Sally Rooney to Percival Everett / The 24 best books of 2024 27 December 2024 Rebecca Laurence and Lindsay Baker

 

Simon & Schuster/ Faber/ Doubleday

From an intense tale of two brothers to a stunning Booker winner – the very best fiction of the year.

Sally Rooney to Percival Everett: The 24 best books of 2024

27 December 2024

Rebecca Laurence and Lindsay Baker

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Launched late in the year to the feverish fan hoards was the fourth instalment in the so-called "Rooneyverse". In a slight departure from the norm, Intermezzo's protagonists are two men: Peter, 32, a talented but troubled barrister, and his 22-year-old chess-prodigy brother, Ivan, both working through grief and family tensions following their father's recent death. Elsewhere, however, there were plenty of Rooney's familiar beats to be enjoyed – tangled relationships, frequent sex, philosophical debates and deceptively simple but assured prose. "Intermezzo is perfect – truly wonderful" writes The Observer, "a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney's richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements." Its review concludes by asking: "Is there a better novelist at work right now?" While The New York Times' critic was enchanted, writing: "Intermezzo is Sally Rooney with a bit more butter and cream. Yes, please, waiter. Call me a fool for love, but this oft-jaundiced reader found this meal to be discerning, fattening, old-school and delicious." (RL)

Review

The best fiction of 2024

This article is more than 1 month old

From Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo to Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Percival Everett’s James and a host of inventive debuts – this year’s highlights in fiction

Justine Jordan

Saturday 7 December 2024

In a year of surprises – a posthumous fable from Gabriel García Márquez, a superhero collaboration between China Miéville and Keanu Reeves – the biggest news, as ever, was a new Sally Rooney novel. Intermezzo (Faber) landed in September: the story of two brothers mourning their father and negotiating relationships with each other and the women in their lives, it is a heartfelt examination of love, sex and grief. With one strand exploring the neurodiverse younger brother’s perspective, and a conflicted stream-of-consciousness for the older, it opens up a more fertile direction after 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.

James by Percival Everett

 

Doubleday

James: A Novel by Percival Everett
The jokes in James range from chin scratchers to knee slappers to gut busters. Although I’m not sure Percival Everett would even classify them as “jokes.” In his re-imagining of the Huckleberry Finn story, Everett mines language, history and irony to showcase brutal truths about America. And yes, it’s often funny. But, like the original source material, things can quickly turn deadly serious depending on how the river flows. The novel is thrilling, hilarious, heartbreaking, and a strong argument for Everett as one of the best doing it right now. — Andrew Limbong, correspondent, Culture Desk, and host, NPR's Book of the Day

NP

 

Percival Everett’s Philosophical Reply to “Huckleberry Finn”

In his new novel, “James,” Everett explores how an emblem of American slavery can write himself into being.

By Lauren Michele Jackson

March 26, 2024

Percival Everett’s novels seem to ward off the lazier hermeneutics of literary criticism, yet they also have a way of dangling the analytical ropes with which we critics hang ourselves. His latest novel follows the misadventures of a runaway named Jim and his young companion Huckleberry in the antebellum American South. As in another novel featuring those protagonists, Jim has fled enslavement in the state of Missouri, and Huckleberry, Huck for short, has faked his own death to escape his no-good abusive Pap. As in that other novel, the two are both bonded and divided by the circumstances of their respective fugitivity as they float together on a raft down the Mississippi River. As in that other novel, the narrator of Everett’s book is setting down his story as best he knows how, but—rather differently—the narrator here is not the boy but the man who has been deprived of the legal leave to be one. “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being,” Jim writes. The novel is titled, simply, “James,” the name Jim chooses for himself. In conferring interiority (and literacy) upon perhaps the most famous fictional emblem of American slavery after Uncle Tom, Everett seems to participate in the marketable trope of “writing back” from the margins, exorcizing old racial baggage to confront the perennial question of—to use another worn idiom—what “Huck Finn” means now. And yet, with small exceptions, “James” meanders away from the prefab idioms that await it.

Booker prize 2022 / Alan Garner becomes oldest author to be shortlisted

 

Booker prize shortlisted authors … top (from left): Percival Everett, Elizabeth Strout, NoViolet Bulawayo; bottom (from left): Claire Keegan, Alan Garner, Shehan Karunatilaka

Booker prize: Alan Garner becomes oldest author to be shortlisted

This article is more than 1 month old

Only British writer on list will collect prize on 88th birthday if successful, and is among a list of books judges say ‘speak powerfully about important things’

Sarah Shaffi
Tue 6 September 2022

Alan Garner has become the oldest author to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, and is the only British writer on this year’s list.

