The Best Books Of 2024

“Comic books, the Bible, road maps, pornography, anything you wanna read, go out and sit in a field sometime,” the great Paul Westerberg once sagely advised. With that in mind, here’s some of 2024's best reading material, presented in no particular order but all worthy of your time and attention.

Irish Fiction

The Heart In Winter
Kevin Barry
(Canongate)
It’s a bold claim, because he’s so bloody good, but this old school western and a poetic, lovers-on-the-run yarn may be Barry’s greatest achievement. Inspired by Cork miners moving to Butte, Montana in the late 1800s and a childhood love of cowboys, and influenced by Terence Malick and Cormac McCarthy, although the equal of both, every line here would be the pinnacle of a thousand lesser writers’ careers. The love story is touching and tragic and gets a suitable ending, the supporting cast are all mad as the wind, and the writer’s alter-ego is a hopeless rake. Brilliant.

Seaborne
Nuala O’Connor
(New Island)
Pirates are cool and O’Connor’s fictionalised retelling of the life of Anne Bonny reminds us of that certainty by having Bonny stand as a symbol for individuality, gender fluidity, and sexual liberation, a hero as relevant to our times as her own. There’s also the requisite amount of rogering, of both the Jolly and venereal kind, cads like Calico Jack, and general lawlessness to keep you going. It’s really a book about freedom. The fact that one of the pirates, a doubtless charming and handsome rogue, is called Patrick Carty did not in any way influence this book’s inclusion.

Wild Houses
Colin Barrett
(Jonathan Cape)
Delivering on the promise his short stories showed, especially culchie/cop caper A Shooting In Rathreedane, Barrett stays in Mayo for this Booker Prize longlisted drug hawking drama. The Ferdia brothers kidnap Doll because his brother Cillian owes their boss Mulrooney for a cocaine consignment gone arseways. Hardly the most original plot under the sun but it’s the way, to paraphrase Frank Carson, Barrett tells it. The uniformity of small town living is perfectly captured and the cast, from Vinnie who sleeps under cars to the goat man to Sergeant Martin who one kidnapped a teacher to take her looking for UFOs, are as odd as two left feet.

Glorious Exploits
Ferdia Lennon
(Penguin)
Banishing forever the awful memory of Colin Farrell in Alexander, Lennon shows that ancient Greeks with Dublin accents can actually be a good idea. Athenian prisoners are rotting in the stone quarries near the Sicilian city of Syracuse after they took a hammering during the Peloponnesian war. A couple of potters who sound like they’re from Crumlin, Lampo and Gelon, decide to stage Euripides plays using the prisoners as cast. Both funny and sad, Lennon’s accomplished and original debut is also a celebration of the transformative power of art, right up to the moving epilogue.

Quickly, While They Still Have Horses
Jan Carson
(Doubleday)
Carson is an author with more strings to her bow than three fiddlers. As great as her novels are, she’s equally adept at shorter fiction and each example collected here deserves some class of award. Whether it’s the dead smoker in the back of Grandma’s Sierra, Catholics speaking a slippery tingly, second language, a farmer praying for his cow, Malcolm trying to empty the sea of jellyfish, or the red hand of ulster in the fridge that won’t go away, the extraordinary crashes into the ordinary in extraordinary ways throughout. Magic realism? Magic writing.

Also Recommended:
Hide Away – Dermot Bolger, Girl In The Making – Anna Fitzgerald, Hagstone – Sinéad Gleeson, Long Island – Colm Tóibín, Intermezzo – Sally Rooney, Heart, Be At Peace – Donal Ryan, Mouthing - Orla Mackey, The Women Behind The Door – Roddy Doyle, The Instruments Of Darkness – John Connolly, The Drowned - John Banville, The Coast Road - Alan Murrin, Witness 8 - Steve Cavanagh, The Hunter - Tana French

Irish Non-Fiction

Power To The People: The Hot Press Years
Michael D. Higgins
(Hot Press Books)
A Hot Press columnist from 1983 to 1993 when he became Ireland’s first Minister for the Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Michael D. this year reviewed the hundreds of pieces he wrote and selected the ones that he feels still strongly resonate today. From parish pump politics and the rantings of Bishop Jeremiah Newman to strange Dáil machinations and his travels to El Salvador, Somalia and Chile, it’s a captivating read with the future President’s finely calibrated bullshit detector helping him get to the truth of the matter. With Hot Press editor, Niall Stokes, supplying contemporaneous introductions to these classic columns, you won’t find a better Christmas stocking-filler – even if we do say so ourselves!

Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives Of Roger Casement
Roland Philipps
(The Bodley Head)
Okay, Philipps isn’t actually Irish, but his book about a great and slightly unsung hero who, according to President Higgins, contributed “not only to Irish freedom but to the universal struggle for justice and human dignity” more than warrants its place on this list. Philipps details Casement’s “three destinies” – almost single-handedly, as Foreign Office consul in The Congo, taking down King Leopold II for human rights violations, uncovering more abuse in the South American rubber industry, and his part in the fight for Irish freedom which lead to his death sentence – in this gripping biography.

Money: A Story Of Humanity
David McWilliams
Likeable smart arse, and as an economist the right man for the job, takes on the mammoth (and mammon) task of presenting a history of cash that stretches from 18,000 BC – where money was, perhaps unsurprisingly, “the first thing we wrote about” - to the current era. If it sounds like a dry subject for a book then fear not for McWilliams, a born talker, peppers his treatise with anecdotes like the influence of economic theory on Darwin and Hitler’s plans to derail the Brits through counterfeiting. I lasted half an hour in undergraduate economics, I might have hung on if I’d had this in my satchel.

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets
Clair Wills
(Allen Lane)
Irish history has its share of dark corners but there is no blacker spot on our collective past than the mother and baby homes. Hearing about hundreds of bodies in a septic tank in Tuam is one, horrific, thing but reading a book which makes it feel very personal is another matter entirely. Wills’ uncle gets a local girl pregnant in 1950s rural Cork and her cousin Mary is born in the Bessborogh Sacred Heart Home. Mary goes on to also become pregnant out of wedlock and ends her own life. Wills documents a ”culture of silence” that stained everyone it touched.

The Story Of The Great Irish Famine
David Rooney
(Gill Books)
Rooney has been contributing his unique scraperboard (pencil drawings completed by scalpel) artwork to Hot Press since I was a very small boy. This book stemmed from work commissioned for The Story Of Ireland BBC documentary series, where he felt a particular and personal affinity for our ancestors who lived and died during the famine. His pieces are intensely moving, especially those depicting starving villagers, the workhouse, famine ships, and a striking work called ‘Death Stalks The Land’ in particular.

Amnesiac
Neil Jordan
(Head Of Zeus)
I reckon Jordan is a better writer than a filmmaker, but he’s pretty hand at both disciplines and this poetic memoir handily combines them. Covering the background he came from to get where he is, his start in the movie industry assisting John Boorman with the Excalibur script in 1981 which helped him break into directing when Film On 4 took interest in Angel, and then onto success with The Crying Game, Interview With The Vampire, and Michael Collins, the star names like Liam Neeson, Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Cillian Murphy, and even Sinéad O’Connor come thick and fast.

Also Recommended:
Who Killed Una Lynskey? – Mick Clifford, Murder At Lordship: Inside The Hunt For A Detective’s Killer – Pat Marry & Robin Schiller, Atlas of the Irish Civil War: New Perspectives – edited by Héléne O’Keeffe et al, A Season of Sundays – Sportsfile

International Fiction

There Are Rivers In The Sky
Elif Shafak
(Viking)
A beautiful, sweeping epic that sways and flows like the mighty rivers within it, Shafak’s masterful novel has one drop of water at its centre which falls on to the head of King Ashurbanipal in the ancient city of Nineveh, then as snow on to the tongue of a baby born by the Thames in 1840 who grows up to uncover part of The Epic Of Gilgamesh, and then on to the present day. A brief overview can’t do justice to a novel that addresses global and sexual inequality and who holds dominion over history and how we are all joined to it.

Playground
Richard Powers
(Hutchinson Heinemann)

Having already covered trees in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 novel The Overstory, Powers turns his attention to the oceans, specifically the Pacific, which covers around 32 percent of the planet’s surface, more than all its landmass combined. The work of oceanographer Evie Beaulieu inspires Todd Keane who gets caught up in the “third industrial revolution” of computing and creates an artificial intelligence. His school friend Rafi Young, a literature devotee, marries Ina Aroita, moving back to her island home of Makatea where all the strands of this ecological call to arms/plea for a less human-centric approach to tomorrow come together.

