Amazingly, author Keiran Fox was studying to be a medical doctor when he wrote this thoughtful and deeply researched book. In addition to the main idea expressed in the title, it provides a wealth of context for major thinkers and thought of the twentieth century, as well as more ancient thinkers on whose work so many of these ideas are based.

Set in a small town in Ireland, this amazing story is told through the eyes of a huge cast of characters. Inhabitants of the same village, they are connected in various ways to its troubles, past and present. I was drawn in immediately, as much for the stark beauty of Ryan’s language as for the story itself.

For some reason, I expected this book to be funny. Beyond a hilarious incident described in the opening essay, it was anything but. Also unexpectedly, it proved a page turner—not what one expects from a book of essays.

The novel opens on a murky night in Troubles era Northern Ireland. Briefly, we meet a boy who “never strays from” the familiar boundaries of “a meshed grid of streets and a couple of roads that only rarely has he followed into the city’s centre.” This child, the product of poverty, ignorance and violence, nurtures a single ambition: “The desire to be someone.”

On the surface, this simple tale relates a frail old man’s imminent separation from the beloved dog he’s no longer able to care for. From the beginning, the reader knows Bo will have to let Sixten go and will blame his son Hans for relocating the animal.

Set in homestead country near Lacombe in the first decade of the twentieth century, the story portrays a disparate group of women with one goal in common: to have homes of their own. This is an era when women had no vote and no property rights.

We meet Seamus sporting his new corduroy trousers, an innocent five-year-old Seamus who dismays his elders by asking the title question with a smile on his face. It will be a long time before true comprehension enters his little heart. “I knew Heaven was a real, physical place, and I couldn’t visit her there…she’d previously spent time in Belfast, where I could visit her, but it was made clear to me that heaven and Belfast were different in that respect and several others.”

Set in the former Greek Leper Colony of Spinalonga, a small island off the coast of Crete, this novel portrays the nature of leprosy, and how society coped with it.

In her inimitable and lighthearted style, the author of Swedish Death Cleaning, (86 when she wrote this book), brings us some of the suggestions that have helped her cope with the challenges of old age.

Sleuth and editor Susan Ryeland is back! In her third outing, her creator combines a jolly romp through a classic style mystery set in 1955 on the French Riviera with a contemporary whodunit that imperils our intrepid editor once again. Susan’s newest adventure showcases the dangerous oddity of a fictional author and reveals some seamier aspects of the publishing world as it grapples with the realities of an era dominated by huge multicultural entertainment corporations which control so much of the visual content that novelists and publishers must now contend with.

I suspect many contemporary novelists would be scandalized by the nimble flexibility of the narrator used by White in this remarkable novel. Omniscient narrators are currently out of fashion.

Like the earlier books in the Malabar House series, this one has an intricate plot that must be unraveled by the delightful Persis Wadia, the newly independent India’s first woman police inspector. With those who govern the new nation already pulling in different directions, Persis manages to stop a lone young man from assassinating a hawkish politician.

“Music can scourge the heart.” The tone of this novel’s opening is poignant, almost elegiac. Showing the musician through a series of moments that echo and return and flow into her compositions, MacLaverty transports us into the heart, mind, and soul of Northern Irish composer Catherine Anne McKenna.

We are all descended from African ancestors, Zeinab Badawi tells us, laying out recent scientific discoveries about this and well as giving us some fascinating glimpses into the development and migration of early humans.

Flanagan’s memoir of his father—though it is far more than simply a memoir—imparts fascinating historical information as well as rewarding food for the soul and imagination.

In 2024 I read only 101 books, the same number as in 2023 and 21 fewer than the year before. Guess I’ve been doing more writing, so that’s all good.

The Author’s Note at the beginning of this novel is a highly unusual disclaimer. Harris aims to “use the techniques of a novel to retell the story of the Dreyfus Affair,” which he characterizes as “perhaps the greatest political scandal and miscarriage of justice in history.” “None of the characters,” we learn, “is wholly fictional.”

As Shafak says in her final note to the reader, “beyond the borders of time, geography and identity,” water connects us all. The author has dubbed her latest work a love song to rivers. “Fluid bridges, they “link one bank to the other, the past to the future, the spring to the delta, earthlings to celestial beings, the visible to the invisible…the living to the dead.”

It’s always a joy to read Kate Atkinson’s work. This latest Jackson Brodie adventure struck me as even wiser and more hilarious than the wonderful stories of his previous exploits. When the story opens, Jackson, now sixty and a grandfather, has been house-hunting. However, he’s just overcome “several weeks being sensible and mature” and bought a brand-new “rugged, blokey” Land Rover Defender. After all, he reflects, “you could live in a Defender if you had to, “but you couldn’t drive a house.”