The best new books released in 2024, as selected by avid readers and critics

You know that uncomfortable feeling when you don't know what to read next? Well, get ready to take some notes because we're about to obliterate it. 

The Bookshelf's Kate Evans, The Book Show's Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange, ABC Arts' Nicola Heath and critics Declan Fry and Rosie Ofori Ward offer up their best reads of 2024, leading us from grieving sisters to mismatched detectives, and from short stories based on real crimes to satire and dystopian futures. 

Happy reading!

• The Echoes by Evie Wyld
• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
• Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors
• Orbital by Samantha Harvey
• Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane
• Juice by Tim Winton
• Change by Édouard Louis
• The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
• Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
• Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford
• Excitable Boy: Essays on Risk by Dominic Gordon
• The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
• Appreciation by Liam Pieper
• Real Americans by Rachel Khong
• Shattered by Hanif Kureishi
• Cute Accelerationism by Amy Ireland and Maya B Kronic

The Echoes by Evie Wyld

Vintage Australia

In a wonderful year of reading, The Echoes boasts the best opening line of them all: "I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death has become something of a problem."

The ghost in question is Max, the recently deceased partner of protagonist Hannah. As he rattles around the couple's London apartment, he learns a lot he didn't know about the woman he loved.

Hannah has rarely spoken about her childhood in Australia. But in alternating chapters, we go back to these years, as Hannah and her big sister navigate teenage life on a rural property known as The Echoes. This is a place where tragedy is literally planted in the ground (the bones of Aboriginal mission girls are buried on site), and for Hannah and her family, a history of generational trauma will have its own devastating impact.

Evie Wyld is a master of plotting — the revelations in this book are perfectly executed, and will have you reeling.

— Claire Nichols

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Picador

There's a reason this book was shortlisted for the US National Book Awards and chosen for former US president Barack Obama's influential summer reading list. It's funny, poignant and lyrical (and features a cameo by animated icon Lisa Simpson).

While it's Akbar's first novel, he has published three collections of poetry and this poetic sensibility informs Martyr!, although it's never impenetrable.

The main character Cyrus Shams is an Iranian-American poet, struggling with addiction and his complicated friendship circle. In an attempt to work out how to think about his mother in the aftermath of her death (she died when he was a baby), he undertakes to write a collection of poetry about martyrs and in the process work out if his own life is worth living.

The result is haunting and off-beat.

— Sarah L'Estrange

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

Fourth Estate

Blue Sisters follows sisters Bonnie, Lucky and Avery, returning home to New York a year after the death of their other sister. In this character-based novel, each of the siblings has a distinct reaction to their sister's death. Grief is depicted as messy and complicated, a non-linear experience that ricochets through life.

Alongside grief, addiction runs through this novel. Mellors has so honestly depicted the chaos of attempting sobriety, with all the mistakes and regrets along the way. The sisters are all trying to mask their addictions, and their pain, in different ways.

Sometimes, an author's closeness to a story makes it difficult to communicate to the readers but Mellors, sober herself, has used this closeness to write an intimate and compassionate portrayal of the Blue family. The weighty and layered characters will stick with you for days, weeks and months to follow.

— Rosie Ofori Ward

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Vintage

I loved Orbital, a slender book at 144 pages but one with an urgent and important message about the future of humanity. It's a timely plea to treat the earth (and each other) with care, and a deserving winner of the 2024 Booker Prize.

Light on plot but tightly structured, the novel follows the International Space Station as it conducts 16 orbits of the earth over 24 hours. As the six astronauts aboard perform their daily duties, carrying out scientific experiments, meteorological observations and shuttle maintenance, Harvey captures the strangeness of living in space: "They hang in their sleeping bags. A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities."

When one astronaut, Chie, learns her mother has died, she reflects on the nature of existence: "Chie's only mother now is that rolling, glowing ball that throws itself involuntarily around the sun once a year … That ball is the only thing she can point to now that has given her life."

From the astronauts' vantage point 400 kilometres aloft, the earth is scrubbed of any evidence of human presence. By day, the planet appears uninhabited. It's a "luminous and humanless" vista: "seas, lakes, plains, deserts, mountains, estuaries, deltas, forests and ice floes." It takes 20 minutes to slide from Eastern Europe to China. Landscape flows, unbounded by national borders.

