12 Books in 12 Months: Circa 2024

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Hilarious - this book was nothing short of a fantastic way to launch 2024. As we transition into a new year, there is always that element of confusion, dread – ambiguity even – but give me a murder comedy book series and I’m right there with you. The premise alone was hook enough centring around four senior citizens in a care home who solve unsolved murders, and then find themselves in the middle of one.

The writing was relatable, the characters were witty, and it never once tried to be something that it wasn’t. This was never supposed to be an intricate, convoluted Agatha Christie-esque stroke of genius, but rather the bringing to life of a demographic that we rarely hear from in a context we would never imagine them to be in. It knew its place and would often bring you back to the reality of having to take a nap or bake a pie for someone’s birthday after a long day of solving crimes, which I adored. It also fell into senior citizen stereotypes enough for quick comedic relief, but didn’t overdo it so as to grind this group into 2D pot.

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Set in the mid-1950s, The Remains of the Day follows Stevens as he embarks on what appears to be his first ever holiday. Stevens takes a driving trip down through the beautiful scenic routes of England and the book is the reliving of his memories over his career as the butler of Darlington Hall. At its heart, the role of a butler is one to be always at the ready but never seen. It is to be ever waiting, yet forever in the shadows. It is to commit yourself to one person and be rid entirely of opinion and quite frankly, free will.

Your heart feels torn as you read because a book about unconditional loyalty can be somehow beautiful but you are simultaneously also grappling with the yearning you feel for Stevens to listen to his gosh-darn heart. We get to know the friendship between him and housekeeper Miss Kenton, who is quickly revealed as the main character of his memories. Their friendship grows over the years beneath a cloud of professionalism that Stevens is determined to keep standing under despite his feelings. His road trip culminates in meeting her for tea and my heart broke as they acknowledge their feelings in a language only they can understand. You watch Miss Kenton leave on the bus to her husband and they never see each other again.

There is also an interesting but sinister undertone of political darkness that builds throughout - centring specifically around the fact that Lord Darlington was a Nazi sympathiser… Stevens' loyalty does not waver even as he begins with a new employer, and it is fascinating to see how far this can and will take you. How you can become reshaped to exist a certain way for someone else, and at what cost? At what sacrifice? Who should you be loyal to?

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If this book were to be summed into one word, it would be heartbreaking. Not heartbreaking to do so; I mean, the book itself was heartbreaking. Shuggie Bain writer, Douglas Stuart is back with another gut-wrenching novel about the socially - and emotionally - paralysing confines of Glasgow’s public housing system. The Observer calls it ‘a gay Romeo and Juliet’, which is exactly what it is - two destined lovers who face relentless torment and trauma that ultimately dooms their romance. 

It is also very much a coming of age novel, revealing how when you have no one to help you grow up, you don’t. You are suddenly an adult and skip right through all the in between because you had to learn to fight from such a young age, hide who you are to protect yourself and learn what love is from toxicity you see around you. Definitely worth a read, I think we don’t speak enough about this side of Scotland and their stories who have been hugely silent for so long.

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I gave this book as a gift to my Dad for his birthday and ended up wanting to read it myself so here we are. He didn’t give it a great review, but curiosity took the better of me. My Dad and I are essentially in our discovering forgotten stories in history era and as this is about a brother and a sister battling through the Spanish Inquisition of The Netherlands in the 1560s, I couldn’t refuse. 

What I found most striking about this book was the way that gender was revealed. Quite quickly into the story, the father dies, the mother descends into madness and the siblings are separated when the brother decides to join a gang of pirates with his uncle. As a woman, the sister struggles to get through a day without being assaulted, harassed or swindled by men, which considering this book was set almost 500 years ago doesn’t look too different to how we experience the world today. The brother is expected to fight and kill, ‘be a man’ his uncle tells him in Dutch - again not too dissimilar hm? 

The history itself was fascinating though and you learn about William of Orange, and therefore why the Dutch are always wearing it today for sports matches, koningsdag and any other carnival, circus style events they love over there. William was born in Orange, which was part of the Dutch Republic and was somewhat indifferent to the colour, but I suppose that isn’t really the point. 

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This book was probably my favourite of all the books I read this year in book club - sorry Richard, sorry Kazuo. It had the most down to earth, I want to be friends with you guys type of characters and made the world of gaming so magical to me when I knew so little about it. It was absolutely heart breaking, but completely and undoubtably beautiful. At its core, this was a story of unwavering friendship, which to me is so powerful in a context where the love we see in romantic relationships seems to be the highest form of love. The love of a friendship can be just as powerful and eternal, which this book absolutely does not shy away from.

What really did it for me is it had so many strong themes intermeshing and didn’t fail any of them. Sam, Sadie and Marx - our three protagnosts - who build video games together (well the latter not so much) show us the way friendship grapples with adverse circumstances and changes over time. Then we see the way that success treats people different - and as does jealously. We see the socio-cultural consequences of creating a game that inadvertently chose a political wing and what revenge will drive someone to do. 

On a personal note too, reading this as a mixed race woman also brought this book close to my heart - finally reading a book about people that also are, but not making this the plot. Having these characters represented meant a lot. Utterly, utterly perfect read. 

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I’ve given this four stars and not five as it was very hard to get into. Reading this was almost exhausting and I think this was also - somewhat ironically - the point. It was almost written in such a way that it would allow you to assimilate albeit very uncomfortably into the world in such a way that you felt the turbulence in the pit of your stomach the entire time.

Where this book triumphs however is in the painting of a dystopian hell where Big Brother is everywhere and a family hinges on the haphazard mundaneness of surviving. It made me think about the world that we live in and how this is more than just Ireland - this is everywhere. Lives being taken unjustly and in secret, only for the remnants to be found far too late… heart-breaking and poignant. It can act as a powerful reflector that events and political regimes like this are cyclical and actually form evergreen activities in history. So for today, it can also speak to the horrors of Gaza as well as of Trump America.

