Best fiction I read in 2024

All women (again) in the top 10

Dec 17, 2024

During my maternity leave this year, I was only able to read fiction. My hormone-addled brain couldn’t handle the additional load of facts. I felt like I needed stories to survive.

And I needed a very particular type of story. Time was compressed and precious, and I couldn’t waste it with bad books. I’m increasingly disappointed by most contemporary fiction, finding it shallow, uninteresting, and badly written, and so it felt like a safe bet to read a select group of women writers I trusted.

This was a year of going deep with an elite coven: Olga Tokarczuk, Ali Smith, Rachel Cusk, Claire Keegan, and Natalia Ginzburg. You’ll see their names crop up multiple times in the list below (as well as a few other old favorites). Accordingly, there’s not much new here, but I found all of it deeply rewarding.

1. Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante

Wildly good and brutal. A story of a deeply unhappy Italian family, with all manner of emotional instability and mental illness, that remains riveting (even if not redeeming) for nearly 800 pages. Elsa Morante is a matchless storyteller, truly one of a kind in her ability to create multi-dimensional consciousness in her characters. I haven’t ever read anyone like her. (Buy)

2. The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk

A true epic, dazzling in its ambition and range. Olga Tokarczuk spins the tale of the Polish religious leader Jacob Frank, who passed through all three major Abrahamic religions and created a wave of devoted followers (cult members?) in his lifetime. Through these nearly 1,000 pages, she manages to maintain such a firm grasp of style and imagination. Even though it is a long journey, Tokarczuk offers up a rewarding and incredibly memorable tale of Jewish endurance. (Buy)

3. Autumn, Ali Smith

Gorgeous and strange and inventive; just the kind of thing I like. I daresay this is the closest to Virginia Woolf I have ever seen a contemporary novelist come. (Buy)

4. Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan

Powerful and spare. Keegan is a master of brevity and manages to reveal such a rich, compelling portrait of humanity and grace in just a hundred pages. I read this whole thing in an afternoon, when Lucinda was six days old, and felt acutely the pain of this dark chapter of (recent!) Irish/Catholic history. I’m doubtful that the forthcoming film adaptation with Cillian Murphy will be able to capture the heart-wrenching gorgeousness of this novella. (Buy)

5. Parade, Rachel Cusk

“To be a mother is to live piercingly and inescapably in the moment. The artist who is also a mother must leave the moment in order to access a moment of a very different nature, and each time she does it a cost is exacted, the cost of experience.”

Perfect and wild and dark and compulsively readable. I have no idea what’s going on or where we are headed, but I’ll go anywhere with Rachel Cusk. Very much about things that occupy my thoughts these days: motherhood, art, men and women, the dying body, perspective shifts. Reading Cusk’s fiction is a continual thrill. (Buy)

6. The Accidental, Ali Smith

A curious tale of a broken family who falls in love, collectively and individually, with a mysterious stranger. Ali Smith’s writing is so mesmerizing to me. She might be a genius. (Buy)

7. Happiness, as Such, Natalia Ginzburg

Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg | New Directions | New Directions Publishing

Bold in its form, brilliant in execution. An Italian family tries to figure out their relationships with one another and questions whether happiness can ever be achieved. (Buy)

8. Walk the Blue Fields, Claire Keegan

Spare, dark stories about Irish people, making their own way in the countryside. Claire Keegan is a master of control: her prose is flawless; her stories are robust and enduring. (Buy)

9. My Work, Olga Ravn

A Danish woman falls to pieces after having a child. More plainly, she could be described as suffering from postpartum depression, but more cosmically, she is reckoning with her new identity, the sacrifices inherent to mothering, and the risk of losing her art altogether. It’s so grim that I’m not sure I’d necessarily recommend it to any new mothers, but it’s impressively written, beautiful and experimental, and left me with a lot to think about. There are many through-lines to A Life’s Work (Cusk), Matrescence (Lucy Jones), and The Baby on the Fire Escape. (Buy)

10. The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington | Goodreads

Reading this novel is like falling into one of Leonora Carrington’s paintings. Everything is a little off, a little serene, a little beautiful, a little disturbing. It’s also one of the most absorbingly feminist novels I’ve ever read, in which we have a cast of leading characters who are all old women, who carry the wisdom and eccentricity of grandmothers as their particular power. The Hearing Trumpet feels like a psychedelic Alice in Wonderland for the elderly (with a dash of Shawshank Redemption and Dan Brown??). It's apocryphal and oneiric and hilarious all at once. The afterword by Olga Tokarczuk in my edition also offers a beautiful conclusion and perspective on non-genre novels and the barrier-breaking feminism at play here. (Buy)