose Body? (1923) andwas taken as much by her Wodehousian wit as her character and mysteries. Another mystery novel I loved was A Helping Hand by Celia Dale (1966), recently reprinted by Daunt Books and a far nastier tale than I’d anticipated.

I did read books without mystery plots, too! The ones I most enjoyed were the post-apocalyptic literary fantasy The Road to Corlay by Richard Cowper (1978), and The Princess Bride by William Goldman (1973) – another metafictional novel, so something of a theme this year! – and a wonderful fix-up novel concerning art and authenticity, Pictures of Fidelman by Bernard Malamud (1969).

I read only two graphic novels this year, but both were excellent. Inside the Mind of Sherlock Holmes, written by Benoit Dahan and illustrated by Cyril Lieron (2023), is a pleasingly faithful rendering of Holmes and Watson that focuses on Holmes’s ‘mind attic’ and his processing of clues and which asks readers to fold pages or hold them up to the light in order to reveal hidden connections. Out on the Wire by Jessica Abel (2015) is a terrific account of the boom of American non-fiction podcasts such as This American Life and Radiolab, with plenty of insights into the craft.

Most of the non-fiction I read this year related to novel research. The best non-fiction book I read purely for pleasure was Writing the Future, edited by Dan Coxon & Richard V. Hirst (2023), continuing the terrific series from Dead Ink Books. It contains essays about SF by Aliya Whiteley, Adam Roberts, Nina Allan, Una McCormack and more, many of which are wonderful, perhaps even essential, and which, I think, will inform many SF novels yet to come.