Best books of 2024, as chosen by South Australian writers and publishers

It’s become a December tradition for me to share my best books of the year in my final column before Christmas. This year, I’ve decided to ask some other South Australian writers, editors, critics and publishers to share theirs, too – and I’m glad I did.

I love reading best books lists, but I’m also very aware that they’re always subjective, depending not just on the personal taste, but on what the person nominating their favourites actually got around to reading during the year. This summer, for example, I lingeringly read Maggie Mackellar’s exquisite memoir of life on a Tasmanian farm, Graft, and knew it would have been among my best books of 2023 if I’d read it in a timely fashion. I’m sure I’ll make a similar discovery next year.

The books nominated by my fellow readers, below, have not just widened the range of this year’s best books tribute beyond what I read. They’ve given me some great summer reading ideas, too… including reminding me of what I’ve missed!

My six best books of 2024

Highway 13.

Fiona McFarlane’s vibrant, intricately crafted linked story collection Highway 13 (Allen & Unwin) is astonishingly good: an intelligent riff on true crime and the dead-girl trope. The serial killer whose crimes are a central thread is a reimagining of Ivan Milat and his backpacker murders, but each story is its own contained universe, raising its own questions about humanity, morality and making sense of the world through stories.

2024 was the year of the semi-autobiographical divorce novel. While Miranda July’s kooky offering All Fours seems to be most people’s favourite, I was blown away by Sarah Manguso’s diamond-sharp fragmented novel Liars (Picador), a savagely intimate and telling dissection of a relationship where the narrator gradually subsumed her own desires and ambitions for her husband’s, while telling herself everything was fine… until it wasn’t.

Kylie Mirmohamahdi’s delicious debut, Diving, Falling (Scribe), begins with the death of the middle-aged narrator’s husband, art monster Ken. While family and friends are shocked by revelations about Ken’s long-running affair with his muse, Leila is more concerned with losing control of his legacy, and being forced to look hard at Ken’s effect on their sons, and whether she did enough to protect them. I loved reading this novel, and expect to one day see its ominously glittery world on the screen, with Asher Keddie in a starring role. (Purely my projection!)

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.

I’m grateful to Adelaide Writers’ Week for introducing me to Jewish-American Israeli resident Nathan Thrall’s extraordinary portrait of the plight of the Palestinian people living under Israeli occupation (set entirely before October 7, 2023), A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (Allen Lane). Through the lens of a bus crash that killed six Palestinian kindergartners, centred on one family effected by the crash (but introducing a cast of Israeli and Palestinian characters), this nuanced and heartbreaking book brilliantly illuminates the ongoing conflict through painstaking journalism.

Ariane Beeston’s stunning memoir of postpartum psychosis and recovery, Because I’m Not Myself, You See (Black Inc) doubles as an incisive, breathtakingly honest account of Australia’s broken child protection system from the inside. Beeston, a perfectionist by nature and a former psychologist within the system, is overcome as a young mother by the irrational fear that her child will be removed due to her mental health crisis. But as she shows, it’s only irrational because she is white and middle-class. This is an important book – but it’s also rich with gorgeous prose and astute insights.

I can’t be objective about Rochelle Siemienowicz’s novel Double Happiness (Midnight Sun), a riveting account of a marriage (initially) devastated by an affair, which takes a different spin on the solution. (Rochelle is one of my closest friends, and I just might share some traits and lines with a character.) But I loved it! Narrator Anna suggests not having to choose between her companionable marriage and her passionate connection with her lover. Why not have both? What follows is a taboo-breaking, emotionally rich journey into the eye-opening world and knotty ethics of ethical non-monogamy that blends Miranda July’s unconventional midlife adventures with the everyday domestic detail of Helen Garner.

Best books of 2024, as chosen by SA writers, editors and publishers

Tell me Everything.

Rebekah Clarkson

I find all of Elizabeth Strout’s books deeply moving and Tell me Everything  (Viking) is a masterclass in storytelling. Characters from previous novels converge here in the fictional Maine town of Crosby and the intertwining of their lives is riveting. I don’t know another writer who can draw characters so truthfully and simply. I’ve also discovered you don’t necessarily need to read her books in the order she wrote them; they circle and overlap and build in a non-linear way. Stunning.

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(Rebekah Clarkson’s latest book is Barking Dogs, Affirm Press.)

Wild Houses.

Alexander Cothren

I used a very sophisticated book-choosing algorithm in 2024: If it was Irish, I read it. Kevin Barry, Claire Keegan, Eimear McBride, Sally “Yes, she is good, shut up” Rooney, and most of all, Colin Barrett, a writer of sentences that teeter drunkenly down the fine line between audacious and ridiculous. His debut novel, Wild Houses (Jonathan Cape), is about a kidnapping in rural Ireland, and its mix of black comedy and tart misanthropy went down like a fresh-pulled Guinness. Sláinte!

