Halfway through the year is a good time to take stock of our reading. The spare elegies of winter have left their mark; the elegant literary novels of spring have come and gone; the big juicy beach reads of summer are just beginning. Let’s pause here and take a look at what good things the year has already brought to us before we look ahead to the riches of the fall. Here are the 10 best books from the first half of 2024.
The cover of The Ministry of Time, a debut novel from Kaliane Bradley, features a subtle flex: there’s a blurb from Eleanor Catton, the youngest person ever to win the prestigious Booker Prize for her literary fiction (“outrageously brilliant”) alongside praise from Emily Henry, queen of frothy romcoms like Beach Read (“Electric…I loved every second”). Bradley, we’re being told, can do it all: the beautiful prose with the serious ideas and the smoldering romance. Plus time travel.
What’s most impressive is that The Ministry of Time pretty much lives up to the promises of the cover. The love story is tense and sexy. The sentences unroll smooth and elegant. The exploration of how colonialism rewires our brains is sophisticated and compelling. And the time travel and its after-effects are pretty fascinating.
In the world of The Ministry of Time, the British government has discovered the technology for time travel. To test it, they’ve plucked people out of history right when they would have died. Our unnamed narrator is a government bureaucrat assigned to help a Victorian explorer adjust to life in the 21st century. They fall in love, of course, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Read if you:like Diana Wynne Jones, Graham Greene wartime spy novels, the first season of Sleepy Hollow.
In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, dissolute Prince Hal has a curious soliloquy. Hal, we know, will grow up to be beloved King Henry V, one of the great warrior kings of England — but right now he’s frittering away his youth on partying and pissing off his dad. But that’s okay, Hal explains to the audience, because he’s being bad on purpose. Later, when he becomes good, his goodness will be all the more impressive because of his past debauchery.
Part of the tension of the three plays that make up the Henriad — Hal’s story — comes from the ambiguity of how seriously you should take Hal’s soliloquy, because his plan doesn’t make all that much sense. It is, however, extremely Catholic, all knotted up around the problems of guilt and pleasure and atonement. That’s an idea debut novelist Allen Bratton fully grasps and explores in Henry Henry, a queer contemporary retelling of the Henriad that leaves behind questions of kingship and England to focus on the issue of Hal’s soul.
In Henry Henry, Hal is one of England’s rare Catholic aristocrats, tormented both by his gayness and by his fraught relationship with his father. He smothers his anguish in dissolute and bitchy debauchery, but he can’t help hating and admiring in equal measure Henry Percy Hotspur, the man Hal’s father wants him to be. The results are gorgeous, sexy, funny, and sad, and Bratton renders them all while taking a palpable pleasure in language that will warm a Shakespearean’s heart.
Read if you: know the St. Crispin’s Day speech by heart, have opinions on The Hollow Crown, just want a satisfying queer romance.
Practice by Rosalind Brown
The debut novel from Rosalind Brown tells the deceptively simple story of Oxford undergraduate Annabel as she takes a day to labor over an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Shades of Mrs. Dalloway! (Annabel is a Woolf fan.) In Brown’s precise, elegant prose, we watch Annabel go through the carefully plotted rituals of her day: mint tea upon awakening, which builds to coffee after sufficient examination of the sonnets; a long walk through the town to wake up her mind; the habitual defecation after a too-heavy lunch in the dining hall. All the while, she thinks through her relationship with her older lover, and whether or not she should allow him to disturb the monastic solitude of her work.
There’s a deep satisfaction in reading about the details of Annabel’s day — the discipline of the well-chosen activities fighting against the natural sleepy indolence of the mind, and the clear pleasure Annabel takes in exercising her thoughts. Most impressive is Brown’s depiction of having an ongoing fantasy that stretches out for years and that you slip into and out of at odd moments of the day. Annabel is deeply immersed in an imagined romance between two men she has invented, and she flits through scenes of their life as she gets bored or distracted. It rings deeply true to life, in a way I have never quite seen an author conjure before.
Read accompanied by: a piece of very crisp toast, lightly buttered, and a cup of deep amber Darjeeling tea to savor.
Great Expectations is the first novel by New Yorker cultural critic Vinson Cunningham, who displays an admirable hubris in his decision to give his book one of the best-known titles in the English corpus. Loosely based on Cunningham’s experience working on the first Obama presidential campaign in 2008, it takes place almost entirely within the presidential campaign of a figure Cunningham will call only “the Senator” or “the Candidate.”
