The best books of 2024: From Sally Rooney to Boris Johnson

Okay, that headline is ever-so-slightly misleading – while many of the entries on this list are indeed among the best books of 2024, others earn their place by virtue of being emblematic of their time (Boris Unleashed), zeitgeist-capturing (Bad Girls of Ancient Greece) or simply so utterly bonkers we felt they earned a spot (The Plot). So here are the most memorable books of 2024.

Cleavage by Cleo Watson

Cleavage is the second Westminster ‘bodice-ripper’ from Boris Johnson’s former aide, and it seems she hasn’t run out of material. Picking up from Watson’s first novel Whips, Cleavage follows the antics of its three bright yuppie female protagonists (a story-hungry journalist, a nepo-baby spad and an earnest political campaigner) during the course of a general election – one which happens to start with a rather large polling gap.

The plot is ridiculous, but intentionally so, and follows the mantra Watson ascribed to her first novel: “the Matt Hancock arse-grab of debut novels, which is to say truly cringeworthy, but nonetheless gripping”. Cleavage proves just as much of a riot as Whips, and one’s only worry is that Watson may have run out of good titles. (Anna Moloney) • BUY IT HERE

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk

Technically released in 2022, The Empusium by Nobel Prize in Literature winner Olga Tokarczuk finally got an English translation this year. Framed as a conversation with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, it follows young tuberculosis sufferer Mieczyslaw Wojnicz who, on the cusp of the First World War, travels to a remote Polish sanatorium. 

At this place where civilization and nature uneasily overlap, the residents indulge nightly in a strange hallucinogenic liqueur before pontificating upon the place of science, religion and technology in the world of men. At its heart it’s a feminist tale, the gathered gents acting as proxies for thinkers including Darwin, Nietzsche, Plato and Yates, exploring the ways they downplayed or rejected the agency of women.

Told with the cadence of a Victorian ghost story, Tokarczuk weaves drab realism with psychedelic folklore, creating a vivid, expressionistic world that’s as unsettling as it is compelling. (Steve Dinneen) • BUY IT HERE

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Unlike Rooney’s previous novels, Intermezzo focuses on two male characters: Peter, a hotshot Dublin lawyer in his early thirties, and Ivan, his younger, dorkier, competitive chess-playing brother, who have just lost their father. The novel tracks their immediate reckoning with grief, their tempestuous relationship with each other, and, of course, their respective travails in love, flipping between their perspectives throughout.

Despite the book’s marketing, which has focused on the dynamic of the brothers, it was these romances that felt like the book’s main focus. Ivan and Peter themselves only share three scenes – a shame, as this was probably the novel’s most compelling relationship. While occasionally frustrating, Intermezzo is, in many ways, a success: it’s compelling, it feels unique and it forced me to reconsider my own preconceptions about love and relationships. (Anna Moloney) • BUY IT HERE

Unleashed by Boris Johnson

Unleashed is essentially a series of mini political essays, framed from the vantage point of someone unable to speak their mind at the time.

Whether friend or foe, you can’t deny Boris Johnson writes well, as you would expect from the former editor of the Spectator and regular Telegraph columnist (something he’s keen to remind us about). It’s easy to follow, amusing in places and serious in others. True to Boris’ style, it’s packed with more puns and metaphors than an episode of Have I Got News for You. He also has a knack for keeping readers engaged with classical and historical references, from the Fall of Rome (a refrain throughout the book) to Pericles and Odysseus. No surprises here, perhaps, but he also throws in references to Lord of the Rings, the Beano and Billy Bunter for good measure.  

It’s a powerful if slightly revisionist account of his legacy, honing the image of a big intellect working in tandem with a bumbling charm. (Harry Owen) • BUY IT HERE

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

At 136 pages, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is the second shortest book to ever win the Booker Prize – a fact that will be hailed by those of the opinion that brevity is a sign of excellence. Orbital’s premise is one that suggests an adventure of grand proportions: a novel following the lives of six astronauts aboard a spaceship. But barely a centimetre thick and unashamedly plotless, this is a novel of ideas over action. Our astronauts are not swashbuckling explorers but observational scientists; and our mission not rocketing to the moon but rather a series of stable orbits around the earth to collect data.

Thoughtful and affecting, it’s a shame we are forced to come back to earth so soon. (Anna Moloney) • BUY IT HERE

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

Most known for his 2004 Man Booker Prize-winning Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst’s latest literary offering is another first-person coming-of-age novel about gay Britain, and it’s my favourite book I read all year.

It follows the life of Dave Win, a queer, half-Burmese actor, from his childhood in the 1960s to the present day. It’s an overtly political novel, with Hollinghurst acknowledging the choice of timeline – from when Britain first tried to join the EU in the 1960s to Brexit and its aftermath in the 2020s – was no coincidence. 

