Books of the Year 2024
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick their favourite books of 2024.
The Letters of Seamus Heaney (edited by Christopher Reid) is surely an important book, giving the reader a more unfettered insight into the mind of the great poet than the equally essential Stepping Stones (Heaney’s autobiography-by-interview with Dennis O’Driscoll). Immediately the lapsed Heaney reader (i.e. myself) is swept back into a world where words themselves are both landscape and oxygen. Which is to say that Heaney writes letters in much the same way as he writes poems, with recourse to what he referred to in ‘North’ as the ‘word-hoard’. You have the sense of a man for whom poetic composition is never far away and as with a method actor he perhaps cannot help but write to friends and acquaintances somewhat in the same manner as he composes poetry. This is a book to dip in and out of and each time you do, you emerge with a sense of renewed zeal for language and the creative spirit.
Street Level Superstar by Will Hodgkinson is a long overdue celebration of Lawrence, one of music’s most overlooked talents. As the founder and leader of Felt he wrote some of the best music of the 80s – their greatest songs like ‘Penelope Tree’, ‘Primitive Painters’, ‘Rain of Crystal Spires’ and ‘Space Blues’ are every bit as good as The Smiths. Having made what well-informed people think of as the first Britpop album with Denim’s retro tour de force, Back in Denim, he disappeared into heroin and obscurity after his first song to be play-listed on Radio One – the inane but insanely catchy novelty song ‘Summer Smash’ – was deleted following the death of Princess Diana. Whatever you think of Lawrence’s output since under the Go-Kart Mozart (latterly Mozart Estate) moniker he remains an idiosyncratic and entertaining presence on the music scene, something which this book is very much a testament to. Hodgkinson spent a year trying to understand the man who made some of his favourite records, whilst also clearly trying to help him finally achieve a modicum of the acclaim he deserves. Hodgkinson is both a witty and a thoughtful accomplice and he brings Lawrence’s unique perspectives to the page with considerable charm.
Finally, I must mention Home is Where We Start by former Lonely Crowd contributor, Susanna Crossman. A memoir of an alternative upbringing told with an unflinching eye, the book is both disturbing and thought provoking in equal measure. Crossman’s writing is steeped in references to art and philosophy and there is a palpable sense of these being tangible, worthwhile things with which we can shore our ruins against.
There is a playfulness to Dai George’s How to Think Like a Poet: The Poets Who Made Our World and Why We Need Them that really begins with the title, it is not a ‘how to’ book at all – thank goodness. Rather George presents a series of essays each considering a different poet from across time and space. His touch manages to be both serious and amusing, analysing the experiences, for example, of Dante the man in contrast to Dante poet. The Divine Comedy, George makes clear, was populated by then recognisable figures, so he suggests we imagine Thatcher, Mandela and Berlusconi in an updated version – this brings a wonderful clarity and understanding to the reader. Likewise, he trawls through Dylan Thomas: ‘’Fern Hill’ has the same combination of technical wizardry and offhand swagger that defines the music of Duke Ellington and John Coltrane’, and Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda and Audre Lorde: ‘How can a person like me hope to be a reliable witness to Lorde’s thought…?’ The important point is that all poets write in order to be read and Dai George offers animating introductions to work that might seem crusty and dried up with age, or too strange and tangy to absorb without harm.
I came across Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels by Toby Ferris quite by chance, but I found the title irresistible, then when I discovered it was about the painter Peter Bruegel the Elder, I was smitten. There is so much teeming life in Bruegel’s pictures it can feel nearly impossible to focus, yet going picture by picture with Ferris as a guide brings illumination not just to the art (and the curious relationship of Bruegel the Elder and his son, the Younger) but to how each of us form relationships with images, with the institutions that hold them and with our own lives. The first Bruegel he tackles is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which it emerges may not be the original but a copy, none the less Ferris hones in on details I had missed, such as the ‘wrongness’ of the galleon portrayed in comparison to the other ships. The book is also a memoir, Ferris bringing his experience into focus in a way that enhances the meaning to be found in art.
I revisited the graphic novels of Joe Sacco earlier this year, in particular Palestine first published in 2003, then Footnotes in Gaza published 2019. I was looking for answers, explanations, clarity – maybe the equivalent of a comic strip for grown ups seems an unlikely starting point – but these are tough well-researched reads and when I say ‘researched’ I don’t mean in a library – Joe Sacco went there for months on end in 1991 and 1992, then again later. Amongst all the horror he describes – the displacement, torture, killing of men, women and children, the demolition of homes, what sticks in my mind is the deliberate destruction of the olive trees – some of them thousands of years old. It isn’t that I have a misguided affection for trees, rather it’s the obvious and lasting impact on the livelihood and landscape of Palestine, on the delicate eco system – or so it seemed… now it must be a thousand times worse. The damage goes on. And on.
In fiction the short form is definitely – and to me gratifyingly – in the ascendant, as demonstrated by this year’s winner of the Booker Prize, Samantha Harvey’s thought-provoking examination of our relationships with Planet Earth, Orbital. A book I shall definitely reread. As I reread Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (itself shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022) the same evening I returned home after seeing the 2024 film adaptation of it this autumn. I should give a shout-out to Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s screenplay, so faithful to Keegan’s story with its twin elements of brutality and tenderness.
