Best summer books of 2024: Fiction

Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru (Scribner)

The final instalment in Kunzru’s informal three-colours trilogy, following 2017’s White Tears and 2020’s Red Pill, Blue Ruin explores the lives of two YBA-period artists abruptly and shockingly reunited during Covid (one’s become a bigshot; the other is now living out of his car). Expertly plotted and evocatively painted, the novel portrays the grime of late-90s east London with relish; it’s also a thoughtful exploration of the corrosive influence of money on art. AD

All Fours by Miranda July (Canongate)

With the artist-writer-filmmaker Miranda July, you know to expect the unexpected. Her first novel in almost a decade — a possibly autobiographical account of a woman careening off the rails as she approaches menopause and discovering polyamory — is sexy, scatty, subversive and in the end disconcertingly touching. Midlife crises have rarely seemed so enjoyable. AD

James by Percival Everett (Mantle/Doubleday)

James is not just an imaginative retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which gives voice and agency to the enslaved Jim) but a gripping and propulsive drama that takes readers on a familiar journey while challenging their preconceptions at every twist and turn. It is the work, according to the FT’s review, of “an American master at the peak of his powers”. LB

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre)

Inside a top-secret government department, a civil servant is responsible for integrating long-dead historical figures who’ve magically been brought back to life into contemporary Britain. One of 2024’s best debuts so far, the book is both goofy and emphatically serious — a time-travelling romcom that’s also a subtle rumination on the legacies of empire and colonialism. AD

Long Island by Colm Tóibín (Picador/Scribner)

The long-awaited and much-admired sequel to Tóibín’s 2009 bestseller Brooklyn sees Eilis Lacey — now living in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with her husband Tony, children and a suffocating clique of Italian-American in-laws — return to Ireland for the first time in 20 years. The year is 1976, and the trip is prompted by a crisis in her marriage, but far from offering the salve she craves, her homecoming unleashes a series of agonising consequences. LB

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Parade by Rachel Cusk (Faber & Faber)

It’s divided critics — the FT’s reviewer said the book may “irk or intrigue” — but for those prepared to commit, there’s much to admire in Cusk’s latest boundary-breaking work. Its nameless protagonist (who may or not be Cusk herself) visits various European cities and considers different artists, each of whom is simply called “G”. Among them are a Louise Bourgeois lookalike and a filmmaker who could be Éric Rohmer. As much a series of essays or ruminations as a novel, it’s an unsettling investigation of creativity and life. AD

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry (Jonathan Cape)

Perry may never stray far from the Essex terrain she knows so well, but her latest novel is an ambitious, poetic exploration of cosmic forces, love and faith. Defiantly old-fashioned, touched by the shades of AS Byatt and Wilkie Collins (you might also spot hints of Perry’s hit The Essex Serpent), it follows the fortunes of a quartet of residents of the fictional town of Aldleigh as they try to disentangle a historical mystery and make sense of their own lives. AD

Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber/WW Norton)

With the UK election looming, now is a good time to pick up O’Hagan’s sprawling state-of-the-nation novel. Caledonian Road is both the locus of the narrative — one that blends a disparate cast of Londoners, from oligarchs and politicians to drill artists and people smugglers, in a complex fable of greed and avarice — but also the journey taken by its protagonist, the Scottish-born celebrity art historian Campbell Flynn. LB

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud (Fleet)

This continent-hopping, multigenerational saga certainly lives up to its title, following a French pied-noir clan as they flee the Nazis to Algeria in 1940, live through the country’s independence fight two decades later, then are flung to the four corners of the Earth. Evocative and richly characterised, the book is made even more poignant by the fact that it’s based on Messud’s own family history. AD

You Are Here by David Nicholls (Sceptre/HarperCollins)

Nicholls’ latest novel (already a bookclub favourite) hardly needs more attention but it would be churlish to exclude it on those grounds. You Are Here, which follows Marnie and Michael as they are thrown together on an ill-fated walking holiday in the Lake District, is a pitch-perfect story about loneliness and love in early middle-age. LB

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