Favourite Books of 2024

The Big Picture

It's been an interesting year of reading for me. Some of the dynamics familiar - the semiregular (mild) depressive fogs for a couple of weeks a couple of times a year which put a brake on things - and some new; this is the first year I've read for an award as a member of the Crawford Jury. The former meant there were periods where I only read trash (complimentary; good quality brain candy is a balm for the soul, but this isn't going to end up on a best of list). The latter meant I've read several dozen debut fantasies this year. I won't be talking about any of those here; I feel like I need to keep those close to my chest until the award is announced in March next year. But a number were very good, and would feature here absent that consideration.

The other thing this broad reading of what publishers are acquiring and putting out from new authors right now gave me is quite a good sense of the zeitgeist. At the risk of being reductive, it really does feel like you could graph the vast bulk of this on two axes; the x axis stretching from creepy to cozy, the y from myth retelling to Marvel Movie. This isn't to say everything you can categorize in this way was bad; far from it. I read a lot of pretty good to very good to very good books this year which more or less fit that description. But in the mass of fiction all clustered around the same data points on the graph, with similar comps and similar wiggly arrow trope marketing, you need excellence to stand out from the crowd.

A couple of books I discuss below arguably do just that; be superbly executed, engaging, well-written, of-the-moment speculative fiction. But it became clear as the year went on that was was more likely to stand out was authors who were willing to try something a bit different with their books and trust readers to do the work on their end to connect with it. This risks divisiveness, sure, but a books that is divisive has a far higher chance of connecting at a more fundamental level with those it works for than those which strive for universal appeal.

While there isn't a single uniting factor in what did stand out in the books I discuss below, it's particular attention to, and skill with, storytelling as an active thing. I'm not talking here about "stories about stories" necessarily (though a few are that), but attention to how information is conveyed to the reader, what is conveyed, when, and (in terms of the narrative) by who. What is required to achieve the desired effect will differ for different books, obviously, but you can tell when an author's thought about this & whether they succeed in what they're trying. Even the most straighforward of my favourite books this year succeeded admirably in this aspect of craft, whether it's skilfully painting the setting through character interaction rather than infodumping, draping meaning between words to achieve astonishing depth and breadth in a very tight word count, granting or depriving context to elicit a particular emotional response, or stitching together quite disparate stories into a genuinely effective mosaic. I was impressed, amused, and affected by the baker's dozen of excellent books I discuss below. I hope you will find (or have found!) something you connect with in them, too.

I've added links to the publishers' site for each book; these all have plot summaries/blurbs so in most cases I haven't recapitulated such in my discussion. Click through, read the blurb if my discussion doesn't make sense without it! In preparing those I noted the wide spread of publishers represented; Hachette comes out top with 5, Pan MacMillian 3, Simon & Schuster and Penguin/Random House both 1, publishers outside the big five 3, and one self-pubbed. None, and I don't know if I can read anything into this, from HarperCollins.

The list

(Disclaimer: obviously this list is limited to things I've actually read. I just didn't have time to get to all the exciting-sounding books released this year (see above; award reading & depression-induced trash pile reading), and hope to get to some of the works I've seen in other best of lists in the early part of next year.)

Robert Jackson Bennett - The Tainted Cup 

An absolute delight of an old-fashioned mystery, set in an oppressive, biohacked science fantasy secondary world. The effect is basically Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (the author's note confirms this is the touchstone rather than Holmes and Watson) meets Attack on Titan. SFFnal mysteries are deceptively hard to do well; often either the SFFnal element is irrelevant to the mystery and is just window dressing, or the established rules of the world are set up and then broken or twisted to provide an ultimately irrational mystery for our brilliant heroes to solve. The Tainted Cup avoids this trap, with a tight mystery driving the plot forward, and our lead duo of Ana and Dinios hugely compelling guides to both the mystery and the world. I had a huge amount of fun with this book, above all, but it's also (as you'd expect from Bennett) an impeccably crafted piece of writing.