Gabriel’s Moon
William Boyd
(Viking)
Boyd, an exceptional writer who gave us 2022’s fabulous The Romantic, maintains that writing 2014 James Bond caper Solo was “tremendous fun” so why wouldn’t he want to create a secret agent of his own? Rather than ape Ian Fleming’s man, he goes in another direction. Gabriel Dax is a mediocre travel writer, who gets dumped by women, can’t hold his booze, isn’t much cop with firearms, and – Bond would balk – uses a second hand bicycle at one point. He is, despite all that, extremely likable and rumour has it Boyd plans to bring him back again in the future. Good.

By Any Other Name
Jodi Picoult
(Michael Joseph)
The sickeningly handsome Pierce Brosnan, the most un-Navan Navan man of all time, came to fame through Remington Steel, a TV detective show where an eminently qualified woman hired a chancer to take her place in order to be taken seriously in a man’s world. That was in the 1980s but imagine how much worse it was in the 1580s where Picoult imagines Emilia Bassano, possibly the Dark Lady of the sonnets, as the actual author of the bard’s plays, who procures a hack actor by the name of Will Shakespeare as her Remington. Clever and pointed storytelling.

The Voyage Home
Pat Barker
(Hamish Hamilton)
The third in her Trojan War series, The Voyage continues Barker’s remarkable retelling of ancient history/myth from the point of view of the women caught up in it. This entry covers the return to Mycenae by the victorious Agamemnon after the fall of Troy, haunted by the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia who he dispatched ten years before to please the gods. Naturally, Queen Clytemnestra is equally unhappy and out for revenge. She represents the past coming to claim its due from cruel, insecure, and superstitious men in the same way the priestess Cassandra stands in for all the unheard women of the ancient world.

Also Recommended:
Odyssey – Stephen Fry, Table For Two – Amor Towles, You Like It Darker – Stephen King, The Ministry Of Time - Kaliane Bradley, James – Percival Everett, Godwin – Joseph O’Neill, Precipice– Robert Harris, Blood Ties – Jo Nesbo, Proof Of Innocence - Jonathan Coe, Karla's Choice - Nick Harkaway

International Non Fiction

Operation Biting: The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler’s Radar
Max Hastings
(William Collins)
Nobody does war like Hastings and Operation Biting is the book equivalent of a bank holiday movie. A brilliant chap in the air ministry notices mentions of the ancient goddess Freya, who could see for miles thanks to a stolen necklace, in German signals intercepted by the boffins at Bletchley Park. A raid is proposed to the Combined Operations HQ led by the vainglorious Lord Mountbatten. There’s also a “fantastically indiscrete” French spy, a horny novelist, and all manner of stiff upper lip types in a caper that should have gone sideways but managed to pull off a badly needed propaganda coup.

Nuclear War: A Scenario
Annie Jacobsen
(Torva)
Terrifying step-by-step examination of the nightmare scenario where North Korea launch a nuclear attack on the United States. Thousands of years of groping towards civilisation are reversed in a mere seventy-two minutes. Rule 42 of the Geneva Convention is violated as the Koreans target a nuclear power plant, prompting the US to respond by levelling Pyongyang. However, the missiles have to overfly Russia, which drags them into the conflict along with the Chinese, who border Korea, and it’s game over for everyone. The matter-of-factness of Jacobsen’s account is chilling.

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster On The Edge Of Space
Adam Higginbotham
(Viking)

For those of a certain age, the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster is as ingrained in the memory as the JFK shooting or 9/11 is for others because we watched it happen on television. Higginbotham puts the work in, interviewing all involved and leaves you aghast at the risks NASA took throughout its history to maintain the forward motion needed to guarantee continued funding. Their Space Flight Participation Programme added teacher Christa McAuliffe to the crew, the reason why so many school children were watching when it all went wrong in January, 1986. The subsequent investigative hearings, starring Richard Feynman, are equally fascinating.

Chernobyl Roulette: A War Story
Serhii Plokhy
(Allen Lane)
“Why would anyone of sound mind send troops into a nuclear disaster zone?” This question is at the heart of this scarcely believable account of the 35-day occupation of the infamous Chernobyl plant that followed Putin ordering the troops in after claiming Ukrainians were planning to produce WMDs. US intelligence had presumed that Russian forces would bypass the exclusion zone on their way towards Kyiv because what sane person wouldn’t? Heroes like foreman Valentyn Heiko emerge and a counteroffensive takes Chernobyl back, although Russia still controls Europe’s largest nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia which is good news for nobody.

