In this blog, I’m sticking to the rules – books I largely read this year, all of which were published this year, in order of publication date rather than preference. Hope you enjoy, or that it gives you a few gift ideas!
The Chain – Chimene Suleyman (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 28th March 2024)
A hypnotic testament as haunting as the Fleetwood Mac banger of its title. Sustaining the riff, ‘If you don't love me now,’ throughout its pages, poet and author Suleyman has produced a clear-eyed memoir of the traps laid for women, the lies we're told and taught to tell ourselves. As powerful as Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, The Chain is unsparing, witty and fuelled by an anger older than time, offering us all the possibility of rebuilding and redemption.
Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame – Olivia Ford (Penguin, 28th March 2024)
Seventy-something Jenny Quinn enters the Britain Bakes show and must overcome her fear of baking bread (her weak spot) while introducing the nation to the classic goodies her family enjoyed while she was growing up. Under this sweet confection is another story, one about illness, fear of loss and death, the potential end of a marriage, childless-or-child-free-ness, and shame from a long-ago secret that will make you furious at what women of Jenny's generation had to endure. I don’t mind telling you I was in bits for the last five minutes of the book.
You Are Here – David Nicholls (Sceptre, 23rd April 2024)
Marnie is a thirty-eight-year-old copy-editor, working on someone else’s sex-filled book set in Beverly Hills. Her life has been shaped, not for the better, by an early divorce, a financial rip-off and lockdown. Michael is a forty-two-year-old geography teacher, whose monologues about erupting lava are regularly interrupted by schoolboy hysterics, and who harbours a secret about the night that left him literally scarred. Can these two find love among the lakes on a walking weekend? Bonus points for good jokes, more flawless female characters and delightfully accurate depictions of copy-editing.
Did I Ever Tell You? – Genevieve Kingston (Quercus, 9th May 2024)
When she dies in her forties, Gwenny Kingston's mother leaves boxes of gifts for her two children to unwrap at pivotal points in their lives: first period, high school graduation, engagement. This luminous book explores the gifts, both their powers and their limitations. Gwenny’s mixed feelings about them are eventually clarified by a tape where her mother explains what she intended by the gifts. Gwenny's struggles with depression and agoraphobia in her twenties make for moving reading, as you root for her to overcome them.
Blue Sisters – Coco Mellors (Fourth Estate, 21st May 2024)
If you liked Cleopatra and Frankenstein, you'll love this. And I loved Cleo and Frank! Like Frank, the Blue sisters have a predisposition to drugs and alcohol, with the exception of second-eldest Bonnie, whose addictions are to boxing and her coach (think Million Dollar Baby with a happier ending). I loved the great depictions of Hampstead and oldest sister Avery's house, plus Avery in general, and her surprise crush on a young British performance poet. Another thoroughly enjoyable read, with some transcendental moments that's sure to win Coco Mellors well-deserved new fans.
Sandwich – Catherine Newman (Doubleday, 6th June 2024)
I loved this author’s first novel, We All Want Impossible Things, and this novel also features a sensitive, queer daughter, an unflappable husband and a heroine who makes everything about herself – but is at least aware of it. Torn apart by anticipatory grief for her children and parents, neurotic, menopausal fifty-something Rachel – ‘Rocky’ – despairs of herself sometimes. As she infuriates and nurtures her family with sandwich lunches at Cape Cod, she makes peace with a decision she made long ago. Rocky learns that if she didn't feel things so strongly, life would lose its taste – and isn’t grief the price we pay for love?
Lifting Off: A Life in Freefall – Karen McLeod (Muswell Press, 6th June 2024)
The author of In Search of the Missing Eyelash (recently re-released; go get it)! and creator of ‘rubbish lesbian poet,’ Barbara Brownskirt goes back to her roots in this account of being a flight attendant for British Airways. Trying to reconcile her love-hate relationship with performance, working-class roots and desire for partying, culture and adventure has its highs and lows, and Karen eventually has to step back, ask herself who she really is, start writing and begin the next act of her life. An extraordinary memoir that’s struck a chord with anyone who’s had to hide a side of themselves.
