If All The World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton
TW: grief, parent loss in childhood
An exquisite poetry collection in the pastoral tradition, the practice of elegeaic idealising of a long gone past. For Sexton, this past is not a mythic Greece filled with old gods, but his own childhood, when he played Super Mario World, and his mother was alive and well.
Sexton has such intent and purpose. The genre and form are so fit to the content it is breathtaking. Blending millennial nostalgia with the pastoral is such a wild and yet brilliantly insightful approach, and this is one of the single best realised collections I've ever read.
Preloved by Lauren Bravo
TW: grief, sibling loss
Probably the most normie book I've read in years, I even bought it from the Sainsburys bestsellers shelves.
A love letter to the British charity shop, and the inherent sadness of secondhand.
Thirty-something Gwen is coasting and unemployed in London, and finds herself volunteering a day a week in a local charity shop. Lonely and struggling to connect to anyone, being surrounded by the ephemera of other people's lives allows her to examine for the first time how she came to be alone, and find meaning in her life again.
Paris Adrift by E.J. Swift
TW: depictions of migraine/seizure type illness, alcohol abuse, addiction
A clever and tightly written time-travel saga, Hallie has abandoned her graduate geology career to bum around Paris, and ends up working in a bar neighbouring the famous Moulin Rouge.
She is approached by a haunting and mysterious woman calling herself the Chronometrist, and soon finds herself experiencing vivid, hallucinatory months long timeslips into 19th century Paris, in which she is compelled to alter history to save a distant future.
I rarely enjoy reading sci-fi, but Swift has such a clear vision for her narrative, a certainty with her imagery, and time-travel as a metaphor for addiction works so much better than I thought. Geologist Hallie slips into one fugue state in which she envisions a long fossilised ocean beneath the bedrock, it's haunting.
The Wild by Esther Freud
TW: toxic family systems, child neglect
This is kind of the only sort of novella a member of the Freud family could produce, one in which a nine-year-old girl is so desperate for a father and a family, she is triangulated into a toxic blended family, tolerating tiny humiliations in hope of being accepted and loved by her step-father and step-sisters.
Much of the narrative makes sense only if you're aware of the half-hearted hippie communes common to the bored middle-class of Britain in the 1970s, and have a decent instinct for feminist theory.
Sweetpea by C.J. Skuse
TW: graphic violence, genital mutilation, murder, torture, rape, violence towards children, sexual assault, pregnancy
This five book black comedy follows a somewhat different narrative to the recent SkyTV series adapted from it, and I suspect is significantly funnier for taking the form of a serial killer's confessional diary. Rhiannon Lewis has been described as a cross between Bridget Jones and Patrick Bateman, and I can't describe her better.
In Sweetpea, book one of the series of the same name, local paper reporter Rhiannon learns her long-term boyfriend has been cheating on her with a work colleague, she steadily plans a vicious revenge on him, and any predator or paedophile unlucky enough to cross her path.
As the TW suggests, this is an extremely graphic book from the first chapter. Skuse is an experienced YA author, and the Sweetpea series is her first foray into crime thrillers, not a genre I usually go for, but her plotting is tight and fast and escalating, and I can see why people who love crime thrillers commit to the genre. I suspect if I go looking for another Sweetpea, I'll never find it. It took me almost exactly two months to listen to all the Sweetpea audiobooks, and now I have no idea who will accompany me on my dog walks, if not C.J. Skuse, and her wonderful voice artist, Georgia Maguire (she does all the voices. She's perfect)
For the longest time, I couldn't work out what I was missing in Larkin's only novel published in his lifetime. The first third is happy to pretend to be a campus novel set in Oxford in the early days of WWII, in which our author-insert hero struggles with class division and seeks the approval of his upper class roommate. It's around the 40% mark that John Kempe suddenly discovers the lure of fantasy in his lonely routine, specifically the fantasy of writing letters to an imaginary teenage sister, and leaving them for his roommate to find, in hopes of seeming less dull and lonely. He continues to weave stories about Jill, and the campus novel briefly becomes a boarding school novel. The snap back to reality turns Jill into a haunting study of obsession, stalking a real teenager named Gillian who becomes the subject of his fantasies.