All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art
Orlando Whitfield
(Profile Books)
Let’s be honest, the art world, and the vast sums of money thrown about within it, is patently ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong, I can be as moved as the next fella by a well-placed daub but a book like this – Whitfield meets Inigo Philbrick as a student, they go into the art business, Philbrick thrives only to be arrested later on for one of the biggest art frauds ever (in the neighbourhood of $86 million) – will leave you convinced it’s all a massive cod. The author’s recounting of his mate’s moral-free machinations is guaranteed to have you picking your jaw up off the floor.

Also Recommended:
The Siege – Ben Macintyre, Knife – Salman Rushdie, Autocracy, Inc – Anne Applebaum, Nexus – Yuval Noah Harari, A Voyage Around The Queen – Craig Brown, Sonny Boy – Al Pacino, A History Of The World In 12 Shipwrecks – David Gibbins

Music

And The Roots Of Rhythm: A Journey Through Global Music
Joe Boyd
(Faber)
Celebrated producer Boyd (Nick Drake, R.E.M.) wrote a fine memoir back in 2006 (White Bicycles) but this gargantuan exploration of where the music came from is on another level altogether. Bursting with anecdote and big names like Paul Simon in Africa, George Harrison going Indian and Ry Cooder heading to Cuba, each chapter is really a book on its own, especially his exploration of the Jamaican sound from its birth out of American R&B to its influence on hip-hop. His take on technology in modern recording will separate the (old) men from the boys but this is required reading.

You Spin Me Round: Essays On Music
Edited by Adrian Duncan, Niamh Dunphy, Nathan O’Donnell
(PVA Books)
While lists are all well and good, the best music writing is about feel and how, like an aural equivalent of Proust’s biscuit, it takes you back where you once were. These essays cover everyone from Shostakovich to Dylan because everything ever recorded can hit someone in the right way and provide “a personal soundtrack to particular experiences”. Like all such compendiums you’ll nod in agreement – Aingeala Flannery on The Smiths and dodgy hairdos, Brian Dillion on Iggy Pop – and howl in anger  – Wendy Erskine’s heretical disparagement of Rod Stewart – but that’s half the sport.

Dreams: The Many Lives Of Fleetwood Mac
Mark Blake
(Nine Eight Books)
As evidenced by the announcement only last month of a forthcoming Apple access (and excess) all areas documentary about the band, interest has yet to flag for the Fleetwood Mac story, perhaps the greatest soap opera in rock history. Blake captures it all, from Peter Green’s (“the greatest guitarist of his generation, and then he wasn’t”) blues boomers to the wild success of Rumours, which definitely did not result in cocaine being blown up someone’s jacksie, and beyond. Everyone from Status Quo to Harry Styles chips in to a tale that never tires.

Hope I Get Old Before I Die
David Hepworth
(Bantam)
“Why don’t old rockers retire?” cub reporters often ask me in the halls of HP HQ, although I fear their ire aims at superannuated codgers like Stuart Clark and myself rather than Jagger et al. Hepworth, a commentator always worthy of attention, answers such queries with a why the hell would they? Using Live Aid as his starting point, where the old guard were reborn, he shows why McCartney, Springsteen, and even the relatively sprightly Bono became rock’s aristocracy and are still packing them out at a stadium near you. Old is not as old as it used to be.

Travelling: On The Path Of Joni Mitchell
Ann Powers
(Harper Collins)

A half-formed rumour about Mitchell scribbled on an alley wall would be worth reading, not to mind this extensive biography, although Powers argues she isn’t a biographer at all, which covers everything Mitchell related, from the polio partly responsible for her unique guitar playing, to her time in Laurel Canyon, where talented men around her were left in the ha-penny place by her otherworldly creativity. Powers doesn’t shy away from ‘missteps’ like Joni’s blackface on the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and is also, admirably, unsure about her recent resurgence. The book a genius deserves.

Also Recommended:
Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love – Leah Kardos, The Blues Brothers – Daniel De Visé, Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence – Will Hodgkinson, The Secret Public – Jon Savage, Uncommon People – Miranda Sawyer, Pressure Drop: Reggae In The Seventies – John Masouri