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The story was very relatable - it just wasn’t written for me. With a pre-teen audience in mind, I understand why the word ‘slay’ was overused, but as a woman in her mid-20s I just couldn’t shake the cringe really.

Although, I won’t end this one on a downer, because I hold stories like these very dearly, especially being someone from the theatre community. These are the stories of dreaming of the stage but being one of so so many like you that this dream really does become one of relentless, cut-throat competition, rejection and luck of the draw. It is a painful reality of an acting career! But at the same time, there really isn’t anything like it. That feeling of magic and wonder as you open your heart to sing. It’s tricky, it really is. You can very quickly switch from asking yourself if you should give up and then to why would you ever do anything else.

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You know what I bloody loved this. I've always loved the Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan film, and when I saw the beautiful hot air balloon cover of the book in the British Museum, I couldn't help myself. Although, I was kind of fuming that they never actually travelled via hot air balloon in the book nor was there any mention of intending to do so, so I did have a few qualms with that.

Lack of hot air balloons aside however, this is a brilliant and epic tale of adventure, friendship and wonder. You see the world in eighty days, right; and for someone reading this in 1872, this will likely be the closest they get to seeing the world. So with that comes the writer’s layering of the two-sides-of-the-coin standpoint on the British empire presented to us by a French writer. On the one hand, he tells us the joys of empire, which involves wealth and advancements in technology. He speaks a lot about trains, which I can understand would be a huge development for that time - connecting nations and making history through a technological evolution of transport. However, empire has also poisoned our world with centuries of white domination and the suppression of millions. 

Aouda is a symbol for this conflict of empire. Aouda is an Indian princess that Phileas Fogg and Passepartout meet on their journey, who is foreign enough to be an exotic specimen that piques their interest but also English enough to come with them. Having an English education transforms her into the perfect colonial subject, and denotes how empire can also result in the erosion of culture, which is an powerful dynamic Verne brings into the conversation. 

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This year, I have been trying to have more honest conversations about race and heritage. Being mixed, I always felt this kind of imposter syndrome of not being one or the other and where did I fit in a world that is so black and white, with confusion around the grey. This book brings to life this experience and tells a story of identity and belonging, which is something I really needed this year. Also reading non-fiction! Always fun to diversify the styles you read. 

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Perfectlty timed around Halloween, this book had be on the absolute edge of my teather.

Every horror novel is never solely about horror is it - there will naturally be a fundamental theme that this fear is really about and The Haunting of Hill House’s was one of loneliness. Eleanor, along with Theodora join Will and Dr. Montague and Will, the latter of which has invited them to Hill House to study it's hauntings. So there they were, spending the summer in this house that they slowly start to realise is actually the fifth resident of their stay. The hauntings ensue and it is Eleanor who becomes the most affected by them, culminating in the semi-symbolic becoming of the house at the end. 

You yearn for her the entire way through because you see how much this house in spite of its spooks and jump scares has become a home for her; a place where she belongs with the other lodger researchers. It was haunting to read and shook me to far down to the bone - I had never read a horror before so this was a new and exciting experience for me. I’ve always stayed clear from horror films, but a horror novel, I couldn’t quite imagine and yet it almost heightens your fear in allowing your imagination to do so much more of the leg work than when you see something given to you on screen. 

I left asking myself and my fellow book clubbers, do you believe in ghosts? I feel like I kind of do and kind of don’t simultaneously, but what can be quite lovely in a sort of eery way is believing in someone. Believing that someone you have lost perhaps is giving you a sign or is just there to say ‘hi’, I think there is some comfort in that for me. 

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This was an unbeatable contextualisation of the Covid experience, which I can really appreciate is a very difficult thing to achieve when the entire world had a different experience. However, the story itself was so convoluted, it - for lack of a better word - was just bad. 

Our protagonist, the superintendent of an apartment building in Manhattan discovers a secret key to the roof of the building and goes up there for air and ‘outsideness’ while the entire city of New York was under lockdown. Others in the building follow suit and soon a tradition forms every night where a bunch of strangers doomed together by pandemic regale stories of their lives. Each chapter is written by a different author but told through the same narrator of the superintendent, which made no sense to me whatsoever. Each writer had to adopt the jokes and voice style of the former, and I didn’t understand why they didn’t just have fourteen people, one for each day of quarantine time, tell the story from their eyes. The stories these people were sharing as well also had nothing to do with Covid. 

That being said though, it did make me think about how isolation intensified your craving for entertainment and human connection so perhaps in some way this was the experience we had. Spoiler incoming - everyone turns out to be dead and the building was just a host for their dying thoughts. Reading this was a huge turn of events. The shock I experienced in reading this reminded me of the shock we faced every single day in trying to conceptualise that scale of death. However, in the context of this book it made no sense as these people didn’t even know each other and why would they all be in the same building? I commend this book for trying to tackle Covid head-on, but it’s a shame it was so terribly written. 

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This was my second favourite book of the year and I will tell you why in five words (and then I’ll tell you in a few more after that of course) - I couldn’t put it down. 

Not necessarily the best writing I’ve ever read, but it made me see that plot alone can make a book just as superior. We follow the life of Evie Porter, who we later discover is not her actual name… mystery unravels, secrets and lies riddle us on every other page and you learn how an intelligent, brave woman can achieve the unimaginable for the price of justice. I don’t want to give too much away as I would recommend this to anyone so will just end with saying that it was exceptionally clever, entirely exciting the whole way through and I hope to high heaven that Reese Wetherspoon picks this up and turns it into a mini-series. Please and thank you.