The Best Books of 2024. 

So, here we are at last in the very early days (or would that be daze) of 2025. Which means, naturally Janus-like we get to look both back and forward. This week I’ll be looking back to the best reads of 2024 and next Saturday I’ll look forward to my ‘plans’ for 2025. As usual the best of the best are in BOLD. I reviewed 103 books in ‘24 with a surprising 2 DNF’s. So... 

Fiction: 

1066 Turned Upside Down by Various Authors 

Surfeit of Suspects by George Bellairs 

Death in the Tunnel by Miles Burton 

The Railway Detective by Edward Marston 

4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie 

Blood on the Tracks – Railway Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards 

The Humans by Matt Haig 

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

The Late Monsieur Gallet by Georges Simenon 

Play the Red Queen by Juris Jurjevics 

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi 

The Testimony of Alys Twist by Suzannah Dunn 

The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin 

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson 

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene 

The Goodbye Cat by Hiro Arikawa   

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien 

The Manningtree Witches by A K Blakemore 

Non-Fiction: 

The Book of Humans – A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War and the Evolution of Us by Adam Rutherford 

Nature’s Mutiny – How the Little Ice Age Transformed the West and Shaped the Present by Philipp Blom 

The Blood of Free Men – The Liberation of Paris, 1944 by Michael Neiberg 

Spying on Whales – The Past, Present and Future of the World’s Largest Animals by Nick Pyenson 

How to Speak Whale – A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication by Tom Mustill 

Divided – Why We’re Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall 

Red Summer – The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America by Cameron McWhirter 

Persians – The Age of the Great Kings by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones 

The Undivided Past – History Beyond our Differences by David Cannadine 

Atoms and Ashes – From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima by Serhii Plokhy 

Fracture – Life and Culture in the West 1918-1938 by Philipp Blom 

How to Make the World Add Up – Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers by Tim Harford 

The Assassination of the Archduke – Sarajevo 1914 and the Murder That Changed the World by Greg King and Sue Woolmans 

The Trigger – The Hunt for Gavrilo Princip: The Assassin who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher 

July 1914 – Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin 

Islands of Abandonment – Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn 

Shadowlands – A Journey Through Lost Britain by Matthew Green 

Napoleon in Egypt by Paul Strathern 

Echolands – A Journey in Search of Boudica by Duncan Mackay 

The Little Book of Hygge – The Danish Way to Live Well by Meik Wiking 

Pale Rider – The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney 

The Plague Year – America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright 

Stopping the Next Pandemic – How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity by Debora MacKenzie 

The Unthinkable – Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why by Amanda Ripley 

I, Warbot – The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne 

Am I Normal? - The 200-Year Search for Normal People (And Why They Don’t Exist) by Sarah Chaney 

Priests De La Resistance! - The Loose Cannons Who Fought Fascism in the 20th Century by Fergus Butler-Gallie 

WOW! Did I have a GOOD reading year in 2024....! I did read a LOT of classic novels so quite a few have showed up here. Every year I become more and more impressed by the Classics, although in 2025 I’ll be reading much less. I’m impressed by the spread of subject matter in my non-fiction and also impressed by the age spread throughout – 140 years, from 1883 to 2023. I expect that will continue next year (probably).