(For you to add to your 2024 TBR pile.)
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Before reading this novel, I’d somehow missed that Shakespeare had a child named Hamnet, who died of the plague in 1596 at the age of eleven, four years before Hamlet was written. Seems relevant! Only the bare bones are known about Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes/Anne, and their kids, and Hamnet is O’Farrell’s lyrical recreation of their 16th century family life in Stratford-upon-Avon. The storytelling is so vivid and captivating, you won’t miss their most famous relation.
—Anna Lind-Guzik
The Guest by Emma Cline
Like everyone else in New York, I flew through The Guest when it came out last summer. A story about a woman in her 20s after she’s been kicked out of her boyfriend’s house in the Hamptons, she pleases her way through strangers’ homes, grasping onto the life that she once had. She was in no way a relatable character—but it was fascinating to me how this woman could so easily sell a narrative and transform herself into what various people want.
—Victoria Rosselli
How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow
My favorite book this year was How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow. It’s a story about women friendships, the heartbreak of breaking up with those close friends, and Kyoto. Throughout the book, Leow weaves their personal experiences, like of being a tour guide and making jam from a thriving persimmon tree, as metaphors on loss and the joy of finding yourself despite it. I have never read a book that so beautifully put the feelings of losing a female friend on a page (including the painful grieving process). Every word felt refreshing and I kept repeating to myself, “This is me.” But as much as it’s about friends, it’s equally about Japan. With every page, I yearned to explore Kyoto and soak up everything it has to offer, even if my heart breaks a little in the process.
—Kiera Wright-Ruiz
Shy by Max Porter
If you are interested in how identity and childhood shape our experiences of the world, you will love Max Porter’s Shy, a novel that begins with its young protagonist leaving a boarding school for troubled boys in the middle of the night and heading for the river with a backpack full of rocks. What I loved is that Porter continuously disrupted my expectations of what would come next. The author—who holds a masters degree in feminism and performance art—writes about boyhood, toxic masculinity, and the existential crisis of growing up in today’s gendered world in a way that incited an emotional and visceral reaction in me, offering the flip side of my own experience growing up as a girl in the US. It made me question and look at things with a new light; and the ending was so cinematic and powerful that I cried in public reading it!
—Elyssa Dole
Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones
I hate to say it, but it’s much rarer these days that a book really knocks my socks off. I blame myself for this. My attention span has waned, my burnout has deepened—both things that have made it harder for me to really sink myself into a good book. This was not the case with Easy Beauty. It was kismet: Entirely by chance, I started reading it while in Italy, where a large portion of the memoir takes place, making it an especially vivid read. But even if I’d been in the middle of the Pacific, I would have devoured this gorgeous memoir. Chloé Cooper Jones’ writing is just sumptuous; her memoir equal parts sharp, tender, brutal, and funny. A breathtaking exploration of “otherness,” and how each of us is complicit in upholding it, even as the “othered”; but likewise how we might be able to push back and subvert the narratives given to us.
—Gina Mei
