The Guardian: The best fiction of 2024 [View all]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/dec/07/the-best-fiction-of-2024

The best fiction of 2024

From Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo to Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Percival Everett’s James and a host of inventive debuts – this year’s highlights in fiction

Justine Jordan
Sat 7 Dec 2024 02.30 EST

In a year of surprises – a posthumous fable from Gabriel García Márquez, a superhero collaboration between China Miéville and Keanu Reeves – the biggest news, as ever, was a new Sally Rooney novel. Intermezzo (Faber) landed in September: the story of two brothers mourning their father and negotiating relationships with each other and the women in their lives, it is a heartfelt examination of love, sex and grief. With one strand exploring the neurodiverse younger brother’s perspective, and a conflicted stream-of-consciousness for the older, it opens up a more fertile direction after 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.

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It was a strong year for American fiction all round, from the widescreen realism of Richard Powers’s Playground (Hutchinson Heinemann), an epic celebration of marine life and a meditation on progress and AI, to Percival Everett’s magisterial satire James (Mantle), an essential rewrite of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Rachel Kushner’s breathtaking spy caper Creation Lake (Cape), which unpacks how we construct politics, history and our own selves. I was on this year’s Booker prize judging panel, which spotlit all three, but in the end we gave the prize to a novel published last winter: Samantha Harvey’s gorgeously wrought Orbital (Vintage), a new and profound perspective on the Earth in all its beauty and fragility and a vital read in an age of environmental degradation and territorial violence.

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