13th December 2024
Books
Books in the Media Review of the Year
More than 900 titles were mentioned in the press’ end-of-year highlights lists, with Booker favourites featuring prominently, fiction at the forefront, and US novelist Percival Everett leading the way with his reworking of Huckleberry Finn
Critics’ choice
Literary
Sally Rooney Intermezzo Faber, £20, 9780571365463
Literary
Percival Everett James Mantle, £20, 9781035031238
Reviews 9
Financial Times Guardian Irish Times New Statesman New York Times New Yorker Sunday Times Telegraph TIME
08
Percival Everett’s Booker-shortlisted novel James topped the books of the year round-ups. The author’s lauded reworking of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written from the perspective of Twain’s escaped slave Jim – here named James – was declared a “significant and exhilarating corrective to history” by Johanna Thomas-Corr at the Sunday Times. James was also selected as one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024. The review found: “By giving Twain’s secondary character much-deserved agency, Everett allows him to be something he couldn’t be before: a hero.” The author’s 24th novel was declared a “gripping and propulsive drama” in the Financial Times and “a work of exquisite originality” in the New York Times. “But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all,” Everett writes. “If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.”
Dubbed “Faber’s superstar” by the Telegraph, Rooney joins Everett near the top of the books of the year mentions. Intermezzo, an intimate study of two brothers mourning the death of their father, has “proved her best since her debut”. The Financial Times called Intermezzo a “rare thing”, a “subtle and powerful” novel, said the New Yorker, a “heartfelt examination of love, sex and grief” wrote the Guardian and “perceptive and precise”, declared the Irish Times.
Literary
Alan Hollinghurst Our Evenings Picador, £22, 9781447208235
Crowned the Times and Sunday Times Novel of the Year, Alan Hollinghurst’s seventh book, Our Evenings, depicts modern Britain through the life of Anglo- Burmese actor Dave Win. “Few British novelists reawaken the senses quite so intensely,” noted the Sunday Times.
Biography
Craig Brown A Voyage Around the Queen Fourth Estate, £25, 9780008557492
In non-fiction, satirist and writer Craig Brown topped the books of the year lists with his biography of the late monarch, Elizabeth II. A Voyage Around the Queen was anointed the Times and Sunday Times Biography of the Year and hailed by critics at the New Statesman as a “treasury of glittering bits” and “fascinating” by the Financial Times, who listed it in their round-up of the best audiobooks of the year. The Telegraph called Brown’s “magnum opus” an “encyclopedia of surprising information”.
Reviews 8
Financial Times Guardian Irish Times New Statesman New Yorker Sunday Times Telegraph TIME
Reviews 7
Financial Times Guardian Irish Times New Statesman New Yorker Sunday Times Telegraph
Reviews 5
Financial Times New Statesman New Yorker Sunday Times Telegraph
Books
Review of the Year
RICH BARR
ADRIAN CECIL
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