Our 2024 picks: General fiction (International)
It's that time of the year - the time for best of lists! We've put our heads together here at Wellington City Libraries, and here are our Top 20 international, non-genre novels of 2024.
Some quick notes... This list is by no means comprehensive, in fact we're sure our picks definitely won’t feature all the best fiction titles of 2024, but they do feature some of our favourite reads of the year and we hope to present you with some great fiction read choices to add to your summer to-read pile. Have a browse!
Our Top 20 are...
"The New York Times bestselling author of The First Bad Man returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and literary novel about a woman upending her life. [...] A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey." (Catalogue)
The alternatives / Hughes, Caoilinn
"The Flattery sisters, four brilliant and very different girls raised in a small town south of Dublin, were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in a tragic accident. Now, in their thirties [...] the four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to fancy catering gigs in London's Notting Hill, until one day their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth's future, abruptly vanishes from her home..." (Catalogue)
Caledonian Road : a novel / O'Hagan, Andrew
"A biting portrait of British class, politics, and money told through five interconnected families and their rising -- and declining -- fortunes. When Campbell Flynn, art historian, professor, and fêted fixture of the literati [...] becomes increasingly entangled with a brilliant student, convention-smashing and working class, like he used to be, he feels he's been given a second chance to embrace the change that frightens him, even as he sees trouble brewing for his family and friends..." (Catalogue)
The empusium : a health resort horror story / Tokarczuk, Olga
"September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone -- or something -- seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world..." (Catalogue)
Gabriel's moon : a novel / Boyd, William
"Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a tragedy- every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing changing landscapes in the grip of the Cold War. When he's offered the chance to interview a political figure, his ambition leads him unwittingly into a web of duplicities and betrayals..." (Catalogue)
"An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family -- but especially love -- from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties [;] Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. [...] For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude - a period of desire, despair and possibility - a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking." (Catalogue)
James : a novel / Everett, Percival
"From Percival Everett -- a recipient of the NBCC Lifetime Achievement Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, and numerous PEN awards -- comes James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view." (Catalogue)
"Jenny Erpenbeck's much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates. [It] tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of the two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears." (Catalogue)
"A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2024, the sequel to the beloved bestseller, Brooklyn. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties [married to Tony and] with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. One day, an Irishman comes to the door asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony's child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but will leave it with her. Eilis has choices to make, and what she chooses to do after this shattering news make this one of Toibin's most riveting and emotional novels to date." (Catalogue)
"Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours. [...] Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet." (Catalogue)
Our evenings : a novel / Hollinghurst, Alan
"Dave Win is thirteen years old in 1961, when he first goes to stay with the wealthy Hadlows, who sponsor his scholarship at a boarding school where their son Giles is his classmate. This weekend of board games with complicated rules, multicourse meals, and conversation about theater and modern art -- so different from the quiet life he and his mother share in their small apartment -- opens up heady new possibilities for Dave, even as it exposes him to Giles's envy and brutality. As Our Evenings unfolds over the next sixty years, the two boys' lives will diverge dramatically, Dave a talented actor, whose queerness and Burmese heritage move him in and out of the margins, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous right-wing politician..." (Catalogue)
"Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away. " (Catalogue)
"Summer 1914. 26-year-old Venetia is engaged in a clandestine love affair with the Prime Minister, H.H Asquith. He writes to her obsessively, sharing the most sensitive matters of state. As Asquith reluctantly leads the country into war with Germany, a young intelligence officer is assigned to investigate a leak of top-secret documents." (Catalogue)
There are rivers in the sky : a novel / Shafak, Elif
"This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives - all connected by a single drop of water. In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, there lies hidden in the sand fragments of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. Arthur's only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur's world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book soon sending him across the seas: Nineveh and Its Remains. In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptised with water brought from the holy sit of Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people. In 2018 London, broken-hearted Zaleekhah, a hydrologist, moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage. Zaleekhah foresees a life drained of all love and meaning - until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything." (Catalogue)
Tom Lake : a novel / Patchett, Ann
"In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew." (Catalogue)
The glassmaker / Chevalier, Tracy
"Venice, 1486. Across the lagoon lies Murano. Time flows differently here – like the glass the island’s maestros spend their lives learning to handle. Women are not meant to work with glass, but Orsola Rosso flouts convention to save her family from ruin. She works in secret, knowing her creations must be perfect to be accepted by men. But perfection may take a lifetime. Skipping like a stone through the centuries, we follow Orsola as she hones her craft through war and plague, tragedy and triumph, love and loss. The beads she creates will adorn the necks of empresses and courtesans from Paris to Vienna – but will she ever earn the respect of those closest to her?" (Catalogue)
"Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed." (Catalogue)
Wandering stars / Orange, Tommy
"This follow-up to Orange's debut novel, There There, delivers a considerably different reading experience than its progenitor. Moving away from that earlier novel's vast, intricately woven tapestry of interconnections, Orange narrows his focus to the lineage and immediate family of There There's Orvil Red Feather, beginning with his great-great-great-grandfather in the 1800s and continuing until 2018, where most of the narrative takes place, examining the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School." (Library Journal)
"Once upon a time, not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint round the outside of their house. What does it mean? It's a truism of our time that it'll be the next generation who'll sort out our increasingly toxic world. What would that actually be like? In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take? And what's a horse got to do with any of this?" (Catalogue)
Girl in the making / Fitzgerald, Anna
"Jean Kennedy is a gentle, perceptive girl growing up in a very strange world: suburban Dublin in the 1970s and '80s. In the company of her mother, her Aunty Ida, and her little brother Baby John F., Jean experiences love and joy. But home is not a safe place, and Jean is unequal and unprotected. When she speaks just one small part of the truth, she must quickly learn to navigate the dangers and possibilities of a world she scarcely understands. Jean's hypnotic, unsparing and ultimately hopeful voice captures the dreams and terrors of girlhood in a brutally hypocritical world, and narrates her encounters with better ways of being. Through it all, Jean's voice pulsates with life and passion. Girl in the Making is a deeply moving, propulsive coming-of-age story from a major new talent." (Catalogue)
Honourable mentions
These last two didn't make our Top 20 list, but we thoroughly enjoyed them and couldn't quite finish up without bringing them to your attention - enjoy!
Only here, only now / Newlands, Tom
"Fife, in the blazing hot summer of 1994. Cora Mowat's mates don't understand her, but then Cora Mowat doesn't understand herself. She's stuck on a seaside council estate full of dafties, old folk and seagulls, with a million dreams and a restless brain that won't behave. She's dying to escape but unsure of what the future holds, if it holds anything at all for a girl like her. When her Mam's weird boyfriend moves in, tensions rise in their tiny house. Gunner means well, but he's dodgy, a shaven-headed shoplifter with more than a few secrets stashed under the bed. As their attempts to forge a makeshift family unravel, Cora rails against her small-town existence in search of love, acceptance and a path to something good. But sometimes you can't move forward until you find your way back." (Catalogue)
Dogs and monsters : stories / Haddon, Mark
"Mark Haddon weaves ancient fables into fresh and unexpected forms, and forges new legends to sit alongside them. [...] From genetic engineering to the eternal complications of family, Haddon showcases masterfully how we are subject to the same elemental forces that obsessed the Greeks. Whether describing Laika the Soviet space dog on her fateful orbit, or St Anthony wrestling with loneliness in the desert, his astonishing powers of observation are at their height when illuminating the thin line between human and animal." (Catalogue)