(Alexander Cothren is associate lecturer in creative writing at Flinders University. His short-story collection will be published by Pink Shorts Press in 2025.)

Alex Dunkin

Distance and Desire (Wakefield Press), by Alex Frayne, is an exquisite exploration of South Australia. Frayne’s photography captures remote areas of our state, along with places we walk by every day without necessarily registering their presence. The images are captivating. The book reminds us of how storytelling and publishing exists beyond printed words. It’s a fine example of how books can be and can contain beauty. It’s art that can be held.

(Alex Dunkin is publisher at Buon-Cattivi Press.)

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Orbital.

Amelia Eitel

Is it “basic” to say that the Booker Prize winner was my favourite book of the year? Who cares! For me, reading Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (Vintage) was a numinous experience. I adored Harvey’s use of language – the gentle rhythms of it, her glorious descriptions of our huge-but-tiny, precious and fragile planet. Orbital is a breathtaking work of utter beauty. Truly perfect.

(Amelia Eitel is the owner of Imprints Booksellers.)

Farrin Foster

Hasib Hourani’s book-length poem rock flight (Giramondo) is such a feat of skill and humanity. Billed as an allegory for the occupation of Palestine, rock flight is striking for how it achieves intimacy, emotional complexity, relatability and narrative pace within the frame of its ambitious concept. Hourani’s astounding and somehow familiar writing snaps together the world of the book and the world of the reader, bringing a necessary and often sensory immediacy to its subject matter.

(Farrin Foster is editor of Splinter literary journal.)

All Fours.

Emily Hart

As someone who once had Miranda July pillowcases on my bed, and also just as an adult woman in 2024, it feels somewhat unsurprising to name All Fours (Canongate) as my standout of new books I read this year. It’s autofiction with a sort of magical realism bent, it’s July’s signature quirk but translated in straightforward prose, and it’s likely to make you question at least one major element of your life.

(Emily Hart is co-director  of Pink Shorts Press.)

Heather Taylor Johnson

Hasib Hourani’s poetry book rock flight (Giramondo) is the most fearless book I’ve come across this year. Written by a Lebanese-Palestinian, it’s a working-through of displacement, fragmentally formatted to be read as one long, sustainable poem of seven chapters. Repetition, lists and endnotes abound, and birds become symbolic, as do stones, fruit pips and dirt. The concept of box as both place of suffocation and place of poem-holder is intense. The whole book is intense! But it’s structurally playful, so there’s balance.

(Heather Taylor Johnson’s latest book is Little Bit, Wakefield Press. She is co-curator of Dog-eared Readings.)

Suzie Keen

The Mires.

Reading novels from Aotearoa New Zealand helps me feel connected to my homeland, and The Mires, by Tina Makereti (a New Zealander of Māori and Pākehā descent), was the standout of 2024. The story unfolds amid the overlapping lives of neighbours in a coastal township as the arrival of an extremist in their midst poses a threat sensed only by spiky teenager Wairere and the murky waters of Swamp – “which knows more than most people about most things”. Makereti highlights societal tensions with uncomfortable accuracy, yet is also a lyrical storyteller who awakens our senses in surprising ways. The Mires is a gem.

(Suzie Keen is an arts writer and InReview’s outgoing editor.)

Megan Koch

Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (Riverrun), Roger Lewis’s sprawling, eccentric, and supremely entertaining biography of Liz and Dick, was the highlight of my reading year. Making no claims to objectivity, Lewis sketches his personal portrait of the pair, with plenty of gossipy tangents and bitingly funny commentary along the way. He has a deep affection for their filmography, and is as interested in dissecting the public image and iconography of the couple as he is in charting the details of their never-dull private lives.

(Megan Koch is a regular book reviewer for InReview and a former bookseller at Imprints.)

Finegan Kruckemeyer

Theory & Practice.

A perfectly observed meditation on small conflicts and large, Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice (Text) traverses the schisms of torn lovers, flawed heroes, imploding institutions, ignored phone calls from anxious mothers, clashing cultures, galvanising friendships, warm beds, cold sharehouses, theory and practice. And through it all, a yearning for life and experience that drives the young narrator on: “I wanted the roll and slosh of [knowledge’s] depths beneath me, the risk of drowning. I wanted it to carry me beyond the limits of myself.”

(Finegan Kruckmeyer’s first novel, The End and Everything Before It (Text), was published in 2024.)