Vajra Chandrasekera - Rakesfall 

The Saint of Bright Doors was my favourite book of last year, and if Rakesfall doesn't work quite as well for me, it's still easily one of the best things I read in 2024. The first of a number of books on this list that play with both how to tell stories across a huge sweep of time and with deliberately denying context to the reader. Both are deployed here to great effect. We follow our lead characters (souls? archetypes? - certainly they are not the same people all the time) through vignettes across time, setting, and tonal register, stitched together to create a singular impression if not, not my mind, quite a singular narrative. And we're typically dropped in each of these sections with no context, and yanked away just as wel develop some comfort with them. The effect is disorientating, deliberately so. The book is an furious mess of rebellion against the inevitability of empire, spelling out in the startling prose of someone rapidly becoming one of the genre's best stylists. Rakesfall largely defies comparison, but the one work that it did bring to mind was Hal Duncan's masterful Book of All Hours, where if the plot drive is somewhat confusing (and also beside the point in many way), the book's direction as an overall enterprise never is. Truly impressive.

A J Demas - The House of Red Balconies 

I think Demas will slip under the radar of a lot of SFF readers because her work is marketed as romance but if you like the sort of "I can't believe it's not history" fantasy of Guy Gavriel Kay and Megan Whalen Turner hear me out; this is great. All Demas's work is set in a thinly veiled fantasy classical Aegean - from minor islands to major cities to colonies in the hinterlands of not!Thrace, and the social worldbuilding is just impeccable. As Liz Bourke puts it, this society is "less awful in some respects than real antiquity, though it’s far from completely sanitised". The House of Red Balconies has a romance at its heart, with two compelling leads; Hylas, a 40ish engineer from a repressed militaristic society, and Zo, a younger, chronically ill courtesan. The plot, outside the romance, is driven by the complicated geopolitical status of the island making it extremely difficult to get money and approval to complete a badly needed aqueduct. The progress of both romance and broader plot is subtle, slow, and very much minor key (without at all being a downer). KJ Charles has compared the vibe to ukiyo-e, and I think this is right. A quiet, bijou gem of a book that deserves a wider audience.

Davinia Evans - Rebel Blade 

Evans thoroughly and impressively sticks the landing on the final book in her Burnished City series. This in some respects feels out of the zeitgeist I mentioned above (it doesn't fit on my graph), to its benefit. It's solid, well-crafted storytelling about the intersection of the lives of its three well-drawn leads with the politics of, and magic behind, the city they live in. This final book builds well on the (very good) two books before it, all the characters being confronted with the consequences of their actions in a way that is both natual and makes for a great story. I'm impressed that the book doesn't shy from the messinesses, the compromise (in several respects), and the iterative failure involved in political change. Points as well for the excellent bit of writing craft involved in the very different, increasingly dreamlike narration we have in Siyon's point of view - the character most involved in the magical plotline. As I was finishing the book, I realised the series had come to remind me of (without at all being the same as) Juliet Kemp's Marek series from a few years ago. Well-crafted, tightly focused stories of a fantasy city going through political change. As with Kemp, I'm hugely impressed by Evans' work here; remarkably assured for a debut series, and very keen to see what she produces next.

Erin M Evans - Relics of Ruin 

(also available via self-pubbed ebook in some regions; see eg the Australia kobo store)

Evans' first book in the Books of the Usurper was one of my favourites of the year it came out, and book 2, Relics of Ruin, more that lives up to it. Deploys to great effect dual plot arcs; a mystery plot resolved in this book, and an ongoing metaplot across the series as a whole, which is progressed but not resolved. That balancing of tension, giving and withholding information, fits well with the thematic concerns of the book as well, where the contingency of knowledge, of memory, of identity - including of our point of view characters - is front and centre throughout. Throw in rock solid prose, fascinating worldbuilding, rock solid character work, casual queerness in a way that works for me (prominent in major characters and the worldbuilding, probably not in your face/central enough to warrant a wiggly marketing arrow), and a genuinely unique magic system (based on anxiety spirals) and this is basically a perfect piece of commercial fiction for me. Reads like the best of late 90s/early 2000s epic fantasy (Kate Elliot meets Ile-Rien-era Martha Wells?), updated impeccably for modern readers. I honestly do not know why this series is not huge; it really should appeal to everyone from the cozy queer crowd to BrandoSando fans. Buy it, read it, make it huge.