With modern eyes, it's obvious that John Kempe shares the same patterns as Nice Guys, Incels, and fiction-reliant fantasists. Larkin wrote Jill while at Oxford, so it's important to remember he is not John Kempe, though there are elements from his own life, Larkin is aware that Kempe is a fantasist. The single most fascinating thing to give context to Jill is that Larkin wrote his own lesbian boarding school novels under a pseudonym, and even roleplayed these stories by post. It's such a contrast to the jmage of Larkin as a giant of Modernist poetry. I can't decide if he was born in the wrong time (he would have an anime schoolgirl RP account of some kind), or if the man is timeless.
Halls uses this excellent research to tell a story of two women becoming friends against insurmountable class boundaries, and trying to survive one of England's darkest acts of femicide.
Set during the Pendle Witch trials of 1612, Halls follows the imagined relationship between gentrywoman Fleetwood Shuttleworth, and one of the accused, Alice Grey. Halls only request for our imagination is to suggest these two historic figures not only met, but were friends, with Alice Grey acting as midwife to Fleetwood Shuttleworth. While there is no historic evidence for these women ever meeting, beyond geographic proximity, every other detail of the text is impeccably researched and accurate, everything from laundry bills to trips to London can be evidenced in real historic record.
(I live in Lancashire, and the stories about the Pendle Witch trials have always been around, though they aren't taught in schools. Best I can describe is something like a Jacobean Salem.)
The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
TW: war and conflict violence, sexual assault, domestic violence, animal attacks
Disclaimer: I read this one much earlier in the year, and my recollection is a little fuzzy.
Natalia is a young doctor running a vaccination clinic in a Balkan village, and her journey through war torn countryside brings her to confront the legacy of her grandfather, a man fascinated by The Jungle Book, and the tiger held in a local zoo. His stories become hers, threading all the way back to a near legend of an unmarried woman protected by an escaped tiger.
The threads of the novel are so rich and dense, the kind of lore which feels eminently true to life. You do pick up all these hearsay stories from your family, and they do accumulate into this generational narrative, whether you ask for them or not.
I lost my own grandfather this year, and I know that like Natalia, I'm holding a lot of stories and secrets of his, which nobody else was ever told. There's a lot of grief books on this list, but it isn't deliberate.
Practice by Rosalind Brown
TW: explicit sexual content
I read a review of Brown a few months ago, which said the radical thing she does is write a story where the main character is completely content with where they are, nothing needs to change, they don't have a greater goal or drive, they don't especially learn anything about themselves, or really develop.
And yet, Practice is bafflingly, immensely compelling. Annabel is an Oxford student of English literature, and living that dark academia aesthetic life without any irony. The novel follows a day in her life during the Christmas term, as she plans and works on an essay about Shakespeare's Sonnets.
Brown must absolutely adore the sonnets, because each chapter feels just as self-contained as one. The vivid, restrained, and precise imagery evokes Shakespeare in every line. It's a flawless debut. It's the book I dream that I had written. I will be on my deathbed thinking, I wish I could claim Practice as mine. It's just perfect.
I knew Annabel. At one point, she breaks from her monastic focus and enjoys a tangent about the slash ship OCs she came up with, never once using any tumblr terminology, but it's clearly the fanfic instinct, and suddenly you realise that she is embodying this flawless, precise academic, but she is truly just a girl in love with academia and with Shakespeare, and chooses to live deliberately in a condensed, self-contented studyspo reality.
An Infinite Pull by Taylor Simmonds
TW: fantasy violence, minor body horror, descriptions of blood
What do you get if you mash-up Treasure Planet, Tangled, The Little Mermaid, and just a hint of Doctor Who?
My 15 year old self was waiting for Simmond's beautiful An Infinite Pull. Half a lifetime ago, browsing the corner of YouTube home to Non/Disney Crossover AMVs, that's where shipping Jim Hawkins and Ariel was first a thing. Simmonds does so much with the concept of grand steampunk spaceships, honouring the Treasure Planet sequels Musker and Clements were never able to give us.
I rarely treat myself to brand new books in print, but I needed a physical copy of this smaller print number release from this year. I'm so happy with it I'm reading it only a chapter a night to make the experience last as long as possible. Call it slowmaxxing. It feels like a story a long time in the making, and I hope Simmonds goes on to great success - there's only 40 ratings for An Infinite Pull on Goodreads and it deserves to be so much more widely read!
And that's a wrap on my 2024 book recommendations!
I hope at least one of these is something you hadn't heard of, or has caught your interest! Happy reading 🩷✨️
More poetry from the Emma Press (illustrations by Emma Wright). DJL recommends Oils in particular, because it’s brilliant (and the Poetry Book Society agrees.)
