Bookseller Picks Part 2 – 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.
Lily:
As usual this year my tastes have tended towards fiction with a sprinkle of non-fiction thrown in. Sally Rooney and Olivia Laing are two of my favourite writers so it’s no surprise that their latest offerings - Intermezzo and The Garden Against Time respectively - are two of my standouts from the year. I love the way Rooney delves into the complexities of relationships with insight and compassion, and it’s such a joy to witness the growing maturity of her prose in Intermezzo. Similarly, Laing always writes with such care and understanding no matter the subject, and in The Garden Against Time she spans the personal and historical with insight and hope. Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost and Miranda July’s All Fours were also favourites, both books that play with our expectations of what a novel can be. And I’m so glad I finally read Childhood, Youth, Dependency by the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen - I was utterly enthralled by Ditlevsen’s writing; her stark observations, ambitions, and tender feelings are evoked with such clarity and understanding.
Marc:
Five is too few - here’s a flurry of recommendations from my not at all bad reading year: Grand Tour by Elisa Gonzalez, Wrong Norma by Anne Carson, Revolutionary Acts by Jason Okundaye, The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures and In the Freud Archives; All Souls by Saskia Hamilton; School of Instructions by Ishion Hutchinson; Love’s Work by Gillian Rose; Blackouts by Justin Torres; My Great Arab Melancholy by Lamia Ziadé (Emma Ramadan); Inland by Gerald Murnane; Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (translated by Elizabeth Jaquette); the poems and translations of Seamus Heaney; Mortal Secrets by Frank Tallis; My Poems Won’t Change the World by Patrizia Cavalli (multiple translators); The Book of Frank by CAConrad; Plato’s Symposium (translated by Robin Waterfield); Ruin, Blossom by John Burnside; The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark; Henry Henry by Allen Bratton; Facing Down the Furies by Edith Hall; The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead; The Anthropologists by Ayșegül Savaș; Artful by Ali Smith; The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner; and Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans.
Molly:
This year, my reading was shaped by new novels from two of my favourite authors: Ali Smith and Richard Powers. In Gliff and Playground respectively, both writers are concerned with confronting the reality of today's world; their characters are somewhat at the mercy of large corporations and interconnected systems of abuse and greed. At the same time, they show there is always space for hope, resistance, intentionality and care for one another and the wider world. I read My Friends by Hisham Matar in January and immediately knew it would be on this list so I was delighted to see it made the Booker longlist too. Similarly, Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou is a short novel that has stayed with me since I read it in one day, following the lives of the guests and staff at a Cypriot hotel over the 20th century and published by a lovely new indie publisher, Foundry Editions. And finally, my one non-fiction choice is Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, a beautiful declaration of love for cinemas as a vital physical space of connection and community.
Ness:
For me, this past year of reading has been about diversifying genres and mediums. I’ve read more graphic novels than in past years, and after a couple of years of almost exclusively listening to audiobooks, I’ve returned to physical books and ebooks. My top five represent the genres I read most of, and the standout of each category - What My Bones Know was my favourite non-fiction, a harrowing yet hopeful tale of recovery from childhood trauma, Bellies was the first literary fiction book I read in a while, and I felt so moved by both main characters and the ways they find themselves at odds with each other but continue to care for each other deeply. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi was a fun historical fantasy pirate romp across the Indian Ocean, I Shall Never Fall In Love was a queer and cosy Austen mashup graphic novel, and The Luis Ortega Survival Club was a thoughtful YA novel that dealt with heavy topics skillfully and made space for joy, kinship and hope. I can’t wait to see what the new year brings!
Niamh:
In January, I picked up Arrangements in Blue, which truly influenced my perspective throughout the year. It encouraged me to savour and celebrate moments with friends and loved ones...and ensured Joni Mitchell stayed on repeat for months. Otherwise, I was most excited about much-anticipated novels from my favourite authors in 2024. Set against the historical backdrop of 1843 Scotland, Carys Davies’ Clear brings together two unlikely characters and weaves together a story of connection, language and the land that shapes us. I’ve long been awaiting Colm Toibin’s sequel to Brooklyn –Long Island – and was delighted to meet these characters again 20 years later. There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines several narratives linked by water in various forms - from the humble snowflake, to a human tear to epic rivers running between countries. As always, Elif Shafak evokes a powerful sense of place across not only continents but centuries and these characters feel equally rich and real. Last but never least, I loved Ali Smith’s new novel, Gliff. At times melancholic as it confronts injustices in the world, it nonetheless instils a renewed sense of hope and care for one another and our shared stories.
Selena:
With new releases by Tommy Orange and Isabella Hammad to look forward to, I found myself first drawn to their stunning debut novels, There There and The Parisian, respectively. Both deal with particularly brutal and turbulent periods of history and their aftermath, but it is the complexity of characterisation and depth of emotion that have made these two not only top of my 2024 reading, but new all-time favourites. As always, gothic and horror were quite prominent in my reading year with A Sunny Place for Shady People (translated by Megan McDowell) and Thirst (translated by Heather Cleary) being the standouts. Finally, it was quite difficult to choose only one history book to feature on my list, so in addition to On Savage Shores, let me take a page out of Marc's book and recommend some more from this year's reading: Fifth Sunby Camilla Townsend, Scenes of Subjectionby Saidiya Hartman, The Story of Art Without Menby Katy Hessel for some art history, Dispossessed Livesby Marisa Fuentes, and Imperial Islandby Charlotte Lydia Riley.
Zoë:
2024 saw me return to my usual 50/50 split between non-fiction and fiction. I was helped along by the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, which introduced me to How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair. I was captivated by Sinclair’s memoir of growing up in a conservative Rastafari household and the father/daughter relationship. I hit the jackpot with two separate recommendations from friends: The Art Thief by Michael Finkel is a stranger-than-fiction story as gripping as a thriller, and the Lightfall graphic novel series by Tim Probert provides the perfect escape to a cosy fantasy world with magical quests and unlikely friendships. I loved Juno Dawson’s Queen B, a perfectly-paced novella addition to the Her Majesty’s Royal Coven series. Its exploration of female power and the patriarchy felt entirely in keeping with the original series but the additional flex of the Tudor court setting took it to another level. Finally, a late entry to my favourites of the year is The Notebook: A Cultural History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. It’s a delightfully entertaining book from someone who clearly loves his subject and is full of inspiration for filling all those empty notebooks I have lying around…
