Bookseller Picks Part 1 – Christmas Guide 2024
We're very excited to share our bookseller highlights from 2024 as part of this year's Christmas Gift Guide! In this post, you can find recommendations of all kinds from one half of the team. Spanning genres and eras, hopefully there's something on this list for you to gift to someone (or yourself!) this festive season.
You can find the rest of the team's recommendations here.
Alice:
I started the year reading Percival Everett's latest novel James, and knew that it would become one of my stand-outs of 2024. This retelling of Huckleberry Finn is poignant, subtly tender and, as always with a Percival Everett novel, very funny, whilst highlighting the horrors of slavery through lacerating observations. If you ask me, it's a new classic, and I'm glad to see it on the Booker Prize shortlist alongside my favourite book of last year, Orbital. I also loved Camille Bordas' The Material. Set over the course of a single day, it follows the students and lecturers from a stand-up comedy masters – it's a really funny book about sad people, with sharp observations about life, sadness and time. I am a fan of Lauren Elkin (Art Monsters featured as one of my favourites of 2023), and she's back in my Top 5 with her debut novel Scaffolding, a novel about stasis, history, the nature of desire and the places we inhabit. Another book that stayed with me since I read it is Guapa, the debut novel by Saleem Haddad, published in 2018. Finally, I've loved dipping in and out of Clay: A Human History, Jennifer Lucy Allan's exploration of this fascinating material.
Amos:
I did a lot of weird escapist reading in 2024, as usual! I’ve been a fan of Kelly Link’s short fiction for a long time, and I really enjoyed her first novel, The Book of Love; it was dreamy and immersive, brimming with bittersweet magic, fairytale logic, and characters who are still on my mind. Shelley Parker-Chan’s He Who Drowned the World and Glen James Brown’s Mother Naked both took bold and very fun liberties in reimagining historical events (the founding of the Ming dynasty, and the lowest-paid entertainer in over 200 years of Durham Cathedral’s mediaeval records, respectively). These were eerie, atmospheric reads, full of characters choosing violence. I picked up Allen Bratton’s Henry Henry expecting a deeply unserious queer retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad - unserious it was not! This was one of the best debuts I’ve read in ages; audacious, dark, compassionate, and charismatic. Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin (a stylish, cut-throat novel about a glamorous and obsessive Palestinian woman teaching middle school in New York City) was another wildly good debut. It’s been a year for them!
Euan:
2024 has brought quite a few books my way that I know will be sharing the top spots in my hypothetical ‘favourite books ever’ list for quite some time. The Extinction of Irena Rey is Jennifer Croft’s shapeshifting novel about the inextricable links between nature and language, the art of translation, morality and mortality. It’s a joyous inevitability that any year with a new Ali Smith novel will see it noted in my favourites. Lo and behold, Gliff is here and with it a generous glimmer of hope in the midst of the turmoil of its near-future setting. Poet Caleb Femi turns to the joy of the house party in his latest collection, The Wickedest, which I enjoyed all the more after hearing him discuss it in August. Small Rain finds Garth Greenwell health, home and happiness in his most beautiful prose yet. And finally, I think that the connections brought about in the hills of Catalonia by Irene Solà in When I Sing, Mountains Dance (translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem) made it one of the most captivating novels I've had the pleasure of reading.
Faye:
Just in time for her upcoming novel, earlier this year I read Bellies by Nicola Dinan which I absolutely devoured! Dinan has such a way of writing loveable characters who do and say unloveable things, and perfectly encapsulated queer experiences with her brutal prose. Quite literally on the other end of the spectrum, I also adored Gerardo Samano Cordova’s debut Monstrilio, a genre-defining horror novel that writes grief and queerness in ways that I’ve scarcely seen elsewhere – this book is truly a contender for one of my favourite novels of all time! After following art critic duo The White Pube for a while now, I was so excited to read Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente’s Poor Artists; an exploration into the very real injustices of the creative industry for the working class that depicts harsh truths with biting humour. My reading taste has clearly been all over the place this year, so it comes as no surprise that my final two picks are a poetry collection and a classic. Danez Smith’s Bluff is an incredible demonstration of artistic urgency, and Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding has a 12-year-old protagonist that quickly became one of my favourite characters I’ve ever read.
Jack:
In my five years as a bookseller I’ve become acutely aware how hard it is to read all the great titles you’d like to read that land on the shop floor each month. So this year quite a few of my recs are for books that I didn’t manage to tick off my to-be-read pile last year. I loved Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, which came out in paperback this year, a brilliant exploration of identity and how hard it is to ever truly know a person. Percival Everett’s Erasure was a book I came to after loving his recent book James, which is featured more than once in this guide, so the former is my pick if you’re looking for another great read by Everett. Etaf Rum’s Evil Eye is a really moving story of one woman’s strength and resilience in the face of extremely trying circumstances. Ekow Eshun’s The Strangers is a great non-fiction read telling the stories of five different black men throughout history, told in the second person, a truly engrossing read. My last pick is All Fours by Miranda July, a brilliant novel about middle age and the menopause that’s been a favourite for a lot of the team.
Jenna:
As a surprise to absolutely no one, I didn’t venture into too much nonfiction and read an incredible array of fiction and graphic novels. Many of the books on this list I anticipated a great deal - and they did not disappoint! I have long admired Caoilinn Hughes' writing, and I was floored by her magnificent offering, The Alternatives, a magnificent novel about the tender but complex, sometimes fraught, bond between sisters. It really resonated with me. I was also entranced by Tommy Orange’s Booker-longlisted novel, Wandering Stars, which is a masterclass in storytelling and continues telling the story of a family readers met in Orange’s first novel, There There. And like everyone at the bookshop, I adored Ali Smith’s newest novel Gliff, an almost mysterious book about language and human nature. Intermezzo is a wonderful return for Sally Rooney, who explores complex sibling relationships with a keen eye and playfulness of form. Lastly, I read the brilliant graphic novel Young Hag by Isabel Greenberg, a fantastic tale inspired by Arthurian legend that will make any person venture out on a journey of self discovery.
Katya:
It’s a great challenge to choose between all the incredible new titles that come into the shop, especially if you want to make time for some classics – but I think I got a good balance this year! I’ve been reading lots of fantasy and sci-fi, including (finally) starting The Lord of the Rings, but my top pick for this year is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. It’s a riveting story, exploring the workings of an anarchist civilisation played off against a highly consumerist and hierarchical one, and it’s threaded through with a truly human story of ambition and shared knowledge. I adore how Le Guin tells it all with empathy and scrutiny – a rare experience that’s made it one of my favourite books ever. I’m also pleased I made an effort to read more general fiction and non-fiction this year. Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then it’s Over was a surprising find, a poetic and darkly comical zombie novel, with a talking crow! And the dreaminess of Leila Slimani’s memoir The Scent of Flowers at Night, exploring the loneliness of writing and womanhood whilst walking through an empty Venetian museum, had me pondering for days afterwards.