Harvey said she wanted her novel to "read like a painting" and there is a painterly feel to the Turner-esque landscapes she renders on the page: "The Saharan dust sweeps to the sea in hundred-mile ribbons. Hazy pale green shimmering sea, hazy tangerine land."

From space, life on earth and what it means to be human come into clearer focus.

— Nicola Heath

Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane

Allen & Unwin

Australian writer Fiona McFarlane (The Sun Walks Down, The Night Guest) has taken the real case of Ivan Milat and the Belanglo State Forest murders from 1989–1992 and transformed it into a collection of short stories, which read as a nuanced novel of memory, grief, place, love and loss. McFarlane's killer is called Paul Riga, the town is Barrow and while we visit the area, we do not look this man in the eye, nor do we confront any titillating re-enactments. McFarlane is careful with how she approaches these events.

Some stories take place decades before people go missing, others decades after; some close to home, others in distant countries, and with a tangential connection that can leave you holding your breath, awaiting the revelation. It's a book of accumulated impact, that respects the reality from which it emerged, while using fiction to remake it.

— Kate Evans

Juice by Tim Winton

Hamish Hamilton

Tim Winton's urgent new novel is more than a story. It's a call to action.

Set in a dystopian future, Juice imagines a Western Australian landscape of ash and dust, where soaring temperatures and relentless storms force people to live months of the year underground. There's no internet, scarce water and little knowledge of what came before.

Our narrator recounts his life story — in particular, the way his world shattered when he learned how people used to live, in comfort and excess. Worse, he learned that this previous generation (read: our generation) allowed environmental disaster to come, condemning future generations to suffering. He's recruited to a group committed to taking revenge.

Winton steps out of his comfort zone in Juice — he experiments with world-building and science fiction, he writes action scenes and, most thrillingly, he names names, calling out the overlords he blames for accelerating climate change.

It's a gripping read. I couldn't put it down.

— Claire Nichols

Change by Édouard Louis (translated by John Lambert)

Vintage

I read many stellar books of fiction this year but this one particularly stood out.

Change is an inordinately beautiful work. The narrator, Eddy Bellegueule, addressing his father, describes arriving in the city at 14 after having spent his whole life in a village in northern France. There, he gradually transforms into Édouard, esteemed author and public intellectual.

It's a story with a long lineage in French literature, from Stendhal to Proust and Balzac: the boy from the provinces moving up in the world. In the city, people carry themselves with "an ease of movement that makes Édouard feel as if his own body were crooked". His accent, habits, joggers and trainers are subbed out for coats and dress shoes; his diet embraces light, airy food; everything is a violent, giddy transformation. The relative absence of privacy reminds Édouard how little privacy the poor have, and how little control. Handing in his stained homework as a young boy, his French teacher laughs: he can discern what Édouard had for dinner last night. Change is extraordinarily perceptive in its analysis of class and privilege.

Édouard forms a relationship with another student, Elena; it is platonic but suffused with love. The scene in which they dance together is simple yet ridiculously beautiful.

Permeating Édouard's narrative is an ambient loneliness. It colours his imaginary conversations, the way he beats himself up for his voice, clothes, tastes. The past is never past, it remains inside of him; it can never be outrun.

Moving, with guilt and pathos and funny horrendous anecdotes, like Édouard's mother proudly, innocently buying her son a right-wing political magazine, since "now you're into politics", Change is a riveting piece of alchemy. Taking all the guilt, disappointment, joy and novelty of youth, Louis offers a formative experience of his own in Change, a heady, nostalgic, unsparing book suffused with all the discovery and pain of being young.

— Declan Fry

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Sceptre

This was another book featured on former US president Barack Obama's 2024 summer reading list and has become a bestseller, too. It's the debut novel of British Cambodian author Kaliane Bradley and it's a wild mix of time travel, romance and espionage.

But be warned, the characters smoke an awful lot of cigarettes, which you can almost smell through the pages. The set up is that a handful of historical characters have been transplanted from their time period to a near-future England.

A government department called The Ministry is responsible for their adjustment to modern life and they're each assigned a guardian or "bridge" to help with settling in. This is where the romance comes in as a bridge and a hot 19th-century polar explorer develop feelings for each other. But those feelings are complicated by issues of colonialism, gender politics and history.

This is my most recommended book of the year.

— Sarah L'Estrange

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Faber

Following two distant brothers grappling with the death of their father, Intermezzo has all the usual hallmarks of a Sally Rooney novel: sex, relationships, hardship, miscommunication, mournful Irish characters, devastating family dynamics and scathing commentary on class structure.

