Books I've Loved in 2024: Winter Edition
Books I've Loved in 2024: Winter Edition
Book recommendations for your TBR shelf
Can you believe there was a time only a few years ago when I struggled to find a book I could devour? Now I feel like I'll never catch up!
This year, I’ve been trying to average about 2-3 books a month and this list is the culmination of that. If you’re looking for a new book to read, I hope this list has found you at the right time.
We start the year strong with lots of Women’s Fiction before delving into Thrillers, Upmarket, and eventually Rom-Com.
I tried to condense this to one post but, Substack told me I was being too wordy, so I’ve broken it up into two lists.
This list takes us into early March, and consists mainly of Women’s Fiction and one Thriller — stay tuned for Spring’s list, which is coming next week!
Here are the books I’ve read in the Winter of 2024.
Enjoy!
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue
The very first book I finished in 2024 and one of my absolute favorites. I’ve been using this one as a vague reference for my own WIP. Witty, clever, touching. I adore The Rachel Incident.
The description had me a little confused going in, but trust me on this one. If you love coming of age, biting commentary, and stories about friendship, you’ll love this.
A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever.
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph. (Goodreads)
Promising Young Women by Caroline O'Donoghue
I was on a real Caroline O'Donoghue kick after The Rachel Incident, so I read her first book, Promising Young Women. This one is a little different, but it has that same voicey bite to it that I adored in The Rachel Incident.
For readers of THE COWS, SWEETBITTER or CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS - as well as for fans of FLEABAG or SEARCH PARTY - Caroline O'Donoghue's debut is a gothic, darkly witty novel about sex, power, work and being a young woman in a man's world.
On the day of her 26th birthday, Jane is recently single, adrift at her job, and intrigued by why Clem - her much older, married boss - is singing to her.
When she and Clem kiss at a party she plunges head-first into an affair. One that could jeopardise her friendships, her career and even her life.
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton
Surely you can sense a theme by now. After devouring The Rachel Incident, I wanted to read anything and everything I could get my hands on that would be even vaguely familiar. This one I listened to on audiobook, and really enjoyed in that format.
Nina Dean has arrived at her early thirties as a successful food writer with loving friends and family, plus a new home and neighbourhood. When she meets Max, a beguiling romantic hero who tells her on date one that he's going to marry her, it feels like all is going to plan.
A new relationship couldn't have come at a better time - her thirties have not been the liberating, uncomplicated experience she was sold. Everywhere she turns, she is reminded of time passing and opportunities dwindling. Friendships are fading, ex-boyfriends are moving on and, worse, everyone's moving to the suburbs. There's no solace to be found in her family, with a mum who's caught in a baffling mid-life makeover and a beloved dad who is vanishing in slow-motion into dementia.
Dolly Alderton's debut novel is funny and tender, filled with whip-smart observations about relationships, family, memory, and how we live now.
Adelaide by Genevieve Wheeler
This one broke my heart. One of the first third person narratives I’d read in a while, this was a beautiful book but very heavy. Seriously, nothing but heartbreak for Adelaide. You have to be in a reflective, nostalgic sort of mood for this one, but I think it’s a lovely read and I do recommend it. I even wrote a whole Substack about it after I finished it.
For twenty-six-year-old Adelaide Williams, an American living in dreamy London, meeting Rory Hughes was like a lightning bolt out of the blue: this charming Englishman was The One she wasn’t even looking for.
Does he respond to texts? Honor his commitments? Make advance plans? Sometimes, rarely, and no, not at all. But when he shines his light on her, the world makes sense, and Adelaide is convinced that, in his heart, he’s fallen just as deeply as she has. Then, when Rory is rocked by an unexpected tragedy, Adelaide does everything in her power to hold him together—even if it means losing herself in the process.
None of This is True by Lisa Jewell
And here we delve into a totally new category — thriller! Does this book count as a thriller? I think so. For me anyway, it was the first of its kind. As someone who has always stuck to Women’s Fiction, None of This is True is the first book that I’ve ever read (aside from I Have Some Questions For You by which I absolutely adored) that fell into a new category. I loved it and it inspired me to pick up three more Lisa Jewell books, which are currently on my TBR shelf.
Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realise that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.
But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.
Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?