My Favorite Five 2024 Novels in English
I hope you find my selections as quirky, penetrating, and unsettling as I did. These five writers have all had highly praised careers, but they are very different from one another, and their works are always full of surprises. D. H. Lawrence called the novel "the bright book of life" because he believed it to be the only literary genre capable of capturing the complexities of the modern world in its fullness and concrete particularity. Some novels can appear shapeless—what Henry James called "loose, baggy monsters"—but if crafted by masters, they are shaped from within, moving at their own pace and guided by their own ends.
The five works of fiction below are technically innovative, propulsively readable, and taut yet open-ended—none of them suitable for a Hollywood adaptation. Be warned, however: they are as challenging as they are captivating, intended for serious readers with open, flexible minds.
1. Orbital by Samantha Harvey
In one sense, little happens on this “day” that differs from any other of their endlessly repetitive days in space. Yes, there are experiments with mice and plants in zero gravity, the monitoring of a monster typhoon in South Asia, and a U.S.-crewed voyage to the moon in progress, but neither characters nor events dominate. Instead, the precise yet suggestive prose of a master storyteller redefines what it means to tell a story.
2. Playground by Richard Powers
Where Orbital is concise, Playground is expansive. I have long admired Powers’ ambitious novels, always compulsively readable but also devoted to exploring subjects often confined to science textbooks. Here, several interwoven plots touch on oceanography (and the plight of endangered oceanic ecosystems), artificial intelligence, and the neo-colonialism these technologies might enable.
At its core are two honors high school friends—one, a privileged white coder who creates the AI threat, and the other, a Black inner-city writer-to-be. After stormy years of intellectual gamesmanship, they part ways, only to reunite in a surprising conclusion I won’t spoil for you. Two women shape the other strands of the story: a Polynesian sculptor who marries the writer and an elderly Canadian scuba diver and scientist leading the fight to protect a pristine Pacific island from foreign capital. These storylines converge in an unforgettable finale.
3. Parade by Rachel Cusk
By contrast, Parade is enigmatic, even gnomic, compared to Price’s larger canvas. Cusk seems to eschew many traditional fictional techniques, including plot. All her major characters—male or female, white or Black—are artists named “G.”
If the theme is how the worlds of art and life interact, the overlapping stories are narrated in a stark, sometimes unliterary voice that suggests hidden complexities beneath apparent simplicities. Events unfold, but few are dramatic, and none are conclusive. Cusk has built her career on indirection, suggestion, and rapture, and this novel is her latest exploration of these hallmarks.
4. Polostan by Neal Stephenson
This time, we follow Aurora (or Dawn, depending on the country she is in), a Russian-American spy and/or counterspy entangled in a pre-Cold War ideological struggle partly played out on the polo pitch. Aurora seeks to aid the USSR’s revolution while escaping the Great Depression in the U.S. The novel leaves us dangling with no clear resolution—but promises more in future volumes.
5. Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio de la Pava
On a very different note is Sergio de la Pava’s strange and unsettling Every Arc Bends Its Radian. Written in English but steeped in Spanish, this work both sends up and celebrates the noir detective procedural, adding uncanny twists.
Set in Colombia, the narrator’s homeland, the story involves cousins, an aunt, the world’s largest drug cartel, its sadistic boss, and a young cousin who is both a mathematical genius and a prisoner (or recruit) of the cartel. She has discovered a method to achieve something akin to immortality. If this sounds improbable, the last third of the novel—with its submersible journey to the ocean’s depths—will leave you breathless. If the novel is “the bright book of life,” this one bursts with it.
Final Thoughts
These five novels push the boundaries of what fiction can do. They challenge and enthrall, offering serious readers the chance to experience the modern world through new lenses. Which of these will you pick up first?
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