The Reading, Writing, and Me Best Fiction Picks of 2024
To keep this list readable when you've probably already read so many, I broke this into a Top 5 that are ranked, summarized, quoted, and include a blurb about why I chose them. If you've been following the blog all year, you'll be familiar with my love for many of these. What follows is an unranked Honorable Mention section with books that have clung in my brain for a while, some of which surprised me. These are not what I'd necessarily deal technically best, but they just captured me in one way or another. Click the title to read each book's full review, and let me know your favorites of 2024 in the comments!
Top 5 Books Published in 2024
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Martyr! directly confronts the big, looming, unescapable question of death through the lens of a protagonist who is numb to it. Cyrus feels like his life is going nowhere fast, so he's intent on figuring out how to make his death matter—hence his obsession with historical martyrs. This leads him to an exhibit in New York put on by an artist who is spending her final days living in the museum, talking to patrons before she passes due to terminal illness. While Cyrus is more intimately linked to this exhibit than he knows, it turns out that an obsession with death can teach you a lot about life.
This is a book I know I'm going to reread at some point, and I greatly look forward to that day. Effortlessly poetic and burning with sincerity and knowing, this book makes the profound feel almost simple and is a good reminder about why we put up with life.
"Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it harder." p. 134
The Wedding People by Alison Espach
Phoebe is going to Rhode Island to die. There's nothing more that she wants from life than to visit the hotel she's been obsessed with as a final bucket list item and the end of the road. After going through a painful divorce and watching her career stagnate, Phoebe is dealing with deep pain. Once at the hotel, she realizes that by mistake she's been folded into a wedding that's overtaken the hotel. As she forms a bond with the bride, suddenly Phoebe is given a temporary sense of responsibility and purpose that opens the world wider for her again.
This book is outstanding for its voice and ability to make a largely internal progression feel gripping. It's hard to write a book where a character exists nearly entirely in their head. Phoebe's struggles are against the larger forces of the world in an abstract way, but they manifest almost entirely internally, and yet Espach handles this beautifully. The book is hard to put down. The close third person here is so intimate that I was jarred every time I remembered we weren't explicitly in Phoebe's head, one with her.
“Having a mother helps you believe that everybody wants to hear every little thing you think. Having a mother helps you speak without thinking. It allows you to trust in your most awful self, to yell and scream and cry, knowing that your mother will still love you by the end of it.”
The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes
Four sisters who've been with each other for nearly four decades means plenty of history. While they've scattered across Ireland, England, and the United States, they reunite at the news that their oldest, steadiest sister has gone missing. While not a mystery or a thriller, this is a rich stories about life and all the different versions there are to live and what happens when you need to take a break from the person you've always been.
This is a slow burn, beautifully written novel that reminds me of a favorite from last year, Wellness, in the sense that the book's characters' interests are extremely well researched and flow through their very being in their perspective chapters. There isn't another book I've read this year that feels like walking into a fully inhabited world like this one does.
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors
These four sisters are also scattered around the globe. After Nicky's death due to complications of her endometriosis pain management, the remaining three sisters residing in LA, London, and Paris are forced to reckon with who they are as a family without their "glue" sister. When it's time to empty her apartment a year later to prepare it for sale, the sisters are forced to confront their grief and their fragmented relationships directly.
I guess if I had to identify a theme for this year's top books, it would be a contemplation of death and sisterhood, both of which are present in this novel. Mellors does a wonderful job of handling the multiple points of view of the sisters. They are each distinct in the ways they choose to handle life and grief. She does a fantastic job of using the benefit of multiple perspectives to give a more expansive view of each of the characters through the lenses of the others and harnesses that to increase the tension. These are characters you'll fall in love with. There's not much more to say than that.
“Their family had always been good at hellos and goodbyes, moments ending even as they began. It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.”
Piglet by Lottie Hazel
This is certainly the most lighthearted selection to grace the top places, but Piglet certainly deals with her fair share of troubles. In the lead up to her wedding, Piglet's fiancé, who has provided her with the kind of upper middle class life and Le Creuset cookware she's always dreamed of, reveals their entire relationship is built on a lie. Piglet has to decide if she's willing to look past this to maintain the life she's constructed or if she's willing to give it all up to honor her gut feeling.
Piglet shines as a book about food. How it can be both a wonderful and awful force in a life. Piglet works at a cookbook publisher, loves cooking as a show of care for others, and is deeply passionate about it. But Piglet also uses food to self-sooth in an unhealthy coping mechanism that leaves her feeling sick. While Piglet's external world creates plot points, this internal grappling with food is the struggle that really marks the novel and gives it depth. Hazel writes in a straightforward, readable way that's further brought to life by her dazzling food descriptions that will make you hungry.
“What could she say? What sentence would pierce him while leaving her intact? She had built her life so carefully around him. To say something, to do something, to feel something, would be to self-destruct.”
Honorable Mentions
Greta and Valdin
The dialogue in this book is incredible as its ability to capture the sense of general doom of being a young adult right now. Focused on two queer siblings navigating their early twenties in New Zealand.
“What if he’s one of those guys who wants to know where you are all the time? What if he runs a meme page and I don’t think it’s funny?”
Mother Doll
The writing in this multi-timeline, somewhat mystical story looks back on Russian history and preparation for motherhood in the modern day.
"I believe that in order to survive, I betrayed everybody who was ever dear to me, including myself."
The Ministry of Time
I'm not a sci-fi girl, but this time traveling book has an incredible amount of heart and characters you won't forget.
“I let her leave without saying goodbye and sat in the pool of silence that followed the crash of the front door slamming shut. This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.”
The Anthropologists
Tiny vignettes of modern life in an unspecified place. Makes you remember the profound within the mundane.
“Where do I feel most like myself? I don't know how to answer that question. I guess I'm still looking.”
Colored Television
There's just something about Danzy Senna's voice. I liked it while reading it but then the book never left me.
“On the shelves, the stalwart anthologies of all those slightly banal stories she found so easy to teach. Genius, she’d learned, didn’t teach as well as mere competence, where the mechanics were all visible on the surface. You couldn’t teach a student how to write by assigning Toni Morrison, it would only create bad imitations."
Evenings and Weekends
This is a book where I'll admit the flaws from the outset, but if you've ever spent time in London, there's something magnetic about it.
“Valerie knows how it feels to move through life's motions, responding to events as they happen, and then, one day, without intention, you've found yourself miles from where you started, with no way to return.”
Wild Houses
The warmth of this book is what I've taken away.
“All boys, all children, are capable of cruelty at the right juncture of opportunity and circumstance, but only a few become committed prodigies of sadism...”
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