Sequels and reboots were the trend: Pat Barker, Percival Everett, Nick Harkaway and Colm Toíbín all went back for seconds one way or another. David Nicholls’s outdoor romcom You Are Here and Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital, bestsellers both, spoke to a hunger for escape that was forged in lockdown, still on writers’ minds. What’s ahead in 2025, I don’t dare hazard, but here’s what I liked best from a year in which I was drawn, I now see, to character-led novels of relationships, not always dysfunctional.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber)
She’s too shy; you can tell she didn’t study creative writing; her characters never stop eating bread... just three of the frankly batshit statements lately uttered amid the discourse frenzy that greets this gifted young novelist’s every last move. Hats off to her for blocking out the noise to rediscover her glorious A-game in a tale of two Irish-Slovak brothers struggling to emerge from the shadow of their parents’ long-ago divorce. So funny and observant about love of many different kinds, this is the book I enjoyed most in 2024.
The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota (Harvill Secker)
One of Britain’s finest writers wrung page-turning drama from the unsexy-sounding subject of a trade union election in Derbyshire. Two leadership hopefuls, both British Asian - one a middle-aged factory worker, the other a privately educated diversity officer - fight dirty over their contradictory visions of leftwing politics.
Godwin by Joseph O’Neill (4th Estate)
Another novel that shouldn’t work but does. Half of it is a drily compelling workplace procedural about bickering pharmaceutical grant writers – see what I mean? – while the other half is a transcontinental chase caper involving an African football prodigy. Both narratives twine around a murky family psychodrama akin to a wicked stepmother fairytale, as if O’Neill hadn’t already given us enough.
Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes (translated by Frank Wynne) (MacLehose Press)
Lockdown met #MeToo in one of the most entertaining novels to have emerged from either. Centred on the testy bond between a washed-up actor and a cancelled novelist who become pen pals after one slags off the other on Instagram, it’s impish as well as sincere, written with all the lapel-grabbing bluntness you’d expect from the title.
Liars by Sarah Manguso (Picador)
Novels of female rage have become something of a marketing cliche in recent years – ditto, tell-all autofiction that cuts close to the bone – but don’t let any of that put you off this grippingly acrid tale of marital breakup, in which a wounded ex-wife recounts sleepwalking into a disastrously draining years-long union.
One for my stocking
I’ve been snacking on Martin Amis’s old Observer journalism - the time he got ghosted by Madonna; his report on Manchester United’s last-gasp treble win – and I want to go back to the novels, recently reissued with A-list intros. Rachel Cusk once said of Amis that he was “something of an honorary woman: the attention due his work is snagged, instead, on his self”, so I’d like to check out what she says in her new preface to London Fields (Vintage Classics).
To browse all of the Observer and Guardian’s best fiction books of 2024 go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
