Booklist

Claire’s Books of the Year 2024

Selected by Claire Williams


It’s a funny thing to look back over the year, to look at everything you have read and spot unifying themes and flavours – connections you didn’t consciously know you were making at the time. There is a strong visual – and often experimental – sense in a lot of the books I have enjoyed most this year. Lots of layers and lots of playing around with time and rhythm; no one quite does those things like Ali Smith whose recent novel ​Gliff is my Book of the Year. 

From the publisher:
The first of two new interconnected novels from bestselling, Booker Prize-shortlisted author Ali SmithO brave new world, that has such people in't.Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red…

From the publisher:
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft contemplating the world below'A slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas'GUARDIAN'Stunning... An uplifting book'SUNDAY TIMESA team of…

From the publisher:
A woman contemplates her hand-me-down toaster and suddenly the whole world erupts into her kitchen, in all its brutality and loveliness: global networks of resource extraction and forced labour, technologies of industrial murder, histories…

From the publisher:
A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman’s unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mindThe…

From the publisher:
A moving, eye-opening journey through the world of contemporary art from one of the most innovative voices in the fieldAt a moment in which working as a professional artist is an increasingly unattainable luxury, art criticism duo The White…

From the publisher:
From Rachel Kushner, Booker Prize finalist and two-time National Book Award finalist, comes a new novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France'The most exciting writer of her…

From the publisher:
The debut novel from the brilliant essayist, reviewer, cultural critic and author of FlaneuseThe story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart.In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is…

From the publisher:
What happens when we stop idolising the generations above us? Stop idolising our own parents?What happens when we become frightened of the generations below us? Frightened of our own children?The Aeolian islands, 2010. Sophia, on the cusp…

From the publisher:
‘What it said to me was that I was here again, I was back, back from the great nowhere of somewhere else, returned, all too officially, to the whereabouts of Moffa.’After a year away, a woman arrives back in her hometown to keep…

From the publisher:
'What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.' – Nigel Slater‘A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements…

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