David, Cunningham’s protagonist, is a college dropout and single dad who feels aimless. Desperate, he parlays his high school reputation for brilliance into a job working with the campaign everyone is talking about: the first-term senator who may just become America’s first Black president.
Cunningham seeds his narrative with the kind of inside baseball shop talk that political junkies will adore. He relishes little details like where campaign staffers sleep while they’re in the field; how they learn to watch the faces of the crowd when the Candidate speaks so they know who to ask for checks at the end; how they remind benefit attendees to follow “airplane rules” as they make their way through metal detectors to get close to the Candidate.
David sketches out this minutiae not because he’s interested in politics, exactly, but because he’s interested in small and telling grace notes. He likes to notice the way a preacher holds his microphone, or the way wealthy Black donors call Martha’s Vineyard “the island.” This is a novel of manners, where the signifiers of class and aesthetics take on enormous weight.
In part, Cunningham suggests, that’s because at the dawn of the Obama era, it felt as though everything might symbolize something else. Pop culture could mean politics and politics could mean pop culture. Your taste in music could speak to your ethics. One man’s political victory might mean the end of American racism.
Part of the drama of the novel is the way David is at first seduced by these ideas and then discards them. The whole way through, Cunningham’s sentences are so perfectly balanced you feel you could rap them with a stick and they would ring like crystal.
Read alongside: Henry James’s The Bostonians, the true 19th-century analogue to this novel. (Dickens is a red herring!)
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer
You Dreamed of Empires takes place over the course of one day in 1519, as the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrives with his retinue in what is now Mexico City. Then, it was Tenochtitlán, the seat of the emperor Moctezuma and the Aztec empire.
The Spanish plan to sack the city. Moctezuma plans to steal their horses, the sole technological improvement the Spanish seem to have on the lavish Aztec way of life. Over the course of the novel, people sneak around the various sumptuous palaces, nibbling at hallucinogens and trying to figure out if today is the day they’ll be beheaded, tortured, or ritually executed.
Yet despite the bloodiness of the setting, this is a playful and witty book. Enrigue is interested in how people in dangerous proximity to power manage their lives and their own status. He is interested, also, in the arbitrary flow of history, of how easily this moment might have become that one instead. His prose is hallucinatory, kaleidoscopic. As Moctezuma trips on magic mushrooms, he sees Enrigue writing You Dreamed of Empires and hears T. Rex’s “Monolith.” I promise, it all makes sense in context.
Read accompanied by: thick, rich mole and the smokiest mezcal you can find.
Tana French developed a cult following writing rich, chewy literary thrillers, full of propulsive pacing and murder mysteries so carefully thought out they doubled as character studies for the detectives who investigated them. French built her name on her Dublin Murder Squad series, which focused on a crew of Irish detectives and their fraught, vexed relationships with their partners in crime-solving. That ended in 2016, and her most recent books (2020’s The Searcher in addition to The Hunter) have begun to form their own series, all about parents and children.
The parent and child in question here aren’t technically related. Cal is a Chicago cop who’s moved to the tiny Irish village of Ardnakelty to live out his retirement. Trey is a half-feral teenage girl from the wrong side of town whose father Johnny walked out and whose older brother is missing. In The Searcher, she gets Cal to go looking for the brother. By the time The Hunter rolls around, the whole town understands that Cal has unofficially adopted Trey — which makes matters difficult when Johnny returns to get the locals to buy into a new get-rich-quick scheme he’s cooked up. (The Hunter does not really make sense if you have not read The Searcher, although it’s by and large a more consistent novel than its predecessor.)
As Cal struggles to find a way to protect a girl over whom he has no legal rights, Trey and Johnny redevelop their own wary, mercenary relationship. The great question of this book is what parents and children owe to each other, and what such a bond should look like. French, as is her wont, offers us no easy answers.
Read if you like: Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, ambiguously supernatural influences, elaborate scheming.
What a strange and satisfying novel All Fours is. It concerns an unnamed narrator, a performance artist who, upon coming into a windfall of $20,000, plans to blow it all on a cross-country road trip to New York and a lavish hotel room. Instead, she ends up at a crummy motel in the first suburb she comes across, spending all her new money on redecorating the motel room to her precise specifications: pink, with Louis Vuitton furniture, botanical wallpaper, tonka bean-scented diffusers, and an antique pink quilt on the bed.
