The best books of 2024 to give this Christmas

Book covers of Long Island, Our Evenings, and James

These critically acclaimed works will make a great gift for the bookworm in your life

(Image credit: Pan Macmillan)

published 21 December 2024

The critics' top eight choices based on Christmas selections in national newspapers.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst's seventh novel – and his first since "The Sparsholt Affair" (2017) – is a bildungsroman narrated by a gay actor looking back on his life from late middle age. Dave Win, who is half-Burmese, recalls his time at boarding school and Oxford; his early successes on the stage; his various love affairs; and his adoring relationship with his seamstress mother. While some critics said that the novel's episodic structure meant that it lacked narrative cohesion, most found it profoundly moving and evocative – a work that not only charts the life of an individual, but also offers a compelling portrait of Britain over the past seven decades.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

In 2017, a nine-year-old girl from Devon was fatally injured in a car crash. After her family asked for her organs to be donated, her heart was transported hundreds of miles and transplanted into a critically ill nine-year-old boy from Cheshire, who soon regained his health. In her latest work of non-fiction, Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor, tells the story of how the girl's tragic death gave life to the boy, and charts the various medical breakthroughs that enabled this to happen. Critics praised the book for its emotional force, its deftly constructed narrative, and for the fascinating light it sheds on many of the more remarkable aspects of modern medicine.

This Booker-shortlisted novel by US author Percival Everett retells the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the vantage point of Jim – the runaway slave who joins Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River. In Mark Twain's 1884 classic, Jim is portrayed as a good-natured simpleton; in "James", this is revealed as a deliberate strategy adopted by Jim to make him less threatening to white people. In reality, he can read and write, and is highly intelligent. Critics praised the novel's linguistic inventiveness, its blend of seriousness and humour, and the intelligence with which it breathes new life into a classic work of American literature.

The latest work of "scattergun" biography by the satirist Craig Brown – who has penned similar recent books about Princess Margaret and The Beatles – offers a portrait of the late Queen. Based on Brown's copious reading of newspapers, memoirs and royal biographies, the book unfolds in 112 short chapters, each focused on a different aspect of its subject: one is about Elizabeth II's love of horse racing; another about her strategies for ending conversations. Critics marvelled at the way that Brown, for all his apparent lightheartedness, says profound things about both the monarchy and Britain.

This work of non-fiction by the memoirist Emmanuel Carrère is an account of France's longest-ever criminal trial: that of 20 defendants accused of helping to organise and, in one case, execute the Paris terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015, at the Bataclan theatre and other locations, which killed 130 and injured hundreds. Carrère attended the whole trial, and from this experience fashions a wide-ranging work – one that conveys the full horrors of the attacks, while also grappling with the larger questions they raised. Critics called the book an astounding work of journalism, and praised Carrère for moulding a huge volume of material into such an absorbing narrative.

The fourth book by the Irish novelist Sally Rooney (the author of "Normal People") tells the story of two brothers: Pete, a successful barrister in his 30s, and geeky Ivan, ten years younger, a competitive chess player. Both are in mourning for their father, who has recently died from cancer. Rooney charts the brothers' romantic entanglements – as ever, there are long descriptions of sex – and explores how shared traumas from their past affect their relationship in the present. While some critics found the novel's rarefied atmosphere off-putting, most agreed that it was a work of great psychological insight, and one of Rooney's best to date.

Colm Tóibín's sequel to his much-loved 2009 bestseller "Brooklyn" is set in the 1970s, 20 years after its predecessor. It begins with Eilis Lacey, the Irish emigrant in Brooklyn, discovering that her American husband, Tony Fiorello, has conceived a child with another woman. This prompts Lacey to return to Ireland, where she encounters familiar figures – the publican Jim Farrell, whom she became close to on her previous visit home, and her irascible mother. Most critics found "Long Island" to be a worthy successor to "Brooklyn" – a work that yet again reveals Tóibín's talent for capturing deep emotion in quiet, understated prose.

Today, the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin is often damned as an exploitative imperialist who found fame by painting semi-naked teenage girls in Tahiti (many of whom he also slept with). In this revisionist biography, which draws on a recently discovered memoir, Sue Prideaux suggests that the reality was more complex. Her Gauguin, while no saint, emerges as a man with good qualities: he was in some respects kind and sensitive, and was a vigorous defender of the indigenous culture of Polynesia. Prideaux was widely praised for her nuanced portrait of the artist, even if some reviewers felt that she sometimes let him off the hook too easily.

Explore More