Keegan’s book is set at Christmas time, the festive season putting the story of the girls incarcerated in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries into stark relief. For a little bit of magic at Christmas I recommend Susanna Clarke’s The Wood at Midwinter. There’s something of Narnia in Clarke’s story, but without C S Lewis’s religiosity; this story is, as the author says in her most interesting afterword, about ‘attempts to heal the great estrangement between the natural world and Man’. There’s also a fascinating comment in that afterword about the story’s relationship to her novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
A version of Clarke’s story was originally read on BBC Radio 4 in 2022. I always enjoy listening to the stories shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award and this year I bought the Comma Press anthology of the 2024 shortlisted stories, particularly to read and enjoy again Scottish author Vee Walker’s brilliantly funny story ‘Nice Dog’.
Rereading has been a feature of my year. I returned to Graham Greene’s 1982 novel Monsignor Quixote with some trepidation: would I be disappointed? I was not, not at all; it was as funny as I remembered, and has so much to say about faith and friendship.
Last but not least in my pick of short fiction is The Significance of Swans by Rhiannon Lewis. A runner-up in the New Welsh Writing Awards 2019, it’s good to see this getting publication by Welsh publisher Y Lolfa. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world, but this is still Wales, and a joy for that; Lewis evokes a sense of place most skilfully, as well as giving convincing voice to an ‘ordinary’ woman who, for all that, is actually extraordinary in surviving in the changed world in which she finds herself.
Because I read for work, finding space and time to be absorbed by books for me can feel like a treat. I do most of my reading at bedtime, for about half an hour before I fall asleep, or on the bumpy bus journey to work through rural Northumberland. Which is why my three favourite reads are slim, almost spare, but all equally compelling.
Handiwork by Sara Baume has been on my shelf for a few years and is a beautiful meditation on what it means to make and to live as an artist. Reflecting back on my own interdisciplinary practice, it’s become a totem, next to my desk and thumbed regularly. Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett is a short story collection that also feels like prose and at times poetry. The voice is witty, authentic and engaging, exploring the advantages and pitfalls of a solitudinous life. One for every short story writer to read and learn from. I only discovered the publisher Periene late in the year, and my first read from them was A Simple Intervention, written by Tael Inokai and translated by Marielle Sutherland. The book is quiet, tender and crisp with an uncanny echo running through it. The whole narrative played like a film as I read, and the setting and characters are still alive in my mind.
Three slight but impactful books by women that explore the small, interior parts of our lives and how these clash with expectation and our own desires.
Kathryn Bevis’s début poetry collection, The Butterfly House is an extraordinary achievement. It’s a kind of grand memorial to a life that she knew was coming to a premature end. Bevis had terminal cancer and died at a Winchester hospice in May. In her review in Acumen poetry magazine, Rosie Jackson said poetry collections simply got no better. ‘This is a poet for all of us,’ she wrote. ‘as we come to terms with being inside bodies that will one day let us down – and meantime need to learn how to hold on to humour, resilience, courage, generosity, truth, love and celebration.’ Bevis covers all these qualities and more in a book that, in visual terms alone, with its generous encomia and its heaving acknowledgements bookending poetry of pain and perception, exudes a feeling of wanting to leave nothing out and to be a fitting indication of what might have come later. One is reminded of Inside The Wave, Helen Dunmore’s peri-mortal Bloodaxe collection of 2017, with its similarly courageous facing up to the inevitable. It was astonishing to be reminded that The Butterfly House was Bevis’s first full collection; in fact, the summation of, and fitting tribute to, a writing life that had already been studded with awards and prizes and was so ripe with further potential.
The stand-out autobiography of 2024 was, for me, Gwyneth Lewis’ ‘Nightshade Mother’. I interviewed Lewis for an event in Cardiff this October and so had the opportunity to discuss the book with her and to read it attentively several times.
Finding the right way to approach autobiographical material is especially challenging because the author is so close to the material – has actually lived it. This creates both unchallengeable ‘access’ to the subject-matter and unenviable liability to crises of verification – can one trust one’s own memories?
I was impressed by Gwyneth Lewis’s scrupulous self-interrogation but also by her bold recognition of a chief endorser of her remembered experience. Mwnci, a toy monkey, was a witness who had dialogued with her in childhood. Found again in adulthood, Mwnci is still able to speak with her about events at which both had been present. The confidences made to Mwnci many years earlier could not, in good conscience, be retracted or denied.
This is an autobiography that bravely delineates a toxic mother-daughter relationship but which does not dwell in recrimination. It is always leaning towards truth. Those words by Gwyneth Lewis on the façade of Cardiff’s Millennium Centre: Creu Gwir Fel Gwydr O Ffwrnais Awen (Create Truth Like Glass From The Furnace Of Inspiration) resonate with a new urgency. And the book beautifully explicates the role of language in the formation of the self.
Clear by Carys Davies is a short novel of enormous narrative drive. With apparently simple materials − two men on an island – Davies creates a page-turner of clarity and profundity. The last native inhabitant of an isolated island off the coast of Scotland in 1843 is under pressure to leave so that capitalism can exploit the place. But with him will go deep knowledge of the environment and a precise language in which to describe its nuances. Conflict over resources, and the claims of personal relationships, are memorably conveyed. Guaranteed to provoke your thoughts!
Michael Longley’s Ash Keys: New Selected Poems is a substantial treasury of work by a poet with a lifetime of craft behind him. I want to put in a word here for his collection, The Candlelight Master because of how it dialogues with art works and for its translation of Catullus poems into a rambunctious and pithy Scots / Ulster-Scots.
Photo by John Lavin