Private Rites – Julia Armfield (Fourth Estate, 11th June 2024)
This compelling new work by Polari Prize-winner for Our Wives Under the Sea is once again an exploration of queer, sensual themes that delve into marriage and the connections between individuals. Set during the final months of a crumbling civilization, the novel draws parallels to Maggie Gee's The Flood, Cloud Atlas, and the blackly humorous Quiz Broadcast sketches by David Mitchell and Robert Webb. Three sisters, compared to 'King Lear and his dyke daughters,' confront their father's architectural legacy while trying to ignore the fact that the impending apocalypse does not diminish the everyday frustrations of life, such as working in a nearly empty café, virtual therapy sessions, fabricated reality TV, and the challenges of love.
My Family, the Memoir – David Baddiel (Fourth Estate, 4th July 2024)
This hilarious and frequently moving memoir focuses on the author’s parents, sparing neither his mother’s erotic poetry and golf obsession, or his father’s compulsive swearing. This is clearly a tale that Baddiel is compelled to tell; when he asks his brother Ivor for permission to perform a show about their parents, the telling response is, ‘Are you going to do this anyway?’ David says yes, but this is an act of love, exploring the vast difference between 1970s and 2000s-style parenting, the beautiful consolation of cats, and a forgotten glimpse on video of David’s father’s loving side that opens up something profound for both the author and reader. ‘It’s like she was in the room,’ says Ivor of their mother when he watches his brother’s show... and it is.
Long Island Compromise – Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Headline, 9th July 2024)
With hints of Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, this darkly funny banger explores the ramifications of a Long Island businessman’s kidnapping in 1980, and its effect on his three children. Full of hilarious detail (worrying 1980s microwaves, the turreted architecture of rich Americans’ houses, extreme fitness regimes, bossy decorators, paleo) and erotic deviance – even the title is a reference to a sex act – this rich, balls-to-the-wall novel from the author of Fleishman is in Trouble is a lip-smacking assault on both minimalism and political correctness.
The Wedding People – Alison Espach (St Martin’s Press, 30th July 2024)
When Phobe Stone checks into a plush hotel with the express intention of ending her life, she reckons without her instant connection to the flawless-looking bride in the foyer with tote-bags of wine who barges into her suite and seems reluctant to leave and marry the guy she’s supposed to. A wicked cocktail of rom-com, social comedy, deeply awkward sexting and more serious, deep meditations on grief and loss, The Wedding People is a must for fans of Anne Tyler and Katherine Heiny, and it just gets better as it goes on.
Wife – Charlotte Mendelson (Mantle, 8th August 2024)
A compulsive, spicy shot of bitchiness, set over the final day of Zoe and Penny’s living together, interspersed with flashbacks both ambrosial and grim. Wife could only have been written about a relationship between two women in all its impossible, intertwined messiness, further entangled by motherhood which initially seems magical and even sexy but creates its own challenges. Initially dazzled by Penny, Zoe now has to hold her nerve for long enough to make her dreams of escape a reality, but with the cavalry consisting only of a matter-of-fact friend, some out-of-their-depth men-with-a-van and some Marlboro Lights, she’ll ultimately have to save herself.
You’re Embarrassing Yourself – Desiree Akhavan (Fourth Estate, 13th August 2024)
A deeply felt, luminous memoir that's strongest when it comes to describing the feeling of being the child of immigrants, 'like being born a widow.' Tall, with size 11 (UK 9) feet and a subtle nose job, she struggles to fit in at a top New York prep school where even the playground games are inspired by the film Clueless (and she isn't allowed to play). By thirty-nine, she's won Sundance, directed two well-regarded films and is contemplating motherhood. A book about growing up, work wives, how relationships change over time, dodgy dating, regrettable haircuts and more.