But Intermezzo, her fourth novel, shows her writing is shifting, with a new maturity and richness not found in her earlier work. Rooney uses different narrators to interrogate masculinity, and displays a kindness for her characters, despite their sometimes maddening actions.

— Rosie Ofori Ward

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

Faber

The American city of Cahokia is wreathed in cigarette smoke and jazz, in rumour and legend, in history and fiction and racial politics. It also doesn't really exist — at least, not in the form imagined by English writer Francis Spufford. He has created an alternative 1920s, given it an independent city governed by Native Americans and overlaid it with the trappings of noir detective fiction.

There are other overlays too: language itself (in Anapa, Native Americans are the takouma, Europeans are takata, people of African origin are the taklousa); the city and how cosmopolitanism is imagined; power; masks; and that other America, outside the city walls.

There is a crime, of course, and a pair of possibly mismatched detectives — Drummond, who knows everybody and plays the game of corruption and connection; and Barrow, a takouma man who just might rather be playing piano. There's romance and sex and a cracking plot that pulses with intelligence and verve.

— Kate Evans

Excitable Boy: Essays on Risk by Dominic Gordon

Upswell Publishing

Near the suburb where I live, a piece of train station graffito reads, "Steal from Coles and Woolies" — a reaction against another corporate homogeniser.

It's a sentiment Dominic Gordon would probably agree with. Gordon's debut shows the honour among thieves, recalling actor Cookie Mueller who, when accused of being a common thief, responded proudly: "We are anything but common!"

Gordon depicts a world where violence is routine and pornography plays as background noise — because, in Excitable Boy's urban milieu, that is what it is: the rattle and hum of commerce and survival. The thieves come in many colours. When Gordon's younger self isn't racking polo shirts for a night on the town he has to contend with Centrelink, which steals the time of its "clients", and the vulnerability of being young, with its apprenticeships and initiations, the screwing up, being callow or confused or both ("I immersed myself in women, loved it, and loved them, or tried to. I was learning.")

With sentences that are jiving, pepped-up, torqued and constantly turning in on themselves, Gordon cajoles and doubles down and back, laughing as he looks over his shoulder. It feels cartoonish because reality often is.

Excitable Boy is also a superb psycho-geography of Melbourne, detailing how the city's libraries have desecrated their collections.

It's Jean Genet with the flirtation scenes subbed out for Centrelink malaise, the French sailors transformed into b-boys and b-girls (the pimps and hoodlums remain put). I also think it would have made Genet laugh, and you can't pay a book a better compliment than that.

— Declan Fry

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

Viking

Sexy and thrilling: of all the excellent novels on this year's Booker shortlist, The Safekeep is the one that had me hooked.

Set in the Netherlands in the 1960s, the book is about Isabel, one of the most tightly wound characters in recent fiction. Stern and repressed, Isabel lives alone in what was once the family home. Her parents are dead, her brothers have left and Isabel remains as guardian, working the garden and counting the cutlery (she's suspicious the maid might be pinching teaspoons).

Enter Eva. Chatty and sensual, Eva (who is dating Isabel's brother) is Isabel's opposite. When circumstances force the two women together in the house, Isabel is furious — and obsessed. In time, her suspicion and rage shift to something deeper, and might just set her free.

The Safekeep is a stunning novel of repression and desire, which also grapples with the legacy of World War II. A truly brilliant debut.

— Claire Nichols

Appreciation by Liam Pieper

Hamish Hamilton

If you like your fiction with a heavy dose of satire, mixed with a sprinkling of irreverence and a side of self-loathing, Appreciation is the ideal book.

It's the fifth from Melbourne-based author Liam Pieper, whose other works include the memoir The Feel Good Hit of the Year and novels The Toymaker, and Sweetness and Light. Pieper is also a ghostwriter so there are many more books of his you might've read (one that is publicly known is The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku).

Appreciation follows celebrity artist Oli Darling's path of self-destruction: after a disastrous TV interview in which he takes down a nationalistic holy cow, he is summarily cancelled. His path to resurrection is to pen a memoir (with the aid of a ghostwriter) and do a tour of regional Australia.

This funny, insightful skewering of the rich and shameless is perfect summer reading.