It’s the incidental anecdotes that often make up the novel’s most biting moments and despite clocking in at almost 500 pages, I would have happily read 500 pages more. (Anna Moloney) • BUY IT HERE

Trading Game by Gary Stevenson

A romp through the bowels of Canary Wharf, Trading Game documents Gary Stephenson’s rise from Ilford council estate to the Citi trading floor. The trader-turned-economic Youtuber paints a stark picture of the realities of modern investment banking: the eccentric colleagues, the widespread drug taking and work practices that bordered on criminal.

But Stephenson’s initial fascination with his new vocation – won over by the rush provided by its high stakes, cut throat environment – is quickly replaced by disillusionment as he struggles to reconcile with betting against the prosperity of the people he grew up with.

His claims to have “the best f*cking trader in the world” that are littered throughout the book may have since been questioned, but that doesn’t stop what follows from being an un-put-downable, well-paced read, as he battles to leave the job and the industry by which he was initially so enamoured. (Ali Lyon) • BUY IT HERE

Bad Girls of Ancient Greece by Lizzy Tiffin

When Bad Girls of Ancient Greece: Myths and Legends from the Baddies that Started It All landed on my desk this summer, I was dismayed but not surprised. Feminist retellings of ancient myths have long been in vogue – and many of them are good, from Margaret Atwood’s 2005 The Penelopiad to Madeleine Miller’s Tiktok-revered Circe. But, as with all things, there is a line – and a bubblegum pink hardback profiling the “wayward wives, mad mothers… and damsels, that quite frankly, caused others A LOT of stress in the ancient world” crossed mine. Imposing feminist credentials on a pre-feminist world is not always graceful. But it won me over: the classics are cherished for a reason, but the tales were always meant to be retold and reshaped. In this way, the reader is empowered. (Anna Moloney) • BUY IT HERE

The Plot by Nadine Dorries

In surely the most deranged political book of the year, the former culture secretary casts herself as the star in a detective thriller. Determined to prove Boris Johnson’s innocence in his own downfall, she meets a series of anonymous whistleblowers in Westminster’s watering holes. In the process, she uncovers a shady cabal of rabbit-mutilating power-brokers she claims have been pulling the strings of the Conservative party for decades. Partygate, Chris Pincher, gold wallpaper and a misbehaving dog, it turns out, have nothing to do with Boris Johnson’s resignation… it was all the responsibility of this shady network, whose ruthlessness even extends to denying our working class heroine her hard-earned peerage. Sometimes fiction really is stranger than the truth. (Alys Denby) • BUY IT HERE

Parade by Rachel Cusk

Fighting back against the traditional novel, Rachel Cusk’s fiction, which often features thinly-veiled versions of herself, has been both praised for its innovation and criticised for its self obsession (in a manner many would call sexist), though mostly the former. 

All the artists who parade around her latest novel, Parade, are different characters yet share the initial G as their identifier. There is no real narrative journey, merely the backgrounds of the ideas of various European cities and people within them. The artists’ various stories swirl around tackling typical Cuskian themes – motherhood, the responsibility of an artist, shame, marriage, losing a parent.

Although the themes are recognisable, the book is no rehash of her previous works, there being a satisfying sense of development away from the Cusk-like central narrator who has dominated her previous book. The artists in Parade are constantly evolving their artwork, creating radically new forms of art. Resistant and abrasive to convention as ever – whilst still being a compulsive and accessible read – Parade is another success of fragmentary storytelling. (Lucy Kenningham) • BUY IT HERE

Knife by Salman Rushdie

“The knife defines me,” Salman Rushdie writes. He wishes it didn’t. As such, Knife is not just a reckoning with the violent attack that nearly took his life just a little over a year and half ago, it’s also a reckoning with what it changes about him as a writer – or more to his point, us as readers.

Rushdie was stabbed 15 times in 27 seconds in August 2022. He had been about to deliver a lecture in Chautauqua, New York, when his assailant (referred to only as ‘the A’) rushed onto the stage. The incident left him in a critical condition, and with permanent scars. 

Despite Rushdie’s reluctance to equate writing to therapy – “writing is writing, and therapy is therapy” – Knife is without doubt an exercise of healing for the writer. Knife is a moving tale with moments of powerful writing, but its heart is struck with contradiction. Rushdie says he wishes not to be remembered for the story of his life, but for his storytelling; but Knife, by its very existence, shows that life and art cannot be easily separated. And I’m not sure what we would gain if we could. (Anna Moloney) • BUY IT HERE

Unfiltered by Guenther Steiner

Guenther Steiner is a modern sporting hero: he speaks his mind, swears more than he cares to admit and dishes the dirt. If you are unfamiliar with the name, he is the former team principal of Haas, the most recent team to make it on to the Formula 1 grid. Alas, it all went wrong: he fell out with the richest of the rich (and his boss, Gene Haas), and got uncomfortably close to Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. His second book, Unfiltered – which follows Surviving to Drive – is a good read for business fans, filled with anecdotes about starting a £1bn business and dealing with kleptocrats. Honest, frank and funny, Unfiltered is is a not-too-serious take on a sport that has raced into our psyche. (Matt Hardy) • BUY IT HERE