In 2024, I enjoyed 75 new books and 25 re-reads. Most of these books were helpful and life-enhancing, and so I've included a short description of each of them, plus links to longer reviews of mine where they exist, either on this site or Amazon. Hope you enjoy!
1. The Playdate - Clara Dillon: Neighbour-themed thriller that will keep you turning the pages.
2. Comfort Eating - Grace Dent: A delicious exploration of cheese, potatoes and Angel Delight. Full review here.
3. The Chain - Chinese Suleyman: Hypnotic memoir of control, lies and redemption from the poet and author. Full review here.
4. The Lagos Wife - Vanessa Walters: Thought-provoking Lagos-and-London-set mystery. Full review here.
5. I’m Fcking Amazing - Anoushka Warden: Coming-of-age novel that reads like a memoir.
6. Mad Woman - Bryony Gordon: The latest instalment in the life of Bryony, as she addresses her history of anxiety.
7. Plaything - Bea Setton: Compelling tale of codependency, COVID and Cambridge. Full review here.
8. Blue Sisters - Coco Mellors: Solid story of sisters trying to escape the shadows of addiction and support each other in their losses. Full review here.
9. Doppelgänger - Naomi Klein: Stone-cold banger; an exploration of misinformation, misdirection and mistaken identity in dangerous times.
10. Death at the Sign of the Rook - Kate Atkinson: A welcome return for sexy grandad Jackson Brodie. Full review here.
11. Experienced - Kate Young: Bristol, bisexuality and… buffets. Lovely bit of visibility for us queers. Full review here.
12. Mania - Lionel Shriver: Shrill, talky wokeness satire.
13. You Are Here - David Nicholls: Love in the Lake District. Full review here.
14. My Favourite Mistake - Marian Keyes: Small-town romance for sweet Anna, the fourth of the much-loved Walsh sisters. Full review here.
15. Careering - Daisy Buchanan: Enjoyable, sexy fashion-mag romp.
16. Four Stars - Joel Golby: Life, listed: a lad’s novel with some laugh-out-loud moments and serious social awkwardness.
17. Sandwich - Catherine Newman: Another irresistible outing for Newman, with lovely explorations of anxiety and anticipatory grief. Full review here.
18. Oh Sister - Jodie Chapman: Three female members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints navigate motherhood, sexuality and the choice to rebel or conform.
19. Everything You Have - Kate Ruby: A dark Devil Wears Prada, with a broody branding expert being manipulated by her assistant.
20. Same Old Girl - Sheena Patterson: Sickness, recovery and selfhood from the Smash Hits legend and author of I’m Not With The Band.
21. How to be a French Girl - Rose Cleary: Strange but delicious novel about a young office worker in pursuit of French sophistication and an older man, and the lengths she will go to in order to get them. Highly recommended.
22. Molly - Blake Butler: A compelling exploration of love, lust, loss, and the life of poet and baker Molly Brodak. Neither Molly nor Blake comes out of it that well, but it’s not the sort of book that looks for easy answers.
23. Operation Mincemeat - Ben MacIntyre: Stranger-than-fiction tale of spies and the larger-than-life men and women behind a plan to trick the Reich in 1943. Not as much fun as the musical, but with more details about both English mastermind Ewen Montagu and a mysterious figure who doesn’t make it into the West End show, Alexis von Roenne, who has his own reasons for wanting the outlandish plot to work.
24. I Love You I Love You I Love You - Laura Dockrill: Teenage kicks in London, based on the author’s school years and the thrill of first love.
25. Boy Parts - Eliza Clark: Creepy fever-dream of art, sexuality and death in Newcastle and London, with a heroine you won’t forget in a hurry.
26. The Bee Sting - Paul Murray: Doorstop of a tale full of secrets, as a seemingly perfect family hurtles towards chaos. Would have made my Top Twenty if it had been published this year and very deserving of the acclaim it’s received.
27. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin: I didn’t love this novel as much as a lot of folks did, but the plot of game creation, home-making and world-building in a time of trauma and grief is undeniably original, with a delightful ending.