— Sarah L'Estrange

Real Americans by Rachel Khong

Penguin

Rachel Khong's sophomore novel asks what it takes to be a "real American". Is it money? A bit of luck? Citizenship? A sense of belonging? The right school, the right job or even the right genetics?

Three generations wrestle with this question. First, Lily Chen, a Chinese American woman at the turn of the millennium who falls in love with the handsome (and very rich) Matthew; her son Nick in 2021, as he searches for his biological father, wondering where he fits in the world; and then finally Lily's mother May, a scientist who escaped the cultural revolution in China.

Behind this sweeping story of family is a sharp critique of American exceptionalism, capitalism and obsession with self-improvement. At times the plot finds almost phantastic places with experimental gene testing and impossible chance encounters — a heightened (un)reality that illustrates the impossibility of the American dream.

— Rosie Ofori Ward

Shattered by Hanif Kureishi

Hamish Hamilton

Before an onstage interview a number of years ago, English novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi was late (not his fault), flustered and needed to pee — but didn't want to push in on a long queue. "C'mon," I said. "You're the one they're waiting to hear. Nobody will mind." I bossed our way to the front, so he could go before coming onstage for an interview.

Why talk about a writer's bladder? Because in late 2022, after an everyday accident, Kureishi became quadriplegic, and all those intimate functions were suddenly shared, discussed and dependent on others.

He is a writer to his core — of The Buddha of Suburbia, My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and many more — and he has observed, narrated and, of necessity, dictated his new story with love and compassion, irritation and rage, occasional despair and vibrant humour.

— Kate Evans

Cute Accelerationism by Amy Ireland and Maya B Kronic

MIT Press

This is the kind of probing, unexpected book that reminds you what good writing is capable of: bringing you back to attention, to life. As I read, I sputtered, I spat, I felt dizzy, I said strange things like "This is what writing looks like, ba-by!" I took the book with me to the sink when I prepared coffee and on the train when I went to work. People stopped wanting to talk to me because all I wanted to talk to them about was this book.

Accelerationism is a radical, sometimes reactionary response to capitalism and technological change. Its connections include everything from Futurism and (cyber)punk to shojo manga and much else besides.

Many touchstones of Accelerationist writing are snuggled in here, squishy and squee: Deleuze and Guattari, JG Ballard, Lovecraft, Reza Negarestani.

Like Rita Hayworth flinging her hair back in the 1946 film Gilda, Cute Accelerationism is flirty, fulsome and endlessly funny.

Faced with the conundrum of something new that is not only struggling but failing to be born, Ireland and Kronic write in a mode that suggests taking a jackhammer and splitting that poor baby free.

All of the analyses are bracing and funny, incorporating everything from Tiqqun's Young-Girl theory to aegyo gestures ("framing the face in a manner that anticipates its reduction to a two-dimensional image, flat enough to slide into DMs") .

So, come slide on in, form fits content fits form here: small and snuggly, the book easily slips into pockets, totes, handbags, oversized purses and the hands of all the cute ones in your circle.

— Declan Fry

Extra recommendations

This year has looked under the sea in Richard Powers' Playground; examined the stars in Inga Simpson's The Thinning; wafted up from cracks in floorboards in Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium; or made walls and floors and shifting ideas of home the very point, in Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep. And what about a long life, remembered on and off the stage, in Alan Hollinghurst's Our Evenings; or remembered in fragments in Rodney Hall's Vortex? There's a life of searching, fairground to fairground, in Gayl Jones's The Unicorn Woman; and two lives intertwined, then diverging, in Dylin Hardcastle's A Language of Limbs. Can I throw in pumas and the giant curved bones of a colonial western, even, in Robbie Arnott's Dusk? — Kate Evans

Gabriela Ponce's Blood Red is twisted in the way something truly shocking is — a reminder that it's not edginess that horrifies, but mundanity. Heidi Honeycutt's I Spit On Your Celluloid is tumultuous and screwed-up and nostalgic. Bobuq Sayed offers a clear-eyed reckoning with personal and geopolitical events in A Brief History of Australian Terror. Amelia Zhou's elliptical, brain-rewiring Repose did unspeakable things to me. I loved Michael Richardson's Nonhuman Witnessing and Rainer J. Hanshe's excellent Dionysos Speed. My favourite poetry collections this year were Woven (edited by Anne-Marie Te Whiu) and Roslyn Orlando's intelligent, hilarious Ekhō. — Declan Fry

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