11 novelists on their book of the year

David Nicholls, Dolly Alderton, Nick Hornby, Coco Mellors + other legends

Today’s letter is a little twist on What Writers Read — instead of asking these novelists to write about their favourite ever book, I asked them for their favourite book they read in 2024. And what a smorgasbord of absolute gems!

Some familiar bestsellers (no list of the year is complete without Miranda July’s All Fours), some stone-cold classics (might this be the year I finally read Love in the Time of Cholera?) and some niche titles to add to my TBR pile. Enjoy.

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Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie, People Person and Empress & Aniya

“The book I’ve enjoyed most this year is No Place Like Home by Charlene White. I’ve been watching Charlene blaze a trail on our screens as a news anchor since I was a teenager, and it occurred to me only when reading her story that for someone I’d seen so much, I knew very little about her. She was one of those hypervisible Black women whose own stories and life and moral positions and beliefs had been invisible — until now. No Place Like Home is open, it’s honest and it’s a chance to finally, and clearly, see the woman who has been in front of us for over a decade.”

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Nick Hornby, author of over 20 books including About A Boy, High Fidelity and Fever Pitch (you can also find him on Substack)

“2024 was the year I discovered Laurie Colwin. As usual, the second nudge was the one that got me there: the first recommendation came from a novelist friend whose work I adore, the second from a kick-ass non-fiction writer who told me she was thinking of writing Colwin’s biography. Men don’t seem to have heard of her. (Weird, right? Men are usually the first people to recommend domestic comic novels by women.) Colwin died in 1992, aged 48, after writing five novels, as well as Home Cooking, which appears to be the favourite culinary companion of everyone in the US of a certain age, as well as Nigella Lawson.

My favourite Colwin so far is Happy All The Time, and I’m sure you have read enough literary fiction to presume there is a bitter subtext hidden in that title. WELL THERE ISN’T! It is a novel about two couples who fall in love and are HAPPY ALL THE TIME! It’s charming, funny, readable, smart, somewhere to go if you’ve already hoovered up every last mote of Nora Ephron. My paperback comes with an introduction by the great Katherine Heiny. I don’t know what you’re waiting for. But then, you probably knew about her already. I will read everything there is.”

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Rufi Thorpe, author of 4 novels including The Girls from Corona Del Mar and Margo’s Got Money Troubles

“Sometimes I don’t want to be pleased by a book, so much as I want to be indelibly changed by it. I want to be unable to ever forget it. I read amazing books this year, I read disappointing books this year, I read books that were amazing right up until they became disappointing, but I don’t think any of them gave me as much pause, caused such a terrific record scratch in my mental life, as the story collection Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. It is audacious and painful and addictive and gross and beautiful. I loved it.”

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Hanif Kureishi, author of 18 books, plays and non-fiction, including The Buddha of Suburbia and Shattered: A Memoir (you can also find him and his son, Carlo, on Substack)

“I've read only one book this year, and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was Disaster Nationalism by Richard Seymour. I found it stimulating and interesting. It examines the rise of far-right movements, emphasising their roots in societal despair and isolation. He critiques the simplistic view of these movements as mere extremism, instead highlighting their psychological dimensions and manipulation of public sentiment through apocalyptic narratives. By analysing global examples, Seymour warns of the urgent need to address these underlying forces to prevent further societal dysfunction.”

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Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time

“I have still not got over The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan. Set in Malaysia – then British Malaya – in the 1930s, it follows (among other characters) Cecily, a Malaysian housewife who is drawn into a dangerous, seductive espionage entanglement with Fujiawara, a Japanese agent who comes bearing the dream of an ‘Asia for Asians’ – of the end of British colonial rule, and the possibility of self-determination and dignity. Cecily’s decisions will have enormous repercussions for her husband, children and her country.

Chan absolutely excels at marrying the epic and political with the intimate and personal, and her plot twists are so deftly handled that I almost fell off my chair towards the end of the book. You know from the first page that you’re in the hands of someone who has total control over her material and such a gorgeous way with words. The Storm We Made is GRIPPING. You will be STRESSED and AMAZED. You have got to read it.”

