I missed the boat for TGCA’s Year-in-Books series this year (see last year’s picks here). Nevertheless, here are some of the books I enjoyed in 2024. Fiction My two favourite fiction books this year were warning-shots fired from slightly different political trajectories. In Prophet Song, Paul Lynch’s protagonist Eilish Stack—wife, mother and microbiologist—watches in eloquent horror as her native Ireland slouches toward a Pinochet-like tyranny and then civil war. As her personal loses accumulate, Lynch draws us close enough to hear Eilish’s heart break. We feel her dread and see how the ordinary (and extraordinary) concerns of her life make it impossible for her to escape the tragedy. Lynch’s writing…

Minor spoilers for the novel follow. Published in 2021, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun predates the excitement and consternation generated by the advent of large-language-model AIs. Yet this astonishing novel has some important things to say to us about quasi-intelligent machines, and how our interactions with them might affect us. Klara, the protagonist and narrator is an android—or AF (artificial friend)—built to provide companionship to a human child. As we first meet her in her shop window, waiting to be purchased and looking out on the world, we encounter a mind that is charming and strange. Klara is curious, childlike, innocent and compliant, but she is also highly perceptive…