The Uncommonly Good Fiction of 2024

John Wilson on novels you won’t find on other year-end lists (and some forthcoming gems)

You may well be satiated by accounts of the best novels of 2024, fiction to keep an eye an out for in 2025, and so on. But I can assure you that most of the titles I mention here will not be ones that turned up repeatedly on the widely circulated lists. That’s not because I perversely set out to be “different.” I am, as you may already know, a firm believer in the irreducibility of taste. (But aren’t some books “objectively bad,” others “objectively good”? Of course! That’s a subject for another day.)

In every publishing season, there are excellent books that (for some reason or another) don’t get near as much attention as they should. The most salient case I know of for fiction in 2024 is A. G. Mojtabai’s novella Featherless, published early in December by Slant Books. I wrote a bit about Mojtabai in this column last September, and Greg Wolfe and I had a conversation about her and Featherless in particular late in the year. Maybe this will spur you to check out the book yourself. And I hope that, even now, an excellent reviewer or two are at work on a big piece starting with Featherless but reckoning more ambitiously with Mojtabai’s fascinating anti-career. (If you decide to try Mojtabai yourself, please do let me know.)

PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series claims it “invites today’s edgiest, most entertaining, and uncompromising writers to present their most provocative work in a format designed to fit in your pocket and stretch your mind.” Ugh. A series under the rubric “Outspoken Authors” is not calculated to get my attention (rather the reverse), but some of the writers featured under that label from PM Press are ones I read with profit (not least, Ursula K. Le Guin). And the books really are of a size to fit in the pocket of my ancient tweed coat.

My most recent acquisition in the series, published in 2024, was John Kessel’s The Presidential Papers. I love Kessel (a self-described lapsed Catholic); you might too, if you check him out. He writes science fiction of a distinctive flavor, with a mix of absurdity, satire, inspired lunacy, and rueful wisdom. (To get a sense of his sensibility, you could check out Pride and Prometheus, a mash-up of Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice.) His day job for decades was teaching literature and creative writing. If you pick up The Presidential Papers, don’t skip Terry Bisson’s interview with Kessel—“I Planned to Be an Astronomer”—also included in volume.

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We pick up books (I do, anyway) for all sorts of reasons (including the cover-art). I am too suggestible; I acquire too many books based on a hasty impulse. On the plus side, this sometimes leads me to treasures. Last year, Charco Press published a novel called The Plains, by Federico Falco (published in Spanish in 2020). What attracted me was not the name of the author (unfamiliar to me), who is from Argentina, but rather the name of the translator, Jennifer Croft. I became aware of Croft several years ago because she is married to the poet and translator Boris Dralyuk. I have never met them in person, alas, but they are my favorite literary couple. Last February, Croft’s novel The Extinction of Irina Rey and Dralyuk’s The Silver Bone, a translation of a crime novel by the Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov, were published on the same day! The Plains turned out to be a very good book.

Last September, my dear friend Tim Larsen, a scholar I greatly admire, kindly asked Moody Publishing to send me a copy of Twelve Classic Christmas Stories: A Feast of Yuletide Tales. (I also got a mug, from which I have been drinking coffee just now.) This beguiling anthology includes stories by Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others. You don’t have to wait to acquire a copy for yourself; you’ll also want to keep it in mind for gift-giving next Christmas.

Faithful readers of this column will recall my mentions of Spencer Quinn, whose long-running Chet & Bernie series is a source of ongoing delight, and who began a new series in 2023 with Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge (delicious). The second book in that series, Mrs. Plansky Goes Rogue, is schedule for publication in July. Septuagenarian protagonists are relatively uncommon in fiction even now; none that I’ve encountered are as winsome as Mrs. Plansky. I hope Spencer Quinn will inspire other novelists to go and do likewise in their own distinctive ways.

And speaking of forthcoming books, I am very much looking forward to Boris Dralyuk’s translation of the second book in Andrey Kurkov’s Kiev Mysteries series, The Stolen Heart, due in May. You have plenty of time to prepare for it yourself by reading The Silver Bone.

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