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Dolly Alderton, author of Everything I Know About Love, Ghosts and Good Material

“All Fours by Miranda July was a life-changer for me. I thought I was reading about middle age, then I thought I was reading about menopause, then motherhood, then sexuality, then monogamy, then marriage. And by the final page I realised I was reading about existence and death and I couldn’t stop crying. Plus it’s so funny and it’s so horny.”

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Poorna Bell, author of 5 books including Stronger and This Is Fine (you can also find her on Substack)

“I’ve read a ton of romantasy this year so it’s unusual that my book of the year is a literary one - specifically Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which also won the Booker. It is slim - almost like a novella and it is a snapshot of six astronauts from all different parts of the world as they orbit the Earth in a spacecraft. It is impressive the amount of research that Harvey must have done in order to write this book because in every line you feel as if you are alongside the astronauts observing our planet.

The writing is staggeringly beautiful in its description of landscape but also the emptiness of space that throws our everyday lives into such sharp relief. I felt at once removed, remote and detached in observing our planet, and at the same time, in such appreciation of how fleeting and fragile it is. It gives you a perspective of the big stuff - death, birth, the life span of a star - and at the same time shrinks our thoughts down to the taste of an orange, a swim in the ocean. Exquisite and poetic down to the last word.”

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Coco Mellors, author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein and Blue Sisters

“Like cashmere, baths and hot chocolate, there’s something so comforting and indulgent about re-reading a classic. I loved Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez as a teenager, but returning to it this winter, five years into my marriage and one year into motherhood, I’m finding new depths of wisdom and humanity in its exploration of both epic, unrequited love and the daily devotion of long-term partnership. And on a sentence level, no one delivers romance quite like Márquez: “To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people… the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter.” I mean, bloody swoon!”

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Lauren Elkin, author of 5 books including Flâneuse and Scaffolding

“In what was an incredible year in fiction, a real standout for me was Alba Arikha’s Two Hours. It’s a compressed and powerful novel built on a short encounter with a boy called Alexander when the narrator, Clara, was 16. The memory of him ticks along in the background like a slightly too-loud clock, forcing everything else in Clara's life to cohere around its insistent rhythm — which of course it cannot, because life doesn't obey a metronome.

We follow Clara into adulthood, marriage, motherhood, and divorce, wondering all the while what happened to Alexander and what it will all mean, and the payoff is fully worth the build-up. Arikha is particularly good on maternal ambivalence and postpartum psychosis — there is one scene that has haunted me ever since I read it; I found myself thinking about it just the other day trying to remember if it was a news article I read, or just a crazy story a friend told me. No — it’s from Alba Arikha’s stunning novel.”

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David Nicholls, author of 6 novels including One Day and You Are Here

“My most enjoyable read this year took a little under an hour - a long short story (or a short novella) called The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai. It’s a delicious, spiky, twisty little story told in the voice of an other-worldly, eccentric 17 year-old girl. To say anything more would ruin it but I can add that it’s published in a beautiful hardback edition by New Directions, and that it’s an absolute blast.”

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Caroline O’Donoghue, author of 6 novels including Promising Young Women and The Rachel Incident (you can also find her on Substack)

“I spent the majority of my life thinking I was somehow too good for Maeve Binchy. Her books existed in the netherspace of my granny's bedside table, in charity shops, or in rented holiday cottages. But then a few years ago I picked up Circle of Friends, and both my reading life and my writing life was changed forever.

This 700 page epic about a group of college students in 1950s Ireland takes place over a single academic year, and within that year, empires rise and fall. Hearts are broken, fortunes stolen, friends betrayed – and while that implies a kind of soap opera quality to the novel, it really couldn't be more grounded and human in its approach. Binchy's addictive, chatty prose forces you to empathise with every character, and ultimately you finish the novel loving everyone. Even the ones I still feel furious at.”

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