28. Free Love - Tessa Hadley: A novel of ill-advised love in the sixties, when some were forging ahead and some still stuck in the suburban 1950s. Well worth a read, though this was my first introduction to this author and I currently prefer her short stories; she shows great mastery of the form.
29. The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou - Eleni Kyriacou: Based on a real-life murder case, this is the unputdownable story of a Greek grandma accused of doing the unthinkable. Zina doesn’t seem particularly sorry. Will she pay the ultimate price?
30. Day - Michael Cunningham: Dreamy exploration of family, love and lockdown with echoes of the author’s earlier Flesh and Blood and The Hours in its themes and three-part structure.
31. Lifting Off - Karen McLeod: A sparky memoir of living the High Life with new friends, a fistful of miniatures and a big secret aboard British Airways. Full review here.
32. Madwoman - Chelsea Bieker: Identity, redemption, motherhood and too much online shopping. Full review here.
33. The Grand Scheme of Things: Warona Jay: Publishing identity-politics satire turns its attention to the theatre world; long overdue. Full review here.
34. Why Mummy Drinks on Holiday - Gill Sims: An enjoyable gulp of pink sunshine wine with Ellen, Simon and the ‘precious moppets’ in a 90s flashback as Ellen tries to befriend the local Yummy Mummies when best friend Hannah goes on holiday with her rancid ex-husband Dan.
35. Someone Else’s Shoes - Jojo Moyes: Two very different women experience, and change, each other’s lives in and out of a London hotel suite.
36. Wake - Anna Hope: Harrowing story of three women coping with the emotional, financial and social ravages of the First World War.
37. Close Knit - Jenny Colgan: Dreamy, cosy story of love and cashmere in Scotland, with some characters from The Summer Skies.
38. Here One Moment - Liane Moriarty: A stranger’s predictions aboard a flight have the passengers questioning their life choices. Full review here.
39. The Proof of my Innocence - Jonathan Coe: Meta mash-up from a novelist at the height of his powers, indecently enjoyable and with echoes of his ubiquitous nineties novels - but better. Full review here.
40. Hot Not Bothered - Harper Ford: Coping with menopause and self-discovery like a badass.
41. You’re Embarrassing Yourself - Desiree Akhavan: Moving memoir of love, identity, work wives, film-making, parents, dye jobs and nose jobs. Full review here.
42. Revisionaries - Kristopher Jansma: What’s in the bottom desk drawers of our favourite and most well-renowned authors, and why did these books not make it into print? Full review here.
43. Our Holiday - Louise Candlish: Pacy thriller from the Queen of glossy interiors and dark deeds.
44. Long Island Compromise - Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Irreverent doorstop chronicle of a wealthy family in crisis. Full review here.
45. Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood: A bit late to the party with this one, but as usual Atwood’s grasp of her source material (The Tempest) and the challenges of staging it, assuredly underpins this tale of incarceration, revenge and parental loss.
46. The Unfamiliar- Kirsty Logan: Exploring the Gothic aspects of motherhood and the toll trying to conceive a child can take on a queer marriage, this memoir of a strange time is written with dazzling urgency.
47. Private Rites - Julia Armfield: Love, lesbians, faith and family in the End Times. Full review here.
48. My Family - David Baddiel: Moving and hilarious memoir of Baddiel’s parents, particularly his mother Sarah, whose golf-related erotic poetry you will never forget. Full review here.
49. Liars - Sarah Manguso: Toxic relationships and rebuilding through single motherhood, this is a short, sharp Martini of a book that isn’t afraid of its icy rage. Full review here.
50. Think Again - Jacqueline Wilson: A real treat to revisit the Girls, Ellie, Magda and Nadine as adults. Once you’ve got over hearing them say the F Word, it’s as comforting as a tub of ice cream, as grown-up mum Ellie chooses between her old art teacher (not again)! and a mysterious girl who she meets on the morning of her fortieth birthday.
51. How Not to be a Supermodel - Ruth Crilly: 90s and early-noughties fashion, globetrotting and seriously awkward moments; great fun. Full review here.