Alex Jeffers - A Mourning Coat 

A short, moving novella about grief and family. Just an impeccable piece of writing craft, to put across meaning, emotion, character, and setting in a very short word count. What struck me here is the efficiency of the prose. This can sound clinical, but I more mean to get at its depth. For a novella to function as a novella - rather than a cut-down novel - each sentence, each word, might need to put across what a paragraph might in a novel. And Jeffers manages this superbly. The story is, in a lot of ways, essentially inward-looking, as grief is. But the interactions with the characters brave and caring enough to pierce the solitude of grief, and Therre's own recollections of his relationship with his father, let in the world in a way that makes me very much want to read more set here. I also now want to pick up everything Jeffers has written (in an apparently long career!). Roseanna Pendlebury has an excellent review which takes an excellent deep dive; I encourage you to read it if you need more convincing, but this is a book that deserves to be widely read and celebrated.

Karin Lowachee - The Mountain Crown 

Delighted to get more in print from Lowachee after a bit of a break from traditional publishing, and this is a hell of a return to the scene. Like the Jeffers book, a hugely efficient piece of writing where choices of diction in the narration and dialogue do much of the work establishing setting, allowing a reasonably expansive fantasy story to be told in a novella length without feeling like there's anything missing. The main plot - go to mountain; get dragon - is quite simple, but the book spends a lot of time reflecting on what the current geopolitical situation - colonialism and a post-war new status quo, basically - has done to the indigenous inhabitants of the setting. It's effective in conveying the brutality and dislocation without ever feeling like a polemic, and also paints a rich culture alternatively subordinated or ignored by the colonial power. Also, again, casual queerness of main characters, including some of the complications in relationships (especially same-sex relationships) across cultures. Really very impressive, and pleased that the next two novellas to complete the series will be out next year.

Devin Madson - Between Dragons and Their Wrath 

If you're not paying attention, this might look like a pretty standard, nicely done epic fantasy series opener. But hoo boy is there so much more going on. There are, indeed, dragons in this book (one of the major points of view focuses on them), but the dragons of the title are also metaphorical. The book depicts a society founded on a colonial enterprise and extractive capitalism, and one which is deeply patriarchal and increasingly nationalistic. It is those dragons our characters begin their fight against in this book. The other thing it does that I really appreciate is almost obsess over control of information and narrative. In all three points of view, who gets to tell stories and who gets to hear them is a major driver of the plot. In one particular case, one character is told "not everyone is owed all of every story", and we then get a major plot revelation entirely off-screen and are never told exactly what was said; we can only infer it from the actions the characters take in reaction to it. I cackled out loud at this sort of metafictional audacity coming up in a genre not known for it. If I have any criticism at all of this book it's that it is very, very firmly in Book 1 mode; the plot drive is a little slow, and most of what happens here is setup. But the setup is so good, and I'm so here for the space Madson is working in, that I don't really mind. Bring on book 2!

Robin Sloan - Moonbound 

It'd be easy to read Moonbound as just a delightfully written, oddball quest narrative. Because it is that, but it also is a great deal more. Like several of the other books on this list, it plays with time; here a 10,000 year time jump from our narrator's time to the book's present. It also plays with context; what do things that look familiar to our narrator actually mean, when separated by 10,000 years of societal, environmental, and technological development? What's the meaning of culture filtered through the slightly deranged eyes of out of control AI? These aren't just questions the book leaves to us, they're also ones which confront our narrator, who is at heart a sentient sourdough starter bonded to the nervous system of a 12 year old boy. The narration in this book is brilliant, sliding in and out of passive third person to the narrator actively commenting on and even involving itself in the action. It's an incredibly effective writing choice. Sloan is also a master of a particular tone that really works for me; teetering on the tightrope of engagingly whimsical, never falling into the fail states of twee on the one hand or irony-poisoned snark on the other. I read and very much enjoyed Sloan's first novel (Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore) this year as well (10 years after release); Moonbound is much better than it. Serious craft, serious ideas, packaged in something that might look like fluff if you're not paying attention.

