This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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It’s that time of year again when this column helpfully sorts sheep from goats, wheat from chaff and men from boys in our reckoning of the best fiction published in 2024. As ever, we omit from this list the best new titles we have covered already in this column: this year that would include Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach, David Nicholls’ You Are Here, Eugenio Montale’s Butterfly of Dinard, David Peace’s Munichs, Lissa Evans’ Small Bomb at Dimperley, Jonathan Coe’s The Proof of My Innocence and Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings. (Phew, it’s been a bumper year.)

What follows, then, is a list of the best books not previously reviewed here. Your correspondent has heard rumours that there may be some very good books of 2024 out there that he has not read — but he doesn’t believe them.

Political novels of the year

If you believe some sources, all novels are political: certainly that seems to be the view of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, which casts its net wider every year. Are there, we wonder, any limits? Would Sunset at Blandings now be shortlisted, for its searing indictment of the idle upper classes and their stolen cow-creamers and overweight pigs? If everything is political, nothing is, and so here we restrict our definition to those novels that address macro-politics.

Hisham Matar’s My Friends may be the best novel of all those I read this year — even if it had the advantage of coming at the start and therefore casting a long shadow over the rest of this year’s reads. It has style, as evidenced by its sinuous, half-page opening sentence. It has structural ambition: that opening sentence lays the ground for the book’s key character, who doesn’t appear for another 250 pages. And it has a hell of a story. 

Much is exactly what Sahota gives us

The narrator, Khaled, is a Libyan in exile from Gaddafi’s regime in London (“where Arab writers came to die”), who has been here since the 1980s, when he witnessed at close hand the Libyan embassy protest in April 1984 where PC Yvonne Fletcher was murdered by shots fired from within. It is a book about friendship, but also about literature, memory, exile and about “everything we were, all that we had lost and everything we felt we were becoming”. None of those issues would matter of course, if they weren’t rendered in empathetic prose with vision and aplomb. My Friends looks like a modern classic.

In Sunjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart, the politics are not international but national and even sub-national. Its intriguing title promises much, and much is exactly what Sahota gives us. This is a book so packed with so many elements, yet never over-stuffed, that I had to check to make sure the pages were numbered correctly. 

Nayan Olak is a British Asian man living in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, who’s active in his trade union movement and is standing for election as general secretary. But there’s a hitch: blow-in candidate Megha, whose identitarian politics are maddening to pragmatist Nayan, is standing against him. This is one strand of the novel: others include Nayan’s burgeoning interest in a local woman, Helen Fletcher (“hard as nails. Driest eye in the house”), whose son has been falsely accused of racism on social media; and his relationship with his memorably rendered father. 

Like My Friends, The Spoiled Heart is not just cleverly structured (it is, in one sense, a story within a story within a story) but executed with rare literary intelligence. That it also becomes a page-turner in its final hundred pages just adds to the embarrassment of riches on display.

Buried treasure of the year

Publishers put out books like clowns firing pies at a wall. Some of them will stick, sure, but most will slide into indistinguishable mush almost immediately. Of course since — per Sturgeon’s Law — 90 per cent of everything is crud, this mostly doesn’t matter. But sometimes the best stuff gets overlooked in the barrage of incoming titles.

Her stories are painful but beautiful

Alba Arikha’s third novel Two Hours is precise and rigorous but also wide-ranging and empathetic. It covers 40 years of its narrator Clara’s life in 160 pages, yet its focus means we never feel under-served. Clara is a privileged young Parisian and the two hours of the title are those she spends in the company of a boy, Alexander, before her family moves to New York. 

With Alexander gone, reality cannot impinge on her growing obsession with his perfection, which colours much of her subsequent decades. She does make a life and family of her own, but this is a book about the gap between what we see in ourselves and what Philip Larkin called “the unbeatable slow machine/that brings what we get”. Unbeatable, indeed, is a good word to describe this extraordinary novel.

Mary Costello’s Barcelona is a story collection that is hard to sell by description — it is mostly about people trapped in unhappy relationships, whether with partners, parents or neighbours — but it proves that the best fiction comes from friction. It may be no surprise that a book which features J.M. Coetzee as a (secondary) character is one that shares that pointed plain style of his which reveals so much, because there is no fluff or floweriness to hide behind. 

Her stories are painful but beautiful because of the insights with which they’re delivered — whether a vegetarian son resenting his farmer father or a woman marvelling at her husband’s apparent sex addiction, aided by the “lustful” housewives of Dublin. It is occasionally funny too. Costello admires Kafka, Beckett, Musil — and of course Coetzee — and she writes with their force and determination.

South Africans of the year

A niche category, to be sure, but one that more than justifies its existence this season. There is perhaps a national character in some South African writing which traces a line from Nadine Gordimer through the aforementioned Coetzee to Damon Galgut. It is dry-ish, spare, clear-eyed — rare in a world of literary bloat, sentiment and overstatement.

Karen Jennings’ Crooked Seeds is even better than her 2021 Booker-longlisted An Island. Its greatest achievement is the creation of central character Deidre, a monstrously selfish middle-aged woman resistant to change (“It’s just the way I am”) living in near-future Cape Town, whose life of feeling sorry for herself and fishing cigarette butts out of the gutter is interrupted when police tell her they’ve found a body in her old family home. And so Deidre’s story goes backwards and forwards with pace and black comedy, in a book of rare grown-up complexity: the sort of novel whose artistic brilliance makes the reader feel joy even if the storyline doesn’t.

It’s not quite like anything I’ve read before — and how often can you say that?

The discovery of the year for me arrived late, with S.J. Naudé’s Fathers and Fugitives, translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns. It comes with praise from Damon Galgut, and it was Galgut’s great novel In a Strange Room that I was most reminded of when reading it. It takes Daniel, a young South African writer living in London (“tattletale from the colonies”) and leads us through five phases in his life: an unwise liaison with a couple of unexplainable lovers; a vigil before death with his demented father, with whom he has a relationship “white and flat and almost frictionless”; a visit to his rural cousin, who, at least initially, is not pleased to see him (“we’ve always been the reject relatives, haven’t we?”) and so on. 

What delighted me about this novel was the repeated surprise of Naudé’s sentences, his wry, cool vision of the world through Daniel’s eyes and the move from cynicism to an almost symphonic emotional richness at the peak of the novel (which actually comes some distance before the end). The even better news is that Naudé has a backlist of one other novel and two collections of stories to explore.

Old new books of the year

As ever, I have an eye too on the best re-issued fiction, and it’s been a rich crop this year. Bridget O’Connor’s After A Dance is a selection of stories of the London Irish in the 1980s and 90s, ridiculous and funny in equal measure, especially when making us laugh around things we shouldn’t laugh at (cancer, domestic violence, a dog being drowned during a mugging). It’s not quite like anything I’ve read before — and how often can you say that?

Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key, first published in 1947, takes us back to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and a couple harbouring a Jewish man, who (we’re told at the beginning) will ultimately die whilst under their care. They must hide him from the fishmonger, corral the barber into their conspiracy (“I only do one kind of cut. I hope you like it”) and finally breathe a sigh of relief as they dispose of his body under a park bench — only to remember that he was wearing a pair of the husband’s monogrammed pyjamas. 

Yes, the approach is farcical, because if you don’t laugh, what will you do? Well, we hope to answer that question in 2025, politics permitting.