He is joined on the shortlist, described by chair of judges Neil MacGregor as six books that “speak powerfully about important things”, by one Irish writer, two Americans, a Zimbabwean and a writer from Sri Lanka.

Historian MacGregor said the judges were looking for books in which “something momentous happens”, as well as novels that would “demonstrate how great writing gives the human predicament a shape”.

MacGregor was joined on the judging panel by academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari; historian Helen Castor; novelist and critic M John Harrison; and novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou.

If Garner goes on to win for his novel Treacle Walker, about a young boy who is visited by a wandering healer, he will receive the award on his 88th birthday. Treacle Walker is also the shortest book on the list, coming in at around 15,000 words.

The judges called it a “mysterious, beautifully written and affecting glimpse into the deep work of being human”, and said the book had made some of them cry.

Also making the cut are former shortlistees NoViolet Bulawayo and Elizabeth Strout. Zimbabwean Bulawayo, who was shortlisted in 2013 for her debut We Need New Names, is through to the final six again with the Animal Farm-inspired political satire Glory, narrated by a chorus of animals. The judges called it “a magical crossing of the African continent, in its political excesses and its wacky characters”.

American author Strout was shortlisted in 2006 with My Name is Lucy Barton. The title on this year’s list, Oh William!, is also part of her Lucy Barton series and sees the character reconnect with her first husband. The judges described it as “one of those quietly radiant books that finds the deepest mysteries in the simplest things”.

Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is about a photographer caught up in the horrors of civil war, and is his second novel, published 10 years after his first. He is the second Sri Lankan author in two years to make the Booker shortlist, and has written a novel “full of ghosts, gags and a deep humanity”, say the judges.

American writer Percival Everett’s The Trees is about detectives who investigate a series of gruesome murders in Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till was lynched 65 years earlier. The judges said it was “horrifying and howlingly funny” and that it “asks questions about history and justice and allows not a single easy answer”.

Irish author Claire Keegan is shortlisted for the slim Small Things Like These, set in the run-up to Christmas in a small Irish town. The panel said Keegan was “measured and merciless as she dissects the silent acquiescence of a 1980s Irish town in the Church’s cruel treatment of unmarried mothers”.

There had been, said director of the Booker prize foundation, Gaby Wood, “virtually no arguments, no proper rows” between the judges when deciding on the list. They had chosen books that bring history to life and, said Bari, “books that use humour as a strategy”.

Half of the titles on the list are published by independents: Small Things Like These by Faber, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sort Of, and The Trees by Influx.

Bea Carvalho, head of fiction at Waterstones said the shortlist showed “astonishing literary experience and prestige, with nominees who booksellers have enjoyed championing for many years”.

“We are delighted that the Booker judges have chosen such a commercially strong and wide-reaching selection and can’t wait to see what they choose as 2022’s winner,” she added.

The 2022 winner will be announced on Monday 17 October in an awards ceremony held at the Roundhouse in London. The six shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book; the winner will receive £50,000.

THE GUARDIAN

Percival Everett photographed in South Pasadena, California, in March 2022. Photograph: Dan Tuffs/

Interview

Percival Everett: ‘I’d love to write a novel everyone hated’

The American novelist on his stereotyping of white characters, the breadth of the black experience in modern literature, and why he always returns to The Way of All Flesh

Anthony Cummins

Saturday 12 March 2022

Percival Everett, 65, is the author of 21 novels, including Glyph, a satire on literary theory, Telephone, which was published simultaneously in three different versions, and Erasure, about a black author who, angered by expectations of what African American fiction ought to look like, adopts a pseudonym to write a parodically gritty (and wildly successful) novel called My Pafology. The New Yorker has called Everett “cool, analytic and resolutely idiosyncratic… he excels at the unblinking execution of extraordinary conceits”. His new book, The Trees, is a twisted detective novel centred on a spate of grisly, seemingly supernatural murders of white people in modern-day Mississippi. He spoke from Los Angeles, where he teaches at the University of Southern California.

The Trees by Percival Everett review – potent satire of US racism

This Booker-longlisted investigation of gruesome murders in Mississippi addresses a deep political issue through page-turning comic horror

Jake Arnott
Wed 31 Aug 2022 11.00 BST

 

Percival Everett is a seriously playful writer. His 2001 breakthrough novel Erasure lampooned the dominant culture’s expectations of Black authors, in a wonderfully discursive meditation on the angst of the African American middle classes and the nature of literature and art itself (its title is a reference to Robert Rauschenberg rubbing out a drawing by Willem de Kooning). The novel within the novel is a self-consciously absurd parody of “ghetto” fiction called My Pafology. Everett’s latest work, The Trees, now longlisted for the Booker prize, is a harsher, more unmediated satire, a fast-paced comedy with elements of crime and horror that directly addresses racism in a boldly shocking manner.