Six of the best: My favourite books of 2024

TODAY I want to tell you about three English literary works that bowled me over last year, and three South African English ones that made a huge impression on me too. It strikes me that out of the six, five were written by women.

Held by Anne Michaels

Certain books stay with you like a recurring dream. You're lost for weeks to plain prose, to clever storylines and snappy dialogue. Your inner ear yearns for a particular writer's word magic, the rhythm and footfall of her words, her luminous images that make landscapes appear in the mist. Anne Michaels is one such.

I read her latest, Held, slowly, testing it on my tongue like a psalm. Michaels's writing is fragmentary: Out of chunks of prose, characters and a history emerge. The reader becomes part of a frame of reference, a mindset, a way of looking. Suddenly, you stand on sacred ground and see a burning bush. You know you're walking on water and you start doubting and sinking. You wonder if you should ever write a word again.

The thinnish novella follows the lives of two people and their descendants. It starts in 1917 on a battlefield in France. John is wounded and doesn't know if he's dead. He can't hear anything and wonders where his shoes and feet are.

This book holds you as tightly as the title suggests. You are held.

Held by Anne Michaels was published by Bloomsbury and costs R420 at Exclusive Books.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

Erdrich is one of my favourite authors. I read everything she writes. She is Native American and Native American characters, a strong awareness of the environment and planet, and sweet, lyrical and poetic language distinguish her novels.

The Mighty Red is set in the Red River Valley in North Dakota. The soil there was fertile once, but now a large company is farming sugar beet, which depletes the soil. Moreover, the company relentlessly wipes out all insects and weeds. There are no worms and moths left, and the birds stay away.

The central character is an eccentric girl with two very different boys obsessing over her. One is a jock, a football star, a heartbreaker with narcissistic traits and a dark secret that drives him. His reckless actions had led to the deaths of two of his friends one snowy night. He is haunted by visions of one of the dead. His self-confidence, as well as his pitiful dependence on her, persuades her to try to save him from himself. She marries him against her mother's – and the reader's – counsel and becomes a hostage on his family's farm. It's like a train disaster that the reader can't look away from.

It's a novel that provokes thoughts about man's greed and selfishness, and freedom, about captivity and dreams. In the end, as the blurb on the back cover says, it's about “love in all of its absurdity and splendour". I recommend it very highly.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich was published by HarperCollins and costs R289 at Loot.

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

Atkinson is another heroine on my bookshelf. I was delighted when she ventured into crime fiction. Here we have a strong literary voice, a wicked sense of humour, and a brilliant head for storylines. Oh, and the characters stay with you forever.

This is a thrilling and hilarious ride. Kate Atkinson is like older British women writers such as Iris Murdoch, Alice Thomas Ellis, Penelope Mortimer and Co: She has a wicked eye and an off-beat sense of humour. There are gems like: “If they would all sleep all the time, she wouldn't mind being their mother."

It's a psychological thriller that reminds me especially of Murdoch's books, which are among my favourites. The reader shares in the shifting dynamics, drives and inner dialogue of a group of diverse characters. It's a changing landscape. Loyalties shift. Who can be trusted? The reader invests emotionally in the characters. They are damaged, human, imperfect, anxious and confused. They are eccentric and driven.

As with Murdoch, there is a large cast of eccentric characters readers can sink their teeth into. I highly recommend it.

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson was published by Penguin Random House and costs R405 at Exclusive Books.

The Near North by Ivan Vladislavić 

This Johannesburger is the king of enumeration: making lists. It's a lyrical book full of observations and musings. Vladislavić lists seeds on his shelf and flowers in his garden and it reads like a poem. He lists the things he picks up on his hikes and it becomes an art collection. He has the hoarder's eye.

The Near North differs from travel writing; in that genre, the narrator explores new horizons so that they can perceive things like a child, as if for the first time. Vlad, as the narrator of The Near North calls himself, explores familiar landmarks, walking a certain route over and over, until one would think he'd have lost the ability to observe them afresh. But no, he breaks through the monotony and sees previously unseen things in the familiar landscape.

When things are documented, or surrounding objects simply named, the selection already reveals much about the person who names them. Between the lines of the list lurk worlds that remain unsaid, associations, memories, images. Vlad calls himself the king of metaphor and says he can endlessly expand on one. Everything reminds him of something else, of something he has read. There are fascinating facts about history, art, literature. This book is a journey.

The Near North by Ivan Vladislavić was published by Pan MacMillan SA and costs R370 at Exclusive Books.

A Short Life by Nicky Greenwall

It's pleasing to recognise landmarks in the beautiful Cape, and the characters feel like people who could have been friends of friends. The structure is interesting and keeps you turning pages, the chapters short and from different characters' perspectives. It begins with a late-night accident: After friends hang out together on a Friday night, a car lies on its back like a beetle. There doesn't seem to be another vehicle involved.

Adam, the driver, hadn't drunk much. Yet he has no memory of the accident and what preceded it. As befits good friends, his pal Nick and wife, Franky, remove him from the scene: He surely must be over the limit.

This is how secrets begin to stack up like thunderclouds. Things are brought to a head and characters are tested. It's sophisticated, smart, and funny, with the privileged grappling with both first-world and third-world problems: Smart, ambitious characters who are sometimes overwhelmed by their seemingly ideal existence and the challenges of young parenthood.

A Short Life by Nicky Greenwall was published by Penguin and costs R310 at Exclusive Books.

The Paris Muse by Louisa Treger

Well, she's not really South African, but Treger is a British writer with roots here: Her mother is from South Africa and she still has family in the country.

In The Paris Muse, her gaze falls on Dora Maar, a remarkable woman and artist who also happened to be Picasso's most interesting mistress and muse, and who was more or less destroyed by his intensity and ferocity over nine years, during which he had other relationships throughout, playing the women off against each other.

She was the most impressive of Picasso's lovers. She was his equal. She had a fertile imagination as well as dark sides that spoke to each other.

What strikes me about Louisa's writing is that she doesn't draw conclusions, preach, moralise, apply pop psychology or label others.

Dora has continued to capture the imagination over the decades. Now she comes back to life in this fascinating, densely woven portrait. Read it.

The Paris Muse by Louisa Treger was published by Bloomsbury and costs R420 at Exclusive Books.

♦ VWB ♦

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