Nghi Vo - The City in Glass 

This is my first Vo book and I will be hurrying to pick up more. God this was good. She's an incredible prose stylist, and that's deployed here in a short novel narrative that covers a sweep of 600 years in its limited page count. It's a difficult trick to make this engaging; we have two immortal characters at the centre, but their interactions aren't the core of the novel. That core is the rise and fall and rise and fall of Azril, the city our point of view demon, Vitrine, is the patron (?) of. Adrian Tchaikovsky pulls of the "city as character" thing in the Tyrant Philosophers. Brian Aldiss managed the "plot about society across centuries" thing with Helliconia. Vo pulls both together here. And the ending is both perfect and absolutely wild. Vo says in the author's note that this was a pandemic book, and that completely makes sense - reality redefining destruction coming out of nowhere, with no clear meaning or context. I found the book moving; hopeful about the possibiltiy of something new, contrasted against the inevitability that something new means something old has to end.

Django Wexler - How To Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying

A lot of my trash reading (see above) is in the Japanese light novel space. Light novels - and manga, and anime - are already hugely influential on a lot of self-published fantasy, particularly progression fantasy/litRPG. These are books that rack up thousands of reviews on the 'zon and are pretty much utterly ignored by mainstream SFF. Wexler's book is one of the first big pub books I've seen engage in dialogue with the same works - he explicitly cites ReZero as a key influence in the author's note (If you read my anime list, this also reminds me of a bunch of Villainess anime, though I believe Wexler had written the book before that wave of media reached anglophone audiences). And god does he do a lot with the key premise: what if save points were real, and you respawned at a point back in the past when you died. Our lead character, Davi, has lived hundreds of lives, longer or shorter, the only inevitability being death - usually at the hands of the Dark Lord's army. This has led her to treat people as disposable, events as barely real, and herself with something approaching contempt. On the loop the book starts with, she decides if you can't beat em, join em, and sets off to become the dark lord. What follows is an absolute romp, complete with amiably snarky footnotes. It is also, if one is paying attention, a surprisingly moving and real depiction of how people use humour and irony to deflect from a boatload of trauma (see: The Ninth, Gideon). The conclusion of the duology is out next year and I'll be picking it up at the first opportunity.

North Continent Ribbon - Ursula Whitcher  

One of the best examples of a mosaic novel in SFF I've read in ages. A collection of six stories, set over several hundred years in the history of the planet Nakharat. What's different about this as a mosaic to others I've read and enjoyed (Rakesfall, in this list; Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang), is it isn't a fixup - i.e. existing short work given additional context and narrative structure with newly-written material for the novel. It's six previously published stories which, when put next to each other in a single volume, add up to a more comprehensive portait of the society they depict than they do apart. The through lines become more apparent: why and how attitudes to machine decision-making vacillate over time; how the collectivist union ethos important in one later story developed in an earlier one. All this adds to a startlingly real depiction of a society that does not exist. As with the other novellas/short novels on this list, this only works because Whitcher is an excellent crafter of prose, evoking setting, character, and emotion in comparatively few words. A complete triumph.

Aliya Whiteley - Three Eight One 

I know writers who are familiar with the concept of context and they're all cowards: the novel. A confounding, confusing novel and that's entirely the point. Again comparison is difficult, but Pale Fire sort of works; if Pale Fire was a possibly AI-generated piece of fic on AO3 and Charles Kinbote was the individual personality strand of a post-singularity quasi collective society. Another pandemic novel, and again that makes sense to me. The book reads to me like a deliberate denial of context to the reader. Our annotator doesn't understand the text she's annotating (mistaking fictional elements for real aspects of our society), and neither do we; an odd, surrealist quest narrative that veers wildly in tone, content, and narrative perspective. Neither do we really understand the society of the annotator, far in our future. The effect on the reader is to deprive us of any context for what is going on, despite a clear narrative actually being present. It's unsettling and odd, but never unreadable - I actually finished the book over the course of a day without rushing. And the mental state it evoked in me is something quite unlike anything I've ever experienced reading a novel before. And none of this is to mention the startlingly audacious Oulipo-esque literary game Whiteley plays throughout. An absolutely staggering piece of writing.