Death at the Sign of the Rook – Kate Atkinson (Transworld, 22nd August 2024)
Jackson’s back, all right! Jackson Brodie is now a grandad, even if he does have a macho jeep with heated seats. Even though he's escaped babysitting duty, Jackson can't resist the urge to come to the aid of damsels in distress. When a troupe of amateur actors (including their 'cancelled by the woke brigade' director) rock up at the local hall for a Murder Mystery evening, madness ensues as snow comes down and there's an actual escaped criminal on the loose. Though he's mellowed out of his bad-ass earlier incarnations, chaos (and women from his past) always seem to find him.
Liars – Sarah Manguso (Picador, 22nd August 2024)
One of those books that make you wonder if straight people are all right (though Charlotte Mendelson’s book proves the alternative isn’t a walk in the park), Liars is a beautiful exploration of marriage, motherhood and Jane’s white-hot fury at ending up in the ‘drag show,’ of nuclear family, seduced by the prospect of caretaking and ‘having it all,’ into being the one thing you never wanted to be. Here, motherhood is depicted as empowering as well as entrapping, with Jane forging her own life – reluctantly at first, then with relief – out of the wreckage of large and small lies.
How Not to Be a Supermodel – Ruth Crilly (Blink Publishing, 28th August 2024)
Dreaming of being the next Gisele Bundchen, tall, curvy Ruth navigates the London modelling scene for over a decade, writing in a scathing and laugh-out-loud style about, among other things: having her eyebrows bleached off and hair tinted ginger without her full consent, trying to explain cystitis medication in a small Italian pharmacy, dyeing herself red by accident on the way to a shoot in Paris, being tricked into a pair of too-small shorts in Tokyo, and falling in love.
Madwoman – Chelsea Bieker (Oneworld, 5th September 2024)
In her thirties with two children, addicted to clean eating and shopping for Paltrow-esque trinkets online, Clove finds her past catching up with her when she receives a letter from a women's correctional facility. And why is she so drawn to the mysterious Jane at the Whole Foods-style market – is this love, or does she know this woman already? A cut above the usual domestic thrillers, this is a precisely written account of a thirtysomething woman's unravelling and remaking.
Here One Moment – Liane Moriarty (Penguin, 26th September 2024)
This book poses the question, 'If you knew when you were going to die, what would you do differently?' On a flight, a neatly dressed, silver-haired woman enters a trance and starts telling the passengers the dates, times and causes of their deaths. The passengers react in various ways; some sanguine, some hysterical, some disturbed. Then the first deaths start... Another cracker from the Australian powerhouse author, Here One Moment is a witty and surprisingly moving exploration of the butterfly effect, the multiverse and what we're here for, that explores those themes more successfully than some heavier novels on mortality.
Bonjour Mademoiselle! – Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts (Scribe, 26th September 2024)
A reminder that truth can be as strange and lovely as fiction, this biography of the pioneering model, dancer and socialite – born in Liverpool and christened George – is a page-turner, lovingly written by two people who clearly intimately understand the importance of glamour and grit when it came to creating April Ashley. Finding herself by performing in a Parisian cabaret, marrying into the aristocracy and running around Europe and the USA until returning to England to embrace a regal retirement of sorts, there was never a dull moment in Ashley’s hard-but-lovely life, and nor is there in this book, which sometimes reads like the sort of thing Angela Carter or Armistead Maupin might have dreamt up.
The Proof of my Innocence – Jonathan Coe (Viking, 7th November 2024)
What a mash up! This book, featuring a sinister cabal of far-right Tory nightmares, set during the fifty-day premiership of Liz ‘Lettuce’ Truss, is a satirical delight with a heart. Twentysomething Phyl Maidstone returns to her parents’ house from university and starts trying to write a book. She's torn between three popular and very topical genres – cosy crime, dark academia and autofiction – so what transpires is told in all three genres, with dizzying overlays of folk songs, cult films and even episodes of Friends. So entertaining that I'm not quite sure it should be legal.
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