52. The Fecking Fabulous Forties Club - Freya Kennedy: Midlife mums go mad.
53. Bonjour Mademoiselle! - Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts: This well-researched biography tells the story of April Ashley, model, socialite and trans icon. Full review here.
54. Kissing Kosher - Jean Meltzer: Bakery romance in Brooklyn.
55. Spoken Word - Joshua Bennett: An exploration of this transformative type of writing and performance, from the Nuyorican Cafe to (checks notes) Leamington Spa.
56. Wife - Charlotte Mendelson: Zoe and Penny seemed to have it all, but is love and the perfect-looking family worth the sacrifice, and who has to make it? A glittering, precise, bitchy novel about saving the only life you can. Full review here.
57. My Husband - Maud Ventura: Gloriously nasty novella about the underside of a perfect marriage. Still weirdly romantic amid the poison.
58. The Wedding People - Alison Espach: One of my highlights of the year, a rom-com with heart, social satire and lots of terminally awkward sexting. Full review here.
59. My Phantoms - Gwendoline Riley: Bridge and her mum have never seen eye to eye, but whose fault is it? A brilliantly sharp-edged book.
60. The Book Game - Frances Wise (2025): Literary retreat turns toxic. Full review here.
61. So Thrilled For You - Holly Bourne (2025): Baby-shower chaos as four female friends navigate the aftermath of a fire. Full review here.
62. The Rewrite - Lizzie Damilola Blackburn (2025): When Temi's ex Wale shows up on a reality TV show, she turns to writing for solace, but what happens when a publisher gets interested? Full review here.
63. Consider Yourself Kissed - Jessica Stanley (2025): Coralie falls in love with Adam when she leavse Australia for London, but no one arrives without baggage. Full review here.
64. Enid Blyton, the biography - Barbara Stoney: Sympathetic but clear-eyed look at the grandmother of children’s literature and the contradictions in her life, from nude tennis to familial estrangement and her intense love for her second husband, while creating stories hundreds of thousands of children around the world would love.
65. Grave Talk - Nick Spalding: The comic novelist turns his hand to loss, as two strangers meet annually in a cemetery to mourn their loved ones.
66. Accidents in the Home - Tessa Hadley: A bravura collection of interlinked short stories/novel, as a simple supper with friends leads a young mother of three to blow up her life, and flashback stories show how the characters got to this point.
67. What a Performance: The Life of Sid Field - John Fisher: A weird choice, this, tenuously related to my research for a project and also faintly linked to Operation Mincemeat (the London MI5 team went to his show on the night they dispatched their ‘Bill.’) Not extensively filmed, having died quite young, Field isn’t well known today so it was interesting to explore his brief time in the limelight.
68. After the Funeral - Tessa Hadley: More short stories, unlinked but each one a gem. I do like the linked approach, though. These tales of infidelity, neglect, family and love and intoxicating.
69. How to Sleep at Night - Elizabeth Harris (2025): Ethan tells his husband Gabe he's running for Congress - as a Republican. Full review here.
70. Food Person - Adam Roberts (2025): When Isabella loses her job, she gets a gig ghostwriting a cookbook for a troubled actress - but is it going to be worth it? Full review here.
71. Favourite Daughter - Morgan Dick (2025): Arlo has always loved and taken care of her father, so why does everything in his will go to another girl? Full review here.
72. The Favourite - Fran Littlewood (2025): A family holiday goes wrong when a father chooses to save one of his girls from a potential accident - but not the other two! Full review here.
73. Mona of the Manor - Armistead Maupin: A return to our favourite characters from Barbary Lane as they bring their own brand of chaos to the Cotswolds.
74. Jokes, Jokes, Jokes - My Very Funny Memoir - Jenny Eclair: As a huge fan of her novels, I enjoyed this memoir a great deal and had no idea she had spent so much of her early career on the pub performance poetry circuit. Eclair is keen to point out her own flaws and those in her art - a ‘cruel’ book, inconsistent mothering, an undercooked show or an outburst of randomly getting off with people as a young mum, none of which she sugar-coats (she’s not the type)!
75. A Lovely Way To Die - Eleni Kyriacou (2025): Suspense and intrigue in Old Hollywood.
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