Carol Lefevre

I waited all year for Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time (Picador), and was not disappointed. In it, Laing recounts the restoration of the Suffolk garden she and her husband – retired academic and poet Ian Pattinson – undertook at the beginning of the pandemic. Between pulling the first weeds and finally opening the garden to the public as part of the National Garden Scheme, Laing’s narrative typically wanders into fascinating byways, including Milton’s Paradise Lost, the life of “peasant poet” John Clare, and the brutal history of exploitation and slavery underlying some of England’s greatest gardens.

(Carol Lefevre’s latest book is Temperance, Wakefield Press. Her next book, Bloomer, will be published by Affirm Press in March 2025.)

Walter Marsh

I helped launch Royce Kurmelovs’ latest book, Slick (UQP), back in September, but it’s as timely as ever, as News Corp runs fossil fuel propaganda paid for by the petroleum industry across its papers. With moral clarity and an eye for absurdity, Royce unravels the history of the Australian petroleum industry and its path to power and influence. These investigations are intercut with his on-the-ground reporting of Australians bearing the brunt of climate change, like a corporate true-crime story rolled into a disaster movie.

Australian Gospel.

In Australian Gospel (Black Inc), Lech Blaine unpicks the braided histories of his family –  a big, rowdy troupe of foster kids raised in Queensland pubs by a larger-than-life dad and a bookish mum – and Michael and Mary Shelley, a pair of born-again Christians whose history of death threats, kidnapping, and bizarre behaviour saw three of their children fostered with the Blaines. Blaine brings this wild story home in a remarkable portrait of love and family, where even the once-terrifying figures of his siblings’ parents are granted complexity and humanity.

(Walter Marsh’s latest book is Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire, Scribe.)

Rachael Mead

My highlight of 2024 must be Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (Viking). While I was absolutely delighted to find two favourite characters from Strout’s previous works meeting in the opening chapters of this novel, it was her deep insight into human nature and the way she explores loneliness and the power of storytelling that had me wanting to reread this novel the moment I turned the final page. Despite my expectations escalating with each book, Strout never fails to impress and captivate me.

(Rachael Mead’s latest book is The Art of Breaking Ice, Affirm. She is co-curator of Dog-eared Readings.)

Molly Murn

Dusk.

My year of reading in 2024 has featured ecstatically exquisite writing at the sentence level, women in powerful transformation, eroticism, language experimentation, and stunning writing of country. Early in the year I fell in love with the poetic heft of The Swift Dark Tide (Katia Ariel, Gazebo Books), followed by the incantatory genius of Alphabetical Diaries (Sheila Heti, Fitzcarraldo). Then there were the novels, All Fours (Miranda July, Canongate), Scaffolding (Lauren Elkin, Chatto & Windus) and The Safekeep (Yael van der Wouden, Penguin), where women’s inner lives claimed the page in exciting ways. I loved Clear (Carys Davies, Granta) and Dusk (Robbie Arnott, Picador), for the wild settings and characterisation, and just finished Theory & Practice (Michelle de Kretser, Text), which effortlessly disrupts the form of the novel.

(Molly Murn’s latest book is Heart of the Glass Tree, Penguin. She is manager of Matilda Bookshop, Stirling.)

Andrew Roff

Nicholas John Turner’s Let the Boys Play was the novel from 2024 that I can’t stop thinking about. Grotesquely funny, fragmented, and laced with graphic violence and cruelty, it’s not exactly a beach read. Turner has an unflinching vision and voice, with plenty to say about authority, relationships and toxic masculinity. Some of the prose is breathtaking, and the characters are finely observed. There’s so much here to love if you can hold on for the ride.

(Andrew Roff is the author of Teeth of the Slow Machine, Wakefield Press. His first novel, Pangea, will be published by Wakefield Press in 2025.)

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over.

Maddy Sexton

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken (Giramondo), is told from the perspective of a zombie, who carries her useless right arm around after it falls off, and stuffs a talking crow’s dead body into her chest cavity for a bit of company. Strange. Silly. But it’s also a deeply poetic and unexpected story of loss, grief and humanity.

(Maddy Sexton is head of YA at Wakefield Press.)

Allayne Webster

I’m invested in anything Vikki Wakefield writes, but To the River  (Text) will forever hold a special place in my heart, not least because of the dedication, but also because of the expertly portrayed push-pull relationship between two very different women, the instantly recognisable SA river landscape, the compelling keep-you-guessing mystery, and a hero dog called Blue. Vikki is a masterful writer (and the best human there is).  To the River is Australian crime at its absolute finest.

(Allayne Webster’s latest novel is Selfie, Text.)