I’m late to the party (as always) but Claire Keegan was my discovery of the year. She’s that rare writer who can conjure beauty from the simplest of sentences. Set in a quiet town, 'Small Things Like These' is a quiet book, but one full of those rare qualities of love and hope.

From the cellular level to deep space, this imaginative reach of this novel alone is awe-inspiring, but even more spectacular is how it uses that scope to bring family relationships and the simple joys of life into focus. By far the longest novel on this list, it never once felt like it.

Harlem in the 60s: a place where everybody’s grafting, including Ray Carney - furniture salesman, upstanding member of the community, and occasional handler of stolen goods. He walks a fine line, until a job comes along that’s more than a little hot. A literary crime masterclass in storytelling.

A wealthy entrepreneur and art collector has vanished and his gardener is being interviewed for a documentary on his life. Tell is a strangely addictive exploration of wealth, art, class and the narratives we create for ourselves and others.

With a Netflix series picking up awards all over the place, 'The Talented Mr Ripley' doesn’t much need my praise but there’s a reason Highsmith is considered a master of plot. Cold, calculating and disarmingly charming, Ripley is one of the great characters. A classic that I should have read sooner.

Following the widow of world famous artist X as she tries to uncover the truth about her dead wife, this ambitious and unusual combo of dystopian society and mediation on art (and what it takes to be an artist) is a real departure from the quiet strangeness of Lacey's debut 'Pew.' I loved it.

August Blue is the strange, melancholy story of a concert pianist who abandons her career mid-performance and finds herself drifting around Europe, shadowed by an oddly familiar woman she encounters at a flea market. Dazzling, odd, and everything you could want in a Deborah Levy novel.

'Close To Home' is a touching and beautifully written exploration of masculinity and the difficulties faced by a young working class man trying to break the cycle of poverty and violence, when the people you love are also part of the problem.

A sleepy hamlet in rural France provides the backdrop for what slowly builds, sentence by beautiful sentence, as the past catches up with the present, into one of the most nerve-shredding books I read all year and possibly the most nightmarish family birthday party ever.

Scott Preston's bleakly poetic debut 'The Borrowed Hills' is a must for fans of Benjamin Myers earlier novels. Set in the hills of Cumbria as foot and mouth disease destroys the livelihoods of two rival sheep farmers and a plan to steal sheep from a wealthy farm in the south of England is hatched.

Time for my annual and completely subjective "2024 Fiction Book of the Year" list...and (drum roll please) in no particular order, the winners are...

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