The motel room starts as a place in which the narrator can conduct a steamy but sexless affair with a younger man. Over the course of the novel, it becomes a place for her to work, to commune with her friends, to be fully herself. All Fours is a quirky-smart dissection of women, aging, desire, and marriage all in one. What are the chances?
Read if you: would like to paint your Room of Your Own a tasteful shade of pink; really felt Fleabag when she said her greatest fear was losing the currency of youth.
This novella is an elegant and thoughtful take on Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Le Guin’s short story imagines a beautiful paradise that is made to function because of a single child who is being tortured in a basement. Samatar’s novella imagines a fleet of spaceships powered by an underclass held in chains below decks, and a professor who develops a scholarship program to bring one of the boys in chains to the world above.
The allegory Samatar develops in this world is rich and compelling, but what strikes me most about the world she’s built is how fully she’s imagined its physical details. When the boy comes up to the upper levels for the first time in his life, he’s untethered from the chain that attaches him to everyone below deck. Without their counterbalancing weight, he has to relearn how to walk.
What a quietly devastating detail. What a completely imagined world Samatar has built in these slight pages.
Read accompanied by: A small and exquisite bowl of fish soup, something like bouillabaisse scented with saffron, and a glass of good chilled white wine.
Toward the end of Committed, Suzanne Scanlon’s layered and lovely new book that is part memoir, part literary history, the author recalls recounting her medical history to a new psychiatrist. She mentions that in her early 20s, she spent three years in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
The new psychiatrist protests: Such a thing couldn’t possibly have happened. Everyone knows that you don’t keep mental patients hospitalized for so long. It makes them worse.
Yes, Scanlon replies, she knows. She lived through it.
Scanlon checked herself into the hospital as a 20-year-old college student in 1992 after a suicide attempt. The place was a panopticon: dorms and common spaces radiating out in spokes from a central nurse’s station, where a portrait of Freud kept a watchful eye over all the patients. Fresh air and exercise weren’t considered part of the treatment plan; patients stayed inside all day, smoking and watching television.
In the hospital, Scanlon’s doctors, she writes, “needed me to get better and instead I got better at being sick.” She craved their attention and care, and she learned to perform her illness in ways her doctors found legible and diagnosable. She would later learn that the hospital was in the midst of a debate over what to do with people like Scanlon. It was the dawn of the SSRI era, and doctors were torn. Should depression be treated like a chemical imbalance? Or was Freudian talk therapy the only true cure?
Scanlon’s treatment plans swung uneasily from one to the other as conflicting models ruled the day at the hospital. When she finally got out, it wasn’t because she was deemed cured or even better. It was because the state stopped funding inpatient therapy for that long.
In the end, what was most healing to Scanlon was the vast body of writing by and about women and madness and hospitalization: Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf and Audre Lorde and Marguerite Duras. It’s through reading and rereading their work that she’s able to find a skeleton of meaning regarding what happened to her in the years she lived in the hospital — and a way of thinking about her own identity that doesn’t require a fixed idea of selfhood.
Read equipped with: pen and paper to take notes of all the books Scanlon talks about that you’ll want to read by the time she’s done with you.
In 2009, Colm Tóibín published Brooklyn, a quietly stunning portrait of how young Eilis Lacey makes her way from her small Irish town of Enniscorthy to America in the 1950s. With Long Island, he picks up Eilis’s story again in the 1970s.
Eilis is middle-aged now, and a mother, settled with her husband Tony in a cul-de-sac populated entirely by his extended Italian American family on Long Island. Eilis sometimes finds herself isolated in this large clan of in-laws, and fights multiple pitched battles of wills against Tony’s mother. Still, she’s largely content with her life — until she learns that Tony has slept with someone else, his mistress is pregnant, and the plan is to leave the baby with Eilis and Tony.
“The baby will not pass the threshold,” Eilis tells Tony, who doesn’t dare to disagree with her face-to-face but won’t acquiesce either. So Eilis packs up her things and goes back to Enniscorthy for the first time in 20 years. If the baby is in her house when she returns, she decides, she simply won’t move back in with Tony. But once in Enniscorthy, she finds that she can’t quite turn her back on her past as easily as she’d like to.
Tóibín’s genius is the quietness of his worlds. His characters always exist at a slight remove from their own actions, unable to quite see why they’re making the choices they’ve made, try as they might to analyze and rationalize after the fact. With Eilis’s return home, he’s given us a portrait of middle-aged regrets, handled so lightly that he makes it look easy. It’s not.
Read far away from: your phone, so that you don’t end up texting your high school sweetheart